[0.16] Stormwalls

[Degraine]

This is a remake, or maybe a remix, of Rseding's Force Fields mod. I've changed how it works significantly, to make it much more customisable.

By placing down an emitter, and laying projection plates within range of the emitter, you can design a wall layout similar to what you would do with ordinary walls in the base game. Once the plates and emitter are placed, it will take a certain amount of time for a 'stormwall' to be generated and brought up to full strength by the system. If the emitter or the plate are removed, the stormwall decays rapidly. Fast-replacing a projection plate with one of a different colour will also cause the existing wall to decay, and begin the process of generating the new wall from scratch. Stormwalls come in four colours, with plates to match:

• Blue: Fast spawn time, average power consumption.
• Green: Long spawn time, low power consumption, high health.
• Red: Normal spawn time, very high power consumption, damages enemies attacking the forcefield.
• Purple: Very long spawn time, high power consumption, low health. Explodes on death, damaging nearby enemies.

This mod follows the same optimisation principles as the original - you should be able to build as many as you like without any hits to performance. And as a further bonus, you can create blueprintable layouts using the base game's blueprint system, bypassing the need to fiddle with custom GUIs. Lay down a blueprint and let the bots take care of the rest for you.

NOTE: The mod is still in beta because I'm sure there are still edge cases for when the mod attempts to create/heal/destroy a stormwall that it shouldn't and causes a game error. If you encounter such a case, please post here describing exactly what happened before the error, and the error itself, of course.

Downloads:
Get it from the mod portal, here.

[deimosian]

Love the concept here. Threw the mod in and dropped some, they spawned fine, but when I shot one myself, I got a crash when it died. Was a purple that I shot. Testing more now.



Confirmed the same happened with biters destroying one. Gonna disable the rest of my mods, figure out which is conflicting if any.



Confirmed it happens without any other mods enabled.

[Degraine]

Hey, thanks for the report! I figured out what the issue was and fixed it. New version of the mod's up.

[deimosian]

Well it worked, and I've been baiting biters into them some more, much better than before but I still managed to get another, different crash.



Upon further inspection it appears to be when a spitter is destroying the emitter.

Before


After

[Degraine]

Thanks for the report, I've found the issue and fixed it. Keep in mind, when an emitter is destroyed, every wall linked to it will evaporate and have to be rebuilt. So...keep those emitters well protected.

[deimosian]

Keep in mind, when an emitter is destroyed, every wall linked to it will evaporate and have to be rebuilt.

That's exactly what I was trying to test actually.

On a side note, I think the 1GJ internal buffer may be a bit too large, they take forever to charge on anything but a hardcore late game power grid. If you were to plug on in early/mid game it would make your entire factory grind to a halt. Perhaps multiple tiers? (bobs circuit recipes? )

Oh, the area the emitters cover is tad off center and gets at my OCD.

[Degraine]

Well, first off, the emitter is only one tile wide, so the area it covers inevitably has to be an odd number of tiles as well. I don't much like it either, but there isn't really anything I can do about it unless I get a 2x2 graphic from my request in the art forum. Overlapping coverage isn't an issue anyway. If one emitter goes down, any tiles within the coverage of another emitter will get linked to those. You probably want to move those emitters in the screenshot further in so they're not vulnerable to spitter attacks.

As for the power question, they are meant to run on a late-game power supply, although the actual power draw for building/repairing walls doesn't seem significant enough to justify the huge power storage. It needs a balancing pass, so I'll give that a look soon.

[deimosian]

Well, first off, the emitter is only one tile wide, so the area it covers inevitably has to be an odd number of tiles as well.

The expected behavior of a 1x1 emitter with an odd number area would result in an equal coverage distance in all directions. However, as I demonstrated with the screenshot, it has a range that is one further to the north and west and one shorter to the south and east. If they were working as described, there would be no gaps, as the placement of the emitters is symmetrical.

