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What is the best MISSION plug? I mean along the lines of BTC, NOT a total conversion like FH ( which I HATED)
ArcMaster: I read on another topic you were doing a novel.
1. Way to go!!! 2. What is the title? 3. What is the plot (in general)
------------------ I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a damn.
1. Thanks 2 and 3. Sorry, I prefer not to let stuff like that out. It's not that I don't trust, I would blab on and on about it if I could, but I can't let it out because someone might steal it :frown:
I can say this though, it is Scifi, and the my idea for the plot takes its roots in EV itself.
If you want more missions for a pirate pilot (say that ten times fast!) then Captains of Freeport is a good one. I liked the Babylon 5 plug, but if you don't like transformation plugs in general than don't get that one. The Universe Next Door is another one I've played and kept which was just a mission plug, I think.
I've heard F-25 isn't bad, though I haven't played it myself
How can you possibly hate Frozen Heart? The graphics were a bit on the funky side, and it was a bit buggy, but you can't deny that it is one of the largest and most innovative plugins ever
------------------ "Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will have me as a member." - Groucho Marx
"....it is one of the largest and most innovative plugin ever"
Largest, yes, innovative... how? FHs missions are all screwy, and most of the ideas just don't work (i.e. asteroids that kill you, spaceviruses, etc.) and those ship graphics, BLAH! EV/O doesn't do that, and he did it wrong anyways! the only up side to his plug were the outfit graphics (i have to admit, those were frickin' good) i don't mean to give FH a bad name, but it's not worth the download.
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Frozen Heart is worth the download, if only to see how Martin Turner used the EVO engine to its fullest potential; those innovations are indeed very innovative.
------------------ God. Root. What is difference? -Pitr
AIM: obormot345
They were innovations alright, but they weren't good ones. Maybe someone just had to walk through the door first. And because of that, the product wasn't too good. Baby steps.
Is this just me, or am I always always posting some wierd words of wisdom? I feel like Ghandi or something...
Umm, I thought that FH was actually a fairly good plug. Yes, the grahics were a little screwy )it looked like the ship was hitting a lot of interstellar debris when you turned), and there were a few bugs, but otherwise it was vary interesting. Specific things that interested me were the natural hazards (those asteroids did actually work as they were intended, I think, although it would have been better if they looked the same as the normal ones ) and the evolved plotline. Having a lot of engaging missions is definitely a plus.
Just my 2 bits.
I would say, DO NOT try Universe Next Door, unless some sort of major overhaul has been made in the past few months. When I played it, it had about five missions, most of which were buggy and poorly edited. In addition, its ships, though kinda nifty looking, were all so insanely much more powerful than anything found in EVO that I couldn't take out more than ONE without cheating. Unless these have been addressed recently, don't waste your time.
Sorry to hear so many of you didn't like FH. It's certainly very different from EVO or EV, but I wouldn't say that necessarily makes it bad. I would agree that some of the ideas (especially the gas clouds) didn't work quite as intended, but I feel that the deeply involved plot more than makes up for it.
Back on the topic of mission plugs, there seems to be a definite shortage of really good ones for EVO. Still, I'll offer my fifty cents.
One of my pet peeves is obviously "re-used" graphics, and so I've not even tried a number of plugs for that reason. E.g., Captains of Freeport might be quite good to play, but it uses all re-used graphics from EV for its "new" ships, so I didn't play it. Sorry!
Reign of the Voinians was pretty good. The author has a good feel for Voinian "bloody-mindedness", and besides, it's always fun to invade and conquer Earth.
Fourth Reich seemed fairly good, but it has (had?) a number of bugs which made it slightly less enjoyable than it might have been. It's certainly worth a look, though.
My own favorite plug (naturally) is my own work, Secession (especially my latest revision, v.1.5). Anything I say is going to sound like bragging, but I'll just say this: Secession has all new graphics, and (because I'm a perfectionist), it's just about the least buggy mission plug-in you can find anywhere. Please give it a try!
Glenn Matthews
------------------ “If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?” - T.H. Huxley
If you also play the original EV (as I suspect), get the Galactic Scourge plugin.
It's not quite a TC, in that it maintains the normal EV universe and ships. It does add about a billion more missions, outfits and systems, however. It also provides insane challenge, kick-arse weaponry (e.g. a Mass Driver that is actually lethal), and some facinating storylines. Oh, and you'll be exploring for hours on end (drool).
