SS2 Repairman WIP/RC

[6666502980415voodoo47]

time to give the Repair skill a bit more value - this dml mod will allow you to:

- repair destroyed turrets. once a von Braun turret gets destroyed, its corpse will get spawned like usual, however the top will stay attached to it. the bottom can be looted as always, but you can now also select the turret top to get the repair console (see the screenshot), and after a successful repair, a new, friendly turret will be spawned from the corpse (it doesn't matter whether the turret that has been destroyed was friendly or not, the new turret will always be friendly). the Rickenbacker turret works differently - it will simply break/power down and emit sparks until repaired. currently requires repair skill 4 and 50 nanites (subject to change).
- repair damaged medbeds. skill 2 required, successful repair will produce a normal incomplete medbed.
- detach activation keys from complete medbeds. skill 5 required, successful repair will detach the key and make the medbed incomplete again.

needs SS2tool patched install, can be activated mid-game, but only not yet destroyed turrets will be affected. works with vanilla, SCP and most likely all fms. testers are very welcome.

full release here


//the attached turret_fixer mod (now part of the full mod, see link above) will add the ability to fix up damaged turrets with maintenance tools. you need maintenance 3 for von Braun turrets and 4 for Rick turrets, currently heals 5hp per one skill level.

load as a standalone mod, with higher priority than Repairman. the Repairman mod is recommended, but not required. should work with vanilla, SCP and all FMs, but only SCP has received (minimal) testing, so maintain away and report whatever weird stuff you find.
[turret_fixer_zb_rc1.7z expired]
[turret_fixer_zb_rc2.7z expired]
[turret_fixer_zb_rc3.7z expired]

[66665029805a1fascinate4]

WTF,  why the trashbin flying outside in space? 

[66665029806bcvoodoo47]

I have no answer to that - for some reason, I took the military trash can mod, and integrated it into the skybox. and I completely forgot where did I stick the modified texture, so now I see a giant trashcan floating in space every time I test new mods on this particular SS2 install. it always amuses me.

just to make sure there are no misundestandings, the texture is not included in the Repairman mod.

[6666502980792fascinate4]

Well, about your mod. I have tested and it's working fine. Cool mod.

[6666502980864fascinate4]

But strange, after repair, turret start shooting to me.

[66665029809d9voodoo47]

well, that shouldn't be happening. what's your (mod) setup? does the Repairman have the highest priority?

//SS2tool patched install is a requirement, as always.

[6666502980b62Kolya]

Mod sounds awesome. That you managed all that through DML: Amazeballs!

[6666502980cf2voodoo47]

it's no big deal, as long as the objects already exist, it's just a matter of making them talk to one another in an appropriate way.

anyway, updated the mod, there is now a slight delay when turning the turret friendly after it's spawned, this should make things safer and hopefully resolve fascinate's problem as well.


//ok, I think I know what's going on - it's the delay I've added between the moments the new turret is spawned and when it's made friendly. if you are standing right in front of it, it might get one shot off before it switches sides. note to self - add good guy turret archetypes to the SCP gamesys to just spawn a turret that is friendly from the start, thus avoiding all the metatrap trickery that causes this. vanilla gamers will have to tolerate the occasional bullet in the face (or just repair not looking down the turret's gun barrel).

weird thing is that fascinate4 did not have the version of the mod with the delay - hopefully he will provide more details.

[6666502980df9System Shocked]

Thanks for this useful mod!

It's great that you added a comment/post that this DML mod has been updated since its original release, based on community feedback. I suggest adding a version number to the mod, so that persons are confident that they have the most recent updated release of the mod.

[6666502980ecevoodoo47]

well yeah Sherlock, once it gets out of Engineering.

[6666502981047voodoo47]

at this point, I'm pretty sure the mod is viable (for all the vB turrets, if nothing else), so we are at rc1 (attached to the first post).

-a turret can no longer get one shot off and hit the player after repaired
-the new turret will spawn completely closed to prevent a few problems
-minimum skill to repair them is 4 (aligned with hacking req), blast turret should be most difficult to fix, slug is easiest, and laser is in the middle. all should be reasonably easy for someone who has repair 4 and most likely a few point in cyb affinity as well. cost is 50 nanites.

not sure how or whether I'll do something about rick turrets. the mod is universal enough to work with vanilla (SS2tool patched), SCP, and all known fan missions (again, thorough testing would be welcome). Secmod is most likely a no go, but there is no reason to, as it already has its own repairable turrets.

[6666502981163voodoo47]

rc2 attached. changed the turret to pop out after repair, which looks smoother, with a small caveat that the turret will stay on the watch until an enemy wanders by - once the intruder is dead, it will close properly again.

not sure which setup is better at the moment - technically, both should be equally safe.

