mod_development

[drifting ore]

there's never a scenario in which you should override the entire function and not simply undo undesired effects and pass through

reasons: it can break the game, sometimes in very subtle ways that are virtually impossible to predict, and because it destroys mod compatibility

[bright fog]

There is

It sure will make your mod incompatible with other mods that do it

But there are uses to it

Such as overwriting the main menu visuals to make your own

[drifting ore]

besides fixing core game bugs i can't think of an example that needs overriding vs decorating

[bronze yoke]

also in some cases undoing undesired effects is literally not possible

[bright fog]

read above

[drifting ore]

i read it, did not convince me

[bright fog]

Yet it's a use case, idk wtf you want more

10YL does it with their launcher addon

I can most likely find quite a few other examples that do it

[bronze yoke]

sometimes your override is so significant that mod compatiblity isn't something worth thinking about anymore

[bright fog]

And for legit reasons

[bronze yoke]

in the main menu example, how is a mod going to stay compatible with that just because you didn't delete their hook

[drifting ore]

everything is a use case, i'm arguing that it's not a valid use case to delete the previously defined function wholesale

[bright fog]

It's fine a mod being incompatible with another one, as long as they clearly state it that other mods doing something with that specific thing might break

[bronze yoke]

it's better to just save yourself the complexity and performance overhead and hard overwrite

[bright fog]

Sometimes you have to overwrite everything, that's it

[drifting ore]

i have a concrete example. One guy made a mod that fixes spear repair counter resetting every time you craft and reset spears.

[bright fog]

For what you're trying to achieve

[drifting ore]

That mod had incompatibility with a lot of cool stuff such as SOMW and Weapon Stats

purely for the single reason of overwriting the function instead of decorating it

[bronze yoke]

yes, hard overwrites are bad ever

that's not what we were disagreeing about

[drifting ore]

well what I did is re-wrote it to use a decorator instead of overwriting

[bright fog]

But when a decoration or using what was originally there can't be done, you don't have any choice

[drifting ore]

and it worked

so there was no reason to overwrite that function in the first place

and of course my mod did not had such compatibility issues

[bright fog]

And it's okay if you know what you are doing and CLEARLY state that your mod overides a specific function

[bronze yoke]

nobody is saying you should always or even usually use hard overwrites

[bright fog]

And that's an example which CAN use a decoration

[drifting ore]

how about this

the blanket advice against overwriting is like the blanket advice against using GOTO

[bright fog]

I literally never said that you shouldn't do decorations: YOU SHOULD
But if what you are trying to achieve requires a full rewrite, do it, as long as you clearly state it in your mod page, that is not a problem

[drifting ore]

if you really know what you're doing then it's fine as long as you do it properly

but otherwise it should be avoided

[bright fog]

Yeah it should, I never said the contrary but if it's the only way: do it

If you had read my messages since the start, you would have understood I was never against avoiding an overwrite

But if what you are trying to achieve requires a full rewrite, do it

as long as you clearly state it in your mod page, that is not a problem

[drifting ore]

don't put that in bold caps please, some newbie coder might be reading it

and in their mind a minor addition ot base function = requires full override

[bright fog]

I literally don't give a shit, I've stated 10 times in this conversation that you should do it if you know what you are doing AND you can only use that

[drifting ore]

but we can agree that we shold help foster environment where mods are compatible, right?

so my opinion is that the default advice on the matter should be: do decorate, don't override

[bronze yoke]

that is the default advice

[bright fog]

Has always been

[drifting ore]

great!

I suppose this entire argument hten is just a case of miscommunication again, but this time on my side. The way you said it made it sound to me like "as long as you state that it makes your mod incompatible it's cool to override whatever you want" but that's just how I saw it, seems like it was a warped view of what you meant.

[bright fog]

[alpine scroll]

I'll try this decoration thing to change it. All I wanted to do is to make the dict being used by the function to include the other items from the mod

In True Actions v3 - Dancing, there are collectibles you get from the cereal, and they are numbered as (01 of 30) , (02 of 30) etc. However, while there are 30 items, the recipe only has 26 of those in the dictionary called by the function. So I was overwriting it to add a complete dictionary instead

But yea, it didnt work when I tried overwriting it. Maybe because its a recipe thing? Dunno

I'll see if doing decoration works

[unreal pewter]

for some reason, no loot is spawning in these containers

ive tried regenerating the loot in these over and over but nothing works

[alpine scroll]

Have they being grabbed and replaced by players?

[unreal pewter]

no im testing this singleplayer in my map, sorry should have stated that

ive messed a little with loot pools, such as adding books and magazines and stuff, but all of that stuff is encased in the same function, which correctly puts loot into other containers and stuff

and i didnt even touch wardrobes at all, so

not sure whats wrong there

[tall moss]

I got a question, figured this might be the appropriate channel for it: how hard would it be to create a mod that is a script that replaces items of two specific categories with a singular specific item? It would be a gag mod for a running private joke I have with mates who also play this game.

[alpine scroll]

You mean something that replaces ammo and weapons with dead rats, for example

[tall moss]

As a hypothetical, yes

[alpine scroll]

You would have to set a trigger, one of the OnEvents things, and make a function that would check the inventory of the player, remove the item if found, and then add a new item

Dont think it would be that hard

On one of the Expanded helicopter mods, there is a zombie that eats your socks. So it is an example of how to remove something from a player

[tall moss]

For real? That's awesome xD

I'll have to look into it. Thanks.

And for clarity, friend of mine has put us in harms way trying to open a can of chilli, while he was driving! So now I seek to replace every spawned non-perishables and perishables with just chilli cans. Load up a game and just enjoy his reaction.

Almost crashed the car and killed us all...

[alpine scroll]

Just add a check to not replace the chilli cans itself

Otherwise it will remove itself and add itself back

[bronze yoke]

you can swap it OnFillContainer, that should be simpler and not have that issue

[alpine scroll]

Needless processing

[tall moss]

Yeah I assumed that would create a nasty feedback loop

[drifting ore]

i hazard a guess that this is caused by the recipe being incomplete rather than any problem with the game, which would warrant changing the function code to include it manually

[alpine scroll]

Exactly, but the recipe is a function

[drifting ore]

what do you mean exactly? recipe is a PZ item script normally

i.e. it has nothing to do with lua

[alpine scroll]

    player:getInventory():AddItem(DifficultDanceBook[ZombRand(#DifficultDanceBook)+1]);
end``` this is in the original, after a table with 26 entries (instead of 30)

[bronze yoke]

most recipes use lua functions to implement more advanced functionality

[alpine scroll]

Because a closed Kosmotsars generate an open kosmotsars + a dance card]

[drifting ore]

oh i see

in this case you need to modify DifficultDanceBook table, not the funciton

[alpine scroll]

Yea, but its local

[drifting ore]

rats

[alpine scroll]

Thats why I was trying to overwrite everything

It would be easier if it wasnt local

And simply copying the function and adding to a new mod breaks the +dancecard function

[drifting ore]

i don't really see how making an exact duplicate but which uses a different table would break it

[alpine scroll]

Ok, not an exact duplicate

I am trying just to replace the .lua that has a problem, not upload another version of the mod itself

So my version, on itself, will not work

It would require the original to apply the fix

[drifting ore]

You probably should upload that as a fix, or submit it to the original author.

[alpine scroll]

I did comment on the mod

[drifting ore]

Writing that directly in the workshop mod folder is liable to get removed when anything updates.

[bronze yoke]

can we see your code? we can't really know why it doesn't work otherwise

[alpine scroll]

Of course. First the original:

"TAD.BobTA_Afoxe_Samba_Raggae_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_Three_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Boogaloo_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Charleston_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Gandy_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_House_Dancing_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Locking_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Robot_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Robot_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Salsa_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Samba_Olodum_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Samba_Pagode_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Slide_Step_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Snake_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Tut_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Tut_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Wave_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Wave_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Rick_Dancing_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Moonwalk_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Northern_Soul_Spin_and_Floor_Work_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Northern_Soul_Spin_Dip_and_Splits_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Breakdance_1990_card", "TAD.BobTA_Breakdance_Freezes_Combo_card",
}


function Recipe.OnCreate.OpenKosmotsars(items, result, player)
    player:getInventory():AddItem(DifficultDanceBook[ZombRand(#DifficultDanceBook)+1]);
end```

Now mine:

"TAD.BobTA_Afoxe_Samba_Raggae_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_Three_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Boogaloo_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Charleston_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Gandy_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_House_Dancing_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Locking_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Robot_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Robot_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Salsa_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Samba_Olodum_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Samba_Pagode_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Slide_Step_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Snake_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Tut_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Tut_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Wave_One_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Wave_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Rick_Dancing_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Moonwalk_Two_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Northern_Soul_Spin_and_Floor_Work_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Northern_Soul_Spin_Dip_and_Splits_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Breakdance_1990_card", 
"TAD.BobTA_Breakdance_Freezes_Combo_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_One_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_Three_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_Four_card",
}


function Recipe.OnCreate.OpenKosmotsars(items, result, player)
    player:getInventory():AddItem(DifficultDanceBook[ZombRand(#DifficultDanceBook)+1]);
end```

And the structure

[drifting ore]

do you replace the contents of the original file, or is this a different file, or is it in a different folder but under the same name as the original?

[alpine scroll]

This is a new file

A new mod

I want my mod to be complementary to this mod

[drifting ore]

i think the issue is that it's called "recipecode.lua"

it overrides the entire vanilla file

[alpine scroll]

There is a vanilla file that is called recipecode.lua?

[drifting ore]

yeah

[bronze yoke]

that would actually cause the opposite issue but yeah you really need to use unique filepaths

[alpine scroll]

I dont think that it is that, but sure, I'll change the filename

Because the recipe of making a closed cereal becoming an open cereal still works

[drifting ore]

when I was doing this kind of thing my issue was that my recipecode file was overriding the vanilla, and since i was making decorators it caused it to crash because there were no functions to decorate

[alpine scroll]

I'll do it anyway, just because I honestly dont know what else could be

[bronze yoke]

they're replacing a mod's function

the wrong filepath would break most of the recipes in the game but not the one it's changing

[alpine scroll]

Btw, I'll change my code to this: ```local oldfunction = Recipe.OnCreate.OpenKosmotsars
local DifficulTADnceBook = {
"TAD.BobTA_Afoxe_Samba_Raggae_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_One_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_Three_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Belly_Dancing_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Boogaloo_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Charleston_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Gandy_card",
"TAD.BobTA_House_Dancing_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Locking_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Robot_One_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Robot_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Salsa_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Samba_Olodum_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Samba_Pagode_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Slide_Step_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Snake_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Tut_One_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Tut_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Wave_One_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Wave_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Rick_Dancing_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Moonwalk_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Northern_Soul_Spin_and_Floor_Work_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Northern_Soul_Spin_Dip_and_Splits_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Breakdance_1990_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Breakdance_Freezes_Combo_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_One_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_Two_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_Three_card",
"TAD.BobTA_Thriller_Four_card",
}

function Recipe.OnCreate.OpenKosmotsars(items, result, player)
dancecard = DifficulTADnceBook[ZombRand(#DifficulTADnceBook)+1]
print("DANCE BOOK" .. dancecard)
player:getInventory():AddItem(dancecard);
return oldfunction
end```

To decorate it and to find it on the console in case it errors

[drifting ore]

in this case decoration isn't really useful

[alpine scroll]

Well then. I'll remove it so its not bloating the code

[drifting ore]

anyway just try your original approach, but give your file a unique name

i mean consider the "require" command

if you have multiple files called "recipecode.lua" which one is required? because only one is required

the game doesn't know which to choose, so it's more or less random. Which causes issues one way or another.

