(potential spoilers)Wondering about World states and how they can be set

[Meepsauce]

Skip below if you'd like to TL;DR and ignore the introduction.

I'm not an experienced modder and I'm not too sure what sort of boundaries or limitations there are yet, but I can grasp the basics very easily. I have a few ideas but I'm not too sure on exactly whether or how I could implement the ideas I have.

After playing with my friend lately I've started to explore, finding open-world spaces such as the Broken Shillelagh, Smiling Jack's, Technically Legal, Steelport Guard HQ (I think that's what it is).

However, I've noticed that so many areas with potential aren't around or easily accessible.

Powder's Warehouse (First stronghold mission) is a good example, the only thing stopping you from entering is 2 doors that could easily be open, the interior itself is fine, all the doors work. Using the Manapault glitch you can fire yourself through the doors in and out. Now, might be said why these areas are of importance, there's no npcs in there, no real significance - but overall it would be nice to have this added depth to the city, especially when in an example such as this there is no reason the doors can't be open.

--MAIN POINT OF POST GOES HERE--
Of course I'm aware that for areas such as Safeword and any of the interiors that turn into cribs there are huge implications, quite game breaking in fact, and Idolninja has done a great job of working around this for the Mission Replay mod. However, I'm wondering if it could be possible to get almost on-demand world states for finer tuning.

At first I thought perhaps cheats could be a great way to change a world state but looking through the cheat table seemed to have very specific criteria for each cheat and I'm not sure what type of commands can be called from that area.

The second idea I had was potentially making dummy missions to set these states, it could be done if you change the sh_state and name for the zones you wish to switch and run the stronghold magic function to check those and re-apply them.

The third thing I was curious about was placing teleports for specific co-ordinates but I'm fairly sure I read a post a while back from Idol saying this wasn't yet possible, and I think the mod to teleport you to the top of the Saints HQ for tanks etc is simply a movement of the previous teleport.

Of course, I'm very new to all this and I'm not sure if I'm even close to a decent theory, but I just thought I'd like to throw the ideas out there and see how wrong I was about stuff. If I can learn about some of the current challenges modders face then maybe I could be another mind working with them.

 

[Corrodias]

Looks like a future version of the Gentlemen of Steelport builder will have some kind of state toggling functionality, although i don't know about those doors, specifically.

It's entirely possible that the doors are simply loaded with the same kind of zone swapping calls that toggle everything else in the game, so it should be possible to figure out what they are by looking closely at the mission script and experimenting with some of them in the sr3_city.lua file.

You can play with it and see if you can figure out how to get rid of the doors. It has been a while since i looked at them, but i'll try to explain. The mission scripts make calls to a function that is named something like swap_zone or zone_swap to change the state of the world. The first argument is the name of the zone or its variant, and the second argument is true or false for load or unload. If you put calls to that function in the sr3_city.lua's init function, those things will occur when you load a game. Extract sr3_city.lua from one of the vpp_pc files and put it in the saints row the third folder to use it as a mod. Edit it freely. You don't need to re-launch the game for changes to take effect; you only need to re-load a save. Don't save while you have that file there, though. Changes to the world are permanently saved in the save file if you do!

 

[[V] IdolNinja]

Turk and I are working on something that will let you toggle zones and world states in real time while in the open world. More news to come.