mod release Vandeanson’s Apocalypse

[Vandeanson 1677]

Yeah persistency is some of the next things on the to do list, gotta find something that i can use independend from ravage tho. Maybe grad persistence or Inidb2 or smth 

[Vandeanson 1677]

Fellow survivors,

 

I figured it might be a good time for a general status update and to give you an idea about the short and midterm roadmap for the Vandeanson’s Apocalypse mod.

 

What is VA today?

It developed from a dynamic site of interest spawner into more of a dynamic survival mission framework.

My main goal was, and still is, to add elements of unpredictability and danger to a mission and to add incentives, that influence your decision making process.

It should always be possible to run into something interesting, wherever you go on your map.

It should incentivize gameplay of discovery, there should always be the possibility of discovering something, or facing a thread wherever you go.

 

Where do I want to go with VA?

About two years ago, I would focus on spawning in Sites of Interest, such as Bandit Camps, Crash-Sites and such things, where you could find loot and maybe face some enemy AI.

While I am more or less happy with the current state of the sites (tuning, bug fixing and optimization is always a thing of course), I did realize that I could enhance the gameplay experience in a different, less performance intensive way.

 

What makes a game interesting? Challenges, threats, a sense of achievement, the thrill of discovering/finding something rare maybe – it really depends on your taste of course.

How can this be done, using existing assets only (to minimize performance impacts and addon size)?

One way in my view, is to make existing assets interesting or rare or to add threat.

 

Few examples:

Radio: The radio item, in times of discord, is probably rather uninteresting.

 

How can we change that?

Create the need for having a radio, a benefit. For example, by adding an NPC that will hand out tasks/errands to survivors randomly via radio broadcast (he is sitting in a bunker somewhere, save from the apocalypse!), subject to them carrying a Radio and being able to receive the message.

Pair this with an adjustable loot economy, make radios spawn somewhat rarely and already there is a new aspect to the gameplay: to get hold of a radio as soon as possible, to unlock access to such tasks and the resulting rewards. Now to top that, make the radio break after some time or use batteries, and you end up with something the survivors must take care of and maintain.

 

Bleeding/Infection: these existing features have the effect, that survivors may be a bit more cautious when approaching potentially risky situations and will ensure to keep a safe stock of bandages, blood conserves and anti-virus medicine, to avoid being caught unprepared. Encounters become much more dangerous and bad decisions have long term consequences – if something doesn’t kill you instantly and you get out of a Z crowd or firefight alive – you might still face injuries that you need to take care of quickly.

 

Uniforms: Uniforms are pretty much cosmetic and may help with camouflage of course. But let’s add a temperature system and combine it with survival elements of being cold, freezing and overheating.

Categorize Uniforms (and vests, headgear, face wear, …) into light, medium and warm types and suddenly you will need to look for appropriate gear depending on the temperatures, if you do not want to suffer from negative side effects of being exposed to the weather. You might also want to hide away some gear for future weather changes somewhere, to access later.

 

Item rarity: generally, I believe that the loot economy must be decently balanced. Finding high end military loot in a suburban family home might not make that much sense. Finding a scoped and silenced m4 at every corner might also not really cause much excitement after few hours of gameplay. Loot should spawn, where it makes sense, which will make loot scavenging also more fun.

Let’s say you need medical supplies, you will seek out medical facilities, if you need food, maybe a super market or a small town and to get the big bad nasty boomsticks you might want to head out to military facilities or search remote places for hidden survivor camps.

 

Skill/reputation/trader system: Finally, you want something to invest in, that helps you further improve and grants you access to improvements – self-explanatory as this is a core element of many games.

 

Some of these features are already present in VA, others are planned features and somewhere on a growing to do list.

But I hope this gives a general picture of where I want to go with this mod, in the end, using VA should provide you with quite a hardcore MP survival scenario.

 

Outlook:

Short term priorities:

1.       Finalize revision of the loot economy including civilian/military/medical loot and spawn site categories + customization options. I am currently sorting vanilla and DLC weapons/gear/items into respective categories. Common mods are next.

 

2.       Dig into iniDB2 and understand if it is the right tool to reach the next very important milestone for VA: Persistent database saving. This will enable me to start looking into setting up a standing dedicated server and will make VA features persistent. It will also allow me to implement early base building elements (setting up a tent, loot crate, storing vehicles,….). And of course, it will allow me to save player states, such as bleeding, infection, hunger/thirst and such.

 

Midterm/longterm priorities:

1.       Again, maintaining a dedicated server, if VA is stable and persistent “enough”.

 

2.       Add temperature feature including tiered (light, medium, warm and special (like wetsuit)) gear (uniforms, vests, headgear, face wear) and side effects of adverse body temperature levels (cold, freezing, overheating).