[bronze yoke]

it's not random

[alpine scroll]

I think I'll need to add a new recipe and override it on recipes too

[bronze yoke]

that's not how the game loads lua files

[drifting ore]

i mean yea sure it's not random, it's deterministic

[bronze yoke]

if multiple names have the same filepath the one in the mod latest in the load order is the only one that is loaded

[drifting ore]

from modders' perspective it's as good as random

you as a modder can't control what mods are installed and what's the load order

[bronze yoke]

if it's specifically recipecode.lua or any other vanilla file require is meaningless anyway

you should require the original mod's file that defines this function to ensure your file never loads before it, but if your file is breaking the original that probably isn't the cause of the problem you're having

the load order of lua files is (mostly) alphabetical so load order isn't too unpredictable

'load order' here being unrelated to mod load order, which apart from resolving file conflicts like that doesn't really do anything

[alpine scroll]

I am testing on a multiplayer server, so it requires a server restart to get the lastest version from the workshop

So thats why its taking so ling

Long/

[drifting ore]

you can set up a local mod, it doesn't even requires game restart, just lua reload

[bronze yoke]

you should just test locally, this won't behave differently in multiplayer and it's quite literally a hundred times faster

[drifting ore]

wait what are we even saying lmao

the same mechanism that allows you to publish mods to workshop, allows you to play these very mods locally

so just unsub from your workshop mod and enable it as local

[alpine scroll]

I mean, I play on a dedicated server that I host myself on my computer

[drifting ore]

same deal

wait no, only if you play through the normal game using "host" option

or is it? i'm not so sure

[alpine scroll]

Oh no, its a separate instance

Like the dedicated server thing

[drifting ore]

is it even at all different form hosting from a normal game?

[alpine scroll]

It MAY have an option to easy reload

But well

Connecting here

[bronze yoke]

test in singleplayer, servers take an insane amount of time to start up, if you're worried about it not working in multiplayer test it in a server after you've got it working

[alpine scroll]

Also, I'll check the console.txt

See if it has any problem

[bronze yoke]

however this is code that runs on the client (despite being in the server folder) so it doesn't usually behave differently in multiplayer

[alpine scroll]

I mean, not that insane. Its like 3 mins top?

[drifting ore]

the differences are usually down to certain functions not triggering gamestate sycnrhonization so you need to do it manually

[bronze yoke]

mine take a lot longer than that and singleplayer takes about five seconds

[alpine scroll]

So

The good news is that somehow now its working?

The bad news is that I have two recipes

So possibly the reason was the recipecode.lua

[drifting ore]

how come you have 2 recipes though

[alpine scroll]

I had another file

[drifting ore]

do you also carry a bunch of files that define identical recipes?

[alpine scroll]

That I tried to do the override thing

[drifting ore]

as a fix your mod only needs the fixed files, you need to delete everythign else

[alpine scroll]

This

Yea

I'll delete this

Btw, changing the subject a bit

Do any of you know a way to load a table that exists in the save file, to alter its contents?

Mod wise

Because I would like to be able to clear the Home Tapes table from time to time

So it can spawn again

[drifting ore]

you need loot respawn to be enabled

[alpine scroll]

Oh no

Not that

The respawn is on

HOWEVER

[drifting ore]

otherwise even if you change anything, then only newly spawned containers will have the items

[alpine scroll]

The home tapes are hard coded inside the game

So once they spawn, the ID get stored in a table

[bronze yoke]

use ModData

[alpine scroll]

And never again spawn

ModData even tho its not from a mod?

[bronze yoke]

moddata isj ust tables to store whatever you want in

[drifting ore]

moddata is a lua table that can store anything

[bright fog]

Mod data

[bronze yoke]

local modData
Events.OnInitGlobalModData.Add(function()
    modData = ModData.getOrCreate("MyUniqueKey")
end)

[alpine scroll]

As long as I know the key, I can read and edit it, right?

[bronze yoke]

oh you want to edit an internal list that already exists

you'll have to go find out how that system actually works, that system is half java so it might use moddata or it might use something else that may or may not actually be reachable

[alpine scroll]

#mod_development message

Here

So its stored inside a homeVhsSpawned array when its spawned, otherwise it ignores and doesnt spawn it anymore

Also, my code didnt work

god dammit

[alpine scroll]

Im seriously considering just adding a translation file to make it (1 of 26) instead of (1 of 30)

GOD DAMMIT IT WORKED NOW

@bronze yoke Thanks for mentioning that lua loads in ALPHABETICAL ORDER

God dammit

Why bother to have a mod variable in servertest.ini if its not being respected

[bronze yoke]

yeah, mod load order does very little - a lot of people are really superstitious about it, changing it will rarely resolve issues

[drifting ore]

it fixes issues caused by load order. Most mods are built in a way that it doesn't matter. But for fix mods, it does.

fix mods need to always load after the original

[bronze yoke]

only if they have to override a file, usually they don't

[drifting ore]

or a function

otherwise you create a function and then the original overrides your fix with the broken one

[bronze yoke]

mod load order does not affect the order in which lua files load

[drifting ore]

doesn't it? what does it do then?

[bronze yoke]

it resolves filename conflicts

there's some special handling for maps too

[alpine scroll]

So, my problems were not the fact that I did something wrong. My idea was right at the first iteration. However my 1st mistake was naming it recipecode.lua and the second mistake having a name that was alphabetically before the one I wanted to change

[ancient grail]

i hate overwriting lua files
it doesnt work for all clients . but if the mod only had local functions and didnt return it then theres no choice

[alpine scroll]

Nothing with the code itself, I mean.

[drifting ore]

well for my mod which need to decorate functions I resolved the issue by using require which forces lua load order

[bronze yoke]

if you begin your file with require "TheOriginalFile" that file will be forced to load before your one regardless

[alpine scroll]

I'll keep that in mind

I'm just happy that I'll be able to finish my dance card collection

[bronze yoke]

if you keep having trouble, there are ways to 'disable' files that don't export anything at all

even if a file uses only locals, locals need to either call external functions to do anything or are triggered by them, so you can just cut them off from doing anything at those points

[alpine scroll]

Works

Finally

I added the original mod as a requirement

[drifting ore]

now you just need to make edit the original mod's picture by pasting "FIXED" on top of it, and upload it to steam

maybe add a small picture that shows something like (1 of 26) => (1 of 30)

but what's the original mod's developer standing in this? do they not want to fix it or something?

i mean i can see how this can be an intentional jab at cereal gacha prizes where the cool rare ones straight up don't exist

[bronze yoke]

iirc not much has been heard from them for a bit over a year

[drifting ore]

well if it's abandonware then you can straight up reupload the entire thing with fixes and take over as the maintainer this way

since this is a modding scene i will completely neglect the IP aspect of it

(in a gamedev scene it's a quick way to lose your life savings) (but here in the modding scene, where this mod violated a lot of copyrights in the first place, it's moot to even discuss anything)

[bronze yoke]

you're thinking of true music

[drifting ore]

pretty sure "Kosmostars" flakes is a protected trademark and all associated imagery are protected by copyrights

and yet here we are. See this is modding not gamedev, aspects like this wholly don't matter. Worst thing that can happen is that Nintendo thinks your Mario Amiibo mod infringes on their property and issue a C&D to you.

[bronze yoke]

is it not parody

[drifting ore]

well i'm not joking either

[bronze yoke]

huh?

[drifting ore]

uh what

[bronze yoke]

'is it not parody' referring to the kosmotsar pun

[drifting ore]

nope, that's how it's spelled on the box

[bronze yoke]

no, it's spelled kosmostars on the box

[drifting ore]

I'm not a lawyer so i can't tell if this razor thin margin passes as fair use or is a copyright infringement. But also like I said this matter is not even relevant here.

[hollow lodge]

I just updated my More Jackets mod and I was curious if you guys can propose outfits suggestions to spawn on zomboids. I know it's a very common piece of clothing but I suck at fashion, any feedback is welcome

[grizzled fulcrum]

This is what I'm doing for another mod. So glad that licenses exist ヽ(ー_ー )ノ

[drifting ore]

yeah if it's MIT or BSD or GPL then it's even completely fine to do this

[grizzled fulcrum]

the original mod is under gplv3 like my mods so it works well

[drifting ore]

Here I recall the lamentations of people who made Lugaru (if I recall this correctly) for people reuploading their game. I don't know if they actually lost any profits because of it - seems like the same exact deal as with regular piracy, except it's technically not illegal.

In any case, charging people for complete binaries of otherwise open source project is a common monetization strategy for FOSS software.

Also software licenses don't cover game assets.

[grizzled fulcrum]

I think it is reasonable

[drifting ore]

It's 100% reasonable. Most of the time people reupload FOSS projects is either as a fork or because the original was abandoned.

[prisma wren]

how does one spawn modded items in the lua scripts?

i was thinking that the last stand accumulator scenario would be cool with some modded weapons

looking at the code it uses like

"Base.Shotgun"

would it instead be like "amodsID.aWeaponsId"

    self:createItemButton(16, y, "Base.Shotgun", 500)
    self:createItemButton(120, y, "Base.ShotgunShells", 90)

what do the numbers mean here as well? height and width?

[bronze yoke]

it depends on the item's module

the first line of a script file will name the module

usually it's supposed to be something like the mod id but a lot of modders just throw things in base

[prisma wren]

how should i go about figuring out what to use

i was thinking of adding the last of guns remastered weapons

[astral geode]

Can I set a sandbox option to only be visible in debug mode ?

[grizzled fulcrum]

I don't know about that, but why would you need to do it anyway?

[astral geode]

For testing so I can have my mod load separate values that make debugging easier but wouldn't be balanced at all for actual gameplay

Would prefer to hide the option from most people

[grizzled fulcrum]

Why not just check if getDebug() and load them anyway?

If you are going to end up using those separate values to make debugging easier, and no single player in prod is going to use them (since it's debug only) then you might as well just load them as is.

[limber onyx]

Hi guys. Sorry to intrude. Need some help figuring out a problem I'm having with a mod.
I got Inventory Tetris and recently installed some compatibility patches and made some changes of my own in debug mode that changes the stack limit and grid value of various items and containers.

For some reason, these changes only seem to take effect as long as I'm playing with debug mode. The moment I disable Debug from the game properties, the modifications to the items are gone.

What puzzles me is that most of the changes are made by mods, even if I'm screwing up with placing the lua file with my own manual modifications, I don't see why the changes made by mods should stop working as well. Help please

[drifting ore]

What debug functions do you use in your code?

[limber onyx]

The tetris mod has a buit in editor that exports a lua file that you must save into your mods folders, let me fetch it, just a sec

[drifting ore]

do you mean inventory tetris' own debug mode?

and not PZ -debug mode?

[limber onyx]

Both. In order to use the one from Tetris, I must be using -debug to have the option to edit the items.

