cyanobotcodes

[cyanobotcodes]

New release! Compatibility patch for  Soft Warm Beds and Primitive Workbenches, using textures by Phaneron. This one is fully just bodging other people's mods into each other so I can't take too much credit.

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

Toddlers

Fix for a niche issue involving moving toddlers to medical beds when certain other mods (including but probably not limited to Celsius) loaded

Cyanobot's Genes

Fix for several issues with precocious children including body type not correctly updating from Baby to Child

Neolithic Frankenpatch

Added compatibility for Research Data Theory

Tweaked Research Data patches so that papers are only required at the VFET research spot if Primitive Workbenches is also loaded (the tablet table from PW is used to enable neolithic creation of research papers)

Jaguar and Snow Leopard Xenotypes

Fixed an embarrassing XML error causing errors to be thrown whenever the Adrenaline gene tried to apply its hediff

Caveworld Flora Unleashed

Fix for mycelium despawning when the mushrooms on top of it are cut

Added mushroom wine recipe to the universal fermenting barrel if Processor Framework is loaded

Added mushroom wine to the things storeable in Medieval Overhaul's large wine shelf and wine cupboard

Added incompatibility notes to About.xml

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

Toddlers

Balance : loneliness now increases faster by default

Fixed: "Already in best location" message displayed whenever a pawn finishes a player-forced play job

Compatibility: [WarHammer 40k] GeneSeed

Compatibility: Dubs Bad Hygiene - Re-added hygiene need for toddlers (if hygiene enabled in DBH) - Added jobs for adults to wash babies whether or not they are in bed - Added right click option to force adults to wash babies - Rate of hygiene fall dependent on activity (lower in bed, higher when playing in the dirt) - Added bathtime job that combines washing and playing with a toddler when a bath / wash tub is available

Leather Overhaul

Added chemfuel-based industrial tanning solution

Added sheep wool to leather exclusion list

Prevented raw hides from generating under a number of circumstances (trader stock with a few exceptions, gifts from guests, quest rewards)

Cyanobot's Genes

Removed no-longer-needed EBSG patch

Neolithic Frankenpatch

Added requested patches for Tribal Warrior Set

Caveworld Flora Unleashed

Fix for error with Ideology fungal gravel

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

Toddlers

Added load-from-XML functionality for a) objects that are suitable targets for firegazing and b) adult apparel that should be wearable by babies

Stopped toddlers wandering off while actively being undressed by adults

Fixed incorrect calculation for learning rate

Cloth Production Expanded Patches

Fixed: industrial wool recipes with Better Wool Production

Increased stack limit of Seeds Please raw cotton to 200 to match other raw textile resources

Caveworld Flora Unleashed

Updated documentation including comparison to the other versions of this mod

Leather Overhaul

Fixed hides appearing twice in thing filters

Vanilla Ideology Expanded Floors Stuffed

Fixed an XML error subsequent to a VIE update

[cyanobotcodes]

New release! Leather tanning mod for people who hate things being easy or straightforward.

Kind of a spiritual successor to Owlchemist's Simple Chains: Leather. I initially set out to make patches for that mod, but it got away from me -- as things do.

Uses the magic of C# to auto-generate raw hides for any leather, so automatically compatible with most things.

Comes with mechanics for shearing wool off the skins of woolly animals, and a consolidation of the vanilla leather types into categories by characteristics instead of by animal-of-origin.

Graphics by the wonderful and versatile @fluffysminion.

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

Toddlers

Fixed: toddlers can no longer generate a "need meditation spot" alert even if they have a psylink or are scheduled to meditate (which they won't do)

Fixed: error on load with mods that replace the main research window

Fixed: NullReferenceException when adults try to decide whether they need to feed a non-spawned toddler

Added: HAR compatibility for 1.5 (finally)

Colored Leather and Wool

Added: compatibility for Outland mods, Biomes! Polluted Lands

Adjusted "tanned" color of human leather to avoid washing out darker skin tones as badly

Softness Control

Added: patches for Anomaly, Medieval Overhaul

Talking Isn't Everything

Added: patch for Life Lessons

Caveworld Flora Unleashed

Increased impact of gleamcap smoke exposure

Made mycelium selectable to facilitate cutting

Added global spawn rate slider

Various code-tidying and minor performance-improvement

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It finally feels like I'm actually making progress through the vast stack of to-dos. I'm almost out of bugs to fix. Soon I'll be moving onto adding some of the planned features to Toddlers that have been on the docket for literal years.

