You could make two kinds of disguised pirates: the "Help the Blatant Pirates" ones and the "Keep cover" ones.

Good use of gövt!

Could have been when we migrated from PHPBB3 to SMF (some issue about server limitations at the time). I recall that caused passwords to be reset…

QUOTE (Spartan Jai @ Sep 12 2010, 08:17 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Now I know I haven't really started on my own TC yet, but most of you keep mentioning having other people help you. In some cases, like my own, that isn't really possible. I don't know anyone who has any experience doing this that I could get in touch with very regularly, and if I did, would they be completely reliable? On pretty much every other point, I couldn't agree more.

You don't need to "know" anyone before you start.
Start working on your plug-in, and if you show you've got something, people in the EVN community will help you.

I did it by checking the positions of 0°, 90°, 180° and 270°. The two main ones I used were 0 and 90, because that gives you a pretty accurate first rendering.

Basically, say the 0° position of one gun is (40,50). Say the 90° position for the same gun is (59,49) (don't forget the values will be reversed, given that the axis changes). You can easily figure out that you need to expand the X values by 100% / 400 for each degree (there are 90 degrees of change, 40 pixels to start with, and we're adding 1 pixel (1/40th of the base pixels) per 10 degrees), i.e. 0.25%, and that at 90 degrees, the X position (Y in this case, given the reversal of values) is therefore 122.5% (100% + 90*0.25).
I can't remember the actual computation to figure out the final "UpCompressX/Y/…", but that was the basis for my approach to calculating gun points in ARPIA2…

QUOTE (DarthKev @ Jul 31 2010, 09:20 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It also sounds like this is the first plug-in you've made. If that is also correct, my advice is to take a break and start smaller. Make a few tiny plug-ins. They don't even have to add anything, they can just tweak some things. Add a ship, make a weapon, figure things out.

That doesn't mean it shouldn't evolve from that initial plug-in…
The Arpiaverse started as a cheat plug-in, involving a combat mission and huge sums of money as reward

I highly recommend reading Guy's "Audio Guide".

Doing a Google search (of "Martin Turner" "Frozen Heart") churns up a result that seems to have the entire novel in .txt… Not sure whether permission was given to distribute it, so I'm not linking to it, but you can read the entire thing there.

Fantastic implementation of the update system. Thanks a million!

I reckon you get the idea across with the right amount of text. There was nevertheless one major bit of concern to me: you write "You spot the client", before going on to describe the client. To me, either the player guesses that this person is the client (in which case the "spot the client" wording needs to be changed), or the player recognises the client from a picture (in which case the "spot the client" and the description need to come together, such as "spot a man of such and such, bla bla resembling the picture bla bla").

I could imagine Brown slamming his hand on the table when he said they were on their honeymoon, but the action described after the words seemed less like an outburst of rage.

With respect to formatting, you should put the "Brown, calm down!" line in a new paragraph, because your previous example of an interruption ("You see-" "We were on our honeymoon") led to a new paragraph.

There is a way to avoid coding 100 "Dxxx" operators: use a counter (see the Cool Nova Hacks topic for links to two methods, if you're not familiar with counters). Basically, set in the ship upgrade a number of bits representing "100 of this ammo", and then use a counter with cröns and the like to remove those 100 ammo.
You can either have the counter system remove the missiles one by one, or you can have it remove them ten by ten…