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Heh, I can do the latter, but the former is up to the mods, of course. If all else fails we can just drop a link in the "All the Important Links You'll Ever Need" thread.
Edit1:
Okay, post has been edited. If anyone can come up with a fitting description for Multiple Ammo Types, BORCs (preferably including something about the multiplication/addition, etc), or RANCs, that'd be sweet... I'm certainly no pro on those topics.
I put some of the ideas that hadn't been completely realized in a different section labeled "tentative". If anyone has some free time and wants to play around a bit, please do so.
Should we also link to things that are documented, but kind of hard to implement? Splitting ships and Escape ships come to mind.
Edit2:
Oh yeah, I just remembered postings about multiple-page descs during missions and after new pilot creation... I also remember making a way to create quite randomized text in order to get variations in mundane missions a long time ago... I'll have to post about that, a lot of people can use that.
~ SP
This post has been edited by SpacePirate : 18 February 2005 - 08:01 PM
The ship hangar portion of The mrxak Challenge is definitely do-able. Though I never submitted the final product for the challenge, there are working ship hangar plug-ins on the Nova add-ons page for the EVC and EVO ports. I've gotten such minimal feedback in regards to them (aside from a few dozen emails asking if I can do it for Nova) that I never bothered to write down exactly how I did it. If there is any interest, I'll give it a go.
The planetary warfare also works, you just need to know how to get a planet to shoot (it isn't easy).
I've posted my solution to the linked thread (yes, I know how old it is) so that it's easier to see what I'm talking about.
Quote
I'm still trying to figure out BORCs and RANCs, but you might try something like this for Multiple Ammo Types: Multiple Ammo Types: How to have a cumulative maximum for several different outfits.
Also, you should probably mention that BGM stands for Background Music.
This post has been edited by Edwards : 22 February 2005 - 06:26 PM
Two things. Going back in time: Not sure if this will work, but there is a field in the misn resouce that allows a certain amount of time to pass by for the player upon completion of the misn, past the 1-day delay for landing. If this field were set as negative, than it might cause time to move backwards. (I will make a quick plug to test this).
Also don't forget ShipHanger for EVC and EVO Nice work, Slouch! Now the only problem is getting it to work for EVN
darth_vader, on Feb 23 2005, 03:34 AM, said:
Going back in time: Not sure if this will work, but there is a field in the misn resouce that allows a certain amount of time to pass by for the player upon completion of the misn, past the 1-day delay for landing. If this field were set as negative, than it might cause time to move backwards. (I will make a quick plug to test this). View Post
The topic the link links to will tell you that negative datepostinc doesn't work. The method it suggests is to somehow overflow the date so that it wraps around to a negative value, much like what could happen with your credits in early versions of EV.
Guy, on Feb 23 2005, 01:34 AM, said:
The topic the link links to will tell you that negative datepostinc doesn't work. The method it suggests is to somehow overflow the date so that it wraps around to a negative value, much like what could happen with your credits in early versions of EV. View Post
And still happens with government ratings...
It's occured to me that, since a sample file for the Cloak Hunter is on the Add-ons section, I should provide a link for those interested.
CloakHunter.sit
Here's an idea I once had. Not sure if anyone else's thought of this before me, but anyway:Disabled sprites. The base sprites actually depict the ship all half-destroyed with animations of fire and stuff and then your alt sprites show the ship normally. Set the alt sprites to hide when ship is disabled and there you go. Of course, then you won't be able to use the alt sprites for other effects, but oh well.
Here's something I noticed while prowling around in the Polycon TC. I don't know if you'd classify it as a hack, a loophole, or even a bug, but it is at least undocumented behavior. Set a shďp Cost parameter to a negative value. This will cause both the purchase price and hiring fee to be zero credits. The weird part is that if you hire this ship, you will be paid 10% of the absolute value of the Cost every game day. Polycon just used it as a difficult to get at Easter Egg. But with a little finesse one could have a mission that first sets an NCB that triggers the negative Cost ship's availability (Buy% = 0, Hire% = 100) and then says that you are to be paid every day for some TBD reason and sends you to the "Hiring Hall" to hire this kind of ship. Dunno how useful that might be, but it's there.
The definitive answer on the Back in Time issue: I got it to work, but while is is possible , it is not feasible in a plug-in enviroment.
How the game's date system works: The current game date of a pilot is stored as three numbers: the Day, the Month, and the Year, initially set for each pilot by the chär resource. The Year is the one we are interested in, as it is the one that can overflow (the others, in the normal course of the game, just loop). It is, as are most Nova numbers, a 16-bit signed integer, so its value can range from -32768 to +32767. This makes it easy to test. I created a chär that set the date to Dec. 30, 32767, landed, and took off. The date was now Dec. 31, 32767. The moment of Truth. I landed and took off again. The date was now Jan. 1, -32768. You can go back in time.