It occurred to me that maybe I'm not placing the exported file where it needs to be, but then the modifications made by other patches i subscribed from the workshop should work, and they don't unless I have -debug activated

[drifting ore]

it could be filename clash issue

apparently it's OK to have identically named PZ scripts but identically named Lua scripts in different folders is generally not allowed

[bronze yoke]

huh?

identically named scripts is bad

[limber onyx]

``
Events.OnGameBoot.Add(function()

local itemPack = {
    ["Base.Hat_SurgicalMask_Blue"] = {
        ["height"] = 1,
        ["width"] = 1,
        ["maxStackSize"] = 5,
    },
    ["Base.Hat_SurgicalMask_Green"] = {
        ["height"] = 1,
        ["width"] = 1,
        ["maxStackSize"] = 5,
    },
    ["Base.Bowl"] = {
        ["height"] = 1,
        ["width"] = 1,
        ["maxStackSize"] = 4,
    },
}
TetrisItemData.registerItemDefinitions(itemPack)
TetrisContainerData.registerContainerDefinitions(containerPack)

end)
``

[drifting ore]

probably? but i've never had issues with those

they stack rather than override each other

[bronze yoke]

one of the most commoni ssues people come here with is making an items.txt or a recipes.txt and deleting the entire game

[drifting ore]

huh, in my mod i've got items.txt living happily and not messing anything up

[limber onyx]

Actually, I was trying to fix some items manually, since the patch i subscribed to didn't seem to work

[bronze yoke]

are you sure this mod is supposed to load stuff in non-debug? there's not that many behaviour differences it could depend on, it sounds deliberate - do these mods work without your changes?

it also sounds like something they would absolutely not do deliberately but otherwise i have no clue 😅

[drifting ore]

yeah debug mode itself doesn't really change any behaviors (from what I can tell) it only activates Lua debugger and a bunch of editors/spawners

[limber onyx]

I play witht he SUSCEPTIBLE mod that makes you get sick from the airborne Knox infection

This mod includes some Surgical Masks and Surgical Mask Boxes

When you play with Tetris and open a box, 50 of them pop out and cannot be stacked
So I subscribed to a "Tetris ALL MODS" patch that claimed to fix this since Susceptible was included in their supported mod list

When i went to play, the same happens. Box opens and you get 50 individual masks taking up all the grid space

[drifting ore]

do tetris fix modpage says anything about debug mode? what do people say in comments?

having mods straight up broken is par for the course and you can't assume that everything is functioning as claimed

[limber onyx]

They say that when you modify any item stats with their editor, it exports a lua file that you must then manually turn into a mod installed in your machine locally or uploaded to the workshop.

[drifting ore]

ok well where did you put it?

paste the filepath

[limber onyx]

ok

\Zomboid\mods\Inventory Tetris - Susceptible Patch\media\lua\client\InventoryTetris\TetrisDataPack_susceptiblemasks.lua

[drifting ore]

the entire path please, down to the lua file

that looks correct though i'm not positive
in order to upload that to workshop it needs to be in /Zomboid/Workshop/MODNAME/Contents/mods/MODNAME(s)/media...

just to be sure do check that there is no modID clash between your patch and anything else

[limber onyx]

gotcha

[drifting ore]

modID clashing is the biggest contributor to faulty loading

[bronze yoke]

that's correct for a mods/ mod

is the other mod's file also called TetrisDataPack_susceptiblemasks?

[limber onyx]

Nope, its just TetrisDataPack.lua

the mod page says to give it another name to avoid issues

Oh you mean the one that is supposed to be a compatibility patch for "All the mods"?

[drifting ore]

if any of them are exact duplicates then this might cause gamebreaking errors

[limber onyx]

The All the mods patch is called: TetrisDataPack_AllTheMods.lua

again, its weird since that patch claims to support the Mask items for SUSCEPTIBLE but it does nothing when i load it into the game

[drifting ore]

the filenames are fine it looks like. What about mod IDs?

is your mod ID an exact duplicate of another installed mod?

[limber onyx]

no, its just a local machine mod, not in the workshop

[drifting ore]

no I mean the PZ mod ID, the text one. The numerical one is Workshop ID.

[limber onyx]

ahh, let me check

[drifting ore]

It's easy to know if you pasted mod.info from somewhere else without checking, or if you pasted the modID string from somewhere else

[limber onyx]

id=Inventory Tetris Susceptible Mask Patch

[fossil salmon]

Why is there no e-girl bathwater mod, and how do I add one?

[drifting ore]

Are whitespaces allowed? ModIDs are usually spelled without non-alphanumeric characters.

[limber onyx]

idk, ill change it to underscores and test

[drifting ore]

Also not sure if modID must match folder names

[limber onyx]

No, the folders can be different

[grizzled fulcrum]

I do this 😭

But I never use Base and only use my own module, so maybe this somehow does not cause any issues?

[drifting ore]

copy and paste item script for a bottle of water and change the name and translation to e-girl text.

[fossil salmon]

Where does one find that script. never actually done a mod for PZ before.

[drifting ore]

it's in Project Zomboid/media/scripts/items_food.txt

in order to make it as a mod you need to make your own items.txt file in your personal mod folder but with the same game file path, paste in it code for water bottle from the original and tweak it. Change script moduel to your own mod's.

your mod folder is C:/User/Zomboid/Workshop/YOURMOD/Contents/mods/YOURMOD and in there you add /media/scripts/items.txt

in the mod folder there needs to exist a bunch of auxiliary files, adapt them from example folder

[fossil salmon]

so basically in mods add a directory called e-girl_bathwater, then just add an empty items.txt and then put in my script?

[drifting ore]

yeah pretty much. Note that the script for the item itself needs to be wrapped in module YOURMOD { } same as in the original file

well there's also a matter of adding it to distributions table so it can spawn

[fossil salmon]

(If you can point me at a wiki or something, I can dig into it in a bit.

I assume I also need to come up with a model/icon too?

[drifting ore]

you can just reuse existing ones

[fossil salmon]

I don't think there's a bright pink glass jar in the game though. lol

[drifting ore]

if you feel like making putting an actual effort into this then you can change the water bottle icon and world item texture

or a glass jar i guess

glass jars exist in the game i think

[fossil salmon]

I assume I can also add effects to the item too? like, happiness decrease on drinking?

[drifting ore]

yeah sure

you can look at soda bottle and wine bottle to check the stats code

[fossil salmon]

What would be a good balance for it. I want it to give a massive debuff to happiness

but not sure what to balance that with.

[drifting ore]

nothing

it doesn't needs to be balanced

it's kinda like drinking bleach - there is no added benefit that outweighs the poisoning

or since it's, you know, just tap water - there are no additional effects

[fossil salmon]

Is there a way to set drink priority for auto drink so that if you have this time bomb in your main inventory and you end up auto drinking it you get the debuff?

[drifting ore]

not sure if you can autodrink anything other than plain water

[fossil salmon]

I auto drink pop all the time, I think?

[slow hound]

not without a mod

[drifting ore]

does anyone knows how many usable bits ZombRand produces?

in other words what's the maximum value you can pass to ZombRand before it starts skipping numbers?

[grizzled fulcrum]

well the param you pass to ZombRand (which is a double) gets explicitly casted to a long, then gets implicitly casted to an int, then ultimately gets explicitly casted back into a double for output

for the bits, iirc it's 32 or something like that (because ultimately it's being processed as an int)

[drifting ore]

i'm asking because it's not using the standard library RNG so I can't tell how many useful bits it produces. I've already ran into RNG clipping issues with PZ RNG and it wasn't anywhere close to 32 bits so I'm producing a long RNG value by stitching several short ones (not adding).
i.e. some naive implementations of RNG use longs internally but only produce about 20 bits of actual RNG and the rest have no entropy, for any given useful bits the rest are the same each time. It's like making a bigger integer by multiplying a small integer by 1000 - the trailing bits are all 0s.

[fossil salmon]

Can food effects be proc'd? Like if I wanted to give this bathwater item a 0.001% chance to cause insta-death?

(I'd rather that it cause insta-zombification.)

[drifting ore]

food itemas have OnEat callback, you can define a Lua function that does whatever you want

cigarettes use it to reduce stress and interact with the smoker trait

[grizzled fulcrum]

It does half use java's Random class if thats what u mean

ZombRand calls func from Rand which calls func from Random

[drifting ore]

it calls from CellularAutomatonRNG which uses a version I can't find on the internet

[grizzled fulcrum]

oh wait true, it extends random

[grizzled fulcrum]

https://maths.uncommons.org/api/org/uncommons/maths/random/CellularAutomatonRNG.html

yeah theoretically it should be from 0 to int's max value

idk why it wouldnt

[drifting ore]

PZ uses a different version

also like i said just because PRNG has large range doesn't mean its entropy actually covers that range

imagine if RNG returned only a few random bits and the rest were zeroes. In reality it's not so simple and mitigating it is not trivial, but it affects the quality of RNG numbers the same way.

[grizzled fulcrum]

but it returns 31 uniquely random bits ;-;

or it's supposed to

[grizzled fulcrum]

also it literally uses the exact version

the latest uncmmons math api is version 1.2.3 which they literally bundle with the game

[drifting ore]

so it says but it doesn't have nextInt and nextFloat in it

[grizzled fulcrum]

ye that calls Random.nextInt

it doesn't override nextInt

thats why my initial thought was hey it's using Random

but it does override next which nextInt calls so I think it will either end up calling CellularAutomatonRNG.next or not

I am not sure if calling a method (CellularAutomatonRNG.next) from a function in the extended class (Random.nextInt which calls Random.next) will call CellularAutomatonRNG.next or Random.next, but my bet is on Random.next which renders CellularAutomatonRNG completely useless for ZombRand in this case

[glass sentinel]

say, is it possible to edit ''Restore Utilities'' to make it only work by individual regions and not the whole Knox Country, specifically using on a server. And if it is, will it be heavy in a server? Thanks! ❤️

[drifting ore]

Is there a way to make and apply only the tile set? The tile set has already been made. Please let me know..

[red tiger]

I had a lot of fun back in 2014 replacing the forced high-quality PRNG with a really fast one as a patch for build 30 / 31. It helped a lot of people with really weak processors play PZ a little better.

I used an implementation of the XOR128 algorithm and it worked faster than the default java.util.Random and worked beautifully.

Weird how we don't have a choice of what randoms to use here in PZ though.

[ancient grail]

but what if they are not using other functions?
anyways about "disable"

toggleModActive(ChooseGameInfo.Mod mod,
 boolean active)

this might be a solution but it affects the whole mod

[grizzled fulcrum]

Yeah, I agree that there probably should've been a like more performant and more pseudo-random options so you can choose which one you need the most.

[unborn saddle]

Hi is there any nice tutorial you can follow on how to create a mod for dummies. I am no stranger to python and C++ but I never modded a game.

[red tiger]

Python support is coming soon via a mod

Gotta explore some conventions with python and see if I can get them in.

[unborn saddle]

I mean I can figure out lua

[red tiger]

Alright. Thought I'd let you kno

It's been quite fun working on the project for the past month.

[unborn saddle]

yeah I just wanna do this for learning purpose

just starting small

[red tiger]

There're type stubs for the entire runtime environments of pz available for python now.

I'm also having fun learning some stuff.

Pz is a great sandbox

[unborn saddle]

yeah it is and I need some distractions sometimes from the other stuff I programm

[meager belfry]

What's the code for passing a piece of debug to the console window in-game? (understanding of course, if that code runs a lot of times you can potentially create a tsunami of notifications)

[thick karma]

print()

Called from client

[meager belfry]

That's all..

Thanks

[thick karma]

😄

[meager belfry]

I assume you can set a global variable, if you only want to have a debug console notification display only once or a handful of times...

Can you do that in a mod?

debugVar=0 or something

[thick karma]

Yes. You may want to start by studying what other mods have done by reading through their code and reading through fundamentals of Lua / Java to get an idea for what is easily doable in PZ modding

You don't need a global variable for that

You just need the variable to be in a scope that contains the function's scope

[meager belfry]

Ok thanks

[thick karma]

Which wont necessarily make complete sense until you brush up on fundamentals of scope in programming

[meager belfry]

Got it thanks

[thick karma]

@meager belfry
https://www.lua.org/pil/1.html

This is official resource for learning Lua but lots of unofficial ones all over the place also helpful

Here's official Java to help you understand how to call and use Java functions, but that is generally only done through Lua in PZ to be clear
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/

[thick karma]

There are also many events you can use for firing specific things on specified occasions

https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Lua_Events
https://github.com/demiurgeQuantified/PZEventDoc/blob/develop/docs/Events.md

These are the best resources for reviewing available events @meager belfry

[meager belfry]

Thanks, I'll take a look, the scope doesn't look difficult to understand at all.

