Mod for 7 Days to Die and Undead Legacy, similar to Xyths Steel Bar mod. As the original mod, this adds three types of bars to the game (wood, iron and steel) that you can look, shoot and loot through. Additionally I've included a corner block for every material and there is even a centered variant. In total adds 12 new building blocks to your game.
In constrast to the original SteelBars addon, these blocks/meshes collide with bullets (of course only where the actual bars and poles are). It should make it a bit more challenging to shoot through bars and you can also damage them.
For discussions, please use the thread for this mod at the official 7 days to die forum: https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/25320-new-steelbar-mod-with-undead-legacy-support
Please report issues and problems directly on GitHub: https://github.com/mgreter/ocbSteelBars7D2D/issues/new
If you downloaded the zip archive, you need to extract the mod into the Mods folder of your
7 days to die installation. This is e.g. found under G:\steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die.
The actual location can vary due to your steam settings where to install your games, but you should
be able to find the location in steam via game properties -> local files -> browse. I can also highly
recommend 7D2D Mod Launcher, to also easily get to your installation folder.
For undead legacy the folder name inside Mods is important, since it must be loaded after the base
undead legacy mod is loaded. The loading order is determined alphabetically, so don't rename it.
The final folder structure should resemble something like 7d2d\Mods\A19_ocbSteelBars\Config etc. If
you copy the zip archive from here and save it into the Mods folder, be sure to choose extract here.
All material variants are crafted via one single master block. You can only craft master blocks and
then, once equiped in your hot-bar, choose a variation by holding the reload key. This mod will
also remove the recipes for the original WoodBars and IronBars to cleanup the crafting UI. You
can edit (comment out) the corresponding lines at the bottom of the recipe.xml file to disable this.
Since I've ported this mod for the original 7 days to die and also for the undead legacy addon, the mod comes in two flavours. Since the only differences are the block and recipe configs, we build the final mod structure via a simple batch script. Currently only windows is supported, but it should be very simple to adopt this to bash, since it only involves copying the correct files. I will attach the archives for every release I do on GitHub.
Please report issues and problems via https://github.com/mgreter/ocbSteelBars7D2D/issues/new.
This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. All the work I did here, I put under public domain, with the expection that I would like to be mentioned in the credits if you want to include my work. This includes commercial (wink to TFP) and private purposes. With the additional exception that the used textures are still attributed to the original authors (which are either governed by the Standard Unity Asset Store EULA or public domain with attribution):
- Wood: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-materials/wood/high-quality-realistic-wood-textures-mega-pack-75831
- Steel: https://3dtextures.me/2016/09/29/metal-rusted-007/
Unfortunately the iron texture from the original SteelBars mod (by Xyth) does not have any license attached. I'm using them in terms of fair-use, but the actual license is unclear and may need to be clarified if you want to re-use it.
The repair cost for steel should not include forged iron (iron plating), but I did not find out how to disable this, even though I added an explicit requirement for zero of these items to repair. I also tried to remove the xml node via xpath remove query, but to no avail. So for now you also need iron to repair steel bars.
I haven't done any translations yet, although I could probably copy some from the original SteelBars mod. I could also easily do the german ones, since I'm native german speaker, but just haven't had time to. If you want to contribute some translations, feel free to create a pull request at this github repo.
I included the blender and unity project files, hoping they are useful to other people. It took me around the equivalent of a work week (40h) to get from not having unity or blender installed to having the first final working version. Didn't even know that unity is that freely available for people to experiment with and Blender was always a beacon in the OSS world. So most of the time was spent in learning how to use blender and unity, but I may have to note that I already had a fair understanding how 3D programming works in general, but I haven't used unity or blender before.
Xyth has put together a nice collection of tools, which I've used to get this mod started.
First I simply tried to alter the existing SteelBars mod, but soon realized that this would be impossible if I wanted to add the additional corner shapes. In order to do that I had to create my own models from scratch, which turned out more complicated than I thought, since I'm a total noob when it comes to blender.
