Industrious Tinkers: Mod Concept

[Sponge]

Hey everybody- long time no type . I've been lurking around the last few days, and have come up with what I feel is a pretty solid idea for a mod. A combination of rereading the review over at Retro Gaming CD(which mentioned industrious tinkers), and recalling a couple of previous suggestions has got me thinking. As such, to give credit where it is due, this is not an entirely original idea. I can't find the old posts that I remember reading, but this is loosely based off of some fairly common Tinker suggestions. So, onward.
**Possible Mild Spoilers beyond this point**

Industrious Tinkers

Tinkers are an unusual group. They take salvage and convert it into useful items... They can also convert raw materials into finished items, like ore into armor...

Tinkers are that oh-so-useful race that you can sell your damaged junk to. That is, until they run out of money. Oh sure, they can take a few of your old lasers and put them on a dual laser platform, or even make you a patcher arm from some nanites. But lets face it, the ever crafty tinkers can only make 19 different items. Adding to that, the majority of these items are very low leveled, and rarely used. Sure, a laser array might be useful from time to time, but you have to carry around numerous tons of useless lasers until you manage to collect eight, and then you have to actually find a tinker station. They don't seem all that industrious to me.

So, how do we fix it? It's fairly simple, really. We first give the Tinkers the ability to disassemble all identified, damaged equipment into base parts. These base parts would be specific to the item they were generated from to an extent, but not completely. For example, when dissembling a broken laser, you won't get 5 random parts. You will, however, get a specific set of parts that may have a use when it comes to assembling other types of laser-based weapons. The tinkers can then use an assembly of these parts to create something for you. No more magically smashing eight lasers into an array of three.

Now Lets Get Specific

Here's a more specific example. You're flying around, and loot a damaged omni laser. You find a tinker station, and select a new option on the DockScreen- Recycle. You hand the Tinkers your damaged omni laser, and for a small fee, they will break it into base parts. So what do you get?
While these are just initial ideas, I would see the breakdown system working as follows.
Weapons will break down into scrap metal of various grades, a damage-type specific weapon "module," a turret base, and a level specific power cell/conduit/etc.

And so, for your broken omni laser, you will get in return a pile of cheap (level 3) scrap metal, a laser module, an omnidirectional turret mount, and a level three power cell.

So now you can give them these components and they'll make you a new omni laser, right? Of course not. You clearly don't have enough scrap metal to create an entire weapon, and what you do have it not of a high enough grade to create a level three weapon. Your laser module is burnt out, your turret mount is banged up and doesn't spin right anymore, and your power cell is mostly spent.

First, the scrap metal is an issue of balance, and so is assigned a specific "grade" depending on the level of the weapon it came from. You can not break a level six weapon into scrap metal and use it to make another level six weapon. You would have to use at least level seven scrap metal. Your laser module has seen better days, but could be repaired with parts from another module. Your turret mount could probably be repaired with a bit of elbow grease, which, of course, translates into credits, and your power cell is going to need to be augmented with at least one more to achieve the power transfer levels a functioning weapon requires. So does this mean you have to go through repairing each of your parts individually? No, you need only have the requisite parts. The Tinkers will take care of all the hard work for you.

So now what? After all that work you just get a new omni laser? Don't think so. Using your parts, you can put them toward any type of weapon you want. While the laser module is laser specific, the other parts sure aren't. Say you have a bunch of other damaged weapons. You get all those broken down, too. The Tinkers can logically assemble old parts from any weapon into something new. No more smashing old recoilless cannons into a dual, now you just need a dual turret mount, a couple kinetic firing assemblies, a power cell or two, and some scrap metal. Sure makes a lot more sense, don't it?

But what about armor?!
Sure, armor too. Broken armor can be broken down into metal plates, obviously of the same material. While you may only get three plates from a piece of armor, it may take six or seven to make a new segment. Obviously it's in your best interests to just repair your armor, provided it's not too badly damaged.

