Pilot for every ship

[clausimu]

Following a short discussion I had with impaktor on IRC - I would like to extend crime tracking to NPC ships. This would enable the police reacting to pirates that target ships within station perimeters. All in all I would like to nudge the game a little further towards independent reactions between ships and away from being player-centered.

That said... One of the problems I am facing is that ships don't have Characters associated with them. It would be best if crime is attached to a (persistent) Character though. Because my coding abilities in C++ are next to nil I am trying to solve this entirely from the lua side and stitch ship objects and Character objects together. I realize that this is a pretty hackish way of doing it. If someone wants to realize this cleanly in C++ I would be more than happy to give the reigns to her/him. I am posting this here because it does change things a bit (more so in the future when things depend on this structure). So if you don't like this direction - please let me know.

The way I would approach it right now would require one new lua file: Pilots.lua.

(In Pseudocode) it would contain the following:

1.

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a central table where ships are associated with characters (pilots[ship] = character)

2.

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createPilot(ship)
char = Character.New()
pilots[ship] = char
return char

3.

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linkPilotShip(ship, char)
pilots[ship] = char

4.

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Code to save the pilots table during serialization, clear it before a player leaves the system, etc. (general "housekeeping" stuff :))

In addition, I would add the following method to Ship.lua:

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Ship:Pilot()
if ship in Pilots.pilot then
pilot = Pilots.pilot[ship]
else
pilot = Pilots.createPilot(self)
end
return pilot
end

Thus, if a ship does not have a pilot and one is required - it gets created and associated automatically. If a script wants a ship to have a certain pilot, it will have to use the "linkPilotShip" function to do so.

If this works out I would then work on extending crime tracking to Characters.