Expanding Tables with Typcreate?

[Atarlost]

I've seen claims that it's possible to use typcreate to add lines to a table (eg. tbCorpDefenders) but can't find any documentation of how to get the table into a string so this can be done.

[RPC]

I do it in this mod.

[Atarlost]

It looks like you're not directly using the vanilla tables.

When typcreate was first suggested, Taben also requested a function to read an XML type as a string for manipulation. That is what I need. If I can't read the original table at runtime there's no advantage to constructing the replacement table at runtime.

[RPC]

You can't read the XML at runtime sadly unless George added it in a later version.

[Jeoshua]

Definitely can't read XML itself. I just spent 3 days searching over the available information and trying to code something that required reading XML and modifying it. Completely not in the game, not even indirectly. Only certain parts of the XML are exposed in various methods, and never raw XML. By the time the script code ends up running, the XML doesn't even seem to still be in memory (unless you've made some fake XML in a <StaticData> block.

The lack of this (or other alternatives) turned what could have been a 3 line fix into a 50 line kludge.

[pixelfck]

The XML structure/data is indeed discarded after read it; the relevant data is stored in C++ objects. At game start, the engine does not know about the original XML nor its structure.

Why do we do this? For efficiency. We need to access a ship's mass to calculate motion. We do that once per ship 30 times per second. If there are 100 ships in a system, we're accessing that variable 3000 times per second. A quick member-variable access is a lot faster than a hash table lookup (plus potentially a string-to-integer conversion).

There is a proposal that would change this (go read the thread, it could be informative).

Cheers,
Pixelfck