my compilation issues are related to SDL, undefined references to SDL functions despite SDL seemingly being installed perfectly.
my compilation issues are related to SDL, undefined references to SDL functions despite SDL seemingly being installed perfectly.
Wish I could help man but I’m no programmer nor do I work in IT. I’ve taken a few CS classes a decade ago and have been brute forcing my way through this.
In retrospect I should have combined these two…
Hide sites can now be “bounced” off of to extend your range to build additional sites. There are decreasing returns though, each bounce you make cuts range to 75%. Also threw up yellow max/min ranges and red paths so you know your limits.
Running an NPC on shuttle duty is now possible in the exact same format. Bounce off an existing hide site to extend range or decline bounce to access items sitting in the shelter on site. Should be super straightforward. Looting a city 2 world maps away and having your companions bring all the gear back is 100% possible but you are going to be paying out the rear-end if you have them bring large volumes or weights back due to the number of trips they would need to make (time costs food). The bonus is that it only takes the lesser number of trips when you are shuttling equipment back and forth. So if you need 4 trips to push gear out and 6 trips to bring gear back, the NPC only needs to make 6 trips since the 4 trips are accomplished while the 6 are being done.
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Outstanding, though the fact that the path cuts straight through a city illustrates the need for having the process be aware of on-map dangers. That shouldn’t be too hard to sort out though.
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Which begs the question, do you implement a dangerousness level for tiles and give chances of NPCs disappearing on missions, or just make them travel around dangerous areas?
Is there any way to see where drop off points are around the camp? I had a bit of trouble finding where to store food to distribute.
Probably depends on the mission, for setting up staging camps I assume it’ll be better to just carry cargo and avoid danger, for exploration you don’t have a choice, so you probably need some gear.
Speaking of, there’s another mission, exploration.
Which begs the question, do you implement a dangerousness level for tiles and give chances of NPCs disappearing on missions, or just make them travel around dangerous areas?
Until we get a path-finding algorithm for NPC map movement I think our best bet might be to allow the player to designate way points. If they encounter something let them roll for escape or drop them into the combat system.
Is there any way to see where drop off points are around the camp? I had a bit of trouble finding where to store food to distribute.
I’m open to suggestions but I don’t know of an EASY way to pull up a preview of the map and color code squares to matching sort groups, or some other way of conveying the information.
Speaking of, there’s another mission, exploration.
Exploration is definitely coming prior to combat, I picture the missions unlocking in order of increasing danger to the NPC since a better more secure home would be something the NPC would be willing to risk more for.
Trenches can upgrade to spiked trenches. The plan is to have them alternatively upgrade into a light palisade (essentially a chain link fence made from heavy sticks or like the trap fences from Unreal World, something that can alternatively be used to corral your livestock) or maybe a scrap wall. I like the idea of a scrap wall since it reminds me of a mad max or fallout apocalypse but the current simple metal wall requires steel plating and welding. I’m looking for something similar to chain link that is easier to craft since wire is a pain. New scrap metal wall terrain that uses wood poles, sheet metal, and nails? Since you can’t craft sheet metal one metal frame per tile would also work.
Also added crafting wild veggy stems, seed potatoes, buckwheat seeds, and dandelion seeds to the max level farm, something to justify adding the extra buildings. Was looking for more conventional crops (excepts for potatoes) but its what we have. Mushrooms, wild herbs, and dogbane are more suited to a gatherer’s hut type expansion.
Closed the old poll, I’ll open a new one later but I’m open to suggestions for potential expansions. I do need a 24x24 size smithy expansion. Recipes are super easy to add and the garage chop shop isn’t too useful without a smithy to make use of the metal. I like stone’s little shop but I need a 24x24 one to make it fill out the OM square.
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We have an A* implementation lying around somewhere, just mark dangerous areas as inaccessable and you’re done, throw in cost for forests/fields/roads/etc and you have real navigation.
Totally agree here, the pathfinding is just for choosing a route, what happens if something bad crops up is a different issue entirely.
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First pass on recruitment is done. I debugged in a super high level NPC to ensure a first time go but you are looking at a survival skill roll to find another person, a speaking skill roll (boosted by the bonus listed) to convince them that your faction doesn’t suck, and finally an appeal roll modified by the adjusted speaking skill on what they’d want to join your faction. Since food is the only thing you can offer, its what I’m rolling with for now. People may be super interested in joining your faction so you don’t need to bribe them at all or even a shitty NPC could want two season’s worth of food to join.
Next up is scouting and all that entails.
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I’m not sure if this has been mentioned before, but as a future possible idea, could recruitment tie in to radio towers somewhat?
If you manage to secure and get a radio tower working, people could occasionally come join your faction.
Also - the use of the radio item - if you are sending NPCs off to do various things, and both of you have a working radio, this could have a benefit of some sort.
It would be no problem at all to send an NPC to a radio tower to roll for recruitment the same way you send them out to build hide sites. Not sure how’d you power her up but I could make it require a fully charged truck battery or something.
