PC V2.0 Storms Brewing Dev Diary

[bdubyah]

Yeah, having item mods be able to show their stats properly in the UI when equipped would be nice. I have power armor that slots into the cosmetic slot of a piece of armor, where the cosmetic piece actually is what gives you the armor, but if you just click on the frame it shows 0 armor even with the mod installed. You can see it by clicking the mod itself, of course, but it throws people off. Would be nice if armor updated its stats based on the mods installed in it.

 

[Khalagar]

I just wish it was a different buff like place a extra robot down and have 3 sledges!!!

This. I'm not getting lost in the semantics, I'm saying that either way, it sucks for a mastery to have a wasted perk level. It feels bad, and no other mastery perk has to deal with it. Int should just have 5 distinct mastery perks that each do something useful

 

[sheep]

I was intrigued, so I downloaded the mod.

It sets the min_count to 1 for every POI they listed in the rwgmixer. It also sets the bias to 20 for each of those POIs.

First, setting min_count to 1 will be decently effective, but not perfect. Those POIs still depend on a Tile appearing that will support their placement and enough of those Tiles appearing to give each POI a chance. The modlet cannot make that happen. In one case (at least) it even configures a POI that isn't tagged to appear in the game, so that one will never get placed regardless of the rwgmixer.xml.

Secondly, setting the bias to 20 just tells me they don't understand how bias is used. Doing that selectively overwhelms the bias calculations such that the tier of other POIs won't be relevant anymore and it might mess up trader placement. Doing that across all the POIs just puts all of the other POIs at the same level as the traders and doesn't otherwise affect the math... unless you add custom POIs (more on that later). Actually, it might move trader placement to last as I don't think they have a tier to add to the calculation. In short, bias and weight options are tricky. You have to know the algorithm to use them effectively.

Third, it overwrites three TFP special cases for rural filler lots, gas stations, and the rural outdoor wedding.

Fourth, none of these changes would apply to any custom POIs you get from other sources. In fact, the bias setting will make any other POIs appear infrequently if at all.

Personally, if you want this rwgmixer, I'd remove all of the bias="20" entries for every line after the "UFFBASEE" comment. If you still want to mess with min/max appearing, then go for it.

Thanks for digging in and taking a look at this. Good to know that it may have some issues in its assumptions/approach. Is it worth touch rwgmixer at all? What would you do if your goal was to increase the number of buildings on a map (not to an insane amount, but just to ensure more POIs and more skyscrapers and other difficult buildings are out there)?

 

[Old Crow]

It is not, but I sent it to Allan.

Cool, thanks!

 

[Jost Amman]

What would you do if your goal was to increase the number of buildings on a map (not to an insane amount, but just to ensure more POIs and more skyscrapers and other difficult buildings are out there)?

The easiest way to raise the chances without modding is to generate a map 100% flat I think.

 

[Blake_]

@faatal , after much RWG testing I can honestly say that the new tweaks increased density of Wilderness POI and cities, very noticeable in smaller sizes, which is awesome, but of course the old margins where there for a reason, and the moment you made the change roads broke in many places (for example cutted off by an artificially high square-shaped POI margin, uneven terrain patches between roads and POIs... etc.) and I see quite a few instances of a POI too close to the road that is on a hill/mountain, resulting in crazy elevation shenanigans.

Those instances are not exactly game breaking ALL the time, but those POI/Patches are usually a bother to access, and I don't know if you guys need a huge amount of reports or if you are planning some kind of logic update that manages hills/mountains/POI and roads in a stable manner for this version.

Great work on this update, having a blast!

 

[Tete1805]

@faatal how is that 4x12 map going?
Did you set the building on fire trying to generate one?

 

[Outlaw_187]

I gotta say, love that random "thonk" sound when getting hit by vultures or zombies, mainly vultures. I'm guessing this signifies they got a head shot on us.
The sound makes me laugh every time!

 

[Uncle Al]

I gotta say, love that random "thonk" sound when getting hit by vultures or zombies, mainly vultures. I'm guessing this signifies they got a head shot on us.
The sound makes me laugh every time!

There's a very distinctive 'thonk' when you dodge a hit with the agility mastery perk, so if you're perked in agility it'll be that.

 

[schwanz9000]

@faatal Not sure if this is your wheelhouse - Any chance the Stealth Boots mod will start displaying changes on the character sheet soon? Kind of annoying and weird that it says it has a noise reduction, but my boots still show +10% to noise. They also don't display the stamina penalty reduction.

Done, but at the cost of flexibility.
It was originally setup to allow either of two different sets of stats to be used depending if it was installed in Medium or Heavy boots.
Medium = Stamina/s .0562 Noise Increase -10%
Heavy = Stamina/s .09 Noise Increase -20%

I can't have it show two different stats for one item, so I went with a bit higher Stamina/s of .1 and the -10% Noise Increase.
Heavy armor shouldn't get full noise cancellation anyway.

