w00zla

you are right, new upgrades and new useful loot would be awesome ;D but unfortunatelly, you cannot alter the "ship menu" yet (maybe never) to add those new modules the way you imagine, and like Laserzwei depicted, you cannot upgrade/modify just any stat with modules, sadly...

here another tip to add (its not that obvious): if you call invokeServerFunction() or invokeClientFunction() you get an implicit global var called callingPlayer which holds the index of the player entity which called that function! I also think it would be a good idea to collect all the "special" entity script functions called by the engine if they are declared (this Wiki page lists most of them I think, but that page is hard to find in the wiki...):

forgot to disable DEBUG output in the latest release :o please re-download if you have gotten the v0.5a ZIP before time of this posting, or change line "local debugoutput = true" to "local debugoutput = false" in file scripts/lib/findstation/common.lua !

Good news for all the server admins ;D I updated the OP and released version 0.5alpha: - mod now supports linux servers! - new configs maxconcurrent and searchdelay for anti-flood/-spam on servers (see "HOW TO - Advanced server configuration" section in OP) - minor changes and bugfixes - decided to introduce proper versioning, as i did not plan to release this many updates for the mod ;)

unfortunatelly, the info about (player-)ships is stored in the binary sector files, and the mod can only read the XML files at the moment! maybe this will change sometime or when the game API for sector data is available...

Cooles Interview, gut gemacht, und koonschi scheint ja ein netter Kerl zu sein ;) Wäre super wenn man das in Zukunft mal zum aktuellen Stand der Dinge wiederholen könnte!

yes, its tested with 0.10.2 stable and 0.10.5 dev/beta !

dont really know what you mean by integrating it into the merchant dialogues, as the mod is intended to provide galaxy-wide search for all sectors. same goes for your second point. but i already thought of creating another mod which could be a system upgrade (something like a "super scanner" ;D) which integrates the search, and has properties like i.e. maximum search distance, max results, power consumption...

thanks a lot, I defenitely will have a look at it!

updated the OP and released version alpha4: - new command /findstationui to enable fancy new UI for station search - the /findstationconfig command checks now if given galaxy or galaxypath is valid (valid means a "server.ini" file is found) - minor changes and bugfixes - additional mod structure and code refactoring (sry guys, but please delete old mod-files again!) Preview of the new UI:

but the wiki defenitely needs an overhaul in its current state! i had a hard time finding this for example...

I think you can already start testing it! the new method of sector-checking is really fast and has no performance cost at all, and you can configure how many sectors are loaded by the server per-frame for each search (see "Performance Tweaking" in the HOW TO section of op). Give the config framesectorloads a value of i.e. 1 and the server will only load and search one sector per frame which will make the searches pretty slow, but should have like no impact on performance (depends a bit on disks and iops of the server). BUT: the described limit only applies per search and per player atm! A single player cannot execute multiple searches in parallel, meaning only one at a time, but multiple players could spam the findstation command and thus produce (heavy) load on the server independently from the configs. On the other side, when players dont abuse stuff i am pretty sure the searches do well ;) EDIT: decided to add the integration of anti-spam/-flood features and configs to the TODOs

would you mind sharing your code?

with little modifications to your code i managed implement the directory scan nicely and now the check for existing sectors is so much faster and takes like no performance hit ;D thats just perfect! and a bit sad that game API calls are so slow in comparison... updated the OP and released version alpha3: added super fast sector checking routine, now searches finish in few seconds and only have little performance cost refactored mod files and code (please delete all old mod files if you are upgrading!)

thats pretty cool :D how do you do that, parse the binary data files directly?

i also came up with this idea, but decided for the api variant for two reasons: the api calls should in theory be faster than file reads (we do a million(!) checks after all) because the engine providing the api should have some kind of cached data of the sectors in memory or the data/binary files, but that does not have to be the case actually. i also was not aware of a good function in LUA to scan directory files or check file existence without opening/reading the file, or installing some LUA modules and stuff. BUT your code looks very promising and I will try that of course, maybe we get even better performance then, what would be damn great :D

the information about found sectors is saved in the players.dat or maybe even the index file of the galaxy ... those are binary and we cant read them atm. unfortunatelly this is also what the standard galaxy-map uses, and we dont have acces to this data yet via scripts :-\

maybe you could try the showdist command, it provides the same functionality ... would be really interesting if that script works or if you have a more general problem...

