I don't think you can add a whole new bar, so you'll have to go with the second option. However, you wouldn't need to buy fuel. When you dock, your energy supplies are replenished automatically. So people would just dock and launch without paying anything

just an idea: you could use "fuel" as an commodity. Alien Organisms and Luxury Food (or something similar) are "highly perishable". That means: there is some form uf "use" in the files. I presume it can be modified how slow/fast they perish.
But if you make a new commodity e.g. "Hydrogen H2" that is "perishable" a player needs to "fuel up" H2 at the stations where H2 is available (not everywhere of course, hehe). And - let's say - because in Sirius they crack H2O into H2 and O2 Hydrogen is cheap only in regions where there is plenty of H2O - and VERY expensive where water is scarce. In these regions H2 could be very interesting for looting or pirating !
There are two ways to integrate this idea into FL:
a) simple: Players are honest (YES!!) enough to accept that they must "fuel up" when running out of H2. Not totally sure though if this works on MP-Servers ...
b) difficult (I have no idea if this can be done): running out of H2 has serious consequences on your gameplay, e.g. engine's killed or ship is slowed down to 15 or you loose equipment (shields, nanos, weapons) or whatever.
Would be a nice mod if this sort of a switch could be done.

zazie
Founder of "We support Newbies, even Nathan"

Edited by - zazie on 7/7/2004 11:54:51 PM

there already is a fuel commodity : H-Fuel. That's the product every small ship uses to move around in a system.

but H-Fuel has no consumption in these ships; it's just a commodity as most of them (with the exception of the highly perishable).
Do it for your own pleasure: buy Alien organizms and take them as "Fuel" - it's not that easy to travel and fight when you always have to care for "Fuel".

zazie
Founder of "We support Newbies, even Nathan"

What can I say, the man's smart. I beleive these ideas have been discussed before, but you've got some great points there zazie.

Leader of the Republic Mod Team. http://republicmod.proboards32.com
"Criminal Organisations don't just spring up overnight. It's a conspiracy" - overheard on a a Liberty comm frequency

I've got an idea. (im no great modder, but its an idea) If me or someone else were to make a commodity for fighter/freighter fuel or something different for each type of ship, than added different perish rates, then someone made a program to automatically take away engine power when the fuel was gone than it could work.

Or, if we made it so that when you dock, it does NOT refuel your engine, than it could be made so that engines have the name fuel, so you have to buy a new engine (fuel) everytime that you run out. Make since dont it?

StarSeeker//\ International Pirate
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I like the fuel as a comodity idea alot, i was thinking of this myself the other day. it would be extremlly cool thing to have, but how would you tell FL to cut engine power to say "5" when the comdity ran out?.....I think i'll look into this further.

Well....

I dont know if a commoditys Weight affects ship handling, but if it does...

Set all ships to have an Outrageous weight. Then set the perishable commodity to have a Negative Value. As the "fuel" runs out, the thrust will become more and more inadequit to fly the ship around.

cough***gravedigging****cough
Look at the date...

Edited by - Question Asker2044 on 2/10/2006 4:08:23 PM

let them... old ideas are not always bad ideas ^^

I can't see how there could be a commodity that works as a source for fuel. There isn't any entries in the select_equip that would control the fuel amounts.
You could remove the power usage for weapons and equipment (you could make all equipment need ammo instead) and use energy as a source that would work ok. Take quite a bit of fine tuning, but it would work ok.

the only way this idea can be implemented is as a shield hack or an anti-F1 exe w/ no power generation in Power plants - for a shield hack you could add a new shield series and call them reactors, give them negative regen enough to overcome the shield's and give them negative constant power consumption,and no power use for rebuild mode so when your shield empties you have to refill it with batteries - of course, shields would be broken so you might as well shrink their SUR files so they don't get drained by guns

unfortunately it just makes for bad gameplay, because once you're out of energy thats it - you're toast

Actually, I did this, in Warriors of the Sky. It's easy, but it requires that players get used to another kind of gameplay.

How to do it? Simple as pie. Give engines little to no speed. I'd set it to higher than zero, so that people aren't stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Next, set the charge time for Cruise to some huge number, so that Cruise is eliminated. Set the Cruise charging sound to a null. Voila- players hit Cruise, but don't go anywhere!

Lastly... you have Thrusters. So set your Thruster recharge rate to zero... and voila! Working fuel! Until you land, you will be out of fuel. Game-designers can have all sorts of fun with this. For example, you could make a mod that was intended to be played with Engine Kill on all the time, and make Thrusters output a high top speed, but use fuel pretty quickly, forcing players to set up a long cruise in Engine Kill to go from point to point, so that they could save their fuel for fights along the way.

So... there you go. Totally realistic! Doesn't require tinkering with Energy! And it's easy to code. The only tricky bit is that you will need to think out your game design very, very carefully, but what else is new.