zztong

Nearly every POI I make has Parts. A part can be something like a horse trailer, a semi-truck, an HVAC unit on a roof, a ladder, port-a-potties, land mines, a tree trunk, a checkpoint with zombies, barbwire, barricades, beehives, billboards, bus stops, campers, culverts, deliveries, driveways that connect to tiles, sections of fence, firewood, guard rails, hay bales, pallets of construction materials, railroad cars, water towers, cellphone towers, storm cellars, tents, scaffolding, and more. Basically, any content that I want to have a chance of appearing, but that does not always appear, is a part. Parts are how I try to keep the same POI from looking the same from placement to placement on a map, or even from map to map. Without the parts, you lose a lot of variety, sometimes you lose some zombies, and sometimes you lose some loot. Here's the front parking lot of zztong_store_s_01 with Parts and without Parts. Everything shown with a blue bounding box is a Part. I've got some POIs with 20+ Parts. I'm not sure I understand the question. Is "mapmaker" a program like RWG or Teragon, or a person who is making the map? RWG and Teragon both have ways to signal. RWG knows to look in LocalPrefabs and in Modlets to find POIs. That's the appeal of modlets to me as I can deliver a self-contained ready to use package. Teragon needs you to tell it about modlets. A person making a map manually has to know the modlets and their tools. If they go pry apart modlets then they need to know what they're doing in terms of how POIs are built beyond just using the Prefab Editor to make the 6 files. They have to know the entire interface between POIs and their world builder of choice or they risk only getting partial POI content. I looked into this one. This is a very nice POI made by VoltraLux, and they were nice enough to package it all up into a modlet for you. Consider the contents: FILE CONTENTS 📁 MegaMall 📁 Config - 📄 localization.txt (224 B) 📁 Prefabs - 📄 MegaMall.blocks.nim (18.2 kB) - 📄 MegaMall.ins (22.5 kB) - 📄 MegaMall.jpg (7.4 kB) - 📄 MegaMall.mesh (2.6 MB) - 📄 MegaMall.tts (1.4 MB) - 📄 MegaMall.xml (5.3 kB) 📄 modinfo.xml (289 B) And note the "Config" and "Prefab" folders and the presence of ModInfo.xml. That's a modlet. If VoltraLux were just giving you a raw POI, you would have only seen the 6 files listed there in the "Prefabs" folder. In this case, the only extra configuration you're getting is the text for the POI in the Localization.txt file, which is an integration with the game's Danger Meter feature. If you were to just lift the POI's 6 files out and put them into LocalPrefabs, the POI would get placed in worlds and work fine, but you wouldn't see the POI's name in the Danger Meter.

A modlet can come with additional configuration. When you copied houses/POIs from my modlet to the LocalPrefabs directory, you actually lost content. You just didn't notice it was gone. BFT2020 shows you another example where the modlet contains additional assets. LocalPrefabs doesn't support additional configuration, Parts, or assets. Unless you also included my modlet, those POIs would not have had any of their Parts. You likely didn't know to expect them so you didn't miss them. The Parts are found in my modlet's Parts folder and the last I checked a Parts folder in LocalPrefabs is not found. You may also not get some of the Tiles, or not get them as often, as Tiles can sometimes have entries in a modlet's rwgmixer.xml file. If PEP is the expansion pack, put PEP in your Mods folder because it is a modlet. The ~50 houses depends. Did they come as a modlet or are they each just 6 files? Modlets go in the Mods folder. Individual POIs that came as 6 files go in LocalPrefabs.

If you download random POIs from the Nexus (or any source) that come to you as 6 files: example.blocks.nim example.ins example.jpg example.mesh example.tts example.xml Then those go into your LocalPrefabs folder. But if you've gotten a modlet, like PEP or ZZTong-Prefabs, then you put the modlet in your Mods folder. If you really, really wanted to, you could copy POI files from a modlet and put them in LocalPrefabs, but you run the risk of missing something important. For instance, a POI can depend upon a custom Tile and/or custom Parts that are also found in the modlet. If you just pull out the POI then you might get an incomplete POI (with none of its parts) or you might never see the POI in the world because the custom Tile isn't there to support it. I don't recommend busting apart a POI modlet unless you're really familiar with that kind of thing. If you just got the 6 files from somewhere, then no additional Parts or Tiles are involved.

