Ambrosia Software Web Board: Totally WACK ideas - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Attack of the Zerberlites, huh? Thats a pretty cool idea...it has scenario potential. Hehe, maybe called "The Hive" or something...


Pallas Athene, I'm pretty sure to count to 10 on the mac you would go 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. *shrug* I'm picky about those things.

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"Do or do not. There is no try."
-Yoda

In binary 0,1,10,11,100,101,110,111,1000,1001,1010 HEEHEE!! I could put it in ASCII if I'd just remember how it went. Well in hex it is 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A. In Octa it is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10,11,12. In decimal it is ofcourse 1,2…8,9,10. HEEHEE!!

I don't know about the attack of the Zerbs, but it was just a thought that there should be a hostile-to-all enemy in the scenario I'm (trying) to plan.

Damn the fact that I can't draw, nor use the Strata 3D well enough (yet).
I have made Sal heavy cruiser picts though (by adding some parts from other sal ships to a plain cruiser [looks alright to me]).
I have made an energizer platform (without the bug that makes shields over charge if you do negative damage, I'd make it replenish your shield too) I was a bit lazy so I had to make it to a neutral (hostile to all) unit. Unless ofcourse I'd make the collide effect itself be the recharging part…
The platform looks quite nice too.

Have any of you noticed any bugs in the completed tutorial files? I have… many.

Few other wack ideas but not yet to be shared…

Napalm would probably have very little effect on those shields but a plasma thrower

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Strange… just a moment ago I was flying through a dense asteroid field… but now I feel quite cold… And just what happened to my
H-Cruiser?!?

[This message has been edited by The Anon (edited 07-09-2000).]

Note: I just realized how to do the "Carrier Pickup."

Multivector/Augmentation to be used...
AZAR COREWORLDS NAVY

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-Pallas Athene, {M}ilitia Aeriane and Dysian Beta representative to the Obish Consensus

ThinkFish, and good things will come.

Yeah, with the ARRIVE sequence.

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Give a man a match and he'll be warm for an hour... Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
-Polaris Confederate Recruitmant Theme
StarLance

warp supresser- beam that stops any ship in the warp then keeps them from jumping into the warp for a minute

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Pyro: Um, how? The only way to do that is to disable it. I don't think that's quite fair. It also depends upon the mass of the ship, so I don't think that quite works.

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-Pallas Athene, {M}ilitia Aeriane and Dysian Beta representative to the Obish Consensus

ThinkFish, and good things will come.

Um, no it's possible. You'd have to make the beam so it changes the object type (preserve ammo) to a version with no warp speed. Of course it'd have to be a level where there was only one kind of ship it was being used against.

Perhaps if you tinker with the launcher's engage flags it could handle multiple types of objects. Nah, that'd require a lot of objects and probably a PPC to get anything over 1 FPS

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Oh, I'm not saying those Alduran ships are bad. In fact, they make excellent minesweepers. Once.

-Orion Axis General Marxx
StarLance

Well I know we're talking about new ships but what about new guns? These here are ones installed on the Ishiman Gate Ship and The UNS Dreadnought on my upcoming plug The Audemedons. None of these are what you'd call original or exciting but I just thought I'd like to tell them to you.

Ion Cannon: A more powerful version of the trazer cannon, it also temporarily disables enemy ships.

Mega Protopulse: Picture a mini gun combined with a sniper bullet combined with a proto pulse. Extreme fire rate and long range too.

Omega Pulse: The name says it all and the damge says so too.

25000

Nuclear Missile: Again a powerful weapon with 10000 damage.

Turbolaser turret: Autotargetting laser cannon with a damage ratio of 300.




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Time is always the best teacher; yet it kills all students!

Um, how different are those than the weapons in Ares?

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Oh, I'm not saying those Alduran ships are bad. In fact, they make excellent minesweepers. Once.

-Orion Axis General Marxx
StarLance

My gateship isn't too original, just a lepton ray, a nonkinetic turret, and Fullerene turret.

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-Pallas Athene, {M}ilitia Aeriane and Dysian Beta representative to the Obish Consensus

ThinkFish, and good things will come.

Um, I think that the nuclear missile is a bit excessive, unless you are using it to kill gateships.

I personally have a Nova missile (rocket) that uses the unused Supernova sprite from Ares. It has a damage of 1000, and then the explosion has a damage of 150. So if you hit a Cantharan carrier heading towrds it with it, and it just passes through, it won't even take half of the shielding away. But if you hit it when it is stationary, it will destroy it. It has a big explosion, and is also good for taking out swarms of fighters. You need to use it sparingly though, because it only has an ammo load of 10.

