A FLAG FOR FIGHTING
by Hazed
In the last issue I told you that in a change of direction we are going to only allow ship fighting to happen in locations that have been flagged with the Fight property.
There’s a new version of the Workbench which will let you add the Fight property to your space map coming next week. In the meantime there’s also a shortcut for those who don’t want to muck around with the location editor, submitting files, waiting for them to link and so on.
Instead you can add or remove the Fight property from a location in the game itself. The command is CHANGE FIGHTING and this toggles the property on or off for the location you are currently in, and tells you whether the property is now set or not.
The command only works in space, and you can’t set the property on an orbit or link location. Oh, and you can only do it if you are the PO, obviously.
If you want the property to be permanent then you will need to ‘SAVE MAP’, otherwise whatever changes you make will disappear at reset. It works just like changing the title or description of a location.
Warning: Saving the map is quite resource-hungry so please don’t use the command until you have finished setting all the properties – if you save after every single change command, it’s going to slow the game down considerably! As an analogy, if a computer ran at human speeds and dealt with one instruction a second, it would take a year to save the game to disk.
If you have a copy of your system’s files on your computer, then after you have set all the fighting properties in the game you will need to load the space map into the location editor and make the changes there, too, otherwise your copy of the file will be out of sync with the game’s copy. Should you wish to make further changes to your space map in the future, you don’t want to lose the fighting properties you set. There will be a new version of the editor out next weekend that will have this new property (along with the weapons shop property).
