Topics

I just saw that Tynan has exactly 3800 posts.

*yay!*

It's great when developers communicate with their players.

Awesome.

So when the world is generated it seems to set up all the factions that will appear on that world.

If people only play the vanilla game, that's fine, but if anybody wants to use a mod that adds or changes existing factions then they have to create a new world every time they use a different mod or a mod is changed.

If my development of Divergence of Civilization mod, I've had to make 40+ new worlds. They're easy enough to delete, but it seems to me that the system could be a little more mod-friendly on this front.

Also, in the future I think it'll cause some problems for non-mod savvy people that try to use them. If someone plays on a world generated with no mods then tries to use a faction-adding mod it won't show an error, but when in-game the factions won't be generated.

I don't think it's a "bug" per se, but it could definitely be better than how it is now. At the very least when selecting a world after pressing the "new colony" button, it should display which factions are present.

Description:
JonoRig requested a way to disable the vanilla grenade and incendiary weapons, so I threw together this liitle mod to do just that.

They shouldn't show up in the hands of raiders, or even with traders.

So far as I know, it should work fine with the vanilla game, and any mod that doesn't add both new factions and new weapons. But I can't guarantee anything.
 
The assorted Mortar types are still all available.

Things Disabled:

Grenadier mercenary type. (you can still spawn them with the developer tool, but they shouldn't show up in raids and wouldn't have weapons anyways unless you're playing with a mod that adds new grenade weapons)
Frag Grenades
EMP Grenades
Molotov Cocktails
T-9 Incendiary Launchers
Inferno Cannons

Mod Team:
Just me.

JonoRig came up with the idea though.


Download:
You should be able to download the mod here at filedropper.

Just unzip it and drop it into your mod folder.

Hope you like it.


Additional Info:
If you want to be "double sure" that no grenade/incendiary type weapons show up while using the Project Armoury mod, then you could disable all of them with the weapons kit selector included in that mod.

Be sure to post a message if there's any bugs/it doesn't work/the download link stops working/the Apocalypse starts.

So I've noticed that there are a few controversial things in Rimworld which some users like and others don't. Personally I like pretty much everything added to the game so far, but it'd be neat if we could turn certain game-play mechanics on or off in the advanced options when starting a colony.

Examples:

Disable Friendly fire:
When this is activated bullets fired will never hurt allies, whether they be members of your colony or visiting people. (would also mean that your enemies can't accidentally shoot each other, to help balance it out a little)

Simplified Health system:
With this activated the game uses the old health system. 100 health per colonist, no long term wounds.

Anybody else have any relatively simple ideas they'd like to see in an advanced game setup?

Over in the Project Armoury mod page this question was asked by a new user:

How do you get to the mods folder? I have browsed around, click on the button that says "open Mods Folder" several times and it does nothing. What do I do? I have a macbook, so if you can help what should I do?

I don't have a Mac but was wondering if anybody who does could answer the question?

Alpha 6 is currently called "Rimworld532" when installed.

It's not a problem for me, but it might cause confusion with some people.

What is this?:
This is a little python script made by my genius brother to help me balance weapons in my mods faster.

What exactly does it do?:
You just have to point it to the weapon's .hml file file and it will automatically examine the weapon's stats and do a bunch of calculations for you, then pump out some more useful stats so you can see how the weapon is performing.

What sort of stats?:
Here's an example of what it puts out when targeted at a .hml file with only the Vanilla M-16 in it:

Code Select Expand


Reading xml file: VanillaWeapon-M-16Rifle.xml
cooldownTicks:    40.0
DamageAmountBase: 7.0
basePrice:        325.0
warmupTicks:      108.0
range:            32.0
accuracyTouch:    0.96
accuracyShort:    0.87
accuracyMedium:   0.77
accuracyLong:     0.64
burstShotCount:   3.0
ticksbetweenburstshots:7.0

Ticks per shot:   56.333333333333336
Shots per second: 1.0650887573964496
Damage per second:7.455621301775147
Power Rating before accuracy: 238.5798816568047

Power Rating: 229.0366863905325
Suggested Silver Value: 458.073372781065

So as you can see, it first of all shows all the basic stats that are visible, cooldown, damage, price, warmup, range, accuracy, and burst fire information.

