Cargo expansions, playerships and modding

[Aury]

Cargo expansions currently increase playership cargo amount by a set amount, as defined in the item, which will increase the playership's cargo up to a maximum defined in the playership.

Now the current system works fine in the context of the vanilla playerships. But the moment a modded playership with creative cargo limits gets thrown into the mix, the entire setup gets out of whack.

The problem here lies with the various choices the modder has, all of them being problematic.
1) Restrict ship to having no greater than 100 cargo difference between starting and max. Flawed in that it restricts modders choices.

2) Ignore it. Flawed in that the ship will not make use of its max cargo space, and thus will be at a disadvantage if balanced with the assumption that cargo added was infinite [as I had thought]
3) Add custom cargo bays. Flawed in that not only do the unwanted vanilla cargoholds bias the RNG as well, but they also end up appearing in the game and being a waste of a spawned item, and the reverse happens when a game with a stock playership or different modded playership is played. Furthermore, the mod was downloaded for the playership, not the cargo bay. TMU could alleviate this latter problem slightly, though this of course requires that; a) the user have TMU, b) the mod maker packed the new cargo expansions sepparately, and c) the user remembers to disable/enable the additional xml appropriately.
4) Overwrite the vanila cargo bays. Overwriting vanilla stuff is a pretty big NO in the world of non-TC modding. Pretty obvious reasons, such as conflicts, etc.

The optimal solution to this is to give access to both the current cargo capacity of the playership and the ability to set the cargo capacity of the playership through events. Betel and Alterecco both stated agreement with this. (This would also allow modders to use non-cargobay items that are scripted to act as cargo bays on install and uninstall. This would also allow stacking cargo bays.)

Less-optimal solutions including: allowing cargo bays to stack, making cargo bays add infinite cargo by default, so that the ship's max takes precidence and then adding virtual stuff to remove the necessary amount of weight, and other such stuff like that.

[Betelgeuse]

no Wolfy I said dynamic cargo holds would be good as a modded item.
Adding custom cargo bays would be the best solution as you can't expect vanilla cargo bays to know and adjust to your mod.

Adding items is a basic part of modding and you can't complain when adding better stuff the worse stuff stays behind. You can't remove it as the code might depend on that item. Also you will not always get the optimal equipment every game, you need to allow for sub-optimal equipment.

I agree that it should be possible to optimize a given ship but that is up to the mod maker by supplying the things that vanilla doesn't. Not vanilla somehow knowing what you want it to do.

[Aury]

I meant you agreed that having control of it through events was useful, not that actually solving the problem was what you were talking about.

I suppose I didn't word it that well.

oh wait... duh; I figured out the solution to this:

1) add your custom cargo holds. Set to 'NotRandom'
2) have some event on the custom playership to find if a vanilla cargo hold has been installed (some ship equiv to 'onInstall', and for later, an 'onUninstall' version)
3) have the event swap out the normal cargo hold for your modded one
4) Well, the modded cargo hold can use the normal onUninstall to swap back to the old one.