This week I let the partially-implemented robot hacking system simmer for a while to instead focus on other developments.
Guessing Game
First up is a rather common feature for classic roguelikes, the ability to tag items with player-specified text as a memory aid. Tagging is usually a part of the item identification process, and due to the nature of Cogmind's items and ID system it's almost never useful, hence the absence of a tagging feature all these years. However there are a handful of special cases towards the end of the game where you may know what a particular unidentified item is (based on where you found it) but not want to immediately attach-ID it.
Here are a couple silly examples of tagging inventory items.
And here's a more realistic use (albeit with a silly tag), also demonstrating how the tag appears in the item info window itself.
I'm sure this feature could also be used for just fun screenshots and jokes, too ;)
Infinite Power
There are already a ton of ways to get data directly from Cogmind, or indirectly through the wiki or about leaderboard player performance, but one of the external pieces of data we don't yet have is robot stats.
I certainly don't want to make players record individual data points from the game to populate the wiki, so for that and other uses I've added a command line option that automatically generates a CSV file containing all the robot data. The item gallery CSV export has already been used to generate the wiki's item pages, but there's been no corresponding feature for robots, until now :)
Here's a sample excerpt of the export, which in its entirety includes 179 lines and over 8,000 data fields o_O
Obviously there are going to be massive spoilers in the complete file, but people who do this will be aware of that fact :P
Again, you don't need any of this to play since object data is available in game, but some players like to have it around as an external reference.
In other data news, we have yet another performance analysis vector, this time from PlasticHeart who's set up a page that shares graphs describing peak state part occurrences among winners, allowing you to more easily see what they were using at their strongest before going on to win.
For example here are the most often equipped utilities--you can see the importance of storage!
The contents will naturally be skewed towards flight in general, because they can pull off wins much more quickly :P (It'd be interesting to compare this data set to another that only takes each player's highest scoring win to see if/what is different.). Flight players may not use so many Lrg. Storage Units, but they'll rank extra high here because combat players often use several at once!
The page is not yet automated, but is based on recent Beta 6 scores.
Note there are somewhat bigger spoilers in other graph categories in terms of item types you might see in the late game!
The Right Tool for the Job
One of my main Cogmind dev tools, which I started releasing freely five years ago, has been updated. You can read details in the REXPaint 1.04 release notes.
People have been making cool art, maps, mockups and all sorts of things with it...
On that note, if you've dreamed of making a roguelike of your own and need some extra motivation/resources/structure, that event I mentioned last week has begun! Check out the first week of the tutorial/code-along series for beginners and experts alike.
Just think, this can happen to you just like it happened to me years ago when I first got into this :P
Be The Hacker (Part 1)
Although I didn't work on hacking this week, it's about time to reveal some more details about how this new system will work, to avoid rampant speculation based on just the tidbits I've been handing out so far :P
First a bit of history.
Back in the pre-Alpha days (2015 and earlier), robot hacking was never fully realized, since ideally it would be designed to fit in with all the other systems but there had really been almost no playtesting since the 7DRL and three quarters of the world had yet to be created, so there wasn't much to go on at the time. Rather than build up something large right away, a better long-term approach would be to just add a smaller functional placeholder that could be tweaked or possibly replaced when necessary as the rest of the game took shape.
So then, as now in Beta 6, there were just a handful of general options running the spectrum from "temporarily disable" to "permanent assimilation." As it was clearly an underdeveloped system tangential to everything else going on, Alpha players almost entirely ignored robot hacking for a long while, exploring other mechanics instead.
Then came late Alpha, and it was discovered that a Cogmind could stack Hackware like there's no tomorrow and literally own anything in the complex, especially later in a run. Here's an example of this type of build, in a screenshot shared by zxc:
A +247% to hacking and the ability to hack robots around corners before they even know you're there? That sounds mighty OP xD (zxc used such a build in early 2017 to achieve the highest ever Cogmind score, a record which still stands to this day)
Certainly it takes skill to set up, but roguelikes should technically get more challenging as a run progresses, not easier, and that's generally how Cogmind works except when it came to strategies abusing this mechanic :P
Flight hackers had their fun with magic wands for a while, then of course I had to nerf it, explaining the diminishing returns of high-level robot hacking over the length of a run as a result of the system adapting its defenses. That said, even the nerf itself was just a temporary band-aid, because clearly much bigger changes were necessary as part of a new system, and that point would be coming in late Beta given that all the other systems were pretty much done.
And that's where we are now, preparing to welcome the last major system. ("last" on the list, but don't worry I have more secrets planned, plus of course there's always this which might happen :D)
I've been collecting and mulling over ideas for how to revamp the robot hacking system for more than a year now. There were quite a few reasonable possibilities to think through, but also a lot of potential pitfalls! Devs are unlikely to get a system absolutely perfect the first time, but as long as it has a solid foundation it can be tweaked and expanded without too much trouble if necessary. So this foundation is extra important. I've never spent this long designing a single system before (17 hours just designing!), and it's gone through lots of iterations and refinements (all on paper) as it starts to look both relatively balanced and interesting.
It's also worth pointing out that I'm very glad I didn't move on this system earlier, or try to have a complete extensive system available from Alpha 1. It would have had a negative, limiting impact on other developments, and much about the current state of Cogmind's world and content has enabled me to make smarter choices about how to best integrate robot hacking into it all, be it the tactics, strategy, or lore. In short, doing this earlier would've meant more wasted effort and less pleasing results.
So what is this new system already?!
Well, last time I showed you that UI animation, and that's where it all begins. With this machine.
Some of you noticed a certain "RIF Installer" in the Scan window of that earlier gif, and this is what it looks like. Every garrison will now contain one of these, and it's your choice whether to use it and deal with the consequences, and of course take advantage of the benefits!
You'll only have to do it once, and the first garrison appears on -8, so that would be your earliest opportunity, though you can do it at any time. You still get all the other benefits of a garrison on top of that, and there will be another advantage particular to robot hackers that we'll get to later.
RIF stands for "Relay Interface Framework," and with that you'll theoretically have access to dozens of ways to manipulate other robots via the Complex-wide garrison relay network. Like a number of other major strategic decisions, however, this comes with a drawback as it will prevent you from forming certain... alliances ;)
Such is the cost of effectively linking up with 0b10 to facilitate access to their systems. And from this point you can probably infer that the new robot hacking system only works on Unaware! This is just the first of several limiting factors--robot hacking will be quite useful, but not a panacea. It'll be what an interesting system should be: very effective when used creatively, but also challenging you to create manageable situations to begin with. Unlike the Alpha approach of "it's an enemy, overload/assimilate it!!!" there will be many unique encounters and different methods of approaching each. As with other strategies, planning ahead will be very beneficial, and to me that also really fits the theme of a robot hacker, whether a stealth hacker or combat hacker or anything in between.
Planning ahead will also be facilitated by the fact that the new system will be removing much of the RNG from robot hacking :D
But more on that and other details next time--there's still tons more to explain, and this is a good stopping point.
Cogmind is currently 10% off through July 5th, both on Steam and DRM-free from the site. As mentioned before, unless I get some kind of a deal from Valve (unlikely to happen again) there aren't any plans to discount by more than 10% during Early Access, which could go on for quite a while because the list of potential content is basically endless xD
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums.