Claim maintainer status and un-obsolete Modular Turrets and Salvaged Robots

[CSHague]

Summary

SUMMARY: Mods "Claim maintainer status and un-obsolete Modular Turrets and Salvaged Robots"

Purpose of change

Claim maintainer status for Modular Turrets and Salvaged Robots and flip their respective obsolete statuses

Describe the solution

Added/edited maintainer lines in modinfo and switched obsolete to false

Describe alternatives you've considered

I guess I could let the mod go, but I already put a lot of time getting it to work properly so I'm the closest this mod has to a maintainer already.

Additional context

Only just found out about the obsolescence recently and was informed via Maleclypse in a response to related PR that this was the way to prevent it from going the way of the Dodo.

[KorGgenT]

what plans do you have to develop this mod?

[esotericist]

To be a bit more specific, I'd like to know what you plan on doing with the mod that warrants it existing as a mod, instead of as features that either exist in core, or should be worked on for core.

What will its identity be? How will it provide a distinct gameplay experience instead of just tacking on a few more recipes?

While a maintainer is a critical component, it's not enough on its own to keep the mods in-repo

[CSHague]

I had planned on working the robots into evolutions, whereby long periods of time allow the AI to learn to be more effective, using downtime to run internal simulations over and over to become more skilled at the task they are assigned. The player can't really "reprogram" the AI cores they acquire, they just have to reset it and allow it to learn all over again with a different set of parameters. This means when the player rebuilds a turret or robot it would be a "baby" robot have very low effective skill or hit chance but over the course of time it would grow into a more effective version of that robot. This way when a player destroys and rebuilds a turret, they don't get the best quality turret that the science labs have, where the machines have had enough time to reach maximal efficacy. This would effectively create 2 new tiers of lower quality turrets that have growth timers to change them eventually into the high efficiency military and lab turrets. With salvaged robots they would start as clumsy makeshift robots that over (months?) time become efficient killing machines.

I would like rework the programming environment for robots and robotic items. The player should need something with programming quality or a powered tablet to actually write the training environments for the AI cores perhaps a 20XX robotic code language reference document. The resulting code would be stored on USB drives and used as a crafting component when rebuilding/repurposing turrets and robots. Relevant skills would be used in the programming tasks. The player needs marksmanship to write a an environment for a turret that shoots.

I'd like to expand on some of the more utilitarian robots, like self-moving versions of other work objects like a self-moving deployable still or kiln.

I wanted to add an AI-assisted robotic crafting workbench using android arms acquired from salvaged robot parts. It would need to be a vehicle part if it doesn't require a microreactor. It would effectively be a be a workbench with a better crafting speed bonus.

I will eventually need to make the mod dependent on Aftershock, since plutonium cells are obsolete and only exist as part of Aftershock (as I understand it, anyway) and the cells are used in the micro-reactor recipes.

[esotericist]

That sounds to me like "I want to contribute to Aftershock" not "I want to continue a separate mod".

[CSHague]

If you mean the power source, then the game is already illogical: Base turrets don't have any real power source at all. They disassemble into dead small storage batteries. As for AI Cores, they are a part of the base game too, I'm just expanding on how the player could use them and a logical framework for how you'd go about doing that. It's certainly science fiction today but I can't judge what leaps machine learning would take in the next couple of decades, with or without also-science-fiction portal technology, impossible geometry and time-traveling quantum computers. Modular Turrets and Salvaged Robots were mods that were before Aftershock and were maintained as Science fiction mods. If you wanna merge this into Aftershock that's fine, but that seems unnecessary.

That said, I can't help that the mod was the realm of science fiction before Aftershock ever existed or before the game shifted away from sci-fi. Without the plutonium cells it stands on its own. I can just put plutonium cells as its own entry in the mod. It doesn't necessarily have to be dependent on Aftershock, I honestly wrote too soon about it.

[I-am-Erk]

It's not that the mod can't be kept, but this particular mod needs quite a lot of work, and Aftershock is willing to subsume the content. To exist separately in main game, we'd need a compelling argument for what exactly it's going to be that's going to be its own thing. Otherwise, if it's just about having more robots and ways to modify them, that fits so closely both with aftershock and the target market of aftershock that it doesn't make a lot of sense having a standalone mod in core for just that.

Does that make sense? We're not trying to throw up hurdles here, but there's a reason in my call for maintainers that I said:

I only added turrets to the list because it's a prerequisite for Robots, it has to go though. These two are big problems for maintenance and are on the chopping block for good reason. If you love them, they're up for maintainership, but be aware, you've got your work cut out for you before they can be added back. It might be easier to just rebuild the whole thing from scratch as a "junkyard robots" concept... These ones might get rolled into Aftershock, we'll see

The bar for rejuvenating these is quite high, as historically they've been a huge thorn in the side of developers, so we want a really clear and compelling case to keep them in.

[esotericist]

as far as i can tell, @CSHague , you're still basically describing "I wanna be aftershock but separate", and that's just not going to work. if you want to do aftershock-shaped things, contribute them to aftershock.

As an additional note, any possible identity that might result in a mod derived from these would need to be a single mod. at which point, you're doing breaking changes, and thus should make a new mod.

unobsoleting these mods in this form pretty much not going to happen.

[CSHague]

as far as i can tell, @CSHague , you're still basically describing "I wanna be aftershock but separate"

Well, you're wrong about that. Robots already exist in the game otherwise we wouldn't be talking about a Salvaged Robots mod, but rather just a Robots mod. You can't tell me that robots are Aftershock content nor AI cores as they are both derived from main and not Aftershock. The ONLY Aftershock component is plutonium cells which could just as easily be replaced with storage batteries like main does. Or are we making the contention that robots and turrets will be removed from the game entirely. If that's not the case, then no, this isn't "Aftershock but not."

That said, it appears you've all made up your mind and asking me to come up with a better justification sounds like an even bigger waste of both our time. My biggest regret is wasting the time last year doing an update in the first place. Oh well.

[I-am-Erk]

My biggest regret is wasting the time last year doing an update in the first place.

I'm sorry you feel that way, the work you did is getting added to Aftershock and I don't think anyone would be unhappy to see you continue working on this. The point is that this mod as it previously existed fits better with Aftershock than as a standalone mod, and can be made to work a lot better in that context. Not 'this mod sucks and nobody should ever do anything with it'.

[CSHague]

I'm glad that it's not going down the memory hole at least and someone will get some use out of it.

I do want to make at least some kinda programming necessary for the robot recipes. It's very strange, to me anyway, that you can plug the AI from a nurse bot into a combat robot without any kind of software manipulation on the player's part. I'll just work on patch until 0.E