Vehicle Additions Pack (Updated December 8)

[KA101]

Neither was marked CR or WIP, so I considered both.

[Coolthulhu]

Sorry - I forgot that [WIP] tag exists.

Manual turret aiming is ready, as far as I can tell. The other one (better turret AI) is in progress, but should be ready by tomorrow.

I think I should make a separate thread, because this is getting unrelated to blazemod.

[Blaze]

Okay, so the autoloader idea is a bust; for example, a bolt autoloader loads “bolts”, which the storm bolter doesn’t recognize. Changing it to “bolt_wood” lets the turret recognize it, but the entire vehicle menu becomes impossible to interact with since “bolt_wood” isn’t a basic ammo type and it starts spamming errors.

So turrets, for the most part, will stay as they are. Though I do plan to have new stuff once I have the time.

I could add acid turrets, but then there’s the issue of balance. Acid isn’t very damaging and takes more time to make as acid rain was removed a long time ago; and having acid turrets would render acid bombs more or less useless.

Water + Sand = Waterblaster ammo?

I could probably work blob turrets somewhere.

For EMP turrets I’ll need more info on whether on_hit effects can target specific monster types.

[Coolthulhu]

For EMP turrets I’ll need more info on whether on_hit effects can target specific monster types.

Currently EMP turrets aren’t possible with jsons alone. They’d be easy to code, but impossible to just mod in at the moment.
Plus, even if you implemented them, right now they’d attack everything including EMP immune critters.

If you wanted the autoloaders to work, you’d need to make the ammo type, default ammo of that type and ammo item all have the exact same id. Not very convenient.

I didn’t check if you updated the mod, but if your old ammo costs are set to low values (or even 0), you may want to rebalance them. When you created the mod, fuel consumption values were hardcoded and I think I saw some zeros here and there. Now they properly check for tags like FIRE_100 and only weapons with CHARGE tag have hardcoded values.

[Blaze]

So I fleshed out the thoughts on some “other” types of additions.

• Blob Additions
  Blob parts are made using blob globs and other materials.
  They’re powered by more blob globs.
  Blob globs can be “fed” as well as harvested, though this takes time.
  Do not require tools to be installed.
  Blob recipes use chemistry instead of mechanics/fabrication.
  Recipes will require a bit of human blood.

Blob “fuel” is separated into blob globs and blob drops. The exchange rate is approximately 200 drops for 1 glob. (I may need to alter the existing blob glob recipe for balance).

I plan on adding more than just turrets too, try combining a large clump of blob globs, make it absorb a whole bunch of superglue, and have it roll around on a bed of pebbles; and there you have an giant rolling wheel of death. I’ll probably stretch things a bit for other parts.

• Fungal Additions
  Fungal parts are “grown” from mycus fruit.
  They use said “fertilizer” at first, and are self-propagating.
  Like blob additions, they do not require tools to be installed.
  Still have to figure out what skill to use.

Fungal Fertilizer would have to be crafted from liquid fertilizer and other items. This requires mycus fruit in order to give the mycus mutation line a bit of a boost until it’s more fleshed out.

Fungal fertilizer requires a fair amount of resources and time, so the turrets are quite powerful.

Fungal Spine: Fires a powerful “Fungal Lance” at enemies. That lance can be collected for crafting
Fungal Column: Fires a “Fungal” Tendril", that spears through multiple enemies. Can also be collected for crafting.
Fungal Colony: Fires a “Spike Pod” that acts as a fragmentation grenade. It leaves behind a fungal pod that can be collected for crafting.

The fungal lances, fungal tendrils, and fungal pods can be disassembled into fungal spikes, fungal filaments, and fungal spores. These 6 materials (along with mycus fruit) will serve as the crafting materials that will create all fungal parts. I plan on adding more than just turrets so you might just be able to literally “grow” the parts for an entire vehicle with enough material. (A fungal engine might be a bit of a stretch though).

Thoughts?

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“Blaze, post:105, topic:7616”]Fungal Spine: Fires a powerful “Fungal Lance” at enemies. That lance can be collected for crafting
Fungal Column: Fires a “Fungal” Tendril", that spears through multiple enemies. Can also be collected for crafting.
Fungal Colony: Fires a “Spike Pod” that acts as a fragmentation grenade. It leaves behind a fungal pod that can be collected for crafting.

