Ambrosia Software Web Board: Ask Slug III - Ambrosia Software Web Board

These collumns are mine! Make yourselves at home by asking me whatever the heck you want related to Plugin Development!

Be it Graphics, neat tricks, Hera Questions, or sounds, I'm your man!

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Time is the best teacher, yet it kills all of it's students.

can you give me a few PC tricks

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EVO/EVN rule 1st, Soccer rules 2nd
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lol. welcome back.

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just take my post, and imagine everything is speeled right.

Well looky here. The old Hera master is back to strut his stuff. Hiya Slug, welcome back.

Well, I might as well pose the first question, and this one's a tricky one.

How do you create a CLUT resource from a standard Photoshop colour table?

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only
Ares Webboard Moderator, and all-around Nice Guy

How do I get a mission to end when all the enemy ships are destroyed. The No Ships Left Command always ends the mission as soon as it starts

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Everyone has that problem; it's a coding thingie with Ares. Fortunately I have a way around it. For this you actually need two condiditons:

1) Make the condition for when all the enemy ships are destroyed, and in mission flags, check "Initially Inactive"

This will make the condition inactive, so it will not execute it's action sequence even if the condition is met.

2) Make a second condition that is time based. "If Game Tick time is >= 0". This means as soon as the level starts the sequence is activated. Make it's action sequence the following:

and enter the condition number of the first condition. This makes the first condition active, which means it will execute it's action sequence when conditons are met.

This way, it won't end the level before it starts.

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Time is the best teacher, yet it kills all of it's students.

[This message has been edited by Slug (edited 06-24-2001).]

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Crikey, why on Earth would you need one of those? The best I can think of is you can't, at least not with my version of PhotoShop (3.0.7).
For all my CLUT resource needs I've used ResEdit, and since Ares only supports 8-bit color (standard 256 colors), I haven't needed to do such customization.

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Time is the best teacher, yet it kills all of it's students.

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Basically, I need the CLUT Resource so my Title Screen will display right. And I sure don't feel like coding in 1024 values one by one by hand...

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Sundered Angel,
The One and Only
Ares Webboard Moderator, and all-around Nice Guy

Thanks Slug I'll try that.

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Ah, all is clear now. For titlescreens, I usually use Graphic Converter to change the image to 8-bit. (then I tidy it up by hand so it looks acceptable)

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Time is the best teacher, yet it kills all of it's students.

Ok here is a weird one. When I put the random direction up and down asteroid shooters in a level and try to play that level it tells me that the flagship of admiral -1 can't be set. How do I fix this?

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In the Scenario Objects Section of the mission you're using it in, make sure you set IsPlayerShip off on the asteroid shooters.

You also might want to update to Hera 1.0.0.

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Time is the best teacher, yet it kills all of it's students.

[This message has been edited by Slug (edited 06-26-2001).]

Ah, the famed ask Snail column is back again...

I have a question which I posed a few weeks ago, and as yet have failed to solve. (To be honest, my plug is, er slightly mothballed at the moment, other commitments. However, the question remains a valid one I think...)

Do you know what the maximum number of single player levels that can be in an Ares Scenario is?

Only 26 levels of my 28 level plug will load in the game interface. Is this a limitation in the game, or is it down to the construction of my plug?
For example, if I delete level 1, level 27 then becomes available at the end of level 26...

My plug is a retrofit constructed on a copy of the original Ares Scenario file, and not a scratch built plug. Could this limit the number of levels to that of the original scenario?

A simple solution is to create a multi-parter plug. Not very satisfactory though, rather akin to replacing one's extensions and preferences folder (with the back up that we all keep from our original installation...) in order to fix that extensions conflict. Fixes the problem, but you never actually correct the actual fault....

Your valued opinion please Slug.

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Oh, so it is another bug hunt then...

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That's quite interesting. I've spent a bit more time with Hera now, and have observed that it behaves quite peculiarly when there are Net Levels present. If, for example, you have 20 missions in the mission list, and decide to stash a net level not at the end, but in the middle (say after level 10), then when you play the plug, Ares will only let you go up to level 10. If, perhaps, you have a plugin with all ofit's net levels BEFORE the singleplayer levels (Net levels first, singleplayer levels last), then try to play it with Ares, it will pop up an error message when you click New Game, aying that there are no single-player levels available in the plug.

Here's what I would like you to do, Anic: remove all multiplayer levels from your plug (put them in a seperate plugin of something) and see if the problem persists.

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Time is the best teacher, yet it kills all of it's students.

There are no multi-player levels in the plug. I deleted them all, along with the tutorials before I started on the plug. However, bits of them could possibly remain...

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Oh, so it is another bug hunt then...

Hey Slug is there a problem with the planet dirtcloud sprite. Mine keeps complaining about not having shape #22 I think

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Creator of the great new plugin for ares that still needs a name.

Woops! never Mind

Here are some toughies for ye:

Tracking lasers: Can it be done?

What happens if you have mission briefings in a net level?

Is there any way to have a stasis-field type weapon?

Can you simulate more than 3 placement values on a ship's weapon?

Can you fire 2 seperate shots from different parts of a ship at once?

Forward arc weapons like in EVO?

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Tracking lasers? I'm not sure precisely what you mean. If you mean lasers that homing missiles automaticaly home towards, and nothing else, then create the laser with a pulse created at the end. Pulse is only engaged by the missile, the missile only engages the pulse. Here's the trick: don't check the "CanBeEngaged" flag on the Pulse, so the only way to "Engage" is to run headfirst at it. The same trick is used with the Energy Blob, if you look.

