As I understand it, it is possible to vastly improve avoidance of many system generation glitches through dynamically generating a radius around stations indicating the 'range' at which they would be an immediate threat to a hostile object. This would prevent the 'CSC is too close to Ares shipyard' glitch, stop stations from wiping out each others' guards or killing each other without player intervention, and prevent immersion breaking spawns.
The formula would be the following:
Max(range of station's highest range weapon, range of each possible ship's greatest possible patrol radius plus that ships's highest range weapon, range of any static turrets plus the spawn radius of those turrets.)
the "enemyexclusionradius=" attribute does this for stations, though I don't know if it would apply to ships like CSCs.
Does EER take weapons, turrets, and patrolling ships into account? The presence of stations that are spawned without regard for these things indicates that either such code does not exist or it is glitched.
Correction: The enemyexclusionradius attribute does this.....badly. Doing it automatically would be quite useful though since not everything has an exclusion radius.
Seems like a good idea. The formula should probably add a constant (10-20 ls) at the end to allow for weapons being off-center and the excluded stations having ships docked or patrolling around them. And another constant inside the max() so that stations with no or very short range defenses don't end up within aggro range of opposing stations' guards.
Some stations, like Ares shipyards, might want to override the default.
"Seems like a good idea. The formula should probably add a constant (10-20 ls) at the end to allow for weapons being off-center"
If there's a way to get the size of a ship/station, we could probably use that. If not, seems reasonable. Might result in slight inefficiencies, but given that most of the things using this are human, that makes sense. Of course, we'll probably want to add in some manner of additional distance regardless, to prevent the player from instantly triggering massive firefights just by showing up.
"excluded stations having ships docked or patrolling around them."
I'm not sure what you mean by "excluded stations". Satellites? For those, we could probably just get the avoidance radius of those recursively, rather than getting only turrets. That was an oversight on my part.
"And another constant inside the max() so that stations with no or very short range defenses don't end up within aggro range of opposing stations' guards."
As I understand it, the minimum distance between hostile stations would be EAR1 + EAR2, plus the constant discussed earlier.
"Some stations, like Ares shipyards, might want to override the default."
Yes, probably. I'd assume we'd use this radius when another one isn't specified.
I'm not sure what you mean by "excluded stations".
I just meant stations that are not allowed to be within the exclusion radius of a given station.
As I understand it, the minimum distance between hostile stations would be EAR1 + EAR2, plus the constant discussed earlier.
My guess is that it uses the max of the two exclusion radii, but I'd have to study a lot of systems or search for the system generation code to confirm. If it's actually the sum, my suggestions would probably not be needed.