[MOD 1.0] Alien walls [0.9.5]

[fishycat]

I was playing a new sandbox game and at start I clicked on "gimme all research", then this error popped up. Then I tried a new game, freeplay with creative mode enabled, that way I could start and do research for hybrid wall and gate. That worked fine, but then I started the first upgrade research and boom, another error.

I was looking wrong with the icon, sorry



edit: I uploaded my personal copy, where I also changed the item-groups and deleted some useless stuff.

[TheBrain0110]

Ohh, I see what I did.
This is what I get for doing most of my research testing via console in sandbox.

Code: Select all

Control.lua 128: update_current_tier(game.player.force)

But if you read the docs closely...

Code: Select all

game.player :: LuaPlayer [Read-only]

The player typing at the console - nil in all other instances. See LuaGameScript::players for accessing all players.

game.player is only valid for console commands, game.players is the full list.
I think what I actually want is game.forces["player"], not game.player.force anyway...

Gonna go push that fix out to Vedrit, and hopefully he can post it soon.
I'll take a look at what else you did in yours and see about including it too.

[vedrit]

Ohh, I see what I did.
This is what I get for doing most of my research testing via console in sandbox.

Code: Select all

Control.lua 128: update_current_tier(game.player.force)

But if you read the docs closely...

Code: Select all

game.player :: LuaPlayer [Read-only]

The player typing at the console - nil in all other instances. See LuaGameScript::players for accessing all players.

game.player is only valid for console commands, game.players is the full list.
I think what I actually want is game.forces["player"], not game.player.force anyway...

Gonna go push that fix out to Vedrit, and hopefully he can post it soon.
I'll take a look at what else you did in yours and see about including it too.

I can approve the push, but I won't be able to build the new version and upload to the mod portal till I get home later today

[fishycat]

I saw you missed to change some "hybridized" to "hybrid". In technologies.lua "alien-hybridization-1" +"alien-hybridization-2", then in structures/recipe, item and entity and in data-updates.lua. These should be all then. Hope it gets through before vedrit builds a new version

Worth looking into is also the change with item-groups. I made it so, that it aligns nice with the other walls and the "alien-bioconstruct" also is in the right item-group.

[TheBrain0110]

I saw you missed to change some "hybridized" to "hybrid". In technologies.lua "alien-hybridization-1" +"alien-hybridization-2", then in structures/recipe, item and entity and in data-updates.lua. These should be all then. Hope it gets through before vedrit builds a new version

Nah, I just left the names as they were. There's no real reason the internal names have to change from "hybridized" to "hybrid", they all refer to themselves / each other correctly.

[fishycat]

hmm, not sure, when I changed it in my copy, I missed some first and it threw me an error. Also for consistency, why one time it is hybrid then hybridized...


edit: I made some pics yesterday and forgot to post them anyway, thats how it looks after I made some changes to item-group.

Pics

Vanilla+AlienWall -- Alien Bioconstruct

Screenshot (1).png (296.58 KiB) Viewed 6977 times

Vanilla+AlienWall -- Hybrid Wall and gate

Screenshot (2).png (295.3 KiB) Viewed 6977 times

Bob's mods+AlienWall -- Alien Bioconstruct

Screenshot (3).png (438 KiB) Viewed 6977 times

Bob's mods+AlienWall -- Hybrid Wall and gate

Screenshot (4).png (626.58 KiB) Viewed 6977 times

[Tanatos]

Please Update Code in control.lua:

Code: Select all

script.on_event(defines.events.on_research_finished, function(event)
    local research = event.research.name
    if string.find(research, "alien%-hybrid%-upgrade") then
        for _, player in pairs(game.players) do 
            update_current_tier(player.force)
        end    
		-- I'm still not sure if it's possible to handle multiple player forces with different tiers, but in theory you'd call the force of the one doing the research here, not `player`.
        update_walls()
    end
end   

[TheBrain0110]

Please Update Code in control.lua:

Yeah, I fixed that and sent it to vedrit ages ago. He seems to have forgotten about it :/
I dunno if I should go and upload a fork or not, don’t wanna be rude.