 

[Mister Forgash]

I was trying to hold off until stable to give the new patch a shot, but.. I just couldn't wait any longer. Haven't had time to play much so I can't really comment on how the new patch feels. On that note, I'm withholding judgement until I really know what the new systems will be like, but I want to voice my concerns.
That being, the removal of wet and temperature. I really like the promise of weather survival. and shifting a little bit of the threat away from zombie and just make living day to day take some extra awareness and preparation I haven't experienced any storms outside of a standard rainstorm in the pine forest yet, so again I haven't seen enough of the patch to know what the experience will feel like.
All that said, I really hope we see wet/hot/cold come back in some iteration.. from my understanding storms are currently .. stay inside or take damage which sounds like a boring implementation. .. That's pretty much it. I love the game, I think the pimps do a good job overall, and this time around I have some concerns.. I was expecting this to be a big patch for weather survival and this seems.. a lot more like a side-grade than an upgrade.. Maybe it wont feel that way when I'm in the burnt/desert/snow.. But also maybe there's reassurances that these things will see more work done? .. IDK.. I'm going to hope so, have a good one.

 

[Caelynd Maclyrr]

There's a trade-off there. If you make them rarer then the achievements to get your acclimation badge will take longer. Maybe they're attracted (spawn more often nearer) to people under the effects of a smoothie?

Post automatically merged: Monday at 4:08 PM

Oh, I see I should have read further before replying. I agree with Vaeliorin on this issue.

Perhaps the rate could be higher when in the biome until you have completed the quest, where upon it drops down to the the lower chance level (you "thinned them out").

 

[meganoth]

I was trying to hold off until stable to give the new patch a shot, but.. I just couldn't wait any longer. Haven't had time to play much so I can't really comment on how the new patch feels. On that note, I'm withholding judgement until I really know what the new systems will be like, but I want to voice my concerns.
That being, the removal of wet and temperature. I really like the promise of weather survival. and shifting a little bit of the threat away from zombie and just make living day to day take some extra awareness and preparation I haven't experienced any storms outside of a standard rainstorm in the pine forest yet, so again I haven't seen enough of the patch to know what the experience will feel like.
All that said, I really hope we see wet/hot/cold come back in some iteration.. from my understanding storms are currently .. stay inside or take damage which sounds like a boring implementation. .. That's pretty much it. I love the game, I think the pimps do a good job overall, and this time around I have some concerns.. I was expecting this to be a big patch for weather survival and this seems.. a lot more like a side-grade than an upgrade.. Maybe it wont feel that way when I'm in the burnt/desert/snow.. But also maybe there's reassurances that these things will see more work done? .. IDK.. I'm going to hope so, have a good one.

Can you explain how hot/cold was NOT a boring implementation, in comparison to storms? With hot/cold it was "wear the right clothes or get debuffs". That's pretty much it, in your own words ;-).

Also it seems with the storms there are more options available (most of them the same as you could use with hot/cold): Get into a POI, or build a hut or understand, or use healing potions and weather it out, or flee to another biome.
Also there is the new thing now that zombies run faster when there is a storm!!! That is certainly something new.

Eventually I hope we get a few drinks and candies (EDIT: and weapon mods like Sapeint6 suggested) that protect **partly** from storms. And there could be more: Random chance for zombies to freeze in a snow storm, random chance for them to get picked up and thrown around in a storm. Hot/cold doesn't seem to provide possibilities like this

 

[Sapient6]

I really hope we see wet/hot/cold come back in some iteration

I don't know that I care about the wet/cold/hot mechanics. Those were pretty shallow in the first place and the new biome-specific approach seems like an overall improvement to me. But I think it would be neat to have armor mods that mitigate storm damage a bit. Might tinker with a mod like that if someone else doesn't beat me too it. Like: got the burnt forest badge? Now you know how to make the Cooling Mesh mod (decreases storm damage in the burnt forest, increases snow storm damage).

 

[Treb]

Can anyone confirm if the farming perk increases your chance to get honey from stumps? It doesn't say it does, but I'm pretty positive it does.

I went from getting like 1 honey per 15 stumps, to getting like 5 honey from 8 stumps. I know RNG gonna RNG, but I'm almost positive that going from 0 to 3 in the farming perk is the cause lol




The difference is it's NOT stacking, it flat out replaces the older perk. It's not "stun Baton does X more damage" it's "Int Mastery 5 makes Int Mastery 4 completely cease to exist" which is really weird. Imagine if the Agility perk line went "Chance to cripple enemies legs" and then the very next perk was "100% chance to remove an enemies leg per shot". It would be a really weird progression because one perk was just flat out replaced by the next one

I just looked and not a single other mastery perk is balanced that way. And it's not that it's not good, because it's actually hilariously broken, it's that it robs the Int Mastery of having another perk in it. The int weapons besides stun baton are pretty meh, so that extra mastery perk could do a lot of good instead of just being immediately replaced

It is stacking. Perk 4 takes 1 less hit to charge. Perk 5 takes 3 less hits to charge (hence 0).

Once again, you're just getting angry at semantics.