Another good plug-in for EV is Eye of Orion. As for "re-used" artwork: it's funny because I'm an artist, but I don't mind it in plug-ins. It's the story and new missions that I like. Jude
Quote
Originally posted by Machiavelli: **Umm, I thought that FH was actually a fairly good plug. Yes, the grahics were a little screwy )it looked like the ship was hitting a lot of interstellar debris when you turned), and there were a few bugs, but otherwise it was vary interesting. Specific things that interested me were the natural hazards (those asteroids did actually work as they were intended, I think, although it would have been better if they looked the same as the normal ones ) and the evolved plotline. Having a lot of engaging missions is definitely a plus.
Just my 2 bits.**
I certainly appreciate the huge amount of work the author must have put into this plug; however, I am not fond of it, mainly due to its gloomy ambiance, the "innovations" that don't work, and the fact that most ships, weapons and outfits are copied straight from EV, just with different graphics (the weapons even use the original EV graphics :frown:), which is not very innovative. Creating a new, balanced set of ships and weapons is IMHO the most important (and the most entertaining) aspect of making a new scenario.
In the hour or so that I played FH, I got infected with a disease that appeared on my radar and that only seemed to have any effect while off-planet (weird huh?), and when I arrived at the hospital planet too late, there was no-one to cure me, so I just aborted the plague (weird huh?). Later, I was hunted down by a swarm of non-newtonian asteroids (weird huh?). Finally, the fact that the Sol system was split up into a tight cluster of individual systems was annoying.
I can't judge over the missions, since I haven't reached far into the storyline, but what I've seen so far doesn't motivate me much.
While the planetary graphics are indeed quite cool, they quickly get boring after you've seen those post-apocalyptic Bryce domes for the nth time.
All in all, I think that if you can afford the bandwidth and the time, you should download it and take a look. The fact that I didn't like it much doesn't mean that you won't either.
-- Cinga
You could try saboteurs realm. All the ships are to strong for normal EVO but their all about the same and the the plot is quite good. Freeport is good if you like to renegade. Where can I get it. In de addons is the update the only one availeble. I used to have it but it dissapeared . with the voinans it's same: reign and reign 2.
On EV there are lots of other plugs but you must ask it on their board.
P.S. Frozen Heart and Femme Fatale rocks. Except for the graphics.
Originally posted by Cinga: Finally, the fact that the Sol system was split up into a tight cluster of individual systems was annoying.
It's just that he wanted to be as astronomically correct as possible, and the max # of planets that can be in an individual system is 4.
------------------ OpenGL Avara!
AIM: EVAndrewM
"I haven't seen myself lately, AndrewM." — GreenYO, #ev
Sorry to hear some of you didn't like it.
Obviously no-one likes to have their work rubbished, however, a couple of points:
It's possible you downloaded an earlier version. For some reason, when the new EVO site was being put up, version 1.0.0 was also on the Board and 150 people downloaded it. If you are one of those, my apologies. I have since arranged with the moderators to have the misleading version taken down. The correct version is 1.0.4.
If you have other bugs I don't know about, please email me. I am working on Version 2.0, and would like to get everything fixed.
However, this is much more disappointing when some new plug-maker releases their first plug, and loads of people lay into them. This was especially the case with Universe Next Door -- it's no wonder that the maker stopped upgrading it: the old EVO Board was covered with very unpleasant criticism for weeks when it was released.
By and large (and I know that this is a sweeping statement) most people who are heavily critical of other people's work have never released their own plug -- and by being so critical, they reduce the chances that other people will want to. The correct response to bugs in any kind of freeware or shareware is to email the author. Most authors are very keen to fix things right away, and will upload updates regularly during the first months.
To date EVO still has far fewer plugins than EV -- largely because the old EV community had Delta-V and was a lot more supportive of people making work.
The innovations (which are the things that people who hate it usually hate most) aren't there to say 'look - how clever'. They are there because I needed something for the story and it hadn't been done yet in EV or EVO. That goes for planets with two ports, concurrent missions, asteroid storms, the Black Hole, fixed gun turrets and all the others.