I did have some ideas I was playing around with about using alien artifacts from Natural Evolution / Bob’s Enemies instead of mining biomass fields, dunno if anyone else would like that...

[vedrit]

Ah jeeze, didn't realize that my working directory wasn't the repo directory...
Anyway, I've fixed that, as well as an error when placing the walls/gates.

[Light]

I did have some ideas I was playing around with about using alien artifacts from Natural Evolution / Bob’s Enemies instead of mining biomass fields, dunno if anyone else would like that...

I was just about to make that suggestion once I saw the mod.

My maps are coated in more than enough ores that another one is unwanted. Removing those fields and instead using alien artifacts would be a great use of them while also encouraging more combat, which is more engaging and gives that risk/reward feeling. It also gives Angel's bio processing more value when it comes to cultivating artifacts should the biter nests be a bit too thick to handle.

I'll keep my eye on this one should that happen, as my team would love some regenerating walls given the abuse we constantly sustain.

[TheBrain0110]

I did have some ideas I was playing around with about using alien artifacts from Natural Evolution / Bob’s Enemies instead of mining biomass fields, dunno if anyone else would like that...

I was just about to make that suggestion once I saw the mod.

My maps are coated in more than enough ores that another one is unwanted. Removing those fields and instead using alien artifacts would be a great use of them while also encouraging more combat, which is more engaging and gives that risk/reward feeling. It also gives Angel's bio processing more value when it comes to cultivating artifacts should the biter nests be a bit too thick to handle.

I'll keep my eye on this one should that happen, as my team would love some regenerating walls given the abuse we constantly sustain.

I think you'd be interested in the map and mod settings I'm playing with now. It's basically rail world meets death world. And time & pollution based evolution is off, only destroying nests increases the evolution factor. But you have to do a lot of that to clear a path the the next ore field

[vedrit]

I've actually been wanting to remove the ore and instead have biomass drop from biters/spitters. It makes more sense that way.

[Light]

I did have some ideas I was playing around with about using alien artifacts from Natural Evolution / Bob’s Enemies instead of mining biomass fields, dunno if anyone else would like that...

I was just about to make that suggestion once I saw the mod.

My maps are coated in more than enough ores that another one is unwanted. Removing those fields and instead using alien artifacts would be a great use of them while also encouraging more combat, which is more engaging and gives that risk/reward feeling. It also gives Angel's bio processing more value when it comes to cultivating artifacts should the biter nests be a bit too thick to handle.

I'll keep my eye on this one should that happen, as my team would love some regenerating walls given the abuse we constantly sustain.

I think you'd be interested in the map and mod settings I'm playing with now. It's basically rail world meets death world. And time & pollution based evolution is off, only destroying nests increases the evolution factor. But you have to do a lot of that to clear a path the the next ore field

Intriguing.

Myself and my family are playing Bob's + Angel's with quite the marathon of harsh settings and mods to prolong it. We're a good 50 hours into our current map and just barely scratched blue science, thanks due to the constant war with the biters and scarcity of the ore patches. The ore is so so rare that we have to kill over a hundred spawners just to have the chance to try and mine a single ore patch a good 50+ chunks away, which with our green science technology is brutally hard and requires good planning.

Suffice to say we've reached the point where defending the factory and outposts are almost impossible due to constant biter raids chewing through our walls and no robots to repair them. We'd hate to start over as we did lose chunks of our factory already, but regenerating walls could most certainly cut down the fatigue of trying to repair dozens of slightly damaged walls every couple of minutes so we could focus on other things. Especially with regards to our mining outposts slowly eroding away since we can't babysit them 24/7.

We've got thousands of alien artifacts just sitting in a chest, so if this mod does adapt their use for wall building then I know what to add into our game for sure. It may be what very well saves the campaign and allows us to finish the rocket so we may retire the game for the next year or so.

[TheBrain0110]

Ah jeeze, didn't realize that my working directory wasn't the repo directory...
Anyway, I've fixed that, as well as an error when placing the walls/gates.