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

Toddlers

Fix for rare reservation error in job BePlayedWith (quick and dirty solution : the baby just doesn't attempt to reserve their own square, since this doesn't strike me as particularly important)

Tin foil hats added to apparel wearable by babies

Expanded firewatching options to include braziers

Established an issue tracker on GitHub to replace my woefully inadequate text-based scatterbrained bug tracking. Slowly, slowly I am learning how to use GitHub.

Colored Leather and Wool

Fix for the serious issue of vanishing stacks during building with Disable Color Stacking

Additional patches for: Anomaly, Medieval Overhaul, Horse Breeds

Cloth Production Expanded Patches

Added missing Industrial Loom recipes for Better Wool Production's fleeces

Rebalanced numbers for Better Wool Production to match non-wool fabric

Increased stack sizes of raw textile materials to 200

Caveworld Flora Unleashed

released 1.5 update

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

I've started off the new year by tackling some relatively straightforward outstanding issues while I get back into the swing of modding.

To wit:

Toddlers

Finally extended the crib logic to non-vanilla cribs

Fixed: toddlers held at wrong angle when carried

Added: orders to put baby down at specific spot

Added: option to pick up or drop baby even when not drafted

Added: new setting to control the number of messages generated by adults deciding to move babies

Cloth Production Expanded Patches

compatibility for Medieval Overhaul

Neolithic Frankenpatch

removed the restriction on cutting stone blocks at primitive stonecutting spot, unless my other mod Build From Chunk is also loaded

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Next up, more bug-fixing. Most of the bugs are in Toddlers, but I've also been alerted to a serious issue in Colored Leather And Wool which looks like it's going to be a bit of a nightmare.

Since I've been looking into Medieval Overhaul, I'll probably do some more compatibility patches for my other mods while I'm on the topic.

And since bug-hunting is both tedious and interminable, I will probably also indulge the desire to put out some new content in between.

[cyanobotcodes]

Water Shader 2 - Surface

As promised, more tutorials. For the water surface I’m still referring to these: Yet Another Stylised Water Shader - Half Past Yellow Stylized Water Shader - Alexander Ameye Stylized Water in UE5 Breakdown - heyitsjosh3D   Depth - Cyanilux

And now also: Unity Toon Water Shader Tutorial - Roystan Stylized water shader – Harry Alisavakis

Last time I talked about the water interior effects – transparency, water colour, refraction (or a rough approximation thereof), and caustics (those light patterns that you see on underwater surfaces).

This time I’m going to get into the surface effects – namely reflections, “edge foam”, and displacement (water surface going up and down).

(If you notice any differences in the test scene, no you didn’t. Nobody accidentally deleted it and had to make a new one.)

Step 4 - Reflections

I love the sparkly water in Josh’s water shader so I had that in mind all through making the reflections. He starts with one fainter (procedural) texture for the main ripple effect, and a second bright layer for the sparkle highlights.

I didn’t end up replicating his brighter-on-the-edges-darker-in-the-middle ripple effect, although it looks really good in his shader, because it kept lining up weirdly with the brighter highlights. It’s something I’d like to come back to for the next iteration, as is using a nicer ripple algorithm in general. 

Instead I’m using the same rather rough approach used for the ripple distortion. Here it is, transparent and slightly sky-tinted, overlaid on the solid blue:

The opacity is lower at steeper viewing angles. At the moment this doesn’t look great, because it makes the rather rubbish-looking ripples near the horizon stronger than the closer ones, but we’ll fix that in a minute. The point of this effect is for when the camera is moved around. Looking directly down into water, the interior of the water is more visible, whereas at oblique angles the reflections dominate.

The bright sparkles are generated from the highest value parts of a second noise texture, with the layers moving across each other faster to produce a more quickly varying effect.

(Apologies for t he gif quality, I'm not sure it really conveys the effect.)

The result looks okay up close (and better when it’s overlaid on the transparent water interior rather than on solid blue), but further from the camera the effect is unconvincing.

Looking at these photos of light ripples on real, large bodies of water by Darrel Gough and Francesco Ungaro respectively on Pexels, you can see that while the ripple effect dominates up close, further away the water surface looks more homogenous, and tends toward the color of the sky.

I imitate this by fading the ripple pattern into the horizon texture when the angle is sufficiently oblique.

These are of course all completely fake reflections. I’m just using the sky color. Actual reflection is well beyond the scope of this attempt.

