I need some help...

alot of help, actually.........

I'm making a plug (the phase cloak) and what its SUPPOSED to do is when you cloak, the shots they shot at you while you were cloaking go right through you!!! But I'm stuck on that last part where when you cloak you can't be hit. I'm sure if we all put our heads together we could figure something out (or maybe this has already been done and I should just drop it).

Doesn't seem doable to me. No single cloak can do that for you: the shots hit the graphics of the ship, nothing to do with outfits. You'd need to have a look at a weapon workaround with submunitions, but I still don't think it would work.

I've always wondered, what are submunitions?

They are weapons. Your weapon, when it hits a target (or dies out, if you check a flak flag in the weap resource), can create new weapons. These new weapons are called submunitions: munitions under the weapon itself, as it were.
To learn more about the weap resource, check Zacha Pedro's annotated weap template.

I don't think it can be done..... it would be cool if it could. I would still like any ideas though

zapp, on Apr 10 2005, 06:44 PM, said:

I don't think it can be done..... it would be cool if it could. I would still like any ideas though
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How about you create a ship which has no pixels. It would be on, say, an 8x8, but it would be entirely masked. You could create some lights blinking off and on to show the player where it is (although this could I suppose make it hittable). You would then swap the player's regular ship for this ship, only to swap back later on. You will need to make a separate one of these for each kind of ship it can be fitted to, as you will want to retain all the characteristics of the existing ship. Making this a cloak-at-will outfit would be tedious, because I'm fairly sure you can only swap ships through ncbs, which cannot be engaged by activation of an outfit. You could do it by starting up a mission which causes cloaking when the player chooses to abort it, but the player would have to charge up with enough of these missions (which would of course be available at the outfitters) before setting off. You would have to 'humanise' it, something on the lines of (dialog that appears at outfitter):
"You are looking at some crates marked 'Top Secret - Ultracloak', scribbled out and replaced with 'Bob's guaranteed 'Hide'n'Seek', which are on a scruffy stall at a murky end of the outfitting hangar, when a short man in greasy overalls sidles up to you.

"'Ah. You'll have heard of 'Hide'n'Seek', then, have you?' Without waiting for your answer, the man explains that the most powerful cloaking device in the Universe is sitting, waiting for you to purchase it for a trifling sum.

Do you hand over 25,000,000 Credits?"

(if yes)

"'Fit this to your ship when you set off.' Says Bob (for it is he). 'It will charge up. When you're ready to cloak, you need to terminate the charge period. This is strictly speaking only a quasi-legal item, so I'll hide the activation codes in the Mission Info folder on your computer where nobody will look for them. When you're ready, just log onto that section and abort a mission called 'Charge H'n'S'. You will stay cloaked for as long as you like. But -- if you should run into the law, you didn't get this from me and we've never met. Understand?'"

For my money, a 'can't be hit' outfit is a bit of a liability for balanced gameplay. You would have to do something to make it interesting -- for example, load up the Bomb outfit when it's engaged, so that the player ultimately goes floating through space in a life-boat. Or you could have it drop your legal status so far that no planet in the galaxy will let you land. Or you could have it drain fuel so fast that you couldn't actually exit the system and would be forced to return to Bob to have the gadget removed. Or you could have it as an item that engages as soon as you depart from the planet, but which only lasts for a single day, before the mission fails (timed out) and your ship is swapped back.

An alternative would be to offer it through a mission, engage it when you sight enemy ships, and disengage it when you complete. This would prevent the player from swanning round the galaxy dominating every planet, especially if there was a time limit on the mission.

Thats a pretty good idea, but making an alternate of every ship? I guess it would be easier if no pixels/graphics, but still.... thats a good idea.