An idea from 'removing stock ships' thread [and another idea]

[Gareth]

Showing how one gets rid of ships that you don't want has given me an idea for a third-party mod.

Why not create something similar to BCUT [which I've only *just* discovered today - been living under a rock for a long time now; ie. not been on here for months on end ^^;].

You have your list of ships as shown in the in-game QB, right? Why not re-create that *outside* of BC, and add a tick-box next to each ship/system etc. to which you would un-tick if you didn't want it in-game?


This is the kind of thing that makes adding & removing ships so much less confusing.
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A second idea is choosing HOW you order/sort your ships, using a kind've tabbed 'spreadsheet'.

Like on Windows, there's a bar where you can choose what order you want your files to be in - whether you sort it by date, type, filesize, etc.

Why not do something similar in BC? Since there are 1000s of ships - with 100s of different authors who made them - to choose from, perhaps we could choose how we'd like to arrange the ships;
whether it's by era [ENT, TOS, TNG, etc.], or by author, by A-Z order, by race/sci-fi series, or even by how powerful a ship is (strongest at the top & weakest at the bottom & vice-versa)! - And that's just to name a few possibilities!

[JimmyB76]

i had actually thought of both of those specific ideas in the past, and thought how awesome it would be if there could be things like that for BC...

[MLeo]

For the first, I suppose we could also do this in BC itself, a menu (somewhere) where you can (de)select ships. It might be a bit tricky to have a third party tool look up all the possible ships, that would need to actually execute scripts to be 100% sure.
Then the script (rather, some plugin) would apply that to the ships each time they are loaded.


For the second, the next incarnation of SubMenu will allow for sorted ships, also user sorting through some mechanism (currently thinking of button selection, then ctrl+up or ctrl+down). But that's just a basic view (Race->SubMenu->A-Z order). A more complex ordering would require a new menu.

But I suppose that it would finally use the credits part of a ship plugin!

[xxSWxxNinja]

I would have use for just such a mod if you'd be willing on a colaboration. Me and a few friends of mine intend to construct a mod based in an entirely new universe as such we were looking for ways to dissable all startrek ships so that only our content will be displayed.

We were also hoping to make this mod MP compatible, the first of the ships is being shown in the WiP thread if you wish to see the style.

[MLeo]

If you disable the stock mutator then it *should* also remove a lot of standard stuff.

[majormagna]

 I have attempted my own custom menu system before. Era based...

However the ships used in the SP campaign appeared twice for some reason, once where I put them, and once in their stock 'positions'. After I sorted this out I attempted to get it into widescreen resolution; which killed it. And I've forgotten what I did to get it to work.
 So I've lost all that work! 

[MLeo]

I actually fail to see how an UI change, and the ship ordering are related. Can't you just roll back the UI change to the, say, Foundation version? I mean, the ship changes are, I think (from what you've written) all located in the scripts/Custom/Ships.


Getting back to the thread, I've been thinkering with the idea of plugins for SubMenu, but couldn't really think of any aside for the standard Sub(Sub)Menu and MVAM. And possibly "species" plugin.

One should note that the next version of SubMenu will feature (user) sorted ships and menus. And it is sorted/stored/loaded through something called a "tree", in which a root node can have child nodes, which can have child nodes, but each has one or more values (such as the name of the node, or the ship).

There are a couple of problems with plugins, for example, can the order of plugin execution change stuff?
Or, should plugins work purely on ships or all types of nodes?
And even, can plugins add nodes, or even remove them, and should other plugins be called on those new nodes? Can this introduce an explosion of new nodes?
Does the order of deletion of nodes change anything?

There are actually several other questions I could ask.