[MOD 1.0] Alien walls [0.9.5]

[abordoli]

I know that when you research the alien Walls you get a graphic of "wormy walls". I'm probably not the only one that suspects they're about to get cool wormy walls.

Might I suggest:
-Alter the research graphic to represent the red walls that you're getting

-or-

-Bring another artist in (possibly me) to give you the alien walls that you seek

Regards,
~B

[vedrit]

By all means, if you want to make walls, please. The red walls was only meant to differentiate the hybrid walls from normal walls until custom graphics were made. I had posted a request for graphics, and never got a response, though I guess making another request wouldn't hurt.

[abordoli]

Have you seen the Alien Floor tiles in the More_Floors mod?



I know they look like fancy palace tiles...

So red-tint-that an apply it over your walls as a mask and see what you think...

[vedrit]

I'm not familiar with that mod, and the image isn't loading

[abordoli]

I'll try to supply you with the real in-game images...

[fishycat]

Hi Vedrit, the first tech, alien bioengineering has no icon in the tech-list. Just change icon-size from 32 to 128 and it works again.

[vedrit]

Hi Vedrit, the first tech, alien bioengineering has no icon in the tech-list. Just change icon-size from 32 to 128 and it works again.

Interesting. Thanks for the heads up, I didn't get to test beyond seeing if there were any errors. I'll get that fixed right quick.

[vedrit]

Icon size fixed!

[TheBrain0110]

Hey, cool stuff! I like escalation, so I tend to make combat harder, and add more powerful weapons & defences to counter. And self-healing walls are what I always wanted!

I've been playing with these walls for a while now, and thought it would be cool if the hybrid upgrade research could increase their max health as well as regen rate. (And actually, the regen rate research was broken in 0.6.1, the script was looking for "if research == 'alien-hybrid-upgrade-1'", but you'd changed the research names to 'alien-hybrid-upgrade1'. Anyway...)

So I went poking around the Factorio API a bit to see if I could make it work, and found you'd asked the same question I had already! Like 2 years ago! viewtopic.php?f=25&t=13085

ThaPear pointed out the only real way to do it is with multiple duplicate entities, and I also remembered encountering that method used in Endgame Combat for Turret Range upgrades.

After a bit of poking around, I managed to adapt his basic outline code to fit the current API version, borrow some bits from Endgame Combat's loops, and throw in a few more fixes, and got it all working! Not bad for my first try at Factorio modding ^_^

Then I went to fork & submit a pull request to your Github source repo, and realized you haven't updated that one in ages, since 0.4.4. So, you should push your latest updates, and then I can properly add my commits on top

[vedrit]

Hey, cool stuff! I like escalation, so I tend to make combat harder, and add more powerful weapons & defences to counter. And self-healing walls are what I always wanted!

I've been playing with these walls for a while now, and thought it would be cool if the hybrid upgrade research could increase their max health as well as regen rate. (And actually, the regen rate research was broken in 0.6.1, the script was looking for "if research == 'alien-hybrid-upgrade-1'", but you'd changed the research names to 'alien-hybrid-upgrade1'. Anyway...)

So I went poking around the Factorio API a bit to see if I could make it work, and found you'd asked the same question I had already! Like 2 years ago! viewtopic.php?f=25&t=13085

ThaPear pointed out the only real way to do it is with multiple duplicate entities, and I also remembered encountering that method used in Endgame Combat for Turret Range upgrades.

After a bit of poking around, I managed to adapt his basic outline code to fit the current API version, borrow some bits from Endgame Combat's loops, and throw in a few more fixes, and got it all working! Not bad for my first try at Factorio modding ^_^

Then I went to fork & submit a pull request to your Github source repo, and realized you haven't updated that one in ages, since 0.4.4. So, you should push your latest updates, and then I can properly add my commits on top

Neat! Great minds think alike, perhaps?

Every time I update the mod I think to myself 'Hey, you should update the repo.'
So...I did! Github repo has been updated. Thanks for your interest!

[fishycat]

Hi vedrit, yesterday the devs fixed the water-connection with walls. I added the sheets in water_connection_patch in the wall entity. Only thing you might want to look into is the colour of the "alien-wall-patch.png". I tried to match your wall-colour, but oh well... close enough

[fishycat]

I updated the icon-graphics for technology, wall and gate. For a more vanilla look in the tech window.

