[WIP-SC2] Revamp Tech Tree Mod (MadTech)

Download
(will fill in the details later, but in short it will be distributed with the Revamp Expansion Mod and available through the Revamp Expansion Mod project website)
Since each tech tree mod relies heavily on the Revamp Expansion Mod (http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=47684), they will be officially released as part of that project and will require that you have Revamp installed.
An Alpha version is almost ready for release. The following is a roadmap of releases:
Alpha

• Catalog every unit and structure into DefaultBuildRestrictions.lua;
• Create entries in Research.lua for all units and structures;
• Arrange all entries in Research.lua to be displayed in research_layout.lua;
• Link all units and structure to proper cause-effect relationships in Research.lua;
• Remove tech toggle as an addon for factories and just use it as a menu system so that it is enabled and usable by default;
• Remove the two initial engineers;
• Set mass, energy, and research costs for all units and structures to 0; and
• Set mass, energy, and research persistent production/consumption rates for all units and structures to 0.

Beta 1

• Set mass, energy, and research costs for all units to appropriate values for balancing.

Beta 2

• Set mass, energy, and researsh persistent production/consumption rates; and
• Set icon priorities such that they appear in factory menus in the order that they are unlocked.

RC Branch Macro 1.0 - Only SupCom 2 Factories

• Program AI to work with mod; and
• Rebalancing of mass, energy, and research costs and persistent production/consumption rates.

RC Branch Micro 1.0 - Basic + Advanced Factories

• Enable advanced factories;
• Disable engineer;
• Enable land, air, and naval engineers;
• Redistribute units and structures into basic+advanced categories;
• Rebalancing of mass, energy, and research costs and persistent production/consumption rates.

In the future: 1.1 releases will begin incorporating individual and class upgrades
Note: Each release will require DLC, but only the "Macro" branch will have support for AI. The "Micro" branch will always be meant for player vs player.

How To Install

Overview
For my first release, I am creating something that can be considered a SupCom 1 + SupCom 2 + Total Annihilation merger, namely the reintroduction of some sort of basic-advanced research-based tier system while ensuring that all units remain unique and useful throughout the game.
However, it is my intention to actually produce several different tech trees each providing for unique gameplay and which are not necessarily related to each other.
The tech trees will be made hot-swappable using CerusVI's SupCom 2 Mod Manager (http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=50303) while leaving the underlying Revamp (largely) intact. This will allow you to easily play several flavours of Revamp with very minimal effort on your part to install/uninstall the different implementations.
What has been implemented so far

• CYBRAN, UEF, ILLUMINATE
  
  • You start the game with 3 ACU's, one each from Cybran, UEF, and Illuminate. Therefore, every player is able to build every faction's units and structures and have access to all the respective tech trees. The 2 Engineers provided by default are no longer provided. This is a separate mod that I created and can be found here: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=50448
    I will also have a version where you start with only a single ACU for the respective faction;
  
  
  • The ACU's can build only 3 structures initially: Mass Extractors, Energy Generators, and Research Stations. You can no longer build Land, Air, and Naval Factories and perimeter defense structures initially;
  
  
  • All units and structures (except Mass Extractors, Energy Generators, and Research Stations) have to be individually researched;
  
  
  • The Land, Air, and Naval Factories (which are now "Basic Factories") have to be researched under the Structures tech tree;

• CYBRAN
  
  • Once the Basic Factories have been researched, the Basic Land, Air, and Naval Engineers and respective Land, Air, and Naval units and structures can be researched, including perimeter defenses;
  
  
  • All of the Factory Add-ons have to be researched;
  
  
  • The ACU will be the only unit that can build all 3 Land, Air, and Naval Factories
  
  
  • There are now three Engineer classes, one for each of Land, Air, and Naval. Land Engineers can build only land, Air Engineers can build only air, and Naval Engineers can build only Naval. If your ACU gets destroyed, and also all your Land/Air/Naval factories + the respective Engineers, then you lose the ability to build Land/Air/Naval. Think twice about doing ACU rushes!;
  
