Yitzi with Thinker?

[golingarf]

I've tried playing induktio's thinker mod with SMAC-in-SMAX. After 40 turns, I'm already impressed by the AI's much better use of formers. However, there are "spore launchers" all over the place! I think SMAC-in-SMAX requires Yitzi to get rid of these. So I wonder, what are the prospects that Yitzi's mod can be made compatible with thinker? I realize they are both "hard mods."

[golingarf]

I actually found a workaround for this specific problem, which is to copy the line for Mind Worms over that of Spore Launchers in alphax.txt under the heading #UNITS, and change "CentEmp" to "Disable". Specifically, I copied over the line starting  "Spore Launcher" with

Mind Wworms,             Infantry, Psi,          Psi,        1, 5, 0, Disable,  3, 00000000000000000000000000

Playtested and it works: the wworms appear and act like mind worms. I assume you can do the same with Battle Ogres and whatnot (I guess you would change them to alien artifacts.) Perhaps SMAC-in-SMAX should be updated so that you don't need Yitzi to disable the native SMAX units.

Still, I'm interested in the original question because I expect anyone modding the game will use thinker from now on, and Yitzi adds a lot of flexibility.

[bvanevery]

Historically you had Yizti's patch, Scient's patch, and I'm not sure what others.  I think it is worth noting that Yitzi and Scient did not combine forces.

Thinker Mod includes Scient's patch.  So you have the historical question of why Yitzi and Scient weren't combined, compounded by whatever Thinker Mod is doing.  Induktio has been on record as not terribly interested in Yizti's code, and he's probably justified, since I don't think there's some pile of documentation to explain what's going on with it.

In short, I think you are probably asking for something that is a metric ton of work, that historically, various patch authors have not been interested in doing.

If you are wondering why it's so much work, well, it's binary patching and there's no source code.  Getting binary patch authors to cooperate with each other is nowhere near as easy as having them work on source code together.  And even that, to be honest, isn't easy for developer political and ego reasons.  Scient's new OpenSMACX project is the kind of infrastructure necessary to get patch authors on the same page, but it is nascent.

If you are not looking to take on this kind of work yourself, then I suggest you isolate very specifically what kind of "flexibility" you have desired from Yitzi, and then try to sell Induktio on adding that specific feature to his mod.  Whereas, I can reasonably predict that open ended, broad requests for porting over Yitzi's work to Thinker Mod, are going to be met with complete boredom on his part.  It's the sort of thing you should take on yourself if you really really want it.  That's pretty much how open source works: people who want boring stuff like that, have to do it.

Myself, these issues are why I don't support any patches at all, and just target the original SMACX binary with my own mod.  People want stuff, then years down the line, you find that patches don't work with each other, authors have vanished, new authors don't want to work with old undocumented code, etc.  I know the official binary is still going to be there and is still going to work.

My mod will work with any patch that doesn't require changes to alphax.txt.  Notably, Scient's patch will work, because you can just overwrite alphax.txt with your own and everything will be fine.  Thinker Mod worked last I tried it several weeks ago.  Yitzi does not work because he "took over" some things in alphax.txt.

[Vidsek]

     More specifically: Yitzi's patch does not work with your AI Growth Mod (or other alphax mods) unless you hand merge the two alphax.txt versions.  As I have done and am in the process of testing.

    But you are correct that "out of the box" the two are not compatible.  Yitzi's 'mistake' was combining pure bug-fixes with new features that involved modifying alphax.

   Would it be possible to make a new .txt file separate from alphax which could contain all the modifications that otherwise would be in alphax and which the program would (optionally) read as an extension of alphax?   Not for Yitzi's patch, but as a better approach to a mixed project like his.

    By the way, my tests of the Merge of Yitzi 35d and AIG 1.30 have so far not found any bugs or weard behavior up to the early mid-game.
    I'll get around to posting the merged alphax.txt here very soon so anyone else interested can take a look at it and see how it works.

[bvanevery]

     More specifically: Yitzi's patch does not work with your AI Growth Mod (or other alphax mods) unless you hand merge the two alphax.txt versions.  As I have done and am in the process of testing.

Yeah.  With Conventional Missile attack power being the main conflict.

