[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

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johnnyBgoode
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by johnnyBgoode »

kyranzor wrote:
johnnyBgoode wrote:Tried using this today using the 0.1.4 version in the OP. I'm building the bots and they seem to be not grouping up with each other or hunting for really far away hives. They just sit near the droid assembler. there was one squad that formed up and hunted biters but after that squad died the rest just didnt move from the droid assembler. Config.lua doesnt seem to have information on how big the tilesize they search for so im stumped.
Please lower DEFAULT_SQUAD_RADIUS to 10 and increase the distance for joining nearby squads SQUAD_CHECK_RANGE to 20 and it will work better. I actually just did that myself when i had the same issue.

What happens is the droids are spawning and the first one makes a squad and then starts "wandering" but the droid doesn't actually have to move for the underlying factorio representation of a "unitgroup" to change position. The squad default radius is tied in with how far the squad wanders while idle. The problem stems from the representation of the squads position wandering away after the first droid spawns and creates the squad and because of the staggered spawning behaviour droids may or may not actually be close enough to join a squad each time, or when they do it might not be the first squad anymore because another smaller one was closer. So the result is a bunch of small under-sized squads standing around because none of them are large enough to start hunting. If you press F6 while looking at the clump you will see many circles (representing unitgroup "squad" positions) slowly moving around the droids. If you want, compare the movement of the circles before and after the fix (after making some new squads).

To fix the ones you have deployed now, either pick them all up and deploy them by hand (can do this before config fix, just spawn them close together and quickly) or let them be deployed by assembler again (after the config fix).

An alternative fix which avoids having to pick up the ones already spawned is to get some more droids and hand spawn them one or two at a time in the blob and you will see them join the undersized squads and trigger the hunting behaviour. It will help if you have already increased the squad check radius when doing this.

Thanks just tested it again and I think I have it down.

Just some notes:
  • They still refuse to squad up and hunt when the player character is away from the droid assembler.
    I usually find a singe droid wandering when I'm away from the droid assembler.
    When Im right beside the assembler they squad up and hunt real good but (maybe due to the games limitation, idk) the biters dont seem to be active when the player character is far from the biter nest.
    Whenever I start running towards the battles is when my squads suddenly keep dying (hypothetically because the biters are spawning and killing them).

kyranzor
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

Set a bunch of droids to be inserted into droid assemblers and then run to other side of your base and keep an eye on the map and see if you notice the squad moving away and revealing the map etc.

The search radius for enemies is only 5k tiles if you have cleared a huge area around your base then they will not have targets.

Set up a train outpost close to the border of your lands and deploy the droid there instead.

One thing I haven't checked is if chunks haven't even been generated then the droids won't have targets. You might have to go out scouting to make the map generate more chunks and biter bases

ArtyD
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by ArtyD »

I can guarantee the droids will hunt down targets not revealed on the map. Makes my map look hilarious at this time.

kyranzor
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

ArtyD wrote:I can guarantee the droids will hunt down targets not revealed on the map. Makes my map look hilarious at this time.
There is a difference between revealed and generated.. The chunks (and therefore, the enemies and resources in them) are probably not generated unless a player goes in that area. The radius of generation is probably pretty huge, but it's still a factor.

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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by ArtyD »

kyranzor wrote:
ArtyD wrote:I can guarantee the droids will hunt down targets not revealed on the map. Makes my map look hilarious at this time.
There is a difference between revealed and generated.. The chunks (and therefore, the enemies and resources in them) are probably not generated unless a player goes in that area. The radius of generation is probably pretty huge, but it's still a factor.
I've seen them go pretty darn far off without me. This is kinda why I want something going out and fetching the alien artifacts.

http://prntscr.com/biih2b

Bloodthirsty little things they are...

