Erosion - Nature takes over

[Matherodin]

@Rathlord: Good point. Never thought of that.

 

@OP and co: What kind of info do you need as in bugs, console messages and what not? Just the bugs or also minor things. Nice to know before i start writing things down.

[Guest Rocjawcypher]

Stay out of the tall grass! There are poke- I mean zombies there!

[turbotutone]

Perfomance wise, everything is fine even in demo mode, nice job. I'd have to explore more terrain to see the long term impact.

 

Great to hear, if it runs fine in demo mode then your set , demomode forces a full reset of the chunkreader + increases erosion and season counters at the same time so thats by far the most intensive setting.

 

I think we start in december instead of september.

 

Correct, it can be changed in the ThemeErosion.lua :

SetMonth		= 12,					-- Startingmonth override

@OP and co: What kind of info do you need as in bugs, console messages and what not? Just the bugs or also minor things. Nice to know before i start writing things down.

 

Bugs for sure, and pretty much anything that appears to be going wrong

 

One thing ive seen mentioned and is a know problem, is the fact that Erosion will spawn over special objects such a mailboxes, plantbeds, and players gardens apparantly hehe. Im still working on some solution, cause for example grass spawning on a mailbox tile aint that bad, in fact that looks pretty neat. A tree spawning on players garden on the other hand perhaps should not happen

[Kyun]

I don't know if it's about the seed or anything, but when loading a save with erosion enabled (before and after) all the trees are gone.

 

I agree about grass on special objects; grass around a barrel is pretty neat too

[turbotutone]

I don't know if it's about the seed or anything, but when loading a save with erosion enabled (before and after) all the trees are gone.

 

Wait a min, which trees are gone exactly?

 

So, to reproduce this locally, you started a game with erosion, save, then load it again?

[Kyun]

I loaded a save without erosion before, trees and stuff appeared a lot, as if I was playing with the mod all this time. Then I exit and reload, all trees added are gone (not the grass).

 

Then with a new game in demo mode, same thing but everything disapeared when reloading.

 

I was in west point.

[turbotutone]

Yep, you're right, i had not noticed this yet

 

Seems at first glance that indeed objects arent saved (the moddata is correctly saved tho) except for the grass, shall investigate this. Perhaps theres some function in PZ code i oughta call.

[Talksintext]

Thought:

- dried blood: over time blood dries into dark stains, eventually fading from view after a month

 

Not sure it's possible currently to access blood sprites, but it'd be nice down the road. Shouldn't be bright red blood everywhere weeks after I've killed a bunch of zombies.

 

Thought:

- corpse decomposition

 

Might take too much work to add in an extra few decomposition states for every corpse in every clothing variety in every stance. But it'd be such a nice touch. Certainly later decomposition states could just have 1 or 2 varieties since the clothes would be rotting brown and the bodies indestinguishable.

[Matherodin]

Here is info that i sent to the OP in a pm:

 

- I noticed some plants have still flowers in mid winter (yellow and purple flowers).
- Flowerbeds are all nice and flowery (guess those are part of the static background, so...probably not worth mentioning at all)
- The plastic white chairs outside of some houses are barely visible in winter.
- DOn't know it is part of the lightning setting, but the best way to describe is like there is a lot of bloom on the snow. Allmost makes me want to use sunglasses .
- Oh, allmost forgot. The snow kinda blends in to much with the UI (fps counter blends in 100%, the speed buttons too except for the speed that is selected).

Above things is what i have noticed so far. No game breaking stuff. The performance is good. Haven't noticed any difference in fps (i have a decent rig though).

 

 

Info from the reply from OP about above:

 

Some plants dont have seasonal sprites yet indeed, so flowers just bloom for the entire year for now

Will change in future..

 

I had not noticed the plastic chairs in snow yet hehe, we might add some shadow lines to those items to make them more visible.

 

The UI can only be fixed if TIS decides to tweak it a bit, or one of the sprites makes new sprites... so sadly that will remain for the time being..
What do you mean with the bloom exactly? its too bright on your screen? Ive tried to get a soft snow color, and this one works on my pc... but i guess with different local settings (monitor, colorprofile etc) it may appear rather different.

