[Mod] Beware the Dark [bewarethedark]

[Ben]

I've been thinking about the sunburn angle some more, and at the moment, I can't see too many players who would have darkness damage and sunlight damage on at the same time. Additionally, I think I'd like to change the damage mechanics for sunlight: if you stand in sunlight, a meter increases, and after it's about half full, you start taking periodic damage proportional to your sunlight meter. So if you hang around til it's full, you'll have a sunburn that takes some time to heal, damaging you all the time.

For this reason, I'm considering not putting sunburns into this mod, but making a new one. If anyone here thinks it would be better to have both in the same mod, let me know ;-)

[Don]

I think separate mods would be better.
Are you going to check for air for 3 or 4 nodes above? That way you can have bright lights in your house and not get a sunburn. Or is there a better way?

[FaceDeer]

What you might consider is going from "sunlight is lethal" to "the surface is lethal", meaning you'd get hurt just the same during the night.

I was thinking it'd be more fun having a window of opportunity where one can scurry out onto the surface to scavenge and harvest surface-specific materials, then burrow back underground again to hide from the coming of the dawn.

For night time danger there's always monsters. Can't have a post apocalypse without horrible mutants lurking in the shadows. :)

[Don]

What you might consider is going from "sunlight is lethal" to "the surface is lethal", meaning you'd get hurt just the same during the night.

I was thinking it'd be more fun having a window of opportunity where one can scurry out onto the surface to scavenge and harvest surface-specific materials, then burrow back underground again to hide from the coming of the dawn.

For night time danger there's always monsters. Can't have a post apocalypse without horrible mutants lurking in the shadows. :)

Some Resident Evil mobs would be awesome.

[Ferk]

For night time danger there's always monsters. Can't have a post apocalypse without horrible mutants lurking in the shadows. :)

I guess there's no reason why that couldn't be the case for daytime as well.

Or you could make the game set a permanent night (set the day speed to 0).. change the skybox to look like a polluted corrupted sky and blame contamination for the permanent darkness.

What would really sell it would be if you were able to change the color of the light the moon gives. But I think that's hardcoded in the engine shaders. Maybe you can set the time on permanent sunset to at least get red tones from the sun.

[Ben]

Alright, separate mod it is! Watch this space (or rather, watch for a new thread in this subforum :-P)!

As for monsters: the actual purpose of Beware the Dark is to compensate for a lack of mobs ;-) But matching night monsters with daylight sunburn could work well – let's try it out.

[…]
Are you going to check for air for 3 or 4 nodes above? That way you can have bright lights in your house and not get a sunburn. Or is there a better way?

Oh, simpler than that: I just check if the player's head is at light level 14 or 15. Default torches are 13 at most, so they're completely safe. Other mods can (and do) add super-lights with strength 14 or 15, but then you'd have to stand in them to get hurt, or at least press your forehead against them. And I think one could justify getting hurt then ;-)

[Ben]

That went quicker than expected: Sunburn :-D

[Don]

That went quicker than expected: Sunburn :-D

That was fast. I will try to test it tonight

[eduardomezencio]

Could you create a git repository for the mod, please? It's easier to update and to eventually contribute code.

Edit: Well, I see you already have one.. just post the link for it then, please :) And just one more thing (sorry for being an arse and asking so much), but it would also be nice to change tha name of your repo in github to bewarethedark instead of minetest-bewarethedark, so that when the user clones it, the name for the created folder is already correct.

[Ben]

Could you create a git repository for the mod, please? […] just post the link for it then, please :)

Ok, it's up! Hope this is the right place to point to.

And just one more thing (sorry for being an arse and asking so much), but it would also be nice to change tha name of your repo in github to bewarethedark instead of minetest-bewarethedark, so that when the user clones it, the name for the created folder is already correct.

No worries about asking, but I'd rather keep the name as it is – this helps me keep repositories organized. I tend to use "obscure" mod names, and this way one can recognize them immediately. I personally just symlink the cloned folder anyway, and git easily lets you clone into a folder name of your choice.

The published .zips are a different matter – GitHub's standard release mechanism appends '-master' to the repo name, and I think I'm supposed to have a .zip file containing a bewarethedark folder. Dunno how I'm going to automate that…

[Lessaloploth]

Woah, this mod is extremely creative and I absolutely dearly love the idea. Amazing, man.

I have a suggestion, it's far out there, though...

What if the night was an "entity" trying to kill the player? As time goes on, the darkness gets aggressive. It starts off slow, just damaging you when you're in the darkness. Then, torches may start to go out. You go home and think, "Huh... I thought I put a torch here.". Then the torches start going out more, and darkness gets more unforgiving and nights grow longer as the "entity" tries to kill you.

