Skill Loss Modding

I’m looking to change the values of how some things degrade in skill. I found the file with the variables that set them. If I set the GAMESKILL loss to 1.0 that seems to stop skills like soccer and golf from degrading, but if I set muscles to 1.0, it seems to go down faster. How do these values work?

_MUSCLES_DEGRADE should be the value you change. Setting it to 1.0 should mean they never degrade. Are you sure you changed the right value?

inside config.txt: _MUSCLES_DEGRADE = 1.0

Saturday: 59%
Sunday: 57%
Monday: 57%
Tuesday: 56%
Wednesday: 56%
Thursday: 55%
Friday: 54%

I just tested this and can’t reproduce the bug. Could you send me a save game where it is doing this? I can’t think what would be causing it, unless the file you edited is somehow the wrong one, or not being saved correctly?

OK, I took a look and I think I can see what’s happening.
When you work out, the value is being stored as 1.0, and lasting forever, it’s working fine.
BUT
You still have all those effects from before you changed that value, and they are still degrading.
In other words, changing a value isn’t regressive, it won’t change the decay rate for muscles ‘per se’ just for new changes to muscles. This is the (slightly complex) way in which the values get calculated.
So if you start a new character with a new game, it should never degrade. If it does, then I definitely have a bug!

ok, that explains a lot.

If I understand this right, as my old workout skills degrade, the new workout skills won’t and eventually over time the degrade will decrease as degradable gets replaced by non-degradable?

The rate does seem quite high, even though when I do the math, it’s about a 1.2% loss in skills daily which doesn’t sound like much, but working out only raises it by 4%, and because the degrade is a percentage, the higher the skill gets, the faster it goes down. At one point, I think my body skill was over 80%, and it dropped down so fast it became discouraging. I’m glad that you’ve made this settings in a text file where I can actually change it and make the game more enjoyable for me, I really appreciate that. It means I can just turn off degrading until if and when a nicer solution is found :slight_smile:

I like the idea someone else had of raising a ‘floor’ level of each stat. so if your muscles was 80, the ‘floor’ might be 60, and it would never drop below that.

Actually, it was one of mine :smiley: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2003

I’ve been trying in my head to come up with ideas to expand on it. Part of what would effect this would be what influence the skill has on events. At a golf, how much of the odds of winning is based on the skill, and how much is based on the stats? I would assume that you’re using a mix of skills and stats, which if that’s the case, you hardly need a degrading skill, since the stats they depend on already degrade.

One of the things to consider in balancing the degrade is how much game time is reasonable for maintaining the skill/stat to where it is. Personally, I don’t think skills should degrade at all. Degrading performance in games should be based solely on stats. 5 years of not playing soccer, I wouldn’t play as well simply from being more out of shape, and not from having forgotten how to pass the ball.

Perhaps changing how these skills are learned can be an alternative to degrading. Competitive games (which I believe all the degradable game skills are) could have the learning based directly to the relationship between the player’s skill and their opponents skills. Playing against a better opponent will make you highly likely to lose, but you’ll learn faster. Once you have matched your opponent, the skill increase is dramatically reduced (say 0.5 to 1.0 per game) on both sides, and the odds of winning basically boil down to 50/50 since you’re playing against an evenly matched opponent. If you play against a friend who is worse than you, you win a lot, but your opponent learns fast, and soon you’ll be matched, and no longer getting that advantage. If you really want to get better, you need to find better people to play against. Also, I remember in Kudos 1 that I could see the game skill of my friends, but I didn’t see that feature in Kudos 2.

Culture and Knowledge makes sense to degrade slowly since they are degrading because the world and culture is changing. I think here a cap would be useful, since the cap would basically being “culturally aware” and “knowledgeable”, but just not knowing the latest in both those categories. It would also show about forgetfulness, which I think is also part of what you are degrading. I go to a museum, I have a huge short term boost to culture with a fast degrade, but I don’t lose everything, since some stuff will always be remembered. Say you get a +10 boost in culture, but it degrades over 4 days to a permanent +2 to culture, or in the alternative, the 60% of max skill cap. If you want a permanent 60%, you first have to get enough culture to raise it to 100% . Someone that cultured is always going to be somewhat cultured. Same thing applies to Knowledge.

Logic and Reason seem to be harder things to pitch on degrading, but since both are heavily influenced by birth genetics and uprising (things Kudos doesn’t have), some balance I suppose is required.

Muscles is one where I have trouble with. It seems that the rate which muscles go down is incredibly fast. At 50% muscles, you need to work out once a week just to maintain that 50% muscles, and it’s a losing battle. I don’t think a cap is as necessary here, but the loss rate should be a bit slower, and I think a more fixed amount. It doesn’t take much working out just to maintain the current muscle level. Fitness could also be tied in to the muscle loss. Someone whose life style involves a lot of fitness (sports, walking to work, etc) would have a slower muscle loss. In balancing it out, I suppose the real question is how often should players need to use the workout activity just to maintain their current muscles, and also factor in that raising the muscles will involve doing at least twice that amount work working out.

