I have been thinking about a similar thing.
But I scrapped the idea of using the players ship, as there are numerous of things to take into considerations, as there can be multiple instances etc, etc, making the total number ship to be ALOT in some popular locations...
One of the key issues is that we do not have "persistent" NPCs, ie, you cannot follow a specific NPC hauling something from station X traveling through some systems to deliver to station Y. This would bring more life, if we actually could follow NPCs to where they picked up their cargo and where they delivered it. OF course would need wake scanners etc. but we cannot truly follow NPCs ships this way, as they just end up doing stupid things very shortly after following them around.
So what I ended up with, was an aggregation on what players where doing, and then spawn NPC ships to mimic player behaviour. How many of these NPC shps to spawn is based on player activity and actions. The more active players are the more such ships is spawned. These ships should be spawned in ALL instances (but reduce the number of ships based on players in the instance, so in busy places in Open, there will be more players and less NPC ships, compared to Private group and solo)
Lets go through an example, Community Goal, deliver stuff.
So lots of players pick their best suitable ship and start delivering stuff to the community goal. So action should spawn more NPC ships doing the same. So if players was gong back and forth between Community Goal and Station X, Y and Z to buy stuff, we should see and be able to follow NPC doing the same. This is the "Trader" type
Now we have those players who like to kill the previous group for various reasons, so this will also spawn NPCs doing the same. Let's call these for "Anarchy" type.
Then we have another group of players who tries to interfere and defend the traders, so this will spawn NPCs doing the same, so this will negate some of the negative stuff happening from the above. This is the "Bounty Hunter" type.
So to simplify:
So Anarchy prey on Trader
Bounty Hunter defend Trader hunts Anarchy
So this could be expanded to govern all sort of activities that reaches a threshold of activity. If many players do something, or if a few players do something ALOT, we pick this up and let NPC do the same thing.
How would this sort of work behind the scenes, as this is big task.
How should the current model with networking do this? Every time an instance is created, the BGS/Mission/whatever function checks the status if the system should have some of these NPCs present, and then gives gives a list to instance master (player) about what ship to spawn and what it function is, passing by? going to station, leaving a station, hunting ship, etc, etc.
So now our instance can process these ships and show them accordingly.
Stuff done, FDev servers collect information about activity etc, so every trade we do, either from missions, or from just doing buy/sell, have a simplied data collecton of a few fields
* From - Where did we get this mission/cargo/etc
* To - We did we deliver to
* Cargo - What did we haul
* Amount
* Timestamp for completion (do not care about how long it took)
If there are multiple From, but same cargo, that is two entries, if we have multiple Cargo types, that means multiple entries.
So this works great for Trading, but what about those Anarchy and Bounty Hunter players actions?
From and To are the system where action did happen
Cargo is now an action, killing/intercepting/etc
Amount is 1, because each such interaction is one...
How do we differentiate the difference between the Anarchy player and Bounty Hunter? We need rules to tell them apart, as both are interdicting ships, shooting at ships etc. So start with a simpliefied view on this.
Anarchy, targets clean players/NPCs, so they get wanted for their actions. So a wanted player/NPC attacking a clean target
Bounty Hunter is targeting Wanted players/NPCs, and is clean. So a clean player/NPC attacking a clean target
The problem is not collecting this data, the problem is processing the data... set the thresholds etc, for when to spawn a ship, and how often should we do the threshold check? Every hour? every 12 hour? every day? this is really tricky part, as we have to be economical about this, just as with the BGS, we do not want to spend lots of resources to update something very often if the gains from doing this does not justify the cost.
So what does this differs from the OPs initial idea of using player ships, how much of the player ship should we replicate, just the looks, or the entire configuration? So if I encounter a "friends" ship, and I know he is trying out a full Multi Cannon loadout, and then the ship shoots at me with lasers and railguns, that would strange.... also things like weapon colours and engine colours would also be a thing to consider.
So there are quite some issues to consider with using players ships in the hands of NPCs. That is why I think that is a bad idea, so simply "randomize" a ship for the specific type and adjust this to fit the player hidden "rank" activity. No need to send Elite Anacondas after players in Type 9's for example...
But we want a more alive universe and even though your or mine action in itself does not have a very huge impact on the universe, but if enough do the same, things, the Universe should show this. If many thousands of players travel ~1000 LY to a new Guardian puzzle, we should see NPC ships do the same.