Step 5 - Edge Foam

Edge foam is generated using the water depth, similarly to the depth-dependent effects in part one, although, this time we’re using the vertical difference between the water surface and the image below, rather than the distance in the direction of the camera. The edge foam is generated wherever the depth of the water is very low. 

There are some disadvantages to this approach. The width of the foam technically follows the shape of the terrain under the water instead of actually being generated out horizontally from the edges of the water. See this thread for a clear explanation of the problem and a solution for some use cases.

But the depth approach is cheap and easy, and the faults are mostly pretty well concealed by the addition of noise.

I used mainly this tutorial for my edge foam.

Stripes are generated from the Y-depth:

And distorted using some moving noise:

For the next attempt I’d like to use the camera depth normals as described in this tutorial to make the width of the foam more uniform with respect to the slope of the terrain or intersecting object.

Combining the edge effect with the ripples, we get:

And combining with the water interior effects from part one:

Step 6 - Displacement

The final feature I added for the full shader is displacement to make the water go up and down. This is a simple fractal simplex noise distribution applied to the Y coordinate of the water vertices. You can see the full effect in the video at the top of the post!

[cyanobotcodes]

Last Updates of 2024

Just settling in to resume modding after the holidays, and the first task is sorting out my to-do list. Step one is removing all the things I crossed off before the break, so here's the collated list:

Toddlers

Reworked the apparel settings for greater consistency (ought to prevent several issues with baby apparel showing up when turned off, and improve compatibility especially with the recipes showing up in modded workbenches)

The "industrial" tech level baby apparel is now medieval

Cyanobot's Genes

Tweaked the balance of Violence Averse: mood penalties increased slightly

Fixed: the growth moment at age 3 for Precocious babies was instead triggering for every baby except Precocious ones

Fixed: an issue with endogene inheritance for Offspring genes

Various additional compatibility patches for Offspring genes

Added by popular request: Caste Commonality genes to allow probability weighting for Offspring and Metamorphosis

Just About: Lions And Tigers (Continued)

Fixed: missing faction

Comigo's Adequate Cooking Continued

Fixed: several grains missing from flour recipes

Cloth Production Expanded Patches, Colored Leather And Wool, Softness Control

Compatibility for Mashed's Ashlands

[cyanobotcodes]

Water Shader 1 - Interior

Here's a water shader I made. I think it's not bad for a first attempt.

Made possible by heavy reference to the following tutorials:

Looking Through Water - Catlike Coding  Yet Another Stylised Water Shader - Half Past Yellow Stylized Water Shader - Alexander Ameye Depth - Cyanilux

Plus some others that I'll link in part 2 when I get to the bits that I used them for.

I also used this beautiful example as a bit of a reference throughout for the sort of style I’d like to aim for.

Process under the cut.

My test scene looks like this.

We’ve got the generic Unity skybox, some generic sand-colored terrain (made of a simple noise function), a generic grey cube to demonstrate intersection with the water, and the water, which is currently a solid blue plane.

Step 1 - Transparency

Water is famously transparent. To make a transparent shader we essentially tell the renderer "instead of drawing this surface, draw the things behind it actually".

Here's if I just ask Unity to do that:

You can see that the underwater section comes out slightly darker than the rest of the scene. This happens (it turns out) because the scene color (everything behind the water) is passed to the water shader before Unity finishes processing all of the lighting.

I think in this case its the effect of the skybox that's missing from the underwater area. This actually suits me just fine, since the terrain underwater should be less influenced by the sky light anyway.

Here it is with a watery blue-green tint:

If you saw this you'd probably understand that it was meant to represent water, but that's about as much as you can say for it.

Real water is not perfectly transparent. The more water between us and the bottom of the lake, the less clearly we should be able to see through it. To implement this, we need to know the distance between the water surface and the bottom of the lake.

Depth shaders were a new topic to me and I am greatly indebted to this Cyanilux tutorial for explaining them very clearly.

Here’s the camera depth for my test scene, normalised to a decent range of values for the lake in question:

Here the water simply fades from transparent to opaque with depth:

And here's my final version of the transparency effect:

For that last image I've used: - a color gradient from greener shallows to deeper, bluer depths - a less aggressive fade (more transparent in the middle of the lake) - an exponential rather than linear depth function, and - a subtractive tinting function as described in this tutorial.

I think it looks pretty good so far.

Step 2 - Refraction

When we see objects through water we notice two main refraction effects.

Left (image by Bcrowell, en.wikipedia) we see the entire straw appear to bend at the surface of the water. Right (photo by Sam E Di) we see a rippled distortion of the sand caused by refraction through the rippled surface of the water.