Getting Technical

I'll admit, it's been many months since I've taken a look at the XML. While I'm pretty sure this is possible, I don't know if it's practical. My current plan is to, in the next week or two, play around with some aspects of the CustomWork tag to see if I can use it for a system such as this. While I have no idea if it's possible, if the custom work tags can generate more than one item type as a result, they would make a very effective means of breaking down damaged items. If the tags are not modifiable in such a way, this instantly becomes a much larger project. At the same time, I will suggest an expansion of said tags be hard coded into the game .

Now comes the hard part. The reassembly of parts into weapons will be no easy task. This is where the real issues with practicality come into play. How do you tell the tinkers what you want to make? Do you ask them what you can make with your parts? Or do you tell them to make something, and hope you have what you need? Then, once you've selected what you want them to make, they have to actually verify you have all the parts you need. Being that each weapon might require several parts, this could be a very messy task. And what if you have parts that are too good? Scrap metal is higher than the required quality, of your only power cells are a level or two above that of the weapon that you want to make. Ideally, the weapon would be created with enhancements. Metal quality might affect firerate, while power cells may increase damage. But is this practical to do? I believe it's possible to compare the level of a component against the level of a weapon you want to create, but is it actually practical to do so in such a way that for each level the power cell is higher than the weapon you get a specific enhancement? It seems like it would become a huge amount of code very quickly.

While there are a lot of technical hurdles to overcome before this becomes a reality, I think it has a chance of working.

If interest is there, this project could make a great community collaboration. Modders of all skill levels could work together to create a totally new element of the game. If anyone is interested in starting a project like this, or just if you have ideas/advice, please, post away.

-Sponge

[Betelgeuse]

my only problem with all of this is I don't think choosing a item is good for the game. As long as you can't just dump in all the weapons you find and get the same weapon every game it would be fine. (remember tinkerers work with non damaged items too)

hmm with this system couldn't you make anything an omnidirectional weapon? or dual or shotgun type?

so if I wanted I can make an omnidirectional ion weapon much earlier and easier than I would normally get one?

[Sponge]

Valid concerns. I'd like to stress that this is still a concept, and so it completely subject to change.

To your first point of choosing weapons:
I agree completely. You will have to go through a substantial amount of effort to collect the necessary parts, and so you shouldn't be able to dump a random assortment of weapons and make something amazing. With out a couple of ion firing modules, you've got no way to make an ion weapon. The idea is for the Tinkers to provide a nice, fairly in-depth tutorial on what parts are required to assemble a weapon. Players would then be able to collect only the parts they need- Tinkers will buy the rest of the parts. Breaking down high level weapons would have a fairly high cost, as to prevent it from being in your interest to just dump every broken thing you find and just grab your favorite weapon. I would also intend this to be a means of removing the Tinkers' ability to work with undamaged weapons. Sure, they can do it, but it doesn't really fit with the mod, and isn't really necessary to begin with.

On Omni stuff:
You've almost answered your own question . Ion weapons are the only outlet for ion firing modules, and high level weapons are the only outlet for high level scrap metal and power cells. You couldn't make an X-leveled omni ion weapon without first acquiring scrap metal from X+1- leveled weaponry and power cells from other high leveled weapons. On top of that, creating various grades of mounts isn't a bad idea either. Not one for every level, but maybe three tiers of mounts for each setup.

I'd also like to state that this isn't meant to be a huge weapon adding mod. However, as a collaboration project, even the newest of modders could add new weapons. And so we are incorporating all skill levels by delegating tasks around. While I don't want to have every weapon under the sun available, omni, partially omni, dual, and array variants of some weapons will be created, as well as some Tinker-only goodies.

[Petrus]

This is a great idea. You could put some good dialogue and extra personality into the game by having the Tinker explain what you needed, or give hints on where to find each sort of part. Would be an easy way to work some extra dialogue into the game and flesh out the personality of the tinker platforms a little more (and possibly factions like the Ares, whom the Tinker could suggest the player hunt to try and get an ion disruptor core, etc.)