I think this may be a good idea because it naturally ramps the difficulty in a predictable fashion, and progresses with the player to give them some challenge, and doesn't make it so the player is totally immune once they make an underground base.

[Ferk]

What if the night was an "entity" trying to kill the player? As time goes on, the darkness gets aggressive. It starts off slow, just damaging you when you're in the darkness. Then, torches may start to go out. You go home and think, "Huh... I thought I put a torch here.". Then the torches start going out more, and darkness gets more unforgiving and nights grow longer as the "entity" tries to kill you.

I think this may be a good idea because it naturally ramps the difficulty in a predictable fashion, and progresses with the player to give them some challenge, and doesn't make it so the player is totally immune once they make an underground base.

I'm not sure if I understand your idea, but maybe that deserves a separate different mod. It seems the purpose of this mod is a simple one and it should probably stay simple.

EDIT: Oh sorry, after reading a second time I understand what you mean. It's a good idea. Actually I guess it would be very easy to add an ABM to the torches to make them disappear randomly (and check the world's time before deciding to put the torch off). Might be simple and de-coupled enough that it could be added as a minetest.conf option I guess.

I still think someone should make some mod that involves insanity, that causes random effects on the player depending on his sanity level.
Maybe I'll try when I'm more free from dungeontest

[Ben]

Two quick thoughts on this:

1) The popular Goblins mod has goblins (surprise!) that, at the time of this writing, do not attack the player. However, they do knock out torches! That's one kind of "evil entity trying to kill you" ;-)

2) There's an idea about torch decay floating around. I first heard of it in Minecraft, where it was never implemented, however. I'm not sure if anyone has written anything for Minetest; I can't find anything. So I've tentitavely put it on my own ToDo list ;-)

[Don]

@Ben - I made a torch for a game I am making. It has 3 stages. After x amount of time it changes to a dimmer torch then a torch that is burnt out.
If you want I can make it a mod.

[Ben]

@Ben - I made a torch for a game I am making. It has 3 stages. After x amount of time it changes to a dimmer torch then a torch that is burnt out.
If you want I can make it a mod.

Sounds good! I'd love to see how other people would tackle the problem (for me, the coding is the fun part, I might write my own anyway :-D), and I think there's demand for a mod like this.

[Lessaloploth]

Two quick thoughts on this:

1) The popular Goblins mod has goblins (surprise!) that, at the time of this writing, do not attack the player. However, they do knock out torches! That's one kind of "evil entity trying to kill you" ;-)

2) There's an idea about torch decay floating around. I first heard of it in Minecraft, where it was never implemented, however. I'm not sure if anyone has written anything for Minetest; I can't find anything. So I've tentitavely put it on my own ToDo list ;-)

Just to clarify, when I say "entity" I mean a theoretical one. It doesn't exist physically per-se, but it's like an omnipresence trying to kill the player by making torches burn out, lights turn off, etc etc.

Torch decay is good for your mod, IMO. Once you have a base indoors there's not much else to do, so that would give you a little bit of a goal.

[Don]

I put the torches in their own mod. Understand that this is not a finished project. It mostly looks ok.
I left the time as 10 seconds. I had it at that for testing. The first line of init.lua has the time setting. I plan to go with 7200 which is 2 hours of game play. That number is for each stage. There is actually 4 stages not 3 like I said earlier. That means a torch lasts 6 hours plus 2 hours of a burnt out torch.
https://github.com/DonBatman/mytorches

[Ben]

I put the torches in their own mod. Understand that this is not a finished project. It mostly looks ok. https://github.com/DonBatman/mytorches

I've had a look at the code, looks neat! I haven't run it though, sorry – when I have some time next ;-)

[…]There is actually 4 stages not 3 like I said earlier. That means a torch lasts 6 hours plus 2 hours of a burnt out torch.

Interesting design choices: your first two stages drop a torch again. The "dim" stage (no 3) drops sticks, the "burnt out" stage drops nothing and eventually dissolves into thin air! Personally, my choice would have been to always drop "brand new" torches, and never disappear – keeping an area lit would mean strolling around and re-placing torches as time permits.

This is not a suggestion to change your mod! I was just struck by the difference in mechanics and game consequences. Your version is much more intense, and makes torches practically strictly temporary (I'd view stage 2 dropping torches as allowing to correct for misplacements). Nice!

[Blehmeh98]

A great way to troll someone with this mod would be to knock out the torches behind them while they are mining, knock out the torches in their house when they have run out of coal, etc.

