[0.12.x] RSO Discussion thread

[Align]

I am not blaming RSO for missing 1 or more necessary resources near the start.

It's supposed to deliberately include all of them in the starting area though, so if it didn't for you that's some kind of bug.

You can mess with map gen settings for size to make fields larger and it should work.
And if I understand correctly those big sprawling fields were not intentional - they would exceed the size parameters more then twice sometimes. So it's either them or actually respecting whats in the config files. You can always set resource size multiplier to 2 and get similar effects. Might need to boost richness also to prevent bigger fields generation with minimum values.

Oil fields for me are mostly around 50% in starting area. It's by design - you are meant to go and find some for bigger industry.
I found that further ones do get very large %-age differences and some get quite high.

You can mess with the settings alright, but I think the default configuration should be more like previous versions of RSO, with large but not too rich fields spread around enough to make trains viable; that's what I was going for with my uploaded settings. A good guideline is the campaign mission that introduces trains.

The oil fields in the starting area were about right in yield, though there were sometimes an awful lot of them - I just discovered that the default settings produce ridiculously huge yields for fields outside the starting area (was 100-300% in older versions of RSO, and that was a lot - 1000% is way too much for standard settings). Probably a bug, but I fixed it anyway in my uploaded config.

[DRBLN]

Does it work with 12.04?

[Align]

Yes.

[DRBLN]

We started to have desyncs on our map after re-enabling RSO

[Bisa]

We started to have desyncs on our map after re-enabling RSO

I'm pretty sure it's connected with "discovering" new chunks of the map after some testing, I don't have the time to debug this so I'll just generate a new map to play on for now :p

[orzelek]

We started to have desyncs on our map after re-enabling RSO

I'm pretty sure it's connected with "discovering" new chunks of the map after some testing, I don't have the time to debug this so I'll just generate a new map to play on for now :p

I'm not aware of any changes that would lead to descyns - tbh I have only vague idea what might cause them in the mods.
If it persists it might be worth reporting as a bug.

[orzelek]

<cut>

I just want a starting area with one medium sized patch of coal, copper, iron, and stone. That way I can start the game. I don't want fields that seem endless. I want to have to explore, but not if it means I can't build anything at all because I can't kill a dozen spawners to find my first patch of iron or copper. I don't want dozens of patches of 1-5 spots of an ore with a value of 300 either. If you get those you have to mine all the resources then place buildings down to actually build your factory. Trust me when you can't even build a furnace assembly longer than 4 double sided because the miners block everything, then you are basically stuck doing everything by hand until you get a large enough area cleared. That is far too tedious and annoying.

Please post me a save like this including any changes you made to the mod.
I made few changes on last version that were intended to make fields a bit larger - it's possible that something backfired.

Alternatively go into config file and enable the debug option at the top and then post log that can be found in script-output.

[Align]

Recently been experimenting with doubling region size while increasing resource spawn probability; fields are now further apart while still being about as common, so seeing multiple fields near each other is much rarer, excepting sub-spawns. Hard to compensate for the effect this has on the starting area, but reducing the size of it works well enough.

1920x1080 map image

[orzelek]

Added new version.
Thanks to Align for the modified config - looks interesting so I applied it in a bit lighter form.
Lets see how it will work - should be closer to RSO experience from early versions.

[GopherAtl]

With forces having been more fully implemented in 0.12.x and pvp, or any mp modes with multiple teams with separate tech etc - becoming viable (see klonan's start on a pvp mod here), the question of multiple starting areas has begun to come up in earnest.

Last night I decided to start poking at RSO, to see how hard it would be to make it generate multiple starting areas. The answer, not hugely. Mostly it was straightforward, the one tricky bit was I had to delay generating starting area resources, since only the vanilla starting area's chunks can be counted on to be generated when on_init is called. Because it can't generate starting area resources until the chunks are generated, it requests the chunks to generate on init, watches chunk generation, and generates each starting area as their chunks are all generated. Players are currently informed by a message "Starting area generated for force <name>"


The latest version of my fork, which I've tested only in sp, seems to be working. The source can be found on my github, and a usable zip of the mod can be obtained here

words are wordy, so I'll pause for a screenshot of the map with it generating 4 starting areas with separation 2



The relevant info on using it currently:

Config Settings
There are two new config settings, starting_area_forces and starting_area_separation.

starting_area_forces is a list of strings, which are the names of the forces that should get their own starting areas. For normal single player this would just be {"player" } and the mod should work as before; for pvp it might be, say, {"blue","red"}, and it will create two starting areas (as well as forces "red" and "blue" if they don't exist already) equidistant from 0,0. All starting areas will be arranged on a circle centered on {0,0}, equal angles separating them (so 2 will be directly opposite 0,0; 4 will be arranged in a square, etc), but the rotation is offset by a random angle so they are not entirely predictable.

starting_area_separation is a factor that scales the radius of the circle on which the bases are placed. The radius of the circle will be starting_area_size * starting_area_separation, so the actual distance between bases will depend on the number of bases.


Remote methods
There are also some remote methods added, intended for use by pvp mods but usable in the console directly as well.

get_forces will return the starting_area_forces config value, just an array of the names of forces with starting areas.

get_force_spawn takes the name of a force as a parameter and returns the center of the starting area for that force, as {x=x,y=y}

------------------------

Now that I got it working, I thought I'd share it here; orzelek, you are of course welcome, encouraged even, to integrate this kind of functionality into the main RSO, whether you use my actual code or not. If you're not interested in doing so, I will likely maintain my fork, which I will try to keep sync'd with your latest main release, to provide this functionality.