In a natural body of water we tend to notice only the second effect (rippled distortion), because we don’t know the exact shape of the sticks/rocks/etc we’re looking at anyway. So, like many other water shaders, I’ll only be modelling the distortion for this quick and dirty simulation of refraction.

Since I’m working in Shader Graph, I primarily followed Ameye’s tutorial, although the section on refraction artifacts required me to dip into the more technical Catlike Coding tutorial to get it working.

To create ripple distortion we first need some ripples. Here’s the ripples I will be using. It’s two layers of ridged Simplex noise panning across each other.

I’ll be the first to admit it doesn’t look that much like water ripples. That’s a major area for improvement that I’d like to tackle as I learn more about creating procedural textures from noise. 

But it looks okay once it’s actually being used as ripples rather than viewed directly, so it’s good enough for a first attempt.

Applying the ripple noise to the scene color gets us this:

And with color:

In the close-up you can see the refraction artefacts mentioned above.

At the upper right edge of the cube the ripples take on the “deep water” color, and at the lower left, in the spaces that were inside the original outline of the cube but are not inside the new, distorted outline, you can just about see that the water looks shallower than it should.

The first fix is to feed the ripple noise into the depth calculator – but this introduces new problems.

The bottom left of the cube now looks right, but the top right has the cube itself “refracting” into the water even though it should be in front of the water. We also now have artifacts at the shoreline where similarly the shore is “refracted” into the water.

You may have seen either breed of artifacts in published games, I certainly have.

The fix involves making sure we don’t grab any pixels from above the waterline, and reverting back to the un-refracted image as a “default” if we were at risk of doing that.

Step 3 - Caustics

When light shines through rippled water, it produces distinctive patterns on objects under the water. These patterns are called caustics. (Photo by BrockenInaGlory)

There’s a fantastic tutorial on caustics by Allan Zucconi here, but I didn’t end up using most of it, since I’m still working (mostly) in Shader Graph.

Even more than the ripples, a good caustics texture would go a long way towards making my caustics look better. But for now I am once again using two layers of ridged simplex noise moving across each other (this time at a slightly lower spatial frequency).

Here they are, tinted slightly yellowish to represent sunlight:

(In a more complex model, like I will eventually need to handle multiple liquids and lighting conditions, the colour of the caustics should be determined by both water colour and light colour.)

And here they are projected down onto the underlying terrain:

Not very convincing. Two problems:

1 - We tend to only see caustics clearly in relatively shallow water. They fade out pretty quickly with depth as the light gets more thoroughly scattered by the water and stuff floating in the water. 

We can fix that pretty easily:

(This is using the same depth function I used for colour and transparency above. Technically it would be more accurate to use the vertical depth of the water or even the depth in the direction of the light source – but the visual difference is slight and this is the quicker, lazier solution.)

Second problem:

Caustics should only form where the light falls. They absolutely should not be visible in the shadows.

The Half Past Yellow tutorial mentions the need to access the shadow map, which pointed me in the right direction, but didn’t give me a lot to go on. 

Figuring out how to access the shadow map was a whole journey and unfortunately: 

I don’t seem to have written down all the sources I consulted (a lot of forum threads as well as articles, tutorials, and the official Unity documentation, iirc), and

I don’t fully understand what I did or how the shadow maps are represented under the hood.

In the end it involved dipping into HLSL to write a custom node that retrieves the shadow map. But I got it working.

Cutting the shadows out instantly makes the caustics effect more believable. It’s still not perfect, but this is where I called it good enough.

Combined with the other “water interior” effects (I wanted to show the animated version but the lower-contrast animation doesn't survive compression/conversion well) :

So far, so good!

Next up, the water surface.

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent(ish) Updates

Talking Isn't Everything

Compatibility patch for Way Better Romance

Mute pawns can now interact with creepjoiners

Now available on GitHub

Cyanobot's Genes

compatibility patch for the littered birth genes from Big and Small

fixed an error with baby xenotype name/icon assignment when parents have multiple Offspring genes

fixed error on pawn killed by turret

several balance adjustments for Wists

Wist Venom Bite can now be used on non-hostile strangers

patch for Alpha Genes' Wretches to stop them randomly acquiring Metamorphosis genes and inevitably ceasing to be Wretches

