[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[ribsngibs]

Hey, thanks again for a very cool mod. A few notes from not very comprehensively testing:

1) I got pretty significant frame rate drop when a bunch of soldiers were on screen. I was following a squad of 50ish and my FPS dropped from 60 to ~40. They weren't fighting, just walking. When I walked back to base and let them do their thing on their own the frame rate immediately picked back up.

2) It might be nice to just have a little text thing show how many squads and how many soldiers per squad. Not like a full fledged gui with buttons or map locators or anything, just a "squad 13: 24 soldiers, squad 15: 3 soldiers" kind of list so I could "manage" how many soldiers I had clogging up the battlefield (the FPS drop freaked me out, but maybe I shouldn't worry and just spam the crap out of them?)

3) It wasn't super obvious that the "deployed soldier" assembler was actually a separate assembler. It took me a few minutes to figure out why I couldn't pick the recipe from an assembler 2. Maybe bold that in your instructions?

4) The undeployed soldier didn't seem to show up in the items list for logistics, so I a) couldn't say "only insert from assembler to provider chest if less than 100 undeployed soldiers are in the logistics network" and b) couldn't request them to my inventory. After automatically spawning and deploying a few squads, I wanted to just make them put stash in the logistics network and keep myself topped up with a stack or two (like carrying capsules), but I couldn't do that.

5) Sometimes their animation is funky - like one time they all did a long SE trek but had NE walking animation the whole time.

6) It was fun as hell following them around and wiping out biter bases with them. A squad of 50 or so can take out quite a few 99.9% evo biter bases before they start getting whittled down too much. And watching them explode is fun. I actually really like the puff of smoke that shows their bullet hits on the biters - when a lot of soldiers are firing it makes a cool smoke trail, and it also makes it easy to see which biter is currently getting targeted for termination.

For future versions it might be nice to have a squad size slider somewhere in game (a squad size of 5 might be fine early game but they were useless against 100% biters). Also would be nice to have a worldwide count of soldiers available somewhere (maybe signal on droid deployment assembler?) so you can set an inserter condition so you don't just spawn an infinite number of soldiers..

Overall super cool and very much fills a need I had in Factorio - so awesome.

[Galacticruler]

So are there plans to add new kinds of robo soldier once things get moving smoothly?

[Wolff Laarcen]

Adding onto a couple things here:

1) I got pretty significant frame rate drop when a bunch of soldiers were on screen. I was following a squad of 50ish and my FPS dropped from 60 to ~40. They weren't fighting, just walking. When I walked back to base and let them do their thing on their own the frame rate immediately picked back up.

I got an FPS drop from 60 to 40ish from just having ~100 deployed. I couldn't see them on my screen or on the map but my FPS didn't go up again until all the squads were gone.

Would it be possible to have the squads extend the player's sight radius so you can at least tell where they are on the map?

4) The undeployed soldier didn't seem to show up in the items list for logistics, so I a) couldn't say "only insert from assembler to provider chest if less than 100 undeployed soldiers are in the logistics network" and b) couldn't request them to my inventory. After automatically spawning and deploying a few squads, I wanted to just make them put stash in the logistics network and keep myself topped up with a stack or two (like carrying capsules), but I couldn't do that.

This. I couldn't request undeployed soldiers nor get them into requester chests to automatically feed the assemblers. I had to have inserters put them directly into the assemblers.

In addition, the assemblers never worked for me. They would accept a single solder then stop like they were full and the machines feeding them undeployed soldiers would stop also. The only way I ever got them to work was by deploying them myself. User error, maybe.

All in all, a fun mod. Thanks for the time and effort you've put into this.

[factoriofrenzy]

Is it possible that I can change how much damage they do? They seem to have trouble fighting even one biters nest. (Am playing with marathon mod).

[Wolff Laarcen]

Sounds odd, but robot-placed droid assemblers don't seem to work. They work fine when manually placed but when robots place them they produce a single deployable soldier, then stop.

[kyranzor]

Sounds odd, but robot-placed droid assemblers don't seem to work. They work fine when manually placed but when robots place them they produce a single deployable soldier, then stop.

