Upgrading the ships sub-class...

OK, I've searched around for this and no topic seems to be on it.

Anyway, my question is does anyone know how to create an outfit that would upgrade your ship to a different sub-class or another ship altogether? (e.g. something similar to the "Chrome Valk Upgrade", except for other ships i.e. turn a Fed Carrier from "Capital Ship" class to "Heavy Missle" class) I've read the EVN Bible and cannot get my head around the NCB system. I've also had a look at the "Chrome Valk Upgrade" and have some idea on how it works, but not all.

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The ship upgrades basically set an NCB which completely changes your ship. Outside of that, they don't do anything else except take your money. 😃

Anyways, it probably works (I can't check on it now) by you just putting in the letter that the chrome valk outf uses, followed by the ID of the new ship.

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I can't remember the specifics offhand, but you can require that the player have a specific ship in the Availability field (and set it not to display unless Availability is met) and have the outfit change the ship type without changing outfits and removew itself. price would be the difference between the two ship types (possibly a bit more).

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Quote

Originally posted by Big Brother GTi:
**Anyway, my question is does anyone know how to create an outfit that would upgrade your ship to a different sub-class or another ship altogether? (e.g. something similar to the "Chrome Valk Upgrade", except for other ships i.e. turn a Fed Carrier from "Capital Ship" class to "Heavy Missle" class) I've read the EVN Bible and cannot get my head around the NCB system. I've also had a look at the "Chrome Valk Upgrade" and have some idea on how it works, but not all.
**

Try my (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/vftp/show.pl?product=evn&category;=plugins&display;=rating&file;=ShipyardUpgrades1.0.6.hqx")ShipyardUpgrades plug-in(/url) that allows you to upgrade your own ship following the same upgrade sequences that Nova uses for escorts. It's based on a non-trivial usage of the Configure-Require flag bits. I made it for EV:N version 1.0.6, but I know it's still valid because I'm still using it. The only drawback is that your pilot will have get a new ship after the ShipyardUpgrades plug is installed or you'll have to start a new pilot in order to get the Configure bits into your pilot data file.

Try it and see, the price is right.

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Originally posted by Arturo:
Try my ShipyardUpgrades plug-in that allows you to upgrade your own ship following the same upgrade sequences that Nova uses for escorts. It's based on a non-trivial usage of the Configure-Require flag bits. I made it for EV:N version 1.0.6, but I know it's still valid because I'm still using it. The only drawback is that your pilot will have get a new ship after the ShipyardUpgrades plug is installed or you'll have to start a new pilot in order to get the Configure bits into your pilot data file.

So it should work with Nova 1.0.8 then?

Thanks. I'll give it a go. However I'd still like to develop one plug-in of my own to practice my skills.

geek#1, could you tell me how to identify if the player has a certain kind of ship using the NCBs?

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You'd have to assign individual NCBs to each ship in the ship's OnPurchase field. You'd also be wise to implement something similar to Arturo's Contribute/Require sequencing.

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Quote

Originally posted by Big Brother GTi:
**So it should work with Nova 1.0.8 then?
**

Yup, it works fine with 1.0.8 since there haven't been any changes to the default scenario shďp resources since ShipyardUpgrades106 was released.

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Originally posted by UncleTwitchy:
**You'd have to assign individual NCBs to each ship in the ship's OnPurchase field.
**

I tried using NCBs for player shďp identification right after Nova was released and it doesn't work for tracking the player's shďp for a number of reasons. One is that the shďp OnPurchase(set) is not performed for the shďp the player gets from a new pilot chär resource. Another is that a captured shďp that players take as their own also does not execute OnPurchase(set). For those reasons (and more) I was driven to use Contribute-Require flag bits instead of NCBs in my ShipyardUpgrades plug.

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Originally posted by Phyvo:
**The ship upgrades basically set an NCB which completely changes your ship.
**

I just want to try and reduce any possible confusion about the terminology used in programming Nova resources. There's a difference between NCBs and operators.
NCBs are any of the 10,000 bits used by the game-engine to make decisions based on whether a given bit has been set to a one-state or a zero-state.
Operators perform differing functions on NCBs or RIDs (resource identification numbers) depending on which operator is being used.
The Chrome Valk Upgrade (CVU for short) oütf is a good example of the difference between NCBs and operators. The CVU Availability(test) looks to see of NCB 4000 has been set to a one-state by a time delay crön by using the "bxxx" test operator. When NCB 4000 gets set, then the CVU oütf becomes available for purchase. When the CVU is bought, the OnPurchase(set) statement executes the Hxxx operator which exchanges the player's shďp for the shďp with RID defined by the "xxx", in this case shďp RID 165 (a ModStarbridge). The "Hxxx" operator also causes players to lose all the oütfits in their old shďp, unless they have the persistent oütf flag bit set.

Quote

Originally posted by geek#1:
**I can't remember the specifics offhand, but you can require that the player have a specific ship in the Availability field (and set it not to display unless Availability is met) and have the outfit change the ship type without changing outfits and removew itself. price would be the difference between the two ship types (possibly a bit more).
**

Sorry, but there isn't an operator that one can use to identify a shďp in the Availability(test) statement of an oütf resource. You're probably thinking of the mďsn resource which has an "Avail.ShipType" requirement that does identify the player's shďp by its RID. It would be possible to use that mďsn requirement to cause an NCB to be set that would in turn enable the purchase of an outfit specific to that ship type. That would work for a one-off ship-specific outfit. But it could get out of hand if you wanted to apply it to all ships because that would mean that a mďsn resource would be needed for every ship type in the scenario, all 288 of them. The default Nova scenario uses 790 of the 1000 available mďsn resources, so there's only 210 left for plug developer's to use unless you want to build an entire TC around shďp specific outfits.

