[WIP] Project Extend And Change Everything (PEACE)

[antistar]

Looking at it again,I'm noticing a lack of means to secure the doors shut. If it's relying on magnets,anything strong enough to remain shut from a rooftop drop would also be strong enough to be impossible to open.

Early on I was thinking of having them held closed via... not sure what they're called. Simple handles with a slot sticking out that goes behind a protruding bit; you rotate the handle to be able to pull the door open. Via a combination of preferring the look and wanting to keep the poly-count down, however, I instead went with even more basic handles inspired by a handle I saw on the Tucker Sno-Cat in the Canterbury museum, in Christchurch. (Unfortunately the specific handle is in shadow in that shot; I took my own reference photos when I was there.)

 

So now the idea is that they're latched on the inside, and since I don't have to render that, I can just hand-wave it and say that whatever would work, yep, that's it. That's what it's got. ;) Something relying on spring tension, I'd imagine.

[antistar]

Here's the power armour cargo carrier in Substance Painter. I've made a number of different paint-jobs for it; hopefully enough to match the vanilla power armour paint-jobs plus any you're likely to use from other mods.

 

- Power Armour LBE 10

- Power Armour LBE 11

- Power Armour LBE 12

- Power Armour LBE 13

- Power Armour LBE 14

 

I'm not totally sure about the rust patterns on the bare metal one yet; I may tweak it some more. Generally I prefer the painted ones anyway, but I do need a bare metal one in there to match the bare metal PA pieces.

[Radsweeper]

Hi Antistar,

I must say that the power armour cargo carrier are looking nice and I have a few suggestions for them. One, they could be craftable and customizable (paint color and/or armor grade).

Second they could be droppable anywhere and allow you to have emergency supply pods at a given location. OR the player can have one or more battle ready backback ready at their base. Better yet, use them like Thunderbird 2 with mission specific loads. You just walk up to one and equip it and off you go.That could open up a lot of customization for the player right there.

Just crazy late night suggestions from me...

[antistar]

Thanks - and I'm definitely doing paint options for the cargo carrier; as you can see in the above images. :wink:

 

I've currently also got it increasing torso DR and Durability by 10% each, since it does give power armour kind of a big steel turtle shell. I wasn't planning on giving the cargo carrier itself multiple DR upgrade options - like on a new slot; the crafting menu for omods is always a linear list, so it can get unwieldy with too many different slots on the one thing. I have been toying with the idea of giving regular backpacks a "plate insert" slot, though; so leather, steel and kevlar plate insert options - roughly corresponding to leather, metal and combat armour in terms of "tiers". (Kevlar backpack inserts are apparently a real thing.) So we'll see.

 

As far as droppable cargo carriers go; probably not, sorry. That'd be kind of a can of worms to implement. As a minor point of interest though, I did design that lower "bumper bar" thing on the cargo carrier - the bit that's behind the power armour's thighs - in such a way that it would allow the carrier to be laid down flat without tipping over. So it could theoretically make sense as a container in the game - e.g. in settlement building. (It's possibly a little high-poly for that, however.)

 

On a similar lore-fluff/design note, the ladder-like bars on either side of the carrier are meant to double as buffers to protect the carrier against accidentally bumping into things (i.e. "bumpers" again) and as hand-holds for when (say) power armour mechanics are lugging the carrier around, or mounting it on armour, or whatever.

Edited June 11, 2019 by antistar

[antistar]

The PA cargo carriers are done now. Here's what they look like in-game:

 

- Power Armour LBE 15

- Power Armour LBE 16

- Power Armour LBE 17

- Power Armour LBE 18

 

This is something that's been kicking around in my head for ages; it's good to finally get it into the game.

[Moldy]

Woe betide the operator,if they get knocked onto their back.

[antistar]

I guess in that situation you could hit the "suit open" button, hold on for dear life, and hope that the back of the suit swinging up would flip you over. ;)

[antistar]

As a progress update: well... I just added a whole bunch of stuff to the Mod Features (Exhaustive) section of the second post, so go check it out if you're interested.

 

I wanted to do some work on consumables; food, drink, chems, medicine. The aim with what I'm working on at the moment is:

 

- Food and drink no longer heals. (Well maybe some healing from some of the high-end Nuka Cola variants/mixes; the idea being that they're basically chems at that point.)

- Consumables return appropriate junk items on use. E.g. tin cans, bottles, syringes, boxes.

- Consumables indicate on their item cards if they have a disease risk, cause thirst, have no nutritional value, etc.

 

There's been some setup preparing for that, just to get all the new items and "magic effects" (used for the new item card info and junk item return features), but also because it kicked up other things that needed attention. Generally this was due to food/drink being treated as healing items in vanilla; healing hooks into other parts of the game. (E.g. perks.)

