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Messages - zeidrich

#1
I think a bit of a problem is a raid is a bit of an abstract concept.  You aren't always happy about defeating a raid because a "raid" could be anything from a single person, or it could be 40 guys with power armor and charge blasters.

I think alternatives like

  • The attacker who attacked me was killed (+x)
  • I killed my attacker (+x)
  • I killed an attacker who attacked a colonist (+x)
  • We frightened away an attacker that I hurt (+x)
  • An attacker left with our goods (-x)
  • An attacker kidnapped a colonist (-x)

My goal here is that if you have an attack, and you sit inside your base and automated defenses wipe them out, it's pretty much neutral.  You will ultimately get a temporary negative for cleaning up the bodies.  But as your pawns weren't at risk or involved, they don't get any bonuses.

On the other hand, if you are engaged in combat with the opponent and you win, or you get revenge, or you cause them to flee, then you get a mood bonus.  But if you are sick in bed while the rest of the colony does that, you don't really get a mood bonus or loss.

You could take it one step further, and assign some hediff or something to someone who kills an opponent and while they're under this "exhilarated" hediff, they might tell stories to other people that give them a bonus, similar to the way that the "kind" trait works.  So the guy sick in bed might not get excited about winning the raid, but when the sniper that took out the bandit leader comes to tell his story, then he gets a bit of a mood bonus.

But a straight up "We defeated a raid, +10 mood" is unnecessary, uninteresting and not very realistic.
#2
This might be a bug, I'm not sure, or it might just be something that shows up because it's in unstable and extra logging is shown.  I got these errors too when I first launched.

The first error you get is Mods config data is 1393 while we are at build 1526. Resetting.  This is just because in modsconfig.xml, the build is set to 1393 (A16), and it corrects it.

Next is a message about being able to find the concept for personalshields.  This is because it's checking the knowledge DB and the personalshields concept is removed from the game, but you've already got an entry in there saying whether or not you have been told the old concept. 

Next is a message about failure to load key/value pair which is likely related to the fact that there was a null reference result from the personalshields concept lookup.

Next is a message that there is no data for the new concept for ShieldBelts, so it's being added to the knowledge database.

Next is a message that there is no data for the new concept for DoorOpenSpeed, so it's being added to the knowledge database.

Then the last three errors repeat. 

It's trying to reconcile old data in the knowledge database for things that have been changed, or new concepts that have been added.  I noticed that I didn't get this message the second time I launched. This might be a bug, or it might be something that would normally get logged, but just not show the debug log in a release build. 
#3
Bugs / Re: [A17 Unstable] Coolers not cooling
May 03, 2017, 01:11:45 AM
I can replicate it pretty reliably. Just build a room (it might need to be connected to another room) and then put a cooler in it. 
#4
Bugs / Re: [A17 Unstable] Coolers not cooling
May 03, 2017, 12:17:46 AM
Here's another album.

http://imgur.com/a/9uRSg

If you create a cooler, it makes the room part of the outside.  When you finish the cooler it doesn't properly finalize the room, it is a room in some ways, but it doesn't properly handle heat etc.  If you add a door on to it after the cooler is finished (or possibly partition or change the room in another way) it does finalize it and looks to have the normal heat transfer behavior. 

[e] However, it looks like the problem spreads in this case to the main room, as the main room now becomes "outdoors"
#5
Bugs / Re: [A17 Unstable] Coolers not cooling
May 03, 2017, 12:09:05 AM
I had the same issue.  Decided to check on the debug inspector to see if I could figure it out.

First of all, I created a room.  Then, I created the walls and finally the cooler.

Here's a look at the inspector: http://imgur.com/a/QFI5S

Notice that prior to reload, the freezer room is bounded in the "Draw Room Groups" debug view.  However, also notice that the CellCount is 60923, which means that it thinks that the freezer is in the same room as the rest of the outside.  It's kind of in room limbo because it knows things like the fact that the first cell is 167,0,130, but treats it as being outdoors otherwise.

My guess is that this has something to do with building the cooler.

After reloading it acts normally.
#6
I made a colony based on Donald Trump, rich explorer scenario.  The goal was basically that first of all, he would accept no refugees, and secondly, as soon as he had people capable of doing work, he wouldn't do any of that himself.

One day, he got a distress call from a pawn with a Slavic name, Rubinov I think.  True to the narrative, he accepted this particular request for refuge.  The man was accepted into the colony.

A bit later, the first female joined the colony, I think she was a drop pod rescue, and I assigned her to sleep in the Tower with Trump.  He didn't really fancy her though, and eventually after they kept insulting and pissing eachother off she got her own quarters.

Then later Trump started to proposition Rubinov.  Trump was straight, so was Rubinov, he kept rejecting him.  But he kept trying.  I thought this was pretty funny, because I'd scheduled a woman to stay with him to develop a relationship, but instead, he kept after this guy with the Russian name.

Rubinov eventually died in a raid though, just shot in the head by a sniper, so I didn't get to see how the whole thing would have played out.
#7
I just looked at this recently.  In A16 the way it works is:

1. Colonists value clothing based on the clothing's sharp and blunt armor rating.
2. Colonists reduce the score based on how damaged it is.
3. A score offset is might be given under certain other circumstances.
4. If a colonist is too cold, and apparel will make them warmer, the warmer clothing will be more appealing.
5. If the the clothing was worn by a dead person, the clothing will be much less appealing.

A pawn might wear a leather jacket over a parka when they are too cold if the parka is a damaged deadman's parka.
A pawn will wear a parka over a duster if the parka has better defense values than the duster even if the pawn is dying of heatstroke.
A pawn that is wearing a duster and cowboy hat and getting cold will put on a parka or a tuque in most circumstances.

Pawns will generally put on warmer clothes, but will not generally put on cooler clothes unless those clothes are more protective.
#8
This is a series that fit together.

#1 - Daylilies planted in interior soil are a great way to create an impressive room early in the game.

Impressiveness is affected by Beauty, Wealth and Space of a room.  Space is calculated by the number of tiles you can stand on, and by a smaller factor of the number of tiles you can move across but not stand on.

If you make plant pots or shoddy art, you reduce the space of the room. However, if you plant daylilies in a growing zone, you keep all of that space.  Daylilies in soil are huge beauty, +23.

#2 - Soil doesn't get dirty.  Let's say you don't know about #1, and you build a room in the dirt, the dirt floor gives you -2 or so beauty.  You decide that it's early game but you want to make it nicer, so you replace the floor with wood giving it all neutral beauty.  Now people start tracking dirt in from outside, and until you get someone to clean it, you've got giant piles of -13 beauty dirt around, and with everyone being busy and nobody getting to clean, it starts to get uglier and uglier until it's so dirty that it looked nicer when it was just a dirt floor.

#3 - Rooms share benefits.  If you create an early-game barracks that's nice and big and filled with daylilies, everyone will get like a +4 for being assigned to a very impressive barracks, and it will take you basically no resources.  Now instead of creating another room, put a table and chairs in it, and put a horseshoe pin in it, and now all of a sudden everyone is going to be walking around with a constant +5 for eating in a very impressive dining room, and a +5 for relaxing in a very impressive rec room, and a frequent +15 for having been in a beautiful environment.

This really streamlines the process of getting started and keeping people happy.  You don't need to worry about personal bedrooms until you get enough spare time to start building good quality art.  It's not good forever, and the maintenance of the flowers does take pawn time away, but this will also build up their growing skill quickly.  But you get a new colonist, and all you need to do is throw down another sleeping spot or bed in the flowers.  Even just a sleeping spot assigned to them is going to give them a +4 immediately at least until you can build a bed.
#9
I like to play in the universe, so to me it doesn't make sense to punish pawns.  There's no benefit to it, it doesn't make anyone feel happier, it doesn't deter outbursts, it doesn't prevent the pawn from doing it in the future.

I think that if I were to actually do something like this, that the behavior would have to support it.  For instance, if a pawn started a fight, the victim, and possibly friends of the victim would get a negative mood that a colonist was assaulted.  Put him in jail, and there is a competing mood that says that a criminal was imprisoned.  Eventually both of those moods wear off, and if you leave the prisoner in jail, there gets to be a negative "Innocent colonist imprisoned" mood for the prisoner's friends, and eventually the rest of the colony.

Kind pawns maybe are affected by anyone being jailed inappropriately, psychopaths aren't fazed by imprisonment or crimes against anyone but themselves.

If this were a kind of behavior in the game, then I would imprison colonists.  But it's not, so just like I don't roleplay growing wheat for my beer, or smelting my steel, I don't pretend to punish prisoners. Instead, I try to keep them happy so they don't start further social fights, or keep them away from people that they hate.  For instance, don't have two pawns who hate eachother sitting next to one another doing research all day, they will fight and it will be your fault, not theirs.  You're the only one with a brain. :)
#10
I think this is WAD. 

The attack button because of an equipped weapon.  You have modified limbs, not an equipped weapon. 

You can still attack by right clicking a target and choosing melee attack target.

While an attack button might be an option, it doesn't exist for unarmed attacks whether you have scyther blades, power claws, bionic arms, or regular fists.  Similarly, even with combat-augmented arms, you can still use a weapon, so you need access to the weapon-specific options.
#11
Worst: Melee.  Melee skill increases melee accuracy very marginally and nothing else.  Even ignoring issues with melee combat, the skill is kind of terrible.  You can actually raise it easily enough, it trains very quickly compared to shooting, but the accuracy benefit is too marginal.  Replacing it with an "Athletics" skill that both increased melee capability and movement speed might be good.  This would help out melee combat in general by letting them close in on range more easily, and give general utility to passionate "Athletic" characters.

Strongest: Crafting.  This skill does so much. Crafting, Tailoring, Drugs, Smithing, Smelting.  Everything trains it, and it affects quality of everything which is often a huge deal.

Favorite design: Growing.  The speed increase from having a good grower is quite noticeable.  Having a very strong grower is like having two weak growers, and the better your growing crew is generally, the faster you plant fields.  This is a bit different from other skills in that they're limited by other things.  For instance, 2 slow growers for most crops are as good as 1 strong grower, but 2 weak doctors aren't as good as 1 strong doctor, or 2 weak crafters aren't as good as 1 strong crafter.  It seems like it scales more fairly for the game.

Special mention: Handling.  Handling is fine for the most part, but a common issue is that you need a base level of skill before you can tame wild animals, and you have to tame wild animals to train it up.   I like it generally as a skill, but the threshold for many wild animals is just too high.  The pawn should at least be able to try with a 0.5% chance when his skill is too low rather than flat out not be allowed. 

I feel similarly about any other skill that has hard skill level requirement to do.  Like planting medicine or devilstrand, or crafting medicine.  The requirements of doctoring and crafting on medicine for instance are very awkward.  I'd rather see a critical failure or something.  Chance to lose the materials, or in planting a failure to plant properly that isn't noticed until the plant dies in a few days, or has an extra long growing time.
#12
Quote from: b0rsuk on March 03, 2017, 04:01:27 PM
On what basis do you claim that melee is strong ? Yes it potentially deals high damage. But damage output is only impressive in early game.

It's not the damage output that makes it strong.  It is that if you are in melee combat with an opponent they can not shoot you.  They will instead punch with their fists. 

If you have 5 guys with longswords or even clubs, and they have 5 guys with SMGs or charge rifles, and you can force them to get into near range you will win.  The guys with the SMGs will now just punch the guys with clubs, and clubs are better than fists.

The problem, as I said, is that it's not long into the game that you will stop ever having 5 guys versus 5 guys.  When you have 5 guys and they have 20 guys, well, now the fact that 5 of their guys can't use their guns doesn't matter, because the other 15 are blowing the crap out of your other 5.  However, if you have 5 guys with guns versus 20 guys with mixed weapons, you can use traps, turrets, terrain, darkness, kiting etc. all to your advantage and kill both the melee and the ranged guys, and you only need to get some of them before they start to run away.

I play a lot of tribal extreme, and so my weapon choices, especially early game, are very limited.  But when I have 5 colonists with the choice between a shortbow and a club, and the pirates come with sniper rifles, LMGs and assault rifles, I choose clubs every time. 

Even later in the game, if there's a colonist that has an incendiary launcher in range of forces there's a reasonable chance I'll send someone with a sniper rifle in to melee him if I can edge in around a corner just to stop him from setting my guys on fire rather than have the sniper sit and take a few rounds trying to right out kill him, because being able to light pawns on fire is very dangerous, and the worst damage I'm going to take in melee from someone with an incendiary launcher is a few bruises from his fists.