The fungal lances, fungal tendrils, and fungal pods can be disassembled into fungal spikes, fungal filaments, and fungal spores. These 6 materials (along with mycus fruit) will serve as the crafting materials that will create all fungal parts. I plan on adding more than just turrets so you might just be able to literally “grow” the parts for an entire vehicle with enough material. (A fungal engine might be a bit of a stretch though).[/quote]

Spine and column are not possible with jsons alone.
Lance would be easy if it was the ammo. Then you would just add RECOVER_X tag to it. Making the gun grow it just before firing it would take either an ugly hack (code, not jsons) or an ammo substitution code. I plan to write ammo substitution some time, but I’m currently maintaining 2 vehicle-related PRs, so it may take a week or more before I can implement it.
Column sounds easy to code. I wrote similar behavior for railgun, but didn’t PR it yet, because it would conflict with my more important PR (the first of the 2 above).
Spike pod is easy if it is supposed to drop on the spot of use (like a shell) and harder than lance if on the spot it hits.

I’d go light on number of new materials. “Less is more”, especially since most of the fungal stuff is supposed to grow and thus probably be malleable.

Fungal materials could work nicely with boats - fungus is probably very light.

[KA101]

Mycus fruit is designed to sustain a native guide, not to be weaponized. I think I’ve got a working idea for how to convey Mycus recipes (ugly hack, but all my code is) so I’m hoping to get the gardening line operational before the new year.

Fungal weaponry isn’t impossible–the tendrils certainly have hard points–but would be Expensive on a vehicle scale. You’re talking a similar investment to making the tendrils a Fungal Tower uses for self-defense (not the ones it spawns). I’m not sold on making a full vehicle kit, sorry.

As for the blob idea, I’m not sure why it would need human blood for the purpose and the superglue’d pebbles seem more like a DDA’d chocolate truffle or something. :-/

Blob parts probably wouldn’t work too well with traditionally-operating vehicle machinery as the parts tend to run fairly fast and/or fairly hot. Closest we’ve got to that is the FNaF modpack, and there the goo’s animating the animatronics on its own. (And it’s not mainline anyway–not sure whether the blob can usefully interface with wholly inorganic material.)

So. Fungal vehicles aren’t likely. Blob-based parts for vehicles are likewise not optimal, but making a corpse-based shell around a vehicle and letting the blob rez that (with some control electrodes–no promises that you’ll be able to control the thing!) might theoretically work with the lore. Jabbernaut, go!

[Blaze]

I don’t really know much about fungus lore, so I based it on conjecture and stretched a bit when needed.

Yeah, I know about mycus fruits, but the closest thing is marloss seeds, I thought about extracting the seed from the fruit, but mycus fruits don’t have seeds.

Human blood was an idea from someone else. Something like “Imprinting” the blob so we wouldn’t need computer parts.

The Spine was a bit of a tough sell for me as well, as I’m not aware of any fungus that creates anything similar hard structures.
As for the column, perhaps instead of a a spear-tendril it’d be more like a whip. That would explain the parts falling off as damaged lashes would need to be replaced.

The vehicle wouldn’t be literally grown from scratch of course, you’d make structures by guiding the growth through pre-placed objects, which is where the fungal materials come in.

Same thing for blob-based vehicle parts. Blob plating would be getting the blob to live on an existing plating. Blobs excel at absorbing impact damage, so it’d absorb the damage before the plating does, and then reform once the offending object is removed.

For most of the blob ideas, I got them from Amorphous+. The Grinder is a giant blob that secretes an adhesive and rolls around in rock beds, gathering stones and then compacting its shell. The idea was based on that. Same thing for the blob spike spitter, it’d take the sand you threw in, calcify it into spikes and then spit them out.

But yes, maybe I did jump the gun a bit by mentioning fully-blob/fungus made vehicles.

[KA101]

Unfortunately, Wiki doesn’t have anything on Amorphous+ so that’s not a useful reference.

KA101 isn’t in the habit of googling strange anime-sounding things.

Re lack of fungal building mat’l: That’s why I mentioned that Mycus isn’t complete. I’d like to work in a few more mutations and restricted recipes so folks could cultivate the various higher-end fungi and ultimately make all the Christmases be grey; side effect of that would be having stuff that might make a better growth medium.

(You didn’t post anything about a blob spike spitter. np.)

Blob plating isn’t a bad idea but I’m not sure how effective it would be. Fungal plating could certainly work–there’s tons of precedent for towns getting fungalized–but whether it’d take much punishment before exploding into spores is another story. Most difficult part would be making sure your fungus didn’t attach the unit to the ground.

[Blaze]

Amorphous+ is an old (by almost a decade) flash game about blob creatures called Glooples. I sorta drew a resemblance.

Re lack of fungal building mat'l: That's why I mentioned that Mycus isn't complete. I'd like to work in a few more mutations and restricted recipes so folks could cultivate the various higher-end fungi and ultimately make all the Christmases be grey; side effect of that would be having stuff that might make a better growth medium.

