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    Notrium Final Mix - New Version out. 0.31

    TNN17 13 years ago
    Following a gargantuan brain storming session (and checking through the major wants from the rest of Notrium history) over the last few days, here's a few of my current, long term plans (a minor spoiler to anyone who hasn't read my notes text files and hidden messages in weapons.day, and a helpful reminder for me when I check this thread for my next "to do"). A lot of these are very long-term and won't be implemented until after 1.0 (which is where I'm aiming for a complete game experience I believe to be on par with the full Notrium (or more likely, full Werivar Ex.) experience.



    Creatures:

    Definite:
    Marines - Various weapons, probably have a few machines in heavy marine occupied areas.
    Plants - Primarily Size differences.
    Insectoids - Unless anyone has any cool insect plans, again, probably size differences.
    Machines - Miners, Support Drones, Battle Mechs, Machine Factories, Orbital Cannons.
    Alien - Blue, Brown, Black (corpse-feeders), Red, Green, Yellow, White, and of course, Reapers (I'll probably revamp adult reapers to be stationary unless they see you, making them harder to spot and better at ambushing you). I've probably forgot a colour. There may be Dire aliens about, but they won't be introduced until later.
    Lurker - a different type for a few areas. Ever been desparate looking for shade in the desert? =)
    Wisps - Ship graveyard may have a few of these deadly, deadly things.
    The Hermit - Just because, bugrit.
    Crewmates - From the other characters, one or two may survive to influence your game. This is probably long term.

    Possibles -
    Tribals - Native, non-hostile lifeforms? Oh the humanity! Whether one of their would be willing to accept items in barter or not
    Herbivores - Non-hostile (unless injured) plant eaters. They'd also eat fungus too.
    Silicoids - These would be an almost exclusively subterranean foe.
    Hornets - Swarms of flying arthropods that spawn from, and defend, Hives containing highly nutritious honey.... and also contain more swarms of them. They'd be unable to attack you if you were in deep water, but on the flipside, they'd be immune to a lot of damage types, including those typically usable *in* water.
    Avian - Brown and Red (because who doesn't love flying enemies they can't melee, that will constantly fly-by attack them and exist to murder you)
    Aquatic aliens (for the river/ocean areas) - these would be slow, but enjoy a massive movement speed boost over water tiles (along with a similarly rapid "lunge" out of the water to take a bite out of you).

    Areas:
    Definites:
    Starting Area - An island in the middle of a lake, your pod's crashing here drove off the larger aliens for a time.
    Ship Graveyard - A region littered with destroyed ships and battered with weapon disabling ion storms. What lurks amidst the shattered star-travellers?
    The mining fields - The marine outpost, the nerve centre of their mining operations on Notrium mining shiny crystals from great crystalline spires that arc from the ground. Their operations perimeter surrounds this area, keeping it clear of the indigenous lifeforms.
    Jungles - Deep, untamed regions of the planet, dangerous aliens and plant life flourish here.
    Plains - Vast savvanah with sparse trees and golden fields. Oh, and aliens.
    Rainforests - Beyond the jungles are thick rainforests full of predatory plants, thick vines that must be cut through to progress, and at the deepest part, Eden, where, as usual, everything wants to murder you.
    Desert - Arid wastelands populated by untiring machines, somewhere in the desert lays the site where the missiles that destroyed your ship came from.
    The volcanic mountains - bathed in burning ashes and populated by fire-breathing creatures, it would be Hell on Earth.... if it was on Earth I suppose?
    The swamplands - Murky, vile swamps, with little solid ground and infested with vile insectoids.
    The ice caps - Far, far to the North, the ice caps are home to an aging Marine base, and possibly hold one of the keys to your escape.

    Possibles:
    The underworld - A pitch black network of caves stretching deep below Notrium, populated by new and unusual things that want to kill you. So dark that night vision doesn't work, hope that your torch is pointing in the right direction.
    The Battlegrounds - Where four regions meet, and each side is battling for dominance, the battlegrounds will be a perfect site to scavenge the remains of the fallen... If you can avoid the victors.
    The seashore - The edges of the island on which you're on, you might not be able to cover the whole planet, but you may be able to explore the island you're on.
    The Prison - A mysterious automated prison centre seemingly neglected by the original owners, but not their prisoners.



    Weapons:
    Besides from the already implemented and soon-to-be implemented weapons, I've vague plans for:

    The Scrambler Beam - Change a machine's side to an allied one for a second. Not long enough? Keep firing! Follow your new leashed robot pet around as it soaked up injuries on your behalf. Tire of it? Shoot it in the back!
    Mines - With safety versions and kill-em-all versions, mines die when a creature is nearby (and with the safety version, when you aren't), and on death, they explode violently damaging everybody nearby.
    Snares - Drop a baited snare creature, with an enemy side to aliens - they so dumb, they'll naturally charge over to the trap and try to eat the bait, causing the snare to die/trigger, trapping them in place. razor snares will perform similarly, but also do a great deal of damage to the creature as the metal barbs tear their flesh. Other enemies might be lead over the trap, but try not to trigger it yourself, that would be embarrassing.



    Miscellaneous plans and schemes

    Expertise - If you get enough practice with a particular weapon, you'll be rewarded; with a one-time bonus to a single weapon type you've used the most over the course of your adventures.
    Day/Night cycle - Not every alien will be equally good at all times of the day. Aliens will be more active, or less active and have a shorter vision range, depending on their preferred time of day.
    Vehicles - I never really used the hoverbike, not even the infinite laser version. I nevertheless plan to include at least two vehicles - one for each control scheme. These would be a hovertank and a Waldo (that's small Mecha to you kids). They probably won't be small, or be able to be brought indoors, but if you're in a walking tank, is that really a problem?
    The Secret of Notrium - What's the deal with Notrium? It's a gigantic mysterious planet with living plants, hints of an ancient civilisation and mysterious, quasi-mystical forces at work. The SoN will aim to give the player clues and information as they explore and discover things about the planet, letting them piece together what happened to make the planet this way.
    The Escape - There will be two main ways to get a good ending for Notrium - Number 1 is to escape, finding and renovating one of the only salvageable wrecks on the planet and gather the perishingly rare materials before flying your way to safety (potentially with a starship combat section if you don't take care of business yourself on foot).
    The Survivor - There are five seasons in F.M. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.... And the fifth season, where the wildlife enters a mode of savage frenzy, the planet itself throwing everything it can at the intruders on its surface. Can you outlast the planet?
    Split Endings - Each ending is comprised of multiple parts, each of which triggers based on conditional of things completed during your game. Some may be good, some may be bad.

    Dialogue - Rather than use single lines spoken from a creature, I intend to have an in-depth dialogue tree available with the few who might use it - your crewmates, a Native trader (UG. Food replicator you say? Have shiny-rock!), the hermit, possibly even some bosses (if you're not the shoot first type of person).

    Project overview plans:
    1) Variety.
    I want to avoid "get weapon X, use weapon X forever" for every game. Want to go Robinson and just use non-energy type weapons? Want to gear up with all the coolest tech? Want to use vehicles? Want to raise an army? Want to escape? Want to settle down? Through races and possible technology I aim to provide enough options that it would be awhile before you had to play the same way twice.

    2) Replayability and Longevity.
    With a minimum of two basic endings, each with their own variable split-endings - (set by triggers for certain actions and race), along with a bigger world and more races, the game should hopefully take as long to finish with it as it took me to make it.

    3) Living Notrium.
    The Planet should have a variety of lifeforms, areas and hazards, not only to provide varied opponents and challenges for the player to overcome, but also to build the feeling of Notrium being an actual alien world, fleshed out by journal entries and interesting denizens.

    4) Fun.
    Through difficulty levels there should always be a setting where the player can enjoy themselves. Unless they hate awesome that is.


    Latest Stable Version:

    0.31 - Stable version. New spawn system is in place. Currently there are nine maps, seven of which are randomised jungles and swamps. There are no longer any caches of items, all drops are randomised and handled by the game. New Fatigue system is in place, now you need to stay still and rest to recover fatigue. Get 0.31 here.

    Other versions are kindly hosted by Harwe here:
    http://www.box.com/s/gg3d23uezmbkolxn8rkp

    Note that Sounds isn't included, if you don't already have the files you'll need to install the most recent stable version.

    Help Requests - Volunteers are always welcome. If people profess an interest, I'll start trying to get onto some shared project hosting.