  
  • In addition to Basic Factories, there are now Advanced Engineers and Advanced Factories. The Advanced Factories produce Advanced K-Bots... All the vanilla SupCom 2 + Revamp units, including Experimentals, are split among the Basic and Advanced levels throughout several tech tree branches.
    My main reason for doing this is to avoid spamming and rushes. Because every unlock costs mass+energy+research, if you stay with any particular unit to spam, then you run into resource problems preventing you from getting to all the Experimentals. The way I've arranged it, if you take only one path to get to Experimentals, then you only have a small number of the possible units available for support, which is crippling.
    By splitting the experimentals as I did, it encourages you to unlock the tree in a more balanced way and play more cautiously, especially given that the same arrangement will be done for Air and Naval. This way, by late game when you start getting experimentals, you'll have all units in gameplay, not just a few types spamming to hell.

What is currently being implemented

• CYBRAN
  
  • Create "Major" and "Minor" gantries for Experimentals (i.e., Experimentals will be broken up into Major Experimentals and Minor Experimentals);
  
  
  • Everything in the research tree costs Mass, Energy, and Research Points (instead of only Research Points);
  
  
  • Organize the tech tree layouts for Land, Air, Naval, Structures, and ACU;
  
  
  • Link all the tech tree items to the corresponding units and structures;
  
  
  • Work in the TechToggle feature that has been implemented in the 1.0 Final / 1.01 release of Revamp;
  
  
  • Each unit in the tech tree will eventually have its own unit upgrade so that unit enhancements are unit-specific. Class-specific (land/air/naval) enhancements will also be eventually implemented.
    The unit upgrades for the earlier units will be more giving than the later upgrades to keep everything more-or-less on par. The early units will be cheap to unlock, but their upgrades will be expensive. The later units will be expensive to unlock, but their upgrades will be cheap. Then, all the units will be diversified by making one excel at speed, another one at vision, another one at damage, etc. This way all the units complement each other and no one unit is made obsolete.

What is planned for future implementation

• Tech tree implementations for UEF and Illuminate analogous to what is being done for Cybran, above.

• Use the ported FA ACU's as Advanced ACU's and the SupCom 2 ACU's as Basic ACU's. The Advanced ACU's are responsible for advanced units and structures, while the Basic ACU's are responsible for basic units and structures;

• Create air and naval units to represent the basic and advanced air and naval engineers, respectively. Currently, the air and naval engineers are clones of the standard "land" engineers.

• (unrelated to the above tech tree) No tech tree at all. All units and structures are available from the very beginning of the game.

Screenshots
(will provide some high res ones soon)

Acknowledgements / Credits
A big thanks to LiveOrDie (aka OverRated) and Mithy. Their help on separating the Engineers into 3 distinct classes was invaluable.