Then it does some calculations and shows you some extra stuff.

Ticks per shot is found by multiplying the burst shot count by the ticks between burst shots, then adding that figure to the warmup and cooldown, then dividing by the burst shot count. Now you don't have to do all that though, it does it for you.

Shots per second is found by taking 60 and dividing it by the ticks per shot.

Damage per second is found by taking the shots per second and multiplying it by the damage amount base.

Power Rating before accuracy basically just takes the damage per second and multiplies it by the range.

Power rating takes the power rating before accuracy and multiplies it by the largest accuracy figure.

Suggested silver value just multiplies the power rating by 2. Might not be ideal for everybody, but it's about where I want things for my mod. You can always do whatever you want with all this infromation, of course.

How does this balance play out?:

Well here's all the non-incendiary/explosive vanilla Alpha 5 weapon's power ratings:

Thrown Stones: 25
Pila: 74
Short Bow: 78
Great Bow: 109
Pistol: 124
Shotgun: 124
Uzi: 145
Lee-Enfield: 172
Charge Lance: 190
M-16: 229
M24: 240
LMG-15: 264
R4: 312
Minigun: 369
Heavy Charge Blaster: 380

The Minigun and Heavy Charge Blaster both have an extra stat "forced miss radius" that isn't taken into account by the formula because I don't know how it works, exactly.

For the sake of this list I've taken the accuracy value, divided it by the forced miss radius, then multiplied it by the power rating before accuracy value.

Result:

Minigun:
Power Rating without forced miss: 887 (I think this is inaccurate stat in this case)
Power Rating before accuracy: 1123
Accuracy: .79
Forced miss radius: 2.4
Accuracy divided by forced miss: 0.3291666666666667
Power rating with forced miss radius: 369.6541666666667

Heavy Charge Blaster:
Power Rating without forced miss: 1103 (I think this is an inaccurate stat in this case)
Power Rating before accuracy: 1186
Accuracy: .93
Forced miss radius: 2.9
Accuracy divided by forced miss: 0.3206896551724138
Power rating with forced miss radius: 380.3379310344828



Overall I think that's a pretty accurate assessment, but it does change from situation to situation. For example the pistol and shotgun have the same rating, but they're very different weapons. The Shotgun has about half again more DPS but the pistol has about half again more range.

In close quarters combat the shotgun is a lot better, but in an open skirmish I personally actually prefer the pistol because the range is so much better.

Likewise the M16 and M24 have a similar power rating. In some situations (such as attacking siege bases) the M24 is a lot better, but in base defense I generally prefer the M16 because it has more then adequate range for that situation and has slightly better DPS.

Also, the accuracy stats are a little funny. Right now the formula only uses the highest accuracy stat. I chose that because then it assumes that the player is using the weapon to it's greatest potential, carefully choosing the range that will best complement it.

If I instead made the formula average together all the accuracy values together then you get some funny results. For example a shotgun has low enough range that it basically only uses the touch and short range stats, and the medium and long range stats will basically just confuse the formula and make the weapon seem worse then it actually is.

In the end, if you don't like the accuracy system I've used, or even the entire power rating system the script will still put out stats like DPS and power rating before accuracy, so it'll still speed up whatever formula modifications you want to use.

So take it with a grain of salt, but at the very least I think it gives people a good starting point for their weapon's balance. At the most I'm planning on using this formula exclusively for my new mod.

Bullet speed isn't taken into account because it has such a small effect on combat that it's not worth taking into account in my opinion. (And yes, it does have an effect on combat. If you want to know what it is ask and I'll post the long explanation, and show that it does make a difference but it's so small that it doesn't matter 99% of the time.)

