I need some help please

@captjosh, on Jun 15 2008, 06:39 PM, said in I need some help please:

Any chance of making this capable of working from pict resources within a plug as well?

I've thought about it, but I'm not sure opening a PICT resource, copying it, and pasting it into Target Generator is enough work to justify bringing in an additional, less standard interface to do the same thing. Deep integration with MissionComputer would make it more difficult to build a stand-alone version (for which it's turned out there really is demand!), and in any case it seems to me that a workflow involving pasting from a graphics application (or opening a renderer's output from disk) is likely more common than one working from an existing plug-in.

Probably. It's not like I can't export the Clavius target picts and work from them from there. It's what I would have been doing trying to redo them in GIMP anyway.

New question: can a beam weapon, or any weapon at all, be coded to damage what they hit but not be stopped by it? Such as a beam that goes through an enemy vessel, doing damage to it, but passes through to damage other targets?

This post has been edited by Match : 16 June 2008 - 07:06 PM

I don't think so. I tried for a beam that passed through 'roids and destroyed them, but the only way I found was destroying the roid very quickly. That isn't what I was after, nor you I suspect.

No, not quite. You are correct, and this is as far as my effort got me as well.

@david-arthur, on Jun 15 2008, 02:46 PM, said in I need some help please:

As for the comments about Nova Target Generator, how does this look?

Looks fantastic!! Can't wait till 4 is released

New question: how do I design one ammo type for several launchers to use? I know EV can do this because wrathii variants stack for the final ammo count (E.g. if you have 600 of the old kind, sell the launcher and buy the new launcher that can fire cloaked plus its 300 wrathii, you end up with 900 launchable. Same goes for polaron torpedoes and multi torps. Old and new ammo types stack.

To be less vague, I've redesigned the entire railgun family. Although incredibly fast, considerably damaging, approvably accurate at medium ranges, and massively impacting, they now have reload times, are secondary weapons, are more expensive, take a little more room, but most of all require ammo.

What I'd like to do is make it so that all four railguns (100mm, 150mm, and 200mm fixed + the 100mm turreted) use the same ammo outfit but use different max ammo settings. EG: the four use one penetrator outfit, but the 100mm's max ammo may be say 12 per railgun, while the 200 would grant only 6 per gun. I thought I had it figured out by setting the four weapons to use the same ammo type (weapon # of 100mm - 128) in all four ammo type fields, but set the max ammo differently. But no, alas it does not work.

EDIT: I must have it almost right though because even though I can not buy the penetrators with any other railgun than the 100mm (which is where the ammo type is original), the other ships in the game would not use their new railguns at all (having not done anything to the ship code, which has the railgun ammo at -1 and thus unfireable now that they require ammo). Now after giving them all an ammo count, they fire again regardless of rail's mm measurement.

This post has been edited by Match : 17 June 2008 - 08:01 PM

Ammo is handled by the AmmoType field, from 0-255. Set all 4 to 28.
As for that MaxAmmo thing, I don't know how that's handled. It should work as Num100s12+Num200s6+..., but who knows?

Well I just figured out something important. If you have multiple weapons that use the same ammo type, they cannot possess different ammo maxes. x_X Well that completely nixes my idea for another outfit that allows the carrying of more ammo... Say is there a way to make an ammunition outfit that grants a certain ammount of ammo even when it's personal outfit quantity is 1? Say I want an expanded magazine that will increase my ammo holding capacity by 24 rounds. Is there a way I can make it "ammunition" in code, but grant ___ ammount of ammo per quantity? It seems maybe chaingun ammo has a similar quality, but its not bluntly obvious enough for me to see it yet.

I think what you do is set the "use ammo at end of burst" button, and then set the burst length to 24. Or you could tell it to grant 23 of the ammunition outfit upon purchase (the 24th being the one you buy.)

But can the outfit somehow increase the ammount of munitions carryable?

EG: polaron torp launcher (regardless of how many) grants purchase of up to 40(noncloak)-20(cloak) max torpedoes, and I want the expanded magazine to allow for 20 more per say. Do I make an invisible ammunition outfit that is identical to the purchaseable variant and make it's max ammo be the additional ammount of ammo I want, then have the magazine grant x number of this ammo on purchase? Or is there a simpler way to cleverly "expand the magazine"?

Well, there's a way, I think, but it's sort of complicated, and I'm not sure if it'll work, although it should. I'm just making it up, and I don't think there will be any problems, but I don't know. Anyway, what you do is create all of your normal weapons and ammo outfits. In the weapon resource, have the max ammo be -1, so it isn't determined by how many weapons. Set the max number on the ammo outfit to the number you want per occasion of the weapon and ammo expander. Create a new, invisible outfit. Under the function, tell it to Increase Maximum of your ammo outfit. In the weapon outfit, tell it to grant one of the invisible outfits every time the weapon is bought, and delete it every time it's sold. Do the same thing in the ammo expander outfit. I hope this works.

