Station Wave & Docked Entity Spawning

    StormWing0

    Leads the Storm
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    I found this rather funny when I saw a station spawn in a wave of pirate or trading guild when it was Set to AI Usable. :)

    The problem with letting stations spawn in the current wave system is the ship spawning code doesn't take into account the limit for the number of stations in a sector, how close it is to other stations, and if it is in more than one sector at one time.


    So I figured I'd see if I could cook up an idea that could be used for later.

    Now all these ideas below do is add one additional parameter to the Initiatewave command and that is to tell the game if it is spawning ships, stations, or docked entities.

    Station Wave Spawning: This allows the sane spawning of stations without causing problems. It checks if the limit of stations has been reached in the sector it is trying to spawn a station in, if there are other stations in X sector radius of the spawn location, if the station it is trying to spawn can fit in the sector at all, and a few other things.

    Basically these checks will keep the current issues with spawning stations this way from happening but it also opens up the possibility of stations not needing to be on the map when it is first generated and having the types of stations that could most often spawn in a system but definable by some system characteristics. Shops and other types of stations could spawn randomly when someone is within a few sectors of a likely spawn location or for other reasons. :)


    Docked Entity Spawning: This is something that might need either manual flagging or dynamic flagging of what can or could go where on a station. Rail Turret Axis's by default would check for things Typed as Turret in the catalog so this would need a way of making the turrets in the catalog actually have the type of such in it so this would work. Now as for other rail types by default they wouldn't check for anything and need to be set somehow either automatically or manually in build mode for what they are checking for.

    In both cases only entities that can fit in the named spawn area and along the whole rail track will be selected. This is to prevent issues of a given entity fitting in one area but not in another. Also it'd check all possible rail dockers and their positions to see if something could fit too. :)

    This part of the wave spawning system could also be set to prevent a continuously spawning chain of docked entities by checking the catalog for entities that have their extra docking points already filled or no other docking points to fill but again it is a config option so people that want to risk it can if they want too and it can be limited to a certain depth before it cuts off checking.


    In the meantime any ideas?