Core: Hint revamp

[Berserker66]

What feature would you like to see?

Hints have some room to improve, some features and current proposals:

1. Hints could use a source field, to differentiate user desire from information that was gleaned.
2. additional location field should be generalized, for example into the form [["at", location_name], ["costing", "20 rupees"]]
3. FreeText hints should be added.
4. Hints or parts of a hint (1/2 hint etc.) should be introduced as generic items any world can make use of, for example as filler. once a full hint is reached, it bestows a "free" use of !hint.
5. (edit) point per % of total multiworld completion as a trickle for stuck players.

Additions and changes should be bundled into as few releases as possible to keep breaking versions low.

[ScipioWright]

For FreeText hint, the option to retain a selection of the existing fields would be nice to have.
Something like:

Sender: Player1, Receiver: Player2, FreeText: "Something important for Player2 is in Player1's Dungeon 3"

Sender: Player2, FreeText: "There are 4 items that are useful or better in the Lava Zone"

Sender: Player2, Receiver: Player1, Entrance Hint: Overworld Door 3 -> Underworld Gate 1, FreeText: "There is an important item for Player1 in Player2's Castle Interior"

[BadMagic100]

With regard to 2 - perhaps it should be a dictionary, if the idea is verb-noun pairs. It would ensure that keys are unique and that values are pairs, and probably makes lookup for known metadata types (such as cost for example) easier

[BadMagic100]

Also I don't imagine that 4 requires breaking structural changes and should be safe to separate. The rest should definitely go together in a perfect world

[NewSoupVi]

I would like a way to create hints for locations in other games that contain my items, because Witness has this kind of hint:

WitnessItem can be found on OoTPlayer1's Market Shooting Gallery

ItemScouts have been proposed, but then I can't choose which copy I want to be hinted for progressive items. Ideally there should be a "slot" argument for LocationScouts, or in general the ability to hint other people's locations with whatever new hint system you make

[Silvris]

For hint tab with regards to FreeText, we could probably change to 5 columns being Receiver Finder Description Entrance Found. We'd lose the ability to sort by item/location, but with the addition of hints that might not even have an item or location, that might just have to be the trade off.

[Ehseezed]

For the idea of the hint source field
Allowing the receiving player to update that field to a valid option (that could be figured out later) by either automatically updating to highest level when using the hint command or by some form of manually setting perhaps through an optional argument at the end of the command or a dedicated hint update command !hint_update [item] [tag] idea being to allow players to dismiss items that have been scouted and are junk or that are no longer relevant due to multiple copies of the progression item in the pool

[Ixrec]

I like the idea of letting players manually annotate their multiworlds' hints, but I think it should be a separate piece of text from all of the automatically provided bits of text (especially if hints start to have a variable structure to allow for vagueness). My strawman name for that would be "note", since systems like Discord already use the term "note" for freeform text added by a user that the program saves without any further manipulation.