Even more specifically, it's always been possible for someone to write a fairly trivial script to do the merge with Regular Expressions, so that it doesn't have to be done by hand.  However, that little bit of kiddie scripting is gruntwork, that I've never personally been interested in doing.  Why?  Because Yitzi's patch never offered me much of anything.  From a "share the burdens" sense it's an easy task to offload to some other more motivated open source person.  Generally speaking Yitzi's patch could be spat upon, polished, and tidied up in a number of important ways.  But I did that sort of thing for years in open source land and I'm poverty stricken as a result, so I'm determined not to invite myself to do that, unless there's some payoff in it for me somewhere.  And now with Induktio's Thinker Mod ascending as the preeminent binary patch, there's even less reason for me to consider doing it.

   Would it be possible to make a new .txt file separate from alphax which could contain all the modifications that otherwise would be in alphax and which the program would (optionally) read as an extension of alphax?   Not for Yitzi's patch, but as a better approach to a mixed project like his.

An alphax2.txt  .  Overwrites lines in alphax.txt as a loading postprocess, according to some matching criterion.  I have to wonder if for the work involved, if someone finally writing a damn mod manager would be a better way to go.  I didn't have time for that, I had to get my mod itself done.  And since that took as long as it did, I'm not putting any time budget into a mod manager.  I need to write a new 4X TBS game.  A mod manager was the "less trivial" open source project that one could do to clean all this stuff up.

    By the way, my tests of the Merge of Yitzi 35d and AIG 1.30 have so far not found any bugs or weard behavior up to the early mid-game.

Yeah I'm not expecting anything.  I still play my mod, and I still don't know how to play my own mod in some respects.  I tend to make it to early midgame before getting completely bored.  I'm thinking of writing a 4X TBS where the player is not in charge of early colonization, or only makes a few key decisions and the rest is automated.  Like let's say you're white, Spanish, and settling North America.  Do you really care about micromanaging all the colonies?  Deciding where an initial few are going to be, and then just letting things run, would probably do fine.

    I'll get around to posting the merged alphax.txt here very soon so anyone else interested can take a look at it and see how it works.

Well you do have the saving grace, nowadays, that I'm unlikely to make a 1.31 unless playtesters report major needs.  Nothing reported so far yet.  In fact, I haven't even announced on Reddit and should probably go do that.

[Vidsek]

    Yes, by ''hand'' merging I was meaning to include scripted automation of the process.

   By the way....what is the formula for conventional missile power in the basic game?   I know fungus ones cover more squares/tiles, do the conventional do more damage to one tile, hit more tiles at the same strength, hit more and hit harder, or what?
   Yitzi's patch does give you several choices for how the power is calculated:

Conventional missile rules:

This controls how the cost and power of missiles are affected by the unit's reactor.

1. They are not affected.
2. The power is multiplied by the reactor value.
3. The power and the weapon cost are both multiplied by the reactor value.
4. The power is multiplied by 2^reactor.  (i.e. doubled for each reactor level.)
5. The power and weapon cost are both multiplied by 2^reactor.
6. The power and weapon cost are both multiplied by 2^reactor, after which the weapon cost is increased by the
   (unmultiplied) power (causing the efficiency of missile weapons to increase with reactor, but fairly slowly).
7. The power is multiplied by 2^reactor; the weapon cost is multiplied by the reactor value.

  Are any of these the same as the original game's formula? 

[golingarf]

Thanks for pointing out OpenSMACX. That's clearly where it's at.

[Induktio]

I've tried playing induktio's thinker mod with SMAC-in-SMAX. After 40 turns, I'm already impressed by the AI's much better use of formers. However, there are "spore launchers" all over the place! I think SMAC-in-SMAX requires Yitzi to get rid of these.

Great to have more players! However, spore launchers are not part of SMAC and the game shouldn't be spawning any of them when smac-in-smacx mod is activated with Thinker. It seems to me you're running the game without actually enabling the smac_only mode. To see if the parameter was passed properly, check if the main menu changes shade to blueish color. If it has greenish color, then the game is just running in the usual SMACX mode. You also need to install the modified txt files from smac-in-smacx mod's Github page for it to work correctly.

So I wonder, what are the prospects that Yitzi's mod can be made compatible with thinker? I realize they are both "hard mods."

