The tool would be a reference or statistical calculator focusing primarily on events. E.g., you would provide info like what sector are you in, how many beacons are displayed, do you have a map or LRS, what do you see on the beacon, and it would give you a list of events that could be at that beacon along with their probabilities and an estimate of the rewards you could get from them. One giant spoiler.
I may also extend it to help players evaluate the consequences of choices at a given event, and do some stats on blue options, etc..Assuming I have enough time for this, the specific format will start with just an Excel spreadsheet that you will be able to autofilter to see the possibilities. If that proves too cumbersome to use, I might make it as an iOS app or something similar.
Things I'd like help with right now:
1. Some events appear to be orphans. That is, they do not appear to link back to the master sector data. (I'm not talking about things that have been commented out; obviously, those are not in use.) Some apparent orphans are definitely not orphans -- I've experienced them myself in game -- which means the game has hardcoded entry points to these data files other than via the master sector data. Some apparent orphans are 99% certain to be orphans -- I've never experienced them myself, nor can I find any info about these events on popular wikis or other game websites. My question is: does anyone have a good way to positively confirm if an event is an orphan or not? Alternative question: can anyone give me a specific list of all possible entry points to the event data?
2. In order to calculate odds, I've had to make a lot of assumptions about how the game generates events. Can anyone positively confirm how it works? (E.g., someone who has decompiled or otherwise reverse-engineered the code?) Here's my working theory:
For events that are derived via sector data:
* Randomly generate between min and max of each type of event listed and put them all into a bag
* Randomly draw 20-24 items from the bag to populate the sector map (the only # of beacons I've ever seen)
* If the bag is empty and you still need to draw more, choose events from the "NEUTRAL" eventList
* Overwrite the entrance and exit beacons with specific events
* Fleet, flagship, and quests also overwrite the event that used to be at a beacon
* So, e.g., even if an event type says minimum 1, it still may not appear