[MOD 0.18] Robot Army. v0.4.4

[supernet2]

So... hows the rally point suppose to work? i've tried variouscenarios like loading droids into it, and then deploying them around it. Still not understanding how they get recalled and return to the rally beacon

[kyranzor]

So... hows the rally point suppose to work? i've tried variouscenarios like loading droids into it, and then deploying them around it. Still not understanding how they get recalled and return to the rally beacon

The rally point is a "chest" object, but that's just for a simple entity to base the code on... guys it's totally possible the rally beacon is broken right now, and some more coding tonight will fix it and you guys can try it out tomorrow. I have had at least 1-2 squads properly respond to the rally beacon, but I saw others ignoring it, so it's still WIP.

This is how it works (is meant to work..): You place the beacon, and some code runs in the background along the lines of;
- for each squad in the beacon's force, if their command is not == "guard", then set command to "go to location" with the rally point's position.

When they get there, they will either idle, or return to battle. This rally code only runs ONCE when the rally beacon is first placed. if you want to try it again, just pick it up and place it down again.

oh btw, I'll be putting in the new GFX for the other 3 droids tonight too. get ready for awesomeness!!

[massey]

hehe.. people are getting over eager for new features.

It works great so far kyranzor. Thanks for your hard work.

A side note for bobs mod users:
if you are using bobs electronics you can open the 'recipe-updates.lua' in the 'bobselectronics_(versionnumber)/prototypes' folder and add the lines:

Code: Select all

   recipe.name == "droid-rifle" or
 recipe.name == "droid-assembling-machine" or

including the second 'or' thats not a typo!

add the lines between these two lines at the start of the file:

Code: Select all

    recipe.name == "splitter" or
    recipe.name == "frame-1" --DyTech basic mining drill

so it will be

Code: Select all

    recipe.name == "splitter" or
recipe.name == "droid-rifle" or
   recipe.name == " droid-assembling-machine" or
    recipe.name == "frame-1" --DyTech basic mining drill

this will reduce the cost of the rifle droids and the assembly machine to be basic circuit boards instead of electronic circuits.
I think thats more balanced. the other droids and terminator will still cost the better electronics.


kyranzor, I don't know a lot about modding factorio. But i think you can do something similar directly in your mod to fix the costs in bobs mods etc. I just feel rifle droids work out a bit expensive on materials in bobs mods for cannon fodder. I know compatibility with other mods comes second to the function of your own mod. its not a request, more a heads up that bobs mods has the effect.

[kyranzor]

Okay guys,

dev branch now has a working rally beacon. guard station icon fixed (has shield instead of target crosshairs like the droid assembler does). the shield is meant to mean "defensive" and the crosshairs imply the droid assembler is for "offensive" deployment of droids (which it is!). Rally beacon calls all squads to a point just below and to the right of the beacon, except guard squads at guard stations.

Check out the new sprites for all the droids! it's super cool.

Thanks to YuokiTani's amazingly fast work, we got these sooner than expected. Test them and give feedback please. they will have more animations on them later, like treads moving and guns up/down when attacking/idle.

[massey]

graphics look great, but now the droid assembler isn't spawning the droids for me. I can place them myself, or use the guard outpost just fine. but the spawner just makes 1 'deployed rifle droid' and does nothing after that.
I can remove this 'deployed' version and place it in a guard outpost and it spawns it.

[kyranzor]

graphics look great, but now the droid assembler isn't spawning the droids for me. I can place them myself, or use the guard outpost just fine. but the spawner just makes 1 'deployed rifle droid' and does nothing after that.
I can remove this 'deployed' version and place it in a guard outpost and it spawns it.

lol wtf.. i'll have a look and see if I can fix the file on github. No idea what caused that kind of behaviour. Have you tried the rally beacon yet?

[massey]

Got this error.

not sure if it involved the rally beacon, but I had just placed it and a squad continued off to fight biters. when it was wiped out the error appeared.
Maybe the recall event was called just after they where dead?

[kyranzor]

Hey, funny timing. while fixing the droid assembler not spawning (was because when you build a droid assembler it was not being properly added to the force list, therefore was not spawning droids), I found and fixed that exact bug too. That bug is caused by the "trim squads" function I use to remove nil/dead squads from the lists.

get the new files from the dev branch, enjoy!

[massey]

Thanks a million. I'm starting a new map with maxed out biter settings. Should be a real battle of attrition.

[kyranzor]

Thanks a million. I'm starting a new map with maxed out biter settings. Should be a real battle of attrition.

The guard stations should make defence reasonably painless once you can get them up and running. Have turrets behind the troops as the fallback option

[supernet2]

You'll have my full attention on testing/debugging the mod tomorrow for about 6hrs straight so ill be available around 5pmish -4 UTC/GMT

Pittsburgh (USA - Pennsylvania) Thursday, July 14, 2016 at 5:00:00 PM EDT UTC-4 hours
UTC (Time Zone) Thursday, July 14, 2016 at 9:00:00 PM UTC UTC

[kyranzor]

Well a combination of game updates and my dev branch fixes should give you a pretty smooth experience.

The next thing on my list is flamethrower robot and patrol poles but I might roll out the mod update first with all the new shit for everyone else before doing those.

[kiba]

Are the different type of robots modular?

I haven't tried out the mod yet as I have other projects I am working on.

If the robots aren't modular, I think it's possible to make them modulars by making them full blown characters.

Also, maybe you could have APC to transport robots. Would that increase performance since the APC is doing the pathfinding until automatic deployment?

