Post
by johgalt » Sun, 3. Sep 06, 17:27
well, I know a little about the scripting engine, and what I know leads me to suspect that tehy station manager and commercial agent can function together without any problem. in order for the station manager/commercial agent logic to take into account the activities and cargo of the stations other ships it owuld have to make a call on its home base and ank it for a list of owned ships. to coordinate these ships the script has only to determine the cargo and destination of the other ships. it is for this reason that I believe that the station manager/commercial agent will not care about the actual command of the other owned ships.
conceptualy, these scripts are rather different, because of the rumber of scripts that have would be running. the station manager is a single monolithic script that runs on the station and monitors its resources, products, and designated ships (this could eb a limiting factor of the station manager, if it only coordinates with the assigned ships, but i suspect it coordinates with all owned vessals). this means there is only one instance per station of the script.
on the other hand, teh commercial agent runs on each ship. this means one instance per commercial agent. this also means that the script has no choice but to be aware of all the factories owned ships. the only way to ignore them would be to explicitly check if the ships it is coordinating with are also commercial agents, and i think that is unlikely, as it would be counter productive.
functionaly, the two are quite similar. the only advantage i have found to the commercial agent is that they will not enter sectors owned by races marked as 'foe' in the command console (perhaps a rather large advantage). the station manager has 2 advantages: 1) as far as I can tell, you dont have to pay them, and 2) you dont have to wait for them to train.
there is one major disadvantage to the commercial agents: their home bases can not be switched once they have gained rank. this means that they can never work for any complex you might own that has no primary resources because the starting rank, apprentice, can only buy primary resources, and since there are no primary resources, it can never gain rank to trade anything. since the home base can not be changed, it is impossible to train the ship elswhere and then assign it to another station/complex with a high rank.
allow me to elaborate on teh part about 'can not reassign teh home base.' I can change the home base in the command console, and then start the commercial agent. teh ship will fly to the new home base. somewhere between the time it starts flying home to the new base, and the time it launches from the new base (most likely when it lands and tried for the next command) the home base will revert to the original all on its own, and nothing can be done about it (nothing i hav efound so far anyway).
any help on that problem woud be appreciated,
thanks.
"Who is John Galt?"
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