How do I get this?:

First of all you'll need python. It's a free download and can be found here. I'm using 3.4, you should probably try to get the same version, unless you know a lot about python and can fix it as you go along.

Second of all you'll need to download my brother's script.

You should hopefully be able to download it from File Dropper here.

If that download doesn't seem to be working then either post here or send me a PM or something so I know it's not functioning, I've not used a free upload/download site before. On that note, I'm very open to suggestions of which free site to use and could upload it again.

Alternatively you could send me a private message saying you want it with your e-mail address and I can send it to you in an attachment.

How do I use it?:

Okay, put the rwb.py file somewhere that you'll remember.

I've put it in my Python34 folder, which I installed right into C:. So if I want to find it, it's in:

c:\python34\

Go into your mod and hold down shift then rightclick on the folder that has all your weapon .hml files in it. In the popdown menu there should be the option: "Open Command Window Here". Press that.

It should open command prompt, which looks a lot like MS/DOS if you're old enough to remember what that is.

It'll show a text line that has your mod file directory in it.

Mine looks like this:

C:\RimWorldAlpha5Win\RimWorld492Win\Mods\ProjectArmoury211\Defs\ThingDefs>

This is because I'm looking at the ThingDefs folder in the Project Armoury mod.

Now you should type in:

python (rwb.py with it's directory here) (.hml filename you want it to check here)

On my computer it looks like this:

python c:\python34\rwb.py PA_MedievalWeapon-Crossbow.hml

If I hit enter, then it'll pop out all the Crossbow's stats, like this:

Code Select Expand


C:\RimWorldAlpha5Win\RimWorld492Win\Mods\ProjectArmory211\Defs\ThingDefs>python
c:\python34\rwb.py PA_MedievalWeapon-Crossbow.xml
Reading xml file: PA_MedievalWeapon-Crossbow.xml
cooldownTicks:    40.0
DamageAmountBase: 18.0
basePrice:        220.0
warmupTicks:      280.0
range:            38.0
accuracyTouch:    0.96
accuracyShort:    0.87
accuracyMedium:   0.77
accuracyLong:     0.64
burstShotCount:   None
ticksbetweenburstshots:None

Ticks per shot:   320.0
Shots per second: 0.1875
Damage per second:3.375
Power Rating before accuracy: 128.25

Power Rating: 123.11999999999999
Suggested Silver Value: 246.23999999999998


Hopefully that makes sense to you.

Extra important bugfixing stuff:
Python is case sensitive. If you type "RWB.py" instead of "rwb.py" it won't work.

This especially applies for stuff inside of .hml files. One of the stats it's looking at is the <DamageAmountBase> </DamageAmountBase> figure. For whatever reason about half of Tynan's weapons have the "D" capitalized, and the rest have it in lower case. The script doesn't recognize the lower case ones, so you have to go through your files and make sure that "D" is capitalized it to make it work.

.hml files can't have the same stat in it twice. The script will collect data from one and ignore the other. (and not tell you that it did so) So you need to have all the weapons in their own .hml files, not all bundled together. If you look in the Core mod's weapons they're all bundled together. It won't work on them unless you separate them all into their own files. If you look at Project Armoury's weapons you'll notice that almost all of them are in their own files, which will work.

This also applies in some cases where the stat shows up twice. In the upper "BaseGun" section of a weapon's .hml file is a "CooldownTicks" stat, usually it's at 40. Some guns have a replacement "CooldownTicks" stat which will overwrite the upper one in the game. This python script will only read the top one though, so you'll want to replace the top one's stat with the bottom one's stat. (which is totally fine if there's only 1 gun in the file. If there's more than 1 gun in the file it'll change the stats on all the guns, so split them apart first)

Also, sometimes modded guns have special duplicate stats. For example mrofa's boomerang uses 2 projectiles, each with their own stats which will confuse the python script. For these guns I suggest either doing the formula by hand, or copying the weapon file then removing the second bullet on the copy and running that one through the script to see how the weapon works.