Well, the problem here is that we don't have the source code to any of the patches. Technically it would be pretty easy to patch the dll import section of any version of the game binary and then just run Thinker on top of that. The problem is there's no easy way to verify if Yitzi's patch might break something on the binary level, and it's never been actually tested. Then there's the issue of dealing with bug reports when we would have multiple binaries, not very viable. That doesn't mean new features couldn't be imported from other patches though, but my criteria was pretty strict in the sense that all new features must be developed in C++ and kept in version control.

[bvanevery]

   By the way....what is the formula for conventional missile power in the basic game?

Not sure.  Once upon a time, I tried reading all of Yitzi's posts on the subject to figure out what was going on.  It wasn't clear and I only ended up scratching my head.  I believe one would have to go through and try stuff, looking at the combat odds before combat starts, to see what actually happens.  That's a chore that has never been worth it to me, but it's not that hard for someone to do.  I've done it for plenty of other combat variables I actually care about.

I know fungus ones cover more squares/tiles,

A fungus warhead is not relevant as it doesn't damage anything.  Now how fungus spread is computed, I don't know.  I've noticed that Singularity Engine fungal warheads seem to give you some fungal towers and immediate mindworms to go with them.

do the conventional do more damage to one tile,

Conventional warheads attack 1 and only 1 unit in a tile.  Bigger reactors do more damage.

[golingarf]

Great to have more players! However, spore launchers are not part of SMAC and the game shouldn't be spawning any of them when smac-in-smacx mod is activated with Thinker. It seems to me you're running the game without actually enabling the smac_only mode. To see if the parameter was passed properly, check if the main menu changes shade to blueish color. If it has greenish color, then the game is just running in the usual SMACX mode. You also need to install the modified txt files from smac-in-smacx mod's Github page for it to work correctly.

Well, there are no SMACX techs, facilities, or secret projects, so I'm happy with it. But it's true that the main menu has green text and says Alien Crossfire. I just loaded the text files from SMAC-in-SMAX using the mod launcher as recommended on the thread for that mod, manually replaced the map of planet with a SMAC version, made the above described change to spore launchers, and replaced the sounds for all unit chassis types with a short silent file. The result is basically SMAC.

[Induktio]

Well, there are no SMACX techs, facilities, or secret projects, so I'm happy with it. But it's true that the main menu has green text and says Alien Crossfire. I just loaded the text files from SMAC-in-SMAX using the mod launcher as recommended on the thread for that mod, manually replaced the map of planet with a SMAC version, made the above described change to spore launchers, and replaced the sounds for all unit chassis types with a short silent file. The result is basically SMAC.

I don't understand why would you manually edit the txt files when they have been already edited to exclude the SMACX stuff. Get them from here. The smac-in-smacx mod will not work as intended unless you *also* start the game with smac_only=1 variable or -smac command line parameter, either of them works. This is required to disable many SMACX behaviours that are present in the game binary. You can still edit the txt files to tweak the random map generator for example, but it's not required.

[bvanevery]

I don't understand why would you manually edit the txt files when they have been already edited to exclude the SMACX stuff.

Perhaps the OP has reported something that could be construed as a bug in the original game.
https://github.com/DrazharLn/smac-in-smax/blob/master/thinker/ac_mod/alphax.txt contains the line:

Code: [Select]

Spore Launcher, Infantry, Psi, Psi, 0, 5, 0, Disable, 5, 00000000001000000000000000
but perhaps it doesn't stop the game from spawning Spore Launchers as random alien menaces.  "Disable" might be better understood as "unavailable to the player via a tech" rather than "completely removed from the game".  For instance a Unity Mining Drill is also "Disable" and you can certainly get one of those in the game.  I'm trying to remember if there's any keyword for making things completely unavailable?

The smac-in-smacx mod will not work as intended unless you *also* start the game with smac_only=1 variable or -smac command line parameter, either of them works. This is required to disable many SMACX behaviours that are present in the game binary.

A deployment problem.  Go download this archive of stuff over here, go change this setting over there... it's not robust in the real world to have so many steps.  Users download stuff, try things out, most just shake their head that stuff doesn't work and give up.  One is diligent enough to actually inform us of his User Experience here.  This is the sort of thing that is generally solved either by a mod manager, or by packaging something very specifically as a complete "SMAC in SMACX" solution.  This is also why I only support the official game binary.  I know what it does, and there is no question of mixing and matching.