    * Writing Assistance - Fluff descriptions and first person journal entries (and first person first-item pick up) would be appreciated, as would writing up an instruction/hints "manual" for the game.
    * People to take screenshots of gameplay for me - Seriously.
    * Artistic Assistance - Anyone capable of reproducing the Notrium art style to keep the whole thing looking artistically polished and coherent would be great. I really want to increase the definition on the Player Characters to at least a 512 x 512 resolution.
    * Sound track - (free license or self-made stuff only please) I rarely have sound, so someone who does and would be able to either pick out or make fitting sounds would be great.
    * Dedicated Tester - Someone who would be happy to check through all the combinations, check all my crazy coding, and sure the player only turns into a duck when they're supposed to.

    All these things will save me time and make me happy, as well as give me something to put into the credits beyond "Damn I'm awesome". But it is completely voluntary.
    Edited 12 years ago
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    Well hi there.

    Nice to see someone is still thinking about modding Notrium, with all that new fuss around here .

    First of all, I'd like to say that beside original Notrium I've played only Werivar, Werivar Expansion, S.O.S. and some mods' alphas. So I can't establish all-so-experienced view on the matter. However, (next goes a big random chunk).

    What I first encountered in W/E, was the bar bug - entering some areas, the health/food/temperature bars gone rogue. Sometimes they became black, sometimes simply line-by-line invisible... Obviously, that was a bug. The only time I experienced that bug again was when I accidentally deleted some map in the editor of vanilla Notrium and started that game to check what would happen. The map survived but I've seen this bug appearing randomly from time to time. This just may be the case with W/E.

    The second bug (I think so) was the Psionic Self-Blast. The versions I've played of both W and W/E had it, and it was pretty annoying. Having to punch himself each time he used Psi Blast, Psionic plainly SU**ED. Someting with sides, I guess, never investigated this matter...

    So then there:
    1) I didn't play everyone. My play with human succeeded, android failed, scavenger and psionic lost their nerves
    2) In my opinion, all later-added enemies (DRs, Battledroids, snipers) deserve to live because at some point of player's evolution (let's call it so) no-one posed any threat for the PC anymore. The game could become boring. However, this limitless spawn . Also, the snipers' field of view (whole area?) is kinda cheaterish...
    So the question that matters is how to make them spawn but so that the difficulty curve does not raise up so sharply. I often encountered a situation when to-live or to-die for a PC was determined simply by lucky or unlucky initial areas (and their creatures') placement.
    3) From this comes a thought about areas. I think the right question is not "More randomised areas, or more unique ones?" but "How to place the existing/future areas nicely?". How do we ensure playability without killing the replayability? If you place all unique areas beside each other and make sure the player can finish the game in that way, what would be the reason to go to random areas with hard to kill DRs, BDs, and snipers? I don't know yet, seriously... Must be designed with respect to the other features.
    4) Moar weapons, moar everything!!! Dislike - not exactly dislike but the leveling-up system is a bit weird. Also, had an infinite special spawn when human gained some very big level.
    5) S.O.S. had a nifty feature of collecting information, and storing it to other inventory. I don't say to copy it but the idea is interesting. Aside of S.O.S. I didn't play any mod that used Notrium's multi-inventory ability.
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    Updated first post with some project info and requests for anyone who might be interested in helping this along.

    Thanks for your enthusiastic reply Venom, rest assured the psionic bug will definitely not be happening in Notrium FM, the guy's getting a big overhaul. The Bar bug is a bit trickier, since it's not something I can replicate consistently, so hopefully starting from the basics will keep it from occurring.

    1) Any comments on Scavenger or Android, play-style not your scene? Unlucky run throughs?

    2) Snipers probably won't make the cut, and battledroids will be revamped slightly, but I do have plans for big, nasty critters, as well as to keep them from clustering together. Certainly, each of the alien races will have a small and dire version at the least, along with new plants, marines, insectoids and...

    Gradually increasing difficulty is very possible to do with a gradually raising creature cap, but I may skip off in favour of difficulty enforced populations (say 20/40/100) creatures in areas and so on, with size, proportion and the like determined by terrain type and season.

    3) Currently I'm planning multiple 3x3 areas - these areas will always be in the same general region of Notrium, but the actual maps themselves will be randomised by type - For example:

    3, 3, 3,
    3, 3, 3,
    3, 3, 3,

    They're all desert type maps, but one of them is the Missile Base.

    Also, by restricting ending-vital materials to a map-type, rather than a specific map, this means the player may potentially need to search all nine maps.

    The area between these squares may be randomised too, making Notrium a whole lot bigger than before.

    As for motivation to face off against the nastiest foes, certainly some will offer rewards, or be necessary for your character to defeat, but some of the time the only reward you'll get will be bragging rights.
    4) Humans will no longer "level" as such, the only ones with anything akin to an actual level so far are the two aliens. The other four planned races will each have their own, hopefully bug free, improvement methods.
    In terms of "moar"; I've put a lot of work into balancing races so they're all worth playing for a different experience, add that on top of the already implemented new item combinations for basic technolgoy (and unique combinations for each character), I hope you're looking forward to it as much as I am.

    5) Thanks for this idea, I'm strongly considering trying to implement this as an easy way to track important player stats, I'll investigate this when I start work on the advancement system.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "TNN17" said:
    1) Any comments on Scavenger or Android, play-style not your scene? Unlucky run throughs?
    First of all, a note on those awesome critters - BDs and snipers. Their cheaterness is down to an extent that the only thing saving from them both is the ultimate human combo: PET + HOVERBIKE (upgraded one, sure). Only with that could one deal with endless flow of insta-kill missiles and sniper bullets. So, both Scavenger and Werivar are out of luck, apparently. Also, with Scavenger I only got one decent way to deal with DRs myself: fire breath - the one that acts like upgraded human flamethrower. It eats much energy, and once I ate all energy plants I was simply stumped. That's not to mention BDs and snipers. Android actually had the chance, perhaps, but I had to spend too much time for collecting parts and making his upgrades. So, when BDs and snipers arrived, he had nothing to do with them despite his high health and energy . My Psionic got Liquid and Life Tokens, but... looking for Void portal... in Mining Field... with all those BDs everywhere... no thanks!
    I'm sorry for such random junk, I've played W/E a whole while ago as of now, so I may have missed many details. Some of which may be important... never mind.
    "TNN17" said:
    ...I do have plans for big, nasty critters, as well as to keep them from clustering together.
    And what would that be, namely? the plans to keep them from clustering together?
    "TNN17" said:
    Gradually increasing difficulty is very possible to do with a gradually raising creature cap, but I may skip off in favour of difficulty enforced populations (say 20/40/100) creatures in areas and so on, with size, proportion and the like determined by terrain type and season.
    Nice idea. But note that the actual difficulty raises non-linearly depending on the population (Rather, squarely or even exponentially). Plus it's pretty difficult to stay alive even if the area has small population of some nasty thing, but as soon as you kill one, a new one appears elsewhere. Maybe have some areas that start regrowing population only after player quits it? Not sure if it's possible though...
    "TNN17" said:
    3) Currently I'm planning multiple 3x3 areas... making Notrium a whole lot bigger than before.
    That's, like, 9 times bigger
    On a serious tune, you may want to consider 2x2 area blocks or even less - I'm not sure players will enjoy scavenging through NINE similar maps instead of one for that one little detail of Escape Pod or something...

    Forgot something for sure... eh...

    EDIT1
    Ah, there it is! Scripting! We'll need some "barebones" mod (at least that's what they call it) to test those nasty script effects, and need it bad.

    EDIT2
    "TNN17" said:
    ... Fluff descriptions, unfluffed items ...
    What's that? The item's short and journal descriptions? Unfluffed items - everyhting except Teddy Bears?
    "TNN17" said:
    ~ AI assistance - I cannot code AI.
    Why?

    Also just a thought. I think you've noticed that Notrium data files support comments. However, most of them are just placeholders like
    "items.dat" said:
        begin_effects;
          3;//effect number
          1.000000;//parameter1
          1.000000;//parameter2
          0.000000;//parameter3
          0.000000;//parameter4
        end_effects;
    making me think they're made for people who can't count. Of course, many people today are simply using Notrium Modder (AKA NMV) which doesn't care. However, I don't use it. Yes, yes, I'm that oldfag using notepad for scripting and stuff, so I'd like to write instead of that something like
    "items.dat" said:
        begin_effects;
          3; // drop item
          1; // Battery Charger
          1; // amount
          0; // -
          0; // -
        end_effects;
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    1) You ran out of energy?
    ...Huh. The Scavenger has multiple armours that gave energy regen, the most basic was actually Hyper Metabolism, which is a component of Fire Breath. It sounds like you may not have advanced to the point of getting Devour, where Scavenger takes off.

