Universal Forum Archive

Couldnt get round losing a few posts in the merge from gameislands.net :/

Hedge ive copied in this one - it'll take me most of tomorrow to understand and answer methinks

(hedge edit: see below )

heh, yeh sorry for the feckin novel..course arguably if i actually can sort out how all that works, that'd make one extra person who can help out answerin the next guy that's all confuddled.

which i'm guessin would raise the total to one

i edited a bit for clarity (pfff), so here's the full deal (but first, a worthless paragraph):

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er... this question wound up being more involved than i thought, heh.

remember that long bit we'd done about life/death stuff? i'm thinkin this is the hunger/thirst equivalent, heh :]

i'm really rather hoping i can maybe run some of this by everyone and see if there's any glaring misconceptions i have in how some of the needs stuff works, or who knows, maybe my logic's all fecked...wouldn't be the first time

that and it's just kind of lame guessing at the whole thing and typing in a few numbers. ideally if this is all sorted out to a logical conclusion once, it could be replicated and altered for any sort of hunger/thirst/time/production scenario flawlessly. maybe. at best.
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what i'd like to do, is start with a "normal" production and cost rate, and then multiply all the values by nine when adding it into the bdat, giving a max employee value of 10 to each building. if SRP is, say, 100%, then each employee would add 10% efficiency (and a resulting 10% increase in storage if i understood the above reply correctly) to the building's output.

i figure that way, what i'd want to do is make a building having 1 employee be up to the "acceptable" level of production required for the island to be reasonably productive.
as the island grows and more people need food/drink/etc, the buildings will automatically be able to hire and produce more; so the world's exports grow as the island does, and business owners have to keep up with the growth of the game and world.

in this hypothetical island, there won't be any offline needs, but when they're online they should have to work to keep fed while they continue towards loftier goals (they'll be expected to have a huge backpack full of food on hand to go off exploring the world for instance).

so if i'm assuming the bare minimum people i can have on the island is two per industry (one to own the building and one to work at it, bringing it up to its "normal" level of efficiency), then i've gotta sort out what the hunger/thirst is and make just enough product (give or take a steak or two) for them to get by.

let's say my online needs % is 100, and my offline needs % are set to 0. at rest needs are 50%.
my online health loss is 0% because they'll only lose health if they're not fed or given drink.

i've set my gametime as 238, which means a gameday every 4 minutes, and 1 game year every realtime day.

my max health decay is 6, because 6x10 = 60 points lost per day, * 365 days in a game year = 21900 health points lost per realtime day, * 365 realtime days is 7993500, or just above the total 7,680,000.

this would ideally mean that anyone who's played a perfect game the whole year would make it to the end still alive. it also means that the closer the game is to the end, the harder it should theorhetically become and the more attentive you need to be to your character, because you have less total health you can lose as the game progresses. i imagine by the final month of the game, everyone would be constantly paranoid about eating and driinking well, unless they've afforded to build and purchase a factory what makes nutrisuits, which'll be one of the most expensive things on the island.

my goal is to run the island for 1 year, so this sounds like a preferable setup to me.

now we get on to hunger and thirst: let's just use hunger for our example since we'll use that data to determine the eventual outcome of the standard production rate for our hypothetical farm...

my inactivity time limit is about 4 days, but in terms of being online, i want my players to fill up a few times a day, so let's say that every gameday (ie: 4 mins), they get 5% more hungry, meaning it'll take them approximately 80 mins to reach starvation status. it's a 45 minute walk to the next town, so if they went to attack the enemy with no supplies in the default vehicle, presumably they would be starving when they return.

according to the manual, it's a 6,400,000 point system. i'm assuming 0 is totally starving and 6,400,000 is totally stuffed. so 6,400,000 divided by 100 (%) is 64000, times five is 320000, which is the number their hunger should increase by per gameday. divide that by 100 (since hunger increase rate is x100), and i have a hunger increase rate of 3200.

{edit} after testing this in-game, i wound up getting to starvation status in, as well as i could calculate it, approximately 37 minutes -- about half what was expected.

i'm guessing this is because everything is calculated on the 32,767 scale, being the max that field can be set at.

redoing the calculation is nearly impossible however until a full understanding of how hunger increase works; as i can't see it working any other way.

the presumption is if my hunger increase rate is 3200x100 = 320000, tha'st 320,000 taken out of the whole 6,400,000 value for for that need.

this would make sense, as 32767, the max value for that field, times 100 is 3,2767,00 -- or just over half the total value for the need (meaning a max setting would have me starving in two gamedays.)

is the setting rounded up in some way that's unclear in the manual that might cause this effect?