 

[meganoth]

Those are all completely different because they compound on each other and you know it. Each stage of Archery gives +10% , where as the Int Mastery just flat out invalidates the previous perk entirely. It's not compounding to build on the prior one, it just out and out replaces it

It is compounding. Lets say the stun baton was only charged after hitting stuff 10 times. Now imagine there is a perk so that the baton is charged after only hitting something 9 times. Next point into the perk makes it charged after hitting stuff 8 times. And so on. You can see that each version makes the stun baton slightly better (in the same metric!!) because you have that charge earlier operational again.

Unperked: Charge after 10 hits
Perk 1: Charge after 9 hits
Perk 2: Charge after 8 hits
Perk 3: Charge after 7 hits
Perk 4: Charge after 6 hits
...
Perk 7: Charge after 3 hits
Perk 8: Charge after 2 hits
Perk 9: Charge after 1 hit
Perk 10: Charge after 0 hits (in other words the baton is always charged)

Do you see the progression? Do you see how the baton gets more and more powerful by allowing it to deal a stun earlier? And do you see now how the baton gets more powerful each step on the same scale of "duration until charged". Each step is an upgrade of the previous.

Also the difference is it's a mastery, so losing one of your main capstone abilities hurts extra hard too. I definitely agree the full mastery is hilariously strong and will almost certainly get nerfed

They should replace the 5th level int mastery with something else like "Robotic Turrets now stagger enemies" or at least slow them or *something*. Currently they don't really do anything because enemies run through, and if you have a set up so that the enemies can't just run past them, they don't do enough damage to justify all the time spent mining.

 

[zztong]

Thanks for digging in and taking a look at this. Good to know that it may have some issues in its assumptions/approach. Is it worth touch rwgmixer at all? What would you do if your goal was to increase the number of buildings on a map (not to an insane amount, but just to ensure more POIs and more skyscrapers and other difficult buildings are out there)?

The creator and I chatted and I gave him a bunch of information. My understanding is he's changed the bias issue and he's changed his replacement rwgmixer.xml file into a modlet so you don't have to replace the game's file. It will be much more friendly to other modlets now.

Related to your goal, we might be better talking about this elsewhere from the Dev Diary, but I'll pass along some generalities based on my observations with 1.0 RWG. (I've not yet generated lots of worlds in 2.0 and run stats on them.)

With an 8k map and the game's rwgmixer, you're likely to see every POI get used and many of them used several times. If you just want more POIs, then set the number of Settlements and the Number of Wilderness POIs to the highest setting. It's the 8k and larger worlds where I start to worry about having enough variety.

Once you start talking about smaller maps, then you get fewer possible locations for POIs and then it becomes more likely that RWG cannot use all of the POIs available to it. Places in the world become more unique.

RWG's priorities, based entirely on the "score" comment in TFP's rwgmixer.xml file, will place higher tier POIs before lower tier POIs, unless you get in and start messing with bias and weight settings. TFP gives the traders a very high bias, but they also limit the number appearing, so basically, they'll place traders first into locations that can have them. Unless you want more or fewer traders, I wouldn't mess with their trader configuration. It's a bit of a delicate balance between available spots on tiles, the bias setting, and max appearing settings.

New with 2.0 appears to be a bias of 5 for rural filler. I suspect this is because the rural district wraps cities and it gets lots of tiles, so it needs lots of POIs. The rural filler POIs aren't as obvious as farms and businesses, so you perceive less repetition. The two places you're likely to see lots of repeated/duplicated POIs are: rural district, wilderness. That modlet, by changing the bias for those rural fillers to 1, should lead to more buildings in the rural district. I might go along with that change, actually, but you have to remember my modlet is also trying to deal with duplication in that area, and I add lots of rural content, so TFP's bias of 5 might not be needed when there's more choice available for RWG.

If you want more Tier 5 POIs, you have several possibilities:

1. Set the bias on those to around 2.
2. Install more (there are custom POIs available).
3. Copy existing POIs and give the copies a slightly different filename; RWG will see them as if they were different POIs.

 

[LewZephyr]

@funpimps in general.
My group hit that big Quarry yesterday and man, that was a fun romp.

Props to FP team for a great update. Very happy and all in my group are as well.
We all appreciate the tweaks from the last exp update. looking at you Pack Mule.

 

[Outlaw_187]

There's a very distinctive 'thonk' when you dodge a hit with the agility mastery perk, so if you're perked in agility it'll be that.

Ah, maybe that's what it is. I suppose that would make more sense. A hit would "thonk" everytime right?
Anyhow, still think it's funny as hell and please Pimps....dont remove it.....please

 

[zztong]

If you want more Tier 5 POIs, you have several possibilities:

@sheep I left off one obvious one. You could set the min number appearing. That's more like a suggestion to RWG as depending on its Tile choices it cannot always accommodate the setting, but outside of downtown, commercial, and industrial, it's got a good shot of playing out like you'd like.

You could also increase the size of settlements, but don't go too crazy with that. Also know that the bigger you make your settlements the more they are going to all look the same because there are only so many POIs to go around -- and that's the heart of the issue. If you want variety, you need more content.