As far as the weapons and ships being the same as EV, all the ships and weapons that are actually important in the plot have no parallels in EV. The Tachyonic Fighter, the Rigellian Hunter Killer, the Rim Prospecter, the Stratofighter, space mines, the Black Hole, and (of course) the much maligned asteroids. Others, such as the Orion and the Liner, bear a superficial resemblance to EV but are in fact differently armoured and differently weaponed.
I'm not quite sure (though) why this is an issue. The point about balance in Frozen Heart is about balancing the ultimate ship against a set of missions which are only just possible even in that ship. This may be (and is) very different from the way EV or EVO work, but that doesn't make it less valid. Again, as I've said before, FH is not intended to be a Total Conversion. In fact, when I wrote it, the phrase Total Conversion didn't even exist. There were plugins for EV that rewrote the entire EV universe to match a particular book or film (Foundation, Star Wars, Babylon V, Star Trek) but -- as far as I know -- there were no new universes. It was only after FH that the fashion for starting to write Total Conversions began. I'm kind of hoping that one of these days there will actually be a fashion for finishing them and getting them out so that we can all play them.
As far as the graphics go, some people love them, some people hate them. In version 2.0 I've revised most of the graphics for the ships, and introduced a lot of new planet scenes. This is especially true with angled graphics -- I personally like them, which is why I did them. Obviously Meouwx thinks angled graphics are good, because he has also produced an angled graphics plugin. A number of other plugin makers have also followed this path.
There will also be loads of new sounds, and loads of new planets. Version 2.0 will include as standard Frozen Heart, Femme Fatale and Flight of the Eagle. Again, this isn't to compete with anyone or to be bigger or better than what's gone before. It's just things that fit with the story I want to tell.
As far as the ambience goes, this is part of the story. It took ten years to grow from the novel into the game. During that time, one of my friends was murdered by the Romanian Securitate, and another was killed in the Lockerbie air disaster. Someone else I knew was kidnapped by terrorists in Pakistan and the body was never recovered. Others were illegally jailed for longer or shorter periods of time in various countries. All these made their way into the ambience. However, as those who've played right the way through will know, you get to challenge the injustice and change the universe.
It takes about 48 hours to play all the way through Frozen Heart. If you've been playing for an hour and don't like it, that's fine. Most people give up on Tomb Raider IV after about that time. However, let me urge you to hold back from saying 'I've played Frozen Heart for one hour and it's rubbish', because in one hour you won't have got very far into the storyline. And the storyline is the entire reason for the plugin.
For all those who did enjoy it and said so, thank-you.
M A R T I N • T U R N E R
Originally posted by Martin Turner: **Sorry to hear some of you didn't like it.
For all those who did enjoy it and said so, thank-you. **
Well, I liked the Tomb Raider IV demo. :rolleyes:
PS: Sorry to hear that about your friends. I can understand the gloomy ambiance of your game now.
PPS: I do plan to publish a plug-in some day... However, it will not be a full conversion, since I'll never have the time to complete it. It will include experiments with ships, weapons and government attitudes, though... I'm thinking of a mystical, reserved species that wouldn't interact with other species unless fired upon, in which case they'd get very angry... with ships similar to Babylon 5's Shadow cruisers... with powerful but slow-firing, short-ranged but guided energy weapons... then, of course, there'd be an industrialist species, which uses heavy steel-and-bolts technology and lots of armor (kinda Voinian-like)... they'd use railguns and space charges as weaponry... etc.
I'll look forward to seeing it.
BTW, FH isn't gloomy -- it's just realistic: all of the unpleasant stories you might run into are straight out of real situations in the world today. It definitely has a noir ambiance -- but not as noir as Bladerunner or Alien(s). Actually, when I was writing it I kept having to push myself back from easy triumphalism.
BTBTW, if you did download the version 1.0.0, please do try 1.0.4, and give it enough time to get into the plot. It starts taking off when you meet Katherine Baxter. It starts really taking off when you get hold of the Tachyonic Starship which (if you haven't got there) is like nothing you've ever met in EV or EVO. Promise.
BTBTBTW, Tomb Raider IV is also definitely worth playing right to the end. If you have to pawn your clothes to get hold of it (and a Playstation), then do it. The lost Library (which I believe is the demo) is actually IMHO one of the weaker bits. However, expect to have to work really, really hard on the puzzles.