 

Anyways, points are noted, next update will contain some fixes

 

Greets

Turbo

[MadDan]

It says access is denied and stays "loading" in the game with a black screen. The mod is there in the game when I go to activate it, but the game just doesn't load in. I assume it's something to do with permission, but I have all permissions. :/ 

 

EDIT: Fixed it by making no spaces and lowercase while naming the save. Off topic, but is that planned to be fixed? (I saw a FAQ) 

 

On topic, this mod looks so frickin' amazing, thanks for taking the time to make it. This should hold me until NPCs come. Although the framerate is unbearable on my rig. :S

[Matherodin]

I made 2 screenshots yeasterday which felt "out of balance". When i have figured out how and where to dump those screeny''s i will update my post.

 

PS: Is there a guide somewhere on the forum about uploading images? Most posts i ever spend on forums before this 1 was about.... 2 on average. Never made it to the point of image uploading....

 

 

EDIT 1: Thanks to Dr_Cox and Marinus for the information. I will fiddle around to get it working . Thanks Again!

 

EDIT 2: Finaly got it (i hope). In the screenshot (i will stick to 1 for now)  you can see that between the houses and the path to it, there is no effect from the mod itself. At other places there is something from the mod (be it snow or a crack in the road etc). This spot seems so..... pristine. Can''t explain it better, sorry .

 

Edited January 23, 2014 by Matherodin

[Dr_Cox1911]

Little OT:

Guide for uploading

 

Will try it out right now, I´m so excited 

 

EDIT:

Just had a quick test with demomode and 0 erosion. Performance was great but after a year it didn´t get snowy and waiting for another year to pass just to get a complete crash when hitting september. No errors though.

[LeoIvanov]

I would also love an ability to chop down those little buggers - they filled up almost my entire garden, that means war 

[turbotutone]

I loaded a save without erosion before, trees and stuff appeared a lot, as if I was playing with the mod all this time. Then I exit and reload, all trees added are gone (not the grass).

 

To get back on this one, i think ive pinpointed the problem, it appears all the objects are actually placed but they are missing their sprites thus get rendered invisible. This only affects the initial chunks surrounding your start position, if you move the rest of the world appears normally.

Erosion only starts loading and setting up sprites when you load a map (new or save) due to the possibility of different themes.

It seems this sprite initialization block is called after the first map chunks are loaded, so i tried binding the initialization to other events such as OnWorldInit, PreMapLoaded etc, to no avail. Ive dropped devs a question regarding this topic. More on this later.

 

Thought:

- dried blood: over time blood dries into dark stains, eventually fading from view after a month

 

Thought:

- corpse decomposition

 

Corpses are definatly coming, the blood is a maybe... id have to actually scan for existing blood and replace them with a stage version, including moddata etc. Ill keep it in mind tho and will take a look at it.

 

Although the framerate is unbearable on my rig. :S

 

Yea, it doesnt run completly smooth on my machine neither , not sure what it is, but i started noticing a little performance drop since ive added many objects with colormods, will be investigated and hopefully improved. RJ has said to take a look at it as well when he has some spare time.

 

I made 2 screenshots yeasterday which felt "out of balance". When i have figured out how and where to dump those screeny''s i will update my post.

 

EDIT 2: Finaly got it (i hope). In the screenshot (i will stick to 1 for now)  you can see that between the houses and the path to it, there is no effect from the mod itself. At other places there is something from the mod (be it snow or a crack in the road etc). This spot seems so..... pristine. Can''t explain it better, sorry .

 

This is a bug indeed, noticed it as well when i was testing yesterday. It appears the system been skipping chunks, should be fairly easy to track this down, will do so tonight.

 

Thanks for the reports so far everyone

Will upload a fix for these issues soon.

I would also love an ability to chop down those little buggers - they filled up almost my entire garden, that means war 

 

Well if someone feels like doing so, i believe all erosion grass objects have the name "grass" if im not mistaken, so you could use that to find them

[Talksintext]

I don't know about the blood because I've heard elsewhere (for cleaning mods) that there's no way to call those specific sprites up in code, so you can't change or overwrite them currently. Might be doable after some patches.

[Kyun]

 

I loaded a save without erosion before, trees and stuff appeared a lot, as if I was playing with the mod all this time. Then I exit and reload, all trees added are gone (not the grass).

 

To get back on this one, i think ive pinpointed the problem, it appears all the objects are actually placed but they are missing their sprites thus get rendered invisible. This only affects the initial chunks surrounding your start position, if you move the rest of the world appears normally.

Erosion only starts loading and setting up sprites when you load a map (new or save) due to the possibility of different themes.