 

That's kind of why there's new stuff scattered all throughout the Mod Features section. Some highlights:

 

 

A simple Drawing Blood system. You can craft sterile IV bags (plus included needle) that can be used to drain some HP, but return a "Blood Pack, Safe" that restores the same amount of HP and does so without a disease risk. They're a lot heavier than stimpaks and don't heal for as much, but on the bright side they don't cause thirst and might be a reliable source of supplemental healing if you have time to recover naturally after drawing blood.

 

Being Fed and Hydrated now gives slow HP regen and AP regen respectively, to compensate (in a somewhat more realistic way) for food/drink no longer healing.

 

Water Pump now gives Dirty Water rather than Purified. You can now drink and fill bottles from Water Purifiers (including the powered water pump from Wasteland Workshop). It's a little clunkier than I'd like - see the Mod Features section for details - but it works, and improving it would take a bunch of extra scripting I don't have time for at the moment. I did want to get this in, though; it didn't make any sense to me that you couldn't drink from them; they have taps/faucets and everything!

 

I added Paper as a new scrap component, replacing Cloth where it made sense. (I did this now because I also added a cardboard box junk item that you get back from boxed food, and it required paper as a component. I wasn't about to have it made of cloth.)

 

Kind of a small thing, but I like it; I needed a new effect for the Wasteland Survival 1 perk, since by default it increases healing from fruits and vegetables by 50%, and obviously I'm removing healing from food. Now it unlocks recipes that let you convert wild crops (mutfruit, razorgrain, etc) into their cultivated versions - and vice-versa, just in case. (It's done three at a time and also requires dirty or purified water - depending on which way you're going - just so that you can't easily convert endlessly back and forth, farming XP.)

Edited June 20, 2019 by antistar

[Moldy]

I just realized something. Since WARS and PEACE will make everything much more fragile,while making weapons near-universally more powerful,this makes complexes full of Gunners Cages for XP and loot farms even more attractive than they are in vanilla. Allow me to elaborate.

 

-A Gunners Cage is made with ten Steel,two Copper,and five hundred Caps. All of these items are very widely available. Furthermore,resetting the trap only costs one each of Steel and Copper,and fifty Bottle Caps.

-All enemies caught by Cages are unlevelled. This means,at level 1,you can capture a Gunner Brigadier,which is the highest level Gunner in the game,and is worth a hefty chunk of XP (317 base),to say nothing of the level 94 loot.

-Even a low-level Gunner packs,at the very least,a Laser Gun as a ranged weapon,plus requisite ammo.

 

In vanilla,this system has significant risks,since a level 94 Gunner Brigadier is a huge challenge early on,even in a controlled environment. With WARS and PEACE,the game's combat balance is looking a lot like rocket tag; Everybody's capable of killing anything in line of sight in short order. At least,that's how it is for humans and most Ghouls. This means that,with sufficient distance and cover,you can open 100 Gunners Cages,releasing 100 Gunner Brigadiers (Statistically infinitesimal,but you will get at least one per batch),and killing them all with a fistful of well-placed grenades. This will grant the player a massive steroid of XP and high-quality weapons and armour,plus an embarrassment of ammo for these weapons. The player can then select choice morsels for their personal use,and scrap the rest,providing a huge windfall of resources which can be used to further invest in equipment,or settlement building. The player can then sell the melee weapons for the 500 Caps they'll need to rearm their hundred traps,and simply sod off for three or so days,waiting for their traps to collect yet more loot delivery boys for them. If the player's sitting on a stockpile of food and drink,they don't even need to leave the settlement; All they need to do is nap for three days to a week.

[antistar]

I can imagine the Seinfeld stand-up bit:

 

"And what's the deal with these Gunner Brigadiers? Why are they always getting trapped in these cages? What do they think is gonna be in there?"

 

(I just had a look at the Gunner cage model and it's got "Free caps, guns and ammo!" painted on the side, so I guess that answers that.)

 

 

Seriously though I was surprised when you said that; like all the FO4 DLC, I haven't played Wasteland Workshop yet - so I didn't know you could catch ostensibly elite mercenaries in a cage as if they were ferrets. I mentioned recently (in the WARS WIP thread I think) how a lot of things in vanilla FO4 had me cringing as I played it, and yeah... this is it. Stuff like this.

 

I'll have a think about it, but trying to beat everything in FO4 into shape so that it makes some kind of sense feels like trying to plug all the holes in a boat made of swiss cheese, so maybe I won't end up changing this specific thing. If people want to spend the time to cheese XP by building a city of entirely Gunner cages of all things - and they find it fun, well they can go nuts. I'm not sure how much crossover there'd be between people like that and people who want mods like WARS and PEACE anyway...

 

 

On character fragility in WARS and PEACE though; what I want is for armour progression to have a noticeable impact on how much punishment a character can take, even if HP values have been normalised. That may be something I'll have to hammer out once I can do the AmmoTweaks integration and start testing things in earnest.