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[Splint]

Hello all. I have a thread further down for something else, but I've decided to put something to up here, because I have a setting that would be... Fun. Politically charged due to some factions, but not playing favorites with anyone there.

This setting I currently just call The Network

It's a virtual world that isn't a simulation, if that makes sense. And I think it could be a kind of fun setting.

Now, I have a few ideas, but there's some issues.

1. I don't know how to do... I dunno, "serious" modding. This is a problem because lacking certain skills entirely, I can't implement things like power generators, robots, or automatic weapons and molotovs.
2. I've always been reliant on others fixing my broken stuff. Ask Hugo and ZM5, I usually go to them when I have no clue what the actual fuck I'm doing.
3. I'm an ideas man. So actually jumping in and getting good and proper stuck in... Scares me, to be honest.

So, let's begin with a few problems.

Spoiler: Main issues (click to show/hide)

- I have only a very basic understanding of modding. I can do creatures and items to an extent, and thanks to workshopdraw, I can readily make workshops. I dunno what goes into making custom graphics, interactions really, or anything of that nature.
- Magic is functionally a thing. I don't know how to fully implement this.
- Firearms and energy weapons exist side by side. While I can simply pull gameplay and story segregation for the energy weapons, the fact remains guns are United States levels of commonplace, and that means for anything besides pump, bolt, and lever action weapons, I need to know how to DFhack. Which I don't.
- Means of providing power besides wind and water wheels. Same issue as for guns, I don't know how to make power generation buildings. I know it's doable, but don't know how.
- I don't know how anything regarding item-syndrome or unit creation works, so I have no idea how to implement things like power armor, hazard suits, or creating robots.
- I don't know how in-depth to go on stuff like weapons and armor. I'm someone who likes to make extra details, so as to help people know who has what when I write, so...

Now that most of that is out of the way, let's go on to factions I have in mind. I'd like to make all of them playable eventually, save for one. For now, I am omitting two factions due to being highly controversial in nature until I've gotten further along in learning how to do shit.

Spoiler: Factions (WIP concepts) (click to show/hide)

Users - Joe blow network residents, like any normal person. The only unplayable of the bunch, and probably present in several copy-paste enties all with varied values, to indicate how disparate people are in our own world.

Datajacks - bandits, murderers, rapists, drug pushers, unfriendly salvagers, and other general human refuse. They'd be my actual focus, being by their nature able to access anything eventually, since they'll steal, kill, and trade for anything, and they come from all walks of life united only by desperation or desire to make their way in the world outside the bounds of the law. They would have the unique ability to make use of blueprints bought from other factions and copy their items as a result. They would come in three flavors: Friendly, Stealing, and snatching, giving you room to experiment with them and giving certain other factions allies.

Bolsheviks - A stand in for communists/socialists. This faction's main thing would actually being excellent for doing megaprojects, high numbers, and dominating trade via being able to bulk produce basic things from fewer materials. As a consequence though, they take hits to skilled labor such as bone carving or armoring, relying on cheaply made junk more than skilled craftsmanship. Due to periodic famines, most are often a bit stunted in height and weaker than average, but make up for this with a bit of natural determination to carry on for the good of those around them.

Otherkin - Based upon animal-kin. Extremely skilled craftsmen, they are mainly comprised of people with what could be considered mental illness or harmless quirkiness, depending on who you ask. Some among them however due to the nature of the setting, can turn into powerful animal-man beasts to fight their enemies (think werecreatures, but on demand and not opposed to life/berserk.) Due to their general ineptitude they have a harder time providing food for themselves, but have an easier time producing fine goods (being often shut away from others to practice the craft they enjoy,) and are at peace with wildlife. They would as a consequence have a stronger affinity for melee combat than other factions besides one of the omitted ones.

Circle G - A megacorp faction sporting the most advanced weapons and armor, as well as medical treatments for all that ails ya - nerve damage, blindness, missing organs? No problem! Want a plasma blaster or a shoulder-fired mass driver? A crysis-style suit of power armor? A reconstructive stasis pod, or nuclear batteries to make your own fusion generators? A Circle G matter fabricator? Then Circle G's got you covered. Assuming you're willing to pay extortionate prices.

Or you could steal from them, but they tend to respond poorly to such behavior, and have the best weapons in the setting, so take precautions if you intend to start a fight with them.

Yoruu - The Russia of megacorps. Where Circle G deals in the super advanced, Yoruu deals in what people know works in the setting - Cloning of parts, ballistic weapons, advanced filtration helms, some robots, and the schematics to make their equipment under license at your very own Yoruu fabrication stations. Like Circle G, they charge heavy, but not as much. Like Circle G they dislike you trying to stiff them.

