Decoupling equipment from ship definitions

[laarmen]

Hi,

For those who don't know it, I've been involved since... forever in rewriting the equipment handling in Lua.

In this topic, I'll mainly ask if it some changes that I consider are acceptable to you.

For starters, as of now whenever you change ships you get an hyperdrive for free. This is hardcoded in the C++ core, and even in the ship def where the default hyperdrive is specified.

My proposal is to stop doing that, and provide bare metal ships. It previously made sense to always have an hyperdrive since there pretty much was no way to make money wihout interstellar travel, but the game has evolved a bit since, and intrastellar missions are available. (and of course it would make my life easier). What do you think?

[robn]

Yep, makes it more flexible. The ship market can provide that function if necessary; the equipment system itself shouldn't have to.

[impaktor]

Sounds good.

[FluffyFreak]

From a gameplay/universe point of view this would be akin to providing a car without an engine, just because you can always free wheel it down the hill.
However I agree with the logical side decoupling and that it should be provided by the shipyard or another system.

[laarmen]

Your car still has an engine, it is just not suitable to do a roadtrip around Europe.

[impaktor]

But the change was just to stop C++ forcing an engine. I assue the ship market will add one on the Lua-side, if we want to.

[laarmen]

I'll do that, and also change the defaultHyperdrive definition not to specify an EquipType anymore, but just an integer representative of the power of the default hyperdrive fitted on the ships. This allows for more hyperdrive implementations :-)

[laarmen]

CALL FOR TESTS!

I *think* my new-equipment branch is closed to being ready. But to be sure of that, I need people to test it. So please go mad, explore the galaxy, create new equipments, do whatever you want to, and wait for the crashes to happen :-)

My money is on TradeShip.lua for the next bug reports ;-)

[edit]
It should be more effective with the URL to the MR:

https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/pull/1719/