Now comes the problem. A mďsn's DatePostInc field is also a 16-bit signed integer, but it modifies the Day number, not the Year. 32767 translates to about 100 years. This is a problem, but as a brave adventurer, you press on: "Why not just run a mission like that 650 times, to loop around to about 500 years in the 'past'?" you ask. Well, there's simple answer to that. It'll take over two and a half hours. In my first attempt at overrunning the calendar, I tried advancing the date one 32767-mission at a time. Each one took a little over 15 seconds to calculate (On an iBook G4 with 256 MB of RAM, running MacOS 10.3.5 (on battery power- oddly it took even longer while plugged in :huh: )). When I strung ten of them together, it took a little under two and a half minutes. After my pilot reached the ripe old age of 5776 (he didn't take a bath in all that time), I gave up trying to loop the date that way. It took too long, waiting for each millenium to pass so I could run the missions again (earlier attempts involving an auto-aborting loop had apparently locked the game, so automation wasn't really an option).
Alas, after all this, it is clear that time travel will never make it out of the laboratory.
Edwards (who thinks he has too much time on his hands- 5776 years of it )
Arturo, on Feb 25 2005, 07:43 AM, said:
Here's something I noticed while prowling around in the Polycon TC. I don't know if you'd classify it as a hack, a loophole, or even a bug, but it is at least undocumented behavior. Set a shďp Cost parameter to a negative value. This will cause both the purchase price and hiring fee to be zero credits. The weird part is that if you hire this ship, you will be paid 10% of the absolute value of the Cost every game day. Polycon just used it as a difficult to get at Easter Egg. But with a little finesse one could have a mission that first sets an NCB that triggers the negative Cost ship's availability (Buy% = 0, Hire% = 100) and then says that you are to be paid every day for some TBD reason and sends you to the "Hiring Hall" to hire this kind of ship. Dunno how useful that might be, but it's there. View Post
I'm not commenting on anything technical, just a possible mission use for this.
After reaching a certain combat rating, you could become quite a well known pilot, and have young,new, rich, excitable pilots wanting to join you in your adventures around the galaxy, and they'd be willing to pay for it. Or something along those lines.
SpacePirate, on Feb 10 2005, 06:15 AM, said:
Hey, been a while since I was any EVN boards. Last time I posted was probably the old style ones. Thought I'd drop by to see what was going on though and found this. Just uploaded the stuff I used to keep on-line back onto my iDisk.
I've also added the conceptual stuff I still have, including the original BORC plug, the Missiles plug and a plug I was working on, but never had the time to properly develop, that would have had a working clockwork solar system. It kinda works at the moment, but there's very little to do, other than fly about. I think it looks kinda cool though.
Anyway, enjoy.
Regarding bugs that can be exploited, for some reason I now remember this one thing that I did. In my first attempt at making a plug, I made a couple new systems. Well, I forgot to set the position of the second, so it was placed at (0,0) aka Sol. So, while testing, I said what the hell and jumped in. It took me to Sol(I think, that part of my memory is a bit fuzzy), then cut off the link back to where I came from(the link to my first created system). At least, I'm pretty sure it did this. The only problem was that since I wasn't using visbits, the names of both systems overlapped and they looked really funky. But that can be easily accoutned for.
I'm not sure if this is fancy enough, but I like the idea of 'smart' missiles. I first found the idea in the pug-in Intelligent EMP Torpedo. It uses a fighter as the missile, giving you the ability to switch targets and not waste ammo when you fire extra shots to compensate for misses. This also inspired my idea for a remote mine, which unfortunately doesn't work.
Requiem, was your first plug-in made for EVC/O? EVN no longer allows one way links, though I think you could still do it with a mission that would be completed upon entering a system which would remove the link.
It was in EVN. I know that EVN doesn't allow one way links, BUT, there are ways to trip up the system. I believe that I found one of those ways.
I will confirm Requiem's point. When I started Arpia, I linked Residio to Sol, but not the other way round, and that link would sometimes disappear when I was in Sol. Very strange, but it didn't happen with the other systems Residio was linked to.
I figured out a way of creating detachable portions of ships as escape ships. It's over there:
Fatal Weapons (EVN)
It's the only "cool" thing I've ever thought of.
This post has been edited by Emmit Gandlodder : 07 March 2005 - 12:59 PM
Well, as far as I can tell, the way Nova handles reciprocal links is as follows: As of v1.0.8, a system will only inherit links from a system in the same location as it with a higher RID. For example, if systs 128 and 129 are in a stack, and 128 links to another system, 129 will not link to that system. However, if syst 129 links to another system, both 129 AND 128 will link to that system. I have tested this fairly thoroughly, and the only problem I have found is that it contradicts this post. It seems to work fine in practice (although I would welcome the results of someone else's tests on this).
I've added a handful of new links, including Continuous Time Progression, Invisible Spobs 101, the Complete Guide to spöb based weapons, and the bit on one-way jumping, and Reincarnated Fighters under tentative, because it's a problem that needs solving. On that note, I should add in the rotating systems stuff, too.
I also tried reorganizing the links a bit... If anyone has some suggestions, feel free to comment.
Thanks again to all of you who contributed not only to this topic, but in all the topics here on the EVDC. Remember, only you can inspire Cool Nova Hacks. And prevent forest fires... Yeah.
(edit: Orca just gave me this link, which was apparently a solution a bunch of us came up with regarding checking for multiple outfits. This was written back in the day where counters were the hot stuff, so a lot of it is written in language that is more complex than it should be. Basically if you don't understand BORCs, caveat lector. Who wants to reverify this for feasibility? :p)
This post has been edited by SpacePirate : 28 March 2005 - 03:18 AM
Mustn't forget your idea for testing for X amount of Y outfit.