Day 104: Not Everybody Hates Roger

Long ago, before I even started this blog, I was testing the game over screen. There were one of two ways for me to do this: I could either put in a 'self destruct' key that would end the game and then accidentally yet constantly press it while doing other things from that day forward, or create a number of badass ships with tons of weaponry that hated my guts. I opted for the latter.

And only just today, months after the fact, did I bother to change the faction back to being neutral.

What can I say, it made things more exciting!

The reason for the change back was to test the results of #140, my first stab at bounty hunting. I spun off the "verify that the target is dead" part into another ticket, so thus far the only thing you can do is to put fleets into a sector and remove them.

Initially, I was going to do this by having a special field in the sector for 'mission fleets' which would always spawn. TraderMissions did this similarly, but more stupidly, by spawning the fleet if you're in the sector when it checks on the mission (much how popups are done).

Then I thought perhaps the editor wouldn't want them to always spawn, but only sometimes. I already have a handler for that, and it's the same "potential fleets" field that the sectors already use to show fleets. So the new actions just use that. I created a 'unique' flag so if you want to spawn pirates that are guaranteed to appear and never go away, other identical pirate groups don't also spawn in.

This turns out to be more powerful than the original approach would have been. Now a mission to deliver, say, planetary defenses could eliminate a (not otherwise mission related) enemy spawn from that sector.

The de-spawning action does something new - one of its children can be a spawner action, which the de-spawner then proceeds to undo. This is because I forsee 'Bounty Hunt' style missions be of the form "Go here, kill this fleet", and you don't want the fleet to still be there once the mission is over. It's a lot easier to just say "Undo this spawn action" than it is to remember which fleets you spawned and which locations you spawned them in. I'll probably do something similar for the sector highlights.

In all this, I had to create a new fleet, which is how I discovered that over the weekend I'd completely broken the "old way" of building things. So every time I run into this, I'm installing a MiniBuilder, which seems to be the way to go.

This has been another productive day. I seem to be alternating.