Factorio Forums

Soooo... lets talk about the Jetpack mod and how it kinda ruins my robot life immersion.

How it started:
Playing away living my best Robot life, FACTORY MUST GROW!... and then i'm like ok time to jetpack around cuz you know, factory has SIZE. So I hit those keys to up, up and away... AND BAM no more robot, jetpack mod has its own nice fancy character graphics. Fair enough this kinda mod conflict is to be expected, but my naïve never made a mod past self is like, " I know how to shoop, how hard could this be"

How its going:
Pi-C, the author of I Robot is keen and has been helpful with making this happen, Earendel author of the jetpack mod... idk, isnt all that keen? Look point is i'm here with the graphics DONE and all that needs to happen is some code, like i've already hard replaced the graphics in my local jetpack mod files to play on, so all this is just "Maximum Effort" as the man in the red suit says.

But as someone new to the modding scene this kind of conflict of character state points at something bigger in they way these types of mods are put together. It could be broadly agreed that there are currently a SET of character or entity states and dif mods have dif skins so like, why arent the mods coded in a way to conform to the state SETs so cross mod graphical sharing is possible. Or is this just the clueless rambling of someone that knows just enough about code to be dangerous and useless.

Anyways, that nonsense aside this thread is so Pi-C and I plus some other keen people can make this mod over-ride or whatever it end up being happen.
Thanks

spinny bot

Apparently, Earendel suggested to overwrite data.raw.animations["jetpack-animation"], data.raw.animations["jetpack-animation-mask"], and data.raw.animations["jetpack-animation-flame"] with animations fitting the character from "I, Robot". This would work if "I, Robot" was the only active character mod. However, the suggestion is useless if "I, Robot" was just one of several character mods that are active at the same time: In this case, the animation used when the jetpack was activated would still be the same for all characters (except that it now would show "I, Robot" instead of the default character).

During the last two or three years, several mods providing new characters have popped up. There also are character-selector mods like miniMAXIme that allow players to switch their appearance at runtime. Currently, there must be something like 40 different characters that are compatible with miniMAXIme (check out its dependencies for the compatible character mods I know of). So there simply is no particular jetpack animation that would be fitting for all the characters available!

The obvious solution would be to allow character mods to supply their own jetpack animations, and to use the default animation only for the default character, or as fallback for characters without jetpack animation. But this can't be done without changes to "Jetpack".

@Earendel: "Jetpack" already provides the remote function swap_jetpack_character. Would you mind changing that function so that it accepts the name of the jetpack animation for a character (optional) an stores that name in global.jetpacks? Then, whenever the jetpack is activated for a character, use the animation with the stored name, or the default if no name has been supplied.

If you could do that, I'd update my selector mod so that it can pass on the animation name. I'd also update my helper for character mods so that it can handle jetpack animations correctly (i.e. overwrite the default jetpack animations if no selector mod is active, or keep custom animations otherwise).