Seraphim

One thing I've noticed that peeves me quite a bit is that the only way to effectively use mining and salvaging fighters in particular is to assign an AI-controlled ship that harbors them to mine or salvage. The reason for this is because - and again, this happens more often during salvaging - the fighters' AI do not seem intelligent enough to select particular blocks to salvage. This makes it infinitely irritating to, say for example, have them unwittingly break a 100,000-xanion wreck into tens of tiny pieces - forcing you to target and salvage each individual one, turning a relatively "multi-taskable" process into a rather time-consuming and arduous task. In light of the recent AI updates being made, I would like to propose an update to how the resource acquisition functions of fighters actually work that I've sort of wanted for a while now. My first suggestion is to have two settings for salvaging fighters: Clean Salvage & Priority Salvage Priority Salvage would designate important blocks such as Hyperspace Drives, Shield and Energy Generators to be salvaged first and foremost. Clean Salvage would function within the bounds of my second suggestion, with the purpose of completely salvaging (or mining) the target. I spent a lot of time actually thinking about how the mechanics could work, but I'm not a programmer and I'm not very good at describing things, so I have created diagrams to help visualize my second suggestion. The basic idea of the second suggestion is that a hypothetical sphere is created, centered at the center of the wreck or asteroid's volume, with a diameter equaling 105% of the entity's maximum length. A "detection bubble" stems from the sphere, shrinking towards the current center of the wreck. The first block the detection bubble touches becomes the sub-target, and the fighters engage that specific block until it is salvaged or mined. After it is destroyed, a new center is calculated, a new sphere created, and a new detection bubble shrinks - designating the next most-protruding block as the next salvaging or mining target. The goal is to completely salvage or mine whatever you target, without having the incident where your over-eager drones end up splitting wrecks and roids into smaller, less manageable pieces. Like I said, I'm not a programmer - so I'm more than certain there's a much more simple way to do something like this in a much neater and more conventional way. I'm also aware it isn't a perfect way of doing this, but I feel it's a step in the right direction. Let me know what you think, especially if you think you have a better way of doing it.

I noticed this too so I manually added in the code for it into my version of this mod and it worked but instead of the original location of the "you" column, it is now positioned as the first column and very squished lol. It works though, just looks a bit ungainly. I can upload the file when I get home from work if you/people want. Edit: Attached below. It does work, but keep in mind that it doesn't look like it should, it's a bit turned around. Side note: Just change the file extension to .lua since you can't upload lua files to the boards for some reason. Fixed the YOU section! ;D Here you go tradingoverview.txt