    Well, part of my reintroduction of the Scavenger will be a more comprehensive explanation of the Scavenger's ability trees. It was too easy to get stuck into a cycle of starvation /suffering where you just couldn't quite get over the hump to getting the actually powerful Scavenger abilities (he was, end-game, perfectly capable of taking out thirty DRs in melee without batting an eyelid thanks to Nightmare Claws).

    Hopefully part of the balancing process will be to avoid needing a specific technique/race to survive, I'll be keeping an eye on that.

    2) Roving spawners - Aliens will spawn at a different spot on the map each time. I've not tested the coding necessary, but hopefully it will work the way I'm predicting and clustering will never happen.

    Of course one possible flaw if I do it wrong will be nasties appearing right next to you from nowhere, but part of the fun, right?

    In terms of spawn numbers - the spawn won't be immediate, so you'll definitely be able to thin the herd for a little while, and there's no guarantee it would remain made up of the same creatures. There is balancing to be done of course, but that's a ways off at the moment.

    3) 2x2 is a pretty reasonable compromise actually, I'll work to that and see how it goes.
    Plus that's more than halved the number of maps I need to muck around with.

    Scripting: Yeah, I'm probably going to fashion up something for testing scripts as and when, just a matter of getting to a point I can do that.

    Fluff: Yeah it's a technical term - There's Fluff and there's Crunch. Art and descriptive prose is Fluff, Technical data and mechanical considerations is Crunch. It does improve immersion to have entertaining journal entries to read, but it's taking time from making the crunch. Since writers are actually one of the most consistently available sources of talent, hopefully someone can take a load off when I've finished all the data entry.

    Honestly, AI in general is a bit of a blind spot for me in general, so I've barely even dared take a peek in there. Might be making a storm in a teacup granted.

    NMV? *Downloads*

    Yes, I've now downloaded this newfangled contraption, and now my life has just become a thousand times easier. Wish this had existed when I was slogging through the Werivar Expansion. I guess now I'm a newfag, thanks so much for mentioning it.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "TNN17" said:
    The Scavenger has multiple armours that gave energy regen...
    The ones with +1 energy over a million years? Yes, I've tried it . Other than that, I think I've got Devour, don't remember really. I might have missed some combinations though - they are all totally trial & error stuff. Fun at first, but when combos number hit over 20 - not so smooth after all. Especially if you have to switch them armors back and forth... BTW this feature (armor on/off + armor switching) isn't quite good in Notrium at all. In vanilla mod, if I've got that armor on constantly, it used too much energy being useless, but if I forgot to turn it on when the battle starts (which is easy deal), I was left without all its protection whatsoever. So for myself, I've even edited items.dat to add a quick key for Enhanced/Power Armor. I suppose that's why W/E, for example, nullified Power Armor's energy drain.

    "TNN17" said:
    ...nasties appearing right next to you from nowhere...
    Well, that could be checked in conditions.

    "TNN17" said:
    Art and descriptive prose is Fluff, Technical data and mechanical considerations is Crunch.
    This said, all items', weapons' and creatures' look is fluff? Just to make it straight.

    "TNN17" said:
    Honestly, AI in general is a bit of a blind spot for me in general, so I've barely even dared take a peek in there. Might be making a storm in a teacup granted.
    Honestly, AI system in Notrium isn't very advanced anyway, so I wouldn't place much plans there if I were you .
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    I can appreciate that, big part of the Scavenger was the need to strip down abilities and find the few that worked, especially important being the initially scarce bioinfusions, which let you upgrade Devour to Brown Aliens for 20 energy each. This should be way, way simpler while I'm done (but I'm totally keeping trial and error combinations, part of Notrium's fun is learning what works and what doesn't).

    I'll leave discussions on armour balance until I've implemented the armours. A quick key wouldn't be a bad idea though, I'll see about adding it to at least powered armours.

    Fluff is look, description and the like, for example:

    Description < Fluff
    Long Description < Fluff
    Wield Scripts < Crunch
    Conditions and Effects < Crunch
    Texture < Fluff

    If it's for game function, it's usually crunch, if it's for looking, sounding or general appearance, it's fluff.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    Do you use any version control? Many version control systems are language-based to aid incremental development in popular prog.languages. What's the laguage of Notrium modding, huh?
    As of general version control I've got only TortoiseSVN. As of now, didn't delve into it much, but may be of any help, don't know...
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    If TortoiseSVN can accomodate the .dat files then I'll try playing with it once I've finished setting up the new items.dat (about halfway finished now, if you ignore the fact that every item has a Goggles.png placeholder). Languagewise.... I honestly have no idea, believe it or not, I'm not the most technical of individuals.

    I assume then it's just a matter of uploading a file to the version control so others could download it/reupload it, showing any changes that were made?


    Moderately important feedback questions for you; the only person that's around and actually have opinions on stuff I'm doing:

    1) Thirst.

    I'm seriously considering implementing it as a secondary need; this will let me lengthen the
    days and have still have hunger calculated semi-reasonably without making life too easy. Not every map will have readily available water supplies so this will be reasonably severe. You've played SOS, do you feel a similar mechanic would be acceptable in Notrium proper?

    2) Fatigue / Sleep

    It's weird how the player can run around for six weeks without blinking, so I'm thinking of a Fatigue meter, which measures how tired the character is. Fatigue is lost by moving, attacking and performing certain activities, but slowly restored by staying still. Getting too tired will make the player shaky, slow and eventually collapse for a bit to recover some fatigue.

    Sleeping to this end is a weapon (different races have different versions, but generally it's the same principle), activating a reverse Rage, immobilising them and setting the lighting to zero when it's used (as well as restoring some fatigue of course). This gives the player a convenient time-skip ability for nighttime, a reason to hide somewhere safe when they do so, and I'll be tacking on a food use reduction (or an energy use reduction "standby" mode for the android, which will otherwise not need to sleep) so the player is rewarded for resting now and then.
    Secondarily, Sleeping will have a safety catch so when you're not interested in sleep, you don't accidentally select it whilst scrolling through for your deathray.

    3) Conditions.

    Finally, rather than have the player either healthy and happy at 1 food/79 heat/-79 cold I'd be aiming to implement a number of "conditions" the player will need to cure, rather than just stopping the suffering as soon as they're no longer at 80 Heat. This will make the player harder to kill by random starvation, but give them a harder time shaking off its effects.

    For example, hunger.

    Food bar: 600 (standard Notrium is 300).
    At 299 (Notrium -1 equivalent) they are now malnourished.

    Malnourishment means that Aliens cannot hibernate or store fat, the Stowaway can't lay eggs, psionic races recover energy slower...
    Regardless of race: They lose fatigue constantly, their max health is lowered by 20 (a fairly big deal, regardless of race). And some other nastiness involved with the new damage calculations I'm planning.
    Natural healing is halted (all biologicals heal naturally, most at a very slow rate of 1 per minute or so).

    The way to cure malnourishment is to reach 350 Food, at which point these problems end.

    At 99 (Notrium -201 equivalent) thay are starving.

    Starvation adds onto the problems of malnourishment:

    Can't use Spit, Bite or Spray alien attacks.
    -30 Additional penalty to max health.
    Even faster fatigue.
    Fairly severe damage penalties.
    Energy regeneration is halved for psionics.
    Their aim gets shaky (for someone as terrible at aiming as I am, probably not going to hurt).

    Starvation's penalties are only cured by getting up to 200 food, at which point they are reduced to malnutrition.

    And finally, at 0 food, the player starts losing health at 1 per second.

    If this seems harsh, bear in mind that in vanilla Notrium they'd have died about three hundred seconds earlier.

    Similar conditions would be attached to fatigue, thirst, cold and heat.

    The android would experience none of these issues (and would still lose health immediately at 0 energy) making it have a very different game experience, ironically one much closer to the original game.


    Naturally the biggest worry for me is complexity (for the player, not for me, it's just a case of a few game tokens and scripts for me, it's the player's got to deal with my sadism). I can put explanatory items into a second "statistics" inventory which explain the conditions, but this may not be enough. Any thoughts?
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "TNN17" said:
    If TortoiseSVN can accomodate the .dat files ...
    It's for any file types, as far as I got it.

    "TNN17" said:
    I assume then it's just a matter of uploading a file to the version control so others could download it/reupload it, showing any changes that were made?
    Also, subversion control - it will automatically merge different files that were changed by different persons and will only ask what to do for files where changes were made by two developers in parallel.

