Donate to Cranks - incorporate info from factions

[zonkmachine]

Improving immersion in 'Donate to Cranks' by adding some faction info as string variables (faction name and the names of the police and military forces) and some new flavours to make use of them.
I tried to make the string interpolation in just one place but failed at that so it's now done in onCreateBB and onGameStart separately.

[Web-eWorks]

The easiest way to handle the interpolation is to store the stringVariables table in the ad object in onCreateBB and do the interpolation using ad.stringVariables in both locations rather than reconstructing the stringVariables table. It's also best to avoid storing the final interpolated text in the ad object, as that's serialized to disk and increases the size of the savefile. (Technically this also applies to the stringVariables object, if you want to go the extra mile and reconstruct it each time the advert is placed.)

I'll need to do a further pass suggesting corrections to the grammar / structure of the ad titles later this week but overall I like the idea of this PR!

[zonkmachine]

I'll need to do a further pass suggesting corrections to the grammar / structure of the ad titles later this week but overall I like the idea of this PR!

Yes. I'm not an author, that's for sure. ;P

The easiest way to handle the interpolation is to store the stringVariables table in the ad object in onCreateBB and do the interpolation using ad.stringVariables in both locations rather than reconstructing the stringVariables table.

OK. I think I managed to come up with something that works. I also added a {SYSTEM} variable.

[Web-eWorks]

I've left suggestions with various typo fixes, you should be able to go through and accept them all + commit the changes from the web interface if you have no objections.

Other than the grammar improvements, I think this PR is good to land!

[zonkmachine]

I've left suggestions with various typo fixes,

Ouch! That was worse than I expected.

Other than the grammar improvements, I think this PR is good to land!

OK. I've been looking into more stuff in 'Donate to Cranks' but I think I'm good for now. One caveat! I haven't actually tested this in other systems than the two available from the start menu. For instance, I don't know if families in the {FACTION}... works in. I'm looking into ways to hack myself to other stations. I have no intention to actually learn how to fly those things...
In any case, I think this should be tested more before merging.

[zonkmachine]

dedicated their lives to keeping {SYSTEM} safe need your support!

{SYSTEM} is the only variable I'm worried about. I don't know if Game.system.name is useful always.

[Web-eWorks]

Game.system.name will always be the translated string that's shown on the map as the system name. Given that it can be randomly generated quite often, there's very little further processing that can be done. The only thing you have to be wary of is Game.system is a nil value while in hyperspace.

[zonkmachine]

OK. So just merge and see if it works for our explorers?

[Web-eWorks]

Yes, at this point if you've seen no issues after testing locally, I'm fine to merge this and sort out any further bugs if they arise.

[zonkmachine]

It's a go!

[zonkmachine]

@Web-eWorks Right, it's much cleaner to use the github builtin squash merge option. I always assume it because my PR tend to start out clean and then deteriorate exponentially. (for the record. If it's me, you don't have to ask to squash a PR).

[Web-eWorks]

Y'know, I didn't even bother to look at the git history before merge... too much on the brain. It's not too bad, just some extra commits in the history.

[impaktor]

Ideally, these commits should have been squashed.