Tool to manage and share custom ships

Hmm, I expect the really "fun" part will be looking up all the custom modules attached to the ship you want to import, and importing those too.

For example, to import my MIRV drone carrier you'd need (among other things) the drone launchers and their ammo, which will require the drones, which will require the payload launchers and their ammo, which will require the MIRV warhead, which will require the nuke and rad-shield inside the warhead.

On the bright side, at least the dependency tree won't loop back on itself.

Once import tools are available though, I wouldn't be surprised if people simplified things using packages that share standardized parts, and people started settling on relatively well-optimized packages as a baseline (sort of a "before you start going wild in the module creator, download these to give yourself a head start" thing).

It will be quite amusing to watch the chaos while that process shakes out though.

This would be amazing! I have no idea where to begin and this definitely strikes me as something that should be officially part of the game but failing that we need to make it ourselves.

This is a great idea, foof!

I was thinking about a tool with partially overlapping functions, but, at a first glance, it seamed to me that custom modules don't really have a way to definitely ID them and discern a new custom module from merely changed old one between multiple sessions of game. This would be much too limiting for the requirements I had. But maybe I was wrong and you have discovered something more on this?

In any case, ability to give custom names to user created modules would be a great feature for better management of parts and role playing purposes.

I have some prototype code for doing pretty much exactly that, which I now guess I won't continue since you seem to actually have the time to work on that :-)

Here's my UserDesigns, anyways. It includes some designs by another user (who had posted the whole thing; I forgot their name but it does include the Count Flakula missile), and several other, posted, designs. Other than that, it's a pretty huge mess.
UserDesignsTestMerge.txt (77.22 KB)

There you go.


Edit: The way I originally planned handling that was to check, for each module, whether another module existed. If so, check whether they're identical. If not, rename them such that each name is numbered consecutively and uniquely over two files. That's already finished, btw. Do you want the code?

If the game can figure out which module is which, a tool can do it. :3

What I'd probably do -- if it were me -- is scrape all the modules and store them in a lookup table (map) by their name, then only print the modules you need into a file. Dependency resolution is going to be a search algorithm, though, because you can have modules that require ships, which also require modules, which might also require ships. IE: missile launching drones. Depth-first search would probably be easiest.

Thankfully, you can search through and just flag what modules are needed, and then come back later to print those out to the file. You also need to identify stock modules and not duplicate them. So the rough algorithm would be:



main() {
   getStockDesignsFromFileAndMarkAsStock()
   getUserDesignsFromFile()

   flagDesignsUsedBy(shipName)

   printFlaggedNonStockDesignsToFile()
}

// depth-first search of a blueprint to flag its components or payload
// returns nothing; assume isFlagged() and flag() functions act on a global-scope map/dictionary
flagDesignsUsedBy(blueprint) {
   foreach(design in blueprint) {
       if(isFlagged(design) == false) {        // will loop infinately if you don't check!
           foundAtLeastOneNewDesign = true
           flag(design)
           flagDesignsUsedBy(design)           // recursive function call
       }
   }
}
I blocked out the recursive/depth-first search part of the algorithm, too, since I think that stuff is tricky if you don't have much exposure to it. I apologize in advance for underestimating folks if I'm wrong. :3

Also, take this with a grain of salt. I glossed over a lot of details and probably missed something important. This is a ten-minute outline, primarily focused around solving the problem of a lot of sub-drones, sub-missiles, etc.

foof , could I ask what programming language you are using?