First of all, we're now talking trunk features, which are
possibly subject to change, so everything I'm going to say might or might not be relevant when 1.74 is ready to be released...
Now that
that's out of the way, I really want to expand on what Ahruman said above: until quite recently, NPCs didn't really have equipment or missiles as such: they had a series of flags indicating whether a piece of equipment was on board or not, and which type of missiles would magically appear whenever they wanted to fire a missile.
That meant that
1) if you wanted to add new types equipment to an NPC ship, you simply couldn't. You were stuck with exactly the NPC equipment allowed in the core game.
2) You could define
anything as missiles for an NPC. You could create thargoids firing cobra3s, or coriolis stations, or asteroids. However you could only have one type of 'special' missile, or get the engine to choose missiles for you. In the latter case, he engine itself would not know which missiles would be on board, but would create a missile at random, with the role defined only a few milliseconds before firing, chosen between all possible missiles. The actual concept of missile slots was entirely bypassed for NPCs, so the max missiles was the amount logged when the ship was created, and the counter could only go down by one every time the NPC decided to fire a missile.
Now, what's happening in trunk is:
1) equipment: NPCs equipment handling is now possible: equipment can be added, removed, and new abilities can be added to NPCs - for example, an NPC can now be scripted that takes advantage of external fuel tanks.
2) missiles: we can now remove & add missiles at our heart's content, detect and change whatever missiles are stocked by npcs. (For example, no more surprise Q-mine in between normal missiles! - if an NPC has a Q-mine, we can detect it now. Before it was impossible to do so.)
TODOs:
- I don't think NPCs' equipment gets damaged (& destroyed in strict mode) in battle yet, so we'll need to implement that.
- Add a compatibility mode that will add missile_roles items to the equimpent list, if not defined. Some thinking required, so that we don't end up generating a 'coriolis station missile'...
Apologies for the rambling, but I hope I've been able to at least hint at the new possibilities open for NPC scripting!