This is my fault, I didn't realize that on_built_entity event doesn't get fired when a bot places an entity, I wrongly assumed it used the same event as when a player placed an object. They are the same events, but the robot event doesn't give me a player handle. This forces me to conclude I need to change my entire squad framework to be based on force rather than player name as the keys for the tables . It's a good thing though, as for the future of the mod it's better to have bots made and organized on a per-force basis rather than always on a per-player basis like it is now. It was only useful in 0.1.2 when squads would follow their creating-player.

Is it possible that I can change how much damage they do? They seem to have trouble fighting even one biters nest. (Am playing with marathon mod).

Yes, in the droidentity.lua file there is a line (around about 152) which has this: damage = { amount = 6 , type = "physical"} Change 6 to whatever you want

I got an FPS drop from 60 to 40ish from just having ~100 deployed. I couldn't see them on my screen or on the map but my FPS didn't go up again until all the squads were gone. Would it be possible to have the squads extend the player's sight radius so you can at least tell where they are on the map?

This may have been related to how they were spawned and if they were having trouble pathfinding or not.. Were they rotating a lot or getting stuck in things? Factorio devs have massively improved performance of their pathfinding in 0.13 so expect this to be much better soon.

Would it be possible to have the squads extend the player's sight radius so you can at least tell where they are on the map?

It might be, but i'm not sure yet how to do it. I'll put in on my todo list.

<GENERAL LOGISTICS ISSUES REPORTED>

I have added the logistics network for items issue (droids not being in the lists for requesting for filterin) to my todo list. Thanks for the bug reports! It seems the "deployable" item shows up on the list but the important one "undeployed" does not.

So are there plans to add new kinds of robo soldier once things get moving smoothly?

Yes! My next release will contain a late-game bot (Terminator, dual lasers) in addition to a large amount of bugfixing thanks to all the great reports i've been getting.

1) I got pretty significant frame rate drop when a bunch of soldiers were on screen. I was following a squad of 50ish and my FPS dropped from 60 to ~40.
2) It might be nice to just have a little text thing show how many squads and how many soldiers per squad.
3) It wasn't super obvious that the "deployed soldier" assembler was actually a separate assembler.
4) The undeployed soldier didn't seem to show up in the items list for logistics
5) Sometimes their animation is funky - like one time they all did a long SE trek but had NE walking animation the whole time.
6) It was fun as hell following them around and wiping out biter bases with them.
7)For future versions it might be nice to have a squad size slider somewhere in game
8)Also would be nice to have a worldwide count of soldiers available somewhere

1. Just curious, what are your PC specs? Also, I just tested 100 and if I put them all in one huge squad my FPS tanked down to 30, but if I deployed them in squads of 10-25 maximum, i have the same 100 droids but fps is 59.9/60.0 (it flickers) I have concluded there must be a maximum squad size and 25 seems reasonable. I did another test with 300 droids, trying to follow this concept of smaller squad sizes, and my FPS tanked down to 40 but was definitely better, and the lag indeed comes from the mount of "nodes" in the path finder in the game. Once all the squads died off, the number of path find nodes went from 200/300 down to 0 of course, and my FPS went back up to 60. Like I said to the other guy, Factorio 0.13 will have a vastly improved pathfinder so these performance issues should be much less of an issue.

2. Perhaps, but how often should the squad/soldier report show? What if you have hundreds of squads, it will be too spammy. See #8.

3. I am going to try and find how the "Made in:" icon can be changed to show the droid assembler icon (with the cute little red flag!). I also now have a more in-depth wiki at the Github wiki https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfactorio/wiki

4. I'm working on it, as mentioned in above responses to others. The Deployed item is in the logistics lists, but not the important one (undeployed).

5. The animations are funky indeed, it might have something to do with where they are "aiming" while they walk along. I don't think I can actually do anything about this..

6. Yep

7. Gui elements will be low priority, because they are annoying and ugly. I will try to find a way to adjust squad sizes dynamically, maybe with a special Constant Integer combinator entity that overrides the min squad size of 5 but cannot override the max squadsize of 25?