 

3.       Review and optimize AI spawner or replace with EOS (or other options)

 

4.       AI spawner: add option to disable AI Skill setting

 

5.       Add option to spawn AI as military unit

 

6.       Add zone types (contaminated zones, militarized zones) that affect dangers and potential loot

 

7.       Add task generator feature (NPC handing out tasks that match the survival scenario)

 

8.       Extensive hunger/thirst/vitality system including: hunting, cooking, farming, fishing, trapping,… as a standalone feature within the mod but with an option to include ravage hunger and thirst.

 

9.       Extended health system (sickness)

 

10.   Optional inclusion of ravage loot pools

 

11.   Base building feature

 

12.   Supply drops (very likely GF Heli Supplydrops)

 

13.   Cargo plane crash event (where loot containers are spread out over a wider area around the crash – should cause some good PVP mayhem)

 

14.   Heli air patrols

 

15.   Inclusion of ALIAS anomalies & dynamic anomalies spawner

 

16.   STALKER like artifacts (?)

 

Cheers

VD

[chernaruski 338]

Its gonna be legendary. Discord five!
This will open up so many possibilities. Keep the hardcore survival spirit alive @Vandeanson , great work!
 

[damsous 329]

2 hours ago, Vandeanson said:

Radio: The radio item, in times of discord, is probably rather uninteresting.

Yeah thats kill a lot the survival aspect, i have set up a mission with this script : http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=32083

But the people just want go in discord 😞 .... thats sad, a radio system add a nice immersion to the game and create some cool situation that cannot be reproduced with discord, radio feature add a more deep coop experience.

 

 

[grimwald 24]

Is it possible to force the raiders and stalkers to have a specific uniform as base? I'm experimenting with a concept that marks them as part of a gang with colours (which the uniform aligns to).

[Vandeanson 1677]

Just now, grimwald said:

Is it possible to force the raiders and stalkers to have a specific uniform as base? I'm experimenting with a concept that marks them as part of a gang with colours (which the uniform aligns to).

Something like that is planned yeah, where you can choose that a specific loadout is used for a site/AI group. May be military unit or a gang, up to the mission maker. You will be able to enter your custom uniforms, weapons, and so on. It is on the to do list but not an immediate priority:) 

[grimwald 24]

Fastest reply, ever. Thanks. I was hoping I could put a file somewhere that'd over ride the current system. Ah well. Thanks. 🙂

[Vandeanson 1677]

5 minutes ago, grimwald said:

Fastest reply, ever. Thanks. I was hoping I could put a file somewhere that'd over ride the current system. Ah well. Thanks. 🙂

There is currently no dedicated set of gearlist placeholders for that, once created, it is possible tho:) 

[Vandeanson 1677]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMWzmOj0F9Y&feature=youtu.be

loot economy/gear categorisation update and showcase.

[Vandeanson 1677]

W.I.P. update:

 

I have categorized item types into the categories military and civilian for vanilla, dlc and ravage content. 

 

Depending on your active mods and settings, this feature will take relevant arrays and merge it into a final e.g. military rifles or civilian rifles loot pool. 

 

These pools are used to randomly equip AI, players, fill loot crates and for loot spawn in buildings. 

 

Military areas and civilian areas spawn different loot as they access the respective gear pool category (civ vs mil). 

AI and Players would mainly be equipped from the civilian gear pool, with a low chance per equipment slot to access the military gearpool. 

Sites (e. G. Banditcamps) have a higher chance to have lootcrates with military gear and bandits have some chance to be military grade geared. 

 

I did some testing yesterday and most parts work well. 

I have an issue with seperating military type buildings but i believe its just a minor error in the code, once thats fixed the new loot economy is working and all i need to do is add/categorize further mods:) 

 

Cheers

Vd

 

 

 

[Vandeanson 1677]

Hi all,

 

I have been able to fix all known issues of the new loot economy. 

I could use some help with testing the beta version, hence anyone interested can find the link to a local addon version below. Any feedback is appreciated. 

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/198q0np1TC3G87ugAnOcNRjac05IOFgql/view?usp=drivesdk

 

NOTE:

You will need to turn on the dynamic loot spawner manually under the loot economy settings. Forgot to enable it by default. Will change it tonight. 

 

New:

- civilian and military loot categories

- vanilla, dlc and ravage gear/weapons are categorized

- affects lootspawn, AI equipper, player equipper, trader goods, lootcrates from sites

- tradercamp (requires ravage and the rvg ambient AI module) traders redone to include VA medical items (bandage, anti virus pills /injectors, bloodbag)

- added a hint loop how to use medical items (shift + f) 

- added tooltip to medical items

 

Known issue:

- in SP, shift + f no longer works after a restart. You will have to close and reopen the mission. Working on a fix. 