{/edit}


now we come to the needs/health lost modifier, which the manual doesn't really have any info for, so i can't edit this right now.

so for now i'll just edit my starving health decay, and later i'll have to adjust it when i know how the needs/health loss mod works.

if my players get more hungry by 5% every gameday they aren't fed, that'd be 20 days (80 minutes) until they reach starvation.

assuming they reach starvation, that's almost an hour and a half of neglect. i'll go easy on them here and set it up so that they have some extra time though to come back and save their character, since all this effects whether or not they can make it to the end of the game next year.

i'll give them eight hours to recover their character before it dies. even in the case of some weird connectivity problem or passin out after too many whiskeys without first loggin off, it should be more than enough time. (and really, with no offline needs all they need to do is show up every 4 days (aka 4 years) to hold on to their stuff if they aren't in the mood to play that week.)

this one is x300, so 7680000 total health points divided by 120 (days in four months, which == 8 hours) = 64000 health points lost per gameday, or every 4 minutes. divided by 300 is 213.333333etc, so we'll just give them a lil' leeway and say 213.

(note that the manual doesn't explicitly say that it's gamedays and not realtime days the points are lost over, but it's prolly safe to assume.)

this would also i suppose allow a person to survive for approximately 18 hours and 40 minutes if they were in their home i'd expect.

{edit}

on 12:35pm today (realtime) i came in with a brand new, bill-wiped character. as mentioned above in the earlier bits about the hunger increase rate, i became starving by approximately 1:17pm (realtime) and started my health decay.

it's now 1:36pm, and so far i'm at 44009 health at the moment, which means i've probably factored this incorrectly as well. partly, that's fair enuf since the game oddly only starts me with 76% of my total health (or 59,990, which i think has been explained somewhere but whateva, that's at least something we can adjust for)

still, at approximately 66% health -- i've lost 10% of my health in 19 minutes, meaning i'll be dead by around 2:46pm today, for a total of 2 hours and 11 minutes total alive time...hardly the 9 and a half hours i anticipated.

last night i let myself die while asleep, and one possible bug that should be mentioned is that health suspension works even if the player is online when they respawn...according to the manual their health should only be suspended if they die while offline.

i dunno if this is sorted with a relog or something permanent as i wiped the bill when logging back on to re-test this morning... i'll let this new character die and note what i find.

{/edit}

so as a result, i guess my question(s) are:

a] does all that sound about right or have i completely misunderstood any of the settings involved, and

b] how's the needs/health gain modifier work again?

c] what am either i or the manual/code missing in factoring the hunger increase rate?

d] same for starving health decay?

edit: additionally...

e] assuming i sold nothing but steaks, then each steak, according to this thread would add 80 points to the hunger meter and +2 to health.

that must be multiplied by a number that's not listed, since otherwise i'd need to eat approximately 80,000 steaks to be full.

i can't see the +2 just being added to health -- that'd require i eat 384,0000 steaks to go from 0 to full health.

so i've gotta assume the +2 is actually a modifyer of the needs/health gain modifier, but i don't know what the modifying % is for that feature yet, so that's as far as i can go there.


ideally i'd determine how many steaks are necessary to keep two players fully fed for the length of time between steak-production cycles, and then multiply it by 9 to determine the overall number of steaks my building should make.

seriously... my fingers gonna fall off very soon if you keep this up

why, are you the one that retypes it on the server when i hit "submit" ?

btw would it help if i trimmed this post down by, say, the entire thing?

according to the manual, it's a 6,400,000 point system. i'm assuming 0 is totally starving and 6,400,000 is totally stuffed. so 6,400,000 divided by 100 (%) is 64000, times five is 320000, which is the number their hunger should increase by per gameday. divide that by 100 (since hunger increase rate is x100), and i have a hunger increase rate of 3200.

{edit} after testing this in-game, i wound up getting to starvation status in, as well as i could calculate it, approximately 37 minutes -- about half what was expected.

Cant see anything obviously wrong with your understanding of those bits.. However, there is a manual bug there - the hunger and thirst modifiers are both scaled by x200 not x100 - hence the reduced decay time. 1600 should give you the 5% daily hunger increase you're after.

now we come to the needs/health lost modifier, which the manual doesn't really have any info for, so i can't edit this right now.

bad naughty manual.
Hunger Health Loss Modifier and
Thirst Health Loss Modifier

both work on a base hunger level of 40%. Once the player is above 40% hungry or thirsty, this modifier can be used to start decreasing the players health. Theres a bit of funny scaling goin on with the values here that make the calculations a bit unpleasant - the "simple definition" is - When a player is above 40% hungry, they will lose health proportional to their hunger amount of above 40% multipled by the health loss modifier - 2 for this value means they'd lose health twice as quickly as when set to 1.

