4DFAF Uploaded

Did some work on the Hellhound shadow-step to improve its reliability and add in a few new FX: https://youtu.be/q6NtQ7HN-es

Version 9 uploaded.

"4D-FAF, a 4DC-DMS adaptation for FAF"

So apart from feedback, what from DMS would folks like to see incorporated?

@blackrobe said in 4DFAF Uploaded:

• Regarding Sera T2 shield Drone: it does work on some units, when you first released it, it shielded every unit and building, including ACU; I see the logic in later versions only shields some; thus my confusion. Might be good to add shield health amount, as you can't tell how strong shield is.

I took a look at how or rather where the information of where the shields health info is coming from. Far as I can tell, this isn't being provided by the shield, but by the units blueprint. Being that our shield drone adds a P-shield to a unit there isn't a blueprint to be drawn from. Maybe there is some way to "hook" in a change for that. Unfortunately , UI modding is not my area of knowledge.

Unless someone can pitch in or offer up some advice on how this can be done?

In the mean time, here is how the shield health is being calculated by the drone currently:

	if table.find(bp.Categories ,'EXPERIMENTAL') then
		sldHealth = 10000
		rChgTime = 120
		rChgRate = 100
		eCost = 300
	elseif table.find(bp.Categories ,'TECH3') then
		sldHealth = sldHealth * 0.3
		rChgTime = 90
		rChgRate = 10
		eCost = 25
	elseif table.find(bp.Categories ,'TECH2') then
		sldHealth = sldHealth * 0.5
		rChgTime = 60
		rChgRate = 5
		eCost = 10
	else
		sldHealth = sldHealth * 0.75
		rChgTime = 30
		rChgRate = 2
		eCost = 5
	end

in many ways, the above figures are not properly balanced. Though the idea was for the shield drone to be a significant material investment and thus I gave it more wiggle room. If you have ideas on how to improve this, I'm open to suggestions.

Resin

Digging into all this further it appears that shields are not really holding the base health figures in self.MyShield and thus the UI has to constantly refer to the units blueprint. While for units that have their shields predefined in the blueprint or enhancement this is all good, but for units that are given shields via non standard means this creates a problem. How can the shields Max and current health figures be discovered if its not held in self.MyShields? Without which It's not possible to update Unitview.lua to show the shield max for that unit during a mouse over.

Edit: Ok figured it out...

Apparently the shields are being treated as entities (I forgot about this). Thus its possible to call on a units shield health via...

if self.MyShield then
	WARN('	self.Shield: ', self.MyShield:GetMaxHealth() )	
end

This its possible to alter the Unitview.lua to work with most custom shields that are not based off a units Blueprint such as the 4DFAF shield drones.

Modified snippet from Unitview.lua, that I will try out...

if not shield.ShieldMaxHealth then
	if unitBp.Enhancements then
		shield = unitBp.Enhancements[getEnh.GetEnhancements(info.entityId).Back]
	elseif self.MyShield then
		shield = self.MyShield:GetMaxHealth()
	end
end

Side note: It could just as easily be unitviewdetail.lua as I'm not ever messed with either of these before and have yet to discover what each one does despite similar names and inferred purpose.

So far my attempts to do anything with the UI are showing nothing. None of the expected outputs, or errors of any kind.

Made a little more progress... It appears that unitviewDetail.lua specifically the "show" function is responsible for this portion of the UI. That being said, not much information is being passed to it to be able to pull the units ShieldMaxHealth from anything other than its blue print. This appears to be by design if i recall, to prevent players with UI mods from being able to directly alter SIM side assets.

Unfortunately this means that it will NOT be possible to have the units ShieldMaxHealth shown on the UI, if the unit received its shields from anything other than a blueprint.

Only possibility is to figure out how to alter the UI from the SIM such when the drone shield is created this gets added somehow. Not sure how this would be possible, as the UI triggers on mouse over, not on the shields creation.

@resin_smoker said in 4DFAF Uploaded:

I took a look at how or rather where the information of where the shields health info is coming from. Far as I can tell, this isn't being provided by the shield, but by the units blueprint. Being that our shield drone adds a P-shield to a unit there isn't a blueprint to be drawn from. Maybe there is some way to "hook" in a change for that. Unfortunately , UI modding is not my area of knowledge.

Well if there's one thing I've observed about you Resin, whether on your own, or with the aid of someone else, you always seem to figure things out

PS: Loving the custom Cybran cloak. I always thought that every faction should have its custom cloak. Now you can differentiate UEF and Cybran cloak. While not essential, to the aesthetic lovers amongst us, a treat. Might as well bring in what you can from DMS. Something different is always good.

@resin_smoker said in 4DFAF Uploaded:

So apart from feedback, what from DMS would folks like to see incorporated?

Maybe a list of what features are inside DMS would help feedback on what to incorporate ?

@krapougnak there is litteraly too much to write about, as Domino rescripted the entire game prior to FAF.

I'd recommend playing a vanilla SC-FA with DMS and 4DC. If you think what I've done was good, prepare to be shocked.

@blackrobe sad thing is that doing so, would break the UI ban on using SIM data. It's why UI mods are allowed in ranked matches, and why most sim-side mods are not. Being able to bridge that gap would enable rampant cheating and a huge amount of desyncs.

