Implementing hunger and thirst (and a little blood)

L

Lyktemann

First time out of the vault
Hi, I'm new here, but have been reading the threads with great interest for quite some time.
My first post will consist of a question and a nifty little tip.

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Hunger & thirst

I'm trying to implement hunger and thirst in my mod, and initially thought this to be a trivial matter. This was, however, not the case.
I ran into the problem with stacking effects. I made the water give the player a small amount of positive effects (a couple of hitpoints), and, after some time, adding a special addiction called "thirst" with negative effects (lower max hitpoints, minus 1PE - you get the idea).

The idea was to make water remove the addiction, only to re-apply it after some time. This did not work at all, and the negative effects stacked, making drinking a rather deadly affair.

The whole point is putting pressure on the player by making him/her think more about the gear before embarking on a mission, and also to put a little more meaning into scavenging.

Does anyone have some tips or ideas of how to implement such a thing, if at all possible?

I know we have some eminent programmers in this forum - would this be possible to implement by coding?


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Bleeding

I managed to implement bleeding, making bandages play a bigger role. Now, every shot or wound begin to bleed, and the player need to apply bandages to stop it. This makes combat seem a little more dangerous.

The concept is easy to add. Simply change "poison" to "bleeding", and make "poison" the default special damage of each weapon. The bandages is simply a "drug" that removes poison points.

A very simple little concept that might be interesting to some ;)

Cheers!
 
First idea is nice as much as almost unreal to inplement. It stays in same row with real-time regeneration. Through you said that there are many programmers, i can remember only Jarekfall, and now he's busy with removing certain game limits: armor types, AP costs and such. I think, that hunger, thirst and RT-regen are not "fixes", but addings that will take much time to deal with. Ask Jarek anyway.

On second idea: no way for this. There is hardcoded limit of one secondary effect on weapon. As you may notice in Tools, there are four effects: poison, radiate, knockdown and stun. While weapon-sourced radiation seems to be useless, two other effect are in heavy use. Why i say it? You want to replace all secondary effects with this "poison". From that point Pacificator loses his "stun" splash attack, Browning M2 loses knockdown effect - i don't like such changes.
Again, if Jarekfall will manage to make patch, that allows multiple secondary effects, it will be fine...
 
Hunger/thirst: Yeah, I figured it would end up as another "impossible" dream.
But hope we must have, young jedi - one day, someone will crack that engine wide open (or maybe - maybe - one day Bethesda will discover a trace of humanity still left in their ice cold heart, and release it to the community).

Bleeding: Well, it's wrong to say "no way for this", since I've done it. It boils down to a matter of taste, really.

In my mod, I seek not a wasteland magically riddled with exotic weaponry, so secondary effects on weapons will not really be missed. However - one could, of course, only give the enemies weapons with "bleeding" as secondary effect, and as such maintain "knockover" as a strategic advantage for the player (as I agree it's a good effect to have for the shotgun, for example).
It's really a simple problem to solve if you don't mind a little extra work on the weapon entities.
 
Well, it's wrong to say "no way for this", since I've done it
Click to expand...
Yes, you also can make 500 damage mega-blaster... YOU CAN. But, should you do that?

I mean there's no way to make it "clean". In that way every player of your mod will feel something strange. Especially, if you plan to make enemies' weapons cause bleed, and player's weapon - to not doing this. Well, remember, that every enemy weapon will be in player hands as soon as enemy killed. What will you suggest then? Honestly NOT pick up enemy weapons? You can also set them to be "not-lootable", but again, how will you reward player, then? Another nice part - creating copy of each weapon. Do you like it?

And no, i don't think that M2 is "exotic weaponry", it even less exotical in terms of canon and setting, than M16. You need to remove many weapons (and Pac bots) or make them useless :|
 
There's not really a big problem to copy each weapon. All I'll need to do is remove "bleeding" from the copy. Not much work at all. This would allow me to reward the player by simply placing the "bleeding"-free copy in the PC's inventory. It is, after all, the kind of workaround we have come to accept when trying to implement things we'd like to see in this game.

As far as I remember, the rather akward speech tree-system released some time ago, was applauded almost as revolutionary within the limits of FoT - reminding us that we have to endure some quirks if we want to change the game beyond simple map building and basic scripting. At least until some genious manage to decode the source (in wich case I would be eternally grateful).

I concider the M2 as exotic in the setting I'm planning to make. In the event of a real nuclear armageddon, not many heavy machine guns would be scattered around. Not in my part of the world anyway.

Firearms should pose a real danger to the player, and both weapons and ammo should be fairly rare and expensive - as should medical supplies and the like - so as to emphasise the aspects of tactics, economy and scavenging.

Perhaps I did not communicate this properly, but I'm not making a mod set in the Fallout universe, with robots and monsters. I'm aiming for more realism.
I'm aware that many prefer the unreal aspect of heavy combat and robots and whatnot, but this is, like I said, a simple matter of taste.

