Modding Discussion Avali 1.0 Reboot Discussion

There's actually a mod that allows you to ensure a 100% chance of job-reward missions, so yes, that's possible.

The instanced avali dungeon is... probably a bit too big a demand for the mod at this point, actually.

Oh nice, didn't know. So that just leaves if a pre-set crew is possible.

EDIT: 10th page get!

 

Would need to make the ship bigger, I shudder to think of a 4-6 person crew on a T3 ship.... eeew.

I don't like having 4 people on a T4 ship as it is, because everybody likes to stand ontop of the teleporter (here's also hoping we switch to the huge teleporters so I can actually click on the teleporter and not a crew member lol).

 

would you though, isn't like twelve the max?

i would just like crew to wander the ship versus stick around the porter, additionally did you put any chairs or beds in your ship? they will often go and sit or sleep on/in them, reducing chances of the traffic at the teleporter

 

Normally, 12 is the max for a T8 ship... but he could say, make T1-5 ships have 6 max, and then T6 could have 8, T7 could have 10 and T8 could have 12 or some-such.

 

Got an idea for a good themed weapon: while other races use flamethrowers, could the Avali possibly use liquid nitrogen frost-throwers (nitrothrowers? Cryothrowers)? Given the sensitivity of Avali biology to high temperatures, it seems to me that a flamethrower would be even more dangerous to the Avali wielding it than it would be to an enemy. A liquid nitrogen weapon on the other hand would still be lethal to other species, but relatively harmless to the Avali, right?

 

Liquid nitrogen evaporate too fast to actually harm anything deeper than surface level and does not remain for long enough to deal lasting damage. If we are going with a thrower-type weapon, acids would suffice, but for a touch of high tech, I imagine an arc cannon that spray conductive metal dust in the air while releasing electrical charge would work. Also works for secondary mode like the vanilla flame thrower that release fuel gas in the air for detonation, just that in this case you are releasing metal dust for a spectacular spark display.

 

At the end of the day these weapons are all really finicky concepts (Why use a short ranged arc of lightning when you can make a hole with a bullet?), you also need to ask "What purpose do these weapons serve mechanically in Starbound". The Avali weapon shortlist I do have, I selected for it's versatility and mechanics, just as much as it's lore. I don't want to have a whole bunch of weapons that basiclly do the same thing like in vanilla

ie.
Missile launcher - Rapid fire missile (Direct fire AoE attack), Guided Missile (Precision indirect fire AoE attack)

Grenade Launcher - Airburst cluster munition (Wide area, indirect fire), Proximity Mine (Area denial)

Gauss Rifle - Rapid fire mode (Single target DPS), Sniper mode (First strike kill-shot)

 

Oh I am just building on an idea, I don't want to discourage a mod author (leinglo) from creating their own flavour of weapons or interpretation of lore. But yeah, what you said makes sense.

On another note: I kind of want to see a wand/staff type weapon for avali. Laser designator for drone strike or something.

 

These could still be used as off-lore, mad scientist weapons; similar to RenTek weapons

 

Let's be fair here, by that logic you could rule out a good chunk of Starbound's weapons entirely. Flamethrowers haven't seen serious military use since, what, Vietnam? And melee weapons haven't been in primary use since the middle ages. But in Starbound, you fly to an exotic planet in a spaceship, beam down to the surface with a teleporter, drive up to the enemy in a hoverbike, so you can hit them with your sword.

Then again, I've always found it cool that you actually do put effort into realism when the rest of Starbound doesn't. As I've said before, the Avali are arguably the most realistic thing in Starbound.

Well someone's clairvoyant. That's kind of exactly what I was planning on doing.

With that said, would it be feasible for the Avali to use some kind of cryo-weapon, even if it wasn't necessarily practical?

 

That reminds me... Most of non-basic secondary fire requires an element. If you want to add versatility, the secondary fire would probably need elements for some of 'em. Fortunately with only four to pick from, it's easier to break them down into weapon categories fitting of avali lore.

Given what they are, there'd probably be a bias towards cyrogenic close-range weapons (as they're resistant to it, they'd feel safest using cyrogenic stuff in close range, plus it slows enemy motion, making close range combat more comfortable) while long-range heavy fire would use... well, obviously fire, given explosives and plasma rounds, but also kept far away from the shooter (usually). Death-of-a-thousand-hits weapons with low power and high fire rate would probably use electrical given its additional low-damage area of effect DoT, and poison would be left for hunting and sniping weapons, for obvious reasons.

EDIT: I support the idea that the avali equivalent of staves/wands would be more like remotes to direct drone attacks.

 

S

that reminds me, will the bike get a avali look, right now it looks alot like the others.

 

Yeah, you need remember ANYTHING I do gets taken as 100% canon. Honestly off-the cuff mentions I've made, or something people saw one time in a picture or mod have historically ended up being extrapolated into whole planets of copyhats.

That is why the core mod, I am to make 100% true to lore and representative. it's also why I won't be putting anything like that in the basic version of the mod, otherwise people will just take it and run off the cliff with it. You'll see fan-writing where every Avali soldier dual wields cryoguns, because there was an Avali with a cryo gun in the official mod

Once that is done, I was see about making extra features

 

I always assumed that the Hailstorm was the Avali's flamethrower.

I can totally get behind a cryo-thrower.

