Suggestions / best practices to follow

[ShockiTV]

Hi,

looking into code and trying to find a way to implement few things I would like to see ingame, I stumbled into some design issues.

First most obvious is that many things are being done in the app lua part and not using game events.

For example suggested flow for MIC interactions. Currently you trigger mic read from the script file and all other is done in lua app.
I would rewrite it a little.
For example I would add talker_event.script which would do AddScriptCallback("talker_event_trigger") and would register processing of given trigger which would lead to save into DB, if it is type which should be saved.
So back to the MIC use, it would do the mic call as now, but also pass reference to on_transcribed_text, which would be something like

function on_transcribed_text(event)
    SendScriptCallback("talker_event_trigger", event)    
end

And in lua app, it would do just that, transcribe and call callback .

Actual AI call will be done in another script, which would be listening for events on "talker_even_trigger". If the even type is something like "actor_mic_spoken", it will call the lua app method to do the processing which can include AI interaction.

The actual events should use raw constants for factions etc in DB, not the translated ones. Translation should be done "just in time" when creating AI prompt. Cause currently it is hard to do any additional things with it, and need to translate back to the game language values before using any game commands.

For example I wanted to trigger "enemy_sound" aggro command if you speak in vicinity of enemy. With this reworked setup, I can listen to event of player speaking on script level, check if any observer is enemy (which is kinda harder with current translation already in event) and trigger enemy version of AI prompt (which can have a chance (or 100% from max 3 enemies or whatever MCM setting) to enemy commenting with slightly different AI prompt) and also provide callback (which will wait for AI response if there is any expected) to trigger given "enemy_sound" aggro event which will make them go check if something is happening on your location.

To make this happen, I suggest 2 things:

• use the custom script callback events to make all interactions more granular and observable
• use raw game constants in DB events

I can do most of it myself, but the DB part is not backwards compatible (well there is possibility of migration when initializing the event store).
Just wanted to start discussion first and know if such things would be welcomed

[Mirrowel]

Dan is gonna be very busy(Discord thread convo), and he is the one who made 98% of this at least.
I.. really don't want to work with lua, so i wanna rewrite as much logic as possible into python. Leaving Lua to only interact with the game logic.
If you wanna help out in any way - PR's are open. But ngl i don't think this is gonna happen.

[ShockiTV]

Yes, I can do the steps described myself and rewire things.
Just did not wanted to waste my time if suggested things will be against something other ppl want to follow.

[Mirrowel]

Yes, I can do the steps described myself and rewire things. Just did not wanted to waste my time if suggested things will be against something other ppl want to follow.

Well, i gave what i am planning to do with this. I don't know that much about most of the game logic involved in making this mod, so I'll need some help or extensive slamming of my head to make the python rewrite.

What you are describing is an enhancement, so go ahead. But if you also want to make the python rewrite easier - i Definitely won't say no. I think this project would benefit a lot from good python base. I'd just need game logic "endpoints" so to speak to hook it in to.

[ShockiTV]

Yeah, I want to use the script level native event bus to split this big lua "blackbox" to smaller processing chunks.
Most of it should be just enhancement, only the event format is breaking change, but migration should be possible if needed at the end of rewrite to make existing saves compatible.
And I am more familiar with python than lua too.
Discord link?

[Mirrowel]

gamma discord. Mods posting->Talker