[Sponge]

While I didn't think of using the Tinker dialog to add personality (more to introduce the concept of weapon building), it's a great idea. Perhaps it could even be set up like the commonwealth bar, where they will give you various tips about finding components, and also some insight into the Tinker culture.

[digdug]

The idea is very nice, I posted something similar some time ago on UTF.

Tinkers can be limited to build weapons based on their experience or skills, for example some tinkers build kinetic weapons and others specialize in laser weapons.

Moreover we can limit the constructible weapons to the weapons available ingame. That means you cannot create a weapon that will unbalance the game.

For high level weapons, tinkers cannot build them if they never saw one.
When you bring a weapon (damaged or not) they never saw, they can try to disassemble it, but the first time thay may fail completely.
Only when they mastered how to build it, they can offer the service to you.

[Sponge]

While I'm not too fond of the first idea you posted, the second two are very nice. I intend to add some extra weapons that the Tinkers can make, but you won't be able to make any weapon you want. As far as the Tinkers learning how to make new stuff, it's a cool concept. I'm not sure if it's really practical, though, as it would be a significant quantity of even more code that will go into the construction of weapons. I'm already thinking the amount of effort and code this will require is pretty high. Also, I don't intend for the really high level weapons to even be constructible. Tinkers specialize in fairly simple weapons, so weapons like the QAC are out of their class. Since you don't find any Tinker in the lategame anyway, I don't think there'll be too many problems with Tinkers making an awesome weapon for you every game.

If anyone is interested in working on a community project such as this, let me know. I think it'd be pretty cool if we could set up a big collaboration.

[F50]

Would the tinker level limit be VI, VII or VIII?

[Sponge]

Not sure- I don't think it's too terribly crucial. The main thing to remember is that you really need to be finding significant amounts of damaged weapons that are a higher level than the weapon that you want to make. This in mind, it's not exactly practical for the Tinkers to make you a nice level 8 weapon until you're finding broken level 9 or 10 weapons in decent quantities. That said, I'd be more inclined to just limit what the Tinkers can make on a per item basis. Saying they can't make anything over X level is a bit restrictive. Instead, you could just call level 7 or 8 an approximate cutoff, and add higher level weapons as you see fit. Just don't want to add anything rare or otherwise difficult to get.

[Aury]

well, give each weapon type a specific part- ie basic lasers use a level one laser generator which can be combined with different mounts to produce dual, single and arrayed configs. This allows you to "tell" them what you want (or you could use a selection list like the buying one) as well as prevents say, making a level ten plasma cannon from level seven parts for example.

it would be intersting to see what tinker only weapons they would produce. maybe add the parts to the "buy scrap" part?

[Betelgeuse]

what I would like is for what they can make vary from game to game. So you know what you can make in one game with a certain formula but you can't be certain that will work in the next game. (not random formulas but formulas available at random)

[digdug]

if the formula takes in consideration the level of the system, that will introduce a random factor, balancing the station custom works at the same time.

even if you bring 60 recoilless cannons (or whatever), you're not supposed to obtain a flenser cannon in a level 1 system.

[Betelgeuse]

the system levels are not random. Every system in game has a specific level. But my point was that even in the same system (lets face it tinkers are not in that many systems) you would get variation from game to game (even station to station if you wanted). This can be done the same as armor stations random shield upgrade.

I don't think the system that was proposed would let you bring in 60 recoilless cannons and get a flenser. You could bring in several dual flensers and get a flenser but that is something different.

[digdug]

well, it was just a silly example

I mean, i just wanted to limit the weapon maximum level using also the system level, for balancing purposes.

[Dosgamer3]

I love the Tinker deconstruction idea, but I'm afraid it would have to be hardwired into the code to work well.

This reminds me of the weapon upgrading "worktable" of Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic (KOTOR)...