Developing a book mod - request for tips

[thiosk]

Hi all,

 

Despite quite a bit of computer experience and time in PZ, i'm not really a modder, and never took to programming. That said, with the advent of the itemzed tool and a little spit and polish with the tutorials, I figure I should be able to get items in the game sometime this weekend. I'm going to blather on a bit about my project, and I'd be happy to field C&C or indicators of problems in scope, whatever.

 

My project is to modify books, replacing the "book" consumable with a variety of different titles and page lengths and get the distribution and ratios set.

 

The initial concept is to make regular books function like skill books, with different titles and page numbers. Thus once a player has read a title, they are driven to locate a novel book to continue the game. I see this tying into an overhaul of the boredom system, making books and other old media (CDs and mixtapes) a late game factor driving exploration and raiding, and community libraries, but I digress.

 

For now, I want a way to easily create the content and get them distributed into the worlds, and then hopefully being able to simply expand the number of book items to create more books that could pop up in the world, using the distribution edit features to create some that tend to be found only in libraries. 

 

I have a key question for the scope of this attempt. It appears to be straightforward to add pages from skillbooks to regular books. But I don't know how thats actually going to work in the wild, because skillbooks train a skill. I can leave that function off in itemzed, but I wondered whether there need to be a commensurate but hidden "skill trained" variable-- creating a ghost skill level tree that gets progressed as the player reads books?

 

Ultimately, I figure I can hack that into an achievements screen somewhere that imitates progression in the regular skill tree but is collectible related, but now you see the scope of my project will grow way outside my experience limits. For now, I really just want to remove the old book item and replace it from an expandable selection of titles, but require that each be read cover to cover to obtain any benefit.

Edited March 18, 2017 by thiosk