Day 106: That Bounty is Mine!

No blog yesterday because I was incredibly busy at work, and only managed a half hour of my project. I'm having company visit over the weekend, so expect a lack of entries then, too.

I did accomplish something, however! #141 is working well.

My first plan for tracking when you killed your bounty was simply to have the sector keep a list of every fleet you'd ever killed. This is less stupid than it sounds - it would only record the base of the fleet (for example, 'fleet_earth_patrol') rather than the specific instance of the fleet you'd killed. Since the base fleets already exist in the game, it's not taking up that much more space.

This wouldn't have worked, however, because you'd have to have a separate fleet for each and every bounty mission you ever wrote. Considering that I want random bounty generation to be possible, this wasn't the way to go.

So now the KuiSpawnAction which spawns the ships has a special flag called "watch_for_destruction". Any mission that performs an action with this flag adds the fleets that spawner made to its list of fleets to watch. Any time the fleet is destroyed, the mission is notified. There is now a KuiDestroyedCondition which looks at the fleets that have been wiped out, compares it to the watched fleets, and returns true if it passes.

That worked fine, it turns out; except that the instant you kill the fleet, it spawns again (because in my test scenario, it has a 100% chance to spawn) even though you've satisfied the conditions to end the mission. This is because the condition won't be checked until you land on a planet or leave the sector. Even if I made the conditions be checked immediately, that still wouldn't solve the case where you have two fleets to destroy, one in this sector and one somewhere else.

I spliced in a bit of the original idea: When you kill a fleet, if it's watched by any of your missions, the sector remembers that you killed it. Then, when it comes time to spawn the fleet again, it looks at that list and doesn't do so if the fleet is unique (which almost all of the spawned ones will be). De-spawner actions remove fleets from the list so it doesn't get gigantic.

Finally, 'end misson' actions now clear out the list of fleets to watch and fleets that have been killed for their mission. With that in place, the mission is now repeatable!