Tech Generator Workflow Improvements

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 TL;DR: Major features are improving the Tech Generator's workflow in significant ways.

 

   This will be a relatively short post, as life is crazy busy these days and I'd like to maximize what little free time I have for working on the Tech Generator, rather than writing about it. (I'm a teacher, and it's the start of the school year -- exciting, but a lot of work!)

   Since last month's blog post, the work I've done on the Tech Generator has been focused on two main areas: Randomness, and Manual Adjustments.


Randomness Control

   The random number generator functions in Google Sheets work well for producing random numbers, but they re-generate their numbers constantly. Any time you re-open a spreadsheet, or make any change to any value anywhere in the sheet, all of the random number fields reroll and come up with new numbers.

   This was causing problems for the Generator's usefulness, as it was difficult to keep a certain outfit you liked while making adjustments elsewhere, for example. And as the scale of the Generator has increased, it has also started imposing significant performance problems, as all generated items were constantly re-generating even when they weren't being changed in any way.

   Long story short, I came up with my own mathematical pseudorandom number generating algorithm based on a user-provided seed, and replaced the default Google Sheets random number generators with my own. Now the output of the generator remains stable unless and until the user wants to reroll the dice, which is huge from a practicality standpoint and also from a performance standpoint. The user can also reroll the dice on an item-by-item basis – so you can keep some items while rerolling others, as desired.

   Overall, this is a massive improvement, and I'm really happy to see it in action. :)

It's honestly really surprising to me that there's no option for these to take random seed values!


Manual Adjustments

   There is now an intermediate step added to the Tech Generator's process, whereby the outfits and weapons it has generated are displayed in a human-oriented way, along with calculated balance stats like DPS etc, and the user can make manual adjustments right there within the Generator, before the final output is generated for automated import into ResForge or EVNEW.

   This is helpful because: A) you can make manual tweaks to get exactly what you want; B) you can adjust just one item of a given "type" at a time to further differentiate it from the other items of its "type".

   Basically it gives the user a lot more control over the Generator's output, and should really enhance the overall process of using the Generator to make the exact plug-in you want to make with it.

The two yellow-highlighed cells in this example were set manually rather than taking auto-generated values.


   ...and that's all I wanted to talk about for now. Happy modding, all!

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