New TC

@foreign-object-impact, on Apr 22 2006, 10:19 AM, said in New TC:

EDIT: Also I'm going to make an outfit which is basically an afterburner, but it is ALOT faster than your standard one but it consumes fuel at an ungodly rate and when you use it you damage your armour. The idea is that you're going so unhealthily fast, your ship can't cope with it and starts breaking up, but we're not sure how to do that, any ideas?

Make an outfit and go to the Function section. Choose in three of the fields Afterburner and in the last one Faster Armor Recharge (in which you've to enter a negative number). I think this should work. And I hope you'll be able to complete your TC.

I don't think you can make an Afterburner faster than it currently is. You could make a Speed Boost function, but that's not what you have in mind.

You could make it a secondary weapon.

Make it an unguided projectile with a negative speed and a very short lifetime so it will always fire behind you. Also give it a proximity delay higher than its lifetime and check the detonate at end of lifespan box so it won't hit anything. Have it hit the player and give it a blast radius just big enough so it will always hit you, with high impact, invisible graphic, the sounds you want and a fast reload. Heck, you could make it leave some particles as well to make a kind of "smoke trail" or debris drifting and all you can think of.

You can even make it damage yourself however you like shields, or right through shields to your armor and whatever. If you are kind of a psycho, you could also want to give it a "special fuel" that are basically ammos so you could possibly trigger some kind of effect as they decrease in number.

The drawback is that it would/could affect nearby ships... could very kill escorts if they are fragile and your "outfit" does too much damage that they can handle. Could also allow some kind of "ramming" other ships...

It could still work well enough if you can find a good balance on its lifetime and speed so it will hit asap but still always get the desired effect, push you forward. Keeping the blast radius as small as possible can also help not making your ship a rocket that will blast whatever it contacts with; that is if you don't want it to happen, while it may seem logical that being rammed by a rocketing to wherever it's going, it doesn't make sense that nothing happens when you do it at slower speeds.

Important note: while this will work well with ships with low mass, those with a high one might just barely move from that.

I don't think multiple copies of an afterburner have any effect.

And the problem with making it a secondary weap, IIRC, is that a weapon impact can't make you move any faster than your top speed.

There still might be a way to pull this off, however.

You'd have to have an abortable misn, that when you open the active mission dialog box, you can abort it. It could be called something like "Disable engine safties" or "Activate emergency speed" or something. This misn is started when the player buys the special afterbunrner (which isn't really an afterburner at all.)

In the OnAbort field of that misn, you have it grant you a speed/accel mod, and start a new misn with a self-destructing dude.

From here, you could then have it also either:
A. A mod that drains your armor. An unfourtinate side affect here is that your armor will drain a predetermined amount regardles if you actually use your thrusters or not.

B. Alternately, you can now use the weapon impact trick mumbling psyco just mentioned. If you use a forward firing negative impact weapon, instead of a rear firing positive impact, it might make the escorts safer from the blast. At any rate, this will require lots of tweaking to get right. I also believe that the weapon has to physicaly exit your ship sprite before its impact will affect you.

You could also try a negative speed, high recoil, (negative recoil doesn't work) but I seem to remember that not working right. I think your ship always recoils backwards for normal weapons.

As you can see, my memory is a little fuzzy about the nuances of all this, so you'll have to do a lot of testing.

Ok, so however you get your ship to go faster, you still have that self destructing dude misn running now.
So you make this dudes death delay however long you want the "emergency speed" to last.
In the OnShipDone field you then remove the speed mod, and special items that were granted earlier.
Then you start the first misn again, so the player can activete it again.

When the player sells the special afterburner, you abort the first and second misns. This will clear them both out.

This post has been edited by Desprez : 22 April 2006 - 12:27 PM

Cool TC Good luck with it!

by the way: for rendering landscapes, i suggest Terragen: (www.planetside.co.uk/terragen)

Hi again I haven't had a chance to do testing on the afterburner yet, but I've been adding systems, as of yet all but two are empty because I haven't had a chance to start filling them full of spobs. But I have been working on some more images for planets in space.

