Thanks for testing all that stuff! We use the mod on a dedicated server and there we don't discovered problems with vanishing elevators so far but I have to say that our longest horizontal elevator is about 55 blocks long. The distance was just a test value and I'm really glad someone tested that. It was also not intended to build such huge elevators. I'll test that further and will definitively decrease that number.

The pickup option comes probably from the master class because I added the parent call of the radial menu in the elevators. The way the mod works is by merging the items table with a mod controller and overwrite the existing entries of the elevators and changing their building class to a new one, which is an exact copy from the old ones with the new functions included. I guess I should make a component for the elevators with the new functions and add them in the mod controller to the vanilla BP ones?

For the better radial menus I have to say, that I didn't find a better, double-radial menu solution (like the emote one), but I'll definitively looking forward to make that happen. This also counts for automatically replacing old elevators that were placed before installing the mod.

Thanks again for all the testing and information.

Originally posted by Lord7even:

... I guess I should make a component for the elevators with the new functions and add them in the mod controller to the vanilla BP ones?

For the better radial menus I have to say, that I didn't find a better, double-radial menu solution (like the emote one), but I'll definitively looking forward to make that happen. This also counts for automatically replacing old elevators that were placed before installing the mod.

Thanks again for all the testing and information.

I have never actually made anything with the Unreal Engine, so I'm unsure of the specifcs for how a mod should be designed. I've just see a lot of other mods out there that appear to do similar things without the compatibility issues.

ElevatorPlus did it well back when it was updated. Good integration of the radial menus for all the various needed options. Those can still be looked at in the mod, though they may not actually do anything anymore. That mod didn't increase distance at all, so I'm not sure if it would have suffered from the same proportional slowdown the longer the span gets.

Ideally, whatever solution you come up with to restore compatibility and make all old elevators work will be one that has no lasting effect on the game. You should be able to remove and re-add the mod over and over again with nothing ever breaking. (Aside from maybe the doors since I imagine to remove collision you had to recreate and overwrite the item, so any new doors with no collision would vanish if the mod is removed. I take this knowledge from LBPR mods by Multigun.
He has done similar collision things in one of his mod versions.)

I would be interested in knowing if there are true distance limitations on a Multiplayer server. I just don't want to go to the effort and downtime required to test it on mine right now with this the mod in its current state.

Originally posted by Piankhi:

Aside from maybe the doors since I imagine to remove collision you had to recreate and overwrite the item, so any new doors with no collision would vanish if the mod is removed. I take this knowledge from LBPR mods by Multigun.
He has done similar collision things in one of his mod versions.)

I have no idea how I felt I should look at this discussion, yet here I am and I see my name. *Looks up in the sky* no, I don't see a Multigun bat signal or anything.

Here is a bit of knoweldge with regards to how modding in Conan Exiles, via the UE4 dev kit works :)

I'm certain Lord7even already knows how this works, but the reason my Collision Add-On mod removes assets on discontinued use is the same reason you would lose access to mods that add original items to the game. There isn't a magic button to keep the assets in the world forever and ever if it's not part of the core game. Technically speaking, if I, or Lord7Even directly edited the assets instead of doing it the proper mod way, then in theory existing assets would stay in the game on mod unsubscribe. However, this is a huge no no in the mod world, and no serious modder would ever consider this as a long term solution. This is why old elevators have to be replaced. It's the same reason why in my Collision Add-On mod that old items don't recieve the new item benifits until they are destroyed or picked up. I look forward to seeing how Lord7Even approaches being able to get a radial menu option to replace the old with the new though.

Lord7Even uses a mod controller to essentially replace the elevator that's there now. This makes it so any existing elevator in the game won't go away, but any newly added evelator receives the new changes. It works exactly the same way as my collision add-on does, just with different changes. We are both simply making whatever change we deem appropriate, Lord7Even with the Elevator, and myself with all my various changes. Now Lord7Even could create a bran new elevator so you still had access to the original + the new one with extra distance, but why honestly? Whole point of using the mod is to gain the benifits of the new elevator, not use the old one randomly and then use the new one randomly.

As far as the radial menus, that's beyond me, I haven't messed with any of that.