First day was mostly spent to learn how to export a simple cube from blender to unity to include in the game. Once I had the block visually in the game, I realized I could simply walk through it and not interact with it. I already knew that this probably had to do with the tagging system (T_Mesh etc). So the second day I mostly spent to learn how the unity colliders and the tags work, or at least which ones work for me.
Once I had that workflow covered, I had to create the actual models for the blocks. First I tried to do this in blender completely, but I soon abandoned that idea, since every time I wanted to alter some detail, like how big the dent on the handle bar is, I had to alter multiple vertices, which turned out to be impracticable. I simply not know blender well enough to pull this off, but since I know how to code, I wrote two very simple perl scripts to generate the required models with a few parameters, which I then could import in blender.
These models (exported as wavefront obj files) only contain the vertices and faces (quads). It's missing the normals and UV coordinates, which need to be re-calculated and unwrapped in blender. Additionally I added some Bevel modifiers to the top/bottom bars, to make them a bit more smooth. The normals are re-calculated from the outside faces of the mesh (Shift+N); but make sure to check that all are correctly set. The UVs are currently simple cube projections for the top/bottom bars. The poles are projected from the front views.
From blender the four models are exported via fbx to unity. There I first create the colliders for each model from 2 or 4 box colliders (for the top/bottom bars) and one mesh collider (for the poles). Once this worked for one variant (e.g. wood), I created the other variants (iron and steel), which means I simply changed the used material on each model. The nice thing about this fbx export approach is, that I can simply refresh the imported fbx to update the models in every variant (including the mesh collider).
Once everything is set in unity, simply export via the MultiPlatformExportAssetBundles.cs script, which is included in the template provided by Xyth (thanks a lot for that!). If you open this repo the first time in unity, be sure to load the scene included in the assets to see something ;) Prefabs can be created by drag and droping the folder from the hierarchy to the project assets folder (preferably the Prefab folder).
I think I could figure out most stuff, but some parts are still a bit mysterious. I couldn't really figure
out what the different tags mean, e.g. the difference between T_Mesh, B_Mesh and T_Mesh_B, T_Block.
Unfortunately I couldn't really dig up any resource that would explain those in more detail. I guess using
a Mesh type is correct here, as we don't have a fully opaque block. But no idea what T or B stands for.
I've used T_Mesh_B for now (on the collider), since that seems to work as needed and wanted.
The metal textures look a bit dull if you look closely (mostly due to my UV unwrapping). I haven't yet put much more time into it, but it seems to be a low hanging fruit to improve the visual apperance quite easily.
I'm still figuring out if the amount of harvested materials are fairly balanced. Hit-points and materials
needed for upgrading are mostly the same as for already existing similar blocks. I'm also very unsure how
the modifiers like count="from,to" or prod exactly influence the harvest drop.
The outer corner should realistically need double the materials to fabricate, since it is infact two outer edges (the center corner doesn't have this issue, since it is the same length as the center or outer edge). But having a different recipe for the outer corner would mean that we cannot include it in the same basic shape helper block.
The in-game icons for the iron material variation are a bit too dark.
Currently the outer and the center blocks work together, but connecting them is not really supported. There is an opportunity to include much more specialized blocks, like an outer edge with center edge intersecting (T-shape).
I don't really know what the performance implications really are with this mod. I guess that the mesh collider should have some performance costs, but I didn't see any significant fps drop with my rig (i9-9900k/GTX 1070 Ti). I use 16 segments per pole-mesh, which could be reduced (in case this would improve performance).
- 0.8.1 - Remove existing recipies (24.12.2021)
- Remove new A20 vanilla corner bar recipes
- 0.8.0 - A20 harmony refactor (13.12.2021)
- Refactor harmony patch for A20 compatibility
- Add harmony patch for motion sensor to see through bars
- 0.2.2 - A19 recipes adjustments (20.09.2021)
- Fixed repair costs for steel inheriting from iron
- Fixed resource costs for steel bars (was too low)
- Added stone as another requirement (because why not)
- Craft times and repair costs adjusted accordingly
- 0.2.1 - Bugfix release (20.09.2021)
- Fixed iron-bars to be upgradable by steel-rebars (ULM)
- 0.2.0 - Initial beta release (18.09.2021)