Short story:
I had spawned in rather limited area. Two roads were blocked by cities too big to handle, one road had turret blockade and the last road hat triffids.
With no way out I had to do with what I found in this small corner of the world. Wrench and hacksaw were not found.
After spending long time scavenging I gave up on finding them and instead started working on making them.
Finally I made them. I took some wide wheels off of a broken bus and headed to a military vehicle that was in good condition apart from its wheels.
The repair option to replace XX wheels with brand new || wheels requires mechanics 4?! Literally unscrew some bolts and put them back in.
Frustated by this experience I will now do a wheel rework.
Installing/removing a wheel will require very low mechanics skill. Mechanics 1 for all car wheels sounds fine. Bike wheels could be done with mechanics 0 and bolt turning 1 (pliers). Wheel change is easy job.
You canāt install wheels directly on the hull! Wheels can be installed only on tiles that have āwheel mountā (name suggestions?) part.
Wheel mount parts come in three sizes: Light (bike/motorcycle), medium (car) and heavy (heavy cars/trucks). Each wheel mount will only accept wheels of correct size.
Installing wheel mount part is much harder than installing the wheel. Install requirements (open for suggestions)
Light: Mechanics 2, 30 charges of welding.
Medium: Mechanics 4, 100 charges of welding.
Heavy: Mechanics 4, 150 charges of welding.
Light wheel mount could be crafted with mechanics 3 with welder and some metal scraps.
I have no idea what one would need to craft the medium/heavy wheel mount parts. I would just leave them as salvageable from cars only part but I know many others want everything to be craftable.
Not sure what to do with drum rollers/train wheels. Maybe they should have their own unique mounts.
Casters and other very small wheels would not need wheel mounts.
Currently wheels are repairable with welder. This doesnāt make much sense. With the change to make them much easier to replace the wheel could be made unrepairable and you would need to scavenge new wheels.
Currently I donāt think I will touch how steerable parts are done. So on the same wheel mount you can install either normal or steerable wheel. But I would prefer that the wheel mount was made steerable and the wheel was just normal. But that would require more c++ stuff.
Now is the perfect time to give good suggestions before I waste time doing things without much thinking and then spending time reworking them.
Iād suggest you try using [c]hange tire instead of (i)nstall/rem(o)ve, since the latter is for adding and removing wheels via welding and whatnot, not just swapping the tire on one.
I like the idea of installing/repairing wheel mounts being a hard mechanical task, while installing/removing tires is a trivial one.
Iād go with mechanics zero for all tire installations, btw, at least until you get up to truck tires or tank treads, same for oil changes or filter change type tasks, if you happen to look at those.
It would make a lot more sense for the āsteerableā trait to go on the mount rather than the tire, but for the time being I donāt suppose it would make that much difference gameplay-wise.
I would tend to make tires themselves repairable with super-glue and plastic chunks, or, as you say, non-repairable.
It works. Wheel mounting piece items exist. All vanilla cars have wheel mounting pieces. Cars from old saves will get wheel mounting pieces added to them automatically (all wheels without mounting pieces get mounting pieces on load). Some of the install/remove/repair requirements are in.
Values, descriptions and names are products of sub 10s thinking. They may change.
And yes. You can now take the normal sized wheels off your car and put off-road wheels in!
Two larger c++ changes that would make this better but are not required.
Unhardcode vehicle part flags for requiring another part in the spot.
Current flags for requiring another part in a spot are hardcoded. For example āTURRETā flag is hradcoded to mean that this part requires āTURRET_MOUNTā flag on the tile. I just added three more hardcoded flag pairs but it would be much better if this wasnāt hardcoded.
I would want vehicle parts to have a new ārequired_flagsā attribute. This would be just a list of flags that need to be in the spot.
Unhardcode lifting requirement. Currently wheel parts are hardcoded to require lifting. It would be better if the lifting requirement was instead listed in the install requirements.
But currently all the fields are as value, value pairs (skill-lvl, tool-quality, using-amount) but lifting would get its value in the code and not in here which would cause problems if it was put in any of these.
Easier way would be to add a flag to the part that it requires lifting. But it would be more consistent for the install/removal requirement to be defined in the install/removal requirements.
There is also a āNO_JACKā flag that is used on some parts. This flag does absolutely nothing.
Steerable wheel hub instead of steerable wheel. Currently the steerable check checks each part one by one to see if the part has āSTEERABLEā flag on it.
Steerable vehicle hub would require multiple parts to be checked together before the steerability can be determined (there is steerable hub assembly and a wheel on it).
Steerability is done in different places in different ways so I am not going to try to do this.
I will probably just add the hub assemblies to the older hardcoded requirements but I donāt like doing that. The 1) would expecially open up new interesting possibilities. For example a āelectric outletā part on vehicle on which you could install tools one by one instead of the current vehicle tool parts which contain set of tools that you have to install all at once.
Iāve noticed that you use a hub assembly on motorcycles there is none on motorcycles or bikes because the act of turning is done with a personās weight and the forks on the front attached to the handle. While on a car it is what attaches the wheels to the axles and allows turning.
Meh, this is a vast improvement over the original design and wonāt lead to confusion due to different methods of installing select wheel types. Thereās still a hub present, itās just part of the wheel assembly rather than mounted to the vehicle. I get what youāre saying, but what solution do you have that isnāt a step backwards?