ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hello good people (or do we call ourselves minions now?). I've played a decent smattering of ToME and wanted to contribute somewhat to the game. I've got a background in programming and game design fortunately, but I thought I might make a post to see if I couldn't generate some helpful pointers for where to start/find out a little more about the grittier details of the background systems themselves to find a better place to start.

Since I'm not trying to learn about literally everything inside ToME, I wanted to focus on making a new class, which will hopefully channel both any discussion, and help focus energy in on developing it.

Basic premise for the class is taking the tinker system we currently have, and giving it a fleshed out and dedicated user for the physics and chemistry trees such that they're less gimmicks and more in line with main class abilities.

I had a few ideas of where to start, but honestly while it's a whole lot of work I thought simply giving them a class tree for each slot would be fairly appropriate. Personally I'm a huge fan of the throwing knives and Master Artificer trees and thought I might shamelessly borrow a smattering of those concepts to start from for a fair few of these.

I'm not sure how to handle schematics here though. Ideally I'd like to integrate with the existing tinker system such that it layers on top of one another and is a loadout that's more important than your gear in a lot of ways and affected how your talents work, but I really dislike the idea of a class that's that RNG heavy to even have access to some core build options potentially. My idea to counter that was either to A) simply give the same bonus schematic mechanic to their class talents and do a very soft limitation on RNG influences, or B) give access to the talents as normal, but have specific bonuses that are added on top of the class talents when you wear the appropriate tinker.

I also loved the idea of having some of the advanced talents be similar to how the tentacle tree and throwing knives trees work where they give you a specific weapon to use for their specific purposes, but I wanted to find a decent way of getting those to scale into later into the game without being able to access egos. Ex: grenade-launcher-esque tree that gives your shots a 1 turn delay and to be ground targetted before exploding, or a steamtech-shotgun that jettisoned all your ammo into one attack every time you shot it.

Unfortunately i am just absolutely TERRIBLE at the base game of ToME. I have a hell of a lot of fun playing it, but I am honestly just bad at the game as a whole. For those of you with that are more experienced, what do you see as the biggest problem with the tinkers(as in the attachments not the classes) that currently exist?

Any feedback you all have would be fantastic. I'm open to any and all ideas you guys may have or any concerns or reasons you think this idea might not be the best. I'm still generating ideas and things but I wanted to see if I couldn't get feedback from people with more experience or a better idea of things that'd make things better or more fun!

Thanks!

The biggest issue with Tinkers is that DarkGod didn't let me pad it out to 300 Tinkers in total. Something about that being too many. Madness!!!

Anyway, someone with coding experience for a change. Yay.

Just a small warning. The Tinker system is likely not a good choice for your first attempt at making something. However as you have a bit of programming background, you might be able to pull it off with your sanity intact.

If you want the class to be Tinker heavy and not RMG dependent, I would suggest you have a class talent (or 6) which simply gives out set recipes for your own selected Tinkers.
You will likely need to make up your own, as the pool is a bit limited if you want a full range of options like a Class should have. This is not a bad thing.

While the Throwing Knives and Master Artificer categories are well designed, you are already aiming at six class categories which are supposed to be the focus of the Class. So I don't think you should go down the route of including something like them.
That said, making a Class that used something like that and focused around a Shotgun or/and Grenade Launcher category weapons would be a simpler thing to make as your first Class.

Hey it's Housepet! Been a huge fan of your mods and wanted to give a quick thank you for replying.

My background is mostly in Java at the moment, so I'm mostly wading into uncharted territories. I honestly am not entirely sure what ToME is made off of, but from some of my prodding it looks more like we're just injecting scripts that proc off of lifecycle hooks in the program, that more or less correct?

Personally agree with the too few tinkers... I'm somewhat sad there haven't been more people proactive in creating more addon stuff for tinker classes, they're really damn cool IMO.

I like the suggestion of giving them the recipes from some of the talents. Similar to some of the already existing "X skill gains blah blah blah at level 3" and so forth. Easy enough to establish a baseline of usability then let the tinker recipes you find from there be good enough. Might add a generic talent tree to let you sort of trade them in for even more recipes. Call it research or study, something to that effect.

I've been toying with the idea of making the new tinkers I add only usable with the artificer as sort of a thematic thing. Idea being that they focused on their gadgets more than anyone else, so no one else can make the same kind of stuff. Might be too much of an annoyance to get to work though, but might be worth it since it'd be easier to guarantee mod stability if I'm only having to weigh in my own code instead of it having a bug when someone else tries to use it with x mod or with the base game.

About how hard do you think it would be to grant effects while a specific tinker is work? One of the ideas I'd wanted to implement is having some of the trees be a little more generic, but then change effect pretty drastically based on which tinker was installed. For example, have a hand-centric Launcher class tree that shoots a dart by base, but modify it to do the same effect as your attached hand tinker, then have the later leveled talents in that tree add bonuses or additional skills (probably an AoE skill at around 8 ). I kind of wanted to make it so that in that case your hand tinker would give you a bonus to the level of the basic launch talent.

I see what you mean about the talent-based weapon shtick. I mostly figured I'd need to come up with some of the advanced talent trees, and those felt like they'd be pretty cool to add in terms of giving players a bit more flexibility later on. Might need to brainstorm it a bit more though.

Edit: Apparently 8 ) turns into ... had to take off my sunglasses there.

The game is basically all running in Lua (except for the hidden stuff that you don't need to see), so its all runtime code. The bits that look like injections (I'm assuming you have looked at how addon work) are really just done for stability and moddability (and in some cases, making the code easier to read).

I'm unsure if you can flag recipes as not available to be found at random. eg. By other classes played when this addon is enabled. But that would be the simplest way to stop conflict issues. Otherwise you should be able to add some code onto the Tinker objects to unequip them if a different class tries to equip them. (I think the Vault could be used to transfer them to different classes, so assume it can happen.)

Changing the effects of your own talents based on what Tinkers are equipped should be trivial. Most Tinkers just give a specific Talent, so you can check for that.