Total Conversion inputs/considerations

Thought I’d start a thread to capture peoples inputs/ideas/considerations on the upcoming Total Conversion (TC) initiative.
Rather than create a massive debate thread… I’m going to suggest we just add our ideas (or variants of other peoples ideas)… and collate them here for the devs to read.

Can I just re-state: please avoid criticizing / poo-poo’ing or showing off your awesome Unreal Engine knowledge… let’s just get some ideas on what would help us mod Total Conversion mods that are epic.

My ones:

  1. Expose sunrise/midday/sunset fields… and other sound ambients in PrimalGameData. Being able to change music/sounds/effects can massively help a TC mod be different.

  2. Easily remove the tamed dino buffs (3.0 damage for example). The disparity between tamed and wild dinos is not only game-balance breaking, but is also negating player weapons usefulness.

  3. Easily change skyboxes. Imagine putting an alien planet in the sky background… or a city backdrop.

  4. Expose (or add?) cross-class aggro multipliers. For example, a Stego coming to assist a Trike against a mutual enemy. An adult Stego (class) assisting a juvenile or infant Stego (different classes)

  5. Ability to form temporary groups. I realize this isn’t quite a TC feature… more of a dev radar concept: imagine people from different tribes joining a group to summon and defeat a dragon. The group leader might have master looter rights to distribute loot equally to people/other tribes.

  6. Expose wild dino levelling stat weighting. e.g. a player will drop everything into health/melee defense… a wild dino will randomly distribute across 5 stats or so. Being able to weight wild dinos to prefer health/melee will make for a more exciting game.

  7. Easily change/add event scripts. Possibly a radar concept as well… but imagine being able to trigger a radiation event that requires players to be in caves… or hail storms that do damage if not protected… or spawn an NPC if a certain condition is met. This all lends to TC immersion.

  8. Easily add/remove NPC buffs depending on time/location/health conditions. e.g. certain NPCs get speed/damage buffs at night… a raptor in grasslands takes less damage… a dying sabertooth gets a 50% damage buff.

  9. Easily modify skeletons/characters to add/remove general enhancements. I did take a quick look around but its not super obvious… e.g. remove the alpha rex damage buff, create a different buff and effect, add or remove camera shakes or sound effects to animations. Hopefully this will be easy to do in the TC.

That’s it for now… looking forward to hearing other peoples ideas!

Hey , I’m definitely not trying to be negative, but the only thing in your list that would require the total conversion capability would most likely be #5 and #8. And that is actually something that I don’t think would be available in total conversion since it is source code related.

Now, doing a TC for your items would definitely make them easier to implement, for sure, but it is not necessary. I would recommend that you try to keep them in a mod format so that you still share compatibility with other mods.

What i want from future updates of the dev kit are :

  • Easy way to access data about players / Tribes in blueprint. (Getters / Setters for everything about the player).
  • A way to have more options on player creation (more than 2 Player Character Definitions for example)

I can’t wait to see what’s possible with the update on the 13th :slight_smile:

what i look for with this update is to be able to changed the leveling system of wild and tame dino :slight_smile:

so that i can tell my wild dino to up more than 1 stat per level and even choose if some are mandatory and other have a chance of being up :slight_smile: (well for now it seem that wild dino will up torpor at each level then choose randomly one another stat to up, i want to be able to make it so that they up torpor and other define stats and randomly another one) and being able to specify for each dino how to do it so that they don’t up the same way :stuck_out_tongue: (why the **** would a para need health or damage when their best option is to run :smiley: contrary to a rex that will obviously up it’s health or damage at each level :wink: )

of course same thing with tame dino, making it possible to maybe up more stats per level for balancing issue :stuck_out_tongue:

that’s all i really need for now. :stuck_out_tongue:

Just adding a few more:

  • ability to add/remove buffs to (dino) character BPs… e.g. the alpha AoE buff being applies to alpha rex etc.
  • ability to add/remove/override alpha dino spawns e.g. is there some reason why alphas don’t show up in the normal dino spawners to keep it simpler from a spawn mgmt perspective.