Plugin Idea/Request: have NPC Ships spawn with randomized amount of damage

Maybe this is already possible and/or discussed before, but I never heard anything about it, so I guess not. My apologies if it is…

Afaik, all NPC ships that spawn, are at 100% of their health, both for their hull as for their equipment.

But wouldn’t the game become a bit more realistic if their health could be randomized between a max and min limit? In-game, then the NPC ships might appear to have been around for a while, had some amount of damage and not yet visited a repair facility.

I can’t think of any way to properly achieve this thru the ini’s (you could approach it t by creating a multitude of varieties of each ship you wanna do this for in ShipArch.ini, each with it’s own amount of hitpoints, and set these up as NPC ships -which would mean lot of data, still static, so not cool) so it would have to be a hack / plugin…

My knowledge of how the game engine processes the data is too limited, but I could think of three o places where the plugin could be called upon (if at all possible):

1. in the Systems’ traffic zone encounters;

2. in either Faction_prop.ini or NPCShips.ini

3. in loadouts.ini

All options have their pros and cons.

So, would this possible at all? If so - when’s the plugin ready?

=Alex= wrote:
I believe NPCs only spawn when a player enters (or is near?) a zone. This means the NPCs should only be created when they are needed. Randomly spawning NPCs with random amounts of health would contradict the game mechanics and stand out from the normal NPCs.

I am not suggesting that the NPC ships should spawn in another place or on another moment then they do now.

What I mean is, that it would be nice if we could decide an upper and lower limit between the ‘health’ of the spawned ships. So, when you’d enter the Badlands and meet four Rogues, their ships’ healths might be at, say, 96%, 87%, 77% and 93% percent, instead of all four of them being at 100%.

adoxa wrote:
Random Damage.

Gisteron wrote:
you are a genius, adoxa.
question: in the example you used hitpoints = -10 while in the explanation you had four digits for the percentage. so by default the damage is like from zero to the last two digits’ value and if there are 3 or four digits, then it is from first (one or two) to last two?

Good question!