Let's talk about it!

Of course, this kinda requires us to go in and figure out what exactly has changed... if anything. The major thing I'm currently concerned with is scripting on attachables, which I'm going to test right now. I'll let you know how it goes... though I'm kinda not hopeful.

Basically, let's make this a repository for any changes we discover.

Things to note:

Materials such as metal are now much stronger. As a result, weapons that would normally kill vanilla actors like coalition soldiers will now require more ammo. If you still want your weapons to kill em quickly, adjust for the armor upgrade. Same goes for doors and terrain. Kind of stupid how a standard door can withstand a C4 charge now.

Vanilla pyro effects no longer create damaging particles, instead taking directly away from a player's health. Useful sine it causes less lag.

Apparently Lua is now used for all missions. But that's for scene stuff.

Nope, you can't script attachables still.

♥♥♥♥ fantastic. Guess I won't be modding anytime soon since I was pretty much banking on that.

This is ♥♥♥♥ fantastic. If that's all we get after two years, I'm pretty damn disappointed.

Not that I have any say or anything, I mean, we did purchase this as a non-finished product and don't necessarily get the full finished one no guaranteed BlahBlahBlah, but we've been wating two years and all we get is that HUD variable and making missions content-driven instead of hardcoded? I'd demand a refund if I had any right, but I don't. Not that I'm an influential modder or anything.

Sorry, little rant there. I'm done now.

On the other hand, if there were some big behind-the-scenes reworkings that data did that we won't notice, if he could tell us that'd satisfy me. I just don't see how it could take him two years to do this.

Terrain names are changed, and missions will need to be changed for the new system.

CaveCricket48 ninja'd me in making a ticket to the tracking system so Data will know about it.
However, it would be great if you(or someone) could list the potential uses for this feature which could potentially give it a significant boost in its priority and importance.
I would compile all the information you give me and make the ticket sound more convincing and wanted so the chances of Data implementing it would increase.

EDIT:
The above applies to any features you would want to see in the game. The more cool and important it sounds, the more likely will get it.

Ooh, ooh, a silenced variable for weapons!
Yeah, so that they don't alert enemies, that would be so cool!
That way we don't have to rely on .lua for silenced weapons.
Also, way points for drop-ships. Just for getting them places outside of you drop zone, so that you don't have to do that manually.

Being able to script on attachables would open up a slew of opportunities. The major thing though is being able to script firearms and other held devices, which you can't do because they count as attachables when they're being held. When they're lying around on the ground they run their scripts, but as soon as you pick them up their scripts stop running until you drop them again. That's hardly ideal. Right now the best thing you can do is run scripts on the projectiles it fires, or if you really want to get anything done you can put an emitter on the gun that rapidly emits short-lived particles that each run a script, but that is awkward as all get-out and prone to errors. So yeah, being able to run scripts on attachables would be useful just so you could run scripts on firearms and held devices.

With that ability, one could easily do things like create guns with multiple fire mode, exchangeable ammo types, and optional parts and accessories. The "optional parts and accessories" would be great for Actors in general too, which would also be enabled by scripting on attachables.

The is ONE other thing I would put in a big request for though: proper inventory handling through scripting. Currently there seem to be inventory handling functions for actors, but they seem bugged or something. I try to use them and nothing happens, or the game crashes. Being able to directly do stuff with an actor's inventory would open up a lot of interesting possibilities. For instance, it would compliment things like ammo types and optional parts, as the firearm could simply search to see if the actor's inventory has the ammo or parts necessary to function. A really wild example of what inventory handling could be used for is a complex series of teleporters or portals, which would essentially be made up of craft that exchange their inventory between each other. It's an idea I've wanted to work on but can't, since they can't actually do anything with their inventories right now.

Wait.. Are you saying that you can not put attachables on guns? So no 'Army of Two' esque shielded AK's?

Or maybe you mean something like Rifle Grenades attached to an Ak, so the gun has two firing methods, bullets, and grenades.

Yeah, if the latter is what you are inferring then that would be a great door opening factor to modding.

You can't attach Lua scripts to guns, but you can put ini coded Attachables on.

As for me I'm still waiting on if AI modding is possible in this build yet or not. If not, then I'm prolly gonna wait until you can to mod once more.

Not being able to script attachables has been a great limitation for me when coding for CC. Many of my mods have to use inefficient workarounds, such using an invisible MOPixel which "follows" an object around to run the script. This causes a whole nightmare of potential chaos, especially when the object being followed is destroyed (usually results in CC crashing if you don't put in the right conditionals). All of this can be avoided if attachables could simply run the script themselves.

Take my particle accelerator you helped me make, numgun, as an example of how these workarounds are inefficient. The script for the PAC's shot had to run on the weapon's projectile. Because of this, the scripts required me to check for nearby PAC and find the actor holding it:


There would be no need to do this if I could run the script on the gun itself. But I can't because the gun is currently an attachable. Sure, it works, but it has to search through EVERY MOID currently associated with an object in game to find the gun. Without the ability to run the script on the gun itself, there is no more efficient way of accomplishing find the closest held PAC weapon.

And just as Darlos said, the one fix of making scripts able to run on attachables would open up many cool modding opportunities for the community.