[Mod Request] Ocean Biome Start

Started by Vaperius, April 14, 2016, 12:20:34 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Vaperius

Add the Ocean Biome as a start.

For mundane implementation, it be a very sandy "island" with infrequent caravans, only small animals, low-yield trees, and little food free trade.

For less mundane implementation you'd start on top of the wreck of part of your ship. To explain you'll need to reclaims parts of the sea with floating sea-float platforms, which are semi-resource intensive at first. Primary threats will be the amphibious lifeforms that will regularly raid your colony in place of normal pirates.
I remain Vigilant.

dragoduval

Island + boats = Im 300% for that. Add pirates riding laser-shark and im 500%.
Im making my own mod !!!! Also im pretty sure that i started World Wars 3.....

Also if i spawn too many subject then dont mind me, i'm just bored at school :D. Damn 3 hours long video's....

something776

Yes, I had a similar idea, this would be awesome!

The ship thing is really cool as well, but for this whole thing to work I feel like fishing would be a necessity to supplement the lack of terrain.

It would also be cool if you started out on your crashed ship, and then there were adjacent islands scattered around that you could go to as well as other chunks of your ship, but to get to them you needed boats or pontoon bridges that could be knocked out with the tides, making it risky to do because your colonists could get separated on different islands and things.  And eventually you could make artificial terrain in the form of wooden or steel platforms in the water or something.  This really has a lot of really cool potential!

milon

It's an awesome idea, but very hard to implement.

tldr summary:
Island = boats (vehicles) necessary = massive pathfinding problems/rewrites

As I understand it, the AI just assumes there is a valid path for a pawn (animal, humanoid, etc) to walk on/off the map.  If there isn't one, the AI throws an exception, and you get all kinds of red error messages & stuck pawns.  How do I know this?  Back in A11 or A12 I made a simple XML mod that added all the terrain types (like water) to the Floors menu, and I turned my map into an island.  The AI did *not* like that.  The "easy" but boring solution is to make the map an island and simply negate walking on/off the map events.  But that means no caravans, no land-based raiders, no animal migrations, no random-join colonists...  Just air-dropping assaults & space refugees.  Unless you roll up your sleeves and dive into the C# pathfinding and make it work with boats or teleporters or add a swimming skill or something.

Again, it would be awesome and I'd LOVE to see it, but it won't be easy.

something776

How about deal with it sort of like a reverse beach, making it so that there's one side of the map that is a larger land mass.  Would that work?   Or is the issue there with pawns in the center of the map being able to get out of the map from anywhere?

If that's the case maybe there could be paths in the form of shallow water where pawns can move across it.  Route size and things could be dependent on altitude of the area on the world map, lower down it is, the narrower the paths are.  This could maybe be the solution until some sort of boat could be implemented.

dragoduval

Should work. You can walk in shallow water and from what i got (Might be wrong), as long as you got some landmass at an edge of the map it wont bug.

Still should need to have the fishing mod to be more useful. And sea monster.
Im making my own mod !!!! Also im pretty sure that i started World Wars 3.....

Also if i spawn too many subject then dont mind me, i'm just bored at school :D. Damn 3 hours long video's....

Vaperius

For everyone going on about boats, and more boats, and bridges, and landmasses. Why?

Objectively; the idea would be to start on a singular landmass surrounded by ocean tiles, which looks like a desert island, and that is it. That is the sum total of the difference a "vanilla" Ocean start would go.

Boats, and bridges, and landmasses for some kind of ocean/sea start have been tossed around in similar threads and in discussions across this community for years. Its nothing original to discuss.

So lets talk about option two: You start on top of the wreckage of your ship. Its "floating in the ocean", you have enough "land" and resources for you to get a small shelter going and enough food to last you long enough to survive a few days. You decide to start expanding your little island using floating platforms. Reclaiming sea, and ocean tiles for your colony to use gradually; you'd fish for new food, develop aqua-culture etc.
I remain Vigilant.

something776

Oh, I think I see what you're getting at now.  That makes sense now, and probably makes more sense for an oceanic situation than the luck of landing on an island chain. 

Vaperius

Quote from: something776 on April 14, 2016, 07:34:18 PM
Oh, I think I see what you're getting at now.  That makes sense now, and probably makes more sense for an oceanic situation than the luck of landing on an island chain.


There is a lot more ocean than land in the ocean. You'd think people get that in the title. Oceanic environment starts should have lots of unique gameplay, but have unique challenges such as land reclamation, fish monsters, and other Eldritich creatures.
I remain Vigilant.

blaze7736

The thing is all of this is great ideas but in the end you would need to change alot of c# code to make any of this work since curently water is treated as inpassible

something776

Isn't that sort of the point?  I mean to have it so that nothing land based can come in, sort of like a trade off in a way.  It becomes harder to be raided, but in turn it also makes it so that no traders can come in over land routes or anything like that. 

AllenWL

I think I like the 'landed on top of a ship wreckage' idea the best.

You can start off on a medium-sized piece of wreckage, with maybe other bits scattered through the map, and instead of mountains, ship pieces to deconstruct and use. You'll have to build more 'floats' to expand your bit of wreckage, and your main enemies will be whatever lifeform that can clamber onto your piece of ship, and lack of resources. The lack of resources will be really harsh, I think. No stone chunks to turn into bricks, no wood to build with. Raiders can drop-pod onto your ship, so that wouldn't be a problem, unless they land on a different part and starve. That'd be silly.

Sieges would be much more harder, as you'd either have to make a mortar of your own and fire back, or build over to the siegers to fight them.

You'll really need hydroponics to get a stable food source, or implement fishing, or lure in sea creatures to kill(that could be intresting. Leaving meat on the edge of your 'platform' as bait to lure in food).

Possibly there could be very small dirt islands, or parts of the ship wreckage with dirt(like, the remains of a greenhouse or something) which would let you farm.

A very interesting mechanic will be to make the floating wreckage and platforms you build be destructible, so a mortar shell can punch a hole in the ground, or cut off a bridge you made. Or you can break apart a part of the wreckage the raiders on on to strand them.