JFDaly
commented
7 years ago Ah, that'll be it - I forgot to invoke DoUpdateContracts(); I was expecting GameEvents.GetContractUnit() to update automatically (just absent-mindedly; it works as intended). However, invoking that (whether manually or automatically via era change) is now causing an infinite loop and the game to freeze.
Without Game.GetContractUnit(), how do I return the unit ID tied to the Contract, for UI purposes?
They might disband, yes. I'm not sure what that function would do, so probably not :p
LoneGazebo
I am here with a rundown of what the Mercenaries system would need, if you are still willing and able to incorporate it into the DLL sometime (in response to the issues that I have with TableSaverLoader).
Essentially, the Mercenaries system is a range of 'Contracts' that can be taken out by the player, exchanging Gold for a limited ownership of a particular unit (or units). Contracts are global - only one player can take one Contract at a given time, and they each cost Maintenance. Some also provide resources, to compensate for what would be deficiency otherwise when you contract Mounted Units or units requiring Iron/Oil, etc.
At the moment, I have 1 dummy policy per Contract, which I thought might increase stability (alleviating how much info is cached), but this appears not to be the case - so they're just needlessly cluttering up the database, pushing to that ~256 limit.
The following attributes are variable, and need to be cached: the player that has taken out the contract, the turns remaining on the contract, the maintenance of the contract, the unit assigned to the contract and any associated resources. I do wonder, however, if it would be possible to cut out the cached resources with some sort of unit:SetHasNoResourceRequirement(boolean) function - something to override the unit's resource requirement.
I have a table (JFD_Contracts) set up which stores the contracts in the database. So any functions would need to refer to the IDs of those entries. I consider the following functions to be what I'd need:
Game.SetContractOwner(contractID, playerID) -- would need to support playerID being set to nil. Game.GetContractOwner(contractID) -- returns playerID from the above. Game.SetContractUnit(contractID, unitID) Game.GetContractUnit(contractID) -- returns unitID) from the above Game.SetContractTurns(contractID, value) Game.GetContractTurns(contractID) -- returns value) from the above. Game.SetContractMaintenance(contractID, value) Game.GetContractMaintenance(contractID) -- returns value) from the above
GameEvents.ContractStarts(playerID, contractID)
And If nullifying the resource requirement of specific unit objects is not possible:
Game.SetContractResources(contractID, resourceID, value) Game.GetContractResources(contractID) -- returns resourceID and resource count from the above.
The following things are non-essential, and can be re-created in Lua, but would be convenient:
Game.IsContractActive(contractID) -- checks the playerID of Game.GetContractOwner() and, if null, returns false. Player:HasContract(contractID) -- checks if Game.GetContractOwner() equals this player's ID. GetContractTurns(contractID) should change SetContractTurns each turn by an established Game Define (which would only ever be 1, so could be hardcoded).
GameEvents.ContractEnds.Add(playerID, contractID) -- would only be needed if the turn time decay is automatically set up, and would trigger when that turn time reaches 0.
I'm not asking this to be worked on any time soon, of course, but let me know your thoughts on how possible this looks.