[TheSAguy]

Orzelek, how does water in the game work. Is it a layer?
I was wondering, if with the Finite Water Mod, once could empty lakes and find resource fields?

I don't think it's possible, but was wondering...

[Align]

words are wordy, so I'll pause for a screenshot of the map with it generating 4 starting areas with separation 2
http://puu.sh/jKJ4p.png

Does this ensure water in the starting areas?

[GopherAtl]

words are wordy, so I'll pause for a screenshot of the map with it generating 4 starting areas with separation 2
http://puu.sh/jKJ4p.png

Does this ensure water in the starting areas?

Not as yet. It also doesn't keep biters off your lawn - they won't actually spawn in the starting areas, but they will spawn literally right outside, much closer than they would otherwise. It also needs to make at least a some effort not to give spawn coordinates that are in water. There are probably other things I haven't noticed yet.

[orzelek]

There is no way to hide resources under the water from what I know.
You'd need to keep track of water tiles that were meant for resource and then spawn the resource there when water is removed by a finite water mode.

Starting area water is guaranteed by game - generating small pond in separate starting areas would need some work to spawn it.

As for multiplayer support - I'm a bit reluctant to play with it due to lack of ability to test stuff.
You will need to make sure that starting areas are stored and then used to ensure that nothing is spawned in starting area size distance from each of them. It shouldn't be difficult to add tho.

[GopherAtl]

As for multiplayer support - I'm a bit reluctant to play with it due to lack of ability to test stuff.
You will need to make sure that starting areas are stored and then used to ensure that nothing is spawned in starting area size distance from each of them. It shouldn't be difficult to add tho.

Yeah, I haven't tested it properly yet (hopefully some time today), but it ought to be saving the starting areas already. Looked into how biter safe zone works, seems to be a separate config setting, clear_area, which defaults to 6, not sure if that's a radius or a diameter yet but need to apply it in any case. That plus basic testing for, and if necessary creation of, water in each area shouldn't be too hard, and will poke at those today as well.

Sadfaced that you're not keen on taking over, as it means I have to keep working on this mod XD but! There is need, and I will attempt to fill!

[orzelek]

As for multiplayer support - I'm a bit reluctant to play with it due to lack of ability to test stuff.
You will need to make sure that starting areas are stored and then used to ensure that nothing is spawned in starting area size distance from each of them. It shouldn't be difficult to add tho.

Yeah, I haven't tested it properly yet (hopefully some time today), but it ought to be saving the starting areas already. Looked into how biter safe zone works, seems to be a separate config setting, clear_area, which defaults to 6, not sure if that's a radius or a diameter yet but need to apply it in any case. That plus basic testing for, and if necessary creation of, water in each area shouldn't be too hard, and will poke at those today as well.

Sadfaced that you're not keen on taking over, as it means I have to keep working on this mod XD but! There is need, and I will attempt to fill!

The area around biter nests has nothing to do with starting area at all.
It's the one of issues I found with trying to get more starting areas. Some places in the code need an update to look through all those instead of assuming that starting area is at 0,0 and has defined size.

As for taking over - I'd wait with this from your side a bit. Yeganer has been working on new version of RSO with some additional features. It would be sensible to add this support to it - it's already on github and it will be available there when finished.

Current version might be discontinued and replaced with the new one.

[TheSAguy]

Taken from the Bob's Mod discussion on best setup

You don't need to edit absolute enemy chance now - it's enough to set enemy bases frequency to higher value in map gen settings. If you want more enemies also size for enemy bases works to make those larger.

Hmm, look at these results.
I'm still think that RSO totally generates too few Aliens.

The size for all below was Medium, I just changed the Frequency.
This was using RSO 1.3.4

Normal NO RSO

Normal / Medium: (NO RSO)

Very High NO RSO

Very High / Medium: (NO RSO)

Normal With RSO

Normal / Medium: (With RSO)

Very High With RSO

Very High / Medium: (With RSO)

With the change to absolute_enemy_chance, from .25 to .5

Very High With RSO and absolute_enemy_chance at 0.5

Very High / Medium: (With RSO & absolute_enemy_chance = 0.5)
]

[orzelek]

You can get the chance to be 1 which means certain amount of bases per region. It will be less then in vanilla for sure - it's not meant to be that much.

[Align]

That's been a recurring problem even since the beginning of RSO, and I'm not sure how to solve it. They can't be too frequent or strong since in RSO you have to scout for resources, sometimes far and wide with the rarer oil and stone if you get unlucky. After that though, since you rarely need to expand to new areas in RSO you generally don't have any trouble with biters.

[orzelek]

That's been a recurring problem even since the beginning of RSO, and I'm not sure how to solve it. They can't be too frequent or strong since in RSO you have to scout for resources, sometimes far and wide with the rarer oil and stone if you get unlucky. After that though, since you rarely need to expand to new areas in RSO you generally don't have any trouble with biters.

Do you mean that there is not enough biters?
I think there is a parameter meant to increase biters density based on distance. It might not be working properly - I would need to check it.

Lower base density is an effect of having less bases per region ( and regions are quite big - approx 210x210 tiles ).
Increasing of base size at map gen settings also increases amount of bases per region currently. So setting high value there will net you a lot of biters currently.