Loot without Fences. Shops without shops? - by Ziemanskye
Shockeye on 26/6/2005 at 06:47
Quote Posted by scumble
Well, the concept of having a free-roaming city section was incredibly under-used.
So true. The freeplay city aspect of the game had massive potential. I hope some of the FMs use it.
Anyhoo, has anyone worked out how to delete cash from the player? If you added a script to an item in the shop :
When frobbed by player
-> Delete [price of goods] from players cash.
...you would have your free roaming shop. There is a Script condition that checks for available cash, but there doesn't seem to be an action to alter it.
Anyone have any ideas?
Bumbleson on 26/6/2005 at 18:29
Wise devs would have put the current cash value in a global integer, so we could simply add and subtract from it. But I doubt it's that easy.
Shockeye on 28/6/2005 at 10:50
good idea, i'll have another look in the globals section when i get a chance. I did look there already but thre was no Cash variable. I remember seeing one for loot but i assumed that would refer to stuff you hadn't sold yet
Ziemanskye on 28/6/2005 at 11:32
I have been playing with other things, but I did find the following values:
sta_loot - I think this is the cash value of the unfenced loot at the bottom of the loot menu screen. I think. It gets increased as soon as you pickup some loot anyway.
sta_lootoverall - the game-wide total loot stolen value
sta_lootpercent - just the percentage for in missions
sta_loottemp - sta_loot*100, part of the calculation of lootpercent
sta_loottotal - loottemp/loottotal = lootpercent, the total available loot on a mission
sta_lootstolentoday - don't know
sta_lootstoelenyesterday - don't know
con_lootpercentmodifier - set to 100, used in the lootpercent calculations. No idea why this is a variable rather than just a fixed number in the script
There may be others, but those are the ones I found while playing with this.
(damn this short attention span)
Shockeye on 29/6/2005 at 12:32
Yeah I found those too.
I did a few experimemnts and as far as I can tell they are only the statistics for your game (hence the sta_ prefix)
I tried a few scripts that loaded values into them, and my actual loot & gold pieces stayed the same, but the percent loot found message popped up when the script ran.
if you add to sta_loot with a script it does nothing to your loot total, but as you say, it changes when you pick up loot, so I fear that it is all handled "under the hood", hardcoded so scripts cant get at it
greenhalomagica on 2/7/2005 at 13:01
I'm probably stating the obvious, but those values look like what is posted on the "police blotter" that gets posted each night in the city.
Ziemanskye on 3/7/2005 at 11:45
Could well be, and it'd explain the lootStolenToday and lootStolenYesterday items at least.
Unfortunately the cunning plan seems to have instantly faltered through not being able to modify how much spendable cash we have, which is bizarre, though may be some kind of anti-cheating measure.
Shockeye on 3/7/2005 at 12:45
Thats what i suspected.
But its stupid, because the only people who could access it if it was scriptable would be people using the editor, who clearly have no interest in cheating.
If people cheat in a single player game, the only person they're hurting is them self so why stop modders from REDUCING gold. Couldn't they have included a "spend" function?
Oh just a thought, does anyone no how to access the UI system? What if we made items that brought up the purchase menu when frobbed, thus skipping the store mode and allowing you to walk around the shop. Not quite as realistic as picking things up, but at least you're not teleported across the map and nailed to the floor.
Ziemanskye on 3/7/2005 at 13:11
Not a clue on that, but you have just given me an idea.
Unfortunately it's a very complex one - basically you frob the item, and it puts you into store mode (so stuck in place and stuff) where you are [spawn the marker at your feet, so you teleport into store mode where you are] with the item as the window in front of you. [or however stores actually work]
Would still suck, but it might be do-able, and better than what we have.
Bumbleson on 3/7/2005 at 18:38
Quote Posted by Shockeye
If people cheat in a single player game, the only person they're hurting is them self so why stop modders from REDUCING gold. Couldn't they have included a "spend" function?
I don't think it's an anti-cheating measure. I fear it's far worse: when the editor was created, they focused only on what was required to release the game as planned. Mission desginers didn't need to be able to reduce cash, so it wasn't put in. The shop system was probably thought out and fixed and there would be no other thieves stealing from Garrett. The same may be true for all the other limited and hardcoded things (like scripting). I guess at that time they didn't waste a thought on releasing the editor to the fan community.
Later, when that decision was revised, most of the programmers had already scattered to the four winds and those who were left wouldn't want to mess too much with things in order to not break anything. Then they ran out of time when they realized that Ion would close down.
This is just my opinion, but I think it makes sense.