8. I will soon be adding a constant integer combinator that outputs the value of how many droids are alive in your force, and maybe how many squads (less important, really.. why does it matter how they are organized into groups. It's more a back-end programming issue than a gameplay important one)

[ribsngibs]

1. Just curious, what are your PC specs?

Fairly beefy: i7-5820 (6 core 3.3ghz), 32 gb ram. I assume vid card doesn't matter but geforce gfx 980-ti.

2. Perhaps, but how often should the squad/soldier report show? What if you have hundreds of squads, it will be too spammy. See #8.

I think I'd probably just hide it in a collapsed button (like Yarm for example), and display only when expanded. Collapsed view would maybe just show total soldiers active?

[kyranzor]

1. Just curious, what are your PC specs?

Fairly beefy: i7-5820 (6 core 3.3ghz), 32 gb ram. I assume vid card doesn't matter but geforce gfx 980-ti.

2. Perhaps, but how often should the squad/soldier report show? What if you have hundreds of squads, it will be too spammy. See #8.

I think I'd probably just hide it in a collapsed button (like Yarm for example), and display only when expanded. Collapsed view would maybe just show total soldiers active?

Your computer is fine, so It's definitely the game's pathfinder getting bogged down.. Anyway when I get around to all the bugfixing and adding the Terminator (late-game, expensive bot) you can use those and keep the population down. The logistics network should be working for my new items properly then too, so you can restrict how many you make. Depending how easy it is to make a soldier-counter combinator that should be in the next update too.

A fancy GUI like a collapse-able chart/menu would be very low on my priority list for now, but maybe I can have the soldier-counter combinator have a special event fired when selected which does the squad printout/report - just means you need to have some infrastructure nearby to get the info rather than at any time via the player gui.

[kyranzor]

Hey guys, I need some help coming up with recipes for the two new units i'm adding in 0.1.4. I have added a rocket soldier, and a terminator (for late game pwnage).

If you want to help me test for balance and for coming up with recipes, please download the current state of the dev branch from github https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfact ... opment.zip

Copy these files into your current robotarmy v0.1.3 folder and overwrite the files (maybe save it all as a copy so you can revert).

Changes so far are:
-logistics issues fixed for the Battle Droid (Undeployed) so now you can do all your favourite logistics things with them.
-rocket and terminator droids added, can join squads

known issues: rocket and terminator droids have the same recipe/items as the battle droid, they cannot be deployed by the droid assemblers either (I think?? I have just been spawning them using the console).

There have been changes to the original battle droid entity, it's name is "droid-smg" not "droid" so please do NOT try to load an existing game with this test version of the mod, because the migration changes have NOT been set up (this will be in place for the proper 0.1.3 to 0.1.4 transition).

I am thinking to just change the SMG for a rocket launcher for the basic droid with rocket launcher recipe.

I am thinking the terminator can be 10 processing units, 2 laser turrets, heavy armour (or modular armour? the basic power armour), and 10 steel per terminator. You do need about 10-20 terminators in a squad to get the most effectiveness out of them - they stay alive as a group for a VERY long time if you do this. I had 20 of them plough through a deathworld biter swarm for like 20 minutes. They make slow progress but they survive and eventually carve out a good area.

for testing, spawn the three currently available droids like so:

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/c game.local_player.insert({name="droid-smg", count = x })

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/c game.local_player.insert({name="droid-rocket", count = x })

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/c game.local_player.insert({name="terminator", count = x })

[Supercheese]

10 steel per terminator doesn't quite sound like enough, I think it should be 50 or even 100, if they're as powerful as you say.

[kyranzor]

10 steel per terminator doesn't quite sound like enough, I think it should be 50 or even 100, if they're as powerful as you say.

total raw steel would be 10 for base cost, +40 for 2x laser turret, +50 for basic modular armour making it exactly 100 steel.

If you look at all the raw mats needed for the proposed recipe, it's quite expensive and time consuming for a single terminator - and you need 20 of them to make a formidable group. It's just my first best guess, and honestly the 10 steel in the base ingredients is just so the user has to have a more complicated belt/resource input into the assemblers. (complexity for complexity's sake, and because this is Factorio!)