I like radios for QRF and fire support so I’ll see how I can pull those in for version 2.0. I was thinking of having a 120mm mortar be a prize from the national guard camp. Being able to call for fire with a radio would be pretty sweet, 100% realistic.
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Just want to say thank you so very much for doing this, i’ve been waiting for something like this that makes the survival not so lonely, and npc interactions and base-building is great! I must admit when i first saw this thread i had to scroll up and down and re-check a few times to make sure that this is still CDDA i am reading about, not dwarf fortress or something. Thank you!!
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Last feature is mostly done. Scout and combat patrols are implemented. Designate a series of way points and your NPC will bounce from one to the next. The scout mission can go into unknown territory to reveal new areas with a sight range of 3(?), the combat patrol cannot but still has a reveal range of 1(?) so that it’ll reveal some things regardless, both can bounce off hides sides which will kick your usable range back up to 75% of the last increase (90 tiles, 67, 50, 37, 27, 20, 15, 11, 8, 6, and 4 for a total of 335 tiles or 2.8 world maps). The game takes every overmap tile the NPC crosses and checks the 4 submaps for creatures. If a creature is encountered you make a survival roll against the monster’s difficulty to see who gets to determine combat. If the monster wins it always initiates combat. If the player wins it will avoid combat if on a scout mission but will engage if on a combat mission. This check is made for each monster in the submap (12x12 tiles) and then combined so even in urban environments you are going to see your NPC take on at most ~8 monsters at a time. Monsters killed in this form of combat are wiped from the map (too difficult to simulate all the death effects in a distant map) while NPCs that die during combat are dropped into the distant map, as can be seen above. Combat is just melee at the moment with your NPC fleeing if they feel they don’t stand a chance. Gear is accounted for in hit calculations and damaged so the optimum NPC build is probably going to be plate armor with a slow very powerful melee weapon… or if they have natural high dodge they might benefit from light armor. You’ll currently have to check your NPCs for bites when they get back because they won’t tell you… but based on the zombie movies I’ve seen I guess they shouldn’t mention if they got bit.
Major shortcomings so you know what to expect:
-Can’t generate monsters in areas that the player has never visited since those are stored differently and loaded based on player perspective when approached (unless someone knows a way)
-Opening all these maps and checking enemies is SLOW, sitting at about 6 seconds for a normal patrol to calculate
-As already mentioned, combat is melee based only
Good enough for me for now though. I know there are lots of changes some of the devs want me to do on the github so I’ll probably try and knock those out over the next few days and hopefully get a semi-final version up on Thursday. One of the changes is for companion mission save format. I’ll mention it again but to prevent losing NPCs don’t have them away on mission when updating to the next build if you are testing.
Thanks for all the support!
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Your work is amazing, I’m actually not playing until this is ready because I’m so hyped for it!
Fantastic work. Between this and Urban development you will have created my two favorite mods.
Dude’s a legend for pulling this off. I’m impressed!
Hey @Acidia? I want you to know that I really appreciate all the amazing additions you personally make to the game. You freaking rule.
Thanks a ton for everyone’s support!
I pushed the latest version to the github so if I could get some people to give it a test, it’ll go a long ways towards getting it ready for merging. There are some behind the scenes mechanic changes that I still need to make but I don’t have plans on changing anything that the player will notice unless its broken/really needs improvement. Just a reminder, the mission save format has changed so if you have an existing game bring all of your NPCs home from missions before upgrading.
I think the only change that I haven’t talked about is that I modified the cooking recipes so that you have to use a pot and knife when constructing the kitchen, flip side is that you don’t need either of those when npc batch crafting food. For balancing, since light isn’t needed, you can’t use a little fire to cook 1000 meats. You are charged for fuel in either charcoal, lamp oil, or splintered wood. As a minor bug, I still need to stop the player from learning the custom recipes…
EDIT: Combat/scout missions seem to be even slower, I’ll have to take a look at what’s going on. Just realize the game probably isn’t frozen, just hit space bar every 5 seconds to see if its stopped thinking.
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Alright, I have one complaint thus far, and I resolved it in my own build.
Your ‘build a base’ dialogue option for followers makes it so ‘k’ is no longer ‘bye’ when they’re followers.
To resolve this, simply move the option in npctalk.cpp below ‘bye’ and it’ll remain consistent.
It’s just fairly annoying when I’m telling my NPC friends to screw off by accident because the build a base dialogue shuffled the keys around.
I’ll continue testing in a normal playthrough and will note any bugs I come across.
Edit:
Anyway, I’m sure many are eager to test, here’s an x64 windows tiles build:
this is now in the main game, download removed because there’s no need for it!
As a side-note, no crashes so far on my end, so it def feels stable!
Updated!
3 Likes
@dissociativity I seem to have issues using zoom (z and Z) causing the UI panel on the right to disappear?
My stats, visible enemies, etc only reappears after using the map, opening doors/standing on stairs, and a few other random things.