If you're playing DF then you will want PEP's rwgmixer.xml file as it matches up with the DF world generation goals. If you're just using the PEP POIs in an otherwise Vanilla game, then I'd view the PEP rwgmixer.xml file as optional and I'd remove it. I might have missed something, but it looked to me it changes many of the settlement settings. They also take an approach to establishing weights and biases for POIs that is different from Vanilla's approach but great for DF. To add an extra POI that came to you as just 6 files, place those files in LocalPrefabs unless they came as part of a modlet, in which case put the modlet in your Mods folder. You do not need entries in Localization.txt but if you have those entries then those entries will show up on the Danger Meter. It is not possible with RWG to force every POI to appear. RWG is more complex than that. You can make conditions more likely to feature everything (large map, many settlements, many wilderness POIs), but the appearance of POIs depends on RWG creating viable places to put them and that comes down to the types of settlements it picks, the number and size of districts in those settlements, and then the Tiles it picks to fill out those districts. You might be able to get close to your goals and then have to be willing to edit the world's prefabs.xml file and/or use the World Generator to get perfection. You might also explore Teragon (and alternative map generator) and see if it can get you closer to your goal, or not.

Me, actually. I like streams with few people. It's easier to chat with the streamer. I'm finding I don't really want to watch them play. I know the game. I want to be social within the context of the game. Twitch integration was neat for a while, but I can take or leave it now. That too seems better if there's just a couple of people and if it costs nothing. I'm not paying real money for it. The ability to occasionally interject a little content is neat. Rampant sessions of clobbering the streamer is kind of dull, almost as bad as watching somebody manage their base's inventory all game night.

In terms of "value", the double pocket mod is worth it, but yes it seems silly. To me, the important gatekeeper is the book that gives you the ability to craft them, not the cloth.

(1) Occasionally I'll get reports of poor performance. Typically, FPS drops while POIs load, usually in the downtown. This has had me looking for ways to diagnose/profile the performance on my POIs. I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone knew of resources that would be of assistance. For instance, other than load and rending times, what other measurable performance might there be? Are there any profiling/debugging features that I might use for more information. I'm currently aware of the Prefab Editor telling me about "Verts" and Tris" (vertices and triangles) ... so potentially a measure of the effort to render a POI. I could look at POI file sizes as potentially a measure of how much effort it takes to load a POI from disk. (2) I'm aware of certain "tips" for performance, such as "don't turn on shadows on POI lights" and "don't overlap POI light radii." There was talk of performance issues related to windows in A20. What else should I know? (3) A seemingly related matter is the notion that POIs located in either the game's files or LocalPrefabs perform better than POIs found in modlets. I have no idea how or why they might perform better, only that a number of folks believe it to be so. I'm a fan of putting things in modlets as I suspect that's the future, should we get into mods being distributed via the Steam Workshop. Can anyone shed any light on if there's any truth to POIs in some locations performing better in some way?

Nope. I'm not disputing it at all. I was saying the choices you make are based on your opinions, goals, desires and the facts. I likely quoted that one point you made too closely, as I have seen people suggest that is a sole reason for why they thought stealth was worthless. You did have other reasons.

I get what you're saying, and I get that you're weighting the value of skills to your own goals and desires. My calculus is different. I have lots of skills that are worthless on horde night. I don't avoid farming and cooking because I can't do them on horde night. I don't get a lot out of my melee weapons on horde night but I need them at other times. I'm not making or driving vehicles during a horde night, but I'm going to want a motorcycle or a 4x4. Stealth is an important tool for my POI-raiding toolbox and sometimes an interesting puzzle that is different than "rock-n-roll with a machine gun" and certainly more than "crouch-and-go" stealth. Arranging the circumstances where I can shake triggered zombies is still a technique I'm working to improve.

That kind of how it works. For example, a typical volume might be configured to select 4-5 sleepers from the 10-12 sleeper blocks that get placed within it. The game picks the 4-5 from the 10-12. Or, if an infestation, it picks 8-10 from the 10-12. Trivia: If you configure the volume to place 4-5 sleepers but only give it 3 sleeper blocks, you get an Exception! Yay! (IIRC, IndexOutOfRangeException)

Many people don't know that when the pandemic struck there was a massive county-wide hide and seek game going on in an attempt to set a Guinness Book of World Records.

I agree that it is super common for zombies to be in usual places. At this point I just accept it as quirk of the 7d2d world, or a "literary motif" if you want. (Yeh, I had to look that up.) I have just come to think that in 7d2d, zombies like to hide in enclosed places and that the pre-apocalpyse humans of Navezgane liked to build secret cubbyholes. Or, that infected, but not yet transformed individuals thought it best to hide in closets, armoires, and hanging ceilings. Also, that in Navezgane, builders like to use super-heavyweight ceiling tiles that will support your weight if you stand on them, but will break if you move across them. For that matter, Navezgane citizens have a habit of building underground layers.

Changes: 4 New Gateway Tiles zztong_restaurant_02 zztong_tfp_apartments_adobe_01 zztong_tfp_prison_01 zztong_tfp_school_k6_01 zztong_tfp_settlement_01 Optional "Dead" Traders Bug fixes

I think he edited the XML files for the skyscrapers and lowered to DuplicateRepeatDistance property from 10000 to probably something like 1000. I think you could also just delete that property.