Survivalists - These guys would have a heavy skew towards males, and natural skill in certain food acquisition and combat skills.  Due to thew skewed population likely guaranteeing being wiped out during world gen, they and likely most Datajacks would be reliant on whatever forts you make with them. Maybe not playable, or maybe distrustful and hostile to everyone? Dunno what to do for them.

And now on to wildlife unique to the setting.

Spoiler: Wildlife ideas (click to show/hide)

3-Floater - Pudgy teal and fuchsia birds the size of turkeys with a <3, prone to fleeing when confronted with danger and a major food animal in the Network.

Fury - A red-skinned, yellow eyed humanoid monster with sharp claws and teeth. Being wrathful and angry creatures, they are sometimes used by Datajacks and others as fighting animals, alongside...

Enreks - a yellow and green death-claw inspired beast. They like to steal things, being based upon envious energies in the code of the world.

Mirelurk (name's a placeholder, don't kill me for biting Fallout) - Take a crab and combine it with the warped tortoise from Runescape and you get a basic idea. They are odd crusteans with tentacles sprouting from under a thick shell on their tops, drawn to areas of gloom, filth, and decay, and have a general affinity for water.

Hollow - Teal-skinned, zombie-like beasts constantly wailing in despair. They are opposed to life.

Black Widow - An intelligent wandering entity. In setting, they often seduce people specifically to steal from or kill them, hence the name, and usually under the control of malicious hackers.

Loli - Now I know what you're thinking, but these adorable, ghost-like little girls love nothing more than to kill people by draining all their blood, and should they land a bite that tears the skin, they do so in a matter of seconds. opposed to life.

Lost Servitor - cybernetic combat husks sporting guns, melee weapons, or both. Imagine a feral ghoul spliced with guns or sharp things. If captured, they can be tamed and brought to programming stations for repair into regular combat servitors.

Corr - Spawned by systems bearing corrupted files, these things are black balls with two small, beady red eyes and spindly limbs ending in three-clawed hands or cloven hooves, with a mouth full of teeth.

Screecher - Basically the seagulls from Brutal Legend - a mic with tings and clawed flippers - and they respond poorly to criticism of their singing abilities, and are extremely aggressive.

Coderats and Giant Coderats - Rats that seem to be even more common than normal ones, and grow in size as they age (which can lead to truly monstrous beasts, which are split into their own creature.) They are especially common around places known to be full of glitched equipment or poorly written programs, and unlike normal rats, nuever come in sizes smaller than a cat, and their eyes are literally nothing but static.

There is also a variant of raven which displays the same static eyes of coderats.

Now, the setting has room for all manner of craziness, and what's in the factions is just what I came up with off the top of my head, or is based on existing setting notes. Among the things I'd like to implent is, particularly for the Datajacks, some things to backfire, creating explosions, fires, or creating code-based entities like Corrs and Coderats as possible failures or even just because of bugs in thier equipment.

But in general, this mod will serve as a learning tool for me, both for what can and can't be done, how to do shit, and if people are willing to, showing me how to do shit directly. What I learn working on this could be carried into other projects (the Copper age mod, a playable civ of monastic knights, stuff like that.)

[thefriendlyhacker]

Can I recommend cribbing off Fallout Equestria for this?  It has a lot of the things you want in it.  I even recently wrote an autofire script that can mimic magazine fed automatic weapons, and I am probably doing another one for multi-shot weapons (e.g. buckshot) and interaction based projectile weapons in the near future.

Lets go into details

Spoiler: spoiled for length (click to show/hide)

...
1. I don't know how to do... I dunno, "serious" modding. This is a problem because lacking certain skills entirely, I can't implement things like power generators, robots, or automatic weapons and molotovs.

With the aforementioned script, automatic weapons are easy.  Robots require a bunch of custom tissues and such but there isn't really anything radically difficult about them.  Molotovs...if you don't mind having a "bag" weapon that creatures throw molotovs out of, then you could probably adapt the rocket launcher script from the Musket mod and get something workable.

- I have only a very basic understanding of modding. I can do creatures and items to an extent, and thanks to workshopdraw, I can readily make workshops. I dunno what goes into making custom graphics, interactions really, or anything of that nature.

Interactions you can do by looking at the interactions from other mods and mimicking how they do things.  Custom graphics are easy so long as you already have a sprite sheet with the images you want on it (actually drawing the sprites is another issue altogether unless you happen to be an artist).

- Magic is functionally a thing. I don't know how to fully implement this.

If by magic you mean personal spellcasting for immediate defensive or offensive purposes while in combat, you implement it with lots of interactions and probably some dfhack syndrome giving scripts.  If you mean something else then, well, it depends on what you want.

- Firearms and energy weapons exist side by side. While I can simply pull gameplay and story segregation for the energy weapons, the fact remains guns are United States levels of commonplace, and that means for anything besides pump, bolt, and lever action weapons, I need to know how to DFhack. Which I don't.

