Is this possible with the engine.

You could make the body a fighter with appropriate alt sprites for the wings (which is the real ship). Make the wings have only the fighter bay, and run away when out of ammo. Once you fire a weapon at this guy, he will launch his figter (the body) then run away, all always pointing the right direction. Im not sure if the fighters 'go feral' or not, but I seem to think they would.

If you need the body to stay and fight, this wouldnt work. If you want it to run away, too, but slower, then it would.

The only problem is it wouldnt matter what weapon you hit it with, the splitting is triggered by him hating you.

This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 20 April 2005 - 07:31 AM

Ok.. i guess I'll have to reveal the curse i'm trying to make.

That is the curse.

So it must seem like the ship is doing this to the ships it attacks.

The ship is supposed to be a pers not a player ship.

This post has been edited by modesty_blaise_us : 21 April 2005 - 06:47 AM

the curse shall not be revealed

edit.

This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 22 April 2005 - 08:44 AM

Ah, I see. So what's the resulting effect on the player? He's no longer able to reproduce?
I think my idea still holds though.

1. Make a ship that looks like the part flying away. Make it a wimpy trader or tell it to run away when out of ammo or something to that effect.
2. Make an invisible, high-speed fighter with a really short-range weapon which doesn't do any damage but has an ammo-type of -999. Make it carry the first ship as an escape ship.
3. Give your pers this fighter as a weapon.

The pers launches the invisible fighter at the player which zooms in to the player and kills itself, escaping and flying away in the 'part' ship so that it seems to come out of the player.

modesty, I'm so sad you had to reveal the curse. You could always now edit your post and take it out, now that some people know what it's about

Pace (haldora), on Apr 21 2005, 07:24 AM, said:

modesty, I'm so sad you had to reveal the curse. You could always now edit your post and take it out, now that some people know what it's about
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Done...

Does not really matter that much.

Guy, if you are going to do it like that, you might as well use submunitioning missiles. The problem is theres no way to make it fly off the direction the player is facing.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Apr 21 2005, 07:56 AM, said:

Guy, if you are going to do it like that, you might as well use submunitioning missiles. The problem is theres no way to make it fly off the direction the player is facing.
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That's the point of Guy's method. The wings have to flap. That is essential. Therefore, the graphics for the second part must either be a shän with animations, which requires a ship, or spďn (standard weapon) that only flies in one direction.
I gave Modesty a solution for getting a weapon to always fly in one direction (towards the lower-right-hand corner of the screen) on IRC. If you put a negative number in a guided weapon's speed field, there is a bug that will always send it towards that corner of the sceen. This will prbably not work on Windows, however, and always sending the "stolen part" in one direction could get repetetive, if done more than once.

Guy's solution would allow for the part to flap in any direction, or return to the launching ship. Return to the launching ship could be easily accomplished by giving it no ammunition, and setting the "leave when out of ammo" flag. You may need to set it up so that it changes from invisible to flappy by using the KeyCarried ship feature, rather than escape ships, though.

Edwards

but in all of the cases, it has nothing to do with the facing of the player, and Id thought that was part of the original criteria.

Though i do see now that my method would have no flapping.

Hmm, an idea occured to me from my hack of the other thread.

Something like, have it swap your ship just before hand with another that looks just like it, but its main frames are all in alt. Make the shot kill you, but have an escape ship that is a copy of your old ship. Hmm, i suppose it depends on when the escape ship pops out, but if you managed to make the burning hulk bit look like the wings flying away, it seems possible for it to all work out. All of your outfits have to be persistant though. And im not sure if escapeshiping aborts all of your active missions, that might be a drag.

Anway, I think i might be able to fix it a bit to make it less unwieldy. I need to test escapeship behavior. Thinking over it now, they wait until the original hulk dissapears, just before the final explosion (supposedly the part that damages them), so the wings bit would have to be in the boom.

Perhaps this is awfly far from the best way of doing it, im just throwing it out there to get people thinking. Note also it requires persistant outfits, which is a drag in and of itself.

So how would you get it to swap just beforehand?

well, Im assuming since its a curse, the thing that casts the curse probably isnt just arandom encounter. Whatever mission makes that guy appear could do spaceship voodoo, too.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Apr 23 2005, 01:55 AM, said:

well, Im assuming since its a curse, the thing that casts the curse probably isnt just arandom encounter. Whatever mission makes that guy appear could do spaceship voodoo, too.
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It's a pers.

Well, thats a bit harder. Theres no way to make sure it happens exactly once, as far as i can figure, unless you set up so it really only meets the player once, ever. And that doesnt seem to be what you want.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Apr 27 2005, 01:45 PM, said:

Well, thats a bit harder. Theres no way to make sure it happens exactly once, as far as i can figure, unless you set up so it really only meets the player once, ever. And that doesnt seem to be what you want.
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It can happen eveytime you meet him..

I have also been thinking of distributing the plugin as EVN Multiplayer..