    "TNN17" said:
    1) Thirst.
    Yeah, I've played SOS, but if you remember, many food items there gave not only nutrition but thirst reduction too. Even thought each area there had water fountains, life wasn't easy. Also, SOS in its not-very-finished state is currently, like, 5 areas connected to each other. As I think what I'll have to do on that 4 times larger Notrium I start to tremble in FEAR .

    "TNN17" said:
    2) Fatigue / Sleep
    Well, that's quite logical, but a tiny discrepancy's here. What if player's fatigue comes in conflict with thirst/nutrition? (It will, eventually) He/she needs to move to get to safety/get food/drink/energy/etc. and is out of fatigue, lol. Also, it's not very interesting to just stay in place and do nothing. A sleep will certainly need to have a time skip and a wake up it some monster draws too near or smth. Also, creatures' stamina usually levels up via training. Not too much for coding it?

    "TNN17" said:
    3) Conditions.
    Well finally . Also do not forget that live creatures have natural temperature control, so they don't start overheating an instant they come out of shadow - that's missed in original alright. Again, won't it be too hard to code? Brings in much stuff there .

    "TNN17" said:
    Naturally the biggest worry for me is complexity (for the player, not for me, it's just a case of a few game tokens and scripts for me, it's the player's got to deal with my sadism). I can put explanatory items into a second "statistics" inventory which explain the conditions, but this may not be enough. Any thoughts?
    Well, SOS did that explanation in there, in data spheres. Also, it had a short tutorial if the player started on Easy difficulty. Otherwise, it skipped that. Err, is the Notrium default tutorial modifiable?
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    Subversion control sounds awesome, that would make merging the two a lot easier.

    1) Fear you say? Excellent. I'll work on that immediately!
    Seriously though, food giving moisture was already planned, and it will be possible to carry fluids with you, so I'm not expecting it to be too painful, the cyborg lost water about ten times faster than is "realistic". You should probably be able to survive a day without water (with some negative conditions experienced).

    2) Fatigue's a tricky one - I'm leaning towards the idea that it should never stop the player staggering around if they have to, but should make their life a living hell until they start hallucinating and foaming at the mouth.

    As it's bar based, and "sleeping" would give, for example, an x10 increase to game speed, you won't have to spend too long staying still to get yourself back into shape. Wake up if a monster draws too near though? Nawww. You'll have to keep an eagle eye on your health bar and listen carefully for footsteps, never sure

    Stamina "levelling" I may implement or may not, I've set plans on improvements in other areas. It's very easy to do though, just insert a script for the original fatigue script to call, like so:

    Fatigue Script.
    Lose 1 Fatigue over 1 second (or whatever).
    Call Fatigue Level script.

    Fatigue Level script:
    If Fatigue Level is equal or greater to: 1
    Add 0.1 Fatigue.
    If Fatigue Level is equal or greater to: 2
    Add 0.1 Fatigue.

    And so on.

    3) Glad you like it, and yes, part of the conditions I'm planning for hot/cold are "sweating" +thirst, -heat, and "trembling" -food, +heat. It might not do much in the scorching desert sun, but it should keep you a bit more stable than without, at the cost of resources.

    Coding here is actually quite straight forward, I'll put it into simple English to explain how I'm seeing it:

    Hungry Script.
    Run every second.
    Conditions:
    Is Hunger less than 300?
    Does player NOT have 1 Malnutrition Token?
    Effects:
    Add 1 Malnutrition Token.

    Symptoms Script: Malnutrition Onset
    Runs every second.
    Conditions:
    Does player have 1 Malnutrition Token?
    Does player NOT have 1 Symptomatic: Malnourished Token? (stops the script from repeating the punishment infinitely).
    Effects:
    Lower Max Health by 20. (Control scripts for max health with handle any surplus for me)
    Add Weakness token (1). (If I can get it working, then there will be a strength bonus to melee damage with different weapons making better uses of the bonus, this will do the reverse, effectively healing the target before hitting it to lower total damage done)
    Add Psi. Weakness token (1).
    Add Symptomatic: Malnourished.

    To get advanced here:
    Set Active Inventory to 1.
    Add "Malnourished".
    Set Active Inventory to 0.
    This should add a pretty but useless token explaining to the player that they are in fact in trouble.

    Script: Malnourished Fatigue
    Runs every second.
    Conditions:
    Does player have 1 Symptomatic: Malnourished Token?
    Effects:
    Lower Fatigue bar by 1 over 1 second.

    You don't need to have anything about Alien storage, hibernation or the like - those are use conditions in the items, namely "does not have a Malnutrition Token", same with natural healing and energy recovery (indeed, a sensible approach to a slowed increment like Psionic energy would be to have three scripts or so, each restoring a third of the amount, then have two of the scripts have disabling conditions such as Malnourished Token and Starving Token).

    Finally, removing the problems:

    Script: Malnutrition Recovery.
    Runs every second.
    Conditions:
    Does player have 1 Symptomatic: Malnourished Token?
    Does player have 1 Malnourished Token?
    Effects:
    Increase max health by 20.
    Remove 1 Weakness Token.
    Remove 1 Psi. Weakness Token.
    Remove 1 Malnourished Token.
    Remove 1 Symptomatic: Malnourished Token.

    And boom, you're healthy again. Tokens make this sort of conditional script a lot easier than the rest.

    If you want to get clever, you could also make Health Packs run a script rather than a single action when used, this script could call several separate scripts with their own conditions and instantly cure conditions (though the problem will return a second later if those problems are still in place) and their symptoms.

    This would allow you to cleanse the player of all their problems, removing fairly awkward to get rid of conditions.

    For example, heat exhaustion - gained at 60 Heat and <100 water, lose it if you have -20 temperature and 300+ water, makes you vomit and lose water/food. You might have trouble getting better normally, even though you no longer qualify for getting heat exhaustion. Major Trauma might be another good one - Your health drops too low, you move slower and are weaker until your health is full - or you just use a medikit and cure the trauma.

    As for a tutorial - sure you could mod the tutorial mod, or I could see about making a "Tutorial" difficulty and slap on a teleport to map location, with one area for each character and some items specifically to provide helpful journal entries.... But that's a lot of work, lemme get finished with the thousand odd bits of data entry and image making first.
    #
    Anonymous1157 13 years ago
    "Venom31" said:
    Also just a thought. I think you've noticed that Notrium data files support comments. However, most of them are just placeholders like
    "items.dat" said:
        begin_effects;
          3;//effect number
          1.000000;//parameter1
          1.000000;//parameter2
          0.000000;//parameter3
          0.000000;//parameter4
        end_effects;
    making me think they're made for people who can't count. Of course, many people today are simply using Notrium Modder (AKA NMV) which doesn't care. However, I don't use it. Yes, yes, I'm that oldfag using notepad for scripting and stuff, so I'd like to write instead of that something like
    "items.dat" said:
        begin_effects;
          3; // drop item
          1; // Battery Charger
          1; // amount
          0; // -
          0; // -
        end_effects;
    Total TL;DR for most of the thread, and I'm genuinely sorry about it, but this caught my eye. IIRC, you NEED to include the dot-then-six-zeroes or the game will bug out. The general idea is good, though; I've always thought those comments were only taking up space. As you've already done in the example, reformat the comments so that they're actually useful wherever needed, and use one consistent... I dunno, "no-comment"? The "// -" thingy. Anyhow, use one no-comment throughout the entire mod so that it'll compress better when it comes time to package the mod.

    To speak of the project as a whole: yes, you should go through with this, as long as it doesn't fizzle out after a page of ideas like most other mod attempts lately. But then you've already worked on a mod, so you've got the experience to make it happen. Don't expect to be able to rely on anyone else's help, and you'll do fine.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "Anonymous1157" said:
    IIRC, you NEED to include the dot-then-six-zeroes or the game will bug out.
    At least I didn't need them - perfectly worked for me IIRC.

    "Anonymous1157" said:
    ... reformat the comments so that they're actually useful wherever needed, and use one consistent... I dunno, "no-comment"? The "// -" thingy. Anyhow, use one no-comment throughout the entire mod so that it'll compress better when it comes time to package the mod.
    Well, first of all, the "// -" thingy meant not "no-comment" but "not applicable", it was just longer to write, I'm lazy .
    Second, for mod compression I'd suggest some little prog with regex or whatever to simply delete all trailing comments.
    And third, mods are not so hard on space when packaging, after all .

