Been stalking these boards for ages.
Thinking of contributing - was a software engineer in a former life, my C is a little rusty, and have never helped out on a colaborative/OS project before. Please excuse my noobness, but wondering what was involved?
Would like to pick something straight forward to start with, had a read through of the issue tracker and decided not to dive in at the deep end! So racking by brains I came up with an idea - epidemics.
First of all, what are peoples thoughts on this?
Figured that each city\station could have a tiny chance each day of contracting a random disease.
Each period (day\week) etc there is:
a chance of that disease being irradicated (this chance should go up in time)
an increase in medical supply consumption
a sustained higher price of medical supplies
a chance of the disease spreading to the neighboaring cities\planets\systems
a % of population die
missions availble to ship people away \ medics to infected cities
Should be faily straight forward to implement if i understood how everything fitted together:
Epidemic class
method called every ?day\turn?
each city would need a Uint16 containing a disease code (0 being healthy)
step through each city
if there is a disease in place
kill % popluation
increase chance of catching at adjacent cities
increase base price of meds....
else
small random chance of catching
few questions
Is what i've mentioned fiesable?
Is there an alternative nice simple class that i can't break that the devs would prefer me to look at
whats the best method of storing data (e.g illness type and weightings) - fully encapulated or do you use XML etc?
is there a day tick\loop that calls things like population changes
will you get really ansie if i go away for a week due to my day job?
I wont be offended re comments.
Sounds like you'd be happier writing Lua mission/plot/universe scripts than C+ engine code. I believe Rob got the whole lot documented in time for Alpha 10. If you have ideas (such as this one about epidemics) try to see if they can be coded in Lua. You might find that there are not enough API calls to do everything you want. I don't know if you can change the population of a system from Lua, for example. Still, you get a safe, high level, powerful scripting environment with which to describe what you want to happen to the game universe.
If you do try Lua, and do find useful API functions to be absent, feel free to request these API functions through the issue tracker, linked in my signature just down there.
Sounds like a plan,
i'll download me a Lua editor and have a look at some of the scripts.
Epidemic - small chance per day of contracting something affecting population levels ( could this be transmitted in some way and are there any events that would boost population)
Multiple diseases
Delivery of medical supplies ( perhaps new classes of medical supplies in cargo)
Price and supply and demand factors based upon population factors
Contagion sounds like a reasonable idea. ( and ways to stop or ereadicate it)
I think as a mission factor to start with, it might be able to later be expanded into actual ingame events and local cluster and solar system factors in a more abstract way but a mission lua scrip sounds like a good start
Daveangel have u made any progress on this front ?
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