SOLUTION - In flight adjustment of ship characteristics

Without the player info box

I notice that Nova doesn't continuously monitor the status of your outfits while in flight.

That is, it seems to make a check when you take off, and only rembers that initial state, even if it changes in-flight.

But there's an exception to this. Every time you Gxxx of Dxxx an item in flight, Nova immediatly recalculates what's on your ship.

So, say you have a missile that is also a speed mod. You want your ship to speed up after it is launched or something. The mass of the missile slows you down while you have it.

So you fire the missle expecting Nova to know that you don't have that mod anymore... and it doesn't work. This is because Nova hasn't recalculated yet.

All you have to do though, is Gxxx and Dxxx an item real quick - ANY ITEM - and suddenly Nova realizes that you no longer have the speed mod.

So, you could have a mission 128 that warps in a ship that dies after 20 frames, triggering onShipDone: a128 s128 g500 d500
where item 500 is any placeholder item, even if it's completely unrelated to the item with mods.

This will make Nova recalculate all the contents of your ship every few seconds.

You could do it through a player activated "Abort Me" mission too.

I'm kinda new to this whole NCB stuff, so someone else might find a way to trigger things faster.

Anyway, I just confirmed that it works with carried fighters and missiles. I had a fighter that also doubled as an IFF, and a missile as a negative speed mod. After launching them, the radar greyed and my ship sped up, respectively, after a couple seconds. When I recalled the fighter I got my IFF back. Cool.

Edit: You know, you could make everything affect speed and turning with something like this. Evey missile and fighter could add a tiny bit of flight performance peanalty. The more you use up, the better your ship will handle with the reduced weight.
Maybe an old, outdated fighter could gain the benefit of a modern missiles tracking system (IFF/Density), while he still has the missile, that is...
(IIRC, one of the earlier models of the A-10 didn't have night-vision systems. But an IR Maverick Missile DID, and the pilot could see with the missile's camera - until he launched the missile. So there is some basis in reality for such a system.)
Oh wow, it works with a cloaking device on carried fighter too! I tried to time it so that I could launch the fighter and then cloak in between updates, and a second later it even uncloaked me!

This post has been edited by Desprez : 07 November 2005 - 08:29 AM

Frikin awesomeness! I've wanted to do this for ages with the **** ****! Fantabulous!

Aftermath Self-Censorship extension installed

Hells yes. Oh hells yes!

All hail the New Contender!

Desprez, on Nov 7 2005, 07:24 AM, said:

I notice that Nova doesn't continuously monitor the status of your outfits while in flight.

That is, it seems to make a check when you take off, and only rembers that initial state, even if it changes in-flight.

But there's an exception to this. Every time you Gxxx of Dxxx an item in flight, Nova immediatly recalculates what's on your ship.

So, say you have a missile that is also a speed mod. You want your ship to speed up after it is launched or something. The mass of the missile slows you down while you have it.

So you fire the missle expecting Nova to know that you don't have that mod anymore... and it doesn't work. This is because Nova hasn't recalculated yet.

All you have to do though, is Gxxx and Dxxx an item real quick - ANY ITEM - and suddenly Nova realizes that you no longer have the speed mod.

So, you could have a mission 128 that warps in a ship that dies after 20 frames, triggering onShipDone: a128 s128 g500 d500
where item 500 is any placeholder item, even if it's completely unrelated to the item with mods.

This will make Nova recalculate all the contents of your ship every few seconds.

You could do it through a player activated "Abort Me" mission too.

I'm kinda new to this whole NCB stuff, so someone else might find a way to trigger things faster.

Anyway, I just confirmed that it works with carried fighters and missiles. I had a fighter that also doubled as an IFF, and a missile as a negative speed mod. After launching them, the radar greyed and my ship sped up, respectively, after a couple seconds. When I recalled the fighter I got my IFF back. Cool.

Edit: You know, you could make everything affect speed and turning with something like this. Evey missile and fighter could add a tiny bit of flight performance peanalty. The more you use up, the better your ship will handle with the reduced weight.
Maybe an old, outdated fighter could gain the benefit of a modern missiles tracking system (IFF/Density), while he still has the missile, that is...
(IIRC, one of the earlier models of the A-10 didn't have night-vision systems. But an IR Maverick Missile DID, and the pilot could see with the missile's camera - until he launched the missile. So there is some basis in reality for such a system.)
Oh wow, it works with a cloaking device on carried fighter too! I tried to time it so that I could launch the fighter and then cloak in between updates, and a second later it even uncloaked me!
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Thats very neat. I too have an interesting user for this

Brilliant! Im glad this works.

I think thats probably the fastest way to self start a mission, unless you use autoaborting missions that trigger themselves automatically (seems to run at the rate of about 3 a frame), but that probably increases system lag quite a bit. Im glad this works.

I will also use this, if that is ok with the author (assuming it is as he has posted it in a public forum...)