As for "not being compatible with other mods". If one mod is merging into a datatable, and another is merging into a data table, and they both use the same rows to edit, whoever loads last wins. In the case of LitMan's stacking mod, he merges all of his item stacks values using a mod controller into the data table also known as ItemTable. To get the elevator changes, Lord7Even also has to merge his data table into ItemTable. In the exact same row. The way the dev kit works is that there is a ruler of 1, they don't stack neatly, Conan Exiles just takes whoever has the higher priority and uses that one.

So in the case of LitMan, you either get his stacking benifits, or you get Lord7Even's new elevator. One or the other, not both. If again Lord7Even made an entirely new Elevator, with it's own special row ID and everything, then yes the old Elevators would stack like before with LitMan's. LitMan's stack mod would of course not affect the special new Elevators at all. But again, why add all of those extra recipes to an already very busy crafting window when it is essentially an Elevator Improved and meant to be a replacer.

Anyhoo, I hope this has filled your brain with lots of dev kit knowledge and helps you further assist in troubleshooting.

Thanks for the knowledge. So I did probably the right thing with my data table solution. I just wasn't that 100% sure but I saw the pros and cons of both methods: merge into the database and just overwrite original files. With my knowledge, overwriting original files works as long as the devs don't touch that original file in an update or in the worst case, you'll have to recreate the mod with every new update. Merging data tables prevents this but it’s kind of like the same: when an update changes things (let’s say) elevators, your mods elevators won’t have the new functions from the update unless you add them separately. There is a third solution with components. In the mod controller you can add "additional components" and assign them to a game object. This comes in handy when you don't want to touch the original file nor want to merge the data table. This could be a valid solution for the elevators in my mod. There is just one big problem with that: The elevators calculate the speed depending on the distance. I didn't look that deep into it, but I had to add the speed factor from my mod to that calculation and this cannot be done in a component. The component could only change the "hardcoded" speed value "units per second". Also I had to rearrange the meshes from the elevator to make the handle location mechanism work correctly. I'll try to make that component solution work... with a little luck are the variables in the elevator not private so that we can access them from anywhere (like from inside a component)... long story short: with this component gets added by the mod controller, no files will be touched and the mod should automatically "replace" the old elevators with the new ones and there should be also absolute zero compatibility issues... let’s see: at least I know what to do the next couple hours :D

For the distance cap: I'll test that on weekend with the admin of our dedicated server explicitly. We have an elevator project going on but I need to be able to update and restart the server quickly, which I'm currently not able to. After some thoughts I guess about 200 blocks should be enough but that really depends on how far the level streaming goes. since the elevator itself is an object, that is located at the base and has a child object, the landing zone, which origin location is also the base, you won't be able to see the landing zone, if the base is not loaded (streamed) in the game. this is totally normal and there is no easy way to fix that. We probably would have to make the landing zone a second object. Then there would be literarily two elevators in the game. One for the level-zone of the landing and one for the base and we would have to blend the elevators in between and at any point we're too far away of one of the elevator origins... So long story short: just no! ;-) but I'll find a good distance that works and makes it enjoyable.

Thanks Multigun for the explanation, and thanks Lord7even for your work at trying to improve things. I look forward to your updates.

update is done. the whole mod works a bit different now. I don't think it will replace old (vanilla) placed elevators without replacing them but maybe it fixes the stock and radial menu compatibility issues. I have another methode in mind that should (technically) fix all that issues but that needs a bit more work and I wanted to give you a version were the speed option should work also on horizontal elevators now.

There are still mod compatibility issues.

If I load just BetterElevators and LitManItemStack, in either order, newly placed elevators do not come from the mod. Old working mod elevators which already existed continue to work. LitManItemStack remains working in either load order.

BetterElevators and UnlockableContainers appear to work together in any order.

The elevators (both) start with a display of 0 speed. I discovered they really believe it to be true and will not move until you increase the speed (but the sound does play).

Elevator speed is still dependent on distance.

When I got on my singleplayer, I noticed some old vertical elevators (which I think were last left as working mod versions), were gone. I couldn't replace them until I destroyed the current ceiling tile and re-created it. The elevators just wouldn't snap on. Not sure if this could have been somehow related to other mods. Was not the case for all locations either, just 3/4 vertical elevator spots I tested.