Again, autofire script.  Happy to be of help.  Here is a sample script call for a 20 round mag assault rifle with various melee attachments that fires in 3 round bursts.

ranged/ranged-rof -name "service rifles" -reqWeaponType [ ITEM_WEAPON_RIFLE_COMBAT ITEM_WEAPON_RIFLE_RIPPER ITEM_WEAPON_RIFLE_CHAIN ] -timeBase [ 5 5 -30 5 5 -30 5 5 -30 5 5 -30 5 5 -30 5 5 -30 5 -40 ] -timeMult [ 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 2 ]

Neat, huh?

- Means of providing power besides wind and water wheels. ... I don't know how to make power generation buildings. I know it's doable, but don't know how.

I am not familiar with how to screw around with power through dfhack.  Hopefully someone else can help you here.

Same issue as for guns

  Guns end up being projectile weapons (i.e. crossbows) with custom ammunition and reactions to make them, along with scripts as necessary.  There is only one serious caveat with this - civs that are given weapons also get access to vanilla style reactions to make them.  This isn't a problem for non-playable civs, but if you give a playable civ power armor, rifles and ammunition for normal use, then the player will be able to produce those items using only a handful of metal bars.  There might be a way to dfhack around this, I don't know enough about how the inbuilt metalsmithing/bowyer reactions and entity equipment system works to say for sure.

- I don't know how anything regarding item-syndrome or unit creation works, so I have no idea how to implement things like power armor, hazard suits, or creating robots.

Again, go crib off Fallout Equestria.  With the exception of anything involving radiation (which is in desperate need of an overhaul), there is stuff there available as a guide for you.

Now for some comments on the details.

Bolsheviks - A stand in for communists/socialists. This faction's main thing would actually being excellent for doing megaprojects, high numbers, and dominating trade via being able to bulk produce basic things from fewer materials. As a consequence though, they take hits to skilled labor such as bone carving or armoring, relying on cheaply made junk more than skilled craftsmanship. Due to periodic famines, most are often a bit stunted in height and weaker than average, but make up for this with a bit of natural determination to carry on for the good of those around them.

I don't know how well this would play out in practice.  The ability to mass produce cheap junk isn't particularly useful when there are so many ways to accumulate enormous amounts of wealth if you care about it enough.

Otherkin - Based upon animal-kin. Extremely skilled craftsmen, they are mainly comprised of people with what could be considered mental illness or harmless quirkiness, depending on who you ask. Some among them however due to the nature of the setting, can turn into powerful animal-man beasts to fight their enemies (think werecreatures, but on demand and not opposed to life/berserk.)

I would suggest not making them like werecreatures - if I remember correctly, transformations reset attributes which is not particularly nice when it happens to a high attribute military commander.  Combat triggered attribute buffs/beneficial tag giving is straight forward enough, though. 

Due to their general ineptitude they have a harder time providing food for themselves, but have an easier time producing fine goods (being often shut away from others to practice the craft they enjoy,) and are at peace with wildlife. They would as a consequence have a stronger affinity for melee combat than other factions besides one of the omitted ones.

Similarly, I don't know how much their downside of lower production rates will actually matter.  Not much, I suspect.

Circle G - A megacorp faction sporting the most advanced weapons and armor, as well as medical treatments for all that ails ya - nerve damage, blindness, missing organs? No problem!

Either syndromes or the full-heal script for the medical stuff, depending on you are just removing damage or providing permanent buffs through cybernetics or whatever.  Reasonably easy. 

Want a plasma blaster or a shoulder-fired mass driver?

Energy weapons are non-trivial, but hopefully by the time you get to the point of implementing them I will have done a script that can handle that with no issues.

A crysis-style suit of power armor?

Custom armor RAWs + item-syndrome item-trigger

A reconstructive stasis pod

Would full-heal plus a paralysis + NOBREATHE sydrome do the trick?

, or nuclear batteries to make your own fusion generators?

Again, hopefully someone else can chip in when it comes to power generation.

A Circle G matter fabricator?

Is this going to be implemented as a custom building with custom reactions that is built with a tool only available from Circle G?  If so, then it is straight forward.

Then Circle G's got you covered. Assuming you're willing to pay extortionate prices.

You will need to do trickery with high value custom materials if you want high prices for armor and weapons - they aren't manually settable but are based off their protective/offensive properties.

Or you could steal from them, but they tend to respond poorly to such behavior, and have the best weapons in the setting, so take precautions if you intend to start a fight with them.

A word of warning - against a committed player who is willing to resort to tactics like magma chambers and cave-in traps or who just manages to field a few squads of legendaries, a Circle G siege sounds like an unusually well armed pinata full of juicy technology.

Yoruu - The Russia of megacorps. Where Circle G deals in the super advanced, Yoruu deals in what people know works in the setting - Cloning of parts, ballistic weapons, advanced filtration helms, some robots, and the schematics to make their equipment under license at your very own Yoruu fabrication stations. Like Circle G, they charge heavy, but not as much. Like Circle G they dislike you trying to stiff them.

You will need to make separate items for circle g/yoruu if you want differing prices afaik.  Otherwise, all of the above sounds more or less doable.

Lost Servitor - cybernetic combat husks sporting guns, melee weapons, or both. Imagine a feral ghoul spliced with guns or sharp things. If captured, they can be tamed and brought to programming stations for repair into regular combat servitors.

Changing unit allegiances is non-trivial, but should be doable.  It will probably be a source of lots of exciting and exotic bugs before you get it working right, though.  You might have an easier time doing something like turning the old servitor inactive with a script (effectively removing them from the map) and spawning a fort owned servitor in it's place.

Now, the setting has room for all manner of craziness, and what's in the factions is just what I came up with off the top of my head, or is based on existing setting notes. Among the things I'd like to implent is, particularly for the Datajacks, some things to backfire, creating explosions, fires, or creating code-based entities like Corrs and Coderats as possible failures or even just because of bugs in thier equipment.

The difficulty of this will depend on how complex you want it to be.  Fires are easy - a custom reaction that drops an object above burning temperature a certain % of the time will do it.  Creating creatures will be a bit more difficult, but I think modtools/random-trigger + modtools/create-unit will get the job done.   Evaporating syndrome boulder style "explosions" are easy, actual explosions with fragments inflicting projectile damage are hard.

If you have other questions, ask away.

[Splint]

Heh, some of that is stuff I already know. I can do very basic stuff (custom entities, creatures to a degree, items, weapons, things like that.) Comes from doing stuff for myself. For example, it'd take me no time really to come up with workable raws for the Datajack's weapons and equipment. A couple hours, tops, depending on how hard I worked on it to get it done and how detailed I want it to be.

Interactions, which include any functionally magical processes such as defensive shields and tazing people to disable them with a touch, and anything needing scripts (which is basically everything else,) on the other hand, I'm totally helpless, having never looked at DFhack's scripts. Every time I look at them it gives me a mixture of "Oh god, what horrible black speech is this" and "I have no idea what any of this does or means." Kind of like how most programs are in the setting (which act as magic in this case; an average datajack can easily use a program, but that doesn't mean he has any clue how it actually does what it does; it's magic to him for all intents.)

Anything with scripts though I have no idea how to apply it, what goes where, how it does anything, nothing. I have zero background in looking at things that look mostly like random jumbles of symbols and numbers. This includes the stuff from other mods (namely creating units, item syndrome, things like that.)

Production rates: For one faction, it's the fact that they can make tons of crap (as in no quality modifier) with custom equipment for less materials - 3 shirts for one cloth at a Bolshevik Autoloom for example. Also also them to quickly provide replacement clothing, uniforms, stuff like that.

For the other, it's not lowered production rates as far as wealth goes, it's that they'd suck at farming and gathering (they're inspired by people who are stereotypically... We'll say off, and be polite about it,) so they have to essentially rely on others to bring food to them, or actively hunt larger animals for it to have a reliable supply. Dunno how I feel about not having them able to transform though, since that's sort of the point behind them in that function, not pull a dragon aspect shout.

Energy Weapons: I'm entirely willing to go with gameplay and story segregation for them. It'll be bizarre as hell, but acceptable break for gameplay purposes.

There's... A whole lot here, and I'm very tired. Let's just say a lot of this is going to be functionally opaque without someone to literally sit and walk me through it past creatures.

[Putnam]

Power-producing buildings requires DFHack and, more specifically, requires actually programming in Lua.

Itemsyndrome's been outdated for, golly, I actually don't know how long, and I made the thing. item-trigger is better to work with, though slightly more complicated.

Not sure what you mean by "in-depth on armor and weapons".

[Splint]

Precisely that for weapons and armor - making use of DFhack to get more out of them and let them function like they should.

Specifically via what thefriendlyhacker offered up for the assault rifles. And semi-auto pistols. And SMGs. Jesus Christ why are you a thing modern firearms. Plus there's hazard suits, respirators, AR visors, stuff like that.

EDIT: Basically I'm looking at an extremely daunting task that I know for certain requires help from outside, because I just don't know what the hell I'm doing beyond the basics of reactions, items, workshops, and entitis and to a lesser degree, creatures. Everything else demands skills I don't have yet and don't know where to even start with. I know I can break it up into smaller tasks, but even then the question becomes where to begin even with that (says the idiot who's been awake for the better part of 20 hours.)

[scourge728]

This is an interesting idea, although I can't say I'll be of much help