Ok, so I've pulled your latest Repo updates into my branch, and merged everything the way it should be.

Not entirely sure why you felt the need to rename the entities 'hybrid-wall' to 'hybridWall', but I went with it, and updated the item and recipe names to match, and added them to the migrations script.

That's about the only changes you had between your repo and mine, except yours was missing my most recent fixes for the upgrade research not working ('game.player' vs 'game.forces["player"]' ) and the descriptions.

Anyway, hopefully if your working directory and your github repo match now, you *should* be able to take my latest pull request and everything should merge smoothly.

You and others may also be interested in my "artifacts" branch on my Github repo, it has the version I've been playing with that uses Natural Evolution / Bob's enemies artifacts instead of biomass in the Alien Bioconstruct recipe.

[vedrit]

Not entirely sure why you felt the need to rename the entities 'hybrid-wall' to 'hybridWall', but I went with it, and updated the item and recipe names to match, and added them to the migrations script.

I'm pretty sure I was using at least some of the changes from the repo, since there were tiered walls and such, but when I would place an entity I got an exception. When I made all the names match entities, the issue resolved, and since entity names can't have a dash (-) in them, it only made sense to go with hybridWall.

You and others may also be interested in my "artifacts" branch on my Github repo, it has the version I've been playing with that uses Natural Evolution / Bob's enemies artifacts instead of biomass in the Alien Bioconstruct recipe.

I'll take a look, and maybe figure out making optional depedenancies. I don't play with Natural Evolution or any of Bob's mods, and don't really plan to. I know it's possible, just not something I've looked into before.

[TheBrain0110]

Not entirely sure why you felt the need to rename the entities 'hybrid-wall' to 'hybridWall', but I went with it, and updated the item and recipe names to match, and added them to the migrations script.

I'm pretty sure I was using at least some of the changes from the repo, since there were tiered walls and such, but when I would place an entity I got an exception. When I made all the names match entities, the issue resolved, and since entity names can't have a dash (-) in them, it only made sense to go with hybridWall.

I'm not sure about entity exceptions on placing them, I don't think I ever encountered that issue. And entity names definitely can have dashes in them, most vanilla ones do.
From what I can tell, you had the first couple pull requests merged, but not the last one that fixed a couple issues related to upgrade research and the player force. And then I added a couple later commits to add description tooltips and some misc stuff. But of course I can only say what the state of the public github repo was, not your personal copy xD

You and others may also be interested in my "artifacts" branch on my Github repo, it has the version I've been playing with that uses Natural Evolution / Bob's enemies artifacts instead of biomass in the Alien Bioconstruct recipe.

I'll take a look, and maybe figure out making optional depedenancies. I don't play with Natural Evolution or any of Bob's mods, and don't really plan to. I know it's possible, just not something I've looked into before.

As for the artifacts branch, that's a bit of a personal project I went with so I could learn how this stuff works myself. I have a pretty good idea of how to make the dependencies optional, just need to get around to doing it.

As always, I dump a lot of my thoughts into commit messages, if you care to read my ramblings :p

I don't play with most of Bob's sweeping overhauls, just the parts that add new tiers of buildings without completely changing the vanilla game, and add stronger enemies. Same with NE & Rampant, etc.
Although for my most recent game I've dipped my toe in and added Bob's Modules, and some parts of Logistics.

[Light]

You and others may also be interested in my "artifacts" branch on my Github repo, it has the version I've been playing with that uses Natural Evolution / Bob's enemies artifacts instead of biomass in the Alien Bioconstruct recipe.

I had to remove the NE dependency yet it worked just fine. The only issue is that the bio plate is in the production category instead of intermediates.

The family thanks you for sharing as we added it in our game tonight. It did as we hoped in saving many minutes of our time by not having to run across the map to constantly repair walls with repair packs. I've underestimated not only the usefulness of repair bots, but also how many minutes such a task can waste. We also love that the walls are not overpowered and can still be easily taken down by a small raid, so the pressure is still on to keep defenses strong.