It seems this sprite initialization block is called after the first map chunks are loaded, so i tried binding the initialization to other events such as OnWorldInit, PreMapLoaded etc, to no avail. Ive dropped devs a question regarding this topic. More on this later.

 

Thought:

- dried blood: over time blood dries into dark stains, eventually fading from view after a month

 

Thought:

- corpse decomposition

 

Corpses are definatly coming, the blood is a maybe... id have to actually scan for existing blood and replace them with a stage version, including moddata etc. Ill keep it in mind tho and will take a look at it.

 

 

So if I move, exit the game somewhere else, load the save, and come back to my original location, trees will be here ? that's not too bad then

 

Maybe you could use the loadGridSquare event to set the sprites of the loaded grid when loading a save ?

 

About blood, I think it can be done, the corpse mod can clean a room with both corpses and blood, but I didn't get a look at the code.

[Kyle_Katarn]

This is a fantastic mod. Excellent work on it so far!

 

Something that I'd love to see that extends this mod is a few items to help cut the grass. So for instance, a sickle could be used for the least amount of sound, but the most amount of exhaustion, then it'd go up to something like a push-around lawn mower (the unmotorized version), which would make a little more noise, but less exhaustion, then a motorized lawn mower, which would take gasoline to power, makes way more noise, but way less exhaustion (though this would take some serious modding power as it's essentially an entity you'd have to move around (which I remember was possible a long time ago, but I think they took the ability out of the game)), and finally maybe a ride on mower (overkill yeah, and no sane zombie survivalist would use it, but it'd be cool to see it nonetheless, and give reason for the garages), which would make the most noise, take the most gas, but would essentially cost no stamina to use.

 

Regardless, I can't wait to see how this mod develops.

[Kyun]

Another thingy that might be an issue : sometimes I can't right click on the ground (some places, not all) to do most actions or interact with some objects placed there by myself. Maybe it's because there is a limit to the number of objects on a square ?

[turbotutone]

Goodmorning

 

I don't know about the blood because I've heard elsewhere (for cleaning mods) that there's no way to call those specific sprites up in code, so you can't change or overwrite them currently. Might be doable after some patches.

Yea could be right, i remember when i did the code that removes childsprites (which i assume blood is as well) that i couldnt find a way to identify sprites properly... in my piece of code that removes erosion childsprites atm im simply removing the last added (assuming thats the erosion sprite) but that is plain wrong ofcourse... will look into it

 

 

So if I move, exit the game somewhere else, load the save, and come back to my original location, trees will be here ? that's not too bad then

 

Maybe you could use the loadGridSquare event to set the sprites of the loaded grid when loading a save ?

 

About blood, I think it can be done, the corpse mod can clean a room with both corpses and blood, but I didn't get a look at the code.

 

 

About the reloading, nope sadly that doesnt work. what ive seen is that once you load a area and the trees get removed, next time you load trees are still gone for that particular area. i think because the game loads the objects, doesnt find the sprite, sets its sprite value to null, then saves that as if the objects were modified. Atleast thats my theory, didnt check it out yet.

 

I could use loadgridsquare as a temporary fix if theres no alternative to be found, but i rather avoid doing so, it would be a bit hacky imo.

 

This is a fantastic mod. Excellent work on it so far!

 

Something that I'd love to see that extends this mod is a few items to help cut the grass.

 

Thanks maybe ill make a small sickle or scythe or something later on to be included, if noone else does.

 

Another thingy that might be an issue : sometimes I can't right click on the ground (some places, not all) to do most actions or interact with some objects placed there by myself. Maybe it's because there is a limit to the number of objects on a square ?

 

Hmm, could you maybe give a few examples of the objects that dont work, and what kind of object placed by erosion is on that tile?

[Aardman55]

I know it's still in alpha, but just wanted to make sure you should make the streets / every tile in the world (and roof) get snow when in winter. Doesnt make sense to have non-snowy streets (unless the zombies are still doing their jobs and know how to drive snowplows )

[Matherodin]

I am also expieriencing a problem with the right-click menu. It doesn't work on grassy area's. I can ope nthe menu when right clicking on a building or on a road/path. Building on grass tiles is not a problem. Build walls, rain barrels and got some farming spots ready. Downside is that i have to activate the option on another tile first. (I included a screenshot of my safehouse for this test save. So OP can see what is on the tiles).

