I need some help please

It's the same thing as my suggestion; the only thing I added (the mission and crön) are just how you get it to work.

No, because I suggested just editing the outfits, and you had some complex thing with multiple copies of the same thing. My way, you just set a bit on entering the system, which is easy. Then clear it after you go through the wormhole. Granted, this only works in its present form on 7even, which can only be accessed once, but I'm sure there's an easy, invisible method for applying it... Perhaps an invisible mission with a Special Ship in the system, and then a cron that clears the bit after one day. Which would work unless there's a hypergate/wormhole to another inhabited system.

Read the whole post.

Oops.

The ideas are pretty much identical; the one thing I'd add to yours is that I'd say it would be easier to have the mission start at the planet in question, auto-abort, and then set the bit rather than sitting invisible in your mission list.

Purely out of interest...

Couldn't you just set the planets tech level to 999? That covers all tech levels, right?

Well the problem is that all the faction specific weaponry requires certain bits to be set before any planet sells them. So that would only make a planet that sells all outfits currently available to you based on your storylines.

Ah. Okay.

Hmm... this brings up the versioning question... Although there is that "hide higher-ID's with same display-weight" flag. (0x1000) Interestingly, the way nova uses this seems not to match the nova bible, which says about the higher IDs, but it appears that if only one of the outfits with a certain display weight has it set, then it blocks all others, regardless of ID (that's how polaran multi-torps work, at least). It makes sense, though.

Alright guys, I'm going to ask a question that is going to make me sound very "newguy"ish but I'll ask it anyway as I've tried fixing this myself to no good avail.

I've brought this up before but it seems that almost any time I add a sprite in for a ship larger than a fighter (as a completely new ship OR a replacement, the game tilts the sprite and things get very chaotic)

I have some picture examples this time, but first I'd like to note that the sprite content of this plugin is taken from rEV total conversion plug and is NOT MY OWN. Furthermore, I do not plan on releasing the plug to the public at any time. All credit for the sprites go to the designers of that plug and I am not in possession of their originality, this I would like to make clear ahead of time.

Lastly, the screens will not be posted here because of their rather large size (1024x768 fullscreen) and photobucket does not allow thumbnailing in any way that I know of. The links are safe, please do not hesitate.

http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l222/fro...whathehell3.jpg

http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l222/fro...whathehell2.jpg

http://i97.photobuck...ring/whathe.jpg

http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l222/fro...hathehell34.jpg

As you can see, the sprite is oddly not aligning front/rear and seems to prefer the fed destroyer (who's numbers the cruiser possess in order to appear in the same circumstances) engine glow rather than the cruiser glow which has the exact same value and I believe to the best of my knowledge is coded in to the new shan resource correctly. Aside from just being skewed at an angle, the sprite will sometimes rotate at that set angle with the invisible fed destroyer base and sometimes just invert to the opposite direction in a single frame just for the heck of it, or so it seems.

There has to be some MAJOR mistake I'm putting out to do this to the ship sprites I try to add. To make matters more confusing, the rebel manta (overlaying the rebel viper at the moment) uses the same method as the R Valkyrie < R Destroyer/R Destroyer (old) < R Cruiser number synching in an attempt to replace it in all encountered circumstances...however IT does not have the skewing problem but retains the original's engine glow despite the addition of its own engine glow rled, mask, and shan coding.

Also, these are the first ships I've imported as .bmps into the rled resource of EVNEW and tried to turn into useable sprites. Unfortunately this seems to have spawned a new side effect as well! The masks for the sprites, as well as the sprites themselves, are fine before I import them, but then shortly thereafter degrade slightly, as well as their masks degrading as well and causing some white pixels to appear arround the edges of the ship (which looks very ugly, as you can see in the screens.) What am I to do?

I see engine glows to the side of the nicely done ships. Is that what I'm supposed to see? If so, then there probably is something wrong with the shän.

Why have you reimported the sprite images at all? Just copy the original rleDs from rEV into your plug. Your other problem may be related. Let us know once you have the original rleDs in there.

Its not that the glow is to the side; the body of the ship is. The craft moves parallel to the direction the engine glows of the original destroyer and the cruiser's sprite does not orient in that direction. No, instead it wants to point sideways and just jump all over the place and not behave smoothly or reasonably.

In case I made the original post too complicated the problem is threefold:

I) The ship's sprite is not aligned to the direction it is moving; ever.

II) The ship refuses to take a new engine glow and instead clings to the old glow sprites for dear life

III) Wierd sprite/mask decay that reduces the quality of the sprite on import (looks like a bad magic selection wand, crtl + x photoshop cut) along with some border pixelation which I'd attribute to the mask being flawed as well...

How do I do that from EVNEW?

At the moment I'm opening the relavant rEV file, saving as a .txt file to keep the rleds as .bmps (all of them: base, bmask, glow, gmask, etc...), opening my plug in EVNEW and creating a new rled with the old values (for the most part, interfering numbering is changed) by importing the base .bmp as an image and then importing the base mask .bmp into the same rled as a mask type. Creating shans that use these values, then editing the ships to number align to the shans.

Is there really an easier way to do this?? It took my whole day just to do 5 ships, and it still does not work.

This post has been edited by Match : 08 June 2008 - 01:19 AM

Heard of copy/paste? Sorry, I just don't see why this should be any trouble. Copy the shan too. Change IDs if necessary to avoid conflicts.

.....dammit......

This post has been edited by Match : 08 June 2008 - 01:51 AM

What guy is saying is that EVNEW is handy and you can open two instances of the program, open two .rez files at once, and copy and paste resources from one to the other. That should make the process easier and less error prone.

If that doesn't fix it, then do the source images for the ships you are using start straight vertical and swing around clockwise? Because that's how Nova interprets each sprite. However, that may not be your problem as the engine flares don't seem to be at a constant rotational offset from your ships. Maybe the ship images have more than 36 frames, and you only imported the first 36?

Ack... too slow. I guess I leave my comment as there's some elaboration...

This post has been edited by Keldor Sarn : 08 June 2008 - 01:55 AM

Well...I'm not sure whether to be overjoyed or rock bottom deppressed that I've done hours of work for what could have been seconds....

At any rate thanks guy(s), didn't know you could just copy + paste a resource like that. oO Its surreal.

EDIT: I have yet to test, but I think I found the answer to my problem: the shans for my new sprites that covered the old bases and glows, where not numbered the same, essentially providing absolutlely zero direction for the game other than to use the new sprites.

This post has been edited by Match : 08 June 2008 - 02:43 AM

Ah yes, that would explain it. Glad to help

Alright it was along those lines, but it also was related to the "Adjust for skewed graphics" value that was checked on all the culprit ships.

However it doesn't seem to be ENTIRELY fixed. It appears that although the standard versions of the modified ships are faithful to their code as I understand it, variant types deviate and skew/use old engine glows. Is there a spot in the Nova .rez core files where variants are defined, and (can/do) they use variant sprites on occassion? If anyone knows that'd be parrot.

Ummm.... Seems like I had another question. What was it? pounds forehead with eyes closed in grimace trying to remember Uhh....well whatever its nearly 3am, I'll remember tomorrow hopefully.

Alright, I remember now. What controls the probability that a certain ship or fleet will enter a system you are in, and is their any way to make a weapon/outfit that is the opposite of a transmissions jammer (instead of blocking reinforcement fleets, it summons one on use)

Secondly, is there any way that a weapon could spawn a temporary escort that disappears after jumping or landing?

This post has been edited by Match : 08 June 2008 - 05:17 AM