[thick karma]

E.g. you can do something every time world creates a player character after they join game

By using OnCreatePlayer

But there are too many examples to explain all the possibilities for achieving your general goal

If you clarify what you want to do in gameplay terms, people might have more specific answers about how to do it

@meager belfry

[meager belfry]

I'm building a mod to grow outdoor flowers and plants. Rather than using the build menu, I'm using the Farming mechanic (and so you have to worry about keeping the things alive), but, one challenge is that PZ has it's own ideas about when growth occurs, and does not.

So I'll be avoid the growth state 5/6 possibly since that adds the option to harvest, I'd rather just work with 0-4. But ultimately if the plant blossoms in July I want that to reflect in the mod... If it's January then it shouldn't be on it's blossom sprite.

So, I think just keep knocking the growth state back, if the month is wrong.

[drifting ore]

or you can allow harvesting of flowers

[bright fog]

Yeah

You could still give the ability to harvest flowers

Some flowers can be used in some cooking recipes for example

That could be an amazing feature

[long hull]

Also, is there any kind of coding environment for lua that I can use to do syntax checks and such? Finding a missing { or whatever is freaking tedious...

[coarse sinew]

for pz typings you can use https://github.com/asledgehammer/Umbrella, and for lua syntax highlight https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sumneko.lua

[alpine scroll]

Just for an update on this subject, I did leave a discussion and pointed in the comments the fix. Also, about the mod creator, I am not sure how safe he is to mess with the mods, since he is russian as far as I can tell, so this fix is the closest we can do to deal with this inconsistency in the mod

[hexed ferry]

can someone make mod that changes all silencers to have infinite durability?

[alpine scroll]

You are someone

[hexed ferry]

i dont know how to mod

[alpine scroll]

https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Modding

[bright fog]

From what mod ?

Bcs most mods that adds silencers have options to make them unbreakable

[hexed ferry]

oh ok i didnt know that im new to game

[bright fog]

Check their respective sandbox options

[dire oracle]

You should start to know how to mod

[cerulean sonnet]

Hello, I'm building an RP server, I just wanted to add some professions like a mechanic who can repair cars, a doctor who can heal faster, a pharmacist who can make medication, a gunsmith who makes firearms, he only needs the gun parts to assemble and forged that can make weapons and other items. in the table part I already have the Crafting Enhanced Core in the miners part I already have Dynamic Mining I'll just modify it, take out some miners and add a copper just what I wanted, change the rafting skiils like those who are doctors will be normal but those who don't have the tag doctor lv 10 will be normal but he doesn't have the doctor tag and I had the medicine lv 10 there will be a cure with only 15% of cure I would like to put a tag for each one choose a profession and need someone else to fix the car who is a mechanic etc and it is possible to do this?

sorry for the big text

[hexed ferry]

i cant edit that mod

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2891251749

[bronze yoke]

if it doesn't interact with things external to the file then it's not really able to affect the game at all

[ancient grail]

you have a point

[ancient grail]

A lot of times i get into this situation when its about zombie behavior

i have problems with other mods that control the zeds behavior or changes their properties, variables, walk type etc

i just tell people my mod isnt compatible with those mods

it would be great to add function on their side that checks if the zombie has custom moddata first before they take control

[cerulean sonnet]

Is it possible to modify the skills in the game? healing type level 10 gives +150% and modifying this part adds 50%?

[bright fog]

Depends on the type of skill but yes, there's a few skills you can modify

In fact there's a few mods that do it

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3305666335

I believe that one ?

No not that one

[cerulean sonnet]

I just want to change the part of the work, medicine, kitchen mechanics, carpenter and so on.

[red tiger]

Umbrella???

https://github.com/asledgehammer/Umbrella

Has the events doc in it

[bronze yoke]

not the text version

[red tiger]

Oh nvm then

Forgot about that

[cerulean sonnet]

Does anyone here know how to make mods from scratch? Do I need a mod to stop a server?

[cerulean sonnet]

You can change the percentages by making it more difficult for the child, carpenter mechanic and so on, just that part

[magic halo]

Is it okay to add new items/recipes scripts to the client after the game has loaded the save? Do you know of any issues with this method?

For example:

ScriptManager.ParseScript(“Script string …”)

[bronze yoke]

items added this way aren't registered in the world dictionary so they can't be saved/loaded

[mystic vessel]

Good evening everyone, I wanted to make a code/system that

Tile "X" every so often will generate an item inside it
example: Campfire every 1 minute
They will generate coal within their inventory, how do I do that?

[solar rover]

I've asked beard before and he didnt seem to know, wondering if maybe someone here did. Where he heck does the game save the location to Respawn In Safehouse? I have a few players that are being spawned way outside their safe zone.

[bright fog]

Keep track of campfires in a table. Every minute, cycle through your list of campfires, check if lit and if yes then access inventory and create a coal item within it (might need to check if there's space in the campfire idk)

[clever coyote]

Quick question, but I'm looking to do some (hopefully basic) modding. How simple is it to add existing items to loot tables? Is it as basic as changing some lua files in notepad, or is there more to it?

[drifting ore]

all you need to do is to make your own file that adds the changes

actually doing it is the easy part

the hard part is figuring out how to do it, because the amount of documentation in existence is basically nil

the topic of loot tables specifically is not obscure, so you picked an easier point of entry

[clever coyote]

That's great to hear! Where would you suggest starting or looking for resources?

[drifting ore]

in the original game's steam folder

specifically, /media/

spawn table distributions are done via lua so that's files in /media/lua/shared and /media/lua/server

items and recipes are created via so-called scripts, which are purely declarative text spreadsheets kinda like JSON or Lua tables, but function as neither and have a bunch of their own quirks, so not to be confused with what people normally understand as "Script"

and the translation table which sits in Lua folder but isn't Lua, and by the way the name of the translation file must be one of the hardcoded options otherwise it doesn't load

basically most of the wheels here are reinvented as platonic solids and the game does not accept round wheels instead - which is the main difficulty with modding anything

even Lua itself wasn't spared and isntead of something like LuaJIT we've got a badly mangled mess that even has bugs in it, which you'd think would not be a thing for something like a programming language

on the other hand there are perfectly regular XML files for storing clothing visual settings, but it requires you to manually generate and handle their GUIDs because why not right

anyway that was a wide tangent if you have specific questions there are a lot of people here who might know hte answers

"might" is the keyword. For one, nobody had any idea how to make zombies change clothes via Lua and I had to painstakingly figure it out over the course of an entire evening.

[clever coyote]

Wow, that's a really in depth look into it, thanks. I'm at work the now but if you're about when I get home do you mind if I hit you up with some further questions? I think having someone to explain the process would make things a ton easier

So to add an item to an existing spawn location, would I just be editing the distribution file, or would I have to make changes any of the spreadsheets as well?

I was hoping it would be as simple as going into the item distributions, finding where hunting vests spawn, and adding the id for the gray one to the list, but I'm not sure if it works like that.

[magic halo]

Interesting, i will avoid adding items that way. So, is it okay regarding the recipes?

[cerulean sonnet]

Does anyone here know how to make mods?

[ancient grail]

#1070852229654917180 message

[drifting ore]

you never edit the game's original files - that counts as "corrupted files" and is reset by Steam. You code them as mods, no matter how tiny your change is.

Luckily, the game has adequate modding support so simply putting together a few files and folders will get it recognized and loaded by the game.

modifying distributions is a little complicated compared to just adding an item - you need to make a correct lua program

I've never touched that so I have no clue how it works, only that there are 2 files - one defines "groups of items", and the other defines what groups of items spanw in which container

[alpine scroll]

I would like to share that, with some help from @red tiger , I've managed to make a little "patch" for the server I run tat I can reset the spawn all the home vhs . Still needs a bit of testing to see if there isnt any unintended effect, but for now it seems to work

Sad part is that it requires changing .class files from the server, so its not something that can be done via workshop

[bright fog]

Nice 👌

[alpine scroll]

I'll study some more to see if I can do something similar via lua, but for now, I can change an option on servertest.ini and, when the server loads, it tells the game its ok to spawn the home vhs sets once more. So its not like they are being treated as retailVhs. It just allow they to respawn once more

[cerulean sonnet]

It is possible to change the skills in relation to the job, like putting the % lower?

[clever coyote]

Ah shit. That makes sense, I had a feeling I'd need to code it as a mod. Can you suggest where I'd start to do this? Do I need any coding knowledge or specific programs?

[alpine scroll]

Grab a mod that adds an Item, check the distribution file inside that mod. Usually they have distributions in their name. It is a lua file. Then just make a mod adding the distribution you want. Just name it something like MaxPotatoDistributions.lua so it wont conflict with another mod

[clever coyote]

So basically copy-paste the code from another item spawning mod, then edit the item ID and spawn area?

[alpine scroll]

Yep. Grab something that works, poke on it until it works again, and voila

The community has great modders, so maybe people do things differently. The great part in zomboid modding is that, as long its published, you can see what they did

[clever coyote]

Stellar! Bicscalabur mod, here I come haha.

[alpine scroll]

Just be aware that the 4 color bic mod has a broken config. So as long as you are not copying the config portion of it, you should be fine

They did manage to add the settings to the sandbox, but the distribution happens before it or something like that, so it never checks correctly, making the bicsalibur always spawn

[clever coyote]

Ah, maybe not the best one to start with then. Probably better to start with a solid working base.

[alpine scroll]

Distribution tables are kinda simple

So any mod can do it, really

[clever coyote]

Righto, so. Sorry, I may need a bit of guidance here if that's okay :S

In the 4 colour bic pen mod, I've found a file under lua>server named 'Bic PenProceduralDistributions.lua'

Would that likely be the file I want to edit?

[alpine scroll]

Yep

You would make a copy of that to your own mod

Remember that the folder structure needs to be the same

[clever coyote]

So like, 'My Mod > Media > Lua > Server > MyProceduralDistributions.lua'?

[alpine scroll]

Yep

[clever coyote]

Grand. Now, my thought process here is to copy the code from the bic pen, then replace the spawn locations with the spawn locations used for the camo hunting vest, which should cause my item to spawn in the same locations, right?

[alpine scroll]

Should be just that

Since you are not even implementing a new item. Just adding it to a new spawn

[clever coyote]

And to change the item do I just change the line "Local item = bic.pen" to "Huntingvest_gray"?

[alpine scroll]

I'm not sure if you need to add "Base." in front of it, but try it

[clever coyote]

I mean the gray hunting vest is pretty based, but for my own curiosity, why does 'Base.' matter?

[alpine scroll]

Haha, because its on the "Base" module of items

Thats why there is a bic.pen

Because its the item 'pen' inside the module 'bic'

[clever coyote]

Ah, I getcha. So it's like a category and a subcategory.

[alpine scroll]

Yep. So when you try to spawn in admin mode it shows on its own tab too

[clever coyote]

Righto. Divvit question here again, but I just wanna be sure I'm getting this done clean.

[alpine scroll]

Knowing what to do is just half of the fun. The other half is why it isnt working when it should

No fun in a mod that works first try

[clever coyote]

The camo hunting vest I'm using as a reference for spawning appears in 'CrateRandomJunk', 'CrateCamping', 'CampingStoreClothes', 'SurvivalGear', 'HuntingLockers', and 'Hunter'

Is this section here where I drop those locations?