I thought ModMax can overcome MaxAmmo.

Hmm... For some reason making the magazine's function be "Max Outfit Mod" and point to the ammunition outfit only makes it so that if I buy the expanded magazine, it somehow associates the ammo to the mag and tells me to sell it off before I sell the mag. Regardless, it does not increase the max number of penetrators I can purchase.

Also, 0101181920, I'm having a bit of trouble mentally picturing exactly what you are suggesting. It sounds like it WOULD work, if only I could understand the steps (and in some cases how to accomplish them...) Like for "invisible outfit" just set it's Buy Random to zero right? Or by "In the weapon outfit, tell it to grant one of the invisible outfits every time the weapon is bought, and delete it every time it's sold." you mean the four railguns by "the weapon" correct? And do you mean the weapon resource for the railguns, or the outfit resource? Err... If its not too much to ask, would you care to explain how to have the expander outfit grant the invisible item, or sell it for that matter? Finally, should the outfit for the ammunition have a limit?

You need two modmax outfits to do that. Say, if I can buy 5 pieces of ammo, only having 1 modmax will not help my buy any more ammo. But if I have 2 modmax, I can buy 10 pieces of ammo, and 3 lets me get 15. And so on.

Max of outfit = (outfit maximum)*(number of ModMax outfits)

The outfit for the ammunition should have a limit, equal to that of maxAmmo in the weapon field. Its just good practice.

0101181920 means that you should set this in the oütf resource. In the onBuy field, set Gxxx where xxx is the ID of the modmax pointing to the ammunition outfits. This will allow one railgun to hold 10 ammo, but two can hold 20, and three can hold 30, etc. Make sure to set the onSell field to remove one modMax outfit per railgun sold so that you don't end up with a bug allowing an unlimited amount of ammo.

To respond to a previous question:

@match, on Jun 16 2008, 05:05 PM, said in I need some help please:

New question: can a beam weapon, or any weapon at all, be coded to damage what they hit but not be stopped by it? Such as a beam that goes through an enemy vessel, doing damage to it, but passes through to damage other targets?

You can't do this with a beam, but you can with projectiles

Set up a weapon that submunitions into itself every couple of frames (and be sure to give it a submunition limit), give it a small blast radius, set the proximity delay to be longer than the lifespan, and check the shot explodes at end of lifespan and the passes over asteroids boxes. With a near invisible weapon sprite and an explosion, this will create a neat fireball effect, though you can of course switch around so that it's a massive bolt thing with no explosion graphic that just tears through things.

Since it requires +1 of the max ammo outfit for EV Nova to allow the purchase of more of ____ type of outfit, would it be possible to say, have one buyable outfit that does nothing but grant 2 invisible max ammo outfits?

Here, I set up a little plugin that you can look at. It won't really do anything, as most of the stuff isn't hooked up, but you can look at it. Also, you aren't really understanding. You see, you don't need something that gives two of the maximum increase outfit, because the weapon also gives one. So at the begining, you don't have any. You can't buy any ammo, because it's, say, 200. Then you buy a weapon. This gives you the weapon, and one of the increase maximum outfits. Now you can buy 201 of the ammo. You buy the ammo pod. This grants another of the maximum increase outfit, so now it's 202. You sell the ammo pod. This deletes one of the maximum increases, so it's 201 again. You sell the weapon. 20*0. If you want the weapon to let you buy twenty, but the ammo pod to let you buy forty, then it's a bit different. You need to find the greatest common denominator, the biggest number that goes into both evenly. That's the base ammo max. In this case, it would be twenty. So the base ammo max is 20. You keep the weapon the same, but in the ammo pod, you put gxxx gxxx in the on buy field, and dxxx dxxx in the on sell. This will grant two of the maximum increase when you buy it, and two when you sell it. I realize this is a complex solution to a simple problem, but I don't know if there's any other way to go around it.

Attached File(s)

• Help_plug.zip (785bytes)
  Number of downloads: 3

I hate to be demanding but could you (or anyone with a computer that isn't so picky) possibly convert them to the window's .rez format? It seems my converter tool won't allow me to convert it into a readable format...sadly. Thank you for making it though, all the same. I was kind of hoping for something just like this. Much appreciated, but still unreadable until it can be converted by a machine that doesn't hate on mac format files... sigh

EDIT: Also, how do I make ships randomly appear in systems? I'm guessing I use a pers resource?

This post has been edited by Match : 18 June 2008 - 10:15 PM

Oh, sure. Forgot you used Windows. Few people around here do. Here you go. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Attached File(s)

• Help_plug_2.zip (879bytes)
  Number of downloads: 1