WifHints

Overview

WifHints is the contextual “ambient VO hint” system for the game’s four commentary characters (Fiona, Ewan, Eva, Misha) — a static pool of one-off VO lines per speaker, each optionally gated by a faction-attitude condition, plus per-speaker “currently active/unlocked” queues that story/mission code adds to and removes from as the campaign progresses.

Inheritance

• Inherits from: none — singleton utility module.
• Imports: MrxFactionManager, WifFreePlay.

Instance pattern

Singleton-state manager. _tActiveHints (per-speaker array of currently-unlocked hint ids), _tLastPlayed (per-speaker round-robin index into that array), _tHints (static data: 4 speakers — Fiona has 33 hints, Ewan 6, Eva 7, Misha 16).

Functions

HasHint(sSpeaker)

True if that speaker has at least one active hint that currently passes _TestHintConstraints.

GetHint(sSpeaker)

Round-robins through that speaker’s active-hint array starting just after _tLastPlayed[sSpeaker], returning the first one that passes _TestHintConstraints (updating _tLastPlayed as it goes); returns nothing if none qualify.

_TestHintConstraints(tHintData)

True unless tHintData.tFactionAttitudeConstraint is set, in which case it defers to MrxFactionManager.TestAttitude(faction, towardFaction, comparator, attitude) — e.g. {"Gur", "Pmc", ">=", "Friendly"} for a hint that should only surface once the Guerrillas like the PMC.

Reset()

Clears _tLastPlayed only (not _tActiveHints) — unlocked hints stay unlocked; only round-robin position resets.

SaveSingleton() / LoadSingleton(tSavedActiveHints)

Save the raw _tActiveHints table; load rebuilds both _tActiveHints and _tLastPlayed from scratch by replaying AddActiveHint for every saved hint id — correctly guarded with type(tSavedActiveHints) ~= "table" (see WifBios for a similar-looking guard elsewhere in this batch that isn’t written correctly).

AddActiveHint(sCurrentHint)

Resolves which speaker owns sCurrentHint via _FindSpeaker, appends it to that speaker’s active list, and calls WifFreePlay.StartNag() — every new hint re-arms the freeplay nag system.

RemoveActiveHint(sCurrentHint)

Removes it from the owning speaker’s active list (table.remove), clearing the speaker’s entry entirely once empty (using the Lua 5.0-style table.getn rather than the # length operator used elsewhere in this same file — harmless here since both agree on a proper array, but an inconsistency worth knowing about if you’re tracing this file’s Lua-version lineage).

_FindSpeaker(sHint)

Linear search over _tHints for whichever speaker owns sHint.

UnlockAllHints(sSpeaker)

Calls AddActiveHint for every hint that speaker has, in one shot (used by WifMissionFlow at story beats like Eva’s full introduction).

Events

None directly — WifFreePlay.StartNag() (called from AddActiveHint) is what actually arms the Event.TimerRelative chain, inside WifFreePlay itself.

Notes for modders

• Every hint entry is just {sCue = "...", tFactionAttitudeConstraint = {...}} (the constraint is optional) — adding a new hint means adding a key under the right speaker in _tHints and calling AddActiveHint("YourHintId") from wherever should unlock it (typically a mission’s fConseq in WifMissionFlow).
• WifFreePlay only ever asks WifHints.HasHint("Fiona") — Ewan/Eva/Misha’s hint pools exist and are unlocked the same way but aren’t wired into that particular nag timer; something else (not in this file) must be responsible for surfacing them, if anything is.
• table.getn(...) in RemoveActiveHint is a Lua 5.0-ism still present in this Lua 5.1 codebase — functionally fine here (equivalent to # on a proper array) but worth knowing if you’re pattern-matching this file against others for consistency.