Ability make a ship skip to the next order

[TacticalMaster]

My ship is constantly buying from stations in a sector and the stations have already expended all of their resources. But my ship has yet to reach the number of units. I've given them an absurdly long list of orders to go through and I don't want to go through of the trouble of manually re-ordering all these ships.

 

So, can there be an order to make a ship skip to the next order? So that if I make a mistake where the sector has already expended all its target resource, I can make them skip the buying process and just have them make due with what they have?

[Gorbald]

+1, great suggestion!

[LiftPizzas]

A lot of the stuff related to setting orders needs improvement. It would also be great to be able to edit the list of orders: add, remove, re-order. Undo/redo would help when you are trying to move the map and accidentally right-click too quickly and it erases your whole list of orders.

 

Also when on a server, the orders apparently need to be sent to the server and back before they show up (WHY?!?!) so if you don't have a great connection it is excruciatingly laggy and slow just to tell a ship to warp somewhere, and takes forever to send a ship over multiple jumps.

[Paulquappe]

So I'm currently working on a mod that contains some of these suggestions. Particularly, it'll include

- An "Abort after X minutes" checkbox for buying/selling (see screenshot)

- A menu for editing command chains (see other screenshot)

 

However, modifying the command chain is actually a bit more complicated, because you need to think about how you could possibly edit a jump order.

See, editing a buy/sell order is easy. You can just edit some values (or remove them entirely), because no other command after that directly depends on it, i.e. removing a "Refine" order will not influence a "Sell" order afterwards. But deleting a jump order could possibly mean that your ship cannot execute the jump after that, because it's too far away.

I'll show you some possibilities I've thought of to handle this in an example:

 

Original order: A>>>B>>>C>>>D

 

These are jumps through sectors A, B, C, D and in the last sector we want to buy something. Now we want to remove/edit the jump to B

 

1st Possibility - Just jump from A>>>C:

Only possible if C is in range of A. Otherwise, we have a gap.

 

2nd Possibility - Don't remove the jump to B, just make a jump less. So A>>>B>>>C.

Easy to implement, but rarely something you want, unless you wanted to buy the goods in "C" in the first place.

 

3rd Possibility - Let the player create a new path:

The player has to create a new path with the restriction that it should start at A and end at C.

E.g. A>>>J>>>K>>>L>>>C>>>D, whereas J,K,L are chosen by the player. That's  what I'm currently planning to do.

 

4th Possibility - Automatic path creation:

Like the 3rd one, but automatic. Would be a nice gimmick, but will just create the same path anyway if you have used automatic path creation for the original route.

 

Tell me if you have more ideas about that or the mod in general. The following features I also consider to implement:

- Saving and loading command chains

- undo/redo (unsure, because tricky on the technical side)

- reassign the command chain to another craft

- pausing the command chain

 

Also when on a server, the orders apparently need to be sent to the server and back before they show up (WHY?!?!)

Because it's less complicated. Maybe I'll modify that too when I'm done with the other stuff.

[LiftPizzas]

So I'm currently working on a mod that contains some of these suggestions. Particularly, it'll include

- An "Abort after X minutes" checkbox for buying/selling (see screenshot)

- A menu for editing command chains (see other screenshot)

Being able to loop to other points would help too. For example:

1- mine

2- refine

3- loop >>>1 (until no more asteroids to mine)

4- jump to [another sector]

5- mine

6- refine

7- loop >>>5 (until no more asteroids to mine)

[etc]

 

As far as validating jump orders, there is a validation check when the order is initially given, which checks within the context it was given. I think the key is to not send the whole order chain until it's actually ready to be sent. When an order is changed/deleted, it should be possible to validate the chain from that point on using the same (or an equivalent scripted) function.  (Assuming the mod API gives access to the map and ship data necessary to perform a check. I haven't looked into modding yet.) Instead of sending each command as it's selected, only send the whole chain once it is all validated. Definitely a lot more work to add that little bit of functionality though.