RELEASED Familiars Race 2.51

That would be nice~ I could poke through and see what you changed that way.

I haven't played in so long now, I'm sure I'll have to actually get into the game and figure out how things are supposed to work now before I can try to make the weapons fit the current system. I just hope they made projectile weapons less awful to try to code. Even after all the time I spent tinkering with them to get them working initally, I still don't know what actually influences the damage they do.

 

I've made my Gitlab repo for the familiars public and pushed an update to the nightly branch. You can access the nightly branch HERE, a comparison of the stable and nightly branches HERE, and a list of known issues HERE.
If you'd rather the repo not be public, just let me know and I'll make it private again.

As for weapons, the entire everything has been changed and I don't have the foggiest idea how it works! \o/ All weapons appear to be somewhat complex activeitems now. They probably aren't as complex as they seem but, quite frankly, I don't have the time to find out right now.

 

You can keep it public. I don't want to hide anything away with this mod, just as well since the files are all publicly available regardless~

I'll have to dig through the game files again. I actually haven't been on the nightly updates at any point so far but I guess it might help to look into things before the official 1.0. Man, just looking through the mod files in their current state makes me wish the devs had some kind of tutorials/documentation to explain how everything works. It wasn't easy to figure out what everything does at first, and it's only worse now. Would be nice to have it all just laid out with explanations of what syntax to use, what all the variables available are and what they do.

 

Really? I find it rather fun to change random settings and see what madness ensues, but I suppose it's not the most practical way.

 

Well I mean, it's not just changing settings but also not knowing what settings even exist in the first place. If I'm grabbing the files for the pistol in-game to base my laser gun from, maybe it doesn't come with light, enable area of effect damage, and other neat effects. Maybe the damage type is physical instead of energy or something. I did change a lot of settings between the gun and projectile and often saw no changes at all. It's not a great way to do things, I find. ^^;

 

I have discovered a crash with this race
--EDIT, MUCH TEXT CUT--
It turns out hitting something with the sword causes the crash, Testing the gun
--EDIT 2--
Sword is the definitive source of the crashing, I would suspect unset parameters are causing it in this case

 

https://gitlab.com/GermaniumSystem/familiars
Download here.

 

The mod definitely crashes in the nightly build. Looks like I need to update the projectile weapons; they've completely changed some of the variables and definitions so the game just pitches a fit about them.

I'm also going to look into the quests... hopefully it's not hard to at least give the player their intro mission and copy other stuff from existing vanilla races. Really looks like the game's scope has expanded in a way that makes it hard to have a custom race that isn't sort of... lesser compared to vanilla races. Hopefully it's possible to copy stuff over and at least make familiars playable like a normal race, even if they don't have special content to play through.
--- Post updated ---
So, I erased all the projectiles and projectile weapons except one, which I setup similar to an existing item in the latest nightly build so it should at least "work". I'm not sure how I'll implement the special familiar weapons/armor other than to offer a more unique starter weapon in the form of that gun, but right now my only goal is to get this thing working like a vanilla race. So.. we're taking some steps back and removing fluff for now but hopefully that makes the thing functional and less completely unbalanced.

Anyway, I got it to stop throwing errors for the projectile files, but now my problem is that it's throwing errors I can't make sense of at all.

