Drones

Was originally a 3 stage rocket but is something more now...

Ok first off here is teh link to the original thread for those of us that are to lazy to do a search(or look around with your eyes)

Previous Thread

Right now I am working on a plugin for windows(meaning its a .rez) that has various things dealing with drones. The drones are small so a small ship(like a shuttle) can cary them and use them, but(when done) will be fairly expensive. So far I have a weapon that shoots a glob of "charged plasma" but is is very inaccurate, but looks quite neat(well at least I think so 😉 ). But the drone "ship" is malfunction and causing a crash of Nova. I am not entirely sure why this happens, but, I think it has to do with images. Nova displayes no error message, it just crashes(I have no idea what would happen if I was running in full screen mode. I have been running in windowed form sence I started this project). So I am posting the plug as of now so others can see what every thing is like and help me fix it. I advise that you change to a windowed screen in Nova before testing as I have no clue if full screen will freeze your computer/not let you click on anything.

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Try looking at a debuglog.. That is done simply by creating a .txt file in your main nova folder naed debuglog

Then you load the game and data will be dumped into that file. After is crashes, go open the file and look toward the bottom what might've happened. If you can't figure it out, then post the log here. If all else fails, I'll take a look at the plug in at some point..

I might add that its only when I attempt to use the weapon that the game crashes. And what does "reggie version check returned nil" mean 'cus that shows up a lot in the debug log and I know nil isn't usually a good thing. And which picts are nessacary for the game to function propperly?

Ones I don't think are required:
Target?
Shipyard?
Outfit?

Ones I think are required:
In game(actual) ship image
Mask for that image
possible others that I can't remember right now and think I included sence in the error log it didden't mention anything about it

@wonderboy, on Apr 27 2006, 05:56 PM, said in Drones:

And which picts are nessacary for the game to function propperly?

The only graphics the game requires for a ship is a shĂ€n with the same RID, that shĂ€n pointing to a valid set of PICTs/rlĂ«s (rlĂ«s preferred), with the dimensions given properly. If a shďp does not have an associated shĂ€n, the game will generally crash when it tries to make that ship appear in-system.

Edwards

1. The ammo ship ID field in the weap resource is refering to the ship resource by it's index number, which starts at 0. Not the ID number, which starts at 128. So this should be set at 287, not 445 which is the ship's ID number.

2. The shan resource refers to the rleD and rle8 resource for the ship's sprite and mask. Not the PICT resource.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 28 April 2006 - 12:43 PM

1. AmmoType for carried fighters refers to the ID of the ship.

2. Spins/Shans reference both rle8s/rleDs and PICTs. If both are found rle8/rleD will take precedence.

Here's a thought, perhaps Nova doesn't like being forced to use a one frame sprite for animation.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 29 April 2006 - 11:50 AM

Actually Nova doesen't mind ask DR. Trowel and I found the reason why it dident work. I has assingened the wrong shan. I hit a 2 instead of a 1 in the ID number. Well now I figgure out why they don't leave the screen when they die and make the drone smaller and other such stuff. Also I'm open for some suggestions for drone type stuff.

Why didn't I catch that before? :blink: I guess I was looking in the wrong places.

This post has been edited by JacaByte : 29 April 2006 - 05:28 PM