Goonhub
06-02-2015, 12:06 PM
I pitched this over on the IRC at one point, and people seemed to be relatively okay with it, so here goes.
The life reaction, as we all know, can make critters and shit. However, the part of the wiki article where it says that "you have to get the reagent numbers exactly right, otherwise you'll just produce a critter or meat cube" seems to suggest that the exact critter produced by the life reaction works on a ratio-based system. Different ratios of blood, strange reagent, and synthflesh result in different critters.
However, if Grayshift is to be trusted, this is actually not the case and the resulting critter is completely random. Not only that, but the selection of critters seems rather paltry: Braindead humans, asshole humans, space wasps, meat cubes, and the occasional space goose are all I've heard about. Not very impressive considering the wide assortment of critters in the game.
So let's change that and give this otherwise anticlimactic form of chemistry some...well, life.
The first suggestion is to actually implement a ratio-based system. This means that different ranges of ratios between ingredients will result in different critters: 33 blood, 33 synthflesh, and 34 strange reagent, for instance, would probably not make the same reaction as 15 blood, 5 strange reagent, and 80 synthflesh. And my second suggestion is to not only increase the critter pool, but perhaps allow for some "secret recipes" within life reactions which have you adding specific ingredients in certain quantities to make special critters. Maybe adding some nanomachines into the mixture can have you make a GuardBuddy, or adding some bee would have you make...well, a bee.
These implementations would turn the all-in-all dishearteningly simplistic life reaction into something much more complex and deep. However, one problem that is immediately raised is that of how the fuck you'd go about coding this shit, and as someone who doesn't code at all, I'm not sure how simple or difficult this sort of thing would be. That's why I'm throwing it at the forums, as well as for general suggestions/comments about the idea.
The life reaction, as we all know, can make critters and shit. However, the part of the wiki article where it says that "you have to get the reagent numbers exactly right, otherwise you'll just produce a critter or meat cube" seems to suggest that the exact critter produced by the life reaction works on a ratio-based system. Different ratios of blood, strange reagent, and synthflesh result in different critters.
However, if Grayshift is to be trusted, this is actually not the case and the resulting critter is completely random. Not only that, but the selection of critters seems rather paltry: Braindead humans, asshole humans, space wasps, meat cubes, and the occasional space goose are all I've heard about. Not very impressive considering the wide assortment of critters in the game.
So let's change that and give this otherwise anticlimactic form of chemistry some...well, life.
The first suggestion is to actually implement a ratio-based system. This means that different ranges of ratios between ingredients will result in different critters: 33 blood, 33 synthflesh, and 34 strange reagent, for instance, would probably not make the same reaction as 15 blood, 5 strange reagent, and 80 synthflesh. And my second suggestion is to not only increase the critter pool, but perhaps allow for some "secret recipes" within life reactions which have you adding specific ingredients in certain quantities to make special critters. Maybe adding some nanomachines into the mixture can have you make a GuardBuddy, or adding some bee would have you make...well, a bee.
These implementations would turn the all-in-all dishearteningly simplistic life reaction into something much more complex and deep. However, one problem that is immediately raised is that of how the fuck you'd go about coding this shit, and as someone who doesn't code at all, I'm not sure how simple or difficult this sort of thing would be. That's why I'm throwing it at the forums, as well as for general suggestions/comments about the idea.