Thanks for the response, Meridian. I have cleaned the list, here is the revised version:
3. RESEARCH: FALSE FOR UFOPAEDIA ARTICLES
Priority: low
Justification: Lack of this option causes confusion with some Piratez players and there's no other way of clearing it up easily (without sacrificing some gameplay).
Clarifications: It's an inversion of "requires". With this, the article only displays when you do not have a given research. It would have to be compatible with requires. For example:
* You find a Plasma Pistol. You can immediately research it regardless of any research prerequisites. It will display an article saying "we think it's an alien weapon, blah blah"
* Later you collect enough knowledge to examine the item in full, which gives you full info, and the old article disappears.
So essentially there are two different articles, which never appear at the same time.
One problem I'm not sure how to approach is writing such rulesets for items. Continuing the plasma pistol example, the "early" research/article could not be STR_PLASMA_PISTOL, because it would conflict with the later article, which would also need to be STR_PLASMA_PISTOL, else the article wouldn't work properly. But it can't be some other string, because then the needItem command wouldn't work. I don't have a good solution at the moment.
The inversion of "requires" is doable, but I don't think it's the best approach.
Also, it might have performance implications in huge mods (for reasons).
I'd rather do something similar to "disables:" in research ruleset (
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,5482.msg86298.html#msg86298), but you'll specify the names of ufopedia articles to disable (permanently).
Would that cover the requirement?About the problem with "needitem"... it is now
possible to specify a different "neededItem", so it should not be a problem anymore:
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8653.msg160505.html#msg160505However, the
problem I see is the middle-clicking on a pistol for example... I can't see a way how the game would determine whether it should open an article called STR_PLASMA_PISTOL or some
other article with unpredictable name, e.g. STR_PLASMA_PISTOL_EARLY.
Any ideas here? If not, is the "disables" feature still useful with this (big) caveat?