Flight Management

[alexanderson1993]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Based on the discussion here: #25. We need database structures, API, and UI for starting a flight. I'll break the individual tasks out into their own issues once this issue is approved.

Describe the solution you'd like

This involves a lot of things to be considered complete. See the screenshots below for how this was implemented in Thorium Nova Prime.

• Define the data schema and properties for flights #85
• Make it so flights can be saved to the file system #86
• Create definitions for stations of a single size (probably 1 to start) #87
• Create the API for knowing what station complements (eg. how many crew members) are available #88
• Create the API for knowing what ship templates are available #89
• Create the API for knowing what missions are available #90
• Create the API for starting a new flight #91
• Create the API for assigning a client to a ship and station on a flight, both for the admin and for the client themselves #92
• Create the API for renaming a client #93
• Create the API for knowing what saved flights are available #94
• Create the API for knowing ending a flight #95
• Create the API for deleting a flight #96
• Create the API for pausing/resuming a flight #97
• Create the API for resetting a flight #98
• Make the auto-generated client names better. #99
• Create the UI for picking the ship size for a new flight #100
• Create the UI for picking the ship for a new flight #101
• Create the UI for picking the mission for a new flight #102
• Create the UI for the admin client lobby #103
• Create the UI for the player client lobby #104
• Flight Management - Create UI for assigning a starting position for a ship in sandbox mode, when no mission is chosen. #325
• Flight Management - Initialize starmap entities when a flight starts. #326

Additional context

Screenshots from Thorium Nova Prime

These are the buttons which are present on the welcome screen. I think we'll skip the custom flight config and just have "Start Flight", "Load a Saved Flight", and "Join a Server". At some point, there needs to be an option for choosing which plugins are included in a new flight, but we won't worry about that right now.

The first step in starting a flight is choosing the number of stations the ship will have, as well as whether there will be a flight director. The flight director choice will likely affect which missions are available. I can't remember why I made it so crew count includes the captain - it probably should always include captain.

In Thorium Nova Prime, the ship was chosen first. You can see a list of all available ship templates and search through them. This is also the place where you would be able to choose a saved ship config from a previous flight, so you can transfer over the state of your ship from one flight to the next for longer campaign-style missions.

The final screen is picking a mission. As nice as it would be to have any mission runnable by any ship, some missions will only work for big ships (multiple decks, NPC crew members) and some will only work for small ships (few internal decks, no NPC crew members). I can't remember why I decided to have them pick the ship first and then the mission, but it might make more sense to pick the mission first and then the ship. Easily adjustable later if we prefer something different.

This is the Flight Admin Lobby, where whoever is in charge of the flight can assign connected clients to specific stations. They pick the client on the left and place them in the station on the right. They can also assign themselves to a station and click "Go to station" to open their controls.

And this is the station selection screen for the connected clients. They just pick the client they want to connect to and it automatically takes them to that station. Clients should have the ability to return to this screen to pick another station later, probably through the ESC key.