NPC scan and surveillance personality behavior changes

[Amazinite]

Feature

This PR addresses the issues with NPC scanning behavior noted by #9706, #4723, and #4240.

Summary

With this PR, ships with cargo and outfit scanners now behave as follows:

• All ships with scanners:
  • Will not scan ships that have already been scanned by another ship in their government. (New)
    • This was previously always the case for non-surveillance ships, but is now also the case for surveillance ships, which would scan any ship they haven't scanned regardless of whether an ally has.
  • Will prefer to scan the closest target to them when finding a new target. (Unchanged)
  • Will prefer to continue scanning targets they have already started scanning. (Unchanged)
  • Will give up on scanning their target if an addition 1 minute has elapsed past their base search timer. (New)
• Only non-surveillance ships:
  • Will make up to 6 successful scan before deciding to do something else. (New)
    • A successful scan is when either a cargo or an outfit scan completes. This means that a ship with both types of scanners that finishes both scans for every ship it scans will only scan 3 ships.
  • Will only search for scan targets for up to 2.5 minutes. (New)
  • Will give up on scanning their target if the target escapes beyond 2 times their scan range. (New)
  • Will only decide to start chasing and scanning a target if it is within 2 times their scan range. (New)
• Only surveillance ships:
  • Won't assist you when you hail them. (Unchanged)
  • Will make up to 12 successful scans before deciding to do something else. (New)
  • Will only search for scan targets for up to 5 minutes. (New)
  • Won't give up on scanning their target based on its distance. (Will still give up if their timer has elapsed.) (New)
  • If there is a ship within 2 times their scan range that they are able to scan, they will always prefer to scan the ship. (New)
  • If there are no ships within 2 times their scan range, they will randomly choose between "scanning" a stellar object in the system (if the ship has the "atmosphere scan" attribute), leaving the system, or choosing a ship in the system regardless of its distance to target and scan. (New)
    • Previously, surveillance ships would always prioritize scanning ships if there were any ships in the system to scan before deciding to scan nearby stellar objects or leave the system. (The way DoSurveillance was set up made it seem like the intention was for surveillance ships to sometimes decide to leave the system instead of scanning every single ship, but in practice they would always have found a target before DoSurveillance is called and so track down that target for so long as there were available targets in the system.)

What this means is the following:

• You will no longer get incessantly scanned by NPCs without end.
• NPCs with scanners will no longer continually build up in systems with high spawn rates.
• You can now escape/avoid ships with scanners by keeping your distance from them instead of only being able to either accept the scan or leave the system quicker than they can scan you.

Overall, not only should this result in less annoying behavior from scanning NPCs, but it should also make it so that running illegal goods is more viable given that you won't be scanned multiple times in the same system and you can avoid scanning ships from even targeting you by keeping your distance (which can make large arrival distance systems great places to run through).

Testing Done + Screenshots.

Idled in Sol with a vanilla version of the game and with this PR. In vanilla, the number of Gunboats in the system quickly increased and remained high.

With this PR, it's still possible for a large number of Gunboats to be in the system at the same time, but unlike vanilla, they eventually start leaving to do other things. Most of the time there are only a few Gunboats flying around.

Repeated the same experiment in Heia Due, where Hai surveillance personality fleets can spawn. In vanilla, I was scanned multiple times by multiple ships.

With this PR, I was scanned once and then never again.

Performance Impact

N/A

Side note

I'm pretty sure we're overusing the surveillance personality. A ship does not need the surveillance personality in order to scan other ships. All it needs is an outfit or cargo scanner and no hostiles in the system to distract it. The surveillance personality was always a way to make such ships more aggressive in their scanning, hence them scanning every ship personally instead of not scanning ships their government has already scanned. I've maintained the more aggressive scanning behavior of the surveillance personality by giving them a higher threshold for how many ships they can scan, for how long, and how they choose their scan targets, but we may still want to reevaluate the fleets we have given the surveillance personality.

Potential tweaks to these changes

While working on this, I figured that the reason that surveillance ships would scan a ship even if their government already scanned it was to give a sense of overbearingness to the surveillance ships, a sense that I feel is now lost with this PR.