[0331.426] [Error] Application: exception thrown, shutting down: (JsonException) No such key in Json::get("charCreationTooltip")
[0] 7ff741201d43 Star::captureStack
[1] 7ff741200ace Star::StarException::StarException
[2] 7ff7411a4839 Star::Json::get
[3] 7ff74159f77e Star::SpeciesDefinition::SpeciesDefinition
[4] 7ff74159ed00 std::make_shared<Star::SpeciesDefinition,Star::Json>
[5] 7ff74159eefe Star::SpeciesDatabase::SpeciesDatabase
[6] 7ff7415581c5 std::make_shared<Star::SpeciesDatabase>
[7] 7ff74155c6e9 <lambda_8ee82560cea9e20045920131ee30a659>:perator()
[8] 7ff74154e53f std::_Invoker_functor::_Call<<lambda_8ee82560cea9e20045920131ee30a659> & __ptr64>
[9] 7ff741552526 std::invoke<<lambda_8ee82560cea9e20045920131ee30a659> & __ptr64>
[10] 7ff7415501a9 std::_Invoke_ret<std::shared_ptr<Star::SpeciesDatabase>,<lambda_8ee82560cea9e20045920131ee30a659> & __ptr64>
[11] 7ff74155ee66 std::_Func_impl<<lambda_8ee82560cea9e20045920131ee30a659>,std::allocator<int>,std::shared_ptr<Star::SpeciesDatabase> >::_Do_call
[12] 7ff74155d387 std::_Func_class<std::shared_ptr<Star::BiomeDatabase> >:perator()
[13] 7ff7415558b3 Star::Root::loadMemberFunction<Star::SpeciesDatabase>
[14] 7ff741553049 Star::Root::loadMember<Star::SpeciesDatabase>
[15] 7ff741566b02 Star::Root::speciesDatabase
[16] 7ff74154e870 std::_Invoker_pmf_pointer::_Call<std::shared_ptr<Star:layerFactory const > (__cdecl Star::Root::*)(void) __ptr64,Star::Root * __ptr64 & __ptr64>
[17] 7ff741552239 std::invoke<std::shared_ptr<Star::MonsterDatabase const > (__cdecl Star::Root::*& __ptr64)(void) __ptr64,Star::Root * __ptr64 & __ptr64>
[18] 7ff74154fc3c std::_Invoke_ret<std::shared_ptr<Star::ObjectDatabase const > (__cdecl Star::Root::*& __ptr64)(void) __ptr64,Star::Root * __ptr64 & __ptr64>
[19] 7ff74154e8fe std::_Call_binder<std::_Unforced,0,std::shared_ptr<Star:ungeonDefinitions const > (__cdecl Star::Root::*)(void) __ptr64,std::tuple<Star::Root * __ptr64>,std::tuple<> >
[20] 7ff74154dfee std::_Binder<std::_Unforced,std::shared_ptr<Star:layerFactory const > (__cdecl Star::Root::*)(void) __ptr64,Star::Root * __ptr64 const>:perator()<>
[21] 7ff74155e9c2 std::_Func_impl<Star::SwallowReturn<std::_Binder<std::_Unforced,std::shared_ptr<Star::Configuration> (__cdecl Star::Root::*)(void) __ptr64,Star::Root * __ptr64 const> >,std::allocator<int>,void>::_Do_call
[22] 7ff7411f8b5b <lambda_7b083dc4bdd496712d99e51bb49515b5>:perator()
[23] 7ff7411f9902 Star::WorkerPool::WorkerThread::run
[24] 7ff7411fe86e Star::ThreadImpl::runThread
[25] 7ffc1a548102 BaseThreadInitThunk
[26] 7ffc1b25c5b4 RtlUserThreadStart
[0331.426] [Info] Application: shutdown...

Here's a link to the mod files I'm using now. I've definitely determined that it's my mod causing this crash, just have no idea what could possibly be doing it.

 

It looks like something is missing a "charCreationTooltip" field. The only thing with a "charCreationTooltip" field appears to be *.species files, so I assume the familiar.species file needs to be updated.

 

Okay, spent all day on this but I got things working at least. The basic gun is in there and functioning, and I even started on more character customization options, too. Since starting this mod I've developed more familiar characters and I'm not 100% happy about how well this mod can represent them, so I added a couple new 'hairstyles' in there for both 'genders'. Also I'm going to rework the head sprites to only use the main fur color, because I realized again (pretty sure I knew this originally because none of my "hair" sprites had the main fur color in them) the main fur color doesn't change the corresponding color in the hair sprite. I'm making it a goal to add a better variety of color options later on, as well. I feel like there should be a wider selection of glow options and more washed-out and non-eye-gougey main color options.

Here's a quick current build for anyone running nightly. Hopefully this same build works once the game hits its final state. I haven't touched the actual current public build yet, but... I mean, it's just another day until 1.0, right?

I'm really behind on this game, haven't "actually" played at all since the beta first hit and even back then I spent more time working on this mod than actually playing. I feel like I'm not really in a good position to be making a mod, but it's been great getting all the positive feedback and knowing this is something people want to play with. I just hope I can make the customization great and give this species parity with the vanilla ones in their gameplay experience. I don't think I'll ever get around to fixing armors and weapons unless someone would like to help me out with the spritework and implementation to give familiars a full-fledged racial set of gear through all the tiers and such. (actually not 100% sure that's even still a thing? I'm so hopelessly behind on all this)

I think for the ship I'm gonna have to stick to my abandonment of that super-rad one for the foreseeable future, just knowing how much of a pain that was to make and it's not made with size upgrades in mind. Maybe a unique pet might be a nice addition, at least. In the fan-lore I've made, familiars aren't really common and the ship you ran off with isn't yours anyway, so it's unlikely they have their own unique ship design.

 

Aww sweet, I just hope you can eventually get them to look just as you want c: I loved this race back in the day! would be so nostalgic to play as them whenever you have them available for 1.0!

 

I haven't noticed any issues with the nightly build of the mod *yet*. Everything seems to be fine, but I had to stop when I got to the Outpost since it seems to be broken atm. It's merging the Outpost data with all characters instead of using a separate one for each one (Anything that was unlocked/changed in the Outpost stayed with all other characters, even new ones).