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If I'm not mistaken, nothing. I haven't tested though.

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Expire Action: Alter BaseType, not Hated, no movement. I shall say no more.

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Have the gun create a pulse with multiple placement values that has a create action of fire special - each gun can have 27 placement values without even creating multiple levels of pulses.

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See above

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Create a friendly pulse as the weapon that automatically faces forward, make it able to turn. Have an age of 5, and make it EXPIRE: Fire Beam/Pulse/Special, wherever you feel like storing the forward-firing pulse.
The pulse will automatically fire at any ship that's in the area where it can turn, or else simply fire forward after the expire.

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"Once, just once, I'd like to be able to land somewhere and say, 'Behold, I am the Archangel Gabriel.'"
"I fail to see the humor in that situation, Doctor."
"Naturally. You could hardly claim to be an angel with those pointed ears, Mister Spock. But say you landed someplace with a pitchforkŅ"

Ignore Pallas. His brain's fried at the moment and he can't think straight

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Quite easily. Human Gunships have them, just they're not very good at shooting down small fast stuff because they're slow and don't do much damage. Make them turreted, make them fast.

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Absolutely nothing happens. It won't play the briefing, but if you have a prologue, it will show up as the description for the Net Level.

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The Cantharan Gateship has one. Pallas' suggestion works too, but it's too complicated. Just give it an ALTER > OFFLINE command to paralyze the target.

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If you mean giving a ship more than 3 weapons, yeah there are ways around that. I use the Activation feature of the actual ship. Make the firing rate the Activation Interval for the ship you want the 4th weapon on, and make the weapon activation sequence under the actual ship activation sequence. I've managed to make a "fourth weapon" that senses whether or not the enemy ship is near; if it is, it fires a turret shot. Again, Pallas needs some brain rest.

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Sure, just make the weapon create two different shots, each with a distance range of whatever. Of course, if you're talking beams, that gets complicated, and if you mean parallel beams, that gets even more complicated.

In StarLance, I have a fighter that fires two parallel kinetic beams at once. The pilot can chose if he wants to fire the gun on the left wing, the right wing, or both at the same time. How? Just put the gun in two weapon slots.

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It's all just a matter of putting the gun at the front of the ship and setting the appropriate bullet properties.

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Time is the best teacher, yet it kills all of it's students.

[This message has been edited by Slug (edited 06-30-2001).]

Actually, your brain looks a little more fried than me.

1. What the Human Gunship has is turreted lasers I interpret "Tracking Lasers" to indicate that it is used to guide a homing missile to a specific target - as on modern fighter jets.

2. Confirmation

3. Alter Offline is not a Stasis Field - have you ever played StarCraft? Offline is a disabling weapon, but it doesn't put the other ship into Stasis.
To expand on what I was saying - each ship has an Expire Action that turns it into a non-mobile version of the original and creates the image of the stasis field. Then, both of those objcets expire after a certain amount of time back into the originals.
The "Stasis" weapon causes ships to expire.

4. That was what I thought when I first saw the question - but actually it's talking about a single weapon, and the hardpoints it fires from.

5. My suggestion for number 4 works well for this - the created pulse can simultaneously fire two shots from separate weapons with respective placement values.

6. Putting the gun at the front? That means nothing as to how it's turreted. As for "the appropriate bullet properties, I guess you'd have to be referring to allowing it to turn for a quick second to face anything in the range then expiring it to prevent it from turning anymore and becoming a homing weapon. But I think you were just referring to setting Autotarget because otherwise you would state such a complicated process, and that reduces it to a common turrent instead of front quadrant.

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"Once, just once, I'd like to be able to land somewhere and say, 'Behold, I am the Archangel Gabriel.'"
"I fail to see the humor in that situation, Doctor."
"Naturally. You could hardly claim to be an angel with those pointed ears, Mister Spock. But say you landed someplace with a pitchforkŅ"

Gentlemen, BOTH of you misunderstood me.

By tracking lasers, I meant lasers that could track a target, like a homing missile. So instead of a concussion missile arcing towards an enemy ship, you get a laser arcing towards it!

There's something else I didn't mention as well,

Is it possible to have a sprite trail a ship exactly? There are only 2 ways around this, to make the sprite a fighter-like object with an independant existence, and have it follow the ship with ridiculously high movement values, or to have it recreate every second. Seomthing I do not want, because the sprite has an image sequence of it's own, and the first method will probably work, as long as you don't make any sharp movements.

Ok lets say I have 2 power stations that have to be destroyed to finish a mission. How do I make a mission end after both are destroyed instead of just one of them

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Creator of the great new plugin for ares "Earth Journey Back To The Stars"

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Have two conditions, one for the destruction of each station.

Set the first condition to, when activated, to do an Alter>Condition True Yet on the second condition.

Set the second condition to be initially inactive and to have a DeclareWinner sequence when it is activated.


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GR Name: Sgt. Patrick[EL]
[url="http://"http://www.obain.f2s.com/eastlegion.html"]Eastlegion HQ[/url]
My upcoming Ares TC:
[url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/webboard/Forum13/HTML/000216.html"]Wrath Of The Fallen[/url]

That great if you have two stations that you know which one will be destroyed first. But how can i make it work with them if either could be destroyed first. And how can I expand it to more than two if any station can be destroyed at any time?

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Creator of the great new plugin for ares "Earth's Journey Back To The Stars"