[MOD] (Alpha 7) Mining&Co.: Security enforcement (V1.5 12-11-2014)

[Rikiki]

Mining&Co.: Security enforcement


  Dear customers, some of you recently reported a bounce of pirate activity in the rim sector. Mining & Co. is always trying to get its customers happy and "A dead customer is a bad customer!".
So we are proud to present you the last creation of out Security enforcement department: laser weapons!
Combined with our new alarm system, the alert speaker, you will never get cought sleeping in your bed during a pirate raid! (a light system is also provided for deaf people).



Features

1. Laser weapons

Our product range has been designed to satisfy most demand:

• The standard laser rifle is the base of any defense.
  
  
  
  • High range
  • Medium firing rate
  • Medium damage
• The prism rifle is generally used by shock troops during pirate nests cleansing.
  
  
  
  • Low range
  • Medium firing rate
  • High damage
• The gatling laser is here to deal with massive invasion of local fauna:
  
  
  
  • Medium range
  • Low firing rate
  • Low damage
  • 20 shots per burst!
• The heavy lasgun has been particularly engineered to repel heavily armor targets:
  
  
  
  • Short range
  • Low firing rate
  • High damage
• The high precision lasgun is the deadliest weapon at long range:
  
  
  
  • Very high range
  • Very low firing rate
  • High damage
  • Once the target is acquired, the shot is assured

2. Alert speaker

This device as its name indicates will warn you of a threat. According to the current level of danger, the alert speaker will emit a light and a siren sound:

• No danger: green light, no sound
• Low danger: yellow waving light, 2 loud sirens
• High danger: red flashing light, 4 alert sirens

As every good manager knows, some pression makes always your guys work harder and faster (joking! ).
It is the same for your colonist when they have to defend their lives!
=> a low or high level of danger provides your colonists a bonus of speed and aiming time as well as a boost of adrenaline.

Warning! Prolonged exposition to danger tends to tire up your workers!

User manual

Here is the simplified tech tree:

Code Select Expand


                                                             => Prism rifle/crysteel
                                                             => Laser Gatling
Integrated circuits board => Targeting module => Laser rifle => Heavy lasgun
                                                             => High precision lasgun
                          => Alert speaker

Please find the complete tech tree here (will be updated soon).


How to obtain your own laser weapons:

• Buy some from weapon trader

OR

• Build a security workbench
• Research requirements (Integrated circuits board) from the Common techtree
• Research the Weapons techtree to unlock the desired weapon
• Craft the required ingrdients: energy pack (Electronics workbench) and targeting module and weapon parts (Security workbench)
• Craft the desired weapon

How to build an alert speaker:

• Must be built near a wall
• Must be powered to work

Technical notes

This mod defines custom XML parameters. This section will explain how to use and tweak them.
(Coming soon! But you may still experiment by yourself, little impatients... )

Showroom

Heavy lasgun warming up (mind the custom dynamic warmup effect):


Heavy lasgun firing:


=> Alert speaker in action! <=



Technical support

Mining & Co. is continuously trying to improving its product to raise its customers satisfaction.
Please leave us our feedback. Balancing cannot be done without you, loyal customer!

Next steps

• Replace the security workbench temporary texture.
• Balance improvements based on your feedbacks!


• Another item is in study by our engineers => alert speaker.

Limitation: only the standard "laser rifle projectile" is working for turrets.

Changelog

Code Select Expand


V1.0
* Initial release

V1.1
* Completely reviewed the prices and values.
* Added a proper texture to the security workbench.
* Simplified the dynamic recipe addition.
* Increased laser gatling damage (4 --> 8 = minigun damage)

V1.2
* Correction of the workbench "lost recipe" bug

V1.3
* Added alert speaker.

V1.4
* Added prism rifle and crysteel.
* Correction of various possible exploits (droping malus, ...)
* Standard laser beam is now usable by turrets (laser with custom warmup will not be supported, feel free to code it yourself! ;))

V1.5
* Finally corrected a bug where only the first built alert speaker would give bonus (Shinzy's bug I guess :D).



Compatibility notes

Mining & Co. is trying to make its mods modular. However, you need the Mining & Co. Common mod.
You need to activate Common mod first, for example:
- Mining & Co. Common
- Mining & Co. Weapons
- Mining & Co. AlertSpeaker


Credits

Laser rifle, laser gatling and high precision lasgun are based on textures provided by Viperlol. Thank you again mate!
The laser rifle sound is from Werne (see the corresponding Nexus page).
LowDangerAlarm.wav: see this page.

Modders note

You may be interrested in the following features:

• Recipes at Security workbenches become available according to researches
• Custom projectile warmup effects
• Draw dynamic textures
• Use of "warmup" pawn stance
• Mood and (light) apparel management
• Use of dynamic glowers

License

You are free to get inspiration from this little work and include it in any other mod/modpack. Just put a link to this thread so people can use it as a standalone version too.
So this is basically licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Note to modpacker: not that I don't want to help, but I have very little time to mod/play so I may not be very fast to answer integration questions.


Download



M&Co.: Common V3.2
M&Co.: Common V3.2 source

M&Co.: Security enforcement V1.5
M&Co.: Security enforcement V1.5 source

[WolfgangPolska]

It looks great ! However, I'll wait untill more "stable" release .

[Rikiki]

Oh, it is stable, I just need to rework the first post and the security workbench texture.

