Entity Cloner +Randomizer

[doughphunghus]

Looking for feedback I figured I'd post this here in case it interests anyone.  Its not a "great tool"...but it gets enough of the job done someone here may want to use it...

 

I put together a small terrible tool I call "7D2D-EntityRandomizer".  Its still very early in development, but it works...so far.  I have not tested it extensively, so I'd advise against using it in a "serious game" until you've tested it out a bit.

 

Note: This is not a "true" entity randomizer! It makes "clones" of existing entities and then randomizes only the clones (so the"vanilla" zeds/animals are not modified). It then generates a modlet with the cloned entities in it. You load/install the generated modlet like any other modlet.

 

Anyway, here's some links to it. If anyone wants to try out the "pre generated modlets" and provide feedback that would be cool :).  If anyone wants to go the "custom build" and install perl and build your own modlets and provide feedback (features needed/wanted/etc) I'd be happy to take any input you have! I have built and tested ONLY on Ubuntu, it may need fixes for windows

 

My Mods Page (Where the current status of this will be maintained)

Github Repo (Where current code will live, and any documentation/examples)

 

Note: My "configuration" files for this on github tend to be set up to make clones that are harder/faster/meaner/etc. than the vanilla zeds. Like the speed settings are set so you cannot run away (sometimes) if they are generated at max speeds.

 

Pros:

- Its an XML only cloner (no DMT needed, no special graphics, etc).  So it should work on a server. I have NOT tested this.

- You can randomize a lot of properties beyond "walk type" and size.  In theory you could randomize any property, but the most common ones that made sense I set up first.

- It has a config file!  No "script editing" needed!  If you wanted you can generate separate config files to generate a mod with only the animals, then another for only the zeds, etc. or even generate 2 separate modlets with different settings (like make 2 clones that are super hard, then 5 clones in another that are easier).

- There are some "helper" methods for special things like WalkType and making changes to size.

- You should be able to (if you generate a custom modlet for your own game) generate clones against any other entity modlet you've loaded.  Meaning: if you load custom/extra zeds/animals/etc, you can make clones of these.  It takes a little work to do this though, and you may have to make a few runs and tweak the configuration to make it work. Some zombies/entities just don't clone +randomize all properties well. I've had some success doing this, so it kinda works.

- Fully open source! Fork and modify to your hearts content. I apologize in advance for the coding mess I have created

 

Cons:

- I have built and tested ONLY on Ubuntu.  It should work on Windows, but its possible that there will be path/file naming issues.  To minimize this, only use forward slashes in path names in the config file! e.g. C://test/test/test...

- Its a script, and I take no responsibility for what happens to your system if you use or modify it

- To make it work well (meaning it feels like game entities are random), you have to generate a "lot" of clones.  Currently I generate 5 extra clones of every entity in the game.  I'm not sure what kind of impact this has (its playable in my solo games).

- The config file is not super clean. Its JSON so you can't easily put comments in it to self document.  Stupid JSON!

- I haven't written much documentation really explaining how to use it yet.  I do have 2 example config files that might get you going.

- "random" is mostly that.  Meaning: if you randomize Walk Type and it randomly makes 4 out of 5 zeds walk the same, then that just happens.  There's not a good tuning mechanism yet to "always add in some extremes" so you always have a crawler of every type of clone, or there's always a zed that runs as fast/slow as the config allowed, etc.

- Every time you run it you get a different modlet (entity names are always ..randomish) and settings are random.  It could cause issues if you played with a generated modlet, then generated another (and didn't make changes!) and added both to an existing game.

- It requires some custom perl modules to be installed.  So if you have perl installed on your system (mostly Unix/mac systems) you may want to be careful and use something like perlbrew to make a "virtual perl" installed just for your account and not mess with the system level perl.  I can probably give some guidance on how to install perl and the modules, but I am not a OS/perl guru and if you blow up your OS ... now you know another way to accomplish that.

- If you give the script really bad data from the config file (like put in negative numbers when it doesn't make sense, it will likely generate a modlet that is unplayable/loadable/throws a lot of errors. In fact, it might just make a bad modlet anyway. I lightly test the modlet it generates only against vanilla entities (no errors on load, etc), as TFP releases new game versions.

- Probably 20 other things I'm not seeing

 

Edited September 23, 2020 by doughphunghus (see edit history)

[GameplayJenny]

Hello! I know this is an old post now but hopefully I've found the right place to post feedback.

 

I love this concept and it makes this way more unpredictable and scary. What I would like to ask is whether it could be made to work with the lootable zombies mod. If not that's OK, I just thought I would raise that they are not compatible (this one stops the lootable zombies). Both working would be my ideal game! Many thanks,

[doughphunghus]

I just posted the tool here for people to comment/find/etc, it’s still “development” as an experiment...

 

what lootable zombie mod are you referring to/using? I’ll have to see how they make them lootable to figure out if it’s compatible.  There’s several caveats to this, so without knowing I’ll list the major one for anyone here:

The “prebuilt modlets” are literal extra entity copies of the xml in the game, so if a lootable mod changes them,  it *should* work.  But, mods are loaded alphabetically by mod folder name, so the lootable mod would probably have to be alphabetically after the prebuilt mod names to take effect, UNLESS/MAYBE it only changes the template entities.....  I’m not sure how the lootable tags/buffs/ or whatever it’s doing will propagate to extended zombie classes. Apparently some rage do not, by design.

 

anyway, let me know what mods you’re wanting to make compatible and I’ll see what I can do.  No promises though :).if you can provide direct links to where you’re downloading them from that would be awesome 

Edited May 21, 2021 by doughphunghus (see edit history)