Here’s my idea. I’m obsessed with Eastern Europe. I’d like to perhaps take the tower blocks added by “Urban Development” mod and make them more common, perhaps creating a new, more Europe-like atmosphere in the game. I hear that this requires adjusting .json weighting etc… But I’m unsure how to adjust the weights, especially for building addition mods. If anyone could give me some advice or tutorials, It’d be appreciated!
Well, adjusting the weight of a particular building is easy.
How much do you know about modding? I was going to write out a step by step, but that would be pretty long if you have no idea how to do anything.
The jist of it is that you find that building’s .json file, open it in a text editor, and adjust the “weight” entry for that building.
IE: You only like one of the cabin layouts and hate the others… Well, you find that layout in the json (which can be confusing if you have no experience with them) and adjust it’s weight value to something enormous. IE:
"weight": 200000,This will make that particular variant of the building to show up nearly 100% of the time.
HOWEVER.
The urban development mod uses overmap specials/overmap terrain in order to generate multi-story/multi-tile buildings. This means that some of the buildings in the mod don’t share an om_terrain with standard buildings (they have their own, like urban_1_1. instead of the standard ‘house’, ‘cabin’, ‘pawn’, etc.)
You can adjust the individual frequency of each urban development building by adjusting (cdda directory)/mods/Urban_Development/overmap_specials. You can adjust the line “occurences” in that entry. IIRC, occurences is how many times it can show up per overmap tile. So, you can use that to adjust how frequently you come across a particular building.
The problem with this is that there are simply so MANY buildings in each overmap tile that even a relatively large adjustment doesn’t seem to change much. In my test of editing the apartment building led to only 8 instances of the building on the overmap, even though I set it to 25-50.
SO, long, I know, not super helpful.
Basically, if buildings use standard overmap terrain (like cabins, gas stations, pawn shops, etc) then you just have to edit the ‘frequency’ in their building file (most are in CDDA/data/json/mapgen) to make a particular version spawn more.
If the building uses its own om_terrain or is part of an overmap special, then I don’t know how to reliably increase the frequency it occurs. It seems to me that adjusting ‘occurences’ should work, but in my testing it only offered a slight increase in the apartment building numbers on the map.
EDIT: om specials are tricky because there’s a limit to how many things can be spawned at once. I think that replacing many buildings with large apartment blocks would take some real work/removal of other things.
I’m aware of how to debug change old colors and values from old mods, etc… But I am rather clueless when it comes to much else. Thanks for helping me with the process. It’s not a huge thing, I just think it’d be cool to play around in a world that’s more largely populated with some old soviet-style apartment blocks. Specials seem to be a bit of tricky business as you said, I might be better off just placing these towers down through debug, then exploring through.
Thanks.
PS - I’m new to the forums, but I’ll be quite active. Expect to hear from me sometime in the future, maybe.
I agree with you. I personally find CDDA to be too ‘single-story’. I’d like to see a lot more Z level buildings in-game, specifically what you’ve mentioned, big, USSR style communal apartments.
Don’t take my words as gospel, probably someone else knows better than I do and I could be totally wrong. All I’ve learned has been from tinkering with the .json and I’m definitely not the most savvy modder in the forum.
And now for the second reason I’ve started this post: I’d like to perhaps make use of the “Default region type” setting under the new world options. Do you know much about that? Plus, I think desert_test has great potential, as well.
I, personally, don’t know much about it. I’ve been playing/in the forum 7 or 8 months and there’s been a lot of development, but none of it (that I know of) touched the desert stuff. I remember reading about it ages ago and it was basically ‘It was a neat idea and all but we’ve never done anything with it and that probably won’t change anytime soon’.
To my understanding there’s a push right now towards using actual New England for the map. There’s a thread about it near the top of the forum. I think most people focus on creating new buildings and improving mapgen over having to create a completely different environment. That said, for all I know there’s a guy in his basement, right now, trying to implement cacti and scorpions and dried out zombies.
Haha. Yeah, I saw that post about the realmap. I’m looking forward to a playable beta, and I’m also looking forward to seeing what’s new with CDDA as a whole, in the future.