 

In my personal opinion, loot spawns feel much better now, with military grade gear only spawning in military facilities and civilian areas only spawning items that are likely to be left behind in a normal household. 

 

I will add two more categories, police and medical sites with specific loot pools. 

 

Cheers 

Vd

[zagr 38]

don't forget to add a mod support for your new loot economy 🙂

[Vandeanson 1677]

EO gear, RHS, friths ruins, project infinity, niarms, cup, warefare thai, will all be added one by one i think, and others that i have forgotten. Just a lot of manual work:)) 

[Vandeanson 1677]

Niarms and CUp weapons as well as most cup equipment is categorized in tge WIP build

[zagr 38]

well how about private mods? i mean i have a friend's weapon mod and i want it to work with your mod, can you make it more independent just like in your old version where all modded weapons are added in the mod.

[Vandeanson 1677]

Yeah i though about automaticaly feeding in all non cathegorized mods too, gotta figure out how to best do that:)

[zagr 38]

1 hour ago, Vandeanson said:

Yeah i though about automaticaly feeding in all non cathegorized mods too, gotta figure out how to best do that:)

it would be just easy for you 🙂

[Vandeanson 1677]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/198q0np1TC3G87ugAnOcNRjac05IOFgql/view?usp=drivesdk

 

In case the old beta link does not work

[Vandeanson 1677]

Currently busy adding cup, rhs, project infinity, friths ruins, eo gear to the categorized loot arrays and working on a way to include all active gear mods (non categorized ones) by default

[Vandeanson 1677]

A new VA v2.19e BETA build is available:

 

New features:

This version changes the loot economy substantially compared to the steam version. 

 

- new mods are categorized

 

- categorized mods are: arma 3, dlc, all 4 RHS, CUP, Niarms, friths ruins, ravage (project infinity, EO, ttsk, warfarethai, ifa3, KA, aftermath and any other mod are yet to be categorized) 

 

- categories are: civilian, military, police and special

 

- option added to take over RAVAGE gear pool settings and overwrite VA default settings. Blacklisted classnames are still excluded and custom gearlists will overwrite this. This is intentional

 

- these categories define in what buildings what loot will spawn

 

- police gear will (wip) spawn in buildings designated as police building (e. G. Liviona police station, tbd for arma, dlc and CUP) 

 

- special gear is ghillie suits, diving suits, oxygen tanks and such. Will not spawn often, will not be equipped to AI, will likely only be obtainable from loot crates and traders, tbd) 

 

- AI will either spawn with gear from the civilian pool or from the military pool, chance based

 

- Loot crates are filled with gear from all categories

 

- mod content will only be categorized if mod is active

 

- new settings: seperate military loot adjuster (chance for rifles, items, uniforms,...) 

 

- setting to bulk exclude arma 3, dlc, ravage equipment seperately (option for weapons and for equipment) 

 

- setting to BLACKLIST specific classname from lootlist 

 

- setting to overwrite/WHITELIST loot arrays for itemslots with custom classnames (will ignore default generated lists and apply your classnames only) 

 

- setting to adjust chance that AI spawns with military gear

 

Other changes:

 

- chance to spawn guard dogs set to 0 by default until friendly fire behaviour is fixed (BAD DOG!) 

 

- debug hints cleaned up (only worls in SP and hosted MP atm) 

 

- added counter to show how much loot is currently spawned

 

- removed bis fnc task defense from AI that is spawned at sites until AI behaviour issues are fixed. 

 

- added a ravage time multiplier to some function. For example for bleeding to avoid bleeding to tick faster than intended.

 

- some settings cleaned up

 

I hope you enjoy and thanks for all the v2.19 testers that have offered their help and have actively discussed the beta on discord so far, you rock! 

 

Join the discussion:

 

DISCORD

 

It looks like we are getting closer to a steam release;) 

 

Cheers

Vd

 

Edited October 16, 2019 by Vandeanson
EDIT: updated with v2.19e, support for ravage gear pools added

[lord3579 0]

patrol AI only on foot??...don't see on cars!

патруль AI только пешком ?? ... не вижу на машинах!

[Vandeanson 1677]

Yep correct, VA only spawns patrols on foot. No plans for vehicle patrols. 

 

I would use ravage for vehicle patrols:) 

[lord3579 0]

1 минуту назад, сказал Вандеансон:

Да правильно, ва только порождает патрули пешком. Никаких планов по патрулированию автотранспорта.

 

Я бы использовал ravage для патрулирования транспортных средств:)

спасибо)

[Vandeanson 1677]

Very welcome:) 

 

Ps: pls make sure to only post in english language, according to forum rules;) 

[lord3579 0]

6 minutes ago, Vandeanson said:

Очень приветствуется:)

 

Ps: pls убедитесь, что только сообщение на английском языке, в соответствии с правилами форума;)

Good