Honestly I’ve not had much programming experience, but I have had some. The UE editor looks pretty easy, but I am lost for knowing if I can do some of the stuff that I’d like to do and where to find it.
Short explanation, I want to bring actual genetics to ark (I am a biologist after all), and re-balance the wild-tamed dino interaction.
I think the balance that I want to do would be the easiest of this.
A dino lvl cap of 100.
Have a very low level of bonus levels for dinos near the cap (Basically if I tame a lvl 96 I’d still be able to add 5 levels to the dino to max it at 101, or for a lvl 100 at . 105)
Ultimately have set levels for dino maturation level skins in the wild (ie. 1-5 baby, 5-15 juvie, 15-20 adolescent, then the full adult).
Make all dinos like the penguins with babies and such wandering. Egg nests would be nice too.
My thoughts behind this are that the level cap makes taming “babies” more desirable because you can “train” them when you level up (min-maxing stats like in D&D). This is my solution to a wild vs tamed dino. Because a trained war horse should be tougher than a wild one but the wild might be a faster runner.
The next idea would be tougher. I’d like to customize how each stat is calculated. With the right equation dominance, co-dominance, incomplete dominance, and several genetic abnormalities could be coded into the dinos for breading. Even a RNG for what you get from a parent would work. These would be hidden varriables. So basically
Add new functions to calculate stats on dinos (I know I can alter the multiplier, but I want a little more variety and to add some soft caps)
Add new hidden stats to dinos that are part of the equations but can be inherited. (Would include disease states too, eventually.)
Add at a latter time some structures (industrial and tek) that could genotype the dinos.
So what I am looking for right now is, where can I find the values to cap dino level, and where are the functions for the individual dino species stats?
It’s very difficult to do anything involving the stats, and especially involving the stat levels. There’s functions for getting and setting the maximum values of the stats, but only for the maximum values as I recall. And, since all of the data related to stats is stored in static arrays (which the UnrealEditor’s graph system cannot directly interact with), that means that you can’t really do anything fancy with them.
There are multipliers though right. I know servers can buff different sections of individual dino species stats. Like making every point into hunger twice as effective. Could we do something with that. Wouldn’t have to change the base lvl 1 stats in that array then.
for the only to lvl 100 its ezy https://i.gyazo.com/284d38b430cfaa458bf14eed419e52af.png (i recommend u put this on every dino and make it an overhaul mod otherwise it will get laggy if you get all dinos at once and apply this [just like destroy wild dinos does] ). as for the stats, thats a hard one due to limits on the knowledge of where wild points went. its going to natually happen that higher dinos will get more per point, but lower might beat them due to number of points. you can always rescale the max stat for a dino through the “Rescale Max Stat”, but then you would be affected by the hidden levels (from when it was wild). the dino default stats are found in the components tab under the status component. please note these are the level 1 stats.
The overhaul was the plan. I don’t see this playing nice with many other mods.
The point of this idea would be to make it so that there are only 100 lvls of stat points to put into dinos. If you tame/hatch a lvl 1, then you get to assign all of them as you see fit. If you tame a lvl 50, then you only get to apply half and the other half (the wild lvls) are assigned randomly. This seems like a better system to approximate training than what we currently have. I wouldn’t expect myself (a wild human) to be able to beat another person at some activity they have trained in for years. Side note, I can also see someone using this system to train an AquaRex.
What I would like to really know how to do is alter the per stat bonus to be more of an exponential function than the linear I’ve seen. That adds in Deminishing returns and kinda a soft cap with the asemtope as a number that would take alot of work to break through. I don’t really see the need to change many of the default values.
Doing the above stat equation lets me add in hidden variable stats to plug into the equations. This is the “genetics” i would like to add in. With careful planning each stat, for each creature potentially, could have a different mechanic. That’s what I really want to do with this idea.