[Qon]

I get clockwork robots spawned inside eachother, all tangled up. And they can't move away from this. Some kind of robot porn easter egg? q:

Pic

RobotDoubleSpawnCollision.png (1.34 MiB) Viewed 7049 times

My evolution went from about 13% (95% time) to 60% (95% spawner kills) after I started spawning these! I guess I should invest in defence before launching too much offense and then forgetting about it!

I'm not very picky about graphics, but Youkis artwork really adds something here. The robots fit in really well.

[Peppe]

Does the death explosion do damage?

If so does it damage friendly bots?

Feel like I have had a few armies go out and get wiped out in a chain reaction of explosion, but maybe they are just losing...

Edit:
Ok watched a battle closely... looks like friendly fire.

I hand release like 25 each of droids, bazooka, and terminators. They all head for roughly the same base.

Looks like when a bot dies everyone start turning on each other? like other squads become enemies with eachother.

Is this from hand placement, mixing squads, or something else?

[kyranzor]

That's from the rocket bots. In the dev branch this is fixed, and rocket droids no longer do splash damage.

If you don't want to try the dev branch code then you should avoid sending rocket bots in your squads because although friendly fire is funny to watch it's expensive and kind of lame when they all aggro eachother. Currently the devs are not too interested in fixing it.

I want to have explosion damage on death, the code is in there, but doesn't seem to work (it's been in there as a death action/event since the beginning but seemingly has never worked).

I will release the next version 0.1.5 in the next day, with the new features and graphics.

[Peppe]

That's from the rocket bots. In the dev branch this is fixed, and rocket droids no longer do splash damage.

If you don't want to try the dev branch code then you should avoid sending rocket bots in your squads because although friendly fire is funny to watch it's expensive and kind of lame when they all aggro eachother. Currently the devs are not too interested in fixing it.

I want to have explosion damage on death, the code is in there, but doesn't seem to work (it's been in there as a death action/event since the beginning but seemingly has never worked).

I will release the next version 0.1.5 in the next day, with the new features and graphics.

Sounds good i'll look at the dev branch.

When I followed them around and with my repair bots they did fine, but this time I held back and watched the massacre... tragic and expensive, but fun to watch

[kyranzor]

Hey guys, v0.2.0 released now.

This update has some awesome sprites made by YuokiTani, for all 4 of the current droid types. There will be new icons for the droids later. This release brings the Guard station and Rally Point (see wiki for details) and improvements to the artifact looting that allows bob's mods artifacts to get scooped up too. Rocket droids are now basically high damage snipers, and do no splash damage which should stop the hilarious-yet-expensive friendly fire issues.

Changes from 0.1.44 to 0.2.0 release:
- added guard station
- adjusted rocket droids projectiles so there is 0 splash area rather than 1, to fully avoid the "friendly fire" issue
- added terminator GFX work in progress, courtesy of YuokiTani - the "Lord of Art"
- added "laser" resistance to terminators.
- added rally beacon
- added bullet shells ejecting from rifle and SMG droids
- added custom sprites for smg, rifle, and rocket droids, courtesy of YuokiTani
- reduced terminator range by 1
- changed icons GFX for droid assembler, guard station has a matching one.
- reduced cost of droid assembler and guard station recipe in terms of electronic circuits
- guard station building graphics
- squads now pick up any item on the ground with the word "artifact" in it, so all bobs mods artifacts are now collected.


Check out the wiki https://github.com/kyranf/robotarmyfactorio/wiki I've done a whole bunch of updating and some new images.
The important wiki pages to check out for the new features are:
Droid Guard Station
Rally Point

And to see the updated graphics for the droids,
Available Droids

[depeter]

Looks like an amazing update, thanks! I haven't had much time until now to test this mod aside from some simple sandbox testing, but I'll be starting a relatively big modded play-trough soon, including Misanthrope and extra enemies (Bob's mods), and I hope to get much use out of your droids to keep my base safe

I was trying to figure out the DPS of the robots, but I don't have much experience with entity definitions, so I'm not sure I interpreted everything correctly. What I'm trying to work out is how Terminators with a maxed out +100% Combat Robot Damage would stack up against SMG Droids with a maxed out Bullet Damage and Speed of a bit over +200% (that includes some extra research tiers from another mod). If I read and calculated things correctly, I think Terminators win out by a fairly close margin (about 15-20%). Does that sound like it could be about right?
Of course there's also enemy resistances to take into account (especially with the extra Bob enemies), and the fact that Terminators are a lot harder to kill, and more expensive to build, so a mix of both types might be best

How I came to those figures : both have "cooldown" 10, which I interpreted as 1 shot per 10 ticks = 6 per second. SMG has 5 base damage, Terminator has 30 base damage. So it's 6/s * 30 damage + 100% damage = 360 DPS for the Terminator, and 6/s + 210% shooting speed I think * 5 damage + 220% damage I think = just under 300 DPS for the SMG.

[kyranzor]

Those numbers seem about right, but i cant confirm other than by logic and entity definitions that the speed upgrade actually affects the droid bullet shooting speed. The damage does work, as far as I can tell, so I am reasonably confident the bullet speed does too.

I'll have to sandbox test a base SMG droid versus a big biter with and without max bullet shooting speed upgrades to double check.

As for your numbers, the reality is big biters have 8 physical resistance so until the droids start doing at least 9 damage per SHOT not per second, does the real performance improvement start being seen. Otherwise each bullet just does minimum 1 damage. Terminator does laser damage which there is no resistance for, in biters, unless mods add it.

I do strongly suggest putting SMG bots in with terminators though to help thin out swarms and let the terminators shoot the big bugs.