It doesn't take into account fire or explosive stuff, so just use it on "normal" weapons for now. Grenades, mortars, and Molotov Cocktails won't work.

If you run into other problems, please say so and post any errors or anything that comes up.

Credits:

Formula: By me. (though I ended up being happy with it in it's simplest form, so didn't have to do anything fancy)

Coding: By my brother who shall remain anonymous.

Does anybody know how to add new tech levels into the game?

Right now there seems to just be:

Neolithic
Midworld
Spacer
Ultra

For example, I'd like to be able to add Medieval, Industrial and a few others. This is specifically so I can make new factions that have their own sets of weapons. I'd especially like to be able to in .hml if possible, but I can take a stab at making a .dll if it's the only way.

In the end, I've thought of a work around, but it'll take a lot more effort to implement and about double the hassle to re-balance things afterwards.

So it's not essential for me to be able to add new tech levels, but it's make my new mod a lot easier to set up and work with.

Thanks in advance.

[The core idea in the RimWorld universe is diversity.]

Divergence of Civilization*
-By Bog

Clothed with Apparello


*Working name. Subject to change.

The basic concept:
On the Rimworld front page it says:

The core idea in the RimWorld universe is diversity. In this setting, humanity is spread across the galaxy, yet lacks any way of traveling or communicating faster than light. Combined with the fact that stellar civilizations regress (due to war or plague) as often as they progress, this means that someone traveling between stars may end up interacting with people at any level of development, from pre-agricultural tribes to transcendent machine gods.

My concept is to take this to the next step by adding new civilization types, each with their own clothing and weapons. No more will you just play with tribal people, rimworlders, and mechanoids attacking/visiting your colony, instead you will also get Hellions (which have a culture based on Mediterranean classical antiquity), medieval, steamers, etc.

Mod Team:
Just me.

Other Contributors:

Via Apparello:
Shinzy


Misc:
mrofa for developing special bullet effects.

Existing Features:

New Faction: The Hellions.

Planned Features:

1: Make new factions and modify existing factions to fit a new scale of civilization levels, spanning from tribals to mechanoids and possibly more. I have an internal list of 25 different new faction types that I'd like to make, but will work on them one by one. Because each faction will need it's own apparel and everything, each one will likely take me quite some time to make.

2: Balance armour and weapons to fit within the tech levels that the factions have by a power rating scale based on the Rimworld Weapons Balancer that my brother and I made.

3. Tweak faction raid numbers to fit their weapons strength. All the eras should be just as difficult to fight, but in different ways. For example tribal civilizations will be difficult because of how many people they throw at you, not because of how strong their weapons are. Advanced civilizations will be sort of like mechanoids. You won't get many, but they won't need a lot to be a big threat.

4. Add new armour and weapons so that every era has a workable variety.

5. Potentially make two versions of the mod, the first one would be Rimworld immersive. It wouldn't use any preexisting weapons (whether real or imaginary), instead it'd only use original weapons and apparel made for Rimwold. The second potential one would be a non-immerseive version because it'll use all the weapons from Project Armoury.

6. ?? (I guess we'll find out)

Questions I imagine people asking:
Q: When will this be done?
A: When it's done. But seriously, I don't really know. It largely depends on how much time I find to work on it, and how much new stuff I end up feeling it needs before release. Also, new official Rimworld alpha releases could potentially make me go back and rework things again because not everything is always compatible between releases.

Q: Will there be early releases before the Mod is completely finished?
A: Yes, but I'll wait until I have at least 1 new working civilization to play with. Then I'll probably release it as v0.1 or something and work my way up from there.

Q: I see you want to make classical and medieval stuff. Does that mean we'll have melee weapons?
A: That's basically up to Tynan. I don't particularly want to develop melee weapons just for my mod, instead I'd much rather just be able to take an existing system and, well, modify it. If or when melee weapons appear in either the vanilla game, or a well thought out and developed mod then I'll probably add them. Until then there'll just be ranged weapons from the different eras.