    "Anonymous1157" said:
    Don't expect to be able to rely on anyone else's help, and you'll do fine.
    Well, I don't see other modders responding. So for now, Nocture17 can only rely on our company...
    What I did in N was just screwing its guts, trying to fix W/E bugs and remaking original mod the way I liked. Not much helpful in all-around modding. I had a place to start.

    @TNN17
    That NOT having item scripts reminded me of some nasty thing I encountered in W/E. The human there started gaining specials - Lower Hunger - infinitely. I looked at the scripts, and what I saw was "if player has zero of this item, give 1". So if you use that condition better check it ASAP.
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    ...as long as it doesn't fizzle out after a page of ideas like most other mod attempts lately.

    Oh I'm certain I can manage much more than a page of ideas, especially after so vigourously stealing stuff from the forty-seven one-page mods full of ideas.

    Seriously though, I'm actually more worried about over-ambition than I am not having the ability to finish the grunt-work. It's one thing slogging through and entering new items, the amount of work I'm setting myself up for in scripting is mind-boggling already.

    As for compression.... Well I'll just let someone else handle it or do a Replace All in notepad changing all the after-line comments into "-", the thing's going to be big enough with all the additional junk I'm throwing at it, a few thousand characters isn't going to make much difference?

    Well, I don't see other modders responding. So for now, Nocture17 can only rely on our company...

    Trust me when I say this is something I value just as much as actively helping me out. Honestly bouncing ideas off people gives me the motivation needed to achieve them.

    And hm, I don't believe I touched the Lower Hunger script, that came off the original; that one should probably have a "disable this script" in there for good measure so it doesn't keep running wastefully. I'll be sure to make a test script when I get there straight off so's I can make sure it functions correctly.

    Items.dat progress:

    All "nature" tech (wood, plants, sand, pebbles, fungi) is entered.
    All Psionic Tokens and powers are entered.
    All survival tech (snares, bows, arrows, tents) entered.
    All utility technology (such as particle accelerators/replicator cells blah blah blah) entered.
    Power technology was entered, but I lost it in an NMV crash the early hours of this morning.
    Likewise, Ammo needs reentering.
    Weapons still to do. (There's about thirty or so)
    Corpses still to do. (Just the original blue, brown and reaper for now).
    Combinations for more of the tech is still outstanding, as are (obviously) all effects.
    359 icons still to do. I'm not even joking, there's probably more.

    After that, I still have some human-specific combinations (notably the level-up based ones) to do, some Android specific upgrades. This will be enough for me to consider "done" for v0.1.


    The Ammo System

    A rather big change on the original, each unit of ammo is actually a "clip" size, giving ammo specific to the weapon.

    Translation: Rather than finding Ether, strangely stacked in fifty can units, and firing it from your flamethrower, you will instead find "Ether". A single can thereof.

    * Combining Ether with a Flamethrower will generate 50 Flamer Fuel (invisible), and 
    * A Flamethrower can hold 100 units, so a can of ether can be combined (1 second combine time) to fill it up.
    * Because of the way combining works (can't conditional a combination), a running script checks the total amount of Flamer Fuel each second. If there's more than 100, it will call a second script: 
    Has >100 Flamer Fuel? 
    Remove 1 Flamer Fuel. 
    Add 1 Excess Ether. 
    Call this script again.
    This will rapidly cycle Fuel to Excess Ether.
    * Another script running each second is: Have Excess Ether > 100, Have Empty Cannister > 0: Add 1 Ether, Remove 1 Empty Cannister". And its twin script: Have Excess Ether > 100, Have Empty Cannister 0: Remove 50 Excess Ether.

    Crystal Ore (100 ammo each) weaponry works the same way, except it will automatically return 1 ore to you without needing a cannister.

    Bullets (and their derivatives, all 20 ammo each) will work the same way again, except they will also be visible in inventory, allowing a desparate gunmen to (slowly) reload their gun a bullet at a time.
    There will also be a larger denomination of bullets (magazines?) which combine for a total of more bullets, just because it would be tedious loading 20 Bullets into the 100 bullet containing Assault Pistol. It will need to be manually combined from 5 "Bullets"

    Likewise, all bullet weapons will have an "Eject Clip", which starts a script to return all their bullets to inventory.

    Ammo for the current weapon will be displayed as a bar if I can manage it. I.... Probably can't, to be honest, that's a lot of potential bars.


    All this is more complicated to code than it is for the user. Ultimately the player will need to reload now and then when their weapon runs out of ammo, and any excess ammo will end up in their inventory sooner or later.

    Being stuck in an extended fire fight will mean that either there will be some tense moments of having to reload, or they will need to use another weapon.

    Or just use stuff that doesn't need to reload, like a pointy stick.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "TNN17" said:
    And hm, I don't believe I touched the Lower Hunger script, that came off the original; that one should probably have a "disable this script" in there for good measure so it doesn't keep running wastefully.
    Wait, are we talking about the same things? I meant W/E level-up Special for human, and the original has no such "Lower Hunger script", as far as I see...

    "TNN17" said:
    All this is more complicated to code than it is for the user. Ultimately the player will need to reload now and then when their weapon runs out of ammo, and any excess ammo will end up in their inventory sooner or later.

    Being stuck in an extended fire fight will mean that either there will be some tense moments of having to reload, or they will need to use another weapon.

    Or just use stuff that doesn't need to reload, like a pointy stick.
    Ok, the ammo loading normative for 30 bullets in 30 seconds is for "A" . But... Hell, when I made those sniper bullets in both original and W/E, it irritated me like throwing pebbles equipped when I wanted pebble shotgun, and now you propose doing so for every dang weapon? Well, that may be a reason to come to SPARTAAAAA - Sorry, to resort to melee. It's been bad, but you're trying to make it better, right? Is that your point? Fighting alien queens with a pogo stick?
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    The human's entire level up chain was from Werivar, I believe I removed some, but I don't recall adding any. I could be wrong granted, it was years ago. Rest assured I'll be testing all new scripts as and when they're made anyway.

    As for ammo - 20 bullets will load in about a second. 100 bullets will take a second to C'ombine the piles into a 100 bullet magazine, and then another second to combine it. 100 bullets should last ten seconds of full blast at least with the most rapid fire weapon in the game, so it's not going to come up as often as Ether/Bullet mixing, you just won't be able to use a dual pistol equivalent to shoot 951049 bullets non-stop anymore.

    Sniper Bullets however, will be made in batches of twenty now, so you're actually better off there, as with the Pebble Shotguns, since the rocks won't be in your inventory to annoy you anymore.

    Alternatively you could just use the mentioned auto-reloader tool to do this for you instantly, at the cost of some power.

    Finally, the worst case there's always me having to include an "options" menu to turn off the script that caps ammo, letting you just load everything into it at once like old times. Don't expect this in any early versions though.

    Buuuut.... Yes, melee will be a lot better, hopefully even decent, since one of the added characters will be a technogical-melee specialist.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    Okaay, so it's fairly advanced, eh? I'm sorry I've forgot how the difficulty differencies are made, is it possible to just have the need in hand-load in, like, Normal and Hard, or only Hard?

    Also, I think I'm happy about the melee - W/E had its "light sabre" so ugly .

    Just a thought. Android's vanilla journal says he spent much time upgrading himself from the ship's hardware. However, his default pummel is... kind of... weak. Well, yeah, if you manage to hit the enemy with it, it's fine and decent, but that's the point! It's even harder than his ranged targeting!
    I've been thinking how to make it work better. At some point a thought came about something like target auto-lock and charge attack. Like a combined psionic dash and pummel - to the targeted position.
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    Hm. Tough one, but I think I could do that. Really heavy on the scripting though, far more so than "hand-load without limits on ammo" at least (that one would be very easy and achieve almost the same thing).

    Script:
    Condition: Mode = Easy.
    Condition: Weapon Equipped = X
    Condition: Ammo for Weapon < 1
    Condition: Parent Ammo (e.g. Ether) > 0.
    Effect: -1 Parent Ammo.
    Effect: +1 Ammo.=]o

    One of these for each weapon that needs reloading and we're done.

    If you're really opposed to the idea after seeing it in action, I can remove it from bullet using guns (this leaves only the Ether and the Crystal using weapons, which number about three total and are more important to keep with the new system), but this will lead back to having to do sniper bullets one-by-one (and will use the equivalent of 100 Ether per bullet, since each Ether can is worth that much in a flamer). I'm reluctant however, partly since the main problem with guns is the hassle of having to reload them, and partly because dodging and weaving with a Psionic (evading three chasing aliens) to get enough time to "reload" my Psionic Blast was actually pretty fun.