(edit: removed erroneous OnRetire(set) assertion )

(This message has been edited by Arturo (edited 07-10-2004).)

Is there a ship onPurchase field? A control bit would do the job.

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Quote

Originally posted by Arturo:
I tried using NCBs for player shďp identification right after Nova was released and it doesn't work for tracking the player's shďp for a number of reasons. One is that the shďp OnPurchase(set) is not performed for the shďp the player gets from a new pilot chär resource. Another is that a captured shďp that players take as their own also does not execute OnPurchase(set). Additionally, if one tries to use NCBs to identify the player's shďp there's a problem with clearing a shďp's assigned NCB. The OnRetire(set) statement is only executed when a shďp is traded-in, but not when it is destroyed or when the player takes over a different captured shďp type. All of those reasons (and more) were why I was driven to use Contribute-Require flag bits instead of NCBs in my ShipyardUpgrades plug.

What an unbelievably helpful bit of information. I've always meant to test these, but never got around to it. One related addition might be that the On Capture field in the ship resource is executed regardless of whether or not the player assigns the captured ship to their fleet or takes it as their own. So, this too is not an option for keeping track of the players ship with ncb's.

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(This message has been edited by slouch (edited 06-26-2004).)

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Originally posted by geek#1:
**Is there a ship onPurchase field? A control bit would do the job.
**

Yup. Once.

Couldn't you just unset it when you sold the ship?

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Quote

Originally posted by Arturo:
**I just want to try and reduce any possible confusion about the terminology used in programming Nova resources. There's a difference between NCBs and operators. <snip>
**

Heheh... Well, now I know. I have to admit, when it comes to bits, operators, NCBs, and other programming mumbo-jumbo, I'm a bit helpless. I only have just started figuring out how to use them, and they all sound the same to me... I probably shouldn't have posted, and left it to the experts.

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Besides the obvious solution of using Contribute/Require bits to figure out what ship the player has (there are only so many Contribute/Require bits anyway), you could use an outfit that did nothing and just identified the ship. Indeed, this is a better approach unless you have a lot of other outfits in the plug-in (COUGH!MASAMUNE!COUGH!), since you can only have 64 Contriburte/Require bits, while you can have 512 outfits—generally enough to handle 768 ship classes, since in Nova ship classes tend to have a dozen different versions for every obscure purpose (Nova only has like, 63 ship classes, yet it has— :eek: 288? Wow...)

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Just for the record, I used only 36 of the Contribute-Require flag bits in my ShipyardUpgrades plug and it could accommodate up to 1536 unique ships (if there were that many) with the patterns I developed.

Also, I'm really curious as to how any NCB based ship tracking scheme overcomes the following obvious problems:

1. A captured shďp that players take as their own does not execute the shďp resource OnPurchase(set).
2. The shďp OnCapture(set) is executed regardless of whether the players take the captured ship as their own or use it as an escort.

(edit: removed erroneous OnRetire(set) assertion )

(This message has been edited by Arturo (edited 07-10-2004).)

Quote

Originally posted by Big Brother GTi:
**OK, I've searched around for this and no topic seems to be on it.

Anyway, my question is does anyone know how to create an outfit that would upgrade your ship to a different sub-class or another ship altogether? (e.g. something similar to the "Chrome Valk Upgrade", except for other ships i.e. turn a Fed Carrier from "Capital Ship" class to "Heavy Missle" class) I've read the EVN Bible and cannot get my head around the NCB system. I've also had a look at the "Chrome Valk Upgrade" and have some idea on how it works, but not all.

**

I already made a plug Ship Upgrades 3 it changes the ship like upgrading an escort. Not an easy plug to make. I will try to find Ship Upgrades 3 plug-in on my drive. I found it do you want to take a look at the plug-in to see how I did it?

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(This message has been edited by Put name here (edited 07-07-2004).)

(This message has been edited by Put name here (edited 07-07-2004).)

(This message has been edited by Put name here (edited 07-07-2004).)

Quote

Originally posted by Put name here:
**

Quote

Originally posted by Big Brother GTi:
**OK, I've searched around for this and no topic seems to be on it.

Anyway, my question is does anyone know how to create an outfit that would upgrade your ship to a different sub-class or another ship altogether? (e.g. something similar to the "Chrome Valk Upgrade", except for other ships i.e. turn a Fed Carrier from "Capital Ship" class to "Heavy Missle" class) I've read the EVN Bible and cannot get my head around the NCB system. I've also had a look at the "Chrome Valk Upgrade" and have some idea on how it works, but not all.

**

I already made a plug Ship Upgrades 3 it changes the ship like upgrading an escort. Not an easy plug to make. I will try to find Ship Upgrades 3 plug-in on my drive. I found it do you want to take a look at the plug-in to see how I did it?

**

Where can I download the plug so I can have a go at it?

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BB/BX/BD_01
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