Salvage & Mining Fighters: "Sub-Targetting" System

[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.

 

 

[Kamo]

Very nice idea, though it may be pretty difficult to put in place.

Idea: the wreckage itself will manage its own bubbles (the clean and priority salvage ones), so every single salvage ship wouldn't make its own bubbles (it would make extreme amounts of bubbles with fighters). Wreckage with less than 32 blocks would simply not have a bubble and choose the last block of the list (or, with priority salvage, the last of the yummy ones).

[Gamer Senpai]

A better idea is to have a command 'Salvage All' or 'Mine All'..

That way you can set those fighter groups to mine or salvage while you fight, trade, etc...

 

It'd be easier to do because most of the code is already there...

[riess]

Continuing from previous point, I was always somehow expecting to see mining/salvage fighters ordered to defend me do their thing on anything suitable within the range of my ship (like 7 kliks), and return to circle around me when nothing mineable is within that range.

 

That way I could act as mothership, defending them, having them nearby without having to micro them to every bit that breaks off from whatever I was harvesting at time.