I downloaded terragen a few days ago to use for my landscapes, it downloaded succesfully but when I tried to install it, it wouldn't work. Puzzled, I tried to download it again but again there was a problem installing. I went to the website and tried to troubleshooting it, it said that if it didn't work properly to download again, and then download a more recent edition of the windows installer.

Here is the map as of now: btw, I have the obatta nebula and the rochak dust field on my map as I haven't got around to moving them around and renaming them, that will be fixed soon

Map as of now

As I said earlier, I was working on some more images of planets in space and I have managed to create some planets with Wings 3d! all I have done to them is smooth them a little in photo editor.

As usual comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcomed

EDIT: It seems as if photobucket has scaled down the map too much here is a larger version

This post has been edited by Foreign Object Impact : 22 April 2006 - 03:13 PM

Looking good. Never seen the windows map dialog before - it appears to use a different font from the mac version.

Hell again, I've been making some more graphics to use as spobs. I've also written descriptions and bar descriptions for every planet I've put in so far, about 5. I have also started writing an introduction to a mission string.

I thought it would be cool that you start in an escape pod, barely conscious and with a splitting headache and very vague memories, and you find out more about your identity as you go along, and you only know your name because its on a tag on your uniform. Though I am aware the whole Bourne Identity thing has been overdone a little.

Im also going to add a moon to orbit round our spiel in s7evyn, and when you explore it all you can find is a 200ft tall statue with the inscription "Dash Riprock"

EDIT: I was looking through the nova data files and found an image for a neutron star and I thought it would interesting to have a system with a neutron star in the center, give it gravity, and make it deadly, I have held off doing this because EV NEW told me that giving a stellar gravity seriously messes with the ships AI

This post has been edited by Foreign Object Impact : 23 April 2006 - 02:52 PM

Deadly stellars with gravity are present in Polycon, and apart from your fighter getting blown up as you try to recall it from across the star, I haven't really noticed anything out of what to be expected from the AI.

FOI, if you own Photoshop, i would recommend downloading LunarCell if you would like quality planets generated very quickly.

But, if you want to be more original and actually create planets of your own, keep on doing planets as you have been doing, but this time, rather than leave the texture flat (and thus giving it a 2D feel), use a spherize tool over it and you will bring the planet to life.

Sadly I don't have photoshop. Most of my planets are made on Wings 3d and photo editor. I make a sphere, smooth it over a few times, make it all one color, then select different faces and add patches of different different color and then smooth them a little. The red and green planet however is a satelite picture of mars in which I've inverted all of the colors except red.

I'm also trying to find a way to put a layer with clouds on them so they look like they have an atmosphere and look slightly more 3d.

Can you think of a free alternative to photoshop? I've downloaded a number of free programs such as dog waffle but I don't have a good image editing program.

You could try Graphic Converter. This is bundled with many macs but is a free download (shareware) if you don't already have it. This is what I use, though I don't really do any serious image editing.

@foreign-object-impact, on Apr 22 2006, 09:19 PM, said in New TC:

but it is ALOT faster than your standard one

Hope you don't write "alot" in any of your descs

This post has been edited by Guy : 24 April 2006 - 04:00 AM

I had a look at graphic converter, but its exclusively for Macs and I'm using windows 2000.

Progress is good so far, I've started writing the Earth Coalition Navy string and the Terran frieght string and things are good.

Just a little bit of advanced warning, progress is going to be half as fast as usual for the next 4-5 weeks because I've got my GCSEs this summer, so my brother will be working (mostly) on his own. For those of you who live outside the UK GCSEs are HUGE exams which you take when you're 16 which pretty much determine the subjects and jobs you do in later life.

I used the search feature to see if I could find an existing thread on this subject, there are probably loads but when I searched hundreds of threads came up so I thought I'd ask here. When you land on a planet there are seven options:
1)Bar
2)Mission BBS
3)Commodity Exchange
4)Shipyard
5)Outfitter
6)Refuel
7)Leave

Is there any way that I can add an 8th option or replace one of the existing options?

There isn't a way to make something completely different, though you can rename the buttons and use the screens in an innovative way. What do you want to add?

