First, an announcement: the long weekend is over, so development is going to slow down a bit, since I have a lot less free time during the work week.
Brohnesorge wrote:Crap I forgot to grab a screen shot but I had another crash with Chain Lightning. Something about an array being out of bounds. I'll see if I can get it again to grab a screenshot.
This may also be entirely my fault; I'm playing with LEGION and monsters are removed completely when gibbed.
EDIT: Reproduced it and took a screenshot [snip]
Ok, first of all, Gun Bonsai is designed to be paired with other mods, and while some of those pairings might not work well, I'm operating on a policy that it should never crash -- so no, it's not your fault.
I think I'm going to have to install Legion and try to reproduce this myself, though, because even having the crash log doesn't help - that looks like it got into the bit where it recurses to find more targets with an empty target array, which makes sense if everything in the room got gibbed by the attack that triggered CL in the first place. But if the target array is empty, then i is -1 and next_target is 0, and -1 is NOT >= 0! So I'm going to have to reproduce this myself with a debug build, because just by looking at the source I cannot see any way this could be happening.
DarkkOne wrote:Personal suggestions:
-An option to turn off the level up music and flashing. While the color customization of the mod window lets me tune it to match the game I'm playing (to a degree, at least) flashing lights and music kinda throw off the feel of Hexen.
I added the musical sting because I found that without it, I tended to fail to notice I had a level-up at all! It is a bit incongrouous in Hexen/Heretic, but as someone with no ability at the A/V side at all I was happy just to have something.
It wouldn't be hard to add an option to toggle between "builtin sound", "the 'you found a secret' sound", and "no sound" -- might even be able to make it customizeable so players can set any sound they like, although that feature might not land in the next version.
DarkkOne wrote:
-The Dark Harvest health maybe needs a cap? I don't know how the armor gained works in Hexen, but even just the health gain seemed excessive. I imagine it's much less so in the other games with different HP scaling on enemies, but it feels like an upper limit is maybe still warranted? Maybe even make it so that multiple ranks in it increases the cap, but cap it quite low initially? Or, keep the uncapped nature, but make it something miniscule like 1% HP&Armor per kill, so that it contrasts with Scavenge Blood (which gives a percentage heal, but would be capped)? OR maybe just apply the XP scale to the amount healed too, so in a game like Hexen where you'd want the XP gained to be considerably lower (because of the inflated damage and health pools) the HP gained from kills would also be lower by the same amount? That might be a fix that helps it scale better in future circumstances too.
Craneo wrote:As for the Dark Harvest health cap, yeah, I was playing with Complexity and idk if it's bc of the mod I was playing this with but I found it very easy to get to 999+ health and armor when using a berserked sledgehammer lol, I think a good way to cap it while still encouraging upgrading it to higher levels could be to make Dark Harvest be capped to the payer's default health ammount BY DEFAULT but upgrading Dark Harvest could increase the ammount gained from it by 20, so if you upgrade it once, it goes to say 120, then to 140, and so on.
Yeah, I might have made Dark Harvest a bit too powerful. In general I wanted to make the melee-exclusive upgrades more powerful than the ranged ones, but I think I went a bit overboard there...Scavenge Blood is 1%, cap of 200, and you have to run over and pick it up, while Dark Harvest is 5% with no cap.
I also did very little testing with Hexen because I don't actually like Hexen at all.
I've been playing through Ashes Afterglow with this as a way to test it, and I honestly find myself wondering if even Scavenge wants a bit of a nerf, too.
I'll do some experimentation but I think both reducing the amount of health/armour restored (maybe just make it equal to your DH level or based on log₁₀(enemy_hp) or something) and applying a cap are good starts. Thanks for the feedback; I don't have much game design experience so my balancing process involves a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and going "I think that looks ok?".
Craneo wrote:Not sure if this has been reported yet or if it's even a bug at all, but having "thorns" on the player and then being attacked by a monster seems to cause the monster to ALSO get the effects of the weapon you are holding (example: if you have the fire effect on a weapon, thorns on the player and a monster attacks you, even if you don't shoot the monster is set on fire)
That's known and I do not currently consider it a bug -- maybe wielding a weapon mystically transfers its element(s) to your thorns aura, or something. I have been considering reworking it; one thought I had is to have the Thorns effect attenuate with distance, and apply elemental effects only enemies are far enough into the aura.
Craneo wrote:Oh, also, one more thing, for the particles maybe you can check Blasphemer (it's like Freedoom but for Heretic) or Hellforged's CreativeCommons file, that is, assuming you are going for open game resource sprites, not commercial ones.
Yeah, I don't want to include anything in this that's not appropriately licensed, which rules out assets from most commercial works (although not all). "Rework the VFX" is pretty low down on my priority list but I've made a note of that for when I get to it.
Craneo wrote:Edited: Here are some edited versions of the XP bar, one with an empty circle and one with an up-pointing pentagram, wasn't sure what symbol I could of used for magic so I went with this one, originally wanted to do the Heretic D'Sparil fork thing, but again since you seem to be using open game resource stuff mostly and also for it to fit other fantasy magic mods I went with something a bit less copyrighted...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e425j4ddacs8f ... s.zip?dl=0
Oh nice! I'll add that to the mod as an alternate HUD skin. Thank you!
N.b. you can also supply alternate WXP/PXP bars if you want, they don't have to be that specific shape -- as long as they start and end at the same X coordinates as the originals, and have roughly the same Y extents, they'll work as drop-in replacements. Take a look at sprites/ui/LHDW* for examples.
Craneo wrote:While I am editing this post I also want to add that the timestop thing for melee feels kinda sudden, music just stops for a few seconds and I'll admit it scared me at first since I kinda have had computer issues as of late, I feel keeping the music or atleast adding a sort of sound effect during timestop would be nice.
Yeah
It works by giving the player a small jolt of Freeze powerup, and as far as I can tell that's hard-coded to stop the music as well. I miiiight be able to add a background sound effect but it does weird things to sound effects as well, and (like new VFX) purely cosmetic issues are lower priority right now than bug/balance fixes.
If there's any zscript wizards in the thread who know how to make PowerTimeFreezer not stop the music, I'm all ears.
DarkkOne wrote:Trying this with XRPG, several of the weapons added by the mod were receiving Ranged weapon upgrades rather than Melee weapon upgrades. I don't know if it's handled by way of some sort of determination, or if weapons are just tagged somewhere and those weapons were mistagged by the mod's author, so I figured I'd ask about it here first, then over there if you say it's not something your mod handles.
So, fun fact, it turns out there's no 100% reliable way to distinguish between different weapon types at runtime! Gun Bonsai basically operates on the principle that:
- if the weapon has the MELEEWEAPON flag set, it's melee;
- otherwise, if the player has a history of doing damage with projectiles that move slower than 300u/tic while wielding this weapon, it's a projectile ranged weapon;
- otherwise it's a hitscan ranged weapon (or a "projectile" weapon that uses super-fast projectiles to mimic hitscans, e.g. Hideous Destructor's guns)
This isn't 100% reliable, and it turns out that the MELEEWEAPON flag is
entirely advisory; it tells the AI that it's a melee weapon but it doesn't actually change the behaviour of the weapon itself. So there's nothing actually enforcing mod authors to tag their melee weapons as such, and if they don't, Bonsai will guess wrong. In this case I'm guessing XRPG melee weapons don't have the MELEEWEAPON flag set.
It works the other way, too; the double-barreled sawn-off in Ashes Afterglow is melee-flagged, which means Bonsai thinks it's a melee weapon and you can get Swiftness and Dark Harvest on it