One idea I had was to have an Avali staff that functioned like the Apex staff [back when you could craft them] where it would spawn a drone which would act like a turret for a short period of time. Or perhaps like the old Hylotl staff, where it would spawn an aerogel crystal [or whatever the blades for their melee weapons are made out of] which would shatter to pieces on collision with a surface or critter, the fragments dealing damage.

 

Cyro weapons in general are not very practical. When you set something on fire, that thing keeps burning as long as there is fuel, whether that comes from your weapon, or from the living flesh of the poor victims such as fat. When you freeze something, it simply stays at that temperature, and while that may be damaging to surface tissues of living things, it also prevent further instant damage as the dead tissues shield the rest of the body with no continuing damage , until the victim core temperature drops low enough for them to die, which may takes a long while, especially when using against warm-blooded creatures that is capable of warming themselves using their energy reserves like fat.

Even things like shooting special ammunitions that inject chemicals to rapidly freeze parts of victim body, causing further aggravated damage from the point of impact by forming ice crystals to damage tissues is still impractical because in turn it seals up and protect the wound. Freeze rays using laser to steal energy from atoms are real but only in extremely small scale and is impossible to scale up due to very specific lab condition for it to happen.

The most realistic way a cyro weapon would be use is likely as an icicles shotgun that use flash freezed water particles and launch them using compressed air...but that is not really what we want here, are we?

But of course, why do we care about such boringly realistic things in a game? If a cyro weapon is what you want to make, go ahead!

 

Oh I've already got a sprite made and there's a conveniently unused icethrower projectile already in the game assets. I'm just brainstorming for fluff justifications at this point. Even for non-canon addon stuff, I want to put enough thought into it to make it fit.

 

Ayy, that's pretty good.

That reminds me, what will be of the multiple tiers of guns in the revamp mod? There's a tier for each material for every gun type [iron, tungsten, titanium, durasteel, aegisalt, sol-aegisalt], but the guns look identical regardless of tier or rarity. Will there be different designs for each tier?
While mostly just a nitpick on my behalf, although it can be important with determining the strength of NPC weapons. Even just having different colors would be fine enough for me.
On a similar note, what will happen with non-violium/sol melee weapons? In the Triage mod, The Aegisalt and Ferozium melee weapons have nearly identical stats and they're easily outranked by Violium, so there's no point for Manipulator or Accelerator tables unless crafting the armors.

And yes, I'm aware that the mod originally came out when there was ten tiers of weapons and armor, which is understandable why there is ten different tiers of all melee weapons.

 

I'm just going to throw this out here from a writer's perspective, but you're approaching the question the wrong way around. Rather than coming up with a great idea and figuring out how to handwave it, try to figure out what sorts of weapons a species like the Avali would need or want first. Since you want to build some more exotic weapons, how about this suggestion: think about improvised weapons. There's not really any military reason you'd want a cryogenic sprayer--but can you think of civilian applications? Try to figure out what purpose the thing has first, and then design it to match, and it'll fit into the fluff naturally instead of needing to be shoehorned in.

 

Yeah, you're right. That actually was the thought process that went into my survival rifle, and it fits more seamlessly because of it. The avali need a hunting weapon. A bow wasn't lore friendly, the railgun was overkill, and so I thought of those bare-bones rifles you might have in a wilderness survival kit, and designed something around that idea. A basic weapon that you'd find in, say, escape pods or civilian homesteads meant for fending off and hunting wildlife rather than combat (an Avali varmint rifle, basically).
The thought process for the Cryothrower, on the other hand, came from looking at the different flamethrowers me and the Augments guys made and thinking "wouldn't a fire weapon be ludicrously dangerous for Avali to use?" And came up with something that fit the same function on the opposite side of the spectrum, without thinking of the actual purpose.

Hm, could a Cryothrower be a modified farming tool perhaps? I would imagine that native Avalon crops would be difficult to cultivate offworld, so maybe the Avali could use a sprayer for ammonia, refrigerants, etc. in situations where a full freezer greenhouse wouldn't be practical, like with a small garden. And then some enterprising psychopath (hint: he wears a grey trench coat and blue goggles) went and weaponized the thing. Not for any good reason, but because he thought it would be cool. No pun intended.

 

Week 1 development log
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13/8/2016

• Formally created new 1.0 Avali mod file and began migrating original content to new format, preparing Starbound assets for modification.

14/8/2016

• Created ship concept art, got feedback from Nexus community and iterated upon final design.
• Floated race colour rework idea with community.

15/8/2016

• Converted concept art into placeholder ship art, created placeholder ship block data to facilitate creation of final ship art assets and upgrade tiers.
• Adding factions page to wiki, minor wiki modifications.

16/8/2016

• Began work on ship sprite, aft 1/3 largely complete

17/8/2016

• • Ship progress slow. Using faster, rougher method to clean-up later

18/8/2016

• • Rough form of ship largely complete. Still requires interior detail planned, clean-up of exterior detail.
  • Implemented first step of colour palette restrictions.

19/8/2016

• • Still drilling down exterior detail on frigate.
  • Created a prototype scout drone based on Occulus engine function that can scout off-screen or into deep caves.

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Goals and notes
Primary goal at present is to complete the ship, sprites, blocks and JSON files. Once I've done this I'll create a set of interior tiles and props that will be used in the default ship as well as in on hardened settlement structures/encounters. That'll not only complete the ship but also lay groundwork for the settlement/encounter overhaul.

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Images
Ship concept art
Frigate progress