Tutorial
A tutorial I'm writing on how to mod the tech tree: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=50389|||Interesting, very interesting. I definitely want to see where this mod is going. +1
By the way, could you possibly post a picture of what you had in mind for a tech tree?
Just simple text boxes and connecting lines would act as a wonderful visual aid.
As a side note, what are you intentions for mass and energy upgrades? Shall we have "3 tiers" of economic upgrades? If so, how much will each econ upgrade give? Will it be like the relatively insignificant Sup Com 2 vanilla econ upgrade? Or more like FA the significant mass extractor upgrades? And for that matter, how much RP cost? Sorry for all the questions, I'm just curious of your plans
Also, might I ask if it is possible to upgrade buildings individually with the Sup Com 2 Moho engine? Like upgrading factories in FA? If so, I think it would be a cool idea if you could implement a mix of regular research and upgrading buildings for tech.|||M11xStryker|||brandon007|||OK, where to start? Hahaha
I'll start with a comment that I posted on a thread in the SupCom 2 forum, in case you didn't see it which might interest you:
It's possible to get extremely close to FA given that tech tree upgrades can be set to take a certain time to build, as well as cost a certain amount of mass and energy. In other words, you can require additional stuff other than RP in order to unlock something. In fact, you can even set RP = 0 and require the unlocks to work strictly on mass, energy, and build time. I intend to incorporate all 4 factors in the official mod, but I'll also develop a RP = 0 version for those that want "FA2".
Regarding a picture, it's way too early. I have to do some coding to the revamp mod in order that the individual FA units themselves be usable directly into the tech tree (the current implementation in revamp is that a single unlock gives you access to all the units simultaneously, hence no code is written to have them individually appear in the tech tree). It's easy to do, but just time consuming. I'll post a preliminary pic once I get all the units in the tech tree sorted out for Cybran Land.
Regarding mass and energy upgrades, I don't know what I'm going to do with them just yet. They'll be part of the Structures tree, which I said I was only going to look at once LAN gets treated. Or at the very least LA, since some maps have no naval, so the game would be playable with no naval units in those cases.
Regarding upgrading buildings individually, a possible way to do this might be through factory addons. But I can't say for sure. I'm not familiar with that part of the code just yet to give a conclusive answer. In fact, a suggestion was made in another thread to implement factory upgrades in exactly the way you suggest. Even if it is possible, as I said over there, for the time being I'm taking the least intrusive approach to the revamp mod. By restricting all the upgrades to the tech tree I don't touch the unit/structure files at all. Once the tech tree matures a bit, I'll look at the factory addon approach.
Also, given the sheer magnitude of diversity that can be made by restructuring the tech tree, when I get some time I'll write and post a tutorial on how to mod it. It's pretty straightforward. I'm really hoping to get the FA community on board with SupCom 2, so I'd like everyone to have easy access to be able to experiment with all the possibilities themselves.

EDIT: about even just a simple hand drawing of the tech tree, i'll just give you an in-game snapshot soon. It wont take me too long to get something. Right now I'm also trying different layouts and whether or not to consider factory upgrades to be part of the LAN trees or as part of the Structure trees. Given their close connection to units, at this point in time I'm inclined to place them in the LAN trees.|||If i remember the time in the research.lua doesn't apply i know mass and energy does but doesn't show up on the UI because it was never used so you will need to add it costs into the tooltips, Upgrading buildings individually isn't possible by using addons because there as there name states there not upgrades, I run into some problems trying to add them to power gens and mass extractors 1. you need to add FACTORY as a cat with give you the units tab 2. you get a unneeded rallypoint 3. when the unit dies it leaves behind the addon which block the ogrids so you cant be there again also doesn't remove the added income so at the end of the day it wasn't worth it.|||OK, I finished a first, very rough, revamped Cybran Land tech tree (just the layout - there's no linking with in-game units just yet. But that'll be very straightforward once I finalize the layout). I'm going to touch it up in the coming days and hopefully upload some images on moddb this weekend.|||Want. When can test?|||Here are a couple of teasers:



The second image is with the prerequisites disabled so that you can see the icons better. Note: I didn't purposefully plan out the above distribution. I just randomly threw all the SupCom 2 and FA Revamp units in the tree and made some arbitrary prerequisites. The icons in columns 1, 3, and 5 are factory upgrades (5 in total), everything else are land units.
Also remember that I will make each upgrade (including the factories) rely on mass, energy, and research instead of just research as in vanilla SupCom 2.
I also have to look into being able to expand the physical area that the research tree occupies on screen in order to be able to include exhaustive unit upgrade subtrees.
@dopefisher: not yet.|||Since your mod is called revamped also, will you be working with overrated aka liveordie?|||The size of the research windows is hardcoded in the ui like most other things but you can make icons smaller ill PM you a custom grid i made some time ago.
yes madface will be come apart of the revamp mod team if he wants to .|||liveordie|||Wow madface, you are one of the few people to go from borderline troll, to ABSOLUTELY AWESOME
I applaud you!
no testing at the moment, im currently at school.....|||madface|||SMASHING WORK MADFACE! (and liveordie)
I can't wait to see what comes from this!
[quote="bioemerl"]Wow madface, you are one of the few people to go from borderline troll, to ABSOLUTELY AWESOME
[quote]
I have to agree with bioemerl here. Instead of just flaming the game, now your actually doing something constructive! Keep up the good work!|||Thanks bioemerl, Stryker. I had my little spaz session, got it out of my system, and now it's time to get to work!!!
Cygnus: I purposefully made the screenshots small. It's a teaser. I'll post higher res pictures soon with a better-distributed tree. The 1.0 final release of revamp is coming out soon. At the very least I'm aiming to get Cybran Land + Air fully implemented (minus specific unit upgrades) as soon as possible shortly after 1.0 is released. So, you guys should be able to test it out soon.
I also had a couple of thoughts that I'd like everyone's opinions on. Ideally, I'd like to implement several different tech trees to cater to different types of gameplay styles. To this effect, I was thinking of implementing the following concepts some time in the future and I'd like your opinions:
- a tech tree system where the entire land tech tree has to first be unlocked before being able to unlock the air tech tree, then the entire air tech tree has to be unlocked before being able to unlock the naval tech tree. There could be variations on these unlock orders as well (i.e., L->N->A; A->L->N; A->N->L; N->L->A; N->A-L) to cater to different types of maps. Structures and ACU tech trees would be accessible all the time.
- disregard the LANSA division altogether and just make one massive intermingled tech tree that just happens to span 5 tabs. unfortunately, the 5 tabs enumerated as "LANSA" are hardcoded, so we wouldn't be able to change the labels, but that's just a superficial nuisance and wont affect anything. Codewise, the LANSA system is already actually treated by the engine as one massive tech tree. The distribution between the 5 trees is artificial. So, it's completely possible to rely on prerequisites between trees.

bioemerl: because the way the tech tree is implemented in the code, the LANSA tabs are irrelevant. It's possible to implement an ode-like tech tree approach, as we were discussing in the other thread, but you'll have to put up with the LANSA labels.|||madface|||I think it was Neph that was talking about that. I like the idea of non-linear increasing investment costs. Ideally, I'd like to make it very difficult to be able to get all experimental units in a game. No spamming experimentals - they need to be used thoughtfully.
But actually thinking a bit more about my L->A->N unlocking, I think it's a bad idea. It doesn't make sense to start building puny little air units once you have land experimentals roaming around, several of which can target air. This would only encourage not building the lower air units and, therefore, make them useless in the tech tree... ok scrap the idea. that one was bad.|||madface|||M11xStryker|||First off I definitly would not suggest where you need the WHOLE land tree, or prereqs to get to air, id just kind of combine them.
If you do make it like that then you know everyone will go land to take advantage of research.......
Also if you need help coding, finding bugs or anything else, i may be of some help. I have a little expierence with programming, and modding stuff.
Otherwise ill just keep up with the suggestions here, tell me if I become a pest, or annoying
actually id like to see every upgrade take time, it would be like a K+K teaser|||Wow! I'll have to keep an eye at this mod :)|||ok, the more I think about the tech tree suggestion L->A->N the more I regret even mentioning it. The idea is dead. Too many flaws. So, I'm no longer soliciting opinions on it, but thank you to those who responded.
bioemerl: your suggestions are always welcome. Thank you. I'll keep you in mind about the coding stuff.
Stryker: thanks for the suggestions. Given that i'll be making two flavours of the mod (i.e., one where AI's can be used and the other meant strictly for human-only players), i'll explore the options you suggest. Even though I too like the idea of ever-increasing costs for higher units, we have to keep in mind that higher costs means that it becomes more difficult to balance the game. If experimentals are excessively expensive, then to compensate they must have high HP and/or damage, otherwise there's little incentive to invest so much resources in them. But then at the same time, they can't become invincible and excessively powerful. I think this is something that will best be decided through trial and error through in-game testing.|||liveordie|||Bastilean