Do "null" cröns work?

@guy, on Jul 25 2007, 09:48 AM, said in Do "null" cröns work?:

Eh? When you buy a new ship, it will come with x bays and 4-x tokens. Any bays or tokens you had previously should not transfer to the new ship.

On the condition that I modify the shďp resource (i.e. all shďp resources from Nova + ARPIA2), or did I miss something too?
Because right now, I've only got 4 "update cröns" for "old pilots", based on the old counter system, and they give a pilot 1 to 4 bay tokens depending on what the counter says. Which in itself was already flawed, so it won't even be a flawless system.
I haven't added anything to the shďp resources.

It might be better for you to re-explain how the system should work

This post has been edited by Pace : 25 July 2007 - 03:15 AM

Ah, no you are quite correct, the system works by modifying every ship resource. Of course you could always make it so that only ARPIA ships can purchase the ARPIAn bays (this would definitely be the easiest solution and the player is quite unlikely to be flying a non-ARPIAn ship unless their name is Qaanol)

But if you don't like that idea...

Okay, so without modifying ship resources you won't be able to have the number of tokens vary depending on the ship type since there's no way to test what ship the player is flying. I think it comes back to using the multiple ammo types trick again but I'll think about it some more and come back.

Nah, I abandoned the idea of a varying number of tokens. But if you find a solution, I'm all ears

Okay, how's this: One cron.
EnableOn: !(O token | (O bay1 | Obay2 ))
OnStart: G token G token G token G token

This says that if the player doesn't have any bays or tokens, grant him the 4 tokens. This solves the problem of the player buying a new non-ARPIA ship and will also 'fix-up' the player if he doesn't have any bays. For ARPIA ships, you can still manually give them however many tokens you want as stock, so you can still have some variance. Perhaps, for instance, you'd like to allow non-ARPIA ships to only have 2 tokens while ARPIA ships get up to 4 (but even if you don't want a different number for ARPIA ships you should still give them the tokens manually since they may buy an ARPIA ship then immediately proceed to the outfitter before the cron has had a chance to kick in).
Now this doesn't 'fix-up' existing pilots with bays but if they already have bays then I don't think they would care. Doing this automatically would be more trouble than it's worth - if they want fixing up they can simply sell their bays, leave and land again (to allow the cron to kick in) then buy them back again.

This post has been edited by Guy : 25 July 2007 - 03:04 PM

@guy, on Jul 25 2007, 10:02 PM, said in Do "null" cröns work?:

Okay, how's this: One cron.
EnableOn: !(O token | (O bay1 | Obay2 ))
OnStart: G token G token G token G token

Heh, that's in fact what I have.
Though it's "!(((o520 | o445) | (o499 | o501)) | ((o503 | o505) | (o507 | o509)))", given that there are more than 2 bays involved.

But you highlighted an aspect of its inner workings that I failed to see, so thanks. I guess I'll just have to polish it a bit, add a little spice to the equation. Make it better to have certain Arpian ships

Everybody knows that the Surubashi is hands-down the greatest ship ever. Who needs fighter bays when you have half a dozen T-head lances and a port-and-polish? :laugh:

Keep in mind the 0-0-0 cron will only run every 2 days (due to bugs). This shouldn't matter though, just make sure you use OnStart rather than OnEnd.

Actually, I was going to use a 0 Pre-, 0 Post- and 1 Duration crön.
Thing is, I forgot about the OnStart. I always use OnEnd, because I thought OnStart didn't work for such a crön. Because cröns don't work immediately planet-side, right?

Basically, when buying a non-ARPIA2 ship from Culuria (or another Arpia-controlled shipyard), the player would have to leave Culuria and re-land to be able to buy bays.

Hm? I've never known OnStart to not work. Either way it'll work fine, though if you put it in OnStart it'll run the first day rather than the second. Not that that makes a difference, since buying stuff makes you spend 2 or more days planet-side anyway. And yeah, you can't avoid the problem of buying a non-ARPIA2 ship where the bays will also be available.

Unless...
How about instead of a cron have an invisible, auto-aborting mission with the same Avail and Abort bits as the cron and is automatically picked up at the outfitter?

I'll test it. Good idea.

'kay. Tested. It works fine, but the pilot still has to leave the planet before the mission can become available. So which would be better? A crön, or a mďsn (of which I only have 3 slots left if I use this one)?

Ah, that sucks. The whole point was that that wouldn't be necessary. Well probably best to use the cron - those mission slots are too valuable