Ah, but this is becoming tedious patter. I want to thank you for your comments, though.
 
Perhaps I did not communicate this properly, but I'm not making a mod set in the Fallout universe, with robots and monsters. I'm aiming for more realism.
Click to expand...

Yes, you didn't. Now i see that your idea is okay. I work on my mod now, and it intented to change main campaign (enlarge) without cutting off details. In another setting such change will be okay.

The unreal aspect? Hm, miniguns are unreal, so i made them much more cumbersome in all ways. ST8 and EN6 for wielding Vindicator will be ok. Also reqs of M2 may be changed to ST9, EN8. Damage, requirements, AP costs - that can be changed without throwing something out, just how i like.

Will you remove bunker aspects? I mean QM, RM and medic at any time.
 
TwoEyedYum said:
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Will you remove bunker aspects? I mean QM, RM and medic at any time.
Click to expand...

I will change some aspects of it. I toy with many concepts at the moment.
Probably, the "bunker" will be a small or medium sized town with all the basic services, like garage/toolshop, hospital, misc. supplies, different people giving you odd jobbs, some way to recruit a team, and so forth.

I'm thinking of maybe making the town itself the main plot. If possible, the town will grow as the player progress (some of the missions might be to find resources and tools for building, other missions to find medical supplies for a more advanced hospital - you get the idea).
 
Lyktemann said:
Does anyone have some tips or ideas of how to implement such a thing, if at all possible?

I know we have some eminent programmers in this forum - would this be possible to implement by coding?
Click to expand...

I always say that everything is possible, but some patches may be too difficult or too time-consuming to create and sometimes the benefit of the work on a patch not compensates the amount of work that had to be done on the patch. My free time is very limited and currently I'm not interested in making such patch. Also the programming isn't a problem, but the hardest part of work on a patch, as always is locating the right place where the patch should be applied.
 
Lyktemann said:
I'm thinking of maybe making the town itself the main plot. If possible, the town will grow as the player progress (some of the missions might be to find resources and tools for building, other missions to find medical supplies for a more advanced hospital - you get the idea).
Click to expand...

Sounds great. But HOW will town grow? Triggers can't (AFAIK) add new tiles or tilegroups on map. So, the only visible growing may be noticed in additional people around streets...
 
Jarekfall: But don't you think such a patch would open up new possibilities beyond just thirst & hunger? I mean; we could make some interesting new enhancers and drugs, and maybe even weapons (if the patch is made accordingly). I don't know squat about programming, so you will have to forgive my eventual ignorance here ;)

TwoEyedYum: While triggers can't add tiles, they can add and remove towns on the world map. With this in mind, I can make significant changes to the town on key points in the storyline by simply building several seperate versions of the town. This, of course, would create some problems with merchants' inventory and such - but nothing I couldn't explain away with a good manuscript.

Successfully implementing this aspect would allow endless possibilities. The town could, at some point, be invaded or even destroyed, forcing the player to either fight off the invaders or find a new home - and thereby adding a significant feeling of free choice and important decisions to be made.

I's a lot of work, but I think it will pay off.
 
I agree, the idea of bleeding, thirst and hunger is interesting, but currently I have other plans to realize.
 
Lyktemann said:
TwoEyedYum: While triggers can't add tiles, they can add and remove towns on the world map. With this in mind, I can make significant changes to the town on key points in the storyline by simply building several seperate versions of the town. This, of course, would create some problems with merchants' inventory and such - but nothing I couldn't explain away with a good manuscript.
Click to expand...
Set the traders as quarter masters then use triggers and zones to change their inventory as appropriate.
 
For thirst and hunger, etc, I came up with this idea:
http://www.duckandcover.cx/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20866

to make thirst work, you could set a trigger to recognize when the player has tag item 'canteen' in his inventory to stop the thirst entity from damaging you.

But we still need someone to make an invisible entity sprite with combat capabilities to make it work.
 
xkcon said:
But we still need someone to make an invisible entity sprite with combat capabilities to make it work.
Click to expand...
As I said back in 2007 we already have a system for this, death traps. Look at a death trap entity from mission 16. It uses a spawn sprite but with a larger bounding box, either place several around the map or copy and edit the sprite making the bounding box really big. Then just have the trigger turn the death trap on or off depending on which zone the player is in and what equipment they are carrying.
 
The problem with using deathtraps for cold, etc is the fact that then we lose gas effects (or whatever) we'll lose something to add something else, I hate doing that... With my system you would be allowed virtually limitless effects with no consequences. I could make STDs (with poison effects), hunger, thirst, and cold and still have the gas deathtraps. Also you could have them all hit at the same time. (ie on a desert map, you would be hit by both Hunger and Thirst). I don't think you could do that with deathtraps as well. A combat capable invisible entity sprite would be a very very useful tool for workarounds.
 