[6666502981299voodoo47]

also, I would like to hear as many opinions on the minimum skill requirements as possible - should it be 4 for all turrets? or perhaps lower it down to 3 - it's not like the repair requirements have to be in line with the hacking requirements, considering the nanite cost.

[6666502981410Vegoraptor]

Should be fine as it is. One could argue that costs should vary with the power and complexity of the turret (whereas a bullet-firing mechanism would be simpler than recalibrating a botched laser), but I don't think there would be too many people to care about such details.

[6666502981595Join2]

Now this is interesting. Perhaps limit its ammo considerably though. I can see intentionally activating alarms and letting the turret go to town on the spawned hybrids resulting in some lucrative rewards (nanites, hypos, shotgun shells). Perhaps the hacked turret doesn't work when the alarm is on would be best, as it kinda encourages doing this by default?

Garbage can in space? Voodoo's system has been compromised by the Russians!

[666650298167fvoodoo47]

turrets die quite easily, and the re-repair is costly, so I don't think they would be very useful for hybrid farming.

[66665029818e5JML]

Tl,dr: Leave at repair 4, 50 nanites. Else imba. Maybe even add hack 2 as additional req.

Good work. Please leave at repair 4.
As a turret is hard to hack it should also be hard to repair it and it's friend-foe target system. If 3 is requirement it might unbalance the high hack skill requirement.
I'd go even further and add hack 2 or at least 1 as an additional requirement. A basic to moderate knowledge of hacking sounds only reasonable to be able to repair and reroute the friend-foe targeting system of military grade turrets.
This mod makes repair very useful imo if you want to play with turrets. With hack it was hard already to hack turrets in some scenarios where you couldnt disable the alarm easily beforehand. *coug*engineering*cough*
With repair 4 and 50 nanites (and maybe hack 1 or 2) it still costs a lot, but killing turrets with armorpiercing rounds and then peacefully repairing it still sounds great.

[6666502981a3evoodoo47]

I don't think I'll add a low-tier hack requirement (besides, any sane person would have hack2 before entering medsci2 anyway) - dual tech requirements are unheard of.

but yeah, I think the rest of the stuff is pretty good as it is - though I'm kind of leaning to lowering the minimum repair requirement to 3 for the slug turret, as it really is much weaker than the rest of the bunch.

also, I think I could implement critical failure, meaning the turret top would get destroyed should the player fail the repair critically, leaving the turret permanently unrepairable.

[6666502981b64JML]

I agree on the critical failure part. Fiddling with a military turret could very well lead to anti intrusion sysems being activated. Security crates that explode in your face are logical also, so why not turrets!

[6666502981c7bvoodoo47]

ok, it's doable, but I'm not comfortable with the complexity (read: awkwardness) and safety (overriding a destroy signal with the slay signal definitely sounds like something one shouldn't be doing) of the setup, so no critfails for the time being. might revisit if a better way of setting things up comes along.

[6666502981dc2voodoo47]

rc3 is up, it's now possible to repair Rick turrets - after being destroyed, they will power down (lights off), sizzle and emit sparks until repaired.

the Rick2 inverted turrets are a bit of a problem - managed to get them going properly for SCP, but in vanilla they will have that small issue with going to the opposite direction when targeting. I don't think this is solvable in any sane way, so vanilla people will just have to live with that (noticeable at exactly one place). apart from that, rc3 should be good enough to become 1.0, so unless some bug pops out, I'll be posting it in the mods subforum in a couple of days.

make sure to completely delete rc1 or rc2 before loading rc3.

[666650298239dOlfred]

managed to get them going properly for SCP, but in vanilla they will have that small issue with going to the opposite direction when targeting.

I think it's an issue about the world coordinates and the model coordinates aren't aligned in the same way anymore after you have flipped the model.
Now I don't know how the script works but this might lead you to something.

[6666502982500voodoo47]

I know exactly what's going on - basically, I need to spawn a proper inverted turret after the repair, but the vanilla gamesys doesn't have the archetype (SCP does), so I'm forced to spawn a normal turret upside down, and doing this will make it track targets incorrectly. it probably is possible to work around this in some insane way, but I don't consider it worth it - pretty sure the Repairman mod is going to be one those 15 downloads a year kind of deals.

and I primarily build mods with SCP in mind, so not working absolutely perfectly with vanilla is not a big deal - as long as they are not breaking the game, small visual flaws are ok (as this is consistent with vanilla, which is riddled with them).

[66665029825e3voodoo47]

RC4 is up, Minstrel FM compatibility added. this should be the final RC (or v1.0).