A UI mod can not interfere with sim code, except through tailored engine calls and sim callbacks. The user layer is in a separate Lua context. You can import even sim files and make edits - the simulation wouldn't notice because it runs in a separate Lua context.

@resin_smoker said in 4DFAF Uploaded:

Unfortunately this means that it will NOT be possible to have the units ShieldMaxHealth shown on the UI, if the unit received its shields from anything other than a blueprint.
Only possibility is to figure out how to alter the UI from the SIM such when the drone shield is created this gets added somehow. Not sure how this would be possible, as the UI triggers on mouse over, not on the shields creation.

We'd probably need to use a unit statistic that is synced from the sim to the UI. And then update the UI code in FAForever to read from that statistic and use the blueprint as a fallback. I'm not entirely sure about the solution because I've not investigated what the exact problem is.

But there's solutions if you really want them, just ask for help of the game team and maybe there's something we can do for you .

@resin_smoker said in 4DFAF Uploaded:
If you think what I've done was good, prepare to be shocked.

I am prepared, shoot !

@jip I'm down with that... I only need the shields:GetMaxHealth() to be passed to be able to update the UI. Otherwise, the drone custom p-shield, would never be able to display without hijacking the SIM in some game breaking way.

Edit: Just rubbed two neurons together and made coherent thought.

Some smart guy, could during the game startup, use blueprint.lua to go through the units that would be drone shield capable. Then assign, what the max shield value would be as a hard value. This is effect would allow me to pass the MaxShieldHealth into the blueprint to be later used by the UI !

Half way there! Here is the Blueprint.lua script to merge the data that i needed...

##########################################################################################
## --Add drone shield max health into unit bp so UI can use it
##########################################################################################

function Custom_Drone_MaxHealth_Blueprint(bp)
	if not bp then return end
	local id = bp.BlueprintId
	local bpDefense = original_blueprints.defense[id]
	
	-- Check to see if the gUnit has a Cloak, BuildRate or Economy, if so return false
	if bp.Intel.Cloak or bp.Defense.Shield.ShieldMaxHealth > 0 or bp.Enhancements.Shield or bp.Economy.MaintenanceConsumptionPerSecondEnergy then
		return false				
	end
	
	-- Unit Categories to exclude
	local excludedCats = {
		-- Primary unit retrictions, basicly anything that build, upgrades or makes ammo
		'COMMAND','SUBCOMMANDER','ENGINEER','OMNI','FACTORY','ECONOMIC','SILO',
		-- Custom unit restrictions
		'DRONE','MINE','PHASING','TRANSFORMABLE',
		-- Misc unit restrictions
		'POD','SATELLITE','UNTARGETABLE','SHIELD','WALL','PROJECTILE','OPERATION','CIVILIAN','INSIGNIFICANTUNIT','UNSELECTABLE','BENIGN','PROP',
	}
	local cats = bp.Categories
	for k, v in excludedCats do
		if table.find(cats, v) then
			return false
		end
	end

	-- Calc the drone shield max health based on the unit cat
	local droneShieldHealth = bp.Defense.MaxHealth
	if table.find(bp.Categories ,'EXPERIMENTAL') then
		droneShieldHealth = 10000
	elseif table.find(bp.Categories ,'TECH3') then
		droneShieldHealth = droneShieldHealth * 0.3
	elseif table.find(bp.Categories ,'TECH2') then
		droneShieldHealth = droneShieldHealth * 0.5
	else
		droneShieldHealth = droneShieldHealth * 0.75
	end
	
	WARN('Custom_Drone_MaxHealth_Blueprint for unit ID: ', bp.General.UnitName or 'no unit name found')
	
	local unitBp = table.deepcopy(bp.Defense)
	if unitBp then
		unitBp.Merge = true
		unitBp.DroneShieldMaxHealth = droneShieldHealth
		bp.Defense = unitBp		
	end		
end

Repr of a units "self"... Look for the "Defense" and then "DroneShieldMaxHealth"...

WARNING:  - Defense: table: 11FB39D8
WARNING:  -    AirThreatLevel: 0
WARNING:  -    ArmorType: Normal
WARNING:  -    DroneShieldMaxHealth: 235.5
WARNING:  -    EconomyThreatLevel: 0
WARNING:  -    Health: 314
WARNING:  -    MaxHealth: 314
WARNING:  -    Merge: true
WARNING:  -    PersonalShieldThreat: 0
WARNING:  -    RegenRate: 0
WARNING:  -    Shield: table: 11FB36B8
WARNING:  -       RegenAssistMult: 1
WARNING:  -       ShieldSize: 0
WARNING:  -    SubThreatLevel: 0
WARNING:  -    SurfaceThreatLevel: 13
WARNING:  -    UnknownWeaponThreat: 0
WARNING:  - Description: Heavy Tank
WARNING:  - DesiredShooterCap: 3

Got the shield info to display, but dam it displays for everything, when it should only display when the drone-shield is active. the problem is becoming a circular one.... I need info from the sim to activate or deactivate an ability but i can't. Not without using a sim.sync.

Notice that the unit is showing a shield stat, without it having a shield on it...

Sure I can pass the data to the units blueprint, but there isn't any way that i can figure to tell the UI that the shield is active or not.

Question: Isn't the shield data already in Sync somewhere ?

How's the progress going? Its been a while since you were quite prolific on the forums. Looking forward to your next iteration.