Here's another screenshot to try and illustrate what I'm talking about. Would expect, with a 33x33 effect centered on a 1x1 emitter then all ends would be the same color, but two are red and two are blue.

[Degraine]

I see what you mean now. I'm either stupid or tired. Anyway, it's fixed for the next version. You can patch it yourself if you want by modifying the range (line 43 in control.lua) to 33.5. Thanks for all this testing you're doing, it's been a big help.

[deimosian]

Sure thing, I'm very interested in this mods progression, I think its concept is superior to the other forcefields, using the 'floor/pavement' tiles for more things, can't wait til you get some textures for them.

[Light]

Finally a forcefield mod that I can use with some flexibility and ease of setup.

One odd thing I noticed is that while the buffer consumes a nice bit of power to get started, once the buffer is done and you start placing walls then it doesn't seem to matter if you make 1 or 100 walls since it consumes the same amount of power. I did notice that different wall types use different amounts of power at least.

So since there's no upkeep for keeping thick walls regenerated compared to a thin one right now, just a couple solar panels can hold back biters indefinitely. Clearly unintentional behavior that you should be aware of.

[Degraine]

I've been thinking about upping the power cost to regenerate walls significantly, although I'm not sure if I want to increase the power consumption of the emitter itself. My original plan was to modify the energy consumption of the entity on the fly, but I haven't gotten around to implementing it yet (I thought it had been made impossible by some of the optimisations that happened in 0.16). I'll probably do away with repair energy costs if that happens, and I'm also thinking about changing the recipes for the different plate types.

So there's still some work to be done.

[Light]

Well it's good to know you've still got some plans for it.

With very powerful regenerating walls it makes sense that power demand would be high when repairing or building over a dozen walls at once compared to just one or two walls. Proper defenses would protect the walls from being attacked too frequently and draining the grid. Nuclear power is likely made by the time these emitters are, so it's not like you'd be hurting too much for power unless you're allowing dozens of walls to be attacked constantly; which is much more realistic than having six solar panels keeping the walls up indefinitely.

Two bugs I've noted on my end is that purple walls don't cause any damage when they're destroyed as they're supposed to and this error randomly appears when the emitter is mined or destroyed.

[Degraine]

Thanks for the report. I found the problem, it's been patched. I've also fixed the purple walls. You'll know when they deal damage now. You'll definitely know...

[Light]

The purple walls are doing a fine job now.

New error:

[Degraine]

Okay, I'm going to need slightly more information for this one. What died, a field or an emitter?

[Light]

Okay, I'm going to need slightly more information for this one. What died, a field or an emitter?

The emitter did.

The best way to test for bugs with this mod is to do the wave defense scenario which sends thousands of biters at you while you use stormwalls to protect the corner. The results are much faster since the waves never end and you only need to protect two sides, which makes it easier to see what's going on.

[Degraine]

I've gotten a CTD using Stormwalls with the Wave Defence scenario, so I suspect it may not be the most reliable means of testing. At any rate, I don't know what conditions could cause the error you reported, and I haven't been able to replicate it using your description of the problem. Can you reliably reproduce the problem?

[Degraine]

It appears the issue was caused by gates being deconstructible, which they never should have been, so that's been fixed.

EDIT: Nope! That was just a symptom. Walls out of range of any emitter that were killed by damage instead of naturally expiring were at fault. it's fixed now, so hopefully that's the last real bug.

[TheBrain0110]

I haven't gotten to try the update you *just* posted yet, so that might fix at least one of the two crashes I've seen. But here they are.



This was during a biter attack where they killed the emitter. Hopefully will be fixed with the new update.



This one's a bit different. There was no attacking going on, the nearby emitter was fine. But I had some green walls, which I replaced with some blue walls, and then a couple seconds later I replaced some of those with blue gates. It was during the gate placement that I got the crash. So there might be something to do with quickly replacing lines of walls a few times. I think what it might be, was the green walls hadn't finished despawning when the tile under them was changed a second time?