Where the fuck is the structure rework?

Okay this thing has been in the works for a WHILE now. (since about may) and so far we had 5 people working on it. Me, Maklarin, Hleb, Seven and Mellow, so we should’ve been done with it by now? Sorta.

Why is it taking so long

The main reason on why it’s taking so long is that the work to set these things up is EXTREMELY tedious, especially the jigsaws. The actual main building part of the desert atom is done, the layout is finished and we have basically every guaranteed building and room done, so we should just PR it at this point right?

What are jigsaws and why they fucking suck

Jigsaws are the dynamic elements of a structure, back-ported from modern mine-crap by Mellow, they give us the ability to add randomized elements to structures, for example; Meteor dungeon is a fully jigsawed structure.

fucking hell hell

So why do they suck?

They’re tedious to set-up, you have to build the actual thing, make sure it actually fits where the jigsaws spawn, align them, organize the names groups etc, make sure that it doesn’t overlap with other jigsaws, amongst many others that would make this list too long. The main problem with these are that given this is a “major” overhaul (idfk why people instantly went to that conclusion given this thing is abysmal dogshit and tiny in the current version, and people just name-plated it as this) and because of that it should have elements that aren’t static so that there’s good variation in the structure. The problem with this is that for this kind of structure, the only thing we can do is add places where loot does and doesn’t spawn, add places where enemies spawn or not spawn, and add decoration that spawn and not spawn, it’s not fully random as if for example we wanted to randomize the location of the buildings or content of entire rooms, they’d need to follow some sort of schematic or blueprint to how they’re structured so a 5x5 room doesn’t spawn in a 10x10 building, this itself isn’t a problem until you consider that this extends the amount of shit that needs to be built over tenfold. So this is why this will NOT be a thing in the rework, unless someone wants to slave away building and then setting this shit up themselves, if you do be my guest.
You can’t do deep nests with jigsaws, at least currently. So AD to the previous point, I wanted to make a randomized basement since this SHOULD theoretically work, since ex. Meteor Dungeon already do this sort of thing, we could just copy a hallway blueprint from current basement and the rooms, as well as make some more rooms since they’re easy and don’t need exteriors and don’t have a size constraint since it’s going to be under-ground. Well the problem is that you CAN’T do this kind of nest since you can’t nest jigsaws if they aren’t fully contained by the parent jigsaw. Ex. I can make a static hallway and randomized rooms because the parent structure (“Desert Atom”) covers everything including the hallway and the empty space, but as soon as you make a jigsaw (“Hallway”) and then add another jigsaw (“Room1”) that should spawn from “Hallway” it won’t spawn since it’s not contained. The solution to this would be just to add a boolean toggle for it, and this 99.9% will be in the finished Desert Atom.
BALANCING, I’ve already been yelled at by seven because I gave zombies security armor which is supposedly “way too op” even though you can get a 50 dmg stun-lock sword like 30 mins into your world which just 1 taps this thing but whatever that’s not the point, the point is that we need to balance radiation, mobs, mob equipment, spawn-rate and loot in this thing, if we give it the standard loot from the already existing loot-tables and no machines like most structures, players will NEVER explore this thing and will either lawn-base it or just mine out all of the concrete and leave. The problem with using mobs as balancing out for loot is pacifist players and the general retardation the mobs have. I’ve seen people in GBT complain about “Skeletons with guns being too accurate” when this is not even remotely true as they can’t hit shit even if you stand still in front of them. And even with “decent guns” they just can’t hit shit and do no damage to someone wearing even early game armor. For RADs it’s much simpler since we can just gate it to a certain point in progression, but this has some problems since liquidator can be acquired pretty early on and you could just cheese to get some good loot. Our idea was to make some sort of quest where you’d need to “fix” a machine to get the actual machine, ex. Fix this turbine with ¹⁄₄ of it’s materials to get it, boom easy right? Well pretty much but this is more time spent on one thing. IE: Buff gun skeletons they suck
Mob block. This thing was buggy when I tried to prototype some spawn-points with it a while ago but has since been fixed, apart from that we don’t really have a good “template” for what mobs should have in desert atom, but I think it’s gonna be mostly T3 skeletons and some with better gear (T4 maybe idfk) for reference factory has one T2 skeleton in the office room.

So what now?

We could just finish this thing and just add jigsaws loot enemies and quests with more PRs, and the fact that it would be released could probably get some new people who’d like to contribute to it as well.