I feel like I know the answer, but I'm not techy, let alone a modder haha

[alpine scroll]

Considering you are doing the bic mod as reference, yes

[clever coyote]

Cool, and I can just copy the numbers afterward from the camo vest as well to keep it at the same rarity?>

[alpine scroll]

Yes

Something you might need to do is change the function name a little bit down

Because I THINK it is a custom function

[clever coyote]

I'm just coming to that now actually, I think.

This is where I'm at so far, with my edits to the item and to its spawn locations and chances in the top section, but I've not touched anything else yet.

[uneven jay]

yo bro its me a year later how you doing

(i was scrolling thru old msgs)

also dm me this aint the place to chat i dont wanna be muted for off-topic again

🙏

[silk pike]

Do you think it's possible to use a mod to change the way you contract the zombie infection? I was thinking of an accumulation of infection until reaching 100% (each type of wound caused by zombies would give a certain percentage of infection. When reaching or exceeding 100%, the real infection starts and the consequent transformation into a zombie. Do you think it's possible to do this with a mod?
Would this be a very difficult mod to implement??

[ancient grail]

its doable
just remove the infection
and add moddata
till that data becomes 100
then set the infection

[silk pike]

thank you so much for the answer... i'll start studying. i'm a very novice modder with little knowledge 😅. but i'm stubborn 🤣. So i'll try! And i'll bother you a bit if i don't succeed 🤣🤣🤣

[bright fog]

Yes, I do that

[bright fog]

Not needed

Check out how I do it here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3248766883

If it's a bite near the top of the body, I set the infection time to 5-15 minutes

(die in 5-15 minutes)

If it's middle it's a bit longer and bottom it's even longer

It's a very simple line of code in fact

[ancient grail]

oh yeah use the time.. never thought of that..

[bronze yoke]

it doesn't sound like you were doing the same thing

[bright fog]

Ah no sry I didn't fully read it

mb 😅

[ancient grail]

yesh but they wanted to accumulate the infection i think
so they shouldnt be infected till it reaches 100 they said

[bright fog]

Yeah mod data then

Then set the infection

[silk pike]

sorry for my bad English 🤣 it takes a while to understand 😅

[bright fog]

np that's on me

Anyway my answer is that it's easy to do

[stone garden]

im going make the first chatgpt mod

is that an good idea?

[bright fog]

I mean, yeah

[stone garden]

then i will do it

[bright fog]

idk why you'd ask me, no shit it's a good idea, just do it

[stone garden]

ye

[silk pike]

Ok! I'll try I'll try and try again until I succeed

[silk pike]

I'm not a programmer...and I don't know much English..but the few mods I've made (especially recipe and crafting) I've done with the help of chat gpt. Now I'm creating a mod that allows the PC to force locked doors with a crowbar. and incredibly it works. Now I want to include the possibility that the PC gets hurt by failing the action. chat gpt helps a lot especially for someone like me with little knowledge 😅

[stone garden]

@mystic vessel can you add me?

[bright fog]

Wait .......

I thought you meant like have ChatGPT talk in-game

ChatGPT doesn't know shit about PZ modding

[bright fog]

Stop your shit, you were already banned from the modding Discord for a good reason, don't get your ass banned from here too because you keep DMing modders to ask them for stuff

[stone garden]

i wont ask him stuff i will just give him money

only that

[bright fog]

Why ask HIM specifically ?

Also you're lying

[stone garden]

well i wanted to pay an modder to make my idea

[bright fog]

You already did that move, to potentially propose money

[stone garden]

like an comission

in reais

yeah i give up i will no longer forever tlak about modding i think

[brittle jackal]

Hi, I'm modding a vehicle and I would like to be able to modify the colors with the vehicle's color menu like on other vehicles. Do you know how to do it?

[uneven jay]

how do i make a player gain/lose temperature with a craft

[astral geode]

@bright fog may I get an invite to the modding discord, please?

[grizzled fulcrum]

#1125248330595848192 message

[drifting ore]

how come I banned on a server I never visited?

i thought it was a link to this channel so i clicked join just for laughs and it says i'm banned

well it says "the user is banned" i'm assuming that means me

[young edge]

Either you were unfortunate enough to have an IP overlap with someone who got banned or you have the maximum amount of servers, maybe

[drifting ore]

i'm only on 3 servers and i think the odds of IP overlap are slim. Unless my entire ISP is range banned which would be weird and silly.

[young edge]

it's rare but I've seen it happen multiple times

[drifting ore]

i mean i get it, when i'm on my phone i sometimes run into someone else's bans. But this is a cable internet service.

weird

[tiny juniper]

Hello gang! I wanto to make patches for zomboid mods - I come from modding skyrim so all this is new to me. Is creating a patch as simple as overwriting a script from another mod, or should it be done as a completely new script?

[drifting ore]

from what I can tell, overriding files is not reliable or straightforward. The best way to go about it is to make your own files that override specific contents or code.

[grizzled fulcrum]

idk

[undone crag]

Something like this would be better than overwriting things
https://github.com/FWolfe/Zomboid-Modding-Guide/blob/master/api/README.md#overwriting-vanilla-code

local original_render = ISToolTipInv.render
function ISToolTipInv:render()
    if not CONDITION then
        original_render(self)
    end
    -- ... some custom code ...
end

[undone crag]

I tried joining it and I'm not banned :\

[drifting ore]

exactly. It's not normal for people to be banned in places they never visited in the first place.

[undone crag]

(Hmm you need to link a steam account to a discord account to post on Mod Discussion channels in that discord server :/ )

[grizzled fulcrum]

but that should not stop you from joining

[undone crag]

yes this is correct it did not stop me from joining.

I was just mentioning another thing. I don't want to link my steam account. :|

[grizzled fulcrum]

It's good for preventing alt accounts and scammers

[thick karma]

People also often get prebanned when their behaviors on one server are seen as toxic to an unwelcome degree. I known many Discord hosts who preban people from other servers who have bad communication habits.

Really no need to give someone 10 chances on 10 servers when you can see how they behave in 1.

[young edge]

Yeah, I've seen a couple of servers do that as well. Not sure where I stand on the issue, given the fact that a lot of servers I've seen it on overused it severely and also used it maliciously

Back then, we only shared IDs of people who genuinely shouldn't be on Discord to begin with. But these days, T&S works a little faster than they did before with their small team

[thick karma]

I think if you get yourself prebanned by communicating poorly, you got what you deserved. If you get prebanned "maliciously", that's another context entirely and I would have to know the details.

[young edge]

It's less the server in question prebanning maliciously and more the server in the sharing program either filing a false report because they dislike the person or putting them into the system over something that usually wouldn't be actionable on other servers. That being said, that's neither here nor there. It's something that would need to be communicated privately to begin with

[drifting ore]

Oh I see. It's the guy who blocked me when a newbie lua user was asking some basic questions about lua and he said something like "use while true do repeat if cond then break end until true end" and I said something like "what are you smoking bro".

And it's the same guy who influenced the decision to pre-ban me there.

when i saw that i said there was an additional end missing which is wrong since repeat loops close with until and not with end but I doubt that was the reason hahaha
Oh well, can't control how other people see things, if that's their view of "excessively toxic to the point of needing a pre-ban" then that's their opinion. Unfortunately due to the suggestion algorithms on twitter & such creating information bubbles, where people live in an environment where virtually no one disagrees with them on anything, this became par for the course over the past 2 decades.

[grizzled fulcrum]

who is this

I don't like getting too invested but I will defend someone if they are correct. If you are talking about burryaga, he did nothing wrong and all of the instances I saw you replying to burryaga in response to a code snippet of anything relating to repeat, it was a for loop and none of the syntax was incorrect.

The instances below are the only examples I can find that fit your description, and both times burryaga's suggestion is correct
#mod_development message
#mod_development message

and it's not like this code is outlandish to recommend, it is simply implementing a continue statement where there is none

[drifting ore]

As soon as he said "no it's correct" i went to check it and it was indeed correct. So I was wrong on it. But it's not like being wrong once on something, occasionally, is a sign of being toxic. Being wrong is being wrong.

It was very outlandish. I've been coding for almost 2 full decades and never saw anything like it before.

It does works. It's just super weird. Especially as a suggestion to someone who's only today seeing Lua for the first time.

You know like 10[array] is a perfectly valid construct in C++.

[grizzled fulcrum]

I know, you've mentioned it before.

[undone crag]

-# (nice idea technique btw)

[grizzled fulcrum]

But this is not the same realm of incomprehensibility.

[drifting ore]

what do you mean, they're both work fine if you know how it works

[grizzled fulcrum]

One is implementing continue in a readable way inside of Lua (which is very easy to mentally map) and one is doing some weird C pointer array thing

[drifting ore]

10[array] is the same as array[10] - since it's more or less *(array + 10) or *(10 + array) either way it's the same result

and yet see how outlandish you find it?

[grizzled fulcrum]

Yes that is true, but I am not saying it does not work. I am saying you're taking a completely valid suggestion and making a complaint out of it for no reason

[grizzled fulcrum]

I am talking about the outlandish part of the lua code burryaga suggested and nothing related to C or C++

But you even admitted to being incorrect, so why strike up a complaint if there is nothing to complain about?

[drifting ore]

i didn't say the construct didn't work. I momentarily thought there was an end missing. Which was incorrect.

[grizzled fulcrum]

A while true repeat loop is not the same as a for loop implementing continue

[drifting ore]

and again, it's the same deal as the pointer thing I mentioned. You don't use C++ too much so it looks alien to you, but you use Lua a fair amount so it looks fine. Now imagine that you use neither.

[drifting ore]

of course not. I'd normally use goto but it doesnt' work here

[thick karma]

That was shared with me originally by Fenris Wolf, one of the og modders here who is now working for IS. I take no credit for its brilliance.

[thick karma]

This

[drifting ore]

It is clever. It just upsets me in the same way as 10[array] upsets other people.

[grizzled fulcrum]

I am not here to judge how large or little people know languages, but I will point out if you say something is correct and it is not. You say "what are you smoking bro" which implies that you are disagreeing with the code posted, but then you even mention (in the past) that there was nothing wrong with it to begin with.
I do not know why you act like bringing up this completely valid conversation of the past to present just to tack it on to the laundry list of figurative complaints you have all because you were pre-banned from a discord server; which has nothing to do with literally anything about the code burryaga posted.
You literally mention you were wrong, past and present, and yet why bring it up as a justification as to why you were pre-banned at all?

[drifting ore]

It sounds like you think I'm upset about the situation. But I never even went to that server, and never will, and they don't even want to see me there. Everything is well for all parties involved. It's just I found it bizzare that I was apparently banned from a place I never visited, and then i found it bizzare that the reason was a mild disagreement in a different place entirely.

I'm not gonna justify "what are you smoking" as benign, I can see how people thought that was too much.

[grizzled fulcrum]

Just to let you know, I personally doubt that the whole lua continue thing was the sole reason for you being pre-banned.

[drifting ore]

that was just the catalyst for the disagreement

the disagreement itself was the reason

or so I think. There's no way i was banned because I errorneously said "it's missing another end" right?

[grizzled fulcrum]

I hope not

that is why I am so adamant that the reason is not that in it's entirety (if at all)

[drifting ore]

Anyway this conversation ran its course and nothing of value was figure out. I'll just refer back to when I mentioned the negative influence of media platform algorithms - at this point just having disagreements is reason enough to ban people.