 

Something else i encountered that seems strange is the cracks (see screenshot). The cracks in the pavement are also on the grass tiles. Ís this a bug or is it working as planned

[Suomiboi]

Just test played the mod a bit. I first tested the demo mode and then an old save. The demo mode and 0 erosion result was similar to Dr_Cox. The first year went fine and all was great. The second winter I didn't get snow at all and then at some point I got a random CTD. The old save was good also. It was on the standard settings. I think there was a small fps drop, but nothing too big or nothing that noticeable.

 

Now to the appraisals! The atmosphere this mod creates is quite unique. I didn't recognise half of the places I had been to and felt a lot more eery in general. Also it added a small excitement element to combat which I didn't think of. I had to watch out for lots of trees when backing up from zombies, charching a swing. It really made the game harder in a good and realistic way.

 

Awesome work! Keep it up!

[turbotutone]

I know it's still in alpha, but just wanted to make sure you should make the streets / every tile in the world (and roof) get snow when in winter. Doesnt make sense to have non-snowy streets (unless the zombies are still doing their jobs and know how to drive snowplows )

 

I think thutz is working on tiles for the roofs, so those are comming soon . The streets however are a bit more difficult, thing is the snow tiles are a animation in essense for their "parent" tiles such as grass etc. The problem with street tiles is that many of them have childsprites such as cracks and what not, those would appear on top of the snow tile and that looks rather awkward

There are some other possibilities or ways to work around this, will certainly look into this later.

 

I am also expieriencing a problem with the right-click menu. It doesn't work on grassy area's. I can ope nthe menu when right clicking on a building or on a road/path. Building on grass tiles is not a problem. Build walls, rain barrels and got some farming spots ready. Downside is that i have to activate the option on another tile first. (I included a screenshot of my safehouse for this test save. So OP can see what is on the tiles).

 

Something else i encountered that seems strange is the cracks (see screenshot). The cracks in the pavement are also on the grass tiles. Ís this a bug or is it working as planned

 

Thanks for posting the info, much appreciated. Will look into this.

The cracks on the road made me chuckle a bit btw, that is definatly NOT supposed to happen like that In fact those cracks are for the walls. Do remember where exactly that happened? And also, were they already there when you came to that location or did they appear after some action / event?

(on a side note, so far it looks like the missing chunks are fixed for next update)

 

EDIT:

Just had a quick test with demomode and 0 erosion. Performance was great but after a year it didn´t get snowy and waiting for another year to pass just to get a complete crash when hitting september. No errors though.

(I must have overlooked this edit , answer below)

Just test played the mod a bit. I first tested the demo mode and then an old save. The demo mode and 0 erosion result was similar to Dr_Cox. The first year went fine and all was great. The second winter I didn't get snow at all and then at some point I got a random CTD. The old save was good also. It was on the standard settings. I think there was a small fps drop, but nothing too big or nothing that noticeable.

 

Now to the appraisals! The atmosphere this mod creates is quite unique. I didn't recognise half of the places I had been to and felt a lot more eery in general. Also it added a small excitement element to combat which I didn't think of. I had to watch out for lots of trees when backing up from zombies, charching a swing. It really made the game harder in a good and realistic way.

 

Awesome work! Keep it up!

 

Oi, the snow thing is odd, i think i have seen 2 or more complete cycles in a row with snow, but i may have written a bug after that Added to fixlist.

The random crashes are still a mystery, they dont produce a error or output to console of any kind. Ive heared a future update of PZ may include improved debugging output to console hopefully that will help tracing it down.

Also thank you for the compliments, glad to hear your enjoying it so far . Full grown nature, especially in summer, freaks me out as well

[Matherodin]

Are those cracks for walls? I noticed them a lot on the road tiles. I will see if i can make a map screen as reverance where i have seen things. I died on my save, so i hope the backup isn't that far back.

No idea if it was there from the start. I have noticed those cracks growing over time. Once i have pinpointed everything in my old save, i can try to start a new game with no zombies, and an inventory of starting situation of the cracks and what happenes after a while.

Upcoming week will be a busy week for me, so i don't know how much time i have to check it out. I will keep you updated when i find something.

 

PS: Seen the fact that the screenshots take a lot of space, i will see if i can budle and pack it into 1 file. I will contact you when i have something. Adding 10+ images to 1 post is a big hit on my max attachment space .

[RoboMat]

PS: Seen the fact that the screenshots take a lot of space, i will see if i can budle and pack it into 1 file. I will contact you when i have something. Adding 10+ images to 1 post is a big hit on my max attachment space .

 

Use an external site like imgur or imageshack (or - like me - dropbox)