[Release 1.7i] Lost Frontier - a Strife mod

[Jarewill]

Hello there.
Decided to push a small update with a few changes and fixes.

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- Changed behavior of the degnin ore: It will now also deal heavy damage to robotic enemies. A few of these will even take down an Inquisitor.
- Made the scope follow weapon's bob.
- Fixed the laser sights being blocked with the shield.
- Fixed a typo.

Nothing major, just figured out a way to make the scopes follow the weapon bob and made degnin ore more useful.

[Vordenko]

Been running this mod in co-op with a friend of mine. It's pretty nice, though we noticed some rather critical bugs:

- Respawning with more than one of the same weapon crashes with a VM abort: https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... nknown.png

- All the console messages lack the local flag, meaning if any player manages their magazines / weapons / health etc, everyone will see it as well.

- The "crossbow start" and "rifle start" class get an armor refill on respawn, but the "dagger start" doesn't. Not sure which behaviour is intended, but it definitely shouldn't depend on player class, imo either make it universal or remove it entirely, or make a cvar for it possibly.

- Not sure if a bug, but: The respawn armor refill deletes the currently worn armor, even if it's better than leather.

Beyond that, the mod is pretty playable, though I felt like reporting these issues in hope it ever gets updated again.

[Jarewill]

Hey, thanks for checking out my mod and for the feedback as well!
Coop is one of those things that I have trouble debugging properly, so I appreciate it!

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- Respawning with more than one of the same weapon crashes with a VM abort: https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... nknown.png

That has been fixed.

- All the console messages lack the local flag, meaning if any player manages their magazines / weapons / health etc, everyone will see it as well.

Took me a while to replace all A_Logs, but I fixed it. (Hopefully I didn't miss any.)
I will remember that for the future though!

- The "crossbow start" and "rifle start" class get an armor refill on respawn, but the "dagger start" doesn't. Not sure which behaviour is intended, but it definitely shouldn't depend on player class, imo either make it universal or remove it entirely, or make a cvar for it possibly.

- Not sure if a bug, but: The respawn armor refill deletes the currently worn armor, even if it's better than leather.

That is indeed intentional.
The alternative loadouts to give players starting gear, such as weapons and leather armor, while "dagger start" is vanilla Strife experience: Starting with just a dagger.

As for the armor replacement, it's not actually replacement.
If you die with armor on the "dagger start" loadout, you can see that no matter what armor you were wearing, when you respawn you lose it.
That is a limitation with the way armor works in this mod, and I'm unsure how to fix it, if even possible.

But that is why the player's armor gets "replaced" with the leather one on death: Alternative loadouts start with leather armor and death always removes previous armor.

It has been a while since I did anything related to this mod.
It was my first experience with ZScript and is very rough in a lot of places, it deserves a complete rewrite someday.
Sadly my time as of recent has been rather limited, so that won't happen anytime soon.
For now I have released a patch that fixes the mentioned issues.

[Vordenko]

Not a problem! Life comes first and all. Played it some more and got a few more to report:

-VM abort. Unfortunately lost the screenshot, but it was "player.zs line 476 tried to read from null". No idea what caused it.

-Backpacks generate absolutely ungodly amounts of rifle mags and energy pods, like 80 each. Possible bug?

-Respawning makes you lose the effect of player augmentations, but if you go back to the rebel medic he will think you still have them, meaning you can't even buy them back.

-Shopkeeper messages are still global. ("Here you go. Here you go. Here you go. You don't have enough!")

[Jarewill]

Hey, thanks for the reports again!

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- I have tried to fix the VM abort by adding a specific check, but not knowing how to replicate that, I haven't tested it properly.
Still, that check worked for most coop-related VM aborts, so I hope it works here too.

- Definitely an oversight. They used to give only 1 magazine worth of bullets/energy, but they weren't updated for the new magazine system.

- This has also been fixed. The issue was that the upgrades applied on pickup, but the upgrade item (hacks) remained in the inventory.
So on respawn all upgrades were reset, while the items still remained.

- The last one I cannot fix, due to the fact the ACS Log function has no way to be local.
So without rewriting the entire shop code, (which should be done, because ACS has it's own issues) this I can't fix.

Pushed the patch.

[Vordenko]

Finished the run with my friend. Got some final bugs to report!

- Targeter highlights are visible to all players, even those not using the targeter
- On respawn, your speed upgrades turn into strength upgrades
- If you have multiple assault rifles in your inventory, switching to another rifle will reset your old rifle to semi-auto mode.
- Sometimes, the medic heal does not work. Typing "Take LFPlayerFullHeal 5" in the console fixes that.
- If you die in a templar suit, you will respawn as a normal player, but wielding the suit "weapon", which you can "eject" from, spawning a new suit back in.
- If there are multiple templar suits, buying a templar suit upgrade applies it to all suits in range. (Admittedly, we had to cheat to create a second power suit; aside from the two issues mentioned above, the suit works well in multiplayer.)

- Bug?: Magazine upgraded crossbow that still has bolts left in it cannot be reloaded with the reload key - it has to be unloaded first and then reloading. This is contrasting with the rifle and the energy weapons, in which you can drop and replace the mag with one keyhold.
- Bug?: Crusaders cannot vertically aim their missiles; at range they can be defeated by simply crouching.
- Bug?: Applying durability upgrade to the assault rifle will halve it's current condition.
- Bug? Rebels do not trigger alarms, making the rebel beacon the ultimate stealth weapon.

- Suggestion: I think maybe decreasing fall damage with the Health / Speed upgrades, so that it is mitigated further to the point of it not being a concern anymore would make buying the upgrades more encouraging for the sake of extra mobility. As it stands, fall damage is perhaps the only thing I feel the mod could probably work on, since it appears everything else was reworked.

-- Another thing I noted... you can still die to fall damage with the Templar Suit equipped. Combined with its inability to jump, it limits it's mobility further, which doesn't help in that you can only obtain it near the end of the game, making it more underwhelming in the short run you obtain it.

[Jarewill]

Thanks for more feedback!
Hope you enjoyed playing through the mod.

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- That is a limitation of how the targeter works currently.
The only way to fix it would be to rewrite it to draw directly to the screen instead of spawning actors, like it does now.
I am sadly unable to do that yet.

- I must have forgotten to change how upgrades handle on respawn for the speed upgrade.

- Once again limitation of the current way it works.
Instead of actually storing the weapon, it stores information about said weapon such as upgrades and ammo.
I have learned how to properly store weapons inside arrays now, so that whole system is bound to be replaced.

- I need to check the code for the healing item, because I am sure I made those items be not actually given to the player.

- I am unsure how to tackle the templar suit respawn problem.

- I'd probably have to do a lot of coding shenanigans to assign a specific suit to a specific player and work the upgrades.

- I know about the upgraded crossbow reloading issue.
However that I am unable to change as it is currently, as the crossbow has two ammo types.
I will want to fix it in the future by making the reload be more shotgun-like, where you load one bolt at a time and the last loaded bolt will be fired.
That should also allow for having two different bolts loaded into it.

- That's how crusaders worked in vanilla Strife as well.
Think about it as a design flaw made by the Order.

- The durability upgrade should fully repair the rifle on buying, so something is screwing up here.
I will need to check.

- Definitely a bug with rebels not triggering alarms.

- Falling damage no longer should deal actual damage.
Instead it only causes pain and kills only at a specific height threshold.
Though making strength upgrades lower the pain could be a good idea, pain in general I mean.

- I mean, wearing a powered suit shouldn't make one immune to gravity.
It already should cause less pain when wearing it.

Though I'm currently focused on another project, so I will probably not work on LF anytime soon.