[0.10.6] Gun Bonsai -- everything-compatible weapon upgrading

[ToxicFrog]

As I think about it, how about adding a toggleable setting that saves the game after you spend all your current level points on a gun?

This is probably best done by emitting an AutoAutoSave trigger token (and having AAS installed). Added to the notes.

I have a few suggestions for upgrades.

No promises on any of these, but some initial thoughts:
Vision -- There isn't really any mechanic for making upgrades more or less common, but I like the idea.
Mini-Bandolier -- Bandolier is already so fragile I'm reluctant to add anything that might interact with it (and have considered removing it entirely, or making it off by default)
Unnamed -- unlikely; fiddling with ammo consumption works fine in vanilla doom/2 but has a lot of bad mod interactions
Ricochet -- it is impossible to reliably detect hitscan shots that miss (note that things like HE Shots proc only when they hit an enemy), so no.
Extender -- similarly, it's hard to reliably detect "the player has picked up an item" because the event can get "eaten" by other items in the player's inventory (or special handling on the item itself) before GB gets a chance to see it.
Tendrils -- a cool idea (shades of the Quake II BFG, a personal favourite) but as written it's also ridiculously overpowered, amounting to a 4.5x DPS increase and added AOE. I'd be more inclined to (and have already been experimenting with prototypes for) make the tendrils do something other than damage, like sticking enemies together so that they are more vulnerable to splash damage.

[stainedofmind]

I don't use the LegenDoom aspect of GB myself, as I have my own mod of LD that does a lot of the same things, so they don't play nice together. Well, they do, actually, not having any game breaking issues or crashes and what not, but they definitely step on each other's toes! It's a testament to how well you've coded GB for sure.

Oh, is your mod published anywhere? I didn't think anyone else had made a "legendoom effects library" kind of mod.

It's not. I never fully managed to find a quick and easy way to completely keep my mod and the original file separate, and it's missing a user friendly way to switch between weapon effects. I may have overstated the similarities between GB and my project (titled "LegenDoom: Fully Loaded"). In short, I created mine because I hate managing weapon inventories (in any mod, not just LegenDoom), so I hacked it apart to allow for collecting all effects, and being able to cycle through them at will. It also includes a toggle so that it only keeps the "active" effect of each weapon instead of all of them, just to make things a little less cheaty. I was actually going to "borrow" your menu code from Gun Bonsai to complete it, but I never got around to it. There's also a few weird bugs/side effects that I can't be bothered to deal with, thus, it has remained a private effort thus far.

[ToxicFrog]

The way Legendoom is implemented makes weird bugs and side effects basically inevitable as soon as you try to have more than one active effect on a weapon at a time, sadly. This is the main reason GB's LD integration (and the new Laevis mod) restrict you to one active effect per weapon -- without that things get real weird real fast.

[stainedofmind]

Oh yes, only one effect per weapon. I just ran into random issues when switching between effects mostly. I'm pretty sure it's just a case of some of the token actors certain actors use not getting added or removed correctly when switching. Been a while since I looked at the code for either part to be honest.

[Starman the Blaziken]

Has the Searing Inscription changed in any way with no written change in-game? Because I recently picked up 0.10.2 to play with a large partially converted (I think) WAD with slow EXP rates, put it on a super shotgun, and it seems to burn enemies past 50% health as it was written.
I even got a 10K HP boss to about 23% after shooting it a bunch of times only with the gun. The damage was starting to falter to that point and not as much by the 50% HP mark, but still it took a bit too long before I could shut down the boss with everything else anyways.

Although I feel like in the case of the SI after playing it enough alongside with the others at this point even with the above happening... I think it needs to be changed since I think the upgrade (in both the HP part of the damage and the damage of the landed hit) can either make or break not just half a boss fight, but also makes it unintentionally overbearing (Lest I mention DeHacked levels of HP) when an enemy is designed with extreme HP values and it takes one SI-infused shot to make any gun- even with factoring EXP, become way over leveled to other guns assuming that you do not swap them out since I know in the current state it does not make the gun actually used gain EXP.

[Dan_The_Noob]

I think Searing Inscription is ok as it is, apart from them going below 50% like you said.
The whole point of it is to burn strong enemies down to half health for less ammo.

I'm guessing the reason it doesn't falloff sooner is so it doesn't need to track individual stacks across a lot of enemies, but i could be wrong.

[Starman the Blaziken]

I think it should probably require a good number of shots to start igniting rather than a few since you can basically play cowardly for half of the bar and then use your other guns.

But at this point though, on paper down to 50% of HP is not bad, but some enemies- heck some allies, can and have been designed to have a lot of HP (and in cases for both sides I have played are meant to be 'unkillable' normally but without invuln flags and use insane HP counts to prevent stuff) and if Gun Bonsai takes that damage seriously even to that threshold off of a never ending effect with percentile damage, it is most likely not intended to be a broken way to get levels off a single gun if you intended it to do it or not for farming purposes.

[Dan_The_Noob]

if it's not about tracking/counters, Frog can probably just make fire tick off after X ticks and still only work above a certain amount.
I recommend setting EXP to 8-10,000 for level 1 if you want a more balanced run though.

also this mod pairs well with corruption cards and harder wads.

