- the necessary information. The script assumes that the set of
- pirates on board doesn't change while you're off the ship (unless
- you're away for more than an hour, in which case it assumes the
- ship is empty when you return to it).
-
- This means that there needs to be a way to manually add and remove
- pirates - but there isn't. I think this could probably be added by
- someone who could be bothered to replace the `sleep 1' in the main
- loop by something which looked for keyboard input.
-
- However it will notice that a pirate is on board if they abandon a
- duty station (in circumstances where the game reports this in the
- log, which doesn't seem to be all the time) or you give them a
- stationing order, and from various other messages that might occur.
+ information about who's on board the ship when you reboard it.
+
+ yoweb-scrape assumes that, unless it is told otherwise (or notices
+ for itself), the set of pirates on board doesn't change while
+ you're off the ship (unless you're away for more than an hour, in
+ which case it assumes the ship is empty when you return to it).
+
+ You can tell it otherwise with specially formatted chat messages.
+ Messages sent or received to officer chat, and messages sent (not
+ received) in private message, are scanned for special `commands' to
+ yoweb-scrape. (So you can have an officer on board the ship keep
+ your yoweb-scrape up to date if you like.)
+
+ The commands are of the following format:
+ /a <pirate>... /d <pirate>...
+ /a <ship-spec>: <pirate>... /d <ship-spec>: <pirate>...
+ And also:
+ /j <pirate>
+ which simulates "<pirate> applied for the posted job".
+
+ <ship-spec> can be the full name of the ship, or or only the second
+ word (the noun). It can also be a pattern, where `*' matches any
+ (nonempty) series of characters including spaces, and which counts
+ if it matches either the whole ship name or just the noun.
+
+ For example:
+ /a haddock: aiah
+ /d aiah
+ /a smart sunfish: copperkatie
+ /a s* sunfish: anaplian
+ These are actually sent by typing in the chat box things like:
+ /o /d plonker
+ /off /a hypiscles
+ since other formulations interpret the scraper command as a YPP
+ chat command. This is deliberate and makes it harder to invoke by
+ mistake.
+
+ If you don't specify a ship, it will assume that it's the ship that
+ you (or the officer speaking) are on board. (For full details of
+ the matching algorithm, see below.) If more than one ship is being
+ managed with yoweb-scrape, any user who wishes to issue these
+ commands should say:
+ /a relevant fish: executiveofficer
+ so that everyone else's yoweb-scrape knows which ship they're on
+ and thus which ship their /a commands refer to.
+
+ * For the ship duty puzzle display, and for sorting pirates by
+ skill, we take the best of Sailing and Rigging.