kyranzor
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

ArtyD wrote:
kyranzor wrote:
ArtyD wrote:I can guarantee the droids will hunt down targets not revealed on the map. Makes my map look hilarious at this time.
There is a difference between revealed and generated.. The chunks (and therefore, the enemies and resources in them) are probably not generated unless a player goes in that area. The radius of generation is probably pretty huge, but it's still a factor.
I've seen them go pretty darn far off without me. This is kinda why I want something going out and fetching the alien artifacts.

http://prntscr.com/biih2b

Bloodthirsty little things they are...
What's your evolution factor at now? If you want a challenge (and to die horribly) add Misanthrope 0.3.7 to your save. Watch them spring out of hiding and destroy your base! You'll need terminator guard squads at every corner

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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by ArtyD »

kyranzor wrote:What's your evolution factor at now? If you want a challenge (and to die horribly) add Misanthrope 0.3.7 to your save. Watch them spring out of hiding and destroy your base! You'll need terminator guard squads at every corner
Oh it probably hit max a long time ago. Thing is it still wasn't a question of how far they would go but how much I could recover from their journey. They went rampaging off in the distance and managed to plow thru huge bases on their own. From the screenshot you can see they go really freakishly far (and in the case of the terminators very quickly) to the randomness of the world. Anything short of 50 wouldn't survive the giant bases. Perhaps we need patrol droids which remain within your network?

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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

Terminators - How many exactly did you send out on a rampage? Did you cheat spawn them or produce them yourself?

Can you comment on the cost of them? Would you change the recipe if so, how?

I have decided to implement "guard stations" and "attack outposts" (variations of the droid assembler) one type spawns squads with "hunt" orders and the other spawns droids that are in a defensive posture and will move to attack in a small radius around their "home" guard station. And return there to idle after battle. What do you guys think of that? Means you can blueprint cute little barracks areas with walls and turrets and requester chests for droids etc..

To support this guard station functionality I will be making a secondary "droid counter" which only counts in a small radius around it (same as the guard station radius) so you can adjust how many are spawned

ArtyD
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by ArtyD »

kyranzor wrote:Terminators - How many exactly did you send out on a rampage? Did you cheat spawn them or produce them yourself?

Can you comment on the cost of them? Would you change the recipe if so, how?

I have decided to implement "guard stations" and "attack outposts" (variations of the droid assembler) one type spawns squads with "hunt" orders and the other spawns droids that are in a defensive posture and will move to attack in a small radius around their "home" guard station. And return there to idle after battle. What do you guys think of that? Means you can blueprint cute little barracks areas with walls and turrets and requester chests for droids etc..

To support this guard station functionality I will be making a secondary "droid counter" which only counts in a small radius around it (same as the guard station radius) so you can adjust how many are spawned
Most likely you would classify them as cheat spawning. I fired up replicators to test it out with merely generating the base resources. Costs seem appropriate for the jobs in question. My factory is very tiny compared to most others and I managed to launch a rocket without leaving the base area originally before I did this. Poison capsules were my method of getting the resources needed to finish research.

If the droids can patrol from guard station to guard station that would make them function more like trains and would make sense to me. The only problems would be dealing with droids getting run over by trains...

Flaws:

Seems they don't like gates, or cars, possibly tanks but wouldn't know as I didn't test that yet.

If you'd like to see the map I used for testing you can:
>>>AAAMACMAAAADAwYAAAAEAAAAY29hbAMDAgoAAABjb3BwZXItb3Jl
AwMCCQAAAGNydWRlLW9pbAMDAgoAAABlbmVteS1iYXNlAwMCCAAAAGl
yb24tb3JlAwMCBQAAAHN0b25lAwMC1WLftH1gAADMYwAAAAAAAAAAAA
ADAMwBEFo=<<<

Pathfinding can sometimes send them into a dead end. They'll dance there for a bit before they pull a Oh shit moment.

Still need a robot to fetch the artifacts.

kyranzor
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

Currently you need to spawn them outside of main walls or put gaps (with extra fortifications) for them to get out. It would be nice if the pathfinding of units in your "force" were able to treat gates as "openings" and if the gates would auto-open when any "unit" in the same force as the gate went close to it.