    However, since the autoloading mechanism will be the Vanilla equivalent of: A long metal rod plus a computer chip, something you should probably have available before you have a real pistol/flamer/sonic death ray, it's entirely feasible for you to never have to reload manually in the entire game. You could even give it a hotkey and make it not take up an equip slot if you wanted.


    I agree that punching in general is pretty lackluster (seriously, it's like a 2 pixel wide projectile at short range centred funny), but unfortunately there's a serious hitch with what you're thinking for the Android - Notrium doesn't have "mouse location" as a possible for effects or conditions - I desparately wanted to have the psionic make a fireball that moves towards the mouse as long as the mouse button is held, only to have to give up. I will be increasing the width of all the punches to make them less terrible however.

    Now the Android is already pretty awesome - He can see in the dark better than the captain, he can punch harder, he has more health (probably where all those upgrades went), and he never has to eat, drink, or sleep. On top of all this is giving him a secondary weapon - an integrated blowtorch type tool that uses energy - he's a robotic engineer, integrated tools are only sensible.

    This tool will also be able to combine with other items to make unique items that only he can make, convert into integrated energy weaponry.

    Lastly is a bit of a test, but the Android will be able to combine (sorry.) his tool with his own core (another of the items he starts with), repairing himself at the cost of a good amount of energy. If I were concerned with competetive balance, I'd be worrying that he's going to be too strong.



    In other news:
    Items.dat has seven more weapons to enter, then I'm onto combinations for all the high tech-type items.... And then done.
    Still to do: The vanilla alien corpses, the Captain's unique items/combinations and the Android's items/combinations.... After that, I'll be cutting off work on items.dat until I'm ready to start Effects and Scripts, so I'll be moving on to Creatures by tomorrow evening.

    I've also finished an early sprite sheet and ragdoll for the planned "eightth" character. It doesn't have every weapon yet, but I'm fairly pleased with the outcome (especially the sword, which actually looks pretty good in-game and is hard as anything to fit inside the frames).

    Included below, feel free to insert it into your game and check out how it looks.

    Ragdoll:


    Sheets:
    #
    MageKing17 13 years ago
    Nice hat.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "MageKing17" said:
    Nice hat.
    Looks like one of them anime characters to me. I believe it'll work if I place it instead Captain's stuff?
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    "MageKing17" said:
    Nice hat.

    Thanks. I was trying for a slightly "Puritan" feel to him.

    "Venom31" said:
    Looks like one of them anime characters to me. I believe it'll work if I place it instead Captain's stuff?

    Damn right it is, at least of them blended with real items. I wasn't kidding when I touted my inept artistry; expect more unholy fusions of various styles as and when I have to make more pictures.

    And yes, if you name it creature0 and creature0_1 it will override the captain's image. I've tweaked them slightly to fix some outlining and jittering (and to reveal more beneath the hat), new ones are below.





    If you want to fix any errors with the images go ahead, if you want to tell me so I can fix them, that's fine too. I'm looking for misaligned sprites mainly, or obvious white outlining.
    There still need to be animations for a bow and arrow and a flamethrower (with cannister visible), at which time it's pretty much completed, perhaps a touch ironically.


    Progress Update:
    * The Captain's unique items are done, this means only twenty more items are needed to enter to get the Android in and it's done.
    * Secondly, and much more excitingly than my trawl through text files, I've succeeded in implementing damage-modifying stats, though it took awhile to find out a way to do so.

    Essentially, the player has bars for each damage mode (Psi, Melee, Ranged), and on hitting the target, this bar is added to a temporary bar for the creature (unfortunately just deducting it from health directly isn't possible that I can see).

    Each creature has a script with the condition that this bar is greater than 1 (the bar being 0 has a nasty tendency to make the creature die), at which point it uses effect 28 to lower its own health.

    Different creatures can apply effect 28 differently, allowing the lightly armoured baby blue to take full damage, whilst the Omega Reaper can be make to take half that. Different weapons can likewise apply more (or less) of a damage bonus from stats.


    There's only two issues: 
    1) Either this can be calculated as a timed script, which will have a much higher load on the system when there's forty enemies running around, or it can be calculated On-Hit, which is much neater, but has the unfortunate problem that it calculates before stat damage is added, meaning it ignores this damage on the first shot. It's your call, I'd prefer the second one myself, which would you rather?

    2) This damage cannot be prevented by damage resistance (unless it's 100, then I believe the shot never actually lands). If you have 10 strength, you'll always deal 10 damage, even if your weapon is only dealing 1/20. I'm open to simple solutions on this one, but otherwise it's not that much of a deal.


    * Punch has been made more likely to connect, as will all the "hit stuff with your fist" abilities. Claws don't need the help, so they'll stay the same.



    As a final question - how attached are folks to the current B-Movie style android? I'm inclined to give him a makeover for his ragdoll and creature pic, the former of which is below. Opinions welcome.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "TNN17" said:
    This damage cannot be prevented by damage resistance (unless it's 100, then I believe the shot never actually lands). If you have 10 strength, you'll always deal 10 damage, even if your weapon is only dealing 1/20. I'm open to simple solutions on this one, but otherwise it's not that much of a deal.
    Don't forget we aren't yet familiar with the new damage system that you've implemented. Am I getting it right that with strength 10 you have 200 times more damage? Please explain the target dynamics - what it should be and exactly what is wrong now with such outcome?

    P.S. Android pic is awesome. Reminds me of some 8-bit game with kinda-robocop looking guy just like that
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    Quite right, sorry about that - by default, I was assuming 1 Strength equates to 1 Damage.

    So:

    Punch deals 10 damage. Against machines, unarmed strikes are half effectiveness, so that's converted to 5 damage by the game.

    What's happening is that the stat-damage is bypassing this multiplier, so with 10 Strength, the amount of damage done will be 15, not 10 as it should be.

    This gets worse with bigger multipliers, either by applying the Strength bonus to damage more than once or by using even lower multipliers, so the ideal result would be applying the damage modifier to strength as well.
    I suppose I could try deducting from the bar (I'm assuming the game would identify that as "damage" and react accordingly) and then handle the system with a set of juggle bars.

    On Hit >
    If Temp. Damage bar < 100%:
    THEN
    Set Juggle Bar A to 0.
    Set Juggle Bar B to 0.
    Add Temp. Damage Bar to Juggle Bar A.
    Set Temp Damage Bar to 100%
    Add Temp. Damage Bar to Juggle Bar B.
    Subtract Juggle Bar A from Juggle Bar B.
    Subtract Juggle Bar B from Health.

    So long as Temp. Damage is too high to be zero'd, this works to count armour - If I'm right and the game does count "damage" to another bar as something to be reduced. It's not something I can test right now, I've gutted Creatures and Races. I'd prefer a more elegant solution though.

    P.S: Thanks! Probably for the best, I saved over Creature7.png with the modified version like a moron and refuse to reinstall for it. Here's the equivalent droid file if you're interested in checking it over as well.
    #
    Curudan 13 years ago
    This is all so very beautiful.

    I'd just like to say that I support reloading of all ammo based weapons, including bullets, and I am very glad that you are going to remove the marine sniper. As a human, the late game always turned into an endless reload fest, whenever I was hit with sniper bullets.

    Another thing I noticed, is that the android can become very overpowered once he has added a million upgrades to himself. Since there is not limit to how many he can have installed, it's fairly easy to reverse his power drain, and add a million other enhancements. I'd suggest adding three or four extra equipment slots for the android, specifically for enhancements.

    I love the new ragdolls, and I prefer the new android image to the old one.
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    Glad you're liking things so far Curudan, please feel free to mention ideas as you have them, they're more likely to get implemented when I have to rebuild everything from the ground up.

    For the Android, there's little danger for his upgrades, they've been stripped away and redone from scratch. A few choice things for the Android will be:

    Servo Upgrade = Increases Strength by 1 (with a maximum of 20), and carrying capacity.
    Advanced Optics = Increases Accuracy by 5 whilst active, also providing night vision.
    Shielding > Smart Shielding > Ablative Shielding = Armour of ascending potency
    Spare parts = Mini repair kits.
    Armoured Core = 1 time large Health bonus, at the expense of increased energy drain.
    Self-Repair Unit = Regenerates health. Utility slot.

    This is the extent of the Android's upgrades. He has some other unique creations, but he shouldn't ever reach a stage where nothing hurts him, he never runs out of health, or where he can just stand around all day to accumulate energy (not at night at least).