Q: What things from the vanilla game are going to get changed?
A: Some of the weapons will have their eras changed. For example, Pila are not going to be tribal anymore, they'll be moved to the classical era because that's where they belong historically. Eventually all the weapons might get re-balanced, depending on how things play out.

Q: Does this mean you're not going to be working on Project Armoury anymore?
A: Nope. I'll still be making new guns and stuff. For one this mod will need a lot of new weapons for the different eras I'm working on, and I'll probably release them through PA as well.

Q: Will this mod work together with other mods?
A: Um. Maybe. With enough work anything is possible... Generally mods need a bit of effort to be merged together and not interfere with each other, and that can't be done ahead of time. If Jerethi50 decides to do the work and add it to his All-in-one mod then the answer becomes yes. But even then there might be other problems, because if I end up making this mod using it's own balance scale it might make the merged mods not fun to play with unless there's extra balance tweaking.

Q: Can I get involved in making it?
A: Yes, for some things anyways. A lot of the work (some of the basic programming, pretty much all the balance formulas) are mostly one person jobs, I think. But I'll need to make a few new weapons, and a lot more new clothing and armour. Clothing and armour specifically take a long time and I'm not all that good at it, so if you're interested in making some for me, don't hesitate to post here or send me a private message. If you don't know how but are interested in trying, don't hesitate to say so, I can hopefully give you a crash-course in it.

Q: After it's released, will I be allowed to use any components from your mod for the mod I'm making?
A: Yup. I'm fine with that. I'd appreciate you saying that you got some stuff from me though, and link your mod's thread back to this page.

Q: Can I ask a question that isn't on this question list? Or make random suggestions? Or just talk about the mod in general?
A: Sure. Post away.

In the in-game sound effects there are two basic categories, sustained sounds and oneshots.

Weapons normally use oneshots, but I'd like to get the new saw-blade weapon that I made to have a saw sound.

I'd be fine with it making the sound for a second when firing, but it'd be really cool if I could make it keep playing the sound as long as it's flying.

I went and put Recipe_MakeWoodPlanks_Electric into the <firesound> of the weapon's .hml file but it causes a bug report that says something along the lines of "tried playing a sustained sound as a oneshot".

Does anybody know how to let me use a sustained sound on a weapon using .hml files? (or .dll if that's the only way)

So I was thinking about what would be the one thing I'd most like to see in the next release.

I decided that it would be a few map options under the "advanced" options when starting a match.

Specifically I'd like to have the following:

Mountain on top: Yes/No/Random
Mountain on right: Yes/No/Random
Mountain on left: Yes/No/Random
Mountain on bottom: Yes/No/Random

That way when starting a match I could choose what kind of to be in.

I could make a completely open map. I could make a map with mountains down both sides so I can colonize the valley in the middle. I could make a map where there are mountains on three sides and I only have to defend from one direction.

It'd probably have to disallow players enabling all four walls, unless Tynan would want to put a bunch more work into it. I imagine to make it work so we could play in a "hidden valley" there'd have to be some changes/tweaks so it doesn't mess everything up. Things I can think of:

Make the play area in the middle not turn into a cave.
Make it so that raids will only come through droppods on this map type.
Make it so that animals spawn randomly out in the open.

...

If I was really bold, I'd ask for it to be more like this:

Mountain on top: Yes/Scattered/No/Random
Mountain on right: Yes/Scattered/No/Random
Mountain in Centre: Yes/Scattered/No/Random
Mountain on left: Yes/Scattered/No/Random
Mountain on bottom: Yes/Scattered/No/Random

Hohoho that'd be fun. I'd probably get 5+ more playthroughs without getting even remotely bored. I could for example make a map with all the sides empty and a big mountain in the middle to build my base in. It'd be like the lonely mountain in the hobbit.

For a challenge I could make a map with all the mountains off so that I'd have to rely on an agricultural economy. Limited stone and nearly no metal on the map would mean that outdoor tree and strawberry farms would be the norm. I'd have to use mostly wooden walls for defense, and I'd need to sell berries so I could get silver to buy whatever metal I'd need. That'd be an awesome match.