[dry chasm]

You could try reaching out to a person who manages said server if you're curious and would ever potentially like to join it. (Best to do so rather than just guess around)
Though if you do not plan on ever joining that server, then just forget about it and leave it be (no need to dig further into it in such cases, it is what it is, life goes on, no need to get upset about anything or get others upset about it)
Atleast that's my personal opinion on that topic.

[grizzled fulcrum]

agree ^

[drifting ore]

I didn't intend to join that server. I thought it was a link to this channel.

[dry chasm]

Just meant in general for this currently prolonged topic at the moment, not how it lead to it at the beginning.
(And yes, I did notice you mentioning it already being more than discussed enough, but I wasn't fast enough in readin and still responded 😅 )

[drifting ore]

that's how it originally went. I said it was weird and that was that.

[grizzled fulcrum]

🤷

[fleet bridge]

you can ban people that never set foot in your discord?

[grizzled fulcrum]

If you have their ID which you can get very easily

or username*

[drifting ore]

makes me wonder if there is a banbot like on twitter that combs through people's contacts and if their bacon's number against some "undesirables" is too low they get autobanned, but for discord

[grizzled fulcrum]

I would say so but they can't access friends unless it's part of server verification, then they would be able to do exactly that

[drifting ore]

then again discord friends is not nearly the same as twitter followers. And the effect is more limited.

on a larger scale this really sucks. At the 99% risk of sounding like "we live in a society" meme the whole echochambering really does a number on the bigger world. NASA is already at the point where nobody can say anything about the projects doomed for failure due to systemic errors in them because they'd get fired.

Which is why Artemis program would need 50x more launches to go to the moon than Appollo (assuming Elon delivers properly, which was already cut back on).

It was 12 launches to begin with, but with updated Starship performance figures that was raised by the factor of 4.

(don't quote me on exact figures. It was from a video of a video about a presentation at NASA. But it was in this quite ridiculous ballpark).

[young edge]

I understand the point you're trying to make but the NASA example seems random as hell

Anyway, similar to aoqia, I don't like to continue this topic too much, but if I may speak from the POV of a retired owner of a large server, let me kind of attach myself to what Shurutsue said. A lot of servers are conceived as safe spaces. And even in those which are not, drama and such is not appreciated. If you disturb the peace of the places you're in, you'll eventually just end up alienating yourself and others until someone eventually takes care of you. I spoke earlier about autobans and such and the pitfalls thereof. But without wanting to step on your toes or insult you, another way of getting banned on servers is simply by word of mouth and people simply not wanting to associate with you. People make mistakes and it's perfectly okay. But it requires you to recognize and fix your own issues. The only person you can fix is yourself, not others.

This is a very longwinded way of saying the following: You should probably take what Aoqia and Shurutsue, as well as what Burryaga said and think about how you can make that work for yourself. And it's the last thing I'll say on the topic, since i think we've tested the mods' patience and have been offtopic for long enough

a. Sorry for the ping

[grizzled fulcrum]

mods rn: https://tenor.com/view/skinenr-gif-20761908

[drifting ore]

Random tangents are funny. They always come out of nowhere.

I used to own a BB forum in the late 00s. It ran fine. Disruptive individuals were given a PM asking them kindly to chill out, and so they did. I never felt the need to ban anyone. Things just worked. And I've been participating in discussion like everyone else under normal account, and I never mentioned I was the main admin. But I've known for a long time that a lot of people who have the power to ban others don't have the same standards. Some are chill like me, and some are plain unhinged: I remember getting banned once because I was saying kind words to a person down on their luck and in a bad mood - "it'll work out, don't give up", that kind of stuff. But it's becoming the norm to ban people over just having disagreements.

For example, when you go to reddit and subscribe to content that has "the other camp" of it, you get to see the content from your camp, stuff you generally agree with, for example /r/business and /r/antiwork. Within that, you will see the comments most people already agree with, and people with the other opinion are hidden. And that just people's self-ranking of content creating these positive feedback loop infobubbles. Not even to say anything about places like YouTube and Twitter which use software tools to serve you content based on whatever you agree with the most. So it's becoming increasingly less normal to see a lot of people who disagree with you. What you see is that almost everyone agrees with you, and then the lizard brain thinks that the few people that don't should just go away.

[drifting ore]

Safe spaces are necessary when you are a victim of wrongdoing, so that you don't have to deal with people blaming you for having suffered it. But in general living in that kind of space is unhealthy for your mind. You lose the ability to function properly in groups of people where not everyone is supporting your opinions - i.e. basically everywhere outside of the safe space.

As a modder this will probably have little effect. But if you want to become a recognized indie developer, you will have a bad time. People will rip into you for every possible reason and you will have no safe space to retreat into.

[undone crag]

Maybe you meant this NASA video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

I used to browse the TheIndieStone forum about 10 years ago and I saw a repeating pattern with the moderation acting toxic and like normal people. The pattern was, or was something like:

• User has an idea.
• Administrator says the ideas is bad, and that the idea should not be discussed. Maybe tells the user to only discuss this in PM's.
• User thinks that the goodness or badness of the idea should be discussed. Maybe gives a quote about free speech and about someone having the right to say something even if you disagree with it.
• Administrator says that the user tried to make a public scene instead of using PM's, "which tells me all I need to know about you", maybe posts a comic calling the user an "ass", and locks the thread (maybe also banning the user, I think?).

So the administrator was confident in his reasoning. If he was mistaken, who would tell him? The guy he just banned?

[drifting ore]

There was someone else who made another video using this one as the basis. Maybe it was thunderfoot? I'm not sure. The bloke says a lot of deeply disagreeable things, but he haven't been wrong yet.

[undone crag]

-# Thunderfoot... back when I enjoyed confirmation bias I liked watching his videos making fun of creationists and dogmatic people.

[drifting ore]

Yeah that was a long time ago. Since then he shifted to dunking all over poorly thought out water-related projects and sometimes physics in general. EEVBlog does the same things but only if it's related to digital electronics.

Both are experts in their respective fields so I can't complain even if I disagree.

[undone crag]

-# (Solar Freaking Roadways)

[drifting ore]

Have you heard of the hot new stuff? Solar freaking fences. And unlike solar freaking roadways, they actually work. You just need to put them in exactly north-south orientation.

Biplanar solar arrays they're called or something. They don't have an opaque layer on the backside so they can collect sunlight from there as well. They benefit the most from collecting albedo illumination which is normally completely wasted on normal sun-facing panels, and in poor weather that's an extremely large fraction of total insolation. And of course they don't suffer from snow buildup. The downside is that obviously they never face the sun, and at noon where the sunlight is most intensive, they get zero direct sunlight. Their power output chart is duck-shaped.

[undone crag]

<_<

hang on

I AM NOT BEFOOLED BY THIS

SIRE

Oh yeah there's a thunderfoot video about the guy and his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxG0WAwwrGk

[drifting ore]

Louis Rossman something something.

[undone crag]

By "like normal people" I mean because in my experience people normally make up ideas, and believe them without the ideas being proven. They also do things like try to change the topic, walk away, plug their ears, and if online ignore and unfriend and block.

I think avoiding disagreement with an idea isn't a rational reason to agree with it.

[drifting ore]

The #1 pitfall game developers face is that when they think of an idea, they think how it can be great, and not how it can be terrible. (when normal people suffer from the same cognitive bias it's not an issue because it doesn't affect anything)

[undone crag]

I have a lot of partly made mod and video game things T_T

[drifting ore]

The system should be failproof, not have good potential for success. It's the necessary mindset.

[undone crag]

I also spent something like several weeks on a PZ mod but the base systems weren't all finished and stuff and it'll take a long time but maybe I actually have ADHD? I stopped working on it.

[drifting ore]

Of course you won't know for certain until you try. But it's a good rule of thumb to use adversarial arguments about any ideas you have.

Figure out all the ways the would-be system is broken before you even made it. Chances are you would be able to recognize if it's dead on arrival, and never start wasting time on it in the first place.

I mean just look at the amount of cut content every single game has in it. All of that were things that passed the arguments whether it can even be good, and turned out not good anyway.

[undone crag]

But it's a good rule of thumb to use adversarial arguments about any ideas you have.
:nods: (no emoji for nodding so you'll have to imagine nodding or something)

[drifting ore]

Who could've predicted that smart tactical AI in half-life 2 would be viewed as too broken and oppressive in single-player campaign, so they'd have to cut it down to "approach player, stand, and shoot"

And even that is considered far too much by a lot of players.

[drifting ore]

ADHD is when you quit it on the same day because you started another making another mod. This is more like a burn out. It's easier to avoid when there are no roadblocks such as lacking API.

Like I'm facing right now. I can't figure out how to tell when a zombie was spawned. There's no associated event, and there's no clear way to tell if the zombie was reused. Additionally, their frickin inventories don't reset when they are reused, only worn items which are a separate section of data.

modData doesn't reset either which is a pretty baffling oversight to be honest

[bright fog]

You can't

It's the source of a lot of problem, not being able to identify reused zombies and new zombies

But if you ever find a solution, I'm extremely interested in it

[drifting ore]

That's my issue precisely. I have 2 mods right now that hinge upon being able to tell if a zombie is "fresh" or "stale".

Both do this to distribute items. It's a simple idea really, if a zombie is fresh then it qualifies to get an item.

[bright fog]

Hmm that's an even more different thing but definitely similar

[grizzled fulcrum]

0_0 anyone else have these issues (I'm not diagnosed with adhd)

[drifting ore]

Worn items reset so in principle I think I can use an amulet of sorts as an indicator. I also thought that setting zombies as reanimated players makes them save and load all data correctly, however this might've been confirmation bias since I recall that I never tested the cases where the zombie would appear mid-game, only right at the start.

When the zombie first spawns, it changes AI state from nil to idle. Not sure if it ever does this again mid-game.

[bright fog]

I do believe reanimated makes them properly unique actually

The amulette yeah I thought about too, haven't tested it

Could give a specific visual to zombies, even an invisible one, and see if it's persistant or not

[drifting ore]

the difficulty is that you need to get worn items by body location and none of these functions return arraylist

[bright fog]

BodyVisuals

[undone crag]

Which ones? The gotta top and start on another on the same day or gotta stop this and almost ever work on it again?

[drifting ore]

Can you elaborate please? I've looked at it but couldn't see anything relating to my issue.