    In a side note, I finally got round to checking what the problem was with Werivar Exp's hunger script. As far as I can tell, it's checking that the player has *at least* 0 of the item, bizarrely "does not" isn't a possible condition to check as far as I can tell. Thanks for mentioning it Venom.
    #
    MageKing17 13 years ago
    "TNN17" said:
    Armoured Core = 1 time large Health bonus, at the expense of increased energy drain.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    Yeah, that made me crack up. Anyway, I'm not much into PS#. M-m, "not much" stands for too big.

    Up to the topic,
    "Curudan" said:
    ...it's fairly easy to reverse his power drain...
    How many power plants did that take? Whatever I've applied to him no power drain reversing occured. Bug?

    "TNN17" said:
    ...it's checking that the player has *at least* 0 of the item, bizarrely "does not" isn't a possible condition to check...
    Well, hope it didn't break anything for you

    As for the damage - I didn't delve too much into Notrium's bar arithmetic yet. Simply by possible effects list I thought it possible to do:
    1. some temp bar <- initial damage + strength modifier
    2. same temp bar <- same temp bar * damage modifier (like 0.5)
    3. creature's health bar -= that temp bar
    "-=" standing for decrement - like effect 28(<health>, temp, -1.0, <does not matter>.
    #
    Curudan 13 years ago
    "Venom31" said:

    "Curudan" said:
    ...it's fairly easy to reverse his power drain...
    How many power plants did that take? Whatever I've applied to him no power drain reversing occured. Bug?

    It's been a few years, but to the best of my memory, it took somewhere in the range of 20-40 power plants. A lot of power plants, but still pretty easy to scrounge up, especially with the ship graveyard's respawning scrap.

    Regardless, I'm glad it's gone now.

    Also, TNN17, I'm wondering what you're planning on doing with the friendly crew members you could find in Werivar. On the one hand, I wouldn't be too bummed out if you removed them- Outside of herding them all into my base where they could be safe, I never used them for anything, but on the other hand, there are a lot of interesting changes you could make to improve them. Things like dropping weapons near them causing them to switch weapons, or giving them an ammo and energy bar which they'd need to replenish to fire their weapons, or even being able to give them health or repair kits in advance, which they could use to automatically replenish their health when it got too low. I even experimented with a script once that would allow followers to pilot vehicles. Hoverbikes, or even tanks maybe?

    The basic problem with followers, is that all late game combat inevitably involved walking backwards while firing your weapon, and the dire reapers would quickly eviscerate any followers who didn't follow that formula exactly. Followers as a whole are almost always more of a liability than an asset in combat, and even trying to get them from any other base to the east hive base, where they could be safe, felt like herding cats.

    What are your thoughts on followers?

    Oh, and a few years ago I created a "telescopic sniper pistol with tripod", created from a sniper pistol, the periscope, and a few long metal rods, it would adjust your view perspective forward, and freeze you in place to prevent the recoil from throwing off your aim. Since you could neither see your body nor move when it was equipped, it was something you could only use from a secure location, surrounded by turrets. It still seemed a little bit too easy, however. Perhaps enemies need to respond better to sniping?

    What do you think?

    Also, it seems to me that buildings, rather than being a collection of walls open to the sky, should have a roof over top that turns translucent when you walk underneath, similar to trees. That way the contents of buildings would be hidden until you enter, and they would protect you from rain, heat, snow, and other weather effects.
    #
    Narvius 13 years ago
    Regarding the open buildings - the only building that was intended to be roofed off was the hermit's hut - but you broke he roof. ;P
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "Curudan" said:
    It's been a few years, but to the best of my memory, it took somewhere in the range of 20-40 power plants. A lot of power plants, but still pretty easy to scrounge up, especially with the ship graveyard's respawning scrap.
    WAT
    "graveyard's respawning scrap" - the only respawning scrap for me there were DRs and snipers. They are absolutely useless for power plant creation (even harmful ). Other than that - 20-40 plants? Easy to assemble? You've gotta be kidding me. Of course I never did that - it felt like nonsense since the difference in energy flow was not even observable.

    As to the topic - well, the roofs are totally possible with Notrium engine. Why not.

    "telescopic sniper pistol with tripod" - heck, I wanted to add that to default mod one day - you've left me behind, Curudan! This is, perhaps, the most logical use of that otherwise futile Looking Glass thing. Other than that I totally hate sniping, for unknown reason
    Anyway, Nocture, whatever of these (player sniping, teammates) you include in NFM, AI should be considerably worked upon (which is awful, due to known reasons).

    @EDIT
    Forgot about textures. Been playing both android and this... err, BTW who is it?
    Well, andy changed his punching hand from right to left, but the default insides remained still. So in default it looks weirdly
    Of all animations of Mr. Incognito, I was only able to test punch and shooting things. Well, cap'n has neither sword nor spear. Punching looks inhumanly fast, which must be the point, right?
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    Wow. There's actually a lot of family resemblance there.

    It's with regret that I have to remove sleeping/weariness from the game; I can't actually get at the function that checks if you're moving or not, since the game apparently deals with temperature at an engine level.

    Fatigue will stick around, and will be responsible for determining "free" attacks - Punches, Claws and other exerting activities. Most things that cause fatigue will also increase your temperature slightly, so if you're cold, it might not be a bad idea to start shadow-boxing.

    Through scripting, the game should "know" when it's daytime now, based on the time. This potentially lets it spawn different aliens at night than in the daytime.


    Looking at your suggestion Venom, I'm not sure there's an effect that can dynamically determine multiplier in order to perform the multiplication.

    On the plus side, for calculating extra damage, I now believe I can do both, thanks to a new addition to script calculations I wasn't aware of "delay script". On Hit can call a script which does nothing except run a second script 1ms later (giving the bars time to update).
    The second bar then runs with the same conditions as it would have run on hit, performing the deductions then.

    Failed. The script called the player, not the calling creature.

    There is one additional downside to this method which I hadn't thought of before, which is "is killed by player" conditions. If it dies because of stat damage, it won't count as a player kill.
    If anyone's interested in using this damage method alongside kill credit, this can be solved by making any creature that it's important to kill immune to stat damage, or make the script "add 1 health" at the very end of the calculation - thanks to the 1ms delay for the script mentioned above, this should allow the creature to die before the script resolves, preventing any unkillable zombies.

    Confirmed working, successfully gave kill credit after switching around -1 Temp Damage correction with +1 Health correction, meaning it even deals the same damage per hit.


    "Curudan" said:
    Also, TNN17, I'm wondering what you're planning on doing...

    1) Funny you should ask about this, I've been giving this some serious thought.

    My current plans for allies in general is:
    * Remove all generic crewman allies. It never felt very isolated when there's fifty odd people running around after me. All allies which accompany you will either be easily replaced or suffering a severe case of badass.
    * Remove the early game hermit - I'm afraid his house will be remaining intact. He'll definitely be a possible ally later on however.
    * Implement a "Control" stat. This caps the number of summons/spawns by the Psionic, Werivar and Stowaway (and is much easier to implement than the damage calculations to boot). I'm hoping to be able to add a mass-AI switch to a hotkey item for those creatures too.
    * Implement Schroedinger's NPCs. Each of the characters will have certain characters from the main roster who they might recruit or fight. For example, the Captain may find the Android and successfully recruit him, and the Stowaway and have to fight her. These allies will ideally have to be death on legs (hopefully by upgrading rather than having to make them potentially spotlight stealing). Their AI, if I can figure it out, will revolve around sticking close to the player or guarding a set location. If I get really advanced, it will include an automatic retreat option at under 50% health.
    * I plan on having a single "escape" ending, and possibly a single "remain" ending, these will probably be it, though I'm planning on making them change based on conditions). One major part of these conditions will be whether these allies survive and are with you at the time of the end.
    * Turrets will require support in the form of energy or ammunition to function. I intend for this to be as simple as holding your mouse over them and pressing "L". There will also be turrets that heal you and your buddies, turrets that repair the android and any nearby drones, and turrets which simply accumulate energy and discharge it to surrounding friendly targets. They'll no longer be changeable to sprinkler mode, they'll have their one default mode and stick to it (necessarily so, I'm fairly sure none of the support turrets would work if they were on the Player's team).
    * The biggest thing I have planned for followers is to create an interaction menu out of one of the player inventories. Each has its own "start" items it gives the player, with the description being their "dialogue" and each item being a response - which takes away the previous responses and adds new ones.
    This dialogue tree will allow condition checking (and I believe the game can check the player has an item at all, not just in current inventory), allowing the player to update weapons and armour through dialogue, as well as hopefully AI tactics.... And letting the player ask what a Burgit is.
    Hopefully this will also work on all creatures - even if it's just a "the Dire Reaper isn't interested in conversation" quick message.
    It's a pretty big thing, one I'd consider "mod-sized" by itself, but fingers crossed it's possible and I'll be able to get it done.
    I have nothing in place for tanks yet, but getting NPCs to ride them for you sounds a good idea. I'll try to see if I can put that into practice when I get around to vehicles, since it sounds epic.