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Long Live Apple! Long Live the Mac!
[url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/salrillian"]http://www.geocities.com/salrillian[/url]
[url="http://"http://www.geocities.com/evclassic"]http://www.geocities.com/evclassic[/url]

There will be nuclear missiles in StarLance, built on planets and targeted to planets. In StarLance the planets are equipped with planetary defence (differs from planet to planet), the nuclear missile devastates the planet and makes it uninhabitable, superb choice for terraforming (yes, that too) and Colony ships.

Have any of you ever played Galactica: Anoo Dominari? It's an awesome [url="http://"http://www.monkeybyte.com"]MonkeyByte Software[/url] game. I'm using the same general concept. One of the factions doesn't capture planets but devastates and re-colonizes them.

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Good laws are produced by extremely bad manners.
-Alduran Pirate Captain Macrobius
StarLance

darn i was going to post "put planetary defences on planets" but it appears thats been done

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Actually I am making a plugin with a cool idea in it. It's a force shield. It would be a ring shaped object that is launched out of certain stations and will be bigger than the station so any shots fired will just hit the shield. It can only be deactivated by
a) shooting the shield a lot (will have about 10000 health)
destroying the shield generator elsewhere in the level.

To make it cooler I will make the shield's explosion an animation of the shield shrinking back into the station with maybe some color flashes for effect. This is not really cheating because maintaining a shield will use a lot of energy.

-Trader

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Its only fun until someone gets blown up. Then it's REALLY FUN!

erk! A revived topic. I only spotted it's age when I saw a post from Li..cough, cough, er Slug...


Actually, on the subject of force shields, I did put some effort into developing one of these for the Piioni Attack Destroyer in my plug. I couldn't get it to work though.

Another pet project of mine is the development of an "intelligent" cruise missile system that the AI ships will use properly... Any ideas?

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

"Use properly"? If I was a little more sure what you meant, I could give it some thought.

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"There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

Basicly, a cruise missile (CSM) is a systemwide weapon. But I couldn't get the AI ships to recognise it as such.
AI ships won't open fire on an enemy vessel until it is in range.
For example consider 2 ships, an AI missile cruiser at planet A and a player's capital ship orbiting planet B on the far side of a scenario map. The problem is to get the AI ship on one side of the scenario map to decide that a suitable vessel (carrier, HVD) at the other side of the scenario map is "within range" of its cruise missile and launch against it.
The best I could get was the Long Range Strategic Missile System on the Aud asteroid base in War Part 1.

I've worked with CSMs which are missile objects and ship objects. In both cases the range problem beat me. My aim was to create a weapon similar to the Cardassian Dreadnought missile from Star Trek, ie a CSM which can defend itself. On average the CSM used in War Part 2 has a 50 to 60 percent success rate in hitting its target on the first pass, so no problem there. But the AI ships treat it as a ship, launched from a mother ship (if it is a ship type of object) or a short range missile (if it is a projectile type object).

In effect the CSM I have in use in the War Plug is pretty much a kamikaze cruiser!!

Any suggestions would be welcome.


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

In general, you probably wouldn't have many ships with CSMs, perhaps one or two. You *also* wouldn't want them firing at random targets that just happen to be in range. Here's an idea on the solution:

- Capital ships get Flags --C- (or something unique like that).

- CSM-carrying ships get Hard Targets for --C- (matching pattern) and Hostile.

- The CSM weapon creates a Cruise missile, using Inherit Dest, and reflexively adds age equal to the reload time of the CSM. Another ship-specific version of it first Alters BaseType to Version B (see below), then fires.

- CSM-carrying ships have two versions - one where first CSM weapon is used, and one where the second is. Version B (normal CSM) has an age slightly greater than the reload of the CSM, and an Expire action that converts it into version A.

- Version B ships have an arrive action of Fire Special while Target Other. (Maximum Arrive range)

So, for ships controlled by a player, simply target the ship at an enemy, and it will start using the CSMs. It's up to the player to choose a good target, but this ensures that the CSMs won't be randomly firing at Zerbilites or something.

Computer-controlled ships will also use it intelligently. They'll automatically try to target the ship at a hostile capship, and once they have, they'll fire at it.

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"There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

So I was about to post: "Wow some really old people are back", until I realized how freaking old this topic is. Man, I was stupid back then.