I'm all for waiting for people to do my work for me :V

Blob plating isn't a bad idea but I'm not sure how effective it would be. Fungal plating could certainly work--there's tons of precedent for towns getting fungalized--but whether it'd take much punishment before exploding into spores is another story. Most difficult part would be making sure your fungus didn't attach the unit to the ground.

Fungus plating is doubtful. The way I envisioned fungal parts were lightweight, but only slightly resistant to impacts as mushrooms tend to be spongy instead of hard. The big selling point is that they're easy to replace due to being able to create their own parts (albiet by using what is essentially super-ultra fertilizer).

[MarcoVGnG]

Hasn’t been merged because you’re self-conflicting IIRC and BevapDin isn’t thrilled with some of your code. :-/

Anyway to see this Christmass present soon or is it definitively a lost hope?
It would be a shame to forget a mid/end-game improvement which doesn t broke lore or game-line…

[TheFlame52]

I am all for fungus vehicles. I may just abandon my world and move to a new one because of that.

As for fungal engines, why not fungal ‘legs’ that act like both wheels and weak engines?

[KA101]

[quote=“KA101, post:99, topic:7616”]Hasn’t been merged because you’re self-conflicting IIRC and BevapDin isn’t thrilled with some of your code. :-/

Anyway to see this Christmass present soon or is it definitively a lost hope?
It would be a shame to forget a mid/end-game improvement which doesn t broke lore or game-line…[/quote]

It’s had some testing problems. Hoping to get it in tonight.

[TheFlame52]

Tiny bug - lead balls are in electronic parts, not ammo.

[Blaze]

Last bit of tweaking before adding any new stuff, it feels like turrets get more inaccurate every new experimental I upgrade to.

OP is up-to-date as always.

[KA101]

[quote=“Blaze, post:115, topic:7616”]Last bit of tweaking before adding any new stuff, it feels like turrets get more inaccurate every new experimental I upgrade to.

OP is up-to-date as always.[/quote]

Just landed some more updates, mostly fixes to the manual-targeting methodology.

[Coolthulhu]

Last bit of tweaking before adding any new stuff, it feels like turrets get more inaccurate every new experimental I upgrade to.

Manual targeting didn’t make them less accurate, though it did introduce automatic misses to creatures under turret vehicle’s roof (including player).
AI update made turrets more reluctant to use AoE weapons, especially close up, but still no less accurate than before.

You can now define range for your turrets. Default range is 12. Turret range ignores weapon range when auto-aiming, but respects it when aiming manually.

[Bumpkin]

Hi, love the mod. I found a bug ; small and little water tanks have their capacity set to match gasoline measurements, not water (6000 and 650 respectively) so you can put a crazy amount of water into them. For comparison the capacity of a regular water tank is 400. Without installing a little tank holds 5 water and small holds 45.

[terroroid]

Turbo laser cannon can make a mince meat of hordes. Is Fusion blaster arm really that common in ant hills?

[Blaze]

Okay so I had some time and looked over stuff, and then did stuff, here’s the new things.

-Water containers fixed.
-Dual/Quad SMGs replaced with single SMG (9mm/22/45 burst 5), Rifle (223, burst 3), and Anti-Material Rifle (.50, single shot) turrets. They are also significantly easier to make.
-Ripper and Shredder are separate recipes.
-You can rip powered turret frames off existing SMG/Military/Laser turrets. (You lose the gun, it’s a recipe, not a deconstruction.)
-Loads of miscellaneous balancing changes. Turrets weigh less due to slightly reduced recipe costs.
-Gatling Cannon Turret renamed Rotary Cannon. Is now a single shot, but changes from 8 barrels to 3, vastly reducing weight, volume, and recipe cost. Can be installed as Rotary Cannon (Paper Cartridges), Burst Cannon (Blunderbuss ammo), or Flak Cannon (Shotgun Shells)
-Slingshot Cannon, Scorpion, Grenade Launcher, and similar long range weapons now have long range.
-Effect payloads for the Scorpion.

Tentatively added blob turrets. So far only 3 turrets. The resources to make them are fairly easy to get, but are quite time intensive (Most parts work like the kiln does, so you won’t be standing around and can run multiple creations at once.)

The plan is for Blob parts to be heavier and weaker than the parts they’re based on, but you don’t need tools to install/remove them; and if destroyed; they just fall off and can be reinstalled.

Blob turrets are, unsurprisingly, not completely balanced.

Link in the OP is updated as always.

Todo:
Move most stuff into books so as to avoid clogging up the recipe list.
More blob stuff, frames, plating, wheels and engines, and of course, balancing.
Have robot disassembly recipes separated into stages. Nothing more annoying than spending 12 hours taking apart a tank drone only for a raccoon to attack you and make you lose all your progress.