Since 1.2 landed, I've put myself back into the modding groove and started expanding on the personal mod I've kept to my band of friends. A previous post of mine from earlier this year asked if it was possible to tweak universal vehicle spawns for the necromorph portion of that mod. As the title suggests, I've returned to the subject, but with different questions in a similar vein.


Firstly, in my modding travels, I've noticed something unfortunate with regards to already-dynamic spawns, like those reserved for faction-specific jeeps. The game seems to arbitrarily pick a specific vehicle with the spawn's tag and only that vehicle. For example, if I were to give a faction all of the tanks in the game, it would only ever spawn Brownpants TroX-80s and nothing else.

Is there a way to get around this and properly randomize what spawns (even if it's a goofy workaround) or am I stuck with one vehicle per tag?


Secondly, the same necromorph-related post I mentioned earlier covered the topic of using vehicle troop offsets. This all works fine and dandy at the start of the game when everybody has the territory and vehicles they started with. It's not so great when other factions start capturing necromorph territory and, in the process, the wrecks I've used to jack up troop counts for the zombies.

In the interest of preventing human factions from going thermonuclear with their population count (as, being almost entirely ranged, they already have a natural advantage against necromorphs), I need to know if it's possible to prevent vehicles from being captured if their spawns are conquered.


Lastly, I've dialed back my resistance to modifying maps to support additional necromorph content. For me to even think of doing so, however, I need to know if it's possible to add new vehicle tags that the game will read dynamically or if it only reads from a predefined list of tags - and, further, if any such list is hardcoded or open to editing.


Anyone out there got a handle on this area of expertise? Thanks in advance for any assistance on these issues.

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

I think you could refer to the Running with Trenchs WWI mod - at some point, Master Blaster had the French spawn in 2 tanks for each single tank the enemy had (one with a cannon, and another with a machinegun). This obviously required modifying the map, but it might be good to know.

If you've got the "vehicle wrecks" set to that only the Necromorphs actually own them in the faction files, then other factions shouldn't be able to take them over. Sure, they can be "stolen", but I'm not sure if that has any practical effect. If that didn't work, you could also make it so the "vehicle wrecks" require a single Necromorph to man it, and make it so you can't boot the Necrmorph out of it (akin to the Vulcan Tank), so it'll ALWAYS belong to the Necromorphs and require the humans to destroy it.

I had a look at Running in the Trenches and I couldn't find anything that looked like it'd make the French machine gun tank spawn alongside its gun-toting sibling. The mod post itself didn't even mention the machine gun variant existed.

I looked at Running With Trench Foot, as well, but that unfortunately led to another dead-end; Trench Foot spawns two tanks at once by using the "truck" tag on the alternate versions. My hope was that I'd be able to have vehicles randomize within their tags - in example, necromorph wrecks randomizing between BTX, GT-C, and SIK-AP wrecks on APC spawns - and I'm worrying that this isn't possible.


I do have the wrecks set to only the necromorphs, but that doesn't stop opposing factions from fully capturing them - name color and all - by securing the territory they spawned in. I know that radio towers can't be captured under most circumstances and I wonder if it has to do with the "existence" field in vehicle files, but I need to do more research on that before I can say anything for certain.

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

Ask Master Blaster personally then - he definitely had a Renault with a gun and a Renault with a machinegun spawn spawn at the same time at one point in the mod's existence.

Have you taken the advice about making the wrecks have a single nercomorph in them and making it impossible to boot him out?

I would try that if I, uh...knew how to. I tried assigning the wreck protectors and that, unfortunately, did not get anyone to hop inside - does a vehicle need a driver slot for someone to get inside on their own?

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

It needs an enter and an exit position as well as a position inside of it (even if the guy is hidden).

Just copy and paste the Vulcan Tank's profile, replace the model and hit boxes, and remove the turret and gunner.

After spending an amount of time I probably shouldn't have on testing this out (another reminder that I ought to use rigged campaign starts for mod tests), I've learned a few things.


Unfortunately, it seems that having a necromorph in the driver's seat before, during, and after the vehicle's spawn point's capture does nothing to prevent it from being claimed by the conquering faction. It'll mark the vehicle as stolen, but I don't know if that prevents troop offsets from applying - and, even if it does, the "stolen" property is still temporary.


On a more helpful note, it seems that the "one_per_faction" setting does prevent the vehicle from being claimed by other factions. I'm beginning to wonder if this is actually how I could get multiple vehicle types to spawn on the same tag, but that's still just a theory.

Edit:
I did some research and found out that this does actually allow multiple vehicles of the same tag to spawn for a faction. As the name of the parameter suggests, you only get one, but you could potentially have a wide variety of unique vehicles to occupy a map's slots. It's worth noting that the "reserves_spawn_point" setting is needed, otherwise you end up with multiple vehicles of the same tag piling up in the same spawn point and potentially telefragging eachother (and any infantrymen unfortunate enough to be standing nearby) via physics.


On a more confusing, but potentially helpful note, my attempt at coaxing the zombies into a wreck produced an unusual result. I couldn't get them to board it without a driver's seat and, naturally, a wreck lacking wheels isn't exactly supposed to be driving. The game crashed, however, when I tried to set the speeds to 0. It didn't when I set acceleration to 0, so I settled with that.

This produced the unusual effect of vehicles driving around when "offline" and out of the player's sight, but coming to a complete halt when switched "online" in the active part of the map around the player. I think I might just retain this quirk; it adds an element of unpredictability, even as much as it might be confusing for a static husk to get up and leave after a first encounter.

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

Bumpdate:
I've gotten most everything working the way I want it to, save for one crucial element; the maps. I've done all the modwork that (I think) is necessary to make universal vehicles open to modding, but I cannot figure out how in the heck I'm supposed to override vanilla maps for a custom campaign.

I'm flying blind on this subject. I have absolutely no idea how to override the maps' SVG files without copying the entire map folders. Considering that's a size of 37MB with just the SVG files compared against something over 163MB for the whole deal, I really don't want to do that.

So is there any way I can override just the SVG files of each of the vanilla maps?

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

Bump:
It's been a reasonable length of time (I hope), so I'm bumping this again in search of answers. I'm still looking for a solution to replacing the SVG files of maps without having to copy the whole thing into my mod.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing?

_________________
I'M COOKIN' WITH GAS! I've got a handful of vertebrae and a headful of mad! Yeah! That's your spinal cord, baby! Dig it! Who's the man? I'm the man! I'm a bad man! How bad? Real bad! I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!

Map data needs to come from single SVG file, so no, it's not possible to load layers from several SVG files. SVG files tend to zip pretty well so you might get 1/4 the actual size for distribution.