Desprez, I think you're going to find yourself making a lot of friends pretty quickly.

Nice work. We need all the inventor-types we can get around here.

Hudson, on Nov 7 2005, 05:38 AM, said:

I've wanted to do this for ages with the **** ****!
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The what now?

Weepul 884, on Nov 7 2005, 03:51 PM, said:

The what now?
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Heh heh heheheheh heh heheh heh heh...

cough

...sorry. You know very well what

As brilliant as this is, you must remember one thing:

AI really dont care about outfits (with few enough exceptions to count on one hand). So a missile that is so heavy it alters speed would only do so whilst on the player ship.

Naturally, there are ways around this. Have the default speed of the ship listed as the minimum when the player is carrying the missiles, give the player an invisible outfit to speed it up to 'empty' speed, then with the missiles it cancels out. Then give the AI few enough missiles that it shouldnt really change speed appreciably. Give them skillvar (i cant remember if this is in the govt, dude, or ship) so different ships are marginally different speeds/turning/accell. It would look close enough, but it would never actually change.

Still, awesome stuff.

I also like mixing shield/etc mods with nonlethal bombs that are gxxx in flight. There is then an automatic timer, you overload the shield capacitor, then suddenly the whole system explodes and you are in fairly deep s###.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Nov 8 2005, 04:59 AM, said:

AI really dont care about outfits (with few enough exceptions to count on one hand).
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How many fingers do you have on your hands? I need my both my hands to count them all

Wow. We should have thought of this before...

By finding this solution you have opened a door that many developers has though would be forever sealed. Congratulations, I saltue you. May your name be credited in may plugs to come.

Awesome work, Desprez. I see much potential for this to be combined with Neb's inflight time advancement to create autoupdating effects every day (of course the day passing is irrelevant and can be removed if you just want the stat updates.)

Guy: Neb == mutant. He's on my team for the wargame, and the first meeting we held didn't accomplish anything because paparazzi kept snapping photos of his, er, "unique" body to sell to tabloids. /nod

Ah, that explains things. Don't suppose you have any of those pics?

@ rmx256:
What? Of course you can use it.

Ok, I did some further experimenting.

You don't even need to add any outfits whatsoever.
You can simply Dxxx an item you don't even have. Nova still checks your ship.

I also tried Nebs idea of having an aborting, self-repeating, mission.
I'm happy to report that the updates are indeed instant. I didn't really see any performance drop, but I admit that there wasn't much else happening.

I also tried stringing a loop of 10 aborting missions together, with only the first being the mission that Dxxx an item. The idea was that I didn't need to check the ship 3 times a frame, when every few frames would be plenty fast. I though maybe checking the ship that often would be even more of a drain on game performance.

However, I didn't see any appreciable difference from the first example. But again, I wasn't doing that much on screen.

Desprez, on Nov 8 2005, 02:39 AM, said:

Ok, I did some further experimenting.

You don't even need to add any outfits whatsoever.
You can simply Dxxx an item you don't even have. Nova still checks your ship.

I also tried Nebs idea of having an aborting, self-repeating, mission.
I'm happy to report that the updates are indeed instant. I didn't really see any performance drop, but I admit that there wasn't much else happening.

I also tried stringing a loop of 10 aborting missions together, with only the first being the mission that Dxxx an item. The idea was that I didn't need to check the ship 3 times a frame, when every few frames would be plenty fast. I though maybe checking the ship that often would be even more of a drain on game performance.

However, I didn't see any appreciable difference from the first example. But again, I wasn't doing that much on screen.
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You are amazing, sir.
If you told us tommorrow that you've found out how to submunition beams... I'd believe you.

Now go add this to the Cool Nova Hacks sticky.

Artanis, on Nov 9 2005, 01:05 AM, said:

You are amazing, sir.
If you told us tommorrow that you've found out how to submunition beams... I'd believe you.

Now go add this to the Cool Nova Hacks sticky.
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Submunition beams, huh? I'll get working on that right away.

I have to admit though, this solution is EXACTLY the sort of thing a newcomer would stumble upon. I don't think I would have even attempted to make outfits that change ship charasterics had I known it couldn't be done.

It just so happend, that the first thing I attemped was adding stuff in flight with Gxxx, whick worked. And then later noticing some stange inconsistancies with in-flight pers missions that look for contribute bits with carried fighters and ammo, before I figured out what Nova was doing.

All the same, I do appreciate all the lavish praise so far...

This post has been edited by Desprez : 08 November 2005 - 08:30 PM

Yes, we certainly needed some new blood to stir us around a bit.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Nov 8 2005, 09:43 PM, said:

Yes, we certainly needed some new blood to stir us around a bit.
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Yeah, the weekly sacrifice haven't been working and have been having the negative side effect of my name slowly moving towards the top of the "To Be Sacrificed This Week" list