[MiniMe943]

So, do the battle droids get the same buffs from the bullet damage and speed upgrades, or do the guns have separate models?

[kyranzor]

So, do the battle droids get the same buffs from the bullet damage and speed upgrades, or do the guns have separate models?

Thanks for reminding me! I think it's reasonable to allow/apply the upgrades for player shooting speed and shooting damage to the droids. Currently they do not apply to the droids.

[Qloshae]

I don't know why, but this mod does not work for me on MP.

To be extra clear. I can start MP without issues, but when my friend tries to join he gets desynced.

[kyranzor]

I don't know why, but this mod does not work for me on MP.

To be extra clear. I can start MP without issues, but when my friend tries to join he gets desynced.

It could be anything, can you list what mods you were using?

what game version do you both have?

Do you both have the save version of my mod? What source (github or here) did you use to DL the mod (there could be a difference??) ?

If you are playing steam version, there are desync reports usually saved in (on windows of course) " C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Factorio\archive " and they will be named something like the ones I have from an attempt at multiplayer unrelated to my mod back in february: "desync-report-2016-02-09-18-19-06"

If you can confirm those things for me, and maybe attach the desync report as a .zip or similar, then I can try to work out what caused the desync.
Thanks for your bug report!

[Qloshae]

It could be anything, can you list what mods you were using?

what game version do you both have?

Do you both have the save version of my mod? What source (github or here) did you use to DL the mod (there could be a difference??) ?

If you are playing steam version, there are desync reports usually saved in (on windows of course) " C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Factorio\archive " and they will be named something like the ones I have from an attempt at multiplayer unrelated to my mod back in february: "desync-report-2016-02-09-18-19-06"

If you can confirm those things for me, and maybe attach the desync report as a .zip or similar, then I can try to work out what caused the desync.
Thanks for your bug report!

More than this mod, I used these

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{
    "mods": [
        {
            "name": "base",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "advanced-logistics-system",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "diplomacy",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "Electricity_XyLe",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "endless-resources",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "FARL",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "Logistics Railway",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "ModuleInserter",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "MoreBots",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "Natural_Evolution_Buildings",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "Natural_Evolution_Enemies",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "Natural_Evolution_Expansion",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "OverMods",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "Powered_Entities",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "RailTanker",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "SmartTrains",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "specialized_refineries",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "upgrade-planner",
            "enabled": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "Warehousing",
            "enabled": "true"
        }
    ]
}

Quite a long list, I know. But when the mod was removed it all went back to normal.
Also, he had a copy of my mod folder.

I downloaded it from here.

Can't find any desync file, but did find a log.
Although it has been overwritten by now, I did copy a part that kept repeating.

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176.554 Info Router.cpp:228: Received malformed packet from 10.212.210.3:34197 (Couldn't read from input file. File could be corrupted.)

[kyranzor]

so you could start the map with those mods + my mod, then your friend joined, and it desynced after that? Had you placed any items from my mod yet? My mod doesn't do much until you start spawning droids or droid assembler buildings.

[Qloshae]

so you could start the map with those mods + my mod, then your friend joined, and it desynced after that? Had you placed any items from my mod yet? My mod doesn't do much until you start spawning droids or droid assembler buildings.

Worked perfectly as long as it was 1 person, then it desynced.
No items were placed or crafted.

We are in different forces if that's important.

[Qloshae]

so you could start the map with those mods + my mod, then your friend joined, and it desynced after that? Had you placed any items from my mod yet? My mod doesn't do much until you start spawning droids or droid assembler buildings.

I could post my mod folder and evolve name and you could try joining and see if same thing happens.
If it does not, it is on his side, not the mod.
If it is on the mod side, it should give you directly the desync log I think.

[kyranzor]

i'm just getting Evolve on this PC now. We can test this in multiplayer if you have the time to help me sort this out that would be awesome. I suggest the game is only started with robotarmy0.1.3 and the base game active just to be sure the logs are not messy with other possible issues. My Evolve username will be Kyranzor, i'm sure i'll see you there soon.