[Dvx]

I noticed that the following research technologies: Alien Hybrid Upgrade 1, Alien Hybrid Upgrade 2, Alien Hybrid Upgrade 3, Alien Hybrid Upgrade 4 has no description and no effects listed in research view. What they are actually doing ? Is it possible to add description and effects if it is a bug that there is no effects? In any case it would be good to know in game what those upgrades actually do.

[fishycat]

Here's a fixed version. Now all upgrades show effect again and work fine. I also added descriptions for all the things.


edit: I also added entity prototype-flag: "not rapairable". So bots don't get triggered and go out and also want to try to repair the self healing wall.

[TheBrain0110]

Here's a fixed version. Now all upgrades show effect again and work fine. I also added descriptions for all the things.


edit: I also added entity prototype-flag: "not rapairable". So bots don't get triggered and go out and also want to try to repair the self healing wall.

Hey, what I coincidence! I was just coming back around to Factorio and thought I'd see if there was any news on this mod, and you posted just today!

I actually did a bunch of work on this back in Feb, fixing some things and adding increased wall HP with each upgrade research! Vedrit even accepted the changes to his Github repo, but then never released it to the mod portal for download.

So I decided to do some more fiddling today, and incorporated your fixes on top of mine, and do some more work behind the scenes to make upgrading from the old version to the new one less broken.

Maybe Vedrit will reappear soon and add the latest updates and post them to the mod portal for download, but until then, you can see the code behind the scenes here: https://github.com/vedrit/Alien-Walls/pull/2

And download 0.7.0 here:

AlienWall_0.7.0.zip

(959.29 KiB) Downloaded 87 times

[vedrit]

I've not died! Thanks for all the work, guys! I really appreciate it!
The reason I didn't release the mod to the portal previously was because I wanted the migration to work. I'm not confident that it works even now, but I went ahead and released it.
Trial by fire, right?

[TheBrain0110]

I've not died! Thanks for all the work, guys! I really appreciate it!
The reason I didn't release the mod to the portal previously was because I wanted the migration to work. I'm not confident that it works even now, but I went ahead and released it.
Trial by fire, right?

Wow, that certainly didn't take long! Cool!

Given the number of attempts, tests and different methods of trying to do migration, I can tell you that what we've got now works well enough.
In that it's not going to break your game, or crash when you try and place new hybrid walls (found that bug and fixed it!).

The only lingering issue is that if you have a certain level of hybrid-upgrade researched, you won't automatically get your basic hybrid walls upgraded to the appropriate tier right away. It'll only trigger once you finish researching the next upgrade level. Sorry, I tried (...and tried, and tried some other things...) but I just couldn't find a workaround. Unless I wanted to trigger the wall update function on some other event, like every few ticks, but that's an ugly hack in its own way...

So aside from the case where you already have the max hybrid upgrade researched, it shouldn't be a big deal. And given that previously the upgrade research didn't actually have any effect, that seems pretty unlikely that anyone would've bothered maxing it out. If it really comes down to it, you could always remove / re-add that tech with console commands...

[TheBrain0110]

Actually, turns out I did find an issue. But it's not with the new migration, it's with the old one in fact.
Upgrading a save from any recent (0.5 or 0.6) version of Alien Walls works fine, and starting a new game works fine.

But starting a campaign mission or scenario will fail when it tries to run migrations/AlienWall_0.4.0.lua, because it's referencing a technology that no longer exists.
Given that nobody ever is going to try and convert an existing save from a version older than 0.4.0, I think the easiest thing is just to remove that file entirely. It doesn't serve much purpose now anyway.

[fishycat]

Hey guys, good to see everyone is still up and ok!

So I tried out new version 0.7.0 and it gave me an error. See pic below. The point with upgrades not applying, see my version 0.6.4 posted above. All the upgrades apply accordingly and work fine. I also did a icon for the hybrid-wall, maybe you missed it, or you just want to stick with the wormy wall.

[TheBrain0110]

Hey guys, good to see everyone is still up and ok!

So I tried out new version 0.7.0 and it gave me an error. See pic below. The point with upgrades not applying, see my version 0.6.4 posted above. All the upgrades apply accordingly and work fine. I also did a icon for the hybrid-wall, maybe you missed it, or you just want to stick with the wormy wall.

That's weird, that error doesn't make any sense. It's saying the "player" force doesn't exist o.o
What were you trying to do?

And I'm pretty sure I included all of the icons you did in your 0.6.4, what one is missing?