Road decals and respawning loot

[Moses]

I'm looking for a way to turn off road decals. They're listed in the blocks xml (blood, newspapers, etc) but changing "isterraindecoration" from true to false didn't get rid of them. Anyone figure out a way to do this? Most of the time you can hit them with an ax and they disappear, but only mostly. If you get further away from them you can see them again, and they disappear the closer you get. I want them off completely.

Also, what all respawns in the game world? I'm mostly asking about rock/ore nodes, trees, grass, bushes/flowers, nests, and the loose loot laying around the map such as small boxes, sports bags, etc. I have all loot respawning off, but I'm pretty sure this loose loot is respawning. If any of these things do respawn, any way to turn them all off? I like permanently clearing areas.

[CatPerson]

Respawning - have the Chunk Rest Time or whatever it's called disabled. The only time stuff like trees/nests or anything that goes "poof" after looting respawns, I think, is upon full chunk reset. Typically if you keep going along regular path routes you won't notice this happen much because you're always running thru the same chunks, preventing reset, unless you're gone for days or a week or more and then return. And of course Trader quests will reset a POI, without a LCB etc.

Decals - interesting question. I tried fully commenting out those blood decal entries and loading a save came up with red console errors that it couldn't load/would skip certain POI prefabs because those blocks (used in the POI) were missing. And the road blood splats were still there, as well. Perhaps such methods would only work if done before generating a new rwg map. so they do not get 'baked into" the worlds files to begin with. I didn't test that (yet). eg, there's a decoration.7.dt file created/put into the world map folder, so maybe such is baked in upon creation. Just theorizing tho.

But yeah, I think they overdid the ground debris stuff - it's way too pervasive. On roads you can remove the entire block and replace with clean player-made asphalt, but that's a lot of work. >.>

[seven]

I haven't checked this alpha, but in the past if you destroyed the block the decal was on and replaced it, the decal is gone. Not something you'd want to do on the whole map, but if you're trying to clean up a small area it's workable.

Anything you can destroy, or that is destroyed when looting or harvesting, does not respawn except bird nests. Or if you have chunk reset enabled. Or some mod that respawns things. Well, I think the loose rocks respawn.

[Moses]

I think your theory is probably right, it would have to be done prior to world generation for the first time. I'll try that at some point, thanks for the reply.

Another question. The "zombie spawning" option in your game options, if disabled does it remove all zombies from the entire map, or does it simply turn off spawns? In other words, when you start the game up and zombies are spawned, if zombie spawning is off, the initial zombies spawned on game start up will still be there, but no other zombies will spawn in afterwards?

I like the idea of zombies initially being there, and then slowly clearing out the map, so if turning this option off allows for that then that's what I want. I don't want the map completely void of zombies though.

[CatPerson]

Decals: The "isdecoration/true/false" seems to only dictate whether you can bash it off the top/gain a minute resource for it. If it's set to false, I couldn't do that anymore/the block would just HP-wither away like hitting any other blocl.

I tried a few things before generating new maps to see if I could make them not spawn. This did not work in a reliable/non-glitch-causing way. Then I tried a few ways to see if I could get the game to substitute another texture/thingie for the blood ones specifically. Fool it into drawing a lot of newspapers instead, for example. Also did not work.

So I'm out of (simpler) ideas. Maybe another case of having to go in and alter the textures in a unity pack itself, to be transparent or make them be chalk cat face outlines instead etc.

Originally posted by Moses:

Another question. The "zombie spawning" option in your game options, if disabled does it remove all zombies from the entire map, or does it simply turn off spawns? In other words, when you start the game up and zombies are spawned, if zombie spawning is off, the initial zombies spawned on game start up will still be there, but no other zombies will spawn in afterwards?

They may stick around in the most recent chunk you are/were in, for a brief time. But they will despawn fairly quickly, or once you leave the area, and nothing will replace them/spawn in newly visited chunks (if z's are set to Off). Zombies are not "physically" spawned all over the map at once, nor remain forever if the player is not sorta nearby, for performance reasons.

the only thought I had on this before, for biome spawns, was maybe one could increase respawn delay on all the biome spawning.xml groups to super crazy levels, meaning it would take "months" of game time for them to respawn.

Edit: so as example you could try

	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="2.9" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" notags="commercial,industrial,downtown" />

and putting respawndelay to, oh, 1000. I don't know if there's a max working/effective number that can be tho.

[Moses]

Yeah I saw the respawndelay in the xml's, but wasn't sure what to set it at so just left it alone. There's a conversion listed, of real minutes, if I remember correctly...but I didn't feel like doing the math. I'll mess around with it later, thanks again for the info.

[CYBORGRISING]

Originally posted by Moses:

I'm looking for a way to turn off road decals. They're listed in the blocks xml (blood, newspapers, etc) but changing "isterraindecoration" from true to false didn't get rid of them. Anyone figure out a way to do this? Most of the time you can hit them with an ax and they disappear, but only mostly. If you get further away from them you can see them again, and they disappear the closer you get. I want them off completely.

Also, what all respawns in the game world? I'm mostly asking about rock/ore nodes, trees, grass, bushes/flowers, nests, and the loose loot laying around the map such as small boxes, sports bags, etc. I have all loot respawning off, but I'm pretty sure this loose loot is respawning. If any of these things do respawn, any way to turn them all off? I like permanently clearing areas.

Go to biomes.xml, type in decal. Its located near the bottom. You can remove the bloodstains and newspaper on all roads. Just change the value to 0

[CatPerson]

Originally posted by CYBORGRISING:

Go to biomes.xml, type in decal. Its located near the bottom. You can remove the bloodstains and newspaper on all roads. Just change the value to 0

This is great and appreciated info, if it works as desired, but it would be more useful if you mentioned/knew whether you set all of those 15 or so decal textures to probability=0, or only certain ones. They do not have descriptive names. Are some of them not blood/newspaper.

For instance, maybe some want/don't mind the newspaper clutter but not the blood decals. Or some variation. Guess it's trial and error time.

[CYBORGRISING]

Originally posted by CatPerson:

Originally posted by CYBORGRISING:

Go to biomes.xml, type in decal. Its located near the bottom. You can remove the bloodstains and newspaper on all roads. Just change the value to 0

This is great and appreciated info, if it works as desired, but it would be more useful if you mentioned/knew whether you set all of those 15 or so decal textures to probability=0, or only certain ones. They do not have descriptive names. Are some of them not blood/newspaper.

For instance, maybe some want/don't mind the newspaper clutter but not the blood decals. Or some variation. Guess it's trial and error time.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that. I do not know what each decal texture represents. I changed all the values to 0 and have not seen any newspaper or blood decals. I can play around with each value and report my findings.

[Moses]

Thanks for the reply, I've moved on to another game but if I find my way back to this game I'll definitely make those changes.