different story teller mod

[patoka]

hey guys, big mod noob here (i did some html back when it was cool, but that was ages ago and doesnt count)
i was wondering if i could make my own storyteller
seeing how many people had performance issues and how most people dislike small maps, my aim was making one that would make playing on small maps a bit more rewarding/fun.
how i'd achieve that with a storyteller alone is that i want to put the player under constant pressure, like the worst combination in vanilla rn. (pissed randy or cassandra on high difficulty) but to make it fair, the story teller would immediately help you out again to get on your feet for a proper defence. i intend to change the way of playing rimworld for many players that would wanna try my new storyteller, in that colonists will die all over the place, you wont be able to save too many enemy pawns either to recruit them due to your low numbers, but wanderers and refugees will join you left and right, so the social and levelling aspect of the game would be less focussed and also bionics would see less play and instead cheap alternatives (like peg legs and even scyther blades) and hopefully even higher amounts of drugs than usual.
ideally, i'd say, we'd see battles that will kill a considerable amount of your colonists and the ones that do survive, only do so because of appropriate use of drugs. soon after you'll be stocked up with new pawns though, so unless you grow fond of them, all you end up with is tons of loot and dead bodies for your war beasts.
since you're gonna have quite a hard time anyway, i guess this map is more intended to be played on easy-medium difficulty maps like temperate and tropical forests, but also arid shrubland and taiga if you want even more of a challenge. the more difficult maps will probably barely be playable like this, but hey, players have survived on sea ice aswell, so what do i know.
ps: totally forgot to say that the pop limits would be between 5 and 7 (crit: 9) for the story teller.

so now to the technicalties:
aside from the fact that i have no clue whatsoever how to program ai (story teller), i did look into it anyway on the wiki http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/AI_Storytellers and came up with a few questions. what do all these expressions mean: xD

threatCycleLength: does this mean that all threats are in a cycle in random order and that if i make the cycle length shorter that it will be less random? why would anybody want to change this? i must be missing sth.

classic_RandomEventMTBDays: ? to me just random words jumbled together. is it maybe that it says how many days have to pass for the same event to happen again?

classic_ThreatBigMTBDays: is this how long volcanic winters and toxic fallout takes?

classic_ThreatSmallMTBDays: and this is a number of how many days i can hunt as my heart desires since the last animal turned manhunter? no way, right? i thought that was directly dependent on how much you hunted and which animals

General Weight: no idea. nope. cant be difficulty, that is sth else.

ThreatSmallWeight: umm...maybe the percentage of how many threats are small and how many big? so if this number is small, i will have more big threats like raids?

LargeThreatWeight: confused now... so is it maybe that general weight is for generally good and bad events, threatsmallweight is for small threats and largethreatweight stands for large threats and these three numbers essentially tell you the percentage of the kinds of events that happen?

MaxThreatBigIntervalDays: this is like a max number of days between big threats?

(and after looking at some other modded storytellers:)

populationIntentFromPopCurve: this is like a little list of things but always seems to be the same over many storytellers. contrary to its name, it doesnt seem to be sth connected to the number of colonists you have...is this sth completely different?

minDaysPassed: what does this one specify? how many days have to pass for the threats to start popping up?

mtbDaysThreatSmall and mtbDaysThreatBig: is this just a different way of writing every how many days small threats occur on average?

i think imma stop comment on each and every single one and just make a list of stuff i found that i dont 100% understand, hope that's ok. i mean, most i have an idea of, but i am not sure why the commands seem to repeat themselves in different ways.

threatOffDays

threatOnDays

minDaysBetweenThreatBigs

      <li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_AllyAssistance">
        <baseMtb>10</baseMtb>
      </li>

      <li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_CategoryIndividualMTBByBiome">
        <category>CaravanTarget</category>
      </li>

      <li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_ShipChunkDrop"/>
no ship chunks ever? or starting off with ship chunks? i dont understand...

      <li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_JourneyOffer"/>
i think this means that there wont be a frienly ai that takes me for a trip, right? or does it mean the exact opposite?

<li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_Disease">
        <minDaysPassed>7</minDaysPassed>
      </li>
i thiiiiiiink this makes it that you can only have a disease per week and not more often, right?

and then there are these huge chunks that i dont understand:
                        <li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_CategoryMTB">
            <allowedTargetTypes>MapPlayerHome</allowedTargetTypes>
            <minDaysPassed>5</minDaysPassed>
        <category>Misc</category>
            <mtbDays>3.0</mtbDays>
         </li>

         <li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_CategoryMTB">
            <allowedTargetTypes>World</allowedTargetTypes>
            <minDaysPassed>15</minDaysPassed>
            <category>Misc</category>
            <mtbDays>8</mtbDays>
         </li>

      <li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_AllyInteraction">
        <minDaysPassed>5</minDaysPassed>
        <baseMtb>6</baseMtb>
        <allowedTargetTypes>MapPlayerHome</allowedTargetTypes>
      </li>

the worst offender in this regard is this list right here:
    <listOrder>1</listOrder>
      <populationIntentFromPopCurve>
         <points>
            <li>0, 8</li>
            <li>1, 4</li>
            <li>5, 1</li>
            <li>9, 0.5</li>
            <li>13, 0</li>
            <li>18, -1</li>
         </points>
      </populationIntentFromPopCurve>
what does it influence? what if i change some numbers? how can i calculate the outcome? should i keep it in as is, or throw it out?

=> and very specifically, i do not see a command that would let me set how often "good" events would happen. can i not set this on my own? do i have to let the story teller decide if the player is in need of good events or not, just by looking at the population counter?

thanks to anyone that cares to read all this and to even respond. will take me probably a day or two for my first version which will probably suck and then maybe a new version every few hours until i have a decent enough version to show you guys. i hope.

and if anybody feels like this mod needs some proper rimworld style pictures, feel free to post them. i am a level 0 artist, so i could never do sth like this on my own. maybe i could go find sth on google, but i probably would end up posting sth unrelated. dont let me do this part. i WILL ruin it.

pps: am i doing this correctly? there isnt an easy make-your-own-storyteller out there, right? and xml is the right choice for me, as an html-rookie, right?

[patoka]

i'm an idiot. i posted this in the wrong subtopic. can a mod pls move this to unfinished?