PS: Looking back at the second last comment... I seem to have turned into Santa Claus in my excitement.

I'm looking for .xml def files for the vanilla items, most specifically:

Body Armour
Frag Grenades
Molotov Cocktails
Mortars

Basically, I'm a Project Armoury modder but I don't have terribly good programming skills. I have to rely on either taking a good long look at how someone else did something, or just copy and modify already existing items in order to make new items.

I'd like to make some new armour, artillery, incendiary weapons and grenade weapons, but don't really know how. If I had .def files to work off of I think I could figure it out without any extra help beyond that.

Does anybody have them on hand or know where I could find them?

Or if you see this Tynan, could you possibly post them here for me?

[Haldor the Warmonger:]

So I'm loving Rimworld, but I find it a little repetitive. I know that it's just in Alpha and has a lot of features that aren't in the game yet, but I figured I'd post some of the ideas I had for new AI storytellers that I'd like to play with.

The following have more unique and interesting personalities then the ones currently in game. I think most of them would be a little harder to program then the ones in game as they'd need new code parameters, but I tried to "design" ones that I think would still be possible without taking up too much of Tynan's time and would be worth the effort.

Note: I'm pretty easy going with my thoughts and ideas. Look at the big picture when considering them, their names and most of the specifics about them are just there to get the idea across. I'd be totally happy for them to be completely redesigned.

Haldor the Warmonger:
With this storyteller you'll get a lot of raids against you, but also a strong mix of positive effects that give you new characters (migrants, escape pod chashes, etc.). Basically he focuses on giving your colony a lot of interesting evenly matched large-scale battles.

Drusilla the Tormentor:
Drusilla generally treats players very badly, but there's a catch. If they player only has 1 active character (ie: not incapacitated) nothing bad will happen. He/she can't have a mental break and whatever hostile enemies there are will flee. It doesn't matter if it's a lone psychotic squirrel or a dozen mechanoids.

As such, players can have a match where they don't have to be afraid of actually losing their colony, but will fairly constantly have their base torn apart and most of their characters killed. 

Cut-Throat Carrie:
This AI storyteller changes the behavior of raiders so that they'll never leave the map. They'll fight you till they die.

Maev, Nature's Wrath:
This one would have little or no raiders, instead there'd be a lot of "natural" negative events that would hinder you, but wouldn't directly threaten the survival of your fortress. You'll be seeing a lot of blights, lightning strikes with long gaps before rain, psychotic animals, solar flares, etc.

If Tynan adds more negative effects like sandstorms, meteor strikes, earthquakes, etc. they'd play a pretty important role for Maev.

Sea-saw Sven:
Sven switches between short "eras" of positive and negative effects. A timeline of a colony would look something like this:

15 days of utopia, to get players started.
3 days of terror.
7 days of generally positive events.
3 days of terror.
7 days of generally positive events.
etc.

A player would need to use the "good times" to specifically prepare for the difficult periods where their survival is at stake.

Stalwart Sadie:
Sadie starts your colony with 5 characters and extra free resources, but never gives you "free" characters through events. You'll have to buy slaves or capture raiders to get your numbers up.
...

Some more ridiculous storytellers:

Anarchistic Ivan:
This story teller would give you a lot of characters through events (migrants, etc.), but the loyalty threshold on characters would be more severe, and players that drop below it would spontaneously turn into raiders.

Mutiny is fun.

Ragnarok Roy:
When you start the game your colony will get a random, hidden "end date". I'm thinking it'd be between 100 and 200 days from the start.

When you hit the date, a special event would take place. It'd say something along the lines of: "The Sun and all the stars have darkened and turned a deep shade of red. Could Armageddon be upon us?"

The entire map would turn a dark shade of red, and strong negative events will take place every single day. The player's relations with the other factions will also steadily drop.

...

What sort of AI storytellers would you like to see?