Ship Systems Information

Joco: Yeah, I think we're on the same page. Whent he ship is given whichever method of salvage, it would be compared against the table, do some random rolls for salvagability and offer some of the components to the salvager.

Mdvalley, this would be for a future release, but:
That is another method which would fit in with the table, but if you've tried to retrieve a hulk zipping off through space, while spinning, this can cause problems... Unless we can have some method of slowing or stopping said debris.
iFleet had a setup for large ships to not explode and disappear. It added a lot of mood, but made it VERY hard to catch up with. Often it would zip off your radar and be destroyed by POG.
I remember destroying a freighter just as it entered LDS, You saw the explosions for several seconds as it careened hundreds of kilometers into it's LDS flight.

- Qlippoth

I thought of a way to catch moving debris!

A tractor beam!

The “tractor beam� weapon is like a mining beam or a cutting beam, but does no damage. When the beam hits an object, a POG script activates. As long as the beam keeps contacting the object, it loses a particular amount of speed (inversely proportional to mass, of course) every, say, tenth of a second. A check will make sure that you don’t bounce your object’s speed past zero. Essentially, fire and hold the beam on your debris, and it will slow to a stop. I can see pirates using this beam en masse to keep freighters from escaping. If we want, then we can use Newton’s laws and add a recoil effect to the player.

It’d be good to make your target stop rotating, as well.

From an implimentation point of view I presume "table" equates to .ini file. Where the section name would be column and the numerated entries in the section equal the rows. You would set up all actual table in a s/s (e.g. OpenOffice) and use a script to generate the .ini file. Or is there another way to achieve this type of data setup?

Have been thinking about this more and have a question that I hope some of the old hands will be able to answer in a trice.

[Question]
Do in game objects like ships, stations, etc have hooks to scripts that get run when certain events are recived by the object. e.g. when a ship blows up the ship objects "death" script fires.

Or do you have to setup a monitoring task that looks at that particular object or a set of like objects and checks for certain state changes.
[/Question]

Thanks in advance,
Joco.

There are a handful of supported call back functions. A death script is one of them. The others are kind of documented in iShip.InstallAIPilot()

That function also lets you tune the AI, so it selects when it runs. When it has taken a critical level of damage. When it ignores a weak ship (so cruisers don't try to chase down fighters).

I did write some code to sit on top of these events for organizing groups of ships. Basically, if one ship in a group was attacked, it would tell its friends. And groups of ships would share targets. These messages between ships could be intercepted by the player - and formed the basis of a sound event system. Essentially a translator from messaged events into player recognizable sounds. It makes the world feel more dynamic.

Your welcome to take a look at the code. I don't have time to do much packaging or documenting however. Trying to get the real release stuff together.

GrandpaTrout,

Having a look at that code would be really useful. I'm getting back my pog language skills so lack of packaging/doco's shouldn't be too much of a problem.

If you can please email an archive file (zip/rar/7z are all good) to mailto:jameswalker@clear.net.nz]jameswalker@clear.net.nz

Cheers.