Salt Ore

reduced abundance

Toddlers

fixed several more potential causes of 10 jobs 1 tick errors

added a debug logging option

toddlers should no longer attempt to skydream in unsafe temperatures

fixed an error in the Settings menu with certain modlists

Upcoming Changes

Talking Isn't Everything - compatibility with Life Lessons

Cyanobot's Genes - balance adjustment for Glimmers

Softness Control, Colored Leather and Wool, Cloth Production Expanded Patches - compatibility patches for Ashlands

Toddlers - compatibility for Humanoid Alien Races

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

Cloth Production Expanded Patches

Added compatibility for Seeds Please

Fixed recipe for Corduroy in the industrial loom

Fixed missing recipes for burlap yarn

Fixed a NullReferenceException on load

Added a recipe to convert several Textiles+ fabrics into generic cloth

Cyanobot's Genes

fixed a compatibility issue with Geological Landforms subsequent to a recent update to that mod

Upcoming

In approximate order:

Talking Isn't Everything - compatibility patch for Way Better Romance

Talking Isn't Everything - patch for creepjoiners

Toddlers - a few more tweaks/fixes to taking to safety

Cyanobot's Genes - balance adjustments for Wist

Cyanobot's Genes - compatibility patch for Big & Small

Talking Isn't Everything - further compatibility patches

Toddlers - HAR compatibility

[cyanobotcodes]

Recent Updates

Colored Leather and Wool - Patch for Better Wool Production (C# Edition)

Toddlers - Major update tackling my "nemesis code" aka "take baby to safety". Rewritten that whole section from scratch with compatibility in mind. Eliminated a number of errors, probably introduced some new ones, monitoring and patching ongoing. - Added missing translate keys for "return to crib", "let out of crib" - Updated my debug logging process to make it harder for myself to leave shittons of log spam in the release version.

Upcoming (in approximate but not definite order):

1.5 update for Biomes! Caveworld Flora Unleashed

tweaks to Toddlers toddler AI to make sure it plays nicely with the new adult AI

Seeds Please compatibility and QoL tweak for Cloth Production Expanded Patches

Compatibility patches for Talking Isn't Everything

Further Toddlers bugfixes

[cyanobotcodes]

Mod Lists

I have organised the mods I use/enjoy into a set of Steam collections grouped into semantic categories. This is mainly for my own use, but maybe others will also find these lists helpful.

Don't expect these lists to remain perfectly static, I will continue to update them as I play, find new mods, etc.

Quality of Life

QoL Tweaks - tweaks and adjustments to gameply, nothing diverging too far from vanilla UI and Control - better user interface, and more ways to control what your pawns do Pawn AI - smarter autonomous pawn behaviour and smarter behaviour in response to commands Graphics - lots of graphical improvements including FX, layering, HD textures, and more texture variety More Words/Names - increase the variety of descriptive words and names in the world

Things and Stuff

Little Things - small self-contained additions, most of which I feel are semi-essential QoL features Decor - stuff that only (or mostly only) exists for decorative purposes Food - more cooking mechanics, more ways of acquiring and preserving food Resources - more materials and resources Neolithic - additions for the neolithic (and sometimes paleolithic) era High Tech - more future tech, mostly spacer/ultra More Stuff - blocks of content that didn't fit into the other addition categories

Biological

World and Biomes - world gen, biomes, and map features Flora and Farming - plants and farming mechanics Fauna - animals, "animals", animal behaviour, more mechanics for animals Mad Biology - crimes against nature

Pawns

Pawn Cosmetics - hair, cosmetic genes, tatoos, apparel Genes and Xenotypes - shedloads more Biotech content Health and Surgery - more complicated/adjusted health mechanics, more surgeries, bionics, medicines, diseases Social and Psychology - more in-depth thoughts, traits and relationships Ideologies - more strange beliefs for your pawns, and more/adjusted ideoligious mechanics

Happenings

Events - more random events, variations on and tweaks to vanilla events Factions - more factions, more mechanics for factions to interact with you and with each other

Complexity and Realism

Survival Realism - survival mechanics, adjusted for more complexity and realism Complex Production - what if acquiring and producing resources was more difficult and complicated

[cyanobotcodes]

New release - compatibility patches for [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2610910079]Cloth Production Expanded[/url].

Patches a bunch of textile mods to use the production chain from Cloth Production Expanded. Also tweaks a few of the mechanics to make that integration easier.

[cyanobotcodes]

New release stitches a bunch of neolithic-era mods together for a more cohesive experience.

I promise I am working on my bug lists, I am just also trying to put together a mod list to actually play Rimworld for once, and that includes fixing up my many messy patches from 1.4. So I figured I may as well polish them up to be release-ready in the process.