[Proposal]: Save set of current missions/spaceport bar patrons in save file

[clintonmead]

Suggestion

Upon reloading, I never accept new missions, I consider refreshing the mission board as a bit dodgy. I know I could just takeoff and land, but I also don't do this on purpose just for new missions/bar patrons.

It would be better if when I reload from an save my game is in exactly the same state as when I saved, which includes whatever the mission/bar patrons were there when I saved.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[bobbens]

I'm not necessarily sure this is a good idea: on one hand, encouraging scumming behaviours is not good, on another hand, potentially wasting the player's time is not good. XCOM uses a pseudo random number generator seed that is saved and loaded with an option to have true randomness (allowing scumming), although it is disabled by default.

For Naev, it would also make sense to implement this with a pseudo-random number generator that gets saved or something instead of all the missions/events, which would probably have more corner cases and be much harder to implement bug-free. The criteria on how it gets updated could be defined such that it only gets changed when a) the player completes a mission, or b) the player goes to a different planet. The game would save and load the pseudo random number generator seed, so it would give the same missions until it gets changed.

Implementation-wise, this would consist of:

1. When generating landed missions, first set the PRNG seed(s).
2. Then, then generating the missions, make it so all the random functions in the rnd module use the PRNG seed behaviour instead of true random behaviour. This behaviour would be reset after missions are generated.
3. When saving/loading make sure to keep track of the PRNG seed(s).
4. Use some criteria to determine if the seed should be updated, in which case it would be updated randomly.

It would probably make sense to also give some option to disable this behaviour, at least to add a plugin to disable this if players are so inclined.