I've created for you an invisible man sprite. He is able to do everything what the actor sprites can. He is faster than a bullet, can't be targeted, can climb, pickup, etc. He must be used in UniqueOther race, so he won't bleed, or he should be indestructible. He can be damaged by area attack, from grenades, and weapon bursts.

Give him a rocket launcher an see the effect.:D You can also add images to attack sequences as the attack special effects.

With help of FT Improver you can create custom weapon types, sound types and animation names. With help of Sprite Creator you can add new animations (sequences) to an actor sprites, so you can have custom weapon sounds and attack sounds, custom weapon types, custom attack animations for the new weapon. If you don't want to add sound to your weapon, use sound type "None". Don't forget to add sound files.
Download
 
Very cool, thanks Jarek I will definitely use this in my Mod. Judging by this size of the file, It wasn't too difficult to make, so thankfully you didn't have to use all your time. Again many thanks, you are truly one of the FOT modding messiahs! heh.
 
Very happy to have found, 5 years later, an invisible man sprite to work with!!!!! Wow. Thanks to the "messiah" too! I want to implement a system soon to change every radiation spot in the game (I use radiation for hunger...) by an invisible attacking creature with a short range and area damage.

I want to do that because poison in my mod means "toxicity" in general, and also because being attacked or receive radiation is I think the ONLY way to make a resistance or threshold work (fire, poison, gaz, ...) and because deathtraps are deceiving to play with. They can't cause any special damage like poison or radiation (DAMN!), so the point of using them is only to cause damage (like electricity, fire, burning sun rays, heat, smoke, etc.) Not pollution or radiation... And also because the type of damage they do (fire, electricity, gaz, energy...) seems to be USELESS. I tried different protections against a "smoke" deathtrap in my mod (a deathtrap causing gaz damage), and even with 100% damage treshold and resistance to GAS, the player was still receiving 100% damage by the deathtrap... Also, that entity could have some strange mutants or ghoul perks (didn't test it) to give radiation or lower perception if you are near... That may only work with characters in YOUR team.

Finally, aside from radiation, pollution and else, I really suggest to you, if you want to implement hunger or thirst, to use in game radiation system for it instead of anything else. A single radiation entity per .MIS with 2000-5000 radius or something is enough for hunger, you will not have to put endless invisible ennemies EVERYWHERE, or just one near the spawn point to discover than your squad members are not hit equally, or one squad member receive all the hits... (better to put some ennemies or deathtraps only in the most toxic places with hi radius and small range invisible weapons). Radiation, too, is a silent condition (WOW), it weakens the character only over time, it can deliver warning texts to the player, it can be temporary cured. If 100% cured, it start to come back automatically after a while and you always have control over it in game (no double/tripple hits). Setbacks? You can travel infinitely when you have no hunger or thirst, and die slowly if you travel and have some weakness caused by hunger or thirst... You then get into the new map with almost no hit-points or dead upon arrival. I kind of like it that way, though. We can assume you found food while traveling, but just enough to keep your hunger or thirst level to the point it were when you left. Also, leaving the map is very annoying, and you can always add RARE "thirst or hunger" random encounters. The other setback, (not so bad I must say) is that radiation resistance don't seems to work nicely in the game... I tested it again and again, and the effect seems to be ON or OFF, never in between. You have 100% radiation (hunger) resistance, you don't eat. You have 99% radiation (hunger) resistance, you eat as much often as everyone else. That could be usefull for robots, as they should not eat at all. You could even give all robots the "Rabid" perk and set all food to be chems. So the robots will not be able to eat. But maybe this is already taken care of by the game, as you could have robot recruit in Tactics. Never tested it.

If you have any comments/suggestions/more accurate infos on what I said, please post!
 
::Cough::

Found this thread a few months ago, could've saved you some time...

Your ideas of using the invisible sprite are great, and it's always nice how you've thoroughly tested so much of the game engine! This invisible sprite has become one of the key elements in most all my background triggers.

My favourite purpose for it has been to simulate artillery, or other support weapons firing from off-map/screen. Hold your radio in your hand (assuming you've battery power :wink:), and a trigger activate the invisible man near the enemy position, who then fires an invisible weapon with an explosion effect, and abysmal accuracy. Viola! The shells never land in the same place, making the firefight different every play though.
 
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Whoa, nice to have a comment on someone that really tested that invisible man and found a way to use it without any weird or unreal results in game! Promising! You're idea fits totally with the trick, that's nice! I like to realise that the invisible man also add a much needed random effect in the game - damage, critical, attack speed AND landing places (it is always a bit weird to see my characters receiving damage from deathtraps at always the same delay, the same amount of damage). An attacking invisible entity solve that! My only concern is about the pipboy console messages. What they look like then?

As soon as I get something nice working, I'll send a video! (but I'll make my french and english "modders" DEMO first I guess.... :wiggle:)
 
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