    2) The basic sniper weaponry will automatically adjust your view to a point where the player is just about on screen, apply an advanced targetting beam effect, and have a fairly moderate recoil. It's not quite realistic, given the range you "should" be able to see even without assistance, but myopia is the tradeoff for 360 degree vision.

    There will no longer be metal rods, telescopes, or indeed, glass marbles to make them, making Sniper Rifles and any other long distance attack forms the only way of seeing further.

    As for the reaction part - It is a touch annoying that nobody seems to care their buddy just died, but unfortunately I can't do much about that one. For other reactions however (such as hearing), the sniper is a silenced weapon, making pinpointing its direction incredibly difficult.


    3) Finally, Buildings with roofs is definitely something I have planned (generally in the fairly small hut variety, anything super big and roofed should get its own area).
    I'm actually thinking of another type as well, which is "vehicle" buildings. Essentially you have your tent. Set it up, use it, and you'll start recovering health and fatigue (even the android might use it to stabilised temperature). When you're done resting up, exit the tent and pack it up with L. There's also a bigger, stronger version which can't be packed up. Naturally as creatures, these are vulnerable to attack, so if you want to make yourself a tentacle farmstead, you'll want to get some fences and a turret support network going.
    #
    Venom31 13 years ago
    "TNN17" said:
    Turrets will require support in the form of energy or ammunition to function. I intend for this to be as simple as holding your mouse over them and pressing "L".
    and then
    "TNN17" said:
    ... if you want to make yourself a tentacle farmstead, you'll want to get some fences and a turret support network going.
    Doesn't stack up quite good for me. Hell, I've rarely used turrets anyway, but now them draining PC of energy/ammo/whatever becomes a real pain. Also, pressing <some button> over one turret will activate them all? What's the point in the farmstead you can't rest in? You'll have to devote all your time to feeding turrets and maybe even fences? Can't see a point in that.

    #EDIT
    I've noticed those punches in original Notrium lure enemies so much to you.
    Aliens in the forest (including PCs) deal as much noise walking as human and Android.
    Psionic is floating but has footprints and footstep sounds, is slowed down by swamps etc...
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    As I mentioned, turrets will have several different types.

    Ammo: These are fuelled by ether, bullets or crystal ore. They'll probably be more efficient, but weaker than, human equivalent weaponry, just so reloading is minimal.
    Energy: These are fuelled by energy.
    Support: These come in four versions, Energy-based, medical "ammo" based, "scrap metal" ammo based, and the Solar Turret.

    Here's some more on my plans:

    Energy Turrets of all types will slowly regenerate energy on their own. Advanced Turrets do so quicker, but if you're being rushed by an army of fifty aliens all at once, then this will be far from sufficient to maintain indefinite firing.
    Ammo Turrets will have large, but finite, unreplenishing ammo reserves - projectile weaponry will typically deal quite a bit more damage than an energy-weapon (in keeping with physics), and lacks the restrictions of laser weaponry.
    Support Turrets come in four types:
    1: Repair Turrets. Energy to repair with. They'll work on turrets, walls and androids.
    2: Medical Turrets. Fuelled by feeding them medical supplies. They'll mainly work on you and any biological allies you have.
    3: Supply Turrets. These turrets are energy based, and provide ammo to all nearby Ammo-requiring turrets using their energy reserves, probably in a conditional form of "IF near Supply Turret IF Supply Turret's Energy > 2 THEN recover +1 Ammo". They'll also work on your bullet types if I can get them to.
    4: Solar Collectors. These turrets generate energy. They automatically provide energy to nearby energy dependent turrets during the day (again in a conditional form of "IF near solar turret IF time = daytime THEN recover +1 Energy" per second). These will work on your battery if you're using a techno power supply.


    Pressing "L" over a turret will load it, and only it, it you have the appropriate ammo item, or 20-odd energy. This won't be a regular thing however - the higher the pressure on a turret, the more frequently you'll need to reload it. A quiet area with a farm? That's not a problem. Middle of the Hive? Little bit.

    This isn't to punish people for using turrets, but it is to stop turrets from being magical. If you want to make a fully supported turret defended base, you'll need to have more than four dual pistol turrets which bullet-spam everything to death. You could make that happen, sure, but making Notrium into a permanent home will take a whole mess of work, but it'll definitely be possible. It's also a whole lot easier to set up a turret defense that can't handle all-comers.

    Of course if it's an unpopular idea, I can strip it out and treat Turrets as infinite carnage generators, that's actually less work for me. Let me know folks!


    Punches - Will not make noise. Neither will claws; noise is too useful for attracting aliens. The victim may be making noise when injured, but that's reasonable.
    Aliens - Will probably make as much noise walking as humans and androids do. I'm fairly sure it's just a sound effect, and I don't hear them, so I'll not be touching them or the music.
    Psionic - I've already planned for a "flying" condition from either technology or psionic abilities. This will make things like swamps have no effect whilst they are flying (in actuality, hovering a few inches/feet off the ground), whilst other types of terrain (such as the fire pits of the hive) will still have an effect, due to convection. If the psionic is already flying (rings a bell, he probably should be) then I'll make sure he picks up the flying condition at creation... and remove his footstep particle.


    EDIT: Oh! And fences will be just that - Fences. Out of materials, not lasers. I just remembered Werivar had a mono-directional laser turret fence.
    Also: Repairs on turrets will be carried out either by repair unit (instant, 360 degree blast of repairs), or "Tools", which will repair whilst draining fatigue.

    EVEN LATER EDIT: Having checked thoroughly on everything, Player Bars cannot be *subtracted* from creature bars, making any attempt to make armour "count" towards this damage impossible.

    Even EVEN LATER EDIT: Aliens now flee when their health drops below 10%, and regenerate slowly. They have a low chance of stopping their retreat after their health has regenerated above 15% (1/30 chance per second). Let's hear it for cowardice eh?
    #
    TNN17 13 years ago
    Mod Update:

    Active Spawners have been successfully implemented.

    Creatures are now controlled by a single roving spawner managing each area. The Area Manager (A.M) is a roving immortal creature, with a single bar randomising every five seconds. 

    Based on the result of this bar the A.M. will then drop off a Seed - Each A.M. (specific to area type) has five possible results for this drop, and each seed has ten possible results to turn into, based primarily on the Season, which has different impacts on creature populations throughout the year - populations which will also fluctuate from day to day.

    This gives up to fifty possible results per area over the course of a full game year, and easily moddable results for anyone after me by just copying a seed and changing a spawner result (did I mention I hated the three-file interdependency of plot objects?).

    It's not just creatures that this will control though, there's also Item Seeds and the Scavenger Seed planned. Item seeds will be area specific, and feature the respawning items common to that area - from Sand, or Cactii, for deserts to discarded tech for Marine bases.
    Scavenger seeds will, in the presence of an alien corpse type, produce a species specific scavenger alien to clean it up.



    Other progress:

    Creatures - Small Blue, Adult Blue, Adult Brown and Reapers are now in place, though their weapons are not in their original states as yet, they are all built with the new damage system in place, and have placeholder weapons ready for matching with Default figures.

    Graphics - New Ragdoll completed for the Captain and the Psionic (the poor fella looked out of place next to all the other races), new cell sheet for the Psionic finished to match his new design. Still need a new cell for the Captain.
    Still have to make new cells for swords, spears, bows and the like as well.
    Still have textures for new items to implement, this is currently the biggest timesink outside of populating item/weapon stats.

    Once the items and weapons are in place, and the spawner is functioning correctly, then I'll be putting out the first (minimal) Alpha for bug-testing (and so folks can wade through the code and pictures to see everything else in there). I'm hoping for that to be later this week.
    #
    Curudan 13 years ago
    Everything I've heard so far is beyond awesome. I'd given up hope on another serious Notrium mod every being completed.

    I can hardly wait to try the alpha.
    #
    Forum » Notrium Final Mix - New Version out. 0.31
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