Ok, so I just have to change the images? Ok, but can I do it only for certain planets? The idea behind it was that you wouldn't stumble across an important general in a bar, or a dockyard, or buying food. Seing how terragen isn't working for me, can you guys suggest any good programs for making planet backrounds, or planets in space?

@foreign-object-impact, on Apr 25 2006, 02:21 AM, said in New TC:

I had a look at graphic converter, but its exclusively for Macs and I'm using windows 2000.

Oh, my apologies, for some reason I had the idea you were on a mac. Maybe I confused you with someone else.

As for the buttons, the labels are all stored in a STR# resource and any changes you make are global. The only way to do it would be to choose one of them which you don't really need (lets say the commodity exchange) rename it to something else and somehow set it up so that it doesn't look like a commodity exchange anymore. Maybe rearrange the dialog so it's nothing but a bit of text (though you'll need to get someone on a mac to do this for you).
Or you could just relabel the bar to something more ambiguous.

(EDIT) Beaten by Croikle. Those are probably better ideas.

This post has been edited by Guy : 24 April 2006 - 05:40 PM

You can't change the button images (or is it text in Nova?) per-planet, at least not very easily. Hmmm... here's an idea. If you want the bar to be labeled different things on different planets, the label can be part of the landing pic, and you can change the structure of the planetside dialog so you can have the label beside the button. The button itself might say 'Enter', with the actual description right beside it.

However, you would still have news and gambling there, and maybe your average military HQ doesn't have those. It might make more sense to use the shipyard, if you had a ship-buying dynamic like in SFA. In this case, the shipyard would be the military command center, and you would talk to important people there as well as getting reassigned to different ships. This might not work well for your TC, though something similar might. Perhaps you have to go to the governmental buildings to get your weapons registered, and that's what the outfitting center is. Or, you could put things in the Mission BBS: you would see a mission called ATTN: <PN> from General Razcak, which tells you to meet him in his office. When you accept, that starts the mission.

It seems like there are several options here, and there are certainly more to be found. Do some more brainstorming, and you'll surprise us with an amazing new idea.

This post has been edited by Croikle : 24 April 2006 - 05:38 PM

Quote

However, you would still have news and gambling there, and maybe your average military HQ doesn't have those.

Of course they have those! Have you been on a Battlestar lately? There's gambling AND news. :rolleyes:

For rearranging the planet dialog, you might also want to think up an arrangment of buttons that would put them right next to the planet landing picture, and have the landing image itself contain the labels for the buttons. It doesn't work to place the buttons on top of the landing picture, but an arrangement I could see working would be to shrink most of the buttons down to round (i.e. just the curved end bits), line them up along one side of the landing image (which would be shrunk slightly), and put the labels into the landing image, lined up with the correct buttons.
You probably would not be able to do this to the leave button (I think that it is used in several other dialogs), and the refuel button might look odd (the button vanishes, but the label remains- perhaps put a "dead button" in the landing screen under it?), but otherwise it seems quite do-able. It might even be possible to edit the existing spaceport background PICT to look right with a large margin on one side of the landing PICT.

I think I'll see about working up a demo of this. Even if you don't use it, I'd like to see how it turns out.

Edwards

You're overthinking with the refueling button, there.

I can understand how an argument for consistency could be made, but idea postulated was to modify locations where a player could get missions. You're never going to get your mission briefings at the gas pump. (1)

Because the "Refuel" and "Leave" options don't supply the same opportunities to offer missions as do the others (Bar, Shipyard, etc.), they don't really need to be changed.

(Edit) (1) Sorry, couldn't resist.

Quote

As you bite your tounge to to hold back bitter complaints about the rising price of deuteurium, you see your contact with the local government, Shortlived Expendable, approaching.

/"<PN>!/" he shouts /"The Crueller Krullers are attacking!/"

/"Alright, but could you give me a chance to top off the tanks, first?/" you respond.

/"Sure thing,/" he responds. Moments later, he is gratuitously slaughtered by a Kruller Pastry Gun.

As the gun melts him into a puddle of cream filling, he shrieks /"D---it, this is the third time today!/"

This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 25 April 2006 - 11:17 AM