Some questions about the capabilities of modding

[loudent]

I have a couple of mods in mind and I was wondering about the answers to the following questions:

1) Can we, via a mod, add or remove assigned skill points?
2) Can we add unassigned skill points to a player?
3) Can we get the staring class and current level of a character
4) can we get their current total XP
5) What happens if we (via script) remove a skill point for an item they currently have in their ship (lets say we're in a station). How is that handled? (e.g. lets say we remove the light cruiser skill and they currently have a ship with a light cruiser hull. or we remove energy weapon 3 and they have a tier 3 energy weapon equipped?)
6) Is it possible to get all items currently owned by a character across the entire galaxy?
7) Can we, via script, get the current buy and sell prices for items at a particular station?

and if the answer is yes  to any of this can you give some direction on where to look for the answers on how? (I don't mind digging around if I know where to look)

EDIT: Oh, and do we have access to a database. I saw that there was a .db file that was written to and I could probably find a way to store values there, I just want to know if that's kosher?

[Lurler]

The answer to most of the questions is - yes.

But have you seen our wiki?
http://wiki.atomictorch.com/Main_Page
There are a lot of info on modding there.

However some of the questions I can't answer myself, unfortunately. Need to ask ai_enabled for that.

[Hammish]

As one of the trickier ones, I believe the answer to #5 is that even if you removed the skill, the item would stay equipped, they just would not be able to reequip it after a dismount.

Easiest way to test this is by setting starting equipment on a character class that far exceeds what a character can use; they can still fly around with it and use it.  It can even do odd things like sticking a missile weapon on an energy hardpoint and the like, or used to be able to at least.

Question #3 has been one I've been wanting to ask as well, since as I develop the classes in BTC I've been wanting to toss in class-specific quests.  Pretty sure there's a workaround for it, though, if it can't be taken directly (or used in an effecient way in scripts): since you can check for specific skills or effects, you just make skills that only a certain class can possess.  As an example, Scout might have a skill called Recon Specialization.  Scout starts with it at level 1 (and thus could develop skills that branch off it like normal) whereas for everyone else the skill requires level 99 (and thus is unobtainable).  This is how I had always envisioned classes working in my mod, and could be used to also check for the Recon Specialization > 1 to make a quest Scout-only.

[loudent]

But have you seen our wiki?
http://wiki.atomictorch.com/Main_Page
There are a lot of info on modding there.

Yes, I looked over the wiki first. There's a lot of good information there to get started and to understand how things are put together and has some good examples on how to make things. But it's missing information on how to directly interact with the game world - Character, skills etc Stuff like that.