[TheBrain0110]

You and others may also be interested in my "artifacts" branch on my Github repo, it has the version I've been playing with that uses Natural Evolution / Bob's enemies artifacts instead of biomass in the Alien Bioconstruct recipe.

I had to remove the NE dependency yet it worked just fine. The only issue is that the bio plate is in the production category instead of intermediates.

The family thanks you for sharing as we added it in our game tonight. It did as we hoped in saving many minutes of our time by not having to run across the map to constantly repair walls with repair packs. I've underestimated not only the usefulness of repair bots, but also how many minutes such a task can waste. We also love that the walls are not overpowered and can still be easily taken down by a small raid, so the pressure is still on to keep defenses strong.

Cool!

I've been tweaking the balance on the recipe a bit, it used to be you got 5 plates per artifact, I adjusted it down to 2, as I ended up with a lot more artifacts than I expected in my playthrough. Let me know what you think of the current recipe.

You may also be interested in the Stormwalls mod, I like that one too for a different approach.

[vedrit]

You and others may also be interested in my "artifacts" branch on my Github repo, it has the version I've been playing with that uses Natural Evolution / Bob's enemies artifacts instead of biomass in the Alien Bioconstruct recipe.

I had to remove the NE dependency yet it worked just fine. The only issue is that the bio plate is in the production category instead of intermediates.

The family thanks you for sharing as we added it in our game tonight. It did as we hoped in saving many minutes of our time by not having to run across the map to constantly repair walls with repair packs. I've underestimated not only the usefulness of repair bots, but also how many minutes such a task can waste. We also love that the walls are not overpowered and can still be easily taken down by a small raid, so the pressure is still on to keep defenses strong.

Cool!

I've been tweaking the balance on the recipe a bit, it used to be you got 5 plates per artifact, I adjusted it down to 2, as I ended up with a lot more artifacts than I expected in my playthrough. Let me know what you think of the current recipe.

You may also be interested in the Stormwalls mod, I like that one too for a different approach.

I've been thinking about lowering the health bonus on the higher tiers. A swarm of medium or big biters and spitters (with Walls Block Spitters mod) and they really can't do much against once any of the upgrades have been researched.

Also, on the topic of Stormwalls, I run Force Fields 2, which is based on the same abandoned mod but takes a different approach.

[TheBrain0110]

You and others may also be interested in my "artifacts" branch on my Github repo, it has the version I've been playing with that uses Natural Evolution / Bob's enemies artifacts instead of biomass in the Alien Bioconstruct recipe.

I had to remove the NE dependency yet it worked just fine. The only issue is that the bio plate is in the production category instead of intermediates.

The family thanks you for sharing as we added it in our game tonight. It did as we hoped in saving many minutes of our time by not having to run across the map to constantly repair walls with repair packs. I've underestimated not only the usefulness of repair bots, but also how many minutes such a task can waste. We also love that the walls are not overpowered and can still be easily taken down by a small raid, so the pressure is still on to keep defenses strong.

Cool!

I've been tweaking the balance on the recipe a bit, it used to be you got 5 plates per artifact, I adjusted it down to 2, as I ended up with a lot more artifacts than I expected in my playthrough. Let me know what you think of the current recipe.

You may also be interested in the Stormwalls mod, I like that one too for a different approach.

I've been thinking about lowering the health bonus on the higher tiers. A swarm of medium or big biters and spitters (with Walls Block Spitters mod) and they really can't do much against once any of the upgrades have been researched.

Also, on the topic of Stormwalls, I run Force Fields 2, which is based on the same abandoned mod but takes a different approach.

See, not the way I play. With Rampant & Natural Evolution and the settings I've got, it seems like a group will chew through a Tier 4 1000HP wall pretty quickly if I don't kill them fast enough.

Of course, the way I add mods is a bit of an arms race...
"I think I'll try some tougher enemies."
"Better add some improved defences to counter them"
...later...
"Ooh, new combat toys!"
"Hmmm, the enemies are getting killed too easily now, guess I need to find stronger ones..."

And repeat :p