This idea does seem to fit well with the Navy surveillance fleets; surveillance fleets only begin spawning after Geminus and Martini are bombed, and are primarily deployed around the Free Worlds. It makes sense that the Navy would be scanning every ship they can multiple times, as it is possible that the first scan may have missed something. It's also not as if there's a cost to scanning, so the Navy might as well do it as much as they can. And from the Free Worlds perspective, it simply reinforces their distaste for the Republic; even if they don't have issues with the Navy by itself, they understand that the Navy takes orders from the Republic, and that it could be the Republic commanding the Navy to be so liberal with their scanning.

More generally, if the purpose of the surveillance personality is to make smuggling goods more difficult, it's possible to have something like interference plating block the first scan, so it would make sense for surveillance fleets to make multiple scans if they're expecting their scan targets to have interference plating.

If we want to keep this idea of surveillance fleets being overbearing in their scans, there's likely a middle ground between the current "scan every ship as many times times as you can" and this PR's "only scan each ship once per day." Thoughts on making it so that surveillance fleets will still generally avoid scanning ships that have already been scanned by their government, but add a random chance in to ignore the fact that a ship was already scanned and scan it again?

Even if we added this back in, surveillance ships will still each individually only be able to make so many scans and spend so much time scanning before deciding to do something else. It's just that instead of having every single surveillance ship that spawns scan you, the first one would scan you and then maybe every tenth one after that would decide to scan you again.

[Hecter94]

If we want to keep this idea of surveillance fleets being overbearing in their scans, there's likely a middle ground between the current "scan every ship as many times as you can" and this PR's "only scan each ship once per day." Thoughts on making it so that surveillance fleets will still generally avoid scanning ships that have already been scanned by their government, but add a random chance in to ignore the fact that a ship was already scanned and scan it again?

Couldn't we tweak how NPCs scanning a player ship are displayed? If the concern here isn't how much your ships are being scanned and just annoyance at the scanning SFX, then reduce the scanning SFX.

If you're not carrying any illegal cargo, don't show any indication that your ship is being scanned. Or only show it at most, once every (x) seconds.
However, if you're carrying illegal cargo, you probably care about every scan. You are unlikely to get annoyed by it since it's important information to be aware of.

A different scanning sound or a different indicator would probably help a lot as well, like if you aren't carrying any illegal cargo, just play a short ding when an NPC completes a scan of your ship instead of the full scanning indicator we get now.
So, if you're not doing anything illegal, you're still aware that you're being scanned a lot because of the periodic dings of completed scans, but it's not constant overbearing noise.

[alexrovw]

• All ships with scanners:
  • Will not scan ships that have already been scanned by another ship in their government. (New)

Have you checked the impact of this change on the difficulty level of mission "FW Katya 3" for new players? Surveillance drones can be pretty fast, and if only one approaches you per system, then it might be tough to isolate it from its Cruiser.

[Hurleveur]

They actually scan you? why didnt I notice that
You can just wait for them in ambush at a gas giant for a free drone, works every time
I wish they'd hint at that in the mission itself, but mb they do and I dont remember

[Amazinite]

Have you checked the impact of this change on the difficulty level of mission "FW Katya 3" for new players? Surveillance drones can be pretty fast, and if only one approaches you per system, then it might be tough to isolate it from its Cruiser.

Surveillance Cruisers will still dump their drones in the system before leaving the system, and surveillance drones can still randomly choose to scan planets in the system since they have the atmosphere scan attribute, so it's still possible to get a surveillance drone away from other Navy ships in the system, they just won't go immediately for you before deciding to do something else.

[ThrawnCA]

Have you checked the impact of this change on the difficulty level of mission "FW Katya 3" for new players? Surveillance drones can be pretty fast, and if only one approaches you per system, then it might be tough to isolate it from its Cruiser.

There's no time limit on that mission, though, and no danger if you have no drones to attack. So it's not necessarily a big problem if the player has to keep trying for longer.

[LepRyot]

Mildy unrelated but @Amazinite how do you view the in game message log like that?

[bene-dictator]

The functionality was added in PR 9246.

Default is /

[Hurleveur]

looks good, I tested this in remnant space and it seemed to be working pretty well
I do have a few notes about how the code looks, however, but its nothing that absolutely needs changing

[Hurleveur]

Looks good to me code wise, and it worked fine when I tested it. We could mb merge both function in a namespace one or smth but its not required and might break stuff

This reminds me we could use a way to not scan all ally govs but that should be for another PR.