ACE - Authorized Community Expansion Project

Oh well, I can’t stop thinking about this all so I am on my phone in my bed, seems like it’s not as efficient as the computer :thinking:

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Also kind of an addition to my previous idea. . . I was always curious about having some sort of “Random Events” campaign or node off of the game events campaign that would allow modders to add mini quests or events too. The node would randomly pick events at a random times to break up some of linearness of the goblin/orc campaign.

Also. . . . What ever happened to the undead campaign that was suppose to give more lore about the Phoenix Empire? :wink:

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heyho - there was a poking? ^^ Yes no prob with the translation ^^

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How hard would it be to tell idlers to find an unoccupied chair and idle there @Moai?

I’ve been having the same idea as @Avairian had

and them at least using the houses we build for them would be unobtrusive, and I think fit the scale of this endeavour.

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AFAIK (which is not much :joy:) there are some AI packs like the free-time and idle which is what I think controls their activities when not working, like going to the hearth to stare the fire, etc…

You’d basically have to come up with cool new actions and inject them in such packs :slight_smile:

Of course if you have a good coder and a good animator you could come up with the coolest stuff :smiley:

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Well imo lots could be done with what we have already, anim wise.
Think cleaning the crafting table (the normal hand fiddling animation)
Admiring decoration (the talking to a hearthling ai pack could be abused I think?)
But to start off with the go find a chair thing should make everything look more lived in by default, because most of the chairs will be in homes anyway. Now if you wanted to show off it would be “find closest unoccupied chair near my owned bed” bu 't that’s RepeatPan levels of showing off :slight_smile:

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My understanding is that it’s important to make idle task computation very fast and efficient, since that’s also what they’ll default to when they don’t have enough computation time to come up with better activities. But I’m sure there are some opportunities.

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True, but let’s be fair: if you hit that level you are doomed already anyway.
Most of the time they will do it if they actually have nothing to do.
(why the devs did not steal/borrow the “slow the entire world down till we catch up again” style of time delay like kerbal space program has beats me to this day but eh!

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Yes, I mean - I don’t think we should tinker with idle - just free time. Idle is basically “work time” but without anything to do. Free time is time they wouldn’t work anyway, so playing around with it wouldn’t affect their “efficiency” nor their attention to work should work comes up. It’s time they just sit by the fire or look at it - there could be more things to do :slight_smile:

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What do they do in their free time now? Hell do they have free time XD?

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This does seem like an ok idea so long as things didn’t get out of hand and were kept realistic, at least to begin with, the best way to do that would just be to look at what was cut from the game and start with those ideas. Although it may not be always be suitable to add them as was originally intended I’m sure something similar could be come up with that fits the narrative of the game.

Personally I’d like to see more campaign arcs created as I feel like the game is lacking in variety when it comes to those, which limits replayability. I’m happy to lend my help with this particularly with creating models, writing json and developing bits of code.

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Having them find a chair to sit when idle is not a good idea, you are adding basically the most expensive task to the a.i. (find something and path to it).
If they go idle, that is because the current tasks didn’t returned a result in time, so the game fill it with silly things like waving or counting as a “disguised waiting timer” for the proper tasks to load. When you add a pathfind action to find a chair, you will just make all the other tasks take even longer, making even more people go to idle states. Basically, you will need an idle state for your idle state.

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Honestly, I’ve kind of been thinking about this… Not sitting in chairs, but “an idle state for an idle state”. I was thinking of making the days a little bit longer, and then giving H’lings a couple of hours of free time before they go to bed. During this free time, they could get together and party (a la DF feasts), stare at the bonfire as they usually do, chat with one another, etc. I feel like it’d give them a lot more personality, and it would make building a little more meaningful, because now you’re thinking of how your H’lings will enjoy being in your town, as opposed to how efficient the town is at making H’lings work. But it is only dreams, as we’d need a big set of things for H’lings to do in their free time, which is a lot of animating, which is something I cannot do…

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Very good point. We’d need some sort of way to distinguish between ‘failed to find tasks’ vs ‘there are no tasks and i’m bored’ :sweat_smile:

EDIT

I remember taking a look into how the cultist trait was implemented. Unless it has changed since, it added a “desire” attribute to the hearthling that was added to every day. If the value of “desire” passed a certain threshold the hearthling would try to find a statue to pray at.

These events could always be implemented in this sort of fashion, having a hearthling perform an idle activity every few days. Though this doesn’t really fill the void of giving hearthlings something to do when there are no tasks to be preformed. . . :frowning_face:

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YES PLEASE

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On the subject of idle animations and the “end of day/rest by hearth” period, it’s worth pointing out that the hearthlings never go and sit around the campfire when they’re out of tasks to do. This implies that there is a “dedicated idling time” where sitting around the hearth is explicitly called, which could be exploited for this purpose (this might be the ‘free time’ AI pack as opposed to idle AI pack?), so any hearthlings without the Night Owl trait will still be able to do all these recreation actions. And the Night Owls will stand out more by contrast, busily working away while everyone else sits around reading/talking/cult-ing/staring at the fire.

I believe that the hearthlings’ Diligence (a Mind sub-stat) will have an impact on how much time they spend working before they go to rest by the hearth; in the late-game I rarely see them resting at the end of the day and I suspect this is because their Diligence is boosted so high that they never want to stop working (except for eating and sleeping.) So an expansion of the free-time system to include more actions would probably also require some offset for that, perhaps the daily count-down/up system so that even the most diligent hearthling will take an evening off now and again?

One rather voodoo option might be to insert a bunch of short free-time periods throughout the day; short enough that hearthlings who are already occupied with a task will miss them but anyone currently idling will get the call to go find a chair/relax somehow. These hearthlings will then go and play the relaxing animation before getting back to work, so it will look like they’re taking a break; although it may become frustrating if the player orders some urgent work and a bunch of hearthlings are too busy chilling out to go do it. Of course, the player could always ring the town bell to snap them out of it…

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Challenge Accepted. I can help with that :stuck_out_tongue:

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@micheal_handy76_mh if you agree i can link our old files from call to arms - perhaps they can become handy? ^^

also @ll if you want you can use stuff from my mods (patrol, brewery, lomc [i like the uniform-hats more then the new ones from rad ^^], and i think @Kittyodoom will grant it that lomh and lomh-nc also can be used)

and at if you have found a group - best open a discordchannel and a githubchannel. with the discordchannel you can easily (and free) interact and with the githubchannel (also free) - all contributors can upload changes.

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@Wiese2007 i agree to this very much lol, better then have to reupload them over and over

i see what u did there

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here is the link to the old files of calltoarms ^^ and kitty has agreed with the use of lomh and lomh-nc :wink: