Changing misson counting/handling

[niculinux]

Hello, this is a suggestion i think players and modders will like, it's about to change how mission are counted, i got the idea from this post here in Extended Piratez subforum.

Now..i'm really incompetent in IT, but this may be possible without breaking compatibility with current nightlies? This is for developers (Warboy1982, SupSuper and others), please, mind also reading the thread from the beginning

[Arthanor]

Yes, please! As I stated in the post niculinux linked, a "completedMissions" section in the save would make a lot more sense than "possibleMissions". It's less info to save, and it is especially good for modders who might add missions as they flesh out their mod over time.

[Solarius Scorch]

But won't it break saves?

[niculinux]

But won't it break saves?

It shouldn't i guess...right?

[Meridian]

Of course it will break the saves!
But I personally think it is worth it.

[niculinux]

Of course it will break the saves!
But I personally think it is worth it.

May be the change to remedy some errors/oversights in the past games! Plesu, there is more lengevity! ^<^ No seriuously I think it's really worth

[Hobbes]

What are the practical reasons behind this 'need'?
* "when upgrading to a new version of a mod with new missions added, you will never see them" - this is wrong. You can still get those new missions once the possible missions list is emptied and refilled using the new mission settings.
* 'It's less info to save' - at the beginning yes since the completed missions will be 0, but as the campaign progresses the 'completed missions' list will increase and thus the save file. You're simply reverting the flow (with 'possible missions' it starts full and moves to empty, with 'completed missions' it starts empty and moves to full) of the mechanism, you're not making the save files smaller (and even if they did get smaller, why would a few additional kilobytes matter on the grand scheme of things?)
* 'This is an unfortunate design choice that makes changing missions a bad thing for upgrades' - The modder added a ton of different starting items but your campaign is already past that point. Or the modder added an upgrade to Cydonia but you've just started the campaign. In both cases, player has to restart or wait to see the changes in the game. With mission changes, player has to restart or wait too.
* 'and it is especially good for modders who might add missions as they flesh out their mod over time' - modders have quicker and more efficient ways of getting missions generated (through temporary ruleset modifications) than to having to play a campaign and wait until the RNG decides to generate that mission.

So, in exchange of the work implementing this, plus breaking all the saves, what would we get out of this?

[Hobbes]

Double post, but I'll use it because there's an underlying mod issue behind this request which is more relevant: Diminishing Returns.

For those who don't know the term, here's a brief explanation from Wikipedia: "The law of diminishing returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower incremental per-unit returns."

How does this applies to mods? Well basically, in all mod development, adding more features will at some point in the future start giving back less returns than when the mod was developed. As an example, on vanilla there are 5 missions that can be randomly chosen for possible missions (Base, Infiltration, etc.), so there are roughly 20% odds for each being generated. But if you have 30 missions, then the odds drop to around 3% that a specific mission will be spawned. So the more missions you add, the lower their chance of appearing either in a month or during a whole campaign.

For modders, this means that at a certain point it can get counter-productive to add more new features since they can never appear during a game due to the RNG. Of course you can change the odds to increase the chance of the new stuff appearing, but by doing that you're giving less importance to all your previous work.

And for players, this means that new features will eventually not give the same fun/novelty as during the first plays.

[Meridian]

What are the practical reasons behind this 'need'?
* "when upgrading to a new version of a mod with new missions added, you will never see them" - this is wrong. You can still get those new missions once the possible missions list is emptied and refilled using the new mission settings.

The issue is that you will never run out of the missions that way, even in vanilla it would take 2 years. In FMP and PirateZ it would take decades.

* 'It's less info to save' - at the beginning yes since the completed missions will be 0, but as the campaign progresses the 'completed missions' list will increase and thus the save file. You're simply reverting the flow (with 'possible missions' it starts full and moves to empty, with 'completed missions' it starts empty and moves to full) of the mechanism, you're not making the save files smaller (and even if they did get smaller, why would a few additional kilobytes matter on the grand scheme of things?)

That's just a point of view. If you had a chance to play through all missions it would be exactly the same amount of data to save in both cases.

Since (as mentioned above) you can't really play all missions, the amount of data saved would be actually smaller.

* 'This is an unfortunate design choice that makes changing missions a bad thing for upgrades' - The modder added a ton of different starting items but your campaign is already past that point. Or the modder added an upgrade to Cydonia but you've just started the campaign. In both cases, player has to restart or wait to see the changes in the game. With mission changes, player has to restart or wait too.

For vanilla, this is irrelevant, because it's stable and won't change, ever.

For mods (expansions and total conversions) in-development, this would be a great improvement. I really don't want to restart in the middle of the LP (several real-world months of play), but I want the new missions.

* 'and it is especially good for modders who might add missions as they flesh out their mod over time' - modders have quicker and more efficient ways of getting missions generated (through temporary ruleset modifications) than to having to play a campaign and wait until the RNG decides to generate that mission.

I think this was misunderstood... I guess the point of this was exactly the same as above.

[Meridian]

And a few numbers to support my statements.

Let's ignore the fact that in the first 6 months, you use up only 1 mission per month and assume each month we use up 2 missions per month from the list.

FMP 1.7.3 generates 148 missions... which is 148/2=74 months=6 years
PirateZ 0.96 generates 260 missions... which is 260/2=130 months=11 years of gameplay.

Good luck running out of missions ;-)

PS: vanilla generates 48 missions (= 24 months = 2 years)

[Arthanor]

Meridian is doing a great job explaining how it would be a good thing. I barely have a few points to add:

- It will break saves: Yes, only if the current functionality is removed and why would you do that? Nothing forces the code that is there to read the current save to be removed. The game could easily:
1-Generate a full mission list from ruleset.
2-Remove from the list anything from "completedMissions".
3-If "completedMissions" wasn't found in the save, but "possibleMissions" was, overwrite the mission list with the possible missions.

See, nothing broken, fully backwards compatible. Just need an if statement bracketing the old code so it executes only when the new one couldn't (ie on old saves).

- Save size: It may not matter storage wise, but it matters in the time it takes to read/write a save. I'm sure the difference is tiny, but on my computer the time to read/write is noticeable, so anything helps.

- "You're doing it wrong if you have too many missions": Certain people don't like "campaigns" (ie a pre-set series of mission or small sets of missions) but prefer open play. I love campaigns, but I play them once because after that they're boring.

If you play Piratez or the FMP, the crazy selection of missions ensures you will see different things. Especially in Piratez where a fair amount of tech depends on interrogations and corpses (for material). Not only will you encounter different enemies, you will actually have different tech and armors that come from those enemies.

That's replay value. Sure, you won't see everything in one "campaign", but you also won't see the same thing over and over in multiple campaigns. Over time you will get to see various amounts of everything. If the weights are done properly, you will manage to see a little bit of most things but what you see more of will vary, especially in a game like Piratez that takes so long to complete.

@Meridian: Is this 2 years reset really a thing? I thought it was just "regenerate when empty". That means it is pretty sure to happen in Piratez!

[Meridian]

@Meridian: Is this 2 years reset really a thing? I thought it was just "regenerate when empty". That means it is pretty sure to happen in Piratez!

It's just how Warboy explained it to me... he might have meant the "regenerate when empty", but wanted to use easier to understand words The 2 years reset and 2 years to run out of missions in vanilla seems like a too big coincidence. I removed that note from my previous post (you're reading too quickly).

[Hobbes]

The issue is that you will never run out of the missions that way, even in vanilla it would take 2 years. In FMP and PirateZ it would take decades.

If it can take decades on Piratez for a specific mission to pop up, then wouldn't it be better simply generate the new mission you want for your LP by editing the save file rather than relying on the RNG?

For vanilla, this is irrelevant, because it's stable and won't change, ever.

And we're not discussing vanilla, so why are you bringing it up why my point doesn't apply to vanilla?

I'll repeat my point again:  The modder added a ton of different starting items but your campaign is already past that point. Or the modder added an upgrade to Cydonia but you've just started the campaign. In both cases, player has to restart or wait to see the changes in the game. With mission changes, player has to restart or wait too, even if you have 'completedMissions' instead of 'possibleMissions'

For mods (expansions and total conversions) in-development, this would be a great improvement. I really don't want to restart in the middle of the LP (several real-world months of play), but I want the new missions.

As I said above, it's far more efficient and quick to edit a save file rather than wait for the RNG gods to spawn the new mission for your LP, specially on Piratez and FMP where there are so many possible missions. And you can already do it this, no changes to the engine required.

- "You're doing it wrong if you have too many missions"

I never said this, so please don't words into my mouth that I didn't said.

What I did said is: the more you add, the less you start getting in return after a certain point, a.k.a. "The law of diminishing returns"

What are the practical reasons behind this 'need'?

And I finish quoting myself by saying that so far I haven't seen a valid reason for this change. Some people sure 'want' this, but to me there's no need for it since it isn't needed for testing or generating specific missions (there are already better ways to do it)

[Arthanor]

I never said this, so please don't words into my mouth that I didn't said.

