System Messages

Visbits, maybe?

You know the messages that appear at the bottom of the screen sometimes in systems? I was wondering if it was possible to use visbits to create a system with one of those messages, used only for a specific mission. For example, the player would be sent to a system, but on arrival to that system, a message would display at the bottom of the screen telling the player to instead go somewhere else.

Come to think of it, it's used in a few missions in the stock scenario. Now my question is, how do you do it?

Use the "Qxxx" operator.

Quote

Qxxx - make the player immediately leave (absquatulate) whatever stellar he's
landed on and return to space, and show a message at the bottom of the
screen. The message is randomly selected from the STR# resource with
ID xxx, and is parsed for mission text tags (e.g. <PSN> and <PRK> )
but not text-selection tags like those above (e.g. {G "he" "she"} )
(see dësc and mďsn resource descriptions for more examples)

Pace is right about the Q bit; but to show that while in flight, you'll need a mission succeeding in space, and using Qxxx in the "OnShipDone" field.

An "Observe Ship" mission usually works for this.

MM hmm, though if it was an empty system, there really wouldnt be any harm in doing it from inside the system. It would save a mission and waste a syst. Generally the former is more valuble, but its irrelelvant if you arent running out.

That works well. The system will be full of mission ships, I'll make one of them activate the bit that shows up when he hypers in from another system.

I had a similar question of where these messages were hiding. I wanted to have a warning show when you entered a system, sort of like "Beware, blackhole"

.........ah, that was easy, once I found where the text was hidden

This post has been edited by Vast Deathmaster : 03 May 2005 - 10:34 PM