"Still need a robot to fetch the artifacts."
Yes i'm going to make a way to "scrape" alien artifacts from the ground around squads (within X radius) and make them appear in some kind of "Droid Collection Bay" building/inventory and you can only build one per force (to make it easier to code for now). the collecting functionality only activates if you have the collection bay building built. How does that sound?

ArtyD
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by ArtyD »

kyranzor wrote:"Still need a robot to fetch the artifacts."
Yes i'm going to make a way to "scrape" alien artifacts from the ground around squads (within X radius) and make them appear in some kind of "Droid Collection Bay" building/inventory and you can only build one per force (to make it easier to code for now). the collecting functionality only activates if you have the collection bay building built. How does that sound?
Squad Barracks - Squads gather and assemble here. Can be configured to be anywhere from 1 to 25 unit squad.

KP - Nobody wants to do KP, but someone gets stuck with it... A unit assigned here will go collect alien artifacts and deposit them here.

kyranzor
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

I am updating the mod to support 0.13, just installing the update now and fixing as required, doing some quick playtesting etc.

Will update Github files and release 0.1.41 hotfix for 0.13 ASAP.

yay101
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by yay101 »

Fantastic, I was just about to post asking about 0.13 as having never used your mod before and so many mods I did use being integrated I was looking forward to a fresh start. Steam achievements can wait, I've got a race to wipe out!

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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

I have it all working, just fixing the combinator that outputs "droids alive" sprite because 0.13 introduced rotatable constant combinator and lots of annoying extra sprites for them

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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by yay101 »

Sounds annoying haha. If you need/want any help with code or art (manpower wise, you seem to be quite adept function wise) I'm always happy to help.

kyranzor
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Re: [MOD 0.12.35] Robot Army. 0.1.4 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

yay101 wrote:Sounds annoying haha. If you need/want any help with code or art (manpower wise, you seem to be quite adept function wise) I'm always happy to help.
I need contributors for the Wiki, to help explain/cover all the aspects of the mod. I will be fixing the wiki for Robot Army 1.4+ for factorio 0.13+ over the next two days, but it still needs fleshing out. I need a page for each robot type, a page that talks about basic strategies and general hints/tips needs to be expanded on i suppose.

I wouldn't mind a "what's next" page, which i'll create and add to so people know what's coming. But yeah, I need wiki help, plus I desperately need artwork which i'll probably ask Yuoki to help me with.

kyranzor
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Re: [MOD 0.13] Robot Army. 0.1.41 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

Hurray! 0.13 is released! So is Robot Army 0.1.41! Everything works, with huge performance improvements as well. Go kill biters!

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MiniMe943
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Re: [MOD 0.13] Robot Army. 0.1.41 Released!

Post by MiniMe943 »

kyranzor wrote:...with huge performance improvements as well.
Shut the front door. Please elaborate on this? Can we now drop 100 battle droids without dropping the UPS? I'm super curious to know the extent of these performance improvements.

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Re: [MOD 0.13] Robot Army. 0.1.41 Released!

Post by kyranzor »

MiniMe943 wrote:
kyranzor wrote:...with huge performance improvements as well.
Shut the front door. Please elaborate on this? Can we now drop 100 battle droids without dropping the UPS? I'm super curious to know the extent of these performance improvements.
well i went from 300 droids and 50fps to 844 droids and 60fps.

edit:
Hey everyone I did a huge overhaul of the wiki for Robot Army, check it out at https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfactorio/wiki


edit mk2:
I finally got it onto the mod portal. It's so buggy omg.
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/kyranzor/robotarmy

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Re: [MOD 0.13] Robot Army. 0.1.41 Released!

Post by atehxx »

Hi,
I just installed your mod in Factorio 13, and Droid Assembler is not working.
In log output there is whole lot of entries:
03:08:36: WARNING: global droidassemblers list does not exist!
What I did is I started fresh game in Factorio 13, and after some time I added your mod - so it wasn't there since game start, may it be the reason?

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