Feature Requests

[89157Z]

What requests have we for specific features, not present in the base game, that we hope will be possibilities for modding in?

 

I'm going to kick off with one in particular. Skill degradation. I don't really want it to be in Academagia proper, but it's important to a mod concept I had. For the 'dragon mod' idea I still want to implement, I want the thing that eats up a lot of a character's time to be the need to find food. Hunting. (This is important because I wasn't intending the mod to be a simulation of dragons going to a boarding school for mages.) To implement this, I wanted a 'Food Stocks' parent skill, with three subskills. One of the three subskills would be the literal 'Stored Food' subskill. It would degrade by a level periodically and have a high training modifier, requiring the constant 'training' of it via hunting.

 

Will this be possible?

 

Another thing I was thinking of doing was to make the dragon mod take place on a timescale of weeks rather than days. (After all, being legendarily long-lived creatures, one hardly expects a dragon to act on the same timescale as humans do.) A several year game where you get three actions per week should give about the same number of actions over the course of the entire game. Will I be able to do that?

 

What does everyone else hope will be possible/need for their mod concepts?

[wardrake]

Whew, thats a good one, waiting for that mod..... teehee...

[Legate of Mineta]

89157Z;

 

Unfortunately, Skill degradation isn't natively possible to the engine, although using the Tools you can laboriously create these conditions in a roundabout way. Changing the days also is not currently possible, but we're going to try to release a version in the future where you can do this- not everyone wants their total conversions to run on Academagia time.

[Nyaa]

Skill degradation.

 

Will this be possible?

The roundabout way to do this is -1 foodstock per month or make a mandatory event like those "holiday" at the end of the month and code a -1 foodstock to the result. Would be interesting if you code this into every event that require the dragon to use a lot of energy.

 

timescale of weeks rather than days.

Replace day name with week, so your dragon do three things a week, then if we could make the game calender only display six day, we can replace month name like Athonos as half a year. Either some script hex or image replacement...

 

If not, then we can assume one year is 16 months....

[89157Z]

That mod will take a long time, and won't be the first thing I produce, assuming it can be produced at all. The first thing I'm going to produce will be a review of the game's skills and events. I want to create an unofficial patch with optional event rebalancing.

 

I can think of ways I can probably create skill degradation with the way things are now. For example, tie a '-1 level of food stocks skill' to the majority of actions! Clumsy and unthematic, but it might work. Alternatively, do the same thing with events as Nyaa suggests, which is more thematic but might be even clumsier.

 

The way Nyaa is describing the days/weeks thing is basically how I was hoping it could be done, but I understand if it can't. That's no showstopper. I'm sure I can come up with something... I already have some great ideas for how I'm going to subvert the game's lore to make this premise work. *evil grin*

 

But don't let me hog the thread, and I hoped to hear some less-TC feature requests. What do people want for modding Academagia proper? For example, Gates-aided exploration. Gates magic can help you travel across planes - what if there were some more Gates-only areas that could be uncovered by a special exploration-type action? There's no such thing in the native game, but I've heard some forumers complain that the Proscribed Schools don't give you enough to do, and so that strikes me as a good niche for a game mod. But is it possible?

 

Edit: To clarify, the idea is, will the modding tools allow us to implement 'x idea'. Also, I'm going to go put the Gates-aided exploration thing in the idea pool.

[Legate of Mineta]

89157Z;

 

Yes, it's possible to do what you suggest. It's a little complicated, but it can be done.