[bright fog]

I feel like that's most likely about hitting a barrier, and the courage to start working on it again

[bright fog]

I personally change clothings on zombies by modifying their itemVisuals

You can change the item, remove it, add a new one, add blood, change the hue etc etc

[drifting ore]

well uh, this is specifically how I do this zombie:getHumanVisual():addClothingItem(zombie:getItemVisuals(), item)

when I loked at itemvisuals i couldn't figure out how to use that

[bright fog]

https://github.com/SirDoggyJvla/Zomboid-Forge/blob/main/Contents%2Fmods%2FZomboid Forge%2Fmedia%2Flua%2Fclient%2FZomboidForge_visuals.lua#L101

Check from this line how I handle visuals

It's actually really not hard

You can manage to do a lot of stuff

In this case it's a more complex use where I handle visuals based on a set of data of a zombie type

[undone crag]

(deleted)

[bright fog]

Sounds like a massive project

[undone crag]

I think maybe it's not exactly that I hit a barrier and then that happens, though maybe something like that can happen to me or maybe not idk

[bright fog]

I already got a burnout one day about one my mods, hit a big barrier on animation making and had been hitting my head on it for a month, then ended up ragequiting for a month. I didn't stop modding, I wasn't mad at modding, just burnt out for working so many hours on a singular and I needed some fresh air

Now whenever I feel like I'm getting less motivation on my main mod, I go mod something funny I like, then come back to my main mod, finally finish the part that had tired me out now that I'm fresh and finally start working on things I like

[grizzled fulcrum]

a little of both. I often start new projects and then push the on top of the stack with high priority and then completely neglect the other ones and never end up finish any, then repeat

[undone crag]

that one seems a bit more like me

[bright fog]

Zomboid Forge and TLOU Infected will always be my success, my big baby mod but I can't deny the love I have for my smaller projects on the side, they helped me still love modding by allowing me some fresh air as well as discovering new fields of modding, making me even better at modding

ZF and TLOU Infected are a mix of technicality as well as having some fun here and there, but sometimes you need something new

[undone crag]

(deleted)

[drifting ore]

oooohhhh ItemVisuals inherits from ArrayList

I've never noticed that before

[bright fog]

Yes it's an array

So you get every visuals with a simple get(i)

And each you can modify

Gives an ItemVisual

[drifting ore]

well in that case I suppose you can simply check if the 1st item is your key, and insert it as the 1st item

[bright fog]

Yeah you can just add an item. But just have to test how the game handles these whenever you reload. I believe the game keeps the visuals when a zombie is reloaded

If you do some tests I'm interested in knowing the results actually

I might test that today later I'll see

[undone crag]

(deleted)

[drifting ore]

my concern is more with syncing it online actually. Will just sendClothing work or not? transmitCompleteItem? That kind of stuff.

[bright fog]

No idea idk these methods

What are you trying to do exactly ?

[drifting ore]

well I had no way around using those when reanimating skeletons

[grizzled fulcrum]

hey jvla, since you did so much work on zombies, did you ever find a way or have an idea for uniquely identifying zombies? I remember someone asking before and I was curious but they never got an answer

[bright fog]

Yes, but there's a twist, it's not perfect

[drifting ore]

ideally i'd want to even turn them to aggressive skeleton NPCs but that's way out of scope for now

[bright fog]

An entity zombie doesn't keep its class

But it keeps one thing: it's persistent outfit ID

[drifting ore]

uniquely identifying zombies is generally not possible, but for the purposes of telling them apart you can just keep the reference to their java object. If you play online then they have OnlineID but otherwise it's -1.

[bright fog]

This persistent outfit ID is a 16 bit number, and whenever a zombie has its hat falling, there's a bit swap so that's easy to detect and Chuck created a method which outputs the trueID (without fallen hat) for a zpmbie whenever its hat fell or not, so you can have a persistant marker which is the trueID for a zombie entity

[grizzled fulcrum]

the problem i found with online id is it doesn't work for offline like u mention and also its not persistent which doesn't matter too much but sometimes I want that

[bright fog]

The twist is that this pID is technically not unique as this pID depends on the outfit and an outfit has 1000 ID possible, and it's given randomly to zombies so it means 2 zombies can have the same pID

[grizzled fulcrum]

I was suspecting as such when you said outfit lol

[bright fog]

So I use it to have persistant zombie data, but this data can be shared

[drifting ore]

could've been as simple as using incremental IDs instead of completely random ones

[grizzled fulcrum]

but there really isn't a ZombieId or something like vehicles have?

[undone crag]

(deleted)

[bright fog]

Yeah well there's a lot of things devs could have done better lmao

[bright fog]

What's that

[grizzled fulcrum]

well you know how vehicles have unique identifier on them

[drifting ore]

yeah it's a random integer value from 0 to 1000. So not exactly unique. Also there's no getter for it so using it is not very easy.

[bright fog]

I don't know anything about vehicles ngl

[grizzled fulcrum]

I was saying that is there really not such things for zombies too? especially when you would want to have one for a lot of purposes imo

[bright fog]

Sadly there is no unique and persistant identifier for zombies

[grizzled fulcrum]

so there is one? or is this explaining something else

[bright fog]

No that's the pID, but the value given is not unique

I have yet to experience with setting the pID

[drifting ore]

to give an example I know of. IsoDeadBody has ObjectID which is unique and persistent. Zombies don't have anything like it. They techically have zombieID field but it's just this.zombieID = ZombRand(1000);

and they have OnlineID but it's always -1 in singleplayer and even in multiplayer it can be -1

[bright fog]

But I believe the solution would be adding your own bit information to the pID but I'm not sure changing it keeps the changes when reloading

I need to do further tests on it

[grizzled fulcrum]

yeah that's why I'm so confused. vehicles have own id, dead body has its own id. but not zombies, the main entities of the game that are like the most synced thing to other people

[grizzled fulcrum]

can you do bit manipulation in lua like bitshifting? that would open up literally Pandora's box

I tried looking before and didn't find anything but maybe there's a Java method that does some shifting or something

I'll search for it tmr using regex assuming I'm not still sick as bricks

[young edge]

[drifting ore]

yeah actually it might not save them

(there's the other "save" but it just finds its own save file and calls this function)

[drifting ore]

bit shifting is just base 2 math

so you can manipulate bits without using bitwise operators. It'll be slow though. (even in C it's really slow so there's that)

[young edge]

Isn't bitshifting quite literally faster than bitwise operations

it only uses 1 cycle instead of multiple depending on the operation

[drifting ore]

i'm pretty sure all integer operations except multiplication and division take 1 cycle on modern CPUs

the issue is that you always need a lot of them

so unless you're really trying to save space, bitbanging is actively detrimental compared to giving each bit its own whole integer

[grizzled fulcrum]

the more you know

I thought there was some special behind the scenes stuff done to edit the bits themselves idk why tho

[drifting ore]

i mean there literally are special circuits dedicated to flipping individual bits

but at the core it's just a bunch of math operations, which conveniently happen to involve just flipping individual bits

well, you know. The entire base 2 math is just flipping individual bits.

[young edge]

I was about to say

[drifting ore]

long division in binary is really cool. You just flip some bits.

[bright fog]

Hmm

[bright fog]

No idea

[drifting ore]

Anyway. Shifting right = dividing by a whole power of 2. Shifting left = multiplying. You can extract a bit by modulo the number against the bit's power of 2 and dividing without remainder by the 1-lesser power of 2.

Not sure about setting, clearing or flipping, but it's along those lines somewhere.

You can clear the bits by subtracting modulo'd value from the number. Then you can set the bits by adding them to the bitcleared number.

or you can do like

   local bit = number % 2
   table.insert(bits, bit)
   number = (number - bit) / 2
end```

[red tiger]

Yes you can. The problem is more about it being slow.

https://gist.github.com/JabDoesThings/1f6406caf5849b49aa528f9e149277ed

[young edge]

ghostping

[drifting ore]

even in C bitbanging is slow. Ho dear boy I got a lot of performance boost by leaving the bytes alone instead of trying to cram 2 data samples into 1 byte when using a 180 MHz Cortex chip. And mind you with whole bytes it's bottlenecked by USB speed.

[undone crag]

(If I just looked at this I wouldn't have guessed Coldsteel should be prevented from discussing PZ online)

[red tiger]

I wrote bite to support AES on the LuaNet service in PZ.

The fact that it operated 100% in the LVM made it more secure.

Was slow as heck but it did the job.

[drifting ore]

project zomboid mods are serious beans. Gotta have the data packets cryptographically signed. 😛

[red tiger]

When you write anti-cheats, yes.

While I have my Gists open, here's a modified utility for JSON support in the PZ Lua environment. (The original source breaks)

https://gist.github.com/JabDoesThings/0742c08f3d066425857c11f7ef28183c

[drifting ore]

Is there really that many man-in-the-middle attacks on PZ servers purely for game cheating?

[stoic kayak]

I asked in support, but realized it might be better suited to ask here- sorry if mistaken 😅
Just to make sure, I can look at and maybe edit for personal use, stuff right? I just can't upload it? Stuff in my downloaded workshop mods folder. B/c that's how I normally learn a game's API and how to mod it 😅

[drifting ore]

what do you mean?

@stoic kayak

[stoic kayak]

Go to a mod file, open the lua file, and see how it does X task.

[drifting ore]

in order to have perfectly clean hands, you just shouldn't copy and paste the contents into your own mod when you upload it

[stoic kayak]

Oh, but viewing it is fine?

[drifting ore]

but in general it doesn't really matter. As long as you don't reupload the entire thing unchanged, it's almost not objectionable.

If you want to tweak or fix a mod, it's normally possible to just make 1 file and upload it separately from everything else.

[stoic kayak]

I am curious b/c I have no idea about the API, and so I'll love to see how cheat menu or something gets and sets tiles.

[drifting ore]

so you want to try to make a kind of map editor?

[stoic kayak]

Err- I just wanna see if I can set multiple tiles x3

And so, I do my own version of what cheat menu does for every tile between point A and B

[drifting ore]

well, looking into game's original files is the main way you figure out how to make your own mods so nobody can blame you for it. The same applies to other people's mods.

[stoic kayak]

I am also curious if it's possible to play a tree xP

place*

[drifting ore]

I've no clue. To answer the original question, it's completely fine to look at the code. It's generally acceptable to copy and paste the code as a concession, since making your own code isn't easy for most people - you know, you gotta do what you gotta do. Copying and pasting assets like models and textures is generally not acceptable if you do it without permission, even if you modify them.

[stoic kayak]

ahhhh ok

[dry chasm]

You're free to look at it and edit it for personal use (no one can really check for that anyway)
The problems do occur if you do redistribute/share it however (virtually or physically).

It's generally acceptable to copy and paste the code as a concession
I'd personally have to disagree - as I'd say this HEAVILY depends on the amount. If it's like a simple loop, slight changes, sure, but lots/whole would be an entirely different matter IMO.
So if that were to be an intention of yours (to upload it to workshop or share it differently included) then I'd guess asking for permission would be best. (I heavily doubt people would be against it all that much unless it's pretty much a copy of all the code? Personally wouldn't be against it either way, but I can't really speak for others)

But yes, learning from others and their mods is the most common way to learn PZ modding - as for code, ideally just not direct copy pastes of it (Seen such complaints before, although in most of those cases it was a lot of the code and not just a single little part or something)
And as Coldsteel said, if you just wish to adjust/extend another mod:

it's normally possible to just make 1 file and upload it separately from everything else.
So usually shouldn't require a full blown copy of another's mod to tweak it, leaving most sides happy.
-# If I did overlook anything or misunderstood something, apologies, still wanted to throw my two cents out there 😅

[dry chasm]

I think someone mentioned that placing normals trees are mostly handled by java-side, didn't find the chat in question after a quick search, so I can just go off of what I remember (which might be totally wrong)

[drifting ore]

speaking of trees. I'm getting question mark tiles that kinda look like they were supposed to be trees. That said I'm playing in debug mode. Is this normal?

[dry chasm]

IIRC in debug there's a "bug" where some tile(s) don't really load, haven't really played in forever to say for sure, but it shouldn't be there when outside debug.
Should be able to easily confirm by save & quitting at said location and restartin outside debug and continue there to see if it still occurs.

[red tiger]

If this becomes a conversation in my court of affairs, my writing style quickly resolves the issue. It's more of a person-to-person issue so each case is different. I write things as utilities first because many people can try to solve the same issue, small or big so those utilities will be there and ready, expecting to be used.

Also personally all I ask for is attribution.

"Hey. He did this." That's all I ask for in my case. =)

[drifting ore]

all I ask is that Kevin stops showing everyone my fucking DeviantArt

[red tiger]

Admission of guilt is the first step in the healing process.