But when it gets to endgame and you have static defenses and a killbox set up, you stop worrying about that sort of thing and just want whatever keeps your pawns as far away as possible from the giant hordes that come after you.

I really think that the biggest problem with melee combat isn't melee combat, it's the "difficulty" scaling.  Melee works pretty well against humanoids when you can be defensive and engage ranged attackers with melee.  Melee works terribly when you are outnumbered, whether you are much stronger than your opponents or much weaker. If I have scyther blades and power armor and shield, and I have to have 5 guys go up against 25 longbowmen, I'm going to expect casualties.  On the other hand, if I have 5 tribals naked with steel spears go up against 4 guys with power armor and charge rifles, there's a reasonable chance I can win, assuming 4 of them make it.  Similarly, if I have 5 guys with power armor, sandbags, and sniper rifles or assault rifles or charge rifles, I'm not really worried about 25 naked longbow men.   But if I had 5 tribals with longbows go against 4 guys with power armor and charge rifles, I'd be screwed.

Melee is alright when the opponent doesn't have a numerical advantage and is using ranged weapons. 

The problem is that the game very aggressively and unrealistically (imagine how much food these raiding parties would need) scales up raid sizes based on your wealth, and wealth can quickly grow out of control, so you need ways for few colonists to kill large numbers of raiders with bad AI.  Melee can't do that. Ranged can.

To fix melee, first improve AI and reduce raid sizes.  Ranged attackers will sit and plink at your ranged defenders in a dark bunker behind rows of sandbags with a 0.2% chance to hit at their maximum range.  They will "find cover" behind a bush.  They'll stay like this until they're dead. It's easy to exploit the AI with ranged weapons. 

For melee, you need to exploit them in a different way, and it can be more annoying, and they can blow up your buildings in the meantime.  They actually act a bit more intelligently against melee because their standard behavior is to stay at long range, and are less likely to just happily follow you around a corner, they're more likely to go melee attack a sarcophagus or something.

I'm not saying that improving AI and reducing raid sizes would "fix melee". I'm saying that it's necessary to first do that.   As long as you have enemies outnumbering you, melee is always going to be bad.

Then there is the question of whether melee should ever really be "good".  There's the whole element of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Modern war certainly isn't waged with swords, and there's a reason for that.  At the same time, bayonets are still useful today.

But get the number of combatants that you fight against down, and strategic melee becomes more meaningful. It turns into putting someone out to disable a big threat like a incendiary launcher or a doomsday rocket launcher.

One thing that could be interesting would be a stealth drug.  Like go-juice, but take it and it would make you invisible for a short while until you attack or take damage. This would mean that your chance to actually engage that guy with the doomsday rocket launcher before he fires would be much higher.

But put a guy with a steel knife in the square next to a guy with any ranged weapon, and in a one on one fight the guy with the knife will always win, because now it's a fight between a knife and a fist.
#13
Pemmican is good for caravans, it's the best calorie to weight ratio. 

And while Pemmican doesn't spoil on caravans right now, the bigger thing is the long spoil time of it means that you can stockpile a lot of it prior to setting out, even when you're tribal and don't have good refrigeration.

But something to note, pemmican isn't weighted the same way as other meals.  A "meal" is 0.85-0.9 nutrition and takes 10 ingredients to make.  Pemmican is 0.05 nutrition and you make 18 with 10 ingredients.  So nutritionally, pemmican is as good as a fine meal, without the mood boost.

But each Fine Meal takes 0.44 weight, while 18 pemmican takes 0.36 weight. And Pemmican takes 80 days to rot, so you can build up a lot of them.

Also, you don't go overboard with Pemmican. With a fine meal, you might need 0.75 nutrition, and you'll eat a fine meal. That "wastes" 0.15 nutrition.  With Pemmican you'll eat 15 pemmican instead of 18.  So it lasts a bit longer.

But don't be surprised that your 50 pemmican didn't last long, that's like 13 berries and 13 bits of rabbit meat.
#14
Mods / Re: Stop trade caravans stealing items
March 05, 2017, 10:27:52 PM
For what it's worth, Caravaneers WILL eat your food.

They have normal "Defend" duties, which include the JobGiver_GetFood thought as high priority.  JobGiver_GetFood will get the nearest food.

The difference is if the pawn is not part of your faction, they will always eat food in their inventory first.  Caravan pawns (minus their chattel) come with 3 meals worth of food.

