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Gamestage / Blood Moon Horde generator


Gazz

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Hundreds of A15 gamestages and accompanying horde group setups were so not written by hand.

 

Did they write themselves? They kinda did. =)

 

 

Google Spreadsheet. Warning! Math ahead!

 

What you should do first:

 

File menu -> Make a copy...

 

Then you can mess around with your copy. (you cannot edit the original)

Guppycur said that he managed to export it to a local XLS file but how or if that works is none of my concern.

 

 

Guppycur made a how-to video on that. Or maybe it's a how-not-to, I haven't seen it, yet. =)

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I can see how making a one line entry is easier than working it into hundreds of groups with a scaling probability.

(without eating your keyboard)

 

The idea of even generating the xml via xls is genius... I would have never thought of that. I've been looking at ways to do it programmatically, but I'm not a very good programmer so the task was always too daunting... but I AM good inside EXCEL, so now I'm wondering how many other xml's I can write an "editor" for using EXCEL.

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Well, there really is no to little programming in there. It's all data, arranged, filtered, and sorted to... fit.

 

Managing the game data is a lot of what I do here.

 

Naturally there were several iterations of this during A15 but with this setup it is trivial to change the balancing or adding a new zombie type. Adding new rules is some work... but much less than redoing everything by hand.

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@Gazz: RawHordeStages seems to be the main place where higher zombie levels get assigned to higher game stages; the issue I'm having is, I've just appended about 60 zombies, thus overwriting your system of repeating harder zombies in ZombieTypes to get the harder ones to spawn at higher levels. Have you thought about assigning "Levels" to the ZombieTypes based on hitpoints, then using that system to determine what zombies go in RawHordeStages?

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@Gazz: RawHordeStages seems to be the main place where higher zombie levels get assigned to higher game stages; the issue I'm having is, I've just appended about 60 zombies, thus overwriting your system of repeating harder zombies in ZombieTypes to get the harder ones to spawn at higher levels. Have you thought about assigning "Levels" to the ZombieTypes based on hitpoints, then using that system to determine what zombies go in RawHordeStages?

You can already assign a probability so that scales automatically.

 

Or you can adjust the existing system that expands the range of picks as GS increases.

 

 

@Gazz: Can you elaborate on this?

 

Just look at the last entries in GroupOutput. See how it scales.

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Are you using UMA and Strength in ZombieTypes for anything other than reference? If not, were you planning to?

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

@Saving locally

 

I can save locally, but damn if Excel in 2007, 2010 or 365 recognizes some of the formula's... as a result it removes them when opening. Because Microsoft sucks. I haven't tried Open Office, but it's best just to keep it on your googledrive. Working fine.

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Are you using UMA and Strength in ZombieTypes for anything other than reference? If not, were you planning to?

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

@Saving locally

 

I can save locally, but damn if Excel in 2007, 2010 or 365 recognizes some of the formula's... as a result it removes them when opening. Because Microsoft sucks. I haven't tried Open Office, but it's best just to keep it on your googledrive. Working fine.

 

Libreoffice is far better with office docs and translations than openoffice is.

Oo is dead now anyway.

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Libreoffice is far better with office docs and translations than openoffice is.

Oo is dead now anyway.

 

Oh? Good to know. Either way I thought it odd some functions weren't available in even the latest office, but the online version works well enough. Even if a little slow.

 

@tin I'm getting pretty handy with the basic functions, got any specific questions that I can answer and gazz can correct me on? :)

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Things like the relationship between TypeRND:A8 and other cells have would be nice; right now we have to go backwards, i.e. find the cell, see what cell affects that number, follow those branches to see what cells affect THOSE numbers, just to find out what A8 does, as an example.

 

It's doable, but commenting your work would be awesome.

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Are you free to scale how you please, or are you running this by the rest of the team? Just curious how the internal workings work.

 

I'm having a blast with this; I haven't actually copy/pasted my changes to my server yet, but it's nice to see ahead of time what affects what, and how.

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Most of it I just set up and no one complained so that was that.

What zombies can go in and what distribution usually comes down to some haggling between designers and coders.

 

 

I haven't actually copy/pasted my changes to my server yet, but it's nice to see ahead of time what affects what, and how.

That's the big plus of using spreadsheets for that kinda stuff.

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Comments about...?

 

Just more.. :p

 

I ask because MM has Posted that more of the gamestage mechanic is being fitted into the spawning mechanic (Wandering/screamer ect,.)

Basically, If you have some on the dev team saying:

it would be cool to have your lingo toned down a bit more and translate better :p
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