What I did said is: the more you add, the less you start getting in return after a certain point, a.k.a. "The law of diminishing returns"

That was just a quick way to summarize your "diminishing return" idea. Over-investing in something with a diminishing return is a bad idea, you claimed that some mods do that and presumably you think that's why they need this feature (otherwise why mention it here?) It isn't true any ways: even a mod that adds a single mission somewhere in its development time could use this feature: It would allow people who are following the mod's development to not have to play in their save to see that one new mission, in exactly the same way it allows Piratez players to see the one new mission. Number of previous missions has no impact on how useful this feature is at a given point, but makes this feature increasingly useful as more missions are added, because it saves more and more save editions.

It was an aside prompted by your double post, so I'll spoiler my reply to the idea that "more missions is diminishing returns" since I don't think it's really relevant.

Spoiler:

Your claim that after a certain number of missions you are not getting the same value out of them is true, but that's not a bad thing and you are not getting less necessarily. Instead of getting "more different within one play-through" by having a new mission in a small subset,  you get "more variability between different play-throughs" because there are more possibilities for the RNG to generate.

Not everybody want to see everything in one play-through, although I respect that that is how you seem to think (wanting to optimize terrain apparition so they are all sampled in a campaign, same for special missions). If you want to replay mods, more missions makes sense so you can get variations on campaign scale. So I would not call it a diminishing return: You get more enjoyment-length than otherwise. If everything is featured in one campaign, then yes, you do get diminishing returns because the mod was already special. It's just a bit more special (one more mission) but since I've already seen all of it, I still not going to play it twice. But not all mods are designed so you see everything in one go.

And I finish quoting myself by saying that so far I haven't seen a valid reason for this change. Some people sure 'want' this, but to me there's no need for it since it isn't needed for testing or generating specific missions (there are already better ways to do it)

It was mentioned already: Adding the possibility of new missions to the table as soon as the upgrade comes up so that you:
1 - make it possible to see new content (as generated by the RNG instead of cheating it in your save)
2 - increase your odds of this play-through being different from the previous one by adding the possibility of new missions.

Some people are dedicated enough to wait for the RNG to generate the mission they need/want to see and consider save editing to tweak/pick alien missions cheating. I am one of those. I want the computer to play the aliens. I don't want to look at what is generated and want even less to put something there myself. The only part I can tolerate tweaking is adding possible missions because there is no other way to see Dioxine's work and, as you can see, I am trying to get away from even that part of save tweaking. I will never add/remove/change ongoing missions (although I can understand the value of that for LP's, like Meridian's FMP LP, since you want to maximize content/time for your watchers)

What I don't understand is why you seem so opposed to the idea. You have nothing to lose, others have something to gain, what's wrong with it? Devs are the only ones to lose something from working on this (their time) and I'm sure they can figure out where to spend it by themselves.

[Meridian]

If it can take decades on Piratez for a specific mission to pop up, then wouldn't it be better simply generate the new mission you want for your LP by editing the save file rather than relying on the RNG?

That's the point! I DON'T want to edit my save... that's why we are asking for this change. And I don't want a specific mission... that's good only for testing... I just want a chance for the new mission to be greater than zero.

And we're not discussing vanilla, so why are you bringing it up why my point doesn't apply to vanilla?

We're discussing a general feature, which applies to vanilla too. I just used vanilla as an example that even in the most extreme case, it is still worth doing.

I'll repeat my point again:  The modder added a ton of different starting items but your campaign is already past that point. Or the modder added an upgrade to Cydonia but you've just started the campaign. In both cases, player has to restart or wait to see the changes in the game. With mission changes, player has to restart or wait too, even if you have 'completedMissions' instead of 'possibleMissions'

Even if you don't reply to anything else... can you please explain this to me like to a man with IQ 10 please? I really don't understand what do you mean.

a/ I don't care about any starting items... why do you even mention them? We talk about missions, not items.
b/ I don't care about a SINGLE cydonia mission... I care about the dozens of missions before cydonia
c/ And last, but MOST important. If 'completedMissions' is implemented, the player DOESN'T have to restart... already next month the new missions could spawn... that's the reason why we ask for this feature

As I said above, it's far more efficient and quick to edit a save file rather than wait for the RNG gods to spawn the new mission for your LP, specially on Piratez and FMP where there are so many possible missions. And you can already do it this, no changes to the engine required.

Absolutely irrelevant for this discussion. This feature is for normal people, who cannot edit saves. We don't talk about testing here, we talk about playing.

And I finish quoting myself by saying that so far I haven't seen a valid reason for this change. Some people sure 'want' this, but to me there's no need for it since it isn't needed for testing or generating specific missions (there are already better ways to do it)

I also don't absolutely need this... I will continue changing my saves as the LP progresses, because I know how to do it.
But many people don't.
And even for me it would be much more convenient.