[Starman the Blaziken]

Oh I have certainly played around with EXP rates and leveling and especially CC even at a 10th EXP gain of say the 1.2k default or maybe just 1.5k. Definitely familiar with the mod, even if I am not sure what to set it to all the time with mods and/or the maps I play and might be new to.

But I know it will depend on what Toxic might think for SI though as I want to shorten my ideas a bit, it should take some more involvement from the weapon to be an effective perk and not just take half of a cowardly way out fights especially for tough enemies. It could perhaps still be good for ammo effectiveness, just not in the case of only one aimed shot for half a fight.
Although, the part of it being able to grind rather a large sum of levels off of more-than-normally-tanky as heck units that are well not intended to be hit as hard with the perk, should be changed in some way. I am not sure what I might come up with, but it should be something so that it is still rewarding (if it really should be though, as mentioned with HP size issues and hitting allies with purposefully high HP), but not just as broken.

[Dan_The_Noob]

I think 10k is if you want it to play like "Doom with bonus upgrades" 5k is "Doom powertrip" and 1k is "I just want to obliterate a cyberdemon"
then mods you jus double or triple it accordingly... I play Intensify with Corruption Cards and Gunbonsai at 25k exp levels for the "doom with bonus upgrades" pace because of the extra damage and tougher enemies.

[ToxicFrog]

Yeah, the default XP threshold is set according to my tastes, which are, well, I want a relatively fast pace of upgrades that I can take into WADs that are normally far too difficult for me. People who prefer a less powertrippy experience and/or are better at Doom than I am will probably want a more sedate pace

On Searing Inscription -- it's meant to have a softcap of 50% and a hardcap of 45%, which it approaches (slowly) as you add more stacks, but it's completely plausible that I've made a mistake in the math somewhere and the hardcap isn't getting calculated right.

More generally, I have been wondering, on and off, what to do about the fire debuff. I don't want to make fire damage not grant XP or something -- that violates one of the core design principles, which is that you should not be punished for using effective tactics by getting less XP for it -- but it also encourages "shoot it once, then hide in another room until the XP gauge stops going up" tactics against powerful enemies (with the possible exception of viles, since the longer you leave those alone the more friends they raise), and not wanting to encourage stuff like that is why (e.g.) I have never added a health-regen-over-time power. Poison and Acid can encourage that too, to some extent, but you generally have to fight the enemy for a while to build up enough stacks that you can get away with ducking out for the last 20-30% of the fight.

I like the idea of it requiring "more involvement from the weapon", whatever that looks like. Maybe instead of doing damage directly it could increase the damage you do (similar to Embrittlement) and/or decreases the damage the enemy does (and then Infernal Forge effectively lets you carry those effects with you for a while rather than it just sticking to the burning enemy). I'll keep thinking about this, and welcome other suggestions for how to make fire fun and interesting; 0.11 is going to break save compatibility anyways, might as well pack in the changes.

In case it wasn't obvious, I have no game design experience and am completely winging it when it comes to balance

[Dan_The_Noob]

for the Fire upgrade, how about it starts at something minimal like 25% cap, then each level gives it a 5% cap increase or something? it's hard because of the EXP thing where some people might have 20 stacks and others have like 3.
but i figure a changing cap would mean you can get the DoTs to fall off without having to actually time them or anything... and people who want to abuse it can point more points into it.

[ToxicFrog]

It's already not timed, it constantly adjusts the damage from the fire based on how close to the threshold the target's hp is. The problem is that it's not calculating the threshold correctly.

The problem with raising the threshold (and with the current concept for fire more generally, if I'm honest) is that it's overpowered at the start of the fight and useless at the end of it. Lightning and poison are useful all the time if you pick appropriate weapons, and acid does almost nothing at the start of a fight but once you wear the enemy down all those stacks you piled up pay off big time, but once you've taken off the first chunk of the target's health with fire all those stacks on it are basically useless.

Increasingly I'm thinking that the solution is to make fire another element like lightning that doesn't do damage over time -- maybe it increases the damage you do to the enemy, or decreases the damage they deal, or hits the enemy with damage whenever they enter (or perhaps as long as they're in) the Missile or Melee state, or something of that nature.

[openroadracer]

...Maybe it increases the damage you do to the enemy, or decreases the damage they deal, or hits the enemy with damage whenever they enter (or perhaps as long as they're in) the Missile or Melee state, or something of that nature.

Acid already has the "enemies effected take more damage" as one of its upgrades, but I'd be in favor of pretty much all the rest; make Fire have an upgrade that randomly forces Pain checks as well, to simulate the panic of being on fire.

Basically, just take all of these ideas and make them into separate upgrades attached to the Fire element, and drop the DoT.

[Dan_The_Noob]

The problem with raising the threshold (and with the current concept for fire more generally, if I'm honest) is that it's overpowered at the start of the fight and useless at the end of it. Lightning and poison are useful all the time if you pick appropriate weapons, and acid does almost nothing at the start of a fight but once you wear the enemy down all those stacks you piled up pay off big time, but once you've taken off the first chunk of the target's health with fire all those stacks on it are basically useless.

how about some alternate effect that stays beyond the 50%? or just ditching the cap altogether and have fire be something you have to maintain (have it tick 5,4,3,2,1 per 35tic but each shot refreshes the value to max)
having damage go up 1 per upgrade with another upgrade to add stacks/duration?

--EDIT--
found a crash [imgur]https://imgur.com/a/6ly0UnU[/imgur]