locationCriteria and stationCriteria

[kaypy]

Can anyone offer more than speculation on the function of these attributes? They seem to be different (although similar) to the item tables' criteria attribute... + and - seem to be less absolute, for example...

Thus I can hazard some guesses, but if George or anyone else with definitive knowledge of their behavior would let me know I would appreciate it. I had a dig though here and the UTF, but couldnt come up with anything...

[george moromisato]

You are right that they are different than item criteria--and they are fuzzier.

Both of these are used when generating star systems. Here is a common example:

Code: Select all

<RandomLocation locationCriteria="++OuterSystem,-asteroids,-gasgiant">
   <Lookup table="StargateInbound"/>
</RandomLocation>

The above snippet of code is saying, "pick a random location that matches the given locationCriteria and then place a 'StargateInbound' group there."

The attributes in locationCriteria can have the following modifiers:

+++xyz means that any locations without xyz are very rarely chosen
++xyz means that any locations without xyz are rarely chosen
+xyz means that any location without xyz are less likely to be chosen

-xyz means that any locations with xyz are less likely to be chosen
--xyz means that any locations with xyz are rarely chosen
---xyz means that any locations with xyz are very rarely chosen

*xyz means that only locations with xyz are chosen
!xyz means that locations with xyz are never chosen

So in the above example, we are probably going to chose a location in the OuterSystem, but probably not near asteroids and probably not near a gas giant.

Now, imagine that the location and the station are both random:

Code: Select all

<RandomLocation locationCriteria="++OuterSystem,-asteroids,-gasgiant">
   <RandomStation stationCriteria="*friendly,+commonwealth"/>
</RandomLocation>

This picks a random location that matches locationCriteria and puts a random station that matches stationCriteria. The syntax is the same, but this time we are checking against station attributes.

*friendly means that the station must be friendly;
+commonwealth means that stations that don't have the 'commonwealth' attribute are less likely to be chosen.

Hope that helps.

[kaypy]

Cool! Thats exactly what I was after.

Thanks