@0101181920, on Nov 19 2008, 10:17 PM, said in New ways to make money:

Thanks. I hadn't gotten around to trying it, actually, but it's great that it works with the actual jünk. That makes it much more intuitive, and eliminates the problem of the planets which can buy everything. Cool.

What happens if you load up on liquid fuel and then sell the tank? Would the fuel stay in your cargo hold but you wouldn't be able to sell it any more?

It's about damn time. I've been waiting for this game for ages. ;.;

Thanks for all the hard work, guys!

Link

Some nifty ideas here for possible planet concepts.

I think at the very least you'd get a lot of interest in the Just Graphics forum. It's always nice to see new content.

As far as music, typically less "ordered" societies have a more personal level of music. In modern society, most performed music is done by professionals, and basically all distributed music (aside from a few videos on YouTube and the like) is professionally-done. When you take away those distribution channels, though, more people will play music just for themselves and their friends. This means more evident casual players, a proliferation of small, portable instruments (flutes, banjos, and the like), much less recorded music, and so on.

As for when to set the game, one possibility is that your ship is the first operational one that one of the more outlying planets has managed to get going. Thus, in a kind of Fallout concept, your job is to go out there, find out what in blazes happened to everyone else, and help get your planet back on its feet.

A few other thoughts:

• Communication lines should be few and unstable. News should not be even remotely instantaneous.
• Murk and radar noise would probably be more common, as gear decays.
• Any operational carrier ships would probably be repurposed as ad-hoc space stations.
• Destroying ships would be wasteful even for pirates. Pretty much everyone should have the "disable and board" AI.
• Fuel will be a problem. Maybe slap a bunch of solar panels onto the ships? It'd be neat if you could work that into the ship models, but I know what kinds of art problems you have.
• Petty warlords would replace the pirate lords of yesteryear. A small fleet of battle-capable Vipers with a Valkyrie "command craft" would be able to effectively terrorize a system for a not insignificant amount of time, if I'm reading your tech levels properly.

Few more thoughts:

• just some Metal as a trade good (ship materials will be quite pure)
• trace rare metals from the electronics (e.g. small amounts of gold, possibly platinum as a catalyst in the enviro hardware)
• As mentioned before, things that are valuable simply because they are old. Holovid posters, old-fashioned clothing, retro electronics, preserved food and old videogames (imagine what a used Pong console or a piece of 1900's candy sells for today). Recreational materials should survive fairly well, too - maybe the ship has a ping-pong table or the like. Books, of course, may not be very useful as a trade good but would still be interesting to your crew.
• Depending on the state of repair of your tramp ship, some of the components might actually be useful for jury-rigging repairs. Mark that down as Equipment tonnage, though only a little. Hull plating would probably still be good, if nothing else.
• Personal effects should be retrieved and a token effort made to track down next-of-kin. They might just reward you (or merely provide more flavor).
• Depending on the level of technological advancement of the universe and the power source for the ship, the computers might still be functioning. Check for lonely AIs.

With respect to the original question, I strongly recommend checking out EVO. EVO has effective fighters, but it's a serious accomplishment to take out, say, a Voinian Cruiser in a UE fighter (I've done it, it took a long time and it was pretty dodgy business, but it was fun). Fighters fare best in dogfights, but if you're in a heavy ship and you don't have a screen of fighters, then the opposing fighters will quickly tear you a new one - that is, a group of fighters can seriously hurt a heavy ship even using the rather stupid AI.

What EVO doesn't have is many "mid-size" ships. There's the Freight-Courier, which is pretty slow, and then there's a few alien ships (the Arada and Lazira, primarily) which are decent but don't have the room to make taking down capships a breeze and don't have the speed that fightercraft do. In other words, the mid-size ships are actually balanced by having features of both fighters and heavy ships while not being as good at either as actual fighters or heavy ships are.

I captured a Fed cruiser in a scoutship once. I only barely made it to the planet before the Rebel fleet that had disabled it destroyed me.

@star-captain-saber, on Dec 16 2007, 02:05 PM, said in Wings 3D:

1. How do I actually create a ship to be used in nova?

1. How can I use Wings to do this?
2. How do I texture my ship?
3. How can I make engine glows/ other cool engine effects
4. How do I control where the weapons fire from?

In brief:

1. Create a model of a ship, and then make renders of it in a variety of rotations, 36 being the usual number. So for example, the first render would have the ship facing straight up, the second would rotate it slightly, the third a little more, and so on until the last image is almost at the same angle that the first image was. The results of this step can then be fed into a program to create a grid of images, which you can use in most plug-in editors to create new ship graphics.
2. I wouldn't recommend using Wings for EV ships, actually; from all that I've seen, it's easy to use, but hard to impossible to get nice-looking results out of as its renderer is so primitive. So it's a good program to learn on, but you'll want to graduate to something more capable (e.g. Blender) to get the really nice-looking ships.
3. Texturing depends heavily on the program you're using, and good textures are never easy to make.
4. Engine glows are simply an additional set of images made like the ones in (1), which are overlaid on the ship image when the engines are fired. The same process is used for running lights, weapon glows, and the like, though a different one is used for ships that actually change shape (like the Leviathan or Argosy).
5. Ship data in the plug-in includes a set of offsets from the center to indicate where bullets come out of. In EV Nova it's actually a bit more complex as ships aren't rendered from straight above, so the exit points actually describe ovals as you rotate the ship, but that's basically how it works.

Palshife and that remote one on the way to the eastern pirate station (with all the spacegoing history museums). Also Zaxted and Ruby; they aren't Rebel worlds but the gearheads on both'll buy anything they can tear apart to make random gadgets.