When bounce works, it works great, so I was trying to figure out why it wasn't seemingly working when I was claiming a ship -- which resulted in my death. Luckilly I had a save just before that -- and I died many many times from failed Bounces trying to claim that ship.
It seems that:
In order for the check script to be running on a newly claimed or purchased ship (from buy used ship missions where the ship purchased doesn't start off docked), we have to disable and re-enable bounce via hotkey -- otherwise that ship won't have bounce running on it unless it changes sectors or undocks from somewhere.
I can probably use SIGNAL_CAPTURED to check for a bailed ship just fine. And I can probably modify the boarding scripts if SIGNAL_CAPTURED doesn't fire on captured ships. For those two I can probably run a script in a loop checking for ownership change. And maybe I can do something in MD for the purchase of used ships that don't start off docked if it doesn't fire SIGNAL_CAPTURED.
Also:
I'm not really sure about this (I'd have to test it), but: from just looking at the scripts, it seems like there's another problem for a ship that's running bounce when it's swapped out of by the player -- because all(?) the scripts return null quickly if its the player ship. Do we need to hit the bounce hotkey twice every time we swap ships in space? Unsure. AFAIK The only way to detect when the player changes ships is through a running AL script.
EDIT1: Tested: Yes, bounce has to be disabled and re-enabled when swapping ships in space, otherwise bounce will only turn on your old ship when it undocks somewhere or changes sectors.
EDIT2: Also, found that bounce has to be disabled and re-enabled when entering any sector that already has your ships present when you arrive in that a sector (unless they're already docked when you arrive). That can be remedied by modifying the Sig.Bounce.SectorChange script to enable bounce on all in-sector ships (basically hitting the bounce hotkey for you when you enter a sector).
EDIT3: I thought of a way to find the player's old ship after a ship change that doesn't require an AL script running by assuming anytime the current ship == the player ship when bounce is running on the current ship indicates a ship change, and that the old ship should be somewhere within 7.5 km. I can't think of reason why it wouldn't reliably work.
If I'm wrong on anything, someone please correct me.
Okay, so I'm going to make some changes to take care of all the above. The ship changing issue will require an AL plugin running, and in my case I already have something running that does the heavy lifting: Gazz's Follow me / Remember homebase + wingman (v8). That mod is essential for me (almost as essential as Bounce is), and I always meant to make a few changes to it, so now's the perfect opportunity to do so because adding a couple lines to it to re-enable Bounce on ship change won't affect performance at all. But I'll probably make a seperate AL plugin for it as well, just because.
And I'll email Litcube for permission to post a download link for my changes here.
Notes:
After Bounce is enabled, it's disabled when ships becomes OOS or when the Player enters them in space. It's only re-enabled when SIGNAL_CHANGEDSECTOR signal fires.
SIGNAL_CHANGEDSECTOR fires when any ship undocks (seemingly this includes drones released from freight) or changes sectors (of course).
I used X-Studio to get a list and there's no signal for when a ship is claimed or when the player changes ships.
SIGNAL_CAPTURED seems to only fire when a pilot bails -- dunno for sure about ships purchased in space through a mission or captured via boarding.
AFAIK The only way to detect when the player swaps ships is through a running AL script.
Gazz's Follow me / Remember homebase + wingman (v8) already has the feature of tracking player ship changes in it's AL plugin (runs every 3 seconds I think)
viewtopic.php?t=230313
Bounce has to be disabled and re-enabled when swapping ships, otherwise bounce will only be enabled on your old ship when it undocks somewhere or changes sectors.
Bounce has to be disabled and re-enabled when entering any sector that already has your ships present when you arrive in that a sector (unless they're already docked when you arrive).
When drones are released in same sector as the player, they're running bounce -- which I admit is unexpected (I suspect SIGNAL_CHANGEDSECTOR fires for them when released from freight as if they undocked)