The PrefabEditor, but as Stallion said, "Tags" is the only one of those 5 XML properties that is used with POI placement. Many of those are legacy tags that are still floating around but have no effect. The EditorGroups only helps searching for them in the PrefabEditor.

If you're willing to edit a POI's XML file, you can tag it for wilderness and remove any other district tags. Like Stallion says, you can't force a biome without C# code.

Pile onto @VoltraLux's dream and ask for a camera.

I'd add on: Broken pinball machine ... would make a great placeholder block for @Cranberry Monster's modlet. Broken video game console ... same reason. A TV / Movie Camera ... see this conversation: Pay Phone? What's that? Phone Booth? Huh? 🤭

I regret I do not. Last week I got the same result and assumed I just messed up something. The Trader POIs coming in my next release (for A21.1) includes Traders that have been overrun with zombies and don't include any trader blocks or functionality. They're not rigged for RWG, so the only way to get them into play is to edit a world's prefabs.xml file. I do that in my solo games so that there's only one trader of each type in the world. I rent a channel on GuppyCur's server, #zztong-prefabs. I've not made my own server as my list is overflowing with servers already. Folks tend just just DirectMessage me, which is fine too.

I'm really curious to see how you represented large TV cameras. I've got a TV station in my pack and my TV cameras are crappy -- like poorly done ASCII art with blocks.

It's a minor issue to me and if didn't change I wouldn't be upset. However, couldn't the game still allow a block with an "open" appearance to be interacted with and would present an empty inventory. If something were placed in the block's inventory, couldn't the appearance change back to "closed"? I do agree that 99/100 times this is an aesthetic matter for a base and waiting until you can make some nails and craft some household blocks isn't a major barrier. There are times, however, when you're in a POI, managing inventory, and you'd like to stick a few things into a cabinet to come back for them later. If your inventory were full, you could drop something, craft a chest, place it, pick up the dropped item, and dump stuff into the chest. Yeh, this is why its a minor issue to me. Sure, I'd love to be able to put something into an empty cabinet, but I'm not suffering. This part of fixing up a base is a small effort.

Those don't follow my naming conventions, so I don't think it is the ZZTong-Prefabs modlet. All of my beehives are Parts (part_zztong_beehive_01) so they couldn't have a loot list. They don't follow the BCP naming conventions either. I grep'd the entirety of both projects and did not find "beehive", "bee", or "hive", (other than references to my part) so I'm not sure where else to look. Any idea what it was? It sounds like there are other modlets involved?

I wonder if it makes any sense not to check volumes if a player is riding in a vehicle. I say this having driven a motorcycle through buildings, even repaired stairs so that I could bring it with me as I explored a large building. But, I'm thinking when a player is driving a vehicle around on the ground between destinations, is it really worth processing a volume to spawn zombies to get left in the dust. Maybe it's along the lines of ... If the player is riding in a vehicle AND if the vehicle is currently on a terrain block, then skip. Or maybe there's a nice way to compare the vehicle's Y to "ground level." Alas, that probably means it will check volumes when crossing a bridge or ramps off of something. heh Hmm, I suspect you could avoid checking volumes for players who are not driving a vehicle they are riding in. That is a passenger is going to be at the same location as the driver.

I settled on 3x but thought 2.5x wasn't bad either. I thought 5x was too much. There's no perfect value because the range of damage being done swings so far, and yet sometimes not far enough. I mean, there are objects that I think should do no damage that can do significant damage and then there's events that I think should destroy the vehicle (even if it were at 100% health) and kill everyone aboard, like driving off a skyscraper.

I see. These volume checks, they would be per-player, right? If so, then 8 players means 50 becomes 400? Perhaps not that bad if players are moving around together. Then maybe you can mark a volume and avoid processing it again, somehow... err, that sounds problematic though I'm not sure why. (Probably because players rarely stick together by distances that would be relevant in this case.) I'm trying to imagine a "worst case" ... 8 players, each driving a 4x4 at top speed through their own city's downtown district. They're all changing chunks quickly and there's a large number of volumes per chunk. Obviously, some servers allow more than 8 players, but uhhh, yeh. Then, IIRC, there's a limit to the number of sleepers the game can have at any one time. I think hitting that shuts down sleeper spawns. If that's true, then oddly enough, maybe it could also be a signal to shut down the evaluation of some kinds of zombie volumes, or maybe that's bad...? Would it help if, after you determined distance and found a volume to be far away, that you flagged it to "skip" some number of ticks before being evaluated again? Like, if it's 100 blocks away, skip the next 3 ticks, but if it's 50 blocks away just skip the next one.