Artificial Hands and Fingers - Is this design plausible?

Started by KestralB, January 24, 2019, 09:58:51 AM

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KestralB

New player here; I know some mods have already been made which attempt to add hand and fingers to boinic parts, but I've not yet found one that accomplishes what I would like to see without accompanying issues/drawbacks.  So I'm thinking or trying to make one myself, but am hesitant.

I'd like to go into detail about how I think artificial hands, feet, fingers, and toes should be designed and hopefully have an experienced modder tell me either "Yeah, that's plausible," or "No, that'll never work." :)

Here's what I want to see/make if possible:
1.)   Prosthetic/Bionic/Archotech arms have hands and fingers, which can take damage and potentially be destroyed/shot off/bitten off just like the parts of a normal arm. 
2.)   Installing any artificial arm results in gaining an artificial hand and fingers that match – not just replacing the arm and letting the biological hand stay attached to the end of it.  These parts, as a whole, give the same efficiency as you previously got from a 'no fingers' arm of the same type in current vanilla. 
3.)   Losing fingers or a hand from the end of an artificial arm reduces overall efficiency just like losing normal fingers does. 
4.)   While artificial limbs are still always listed on the "health" tab even when undamaged, artificial hands and finger are not. Injuries to these parts, however do show up as injuries to a part with an artificial modifier (e.g. "Left bionic hand --- bruise (human fist)" or "Right bionic ring finger --- bitten off"). 
5.)   A destroyed finger/hand of a prosthetic or bionic arm can be repaired with a craft-able item that works like a healer mech serum for injuries to that kind of body part.  Bionic and prosthetic repair kits cost about 1/5 the resources of a new limb of the same type. 
6.)   A destroyed finger/hand from an Archotect arm will simply regenerate on its own in a short time. 
7.)   Repeat all of the above with legs/feet/toes subbed in for arms/hands/fingers.

In terms of modding, I have no experience yet with Rimworld at all.  But usually difficulty in modding comes when you want to do something that is "different in kind" from other pre-existing things.  With that in mind, the three most likely difficulties seem to be:
(1) having one "artificial part" item, that is installed with one surgery, actually install multiple new "parts" (currently I see a strict 1-1-1 ratio of item to surgery to new body part in vanilla)
(2) making "healer mech serum"-like items that work with different specific kinds body parts (maybe healer mech serum is hard-coded and can't easily be copied and made to apply to a different type of injury - also, since all artificial parts are currently monolithic single parts, the game may not even yet have the concept of a "missing/destroyed artificial part". I think if your bionic arm is destroyed in vanilla it may just become a "destroyed arm" again, not a "destroyed bionic arm".)
(3) getting Archotech sub-parts to regenerate without any associated item use or surgery. Nothing like this happens without the intervention of an item or surgery in vanilla that I'm aware of, so this may be breaking new ground - or may just be impossible.

If someone more familiar with modding could give an opinion on the plausibility of the overall design and likely implementation difficulties, that would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks for reading! 

LWM

My understanding is that an "arm" has a bunch of parts included in it, e.g., "hand" which has "fingers" etc.  So I think some of what you want is already there?

I don't see why everything you want shouldn't be possible, fwiw.

--LWM