[dry chasm]

what did I miss? 👀

[drifting ore]

teleports behind you pssh... nothin personnel,,,,,,,,, kid

[stoic kayak]

So I booted into debug more and it seems like brush tool, selecting tile, and then placing a tree works.
Also- oh my gosh- Do map makers actually have to get each and every tile they want? o.O

no I'm assuming

[dry chasm]

and yeah, just seen it with code as well (and in some instances fully understandable)
Personally not against it so long as it's not essentially a full mod reupload with just one tiny change. (Might as well have been a single file as Coldsteel mentioned then)
But yes, depends on the people.

[red tiger]

I would say that in a situation where someone squats a "fix" that's honestly the only way to perform a certain task and demands some form of tribute or limits the availability of the fix is also a potential problem.

This is what I worry about.

This is even more of a reason for my tools to exist because if there's such a situation, I can at least front the solution without that happening.

[dry chasm]

Ya lost me there, didn't understand that part. 😅

[red tiger]

Oh. I'm saying if there's one way to do something with some kind of file or something in PZ and someone does this and then tries to shut down others who can only use this approach or technique.

Sorry.. I've seen too much silly shit happen in my 20 years of modding. x)

People can be some of the most creative assholes.

[drifting ore]

ah yes the software patents except even less sensible by a factor of 10

[dry chasm]

Oh yeah, I just meant more like "Hey this mod adds a whole new feature and such" - "Hey I copied said mod, allowing for more of XYZ" is rather the issue, especially if nearly nothing was changed

[red tiger]

Yes this is bad.

I'm giving you the other end of that spectrum.

Your case is almost 100% of the stupid situations honestly.

[dry chasm]

That's the point though.
If it can be done without a blatant copy, it should be done without a blatant copy.

[red tiger]

When you get into scenarios where machine code is used to open up games or software to modding, the situation I've mentioned becomes more of a thing.

[drifting ore]

There are scenarios where the mod is almost perfect but it has flaws and the dev refuses to fix them. Your only solution is to make changes and upload, all of concerns notwithstanding.

[coarse sinew]

Can I use it in a mod I'm working on?

[red tiger]

Modding bytecode is way better IMO. xD

[red tiger]

Absolutely.

I'm not sure if I made a fix for a custom userdata type but it should be simple to add if you ever see this error.

[red tiger]

For context I lean copy-centric.

Even copy-left can be toxic.

[coarse sinew]

And do you have an idea of how well would handle reading through a large volume of code, say around +30k lines?

[red tiger]

Oof. Benchmark it.

That's a lot of data.

[dry chasm]

Plottwist: You can essentially make a mod that reads the file as string, edits said string to include fixes and run that instead of the original! (Annoying way, to just prevent a full reupload but theoretically possible)
-# Hopefully we don't reach a point that will ever be necessary.

[red tiger]

This is a modified JSON library that used optimized, non-present Lua functions so it might be slower than the original in a proper Lua environment.

[drifting ore]

if I find out a mod does eval i'm never touching it

[red tiger]

I use loadstring

[drifting ore]

yeah that

[red tiger]

But it's for a specific case.

[drifting ore]

that's a big fat no for me dawg

[red tiger]

You're entitled to your decisions.

[drifting ore]

PZ Lua environment has its wing clipped all the way up to the neck, but you never know what other bugs kahlua might have which can be maliciously exploited

[red tiger]

Why do you think I work on anti-cheats?

=)

[drifting ore]

i mean beyond just cheating

[red tiger]

I know.

[dry chasm]

Now include taking the content for that from the web 😰

[ancient grail]

like these?

[red tiger]

You're talking about getting into that territory and I'm very familiar with this realm in other software. People paid me to fix vulnerabilities and exploits in the past.

A couple fixes in PZ are from reports I made privately with the devs in the past.

👍

[drifting ore]

allright well real question though: what's your use case for loadstring since it does the same thing that PZ Lua loader already does

by which i mean everything is a use case but what's your case that warrants using it

[red tiger]

Bootloader to fraction out code from the server-side with encryption. It's to avoid theft in the workshop and also secure any custom-made code for things like anti-cheat.

Also for TypeScript-built environments. (Separate project)

I'll be back in like 20 minutes.

[drifting ore]

I don't get it. You said you were "copy-neutral" which means stuff like MIT right? I don't see how does "preventing mod theft" works into that. I also don't see why anticheat needs to be eval'd when putting everything as local accomplishes the same thing pretty much.

[red tiger]

I am copy-neutral in that I believe that I don't need to force your source to be available and that I don't believe I have the option to force your code from being closed off.

I do not believe I should force your hand to make actions based off the use of my works.

[drifting ore]

That's copyright.

[red tiger]

That's not.

You are wrong.

[drifting ore]

Not forcing code available = not copyleft.

Not forcing code closed = not anything really.

Closing your own code = copyright.

[red tiger]

You have your rights to modify my code as the copyright holder yes. Even copy-left licensing has the rights as a copyright holder.

This is a legal conversation, not modding.

[drifting ore]

Well no I don't mean legal definitions, just general direction.

Copyright in relation to source code genrerally means proprietary, closed. Copyleft means forcibly open so you can't sublicense it as closed.

Legally speaking the creator of source code always holds the copyright and it's pretty difficult to waive it and put in public domain, not to mention that public domain has different rules in different countries.

[red tiger]

I'm not holding a gun to anyone's head and they're not about to sue me for "Damages" mentioned in those licenses that sit in the center. That's basically my position.

It doesn't contradict the work I've mentioned above.

I open-sourced the code that's encrypted and sent.

[drifting ore]

I guess a more apt description of your position on this spectrum is "copy-none of my business and none of yours".

[red tiger]

So copy-centric.

[drifting ore]

I'd put it outside of the scale altogether.

Centric means between extremes, and here it's copyleft and proprietary code, and the place between them is generally recognized as permissive FOSS>

i.e. the code that under its licensing terms can be used either way

as open source or as proprietary

copyleft licenses prevents the use of code as proprietary, and proprietary prevents the use of code as open source

allright well that was a pointless tangent and I didn't need to ask. Can you say why the anticheat needs to be eval'd though?

is it purely for the sake of making the code marginally harder to decipher?

loadstring("foo") is the same as requiring a file with contents "foo"

(with an asterisk)

[drifting ore]

I'm just not seeing it as a good use case which could not have been just a file. You need eval when you fetch code from the internet as text, like Shurutsue said. Or when you JIT-compile scripts to machine code (that's not really eval but it's the same idea)

[limber onyx]

Hi guys, having some problems replacing recipies from a mod.
I'm trying to create a patch for a mod so it works better with inventory tetris, so I wanted to reduce the number of items given by a recipe

This mod has it's own module in the code, I'm not sure if I should be using Base or the mod's module on the imports, since its generating additional recipes instead of overriding them

[red tiger]

It's actually quite effective at executing annonymous functions not referenced to anything. It can't be reloaded. It can't be overridden.

[bronze yoke]

if you want to override a recipe you need to use the module it's defined in

[drifting ore]

consider me educated

[limber onyx]

Thanks

This is the code used by the mod

module Susceptible { imports { Base }

[red tiger]

The only way to interact with the function is to somehow obtain the LuaCallback object from a walled-off LuaEventManager sub-class collection and destroy it in the Kahlua environment.

This or MITM packets.

[limber onyx]

So I figured I'd just use the modlue Susceptible to override the recipes aded by that mod, but it seems to create another instead or replacing the existing ones even though I'm using override:true

[red tiger]

Even then the expectation of a response-call from the packaged code will alert the server and can handle it.

[bronze yoke]

if there's multiple originals the override method won't work (it only looks for the first recipe by that name and replaces that one )

[limber onyx]

Should I create a script for each individual recipe i want to replace then?

I tried placing the override line inside each recipe and still doesnt work

[red tiger]

@drifting ore The best part about writing security solutions is trying to break it.

Kahlua has so many kinks and little nuances that even vulnerabilities can be used to strengthen security.

It's a wild game.

[bronze yoke]

problem with that is it just replaces the first one every time, it's an oversight in the way overrides are set up

you can mess with recipes through lua to get around this but it's a lot more of a pain, what exactly are you changing about the recipes?

[limber onyx]

Original mod adds a box of surgical masks, when you open it, it gives you 50 masks

I want to change it so it only gives you 20

[bright fog]

DoParam

No ?

Not sure

Wait no

It's a function

function OpenMaskBoxBlue(items, result, player)
    player:getInventory():AddItems("Susceptible.EmptyMaskBox_Blue",1);
end
function OpenMaskBoxGreen(items, result, player)
    player:getInventory():AddItems("Susceptible.EmptyMaskBox_Green",1);
end
function OpenDustmaskBox(items, result, player)
    player:getInventory():AddItems("Susceptible.EmptyDustmaskBox",1);
end

no nvm

That's the empty sry

[drifting ore]

doesn't doparam only works on items?

i.e. not recipes?

[bright fog]

Doing 10 things at the same time sry

[drifting ore]

does it define the result of opening a box as a mask, times 50?

[bronze yoke]

local recipes = ScriptManage.instance:getAllRecipes()
for i = 0, recipes:size()-1 do
    local recipe = recipes:get(i)
    if recipe:getFullType() == "Susceptible.RecipeName" then
        recipe:getResult():setCount(20)
    end
end

[bright fog]

recipe Open Box of Face Masks
    {
        destroy MaskBox_Blue,
        Result:Hat_SurgicalMask_Blue=50,
        Time:5.0,
        Category:Misc,
        Sound:PutItemInBag,
        OnCreate:OpenMaskBoxBlue
    }    

[limber onyx]

the original recipe looks like this
recipe Open Box of Face Masks { destroy MaskBox_Blue, Result:Hat_SurgicalMask_Blue=50, Time:5.0, Category:Misc, Sound:PutItemInBag, OnCreate:OpenMaskBoxBlue }

[bronze yoke]

this lua script should find all recipes by that name and change the result amount to 20

[limber onyx]

Figured it was only a matter of changing the 50 for a 20 and adding Override:true, at the end before the brackets

[drifting ore]

and there are a bunch of thse and they're all called "open box of face masks" yeah i see what would be the issue

[limber onyx]

there's 3

Dust masks, green surgical masks and blue surgical masks

each one with 2 recipes to open a box and give you masks or put masks in a box

At least I was able to fix the problem i had a few days ago regarding the Inventory Tetris stack values only changing when -debug was enabled (a huge thanks for the help btw)

To be honest. I don't even like the mask boxes, gives WAY too many of them when you open it and also gives you an empty box.
I wish I could just change it so it works like the box of nails when the cardboard box magically materializes when you have a certain amount

[drifting ore]

there might be a recipe for that? takes 100 nails and makes a box of nails

[limber onyx]

Yeah, i'll just have to learn how to work around the override limitations with lua
I barely know how to make the most basic of scripts and edit existing lua files. But this is uncharted territory for me

[bronze yoke]

you could use a similar script to the one i just posted to disable all of those recipes and just make your own instead

[limber onyx]

Good idea

The lua file should start with this line, yes?

Events.OnGameBoot.Add(function()

[bronze yoke]

it doesn't really matter if you do it on an event or not

[limber onyx]

Thanks. sorry, i have nearly 0 lua knowledge.
So I just took the code you posted

local recipes = ScriptManage.instance:getAllRecipes() for i = 0, recipes:size()-1 do local recipe = recipes:get(i) if recipe:getFullType() == "Susceptible.RecipeName" then recipe:getResult():setCount(20) end end

If i were to use the code to disable the recipes added by the original mod as you suggested. How would that look after the "Then"?

[bronze yoke]

recipe:setIsHidden(true) seems like it should work

[limber onyx]

thanks mate, I'll get to work on it and let you know how it goes

I assume I have to create the new recipes with a different name or the lua function will hide them too, right?