{ The full calculation for this is -
Hunger is converted to scale 0-50000 (so the cutoff point, 40%, is 20000 hunger points -- 2,560,000 in the normal scale). For example a player with half hunger results in a scaled value of 25,000. The amount above the cutoff point is then used - in this example, the player is 5,000 points above the cutoff. 5000 is then multiplied by the health loss modifier, and divided by 100 to give the final resulting health change (in the original 0 -> 6,400,000 scale). Sooo... with a health loss modifer of say, 60.. our example player would lose ( 5000 x 60 ) / 100 health points on the day he is 50% hungry i.e 3000 of his 6,400,000 points. }

It is possible to ignore this setting completely, and just have your players health affected simply by the starving modifier. I'd personally be quite interested in seeing a system where its something like, if you dont eat once a realtime week you starve, and cut out some of the complexities of balancing health loss modifiers and food needs.

Right.. on to the "Health Decay Rate Starving"..

this one is x300, so 7680000 total health points divided by 120 (days in four months, which == 8 hours) = 64000 health points lost per gameday, or every 4 minutes. divided by 300 is 213.333333etc, so we'll just give them a lil' leeway and say 213.
(note that the manual doesn't explicitly say that it's gamedays and not realtime days the points are lost over, but it's prolly safe to assume.)

Again, cant see anything particularly wrong with your understanding . The calc is indeed x300 and on initial inspection those figures look fine enuf to me. That they dont work suggests somethin is wrong then . Might need to look into that further, but a couple of things might be affectin it..
- Are your hunger and thirst Health Loss Modifiers both 0? (If not, health will also be decreasing as described above - The starving health loss is additional to the normal loss experienced when hunger and thirst are both above 40%)
- Is your Standard health decay rate 0? (Again, the starving decay is applied as an additional amount to the normal decay)
- Is your thirst maxed out too? - The starving health loss is applied separately for hunger and thirst so if both are on max health will decrease at double the defined rate.

mm, cant think of anything else that might be affecting that so if none of the above applies i might need to have a sit in the debugger on that one.

I'll reply again a bit later on re the steaks and health modifier when my headache has reduced [/quote]

righht... starting point.. *settings -> Life -> Food Health Modifier.

The values given in the list i put on the forum (and which i need to include in the manual :] ) are scaled by x12800 relative to health's normal 0 to 7,680,000 -
So the +2 health steaks have a base effect of 2 x 12800 = 25,600 health points per steak.

This is modified by the Food Health Modifier setting mentioned above then divided by 1000 to give the final resulting health gain or loss.

Sooo.. If Food Health Modifier is, for example, 2000, then 1 steak will result in..

( 2 x 12800 x 2000 ) / 1000 = 51,200 health points increase.
(i.e. 150 steaks would change em from 0 health to full).

The max value for the FHM, 32767 would be..
( 2 x 12800 x 32767 ) / 1000 = 838,835 health points increase.
(i.e. 9 steaks to go from 0 health to full).

Interestingly, negative FHM values make shite food good for ya ;]

much obliged. i'm not sure for whom the math is more painfully irritating for, but surely we've just conquered some sort of everest of aversion

* yup, x200 clears that problem up, since it's moving twice as fast as i thought it was

** indeed, i'm a doofus and didn't figure in the obvious -- i was both dying of thirst and starving -- so naturally it would move twice as fast. max health decay was also in play, but it's running so slowly that it shouldn't have been a factor over 8 hours; at least not in any noticeable way.

*** predictable hunger/thirst on a weekly basis or something might indeed be fun; particularly if there were no online needs and simply offline ones; tho for this particular isle it'll be the opposite: hunger and thirst working like fuel, but being offline indefinitely won't ever kill your character (if the server ever goes down, no flood of posts asking for health suspensions, plus i always rather hated all that stocking the house crap).

mainly i just want to add to the spirit of adventure a bit, so if they're planning a long voyage to wage battle on an enemy, they'll have to remember to pack a few sandwhiches, heh.

so...

**** many thanks for the details on the other two bits, as that should make it much easier to get a nice proper lil' needs system set up.

(on the plus side, ya can prolly cut and paste it into the manual )

heh, ironically in the end i decided to take your idea/advice anyway and make food/drink as similar to fuel as i could -- food and drink slowly decay over time with no health penalty -- if you let your needs max themselves out while online, your health will rapidly drop over the next 45 minutes, causing death, similar to how your vehicle gives you a warning, but will eventually just stop working.

i'm gonna use that other bit in something tho, i swear