It needs surely some balance tweaks however, like any new mod...

[mrofa]

Thats a quite nice codding on beams, its so nice that i didnt understand a thing which is why i think its nice

[Rikiki]

  Just ask away!
I will be pleased to help you understand and improve/use it.

[Rikiki]

Hi Canute, thanks for the feedback.

About the continuous beam weapon:

• the small continuous damage with 100% accuracy is possible: just make a mix of the HighPrecisionLasgun (100% acuracy) and LaserGatling (multiple burstshots).
• however, there are several points to note:
  
  
  • I already tried to do this and the graphical result is poor on moving targets. I did not figured how to get the Vector3 position of the target so the beam will "jump" from one cell to another when the pawn is moving.
  • 100% accuracy weapon breaks the game feeling (a crashed civilian is not the best person to handle and aim with a heavy lasgun you know ), so this gun would be a little bit OP - or need a huuuuge warmup time.

I will try to work on this again but don't expect a fast result...

About the prices, yeah I know this is not well balanced and that is why your feedback is precious! I will look into it for next version.

[Rikiki]

Mmmh, I am not sure about the high precision lasgun range.
I wanted it to be 100% accurate with a very high range to represent the fact laser ray is more precise than a bullet.
This is balanced by the high warmup time and lower damage than M-24 (35 instead of 40) so it cannot insta-kill with a shot in the torso.

I will add a poll to see what want most users.

Thanks again for the feedback!

[Rikiki]

Nope, weapons with custom warmup (Heavy and High precision lasguns) do not take into account the pawn firing stat (Trigger happy or Carefull shooter). It is for now a fixed time because it broke the warmup effect.
Buuut, I don't see the point equiping a psychopath with a fine and precise sniper... Better give him a minigun

I will look again to try and correct it tonight.

Still no answer to the poll. For now, Lee-enfield has 37 range, M-24 has 45, so why not a High prec lasgun with 50? See it as a superior sniper and mind the price to make it (1100 instead of 370, this is very expensive I believe)
I have not yet tested it against a real siege party though. I'm a modder, no time to play you know

[sanya02]

.

[eatKenny]

hi, i've been trying to implant your laser weapon to my turret mod to creat some over-powered fun turrets, i made a turret-base and add your laser rifle as weapon on the top of it but seems not working properly(might have something to do with custom warm-up?). since i'm not a coder i'd like to ask for your help.

see below: Laser rifle works fine in colonist's hands but dosent work on a turret

[Rikiki]

Oh yeah, I had to make some choices to simplify the code and those kind of projectiles are not supprted for the turrets.
It may change in the future but I am not a fan of the turrets packs so... maybe not...

If you are not a coder, sorry but I have no time to implement this for now. If you can modify C# code, then go into the source and look for all pawn references. You must then test each time if it is a turret building and a pawn before getting the right variable (firingPawn.equipment.Primary...).

Sorry, but I have really too few time and I must concentrate my efforts on things I have in mind for now. Let's hope another "touch-to-everything" modder might want to help you though...

[jonbrant]

What's with all the QQ over balance? If you don't like it, don't use it. I'm also having the issue with ED Turrets. 10 units on map and getting 1 frame every few seconds due to all the errors D:

My take on the laser sniper rifle: Increase the cooldown enough for the sniper to close the range gap

[Weyrling]

Excellent set of mods you've made so far, I've been using them for a day or two, the mining system is excellent, and crafting weapons is awfully nifty, but the laser weapons seem a bit awkward in practice.
Note: Potentially science-based intuition ahead.

Regarding laser weapons in general I believe the bottleneck should be cooldown and not aiming/charging(?) duration, lasers within (relatively) short ranges travel nigh instantaneously so they would take less time to aim than a conventional weapon. However they're one of the few weapons that would require a literal cool down period after the lens(es) heat up. Your lasers seem to work the opposite way, they take a long time to fire but have no cool down period (Are the energy packs charging them at the speed of potato?).

I'm not sure what the balance would look like, but the cooldown would probably have to be much longer than the current warmup time, making it great for alpha strikes but bad at prolonged engagements.

[Rikiki]

Thanks for this really interresting feedback!
Here are some answers to your remarks/notes:

but the laser weapons seem a bit awkward in practice.

Precision is determined by
- the weapon accuracy: M&Co. laser weapons are already very high compared to core weapons, I may tweak this in the future based on general feedback,
- pawn shooting stat: I want to keep this important as it is really one of the core game mechanics,
- other factors (light, weather, target size,...)

I believe the bottleneck should be cooldown and not aiming/charging

You are right but:
- game mechanics offer a nice "aiming pie" warmup animation whereas cooldown only completely block your pawn for no obvious reason,
- to justify the laser weapons high accuracy (especially the high precision lasgun), they all integrate a targeting module which in counter-part needs some time to acquire its target (balance, balance, ... always trying my best).

would require a literal cool down period after the lens(es) heat up

You can still imagine it is part of the warmup/acquisition time.

Are the energy packs charging them at the speed of potato?

You got me with this!

making it great for alpha strikes but bad at prolonged engagements.

You are surely right, batteries would need to be changed often but soldiers could carry some as any other ammunition.
Plus, I don't think this advanced feature would fit well in the current game phase (and it would require a lot of additional work!!! )

Thanks again for the comments and see you soon!

[Rikiki]

Mining & Co. Security enforcement V1.1 is released.
See main post for the changelog.