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Life sucks, get a helmet.
Diablo 2: *PyroHC *Pyro444
Warcraft III: PyroTheDragon

Old, but still mostly relevant...

... and supported by its original poster, now there's quality for you

Thanks for the assist Pallas, I'll apply your suggestions over the weekend. It'll be an excuse for some wargames...

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

I wish I'd had the sense to name the topic something else, but I deal

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"There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

Hmmm, I must have made an error.
It didn't work.
I did manage to create a ship that vanishes after it fires the missile though.....

.... not terribly practical!
Perhaps I'll find a ues for it sometime.

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

Let's see, I may have made a mistake with the weapons:

CSMWEAP1:
Create 1 CSM inherit dest
Alter BaseType VERSIONB retain ammo reflexive

CSMWEAP2:
Create 1 CSM inherit dest
Alter Age by 20 (or the reload time) reflexive

If you had put the CSMWEAP2 on VERSIONA, then you would be keeping the type constant, while giving it a positive age without an expire action. The ship wopuld quickly expire, but would not have an expire action - this could be your problem.

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"There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

....I'm back....
Cool, you got some WACK ideas here... Lemme give ya some of mine.

A permanent stealth field: A ship's icon is a small, green/red triangle or whatever. Make its size 0. Pretty simple...

Mine Layer: A ship capable of laying mines. Not very original. But I can set a limit on how many mines can be set at one time. When a mine is laid, ChangeScore by 1. When a mine expires/explodes, ChangeScore by -1. Set a condition so that when the counter = n, the mine wep is disabled.

Ship respawning: Yep, there is such thing. Just restore it to full health, and relocate the ship. You may add a short delay. I've never tried it... but taking risks are a part of life.

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[url="http://"http://www.evula.com"]EVula's Lair - Visit or perish![/url]

Quote

But it's not really cloaked. Cloaking, in general, needs an overhaul, at least in my opinion. While effective in general strategy, it has no real influence on combat, and I think it should. The basis behind my general overhaul follows - assume that CLOAKER refers to any cloakable ship, and PROJECTL refers to any projectile fired by a weapon:

CLOAKER|A (Ship)
...
Special: CLOAK
Expire: Alter BaseType to CLOAKER|B

CLOAKER|B (Ship)
...
Flags: AB-D
Special: DECLOAK
Expire: Alter BaseType to CLOAKER|A
Period: 2
Activate: Create 8 SHADOW dist range 64

S GHOST (Object)
Hated
Age: 2
Sprite: Invisible

CLOAK (Device)
Activate:
Alter Cloak reflexive
Die Expire reflexive

DECLOAK (Device)
Activate:
Alter Cloak reflexive
Die Expire reflexive

PROJECTL (Object)
...
Collide: Die Expire on Flags AB-D

Your "permanent cloak" could be implemented by:
1) Making the cloaked version the standard (i.e. the one a planet builds)
2) Removing the "CLOAK" and "DECLOAK" devices from the CLOAKER|A/B
3) Implementing CLOAK's activate as part of the CLOAKER|B's Expire

To explain what the code above would actually do... essentially, it creates 8 "sensor ghosts" within a 128x128 square around the cloaked ships. It decreases the accuracy of computer-controlled ships, which means that cloaking is actually *useful* against them.

Using Bit31 would be more effective, but it might be more dangerous :shifty:
Need to try that some time.

Quote

Except that that way imposes a global limit, rather than a per-ship limit. Even better would be the ability to let each minelayer have only a single mine in operation at any given time. I think that would be done along the lines of the following:

MINELAYR|A (Ship)
...
Special: LAY MINE

MINELAYR|B (Ship)
...
Special: DISABLED

LAY MINE (Device)
Activate:
Alter Special to MINELAYR|B reflexive
Nil target reflexive
Create MINE inherit dest reflexive

DISABLED (Device)
Placeholder - no action

MINE (Object)
Special: PROXDTCT
Sprite should have a red light on it.

MINE ACT (Object)
Age: 10
Expire: Create damaging explosion
Arrive Distance: Maximum
Arrive: Alter BaseType to MINELAYR|A
Sprite should have a green light on it.

PROXDTCT (Device)
Range: 32
Activate: Alter BaseType to MINE ACT reflexive

Now, you could specify a higher per-ship limit by chaining together Expire actions, but this explanation is lengthy enough already. What it does (I think) is set up the mine's target to be the minelayer. Once the mine activates, it switches the minelayer back to active mode in order to lay another mine.

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With "Doesn't Die When Destroyed", it should work, yes.

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"There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."