Overall, I think the basic idea is a mix of permanent and temporary stat & skill as a replacement for some or all of the degradable skills. Two ways I can think of are the 60% of max skill cap, or by mixing permanent and temporary skill gains in an activity coupled with a higher degrade loss for temporary. In the latter method, it can also be expanded on that continued learning of the stat/skill while there is temporary could, instead of adding more permanent & temporary, instead replace some temporary with permanent.

For example:
Day 1) +8 temporary (-2 / day), +2 permanent: Current skill 10 (2+8)
Day 2) [-2 temporary for day change] +4 temporary (-2 / day), +2 permanent: Current skill 14 (4+10)
Day 3) [-4 temporary for day change] +4 temporary (-2 / day), +2 permanent: Current skill 16 (6+10)
Day 4) [-6 temporary for day change] +4 temporary (-2 / day), +2 permanent: Current skill 16 (8+8)
Day 5) [-6 temporary for day change] +4 temporary (-2 / day), +2 permanent: Current skill 16 (10+6)
Day 6) [-4 temporary for day change] +4 temporary (-2 / day), +2 permanent: Current skill 18 (12+6)
Day 7) [-4 temporary for day change] +4 temporary (-2 / day), +2 permanent: Current skill 20 (14+6)
Day 8) [-4 temporary for day change] {does something else}: Current skill 16 (14+2)
Day 9) [-2 temporary for day change] {does something else}: Current skill 14 (14+0)

As you can see, this provides an example to show how regular use creates a buffer of temporary skills. The switch between +8 or +4 temporary is based on whether or not there is currently any temporary skill. The +8 divided in half. The first half is always there, the second half is subtracted by the temporary skill. Since the temporary is always above 4, the second half is always negative, so not added. If there is only 3 points in temporary, then +5 would be added to the temporary (4 + (4-3)). In the alternative, 8 if the temporary is 0, 8/2 if > 0

If the player stops using the skill, the +6 bonus disappears and the skill drops down to +14. Naturally, because of the Kudos limitations you wouldn’t be doing the same thing 7 days in a row, so perhaps the skill can be balanced by changing the drop off rate. I just used those numbers as an example. In design it looks and sounds complicated, but based on how I’ve been seeing how the skill system works, it’s probably simpler to implement than it sounds. There is also a small period where the player isn’t gaining on the total. This would be where the player is simply learning and remembering what they already knew (turning temporary into permanent).

The only possible downside to this method is that it’s possible to reach 100% of permanent. If this isn’t desirable, than the permanent can further be capped at say 60%, and further refinement would be needed on the numbers to allow the temporary to reach 100 (reduce the daily rate, as well as reducing the daily loss once the skill passes the cap)

This is a good point, because it means that you can almost achieve the correct result now (with modding) because the game supports you boosting culture partially with degrade and partially not. The only thing requiring a new piece of code in a patch would be a cap on permanent raises, which is easy because you just disregard any permanent boosts if they would take the current perm level above a defined floor.
My chief concern right now is eliminating all crash bugs, but post-holiday I will be taking a look at this.

Are musical skills under a different category than game skills when trying to mod it for degrade rate? In the game the guitar skills barely keep steady. It’ll go up 2% and if you don’t practice the next day, it’ll go down %2 and it never finds a place to level off.

I have GAMESKILL_DEGRADE at 1.0, and it works with Bowling and Chess and whatnot, but not for musical skills.
Is there a hidden MUSICSKILL_DEGRADE option somewhere?

Thanks

There is no musicskill_degrade value in the game. However, if you go into the solo_activities.csv file, you will see lines that start:

practice_bass

practice_drums

practice_guitar

practice_keyboard

practice_saxophone

Towards the end of these lines are the following values:
music_bass,0.05,0.96
music_drums,0.05,0.96
music_guitar,0.025,0.96
music_piano,0.0125,0.96
music_saxophone,0.025,0.96

The guitar goes up 2.5% each practice session, but you only keep 96% of your skills from one day to the next. If you want them to decay at a slower rate, change the 0.96 a higher number. Setting that value to 1.0 means they will never degrade.

Ohhhh, Thank you so much. :smiley:

I didn’t even think about that. Its a little bit different from the first Kudos so I was a bit lost.

I’m kind of surprised that there isn’t a musicskill_degrade, since they’re all set to 0.96 in the same file. Still, glad to help out.

After following the explanations for modding above I did some digging myself. Opening the ‘solo_activities.csv’ file opened a lot of doors. The instruments section for ‘DEGRADE’ in the config.txt file is actually labeled under ‘CULTURE_DEGRADE’ according to the ‘solo_activities.csv’ file. Looks like both these files coincide with each other in multiple ways to calculate all the additions and takeaways to the attributes. Hope this helps!! =)

Whenever I set all the skills to 1.0 the month in the date goes all werid like !! or !a! and also my energy just goes completely down more than normal why is this? I fixed it by returning tired to the orginal value looks like I will also have to do the same with excitment.

Edit- In fact everything is degrading slightly, some more thanothers :frowning: If anyone wants to email me a config file to show me how to set the degrades to 1.0 I would be most grateful maybe that way i can see what I am doing wrong.