Vehicle Show and Tell

[Lomax]

Registered here so I could resurrect this excellent thread (hey, it’s a zombie game, geddit?) and show off my WIP mobile base, the Ursa II (yes, there was an Ursa I, which I eventually outgrew and stripped for parts). It took me around two in-game seasons of 91 days to get this far:

The welding rig on the back is a docked single tile vehicle which I use when working on the Ursa, since I’m rarely within range of the fixed welding rig To reduce weight the inner framework is all made from extra light frames (82 in total; took me ages to collect them all!), surrounded on the outside by a layer of heavy-duty frames with military composite plating (52 pcs, took me another age to collect it all!). The whole thing rests on 12 32" armored wheels, and is surprisingly easy to drive, if a bit sluggish. I had intended to double up the wheels under the main cabin, but found that the vehicle had become too heavy to jack up by then Energy is provided by 36 upgraded solar panels, and stored in 8 storage batteries. Hope to get to Mechanics 12 some day, so that I can add a gas turbine

There’s till some room left for adding more equipment and/or storage - but I fear I will eventually outgrow this vehicle too, and am already thinking about what an Ursa III might look like; I may have to go to 11 tiles in width for that…

[Lomax]

The “control desks” look pretty neat at night; there’s an atomic night-light in each one for illumination.

[Lomax]

If you’re wondering about the unusual looking tiles, I cloned the cargo carrier to a bunch of new parts with different names and sprites to make their contents easier to remember, and added a “control desk” which is just a copy of the normal workbench with a different sprite. I also tweaked the floor trunk and vehicle heater graphics, and made the vehicle heater passable:

Having differently named storage units is useful when I forget which sprite represents what, as the game will tell me when I put something in the wrong place, e.g. “You put your flamethrower in the Ursa II’s canned food storage”

[Mantar]

That’s a pretty clever bit of modding!

[Colin_Browne]

Wow. That’s an absolutely amazingly big vehicle. I’m impressed!

[Lomax]

Thanks guys! I’m already working on the layout for an even bigger, gargantuan mobile base, with separate cabins for four NPCs. It’s still very much on the drawing board, but looks like with will require a footprint of 11x30 tiles

I’ve tried to design the layout with the following goals:

• Crafting should be divided into zones (cooking, chemical/medical and fabrication)
• Relevant materials should be “gettable” from the crafting position
• Relevant recipe books should be “readable” from the crafting position
• First aid and vehicle controls should be available close to entrances
• Storage units should be optimised for advanced inventory management (3x3)
• No external equipment should protrude beyond the framework
• Entrances should be heavily defended
• Crafting positions should be close to windows
• The outline should be more “interesting” than a simple rectangle

It will take an enormous effort to gather the materials for this monster. Can’t wait to get started

[Miloch]

Nice Lomax! Good to see the old topic in use again!

[Lomax]

Got the outline frame completed after about two weeks of game time - and this time I remembered to fit the wheels before adding too much weight I hope 14 wheels will be enough because there will be no easy way to add more later!

The rest of the framework will be filled in with extra light frames, but I need to find more electric vehicles to scavenge them from. So far I’ve dragged 4 electric cars, one tour bus(!), two APCs and five Humvees to my base, and I am slowly breaking them up for parts. This will take some time…

[zantanzuken]

somethin i’ve been working on as i go from town to town… upgrading it as i find new vehicles to tear apart.

[Lomax]

Looks tough! What’s JP8 fuel?

[mlangsdorf]

It’s a kerosene-diesel substitute used by the US military to fuel jets and ground vehicles so that the Army only needs to ship one flammable liquid around.

[zantanzuken]

yeah its ‘basically diesel’

… i havent actually figured out if the engine will swap over to the diesel i DO have, instead of only using JP8, so if it doesnt i’ll have to go engine hunting, but i also have spare large electric engines, so i’ll probably still be able to move around regardless.

[Miloch]

When did they add JP8 in the game? I’ve dealt with that stuff IRL.

[zantanzuken]

i do have on ‘blaze industries’ mod, which adds a lot of vehicle related stuff, so its probably that.

[GiggleGrassGatherer]

No, JP8 is vanilla. I can’t say for sure but I think it was in some 0.E experimental.

@zantanzuken

i havent actually figured out if the engine will swap over to the diesel i DO have, instead of only using JP8

Diesel engines can use diesel, JP8, biodiesel and some other thing I don’t remember now. Some oil, I think. You can select which one to use by “control multiple engines” vehicle command - it’ll show multiple lines per diesel engine with same engine and different fuels.

[Colin_Browne]

IIRC it’s lamp oil, at a reduced efficiency. Which is interesting, it’s much easier to create than biodiesel, but less effective.

[Colin_Browne]

Oh wow. That’s incredible! I’m looking forward to seeing it progress! Seeing your custom modded parts makes me want to make some, too. A custom engine that can use all the fuel types would be interesting… I’ve just never modded CDDA before…

[Lomax]

It was pretty easy; I simply copied the relevant bits of JSON in /data/json/vehicleparts/vehicle_parts.json and edited as needed:

{
"type": "vehicle_part",
"id": "cargo_space",
"name": { "str": "cargo space" },
"symbol": "=",
"looks_like": "box",
"color": "light_gray",
"broken_symbol": "#",
"broken_color": "dark_gray",
"durability": 250,
"size": 1000,
"item": "cargo_rack",
"location": "center",
"requirements": {
  "install": { "skills": [ [ "mechanics", 1 ] ], "time": "60 m", "using": [ [ "welding_standard", 5 ] ] },
  "removal": { "skills": [ [ "mechanics", 2 ] ], "time": "30 m", "using": [ [ "vehicle_weld_removal", 1 ] ] },
  "repair": { "skills": [ [ "mechanics", 2 ] ], "time": "60 m", "using": [ [ "welding_standard", 5 ] ] }
},
"flags": [ "BOARDABLE", "CARGO", "COVERED" ],
"breaks_into": [
  { "item": "steel_lump", "count": [ 6, 8 ] },
  { "item": "steel_chunk", "count": [ 6, 8 ] },
  { "item": "scrap", "count": [ 6, 8 ] }
],
"damage_reduction": { "all": 28 }
},

Copy/paste the entire block above and change these two lines:

"id": "cargo_space_weapon",
"name": { "str": "gun storage" },

Save the JSON file and hey presto, you now have a new part you can install in vehicles. Just be careful to keep commas and curly brackets in the right places - I’d recommend making a backup copy of vehicle_parts.json before making changes. To get a custom sprite you’ll need to open the spritesheet (/gfx/RetroDays+Tileset/tiles.png in my case) in a photo editor (I use GIMP) and add a new sprite to the end (10 x 10 pixels). Then open tile_config.json in the same folder and add an entry for your new item, e.g.

    {
      "id": "vp_cargo_space_weapon",
      "fg": 3097,
      "rotates": false,
      "multitile": true,
      "additional_tiles": [ { "id": "broken", "fg": 155 } ]
    },

“fg” is the number of the sprite you want the item to use, starting from top left of spritesheet (yeah, there really are more than three thousand sprites in there). Note that you need to prefix the item id with “vp_” (for vehicle part) in order for the game to find it (this had me stumped at first). Happy modding!

[Lomax]

Re. your universal fuel engine idea: that sounds a lot like a steam engine, which you should be able to run on anything that burns…

[GiggleGrassGatherer]

We do have steam engines in the game but IIRC it only works on (char)coal.
There IS a class of engines which can burn both gasoline and all the things diesel can burn, too: the gas turbines. It guzzles fuel very fast but you can achieve really crazy speed using it.