 

That sounds a bit scary.. I have no idea why it would do that. @_@ Or specifically, why my mod in particular would do that while the vanilla races don't. Let me know if you run into anything, and if you hit any crashes that you think my mod might have caused, be sure to post the starbound.log file here. I still have some files that update dungeons that might have changed but AFAIK there's no way to test those other than to randomly come across them in the vast, infinite universe. Definitely going to delete them.

In other news, I'm adding more head styles and colors than previously stated, so hopefully everyone can find something more suited to their tastes... or existing character designs~
--- Post updated ---
I just realized Novakids glow (they're drawn fullbright, so they're not affected by lighting). I don't know how I missed it for so long, but knowing that it's possible to make player sprites fullbright, maybe there's something I can do about the familiars and their glowy bits?

Does anyone happen to know if it's possible to either add extra sprite layers to the player for fullbright details, or to specify certain pixel colors to draw fullbright?

 

I know a lot of games (pixel, 3D, or otherwise) would simply have two separate sprite sheets/textures for the glowing and the nonglowing bits. Not sure what they're doing with the Novakids, but my guess is that your best bet's gonna be having two different files; one of the normal familiar body (glowy bits and all), and one with just the glowy bits isolated.

IF NOT, then...SHRUG. Good luck!

 

Sorry, I forgot proper context xD. I meant that this was an issue overall, if anything, it had nothing to do with your mod because I reported it in the nightly build support forums and other people had come across it too.

I also unpacked the assets and came across these lines for novakid's brightness in the .species file. (A larger paste for context of where it is in the file)
"kind" : "novakid",

"charCreationTooltip" : {
"title" : "Novakid",
"subTitle" : "CH4",
"description" : "The Novakids are a mysterious race of 'interstellar gas-bag people'. They have no charted settlements and no documented history. They're volatile beings, untroubled by the past. No one knows what they're made of, much less where they came from."
},

"statusEffects" : [ "novakidglow" ],
"humanoidOverrides" : {
"bodyFullbright" : true
},

 

I went ahead and added the fullbright thing. It looks alright, a lot better on dark characters with a light glow color, but still looks good on lighter characters too. I'd really rather have just the glow parts stay fullbright but I have no idea how I'd do that. I'm working on uploading the mod to Steam and I'll get it updated here shortly~

 

Bitcoon updated Familiars Race with a new update entry:

1.0 Time, Baby~

Read the rest of this update entry...
--- Post updated ---
Hey guys, anyone know if you're supposed to have NPCs on your ship? I got my first upgrade and it said I have 3 crewmembers now, I think. But it's still just me and a cat.
--- Post updated ---
Does anyone have any clue how crewmembers are supposed to work in this game? I've never played enough to get any crew and I don't see anything in the ship files about them. I looked through the Avali race mod and don't see anything about crew in there, either, but apparently my mod's not spawning them like it's supposed to... I have no clue where in the game files to even look, but not having any crew spawn seems like a real problem...

 

It's been a while since I played starbound, so refresh me, what exactly is the lore concerning the Familiars? Their codexs seem to have flown the coop.

One reason I ask is possible suggestions for Frackinraces abilities. Should they have the same abilities as the Novakids (since they seem pretty familiar from what I remember) or something different you think?

 

Does anyone have any clue how crewmembers are supposed to work in this game? I've never played enough to get any crew and I don't see anything in the ship files about them. I looked through the Avali race mod and don't see anything about crew in there, either, but apparently my mod's not spawning them like it's supposed to... I have no clue where in the game files to even look

Familiars are sort of like organic robots powered by electricity (which is powered by magic). Their internal organs are standard but simplified, as they directly convert food into energy which is stored in their blood, which glows when powered. (areas on their body which appear to glow are due to optic fiber-like patches of transparent fur, which lets the glow shine through) Their bloodstream directs the flow of electricity to the parts that need it. Familiars do need to eat, sleep and breathe, and there's nothing notable about their bodies aside from their tendency to have higher levels of stamina.

There are different types of familiars but the only one that this mod really focuses on are digital familiars, who have the power to inhabit computers and other electronics. Their magic is able to create and destroy their bodies as necessary (basically rearranging the molecules floating around in the air to recreate their physical form) to do this, and when they're in electronic devices they experience it like a cyberspace sort of thing.

Nobody really knows where the familiars came from, least of all the familiars themselves. There's no rhyme or reason as to where and when they first appeared, leading many to speculate wildly.

 

Bitcoon updated Familiars Race with a new update entry:

Quick fix

Read the rest of this update entry...