The trigger to send them away from your colony is based on how long they stand in your colony.  The time they spend in the "Travel" lord toil doesn't count towards the time they will stick around in your colony.  At least I am pretty sure that's the case, I haven't done much testing with the stategraphs.

This means if you're on a big map with a circuitous path, they can spend a fair bit of time just getting to your base, which could cause them to eat some of the meals that they bring along with them.  If they run out of meals they'll certainly take them right out of your stockpile.

You can see this behavior yourself by using the dev tools and smacking one of the pawns with a -20% food a few times. He'll eat his own food until it's all gone, then he'll raid your stockpile.

I'm not sure HOW I would "fix" this though.  It's no good for them to starve to death, and they do have enough food for this to typically not be a problem.  It's part of the general issue with realism with NPC's though.  You're a caravan, and by the time you get to my base, you have 1.5 days worth of meals? Shouldn't you have planned better?  Probably upping the number of meals the pawns carry would be best.  Give them 20 meals. 10 days should be good to get back to their outpost, or at least to seem realistic, certainly long enough to keep them from starving getting to and from your base.  Even more realistic would be to let them get food from their pack animals to eat, but I think that would be too challenging to be worth the bother. It would require things like making sure that the player couldn't buy all of their excess food, and rewriting the toils, and allowing the reasonably complex behavior of taking food from the pack animal, and eating it or putting it in inventory to eat.
#15
These posts have been split from DRM in mods:




Quote from: Thirite on March 05, 2017, 08:39:54 PM
Look, I don't really care if people know it's my Children & Pregnancy mod in question. If people want to start a witch hunt go ahead. But you should be aware of the facts:
- The mod did not crash the game, it caused RimWorld to load endlessly if Children & Pregnancy and the 'other' mod were both being used. Neither did it intentionally cause a memory leak/freeze RimWorld.
- The 'other' mod was a mod which I had been informed (and been shown gifs of) that it allowed child rape when used in conjunction with my mod.

I didn't plan it to be any sort of "DRM", it was made entirely as a middle finger to people to want to simulate pederasty. So you can judge for yourself whether or not this was "problematic malicious code".

Ehh, if I were in your situation I would ignore it. 

A) The other mod writer can work around it if they want to.
B) By singling it out, there's other mods that you maybe don't single out.  If you block the ones you think are inappropriate, does that mean that the ones you don't block are ones you endorse?

For instance, you posted positively on a thread about a torture mod.  Do you recognize that that torture mod would most likely allow players to torture children if they combined it with your mod?  Do you support torturing children?

Of course you don't.  Does this mean that you will similarly block this mod from working with your mod?

What about a mod that allows you to do gender reassignment surgery?  Is it appropriate to do on a newborn?  Are you encouraging genital mutilation?

What about a mod that lets you put corpses straight into a nutrient paste dispenser?  Are you supporting the consumption of dead babies?

There's so many potential, and often accidental conflicts that are going to come up when you create a mod like this. I'm not sure that the author of the mod in question specifically wrote it with your mod in mind.  It's possible, I haven't used either of the mods.  But I can see a situation where you write a mod that interacts with pawns generally, and you write a mod that creates child pawns, unless the other author writes his mod specifically to avoid the scenario where child pawns exist in the game, and prevent certain actions, it's just going to be a consequence of the two mods.  In some ways, emergent behavior.

I don't particularly like the idea of either mod.  One adds a sort of "protected" class of people to a game that is way too rough and brutal to start with.  This is a game where people talk about their ways of committing mass murder and maximizing value by creating cowboy hats out of their leather.  Children don't really fit in this world, especially if you're worried about what might happen to them.  The other mod is just meaninglessly crass.  The game is brutal as it is, and that's with generally utilitarian actions.  Yes, you can butcher the dead and sell to slavers, but your colonists hate it, and it's not really supported.  For instance, you can't have a human "farm" or commit straight up malicious acts against colonists.  The worst you can do is schedule unnecessary surgery, and that's kind of a game limitation.  The other mod adds a level of malicious acts that I just don't think make the game better, just "edgier".

That said, it's not your responsibility to stop that mod from interacting with yours, and if you commit to the purity of your own mod, you're going to have a lot of work to do to make sure to continue to break that mod and others from interacting with yours. I think it's a losing battle.