[Ben]

A great way to troll someone with this mod would be to knock out the torches behind them while they are mining, knock out the torches in their house when they have run out of coal, etc.

Yes, or even more drastic: block a skylight they're standing under ;-)

Actually, you made me think of something: I had intended for this mod to be a replacement for "hostile mobs spawn in darkness", except without the mobs. But there is a difference: many mob systems don't spawn mobs directly next to players. In that case, darkness that is far away is dangerous, but darkness that is near is safe. With Beware the Dark, you need to stand in darkness for the effect, so near darknesss is dangerous, while far away darkness is safe.

This means it totally makes sense to have this mod and a (hostile) mob mod installed at the same time! Thanks for the insight !-D

[Ben]

Version 0.3.3 released

No new features, so just a version number bump at the patch level. (Then again, I never promised a rigid versioning scheme. Maybe I should at some point.)

The only change is in configurability: There's a new file "bewarethedark.default.conf" which contains the entire configuration. To configure the mod without your changes being clobbered by or blocking a mod update, copy this file to "bewarethedark.conf" within the mod folder, or within a world folder for world-specific values. Then modify those copies. The three configs are merged together in that order; see the .default.conf for details.

I plan to use this configuration system for all my other mods, and would be grateful for any feedback!

Other than that, I do consider this mod feature complete for now, and am looking to move it to "released". There is one more code change I'd like to do, but that should be it.

[Ben]

Version 0.3.4 released

And here's the code change I mentioned: the "persistent player attributes" part is no longer a "mixin", but a regular part of the mod.

[Gerald]

I like the idea and the implementation seems good.

I tried it (i do not know if it is version 0.3.3 or 0.3.4, you should update the primary post).
I noticed the sanity changes quick, while i think of insanity as an slowly increasing problem, which is hardly cured, so i changed the damage in the config (nice feature!). The problem is that the "real damage" is as bad as the "sanity damage". If there is a healing hunger or armor mod insanity is not deadly anymore. Could you add a possibility to scale or set the "real damage" or a "instakill" option, which means a player dies immediatly if he has no sanity.

I am thinking of a mod nonreturnable extinguishing torches. (I think, it is easy enough to be my first real mod.)
It could be an interristing combination with the charcoal mod.


I wondered the sanity is not reset on respawn.

[Ben]

I like the idea and the implementation seems good.

Thanks!

I noticed the sanity changes quick, while i think of insanity as an slowly increasing problem, which is hardly cured, so i changed the damage in the config (nice feature!). The problem is that the "real damage" is as bad as the "sanity damage". If there is a healing hunger or armor mod insanity is not deadly anymore. Could you add a possibility to scale or set the "real damage" or a "instakill" option, which means a player dies immediatly if he has no sanity.

Ah yes, you're right – the two "damages" are quite coupled. I thought about this, and I think the most flexible solution would be to have another table (optional) with damage values when sanity is depleted. I'll have a look when I get around to it.

I am thinking of a mod nonreturnable extinguishing torches. (I think, it is easy enough to be my first real mod.)
It could be an interristing combination with the charcoal mod.

Yes, definitely. Anything where the player has to manage light and darkness. Good luck with the mod!

I wondered the sanity is not reset on respawn.

Oops. If this is the case (can't check now), that's a bug. Thanks for pointing it out!

[Ben]

Version 0.3.5 released

Just confirmed: sanity did indeed not reset on respawn. Fixed, and thanks Gerald!

[Ben]

Version 0.3.6 released

Another bugfix: the sanity loss / damage had not been scaled by the tick time (default 0.5 seconds) as it should. I've fixed this, meaning the damage per second should not change if the tick time changes.

However, I did not adjust the damage values in the default configuration file. This means that if you're using Beware The Dark, and have not changed anything, you should now lose and regenerate sanity (and damage) at half the former speed.

I left these slower values because I they do seem closer to what I had in mind, and I also fear I may have set higher values during development just to "see something change". I'd be happy to hear what other users think about the old and current sanity and damage speeds. If there's enough interest, I could also add a flat multiplier in the configuration for quick play style switching.

@Gerald: I'm still working on your request about separating damage from sanity loss. Watch this space ;-)

[Ben]

Version 0.4.0 released

Well, that was fast :-P

The configuration now also defines a table "insane_damage_for_light". This can be used to adjust the (HP) damage when a player's sanity is completely gone. Missing values default to the original "damage_for_light" values.

For example, to cause insane players to lose health even in "safe" light levels, fill the table with 15 entries of 1.0 each. To cause instant death when running out of sanity, fill the table with 9999.0.

[Echoes91]

This made its way into my Minesim subgame among with your thirsty mod.
Thank you for the great work!