I'm also not averse to telling people to just get over the idea of "purist" SMAC anyways.  Just play SMACX.  If the Alien factions are too powerful, I have an answer for that: play my mod.     If the Alien factions are too goofy, or the other add-on characters, there's no real answer for that.  The path of least resistance is to ignore them.  But over time, I found that game mechanically they are semi-valid.  They needed balancing, but hey I did that.

[Induktio]

Smac-in-smacx must be installed in a particular way or else there will be some issues similar to what the OP had with the spore launchers. Setting units to "Disable" mainly just prevents the player from building them, but the planet might keep spawning spore launchers and similar units anyway. I'm assuming the problem was caused by not enabling smac_only mode.

Config variable smac_only=1 disables this SMACX-related behaviour from the game binary. I have to keep repeating this or else players might get wrong ideas on how smac-in-smacx mod was meant to be installed. Editing txt files manually is not required and neither is overwriting any existing txt files, that's why the game reads the modded files from ac_mod folder when smac_only mode is activated. Maybe the modded txt files could be bundled with Thinker, but it's really simple to download them separately too.

[golingarf]

I don't understand why would you manually edit the txt files when they have been already edited to exclude the SMACX stuff. Get them from here. The smac-in-smacx mod will not work as intended unless you *also* start the game with smac_only=1 variable or -smac command line parameter, either of them works. This is required to disable many SMACX behaviours that are present in the game binary. You can still edit the txt files to tweak the random map generator for example, but it's not required.

I got the files from the git that you link, and I am launching the game from SMACXLauncher, as the author recommended. I am not launching from a command line, so I don't know where I can set any "smac_only" variable. It does work, however: almost all the expansion content is gone.

I assumed the issue was as bvanevery says, namely, the author of the SMAC-in-SMAX mod mistakenly thought that "Disable" would prevent the spore launchers from spawning, when really it only prevents them from being built at a base. That's why I suggested updating the mod.

If the Alien factions are too goofy,

That's my problem.

[bvanevery]

Maybe the modded txt files could be bundled with Thinker, but it's really simple to download them separately too.

It isn't.  You're wrong.  You're thinking like a modder who likes to grovel in details, not like a consumer who wants to just play a game and be done with it.  "Mere mortals" mess up very trivial deployment tasks all the time.  This is why people get paid big bucks for User Experience, develop installers and package managers, do QA and stress testing, etc.  Even Microsoft screws up this sort of stuff fairly regularly, with weird uninstall and reinstall scenarios that they weren't expecting and didn't test for.  Not so weird for the consumers who have to deal with their damn products though.

Anyways, yeah, making these things "smooth" takes effort.  Effort that an open source person might not be inclined to make, or want someone else to do.  I have my own Rules of Engagement on that.  I modded the simplest .txt things and chose not to get into patching, mixing, and matching.  I can always tell someone "drop my files on top of existing files"  "...no, do what I say, drop my files on top of existing files."  "Seriously!  Not debating here.  Drop my files on top of existing files..."  Nothing to screw up except a person's basic ability to unzip and drop files.  Which can be screwed up, and I'm aware someone is probably screwing it up, somewhere, but I'll accept that for now.  'Cuz it's way less work for me.

If the Alien factions are too goofy,

That's my problem.

If you really can't accept those factions, but you're willing to accept the 5 new human factions, perhaps it would be expedient to simply delete caretake.txt and usurper.txt.  Then you could, for instance, select games with random opponents and you'd never get Alien factions in the game.  I haven't tried this approach so I'm not 100% sure it works, but I do know if you delete enough stuff pertaining to those factions, they're not going to be available.  There are a few other files associated with a faction, but getting rid of the *.txt might do it.

Some people have issues with the technologies the Alien factions introduce, and want those gone.  I'm not hardcore like that, I can't be bothered / flapped that easily.  I did, however, rebalance those techs in my mod.  In particular, Soporific Gas Pods are overpowered.  I made them late and helluh expensive, a "soft" way of taking them out of the game.  You can have them if you're willing to pay through the nose for them.  And with lotsa things being otherwise more expensive and harder to obtain in my mod, you'll probably think better of it.  And then you won't miss them.  You won't fret about whether you should have built the Soporific Gas Pod version of everything anymore.