Mentionning special ships' system in description

Is it possible at all if randomly chosen?

This is not a big issue, more of a nuisance... I can't find any way to mention in descriptions a randomly-chosen special ship system. This is a concern for me since I have quite a lot of missions of the "intercept and destroy fleet" kind, and I'd like some of them to be in a random system of the enemy government. So far the only "solutions" I've found are either to have the ships in a static system after all, and to hard-code the system's name in the dësc, or to write something like "check the map for secret location" and activate the "Mark special ships on mission map" flag, which can be a little amusing for one mission, but gets annoying if it's over-used. Does anyone have anything better to propose?

Thanks,

K.

How about a mďsn duo?

The first mďsn has a "returnstellar" destination, planet X, and the special ship is in that system. When the ship objective is met, the mission starts mission 2, and aborts itself at the same time. This would lead to another problem, though: you can't use random destinations for the final mission, because you need to know where you're going to right from the start and indicate it in clear terms in the dëscs for the first missions.

Make sense?

You could make several versions of the mission, each with with a different special ship location. The player just picks up a random version of the mission.

Bubbles

Pace, yes that makes sense and could be of use to me. I do foresee one problem though: the planet is supposed to be hostile to the player, and yet it would let him land as it's mission goal...

Bubbles: that's more or less what I'm doing but it's a pain when the target space is large...

You could add another invisible spob. If that's feasible.

@guy, on Oct 15 2006, 09:44 PM, said in Mentionning special ships' system in description:

You could add another invisible spob. If that's feasible.

And that would also allow more custom targeting... Invisible spöbs with special governments just for mission addressing. Interesting possibility. I'll look into it.

Invisible spöbs are possible: just have a 1x1 image, make a rlë out of it (just like that), and tadaa, it works. Then make your spöb have NavDefault 16.

I know it works, guys, don't worry

anyone tried a 0x0 sprite for a spob?

@pace, on Oct 16 2006, 01:15 AM, said in Mentionning special ships' system in description:

Invisible spöbs are possible: just have a 1x1 image, make a rlë out of it (just like that), and tadaa, it works. Then make your spöb have NavDefault 16.

I know it works, guys, don't worry

I wonder if EnRLE would make that as efficient as it could. Basically, here's the RLE required (made up by me just now):

0001 0001 0010 0000
0001 0000 0000 0000
0100 0000 0000 0000

(hex).

If you copy that into ResEdit's hex editor for an rleD resource, it should be a transparent 1x1 RLE. A 0x0 one would be:

0000 0000 0010 0000
0001 0000 0000 0000

assuming it worked.

EDIT: Quick correction on second RLE.

This post has been edited by orcaloverbri9 : 19 October 2006 - 07:23 AM

what about 0x1?