Good news everyone ;D I found a way to read the sector XML files in an usable way within ingame scripts :) This means i managed to create a mod which can be used to search for specific stations in every found/created sector in your galaxy! SCREENSHOTS: Search UI Search Command The mod stays alpha until sector data is provided by game API! This implementation is a workaround until proper access to sector data is provided by the game for scripts, and some functions used for file access by this script even may be permitted in the future due to security/performance reasons (mods being able to read/write any file on the system is never good in terms of security)! BACKUP YOUR FILES/GALAXY! FINDSTATION v0.6alpha: Commands: /findstationui Enables/disables the UI (menu item & window) for station search. Usage: /findstationui /findstationui enable /findstationui disable /findstation Finds near stations in any of the found/created sectors in the galaxy and displays them in chat-window. Usage: /findstation <SEARCHTERM> Parameters: <SEARCHTERM> = term to search in station names (spaces possible, case-insensitive) /findstationconfig Used to set the configuration values for /findstation command. Usage: /findstationconfig galaxy <GALAXYNAME> /findstationconfig galaxypath <GALAXYPATH> /findstationconfig searchmode <MODE> /findstationconfig maxresults <NUMBER> /findstationconfig framesectorloads <NUMBER> /findstationconfig maxconcurrent <NUMBER> /findstationconfig searchdelay <NUMBER> Parameters: <GALAXYNAME> = name of current galaxy <GALAXYPATH> = full directory path for galaxy <MODE> = one of the available search modes player or galaxy <NUMBER> = any positive number or 0 INSTALLATION: Download ZIP for latest release from GitHub and extract it to <Avorion>\data\ directory, like with other mods. No vanilla script files will be overwritten, so there should be no problem with other mods or file changes due to game updates! Server/Client: The scripts are server- and client-side by now! Following files have to be available on the client for multiplayer games: scripts\entity\findstation\searchui.lua scripts\lib\findstation\common.lua scripts\lib\findstation\config.lua scripts\lib\findstation\sectorssearch.lua textures\icons\findstation\searchstation.png TIP: If you disable the /findstationui command on your server (and thus not using the search UI), no client files need to be installed at all! HOW TO: CHANGELOG & TODOs: And now have fun searching those pesky hyperdrive-overloader parts ;D Feedback of any kind and bug-reports are of course welcome!

simple question :'( :'( :'( :'( how can i get this ? :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( type /run Entity():addScript("lib/entitydbg.lua") in your chat-window and press enter ... then you have a second "puzzle piece" in the top right menu (it says "~dev" in its tooltip), just click that to get the developer dialogs!

Thanks for the nice explanation :) and.. +1 for the moddinghelp subforum! would really help to seperate "technical" discussions and mod releases / general stuff...

EDIT: created own thread for "findstation" mod: http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,2665.0.html

Update to version 0.4: you can now show the distance to any existing player's home-sector, not only your own locations registered with the /showdistjump command will now be remembered over saves and loads of the game/server the problem with negative coordinates and reversed coordinates parameter (oops!!) has been fixed

This is where I got stuck... I'm trying to make a mod that records what goods are for sale/purchase in each sector the player enters. But... I couldn't see if I could save data to the players inner db, or whatever. ... You could try the secure() and restore() functions of entity scripts (like described here in the wiki), they seem to be the built-in hooks for easy persistence...

Very happy that you like my mod ;D I have just uploaded a new version 0.3 which improves the output of the standard /help command for showdist and showdistjump! Just type "/help showdist" or "/help showdistjump" in your chat-window and you will get detailed info about the commands 8) And btw, you can now also name the user-defined sectors so the output can be more usefull! Also updated the post so it contains info about server-/client-side.