Horizontal elevator speed increase appears to be working now. 5x actually makes long spans doable, but still much slower than short spans.

If the BetterElevators mod gets removed, all elevators added with the mod disappear. They reappear if the mod is re-enabled with no changes to their connection points. This follows what I've seen in other mods like Pythagoras when I tested them for the first-time years ago.

Well its like I sayd. The update will not replace the old ones automatically. thats just not how the game works. if you place object A+ in the world and then remove the + with a mod, you still have all the A+ in the wold. only the new ones will be placed as only A. This is especially the case with my new doorframes withouth player collision at top of them. I believe there is no elegant way arround that problem other than some nasty "get all objects of class" -> check if any of them is a doorframe and replace it. I'm not sure if the server would allow that and how much perfromance it costs. (Especially on large servers)

But hey, since this is your wish and to be honest, it would be nice... I'll try that. On elevators this could maybe work.. on the doorframes, I'm not sure if I just can replace them or if the building will fall down because it loses stability or so. (I don't know how buildings are put together or where the information is stored on what is on top of what. [i.E. if you have just 2 walls on top of each other and you remove the bottom one, the top one also breaks down)

I don't think I was actually asking for it, though I admit it could be nice if it worked. With my post I was really just writing my findings for how things behaved, so you could see what was/wasn't working as expected.

Thinking back, I think Sunday, the Pythagoras mod developer, wrote a script for converting his Support Beams from his old mod to his new one. That script was run offline on a game.db file to preserve everyone's constructions and to use the new version of the Beams. Not sure if that would be at all usefull in your case though.

Whatever you do, I'll give it a test and see how it works.

Keep up the good work!

So I tested the idea with a component that just replaces the old elevators but no matter what I do, the game crashes. I also didn't find a elegant way to hijack the InteractionMenu function of the elevator inside a component. Its just not how the game works. So for now I guess we have to deal with it and take it as it is. We need to replace the old objects with the new ones manually.

A game.db script would be interesting but I guess for the elevator mod its not worth it. Or lets say I prefer to work on more landing pads for elevators instead of such a script. Maybe in the future but I'll keep that in mind.

Today is also our server test where I'll test the range of the elevators on a dedicated nitrado server. Also I updated the mod with the new radial menues and some bugfixes.

Thanks for testing and all your time!

Mod not compatible with LitManItemStack. Reliable working basic stack mods also are a rare thing right now, so I would really like LitMan's to eventually work.

I tried with StacksizePlus. With BetterElevators loaded after StacksizePlus, the stack mod appeared to work, but was a bit glitchy, this could be normal for StacksizePlus, but I don't know since I have never used it before. If BetterElevators is loaded first, StacksizePlus is very broken. The radial config options are gone and I'm getting all sorts of inconsistent behavior in stacking things. I even removed all stacking mods and just have BetterElevators running, and I can somehow still glitch stacks up to the stacksize I set in StacksizePlus. I have no idea what is going on here.

Vertical Elevator Base Handle Location is backwards from expected. All others are good. I do like the new menus better though. I know the old ElevatorPlus Dev had it so you changed handle location at the base/landing ends exclusively, which provided for simpler menus.

With the way the Speed vs. Distance Function works, I sort of feel like it is backwards. You would think a much longer span should move faster so you still get to your destination in a reasonable amount of time. It would be faster to set up multiple short span elevators instead of one long one. Any way you can adjust Funcom's algorithm a bit to make it not so crazy?

Though maybe it really won't be needed when the distance limitation is set to around the load distance limit. I will say though, with the longest span I've made going down the length of the Jungle river, the new 3,000 block limit still allows it and the elevator at 6x speed is still stupidly slow on. You can walk or swim far faster. I get it if you want to keep it as is though, and can live with it if the final compatibility issue gets figured out.

One final note, at 82 blocks out in SinglePlayer, the horizontal elevator disappears. It Re-appears when you backtrack to #78.

I worked on aditional elevator stops today and had to deal with distance and playrate of the animation. for aditional stops I had to fully rewrite the functions of interaction and the elevator movement itself. I guess now I know what you mean with "I sort of feel like its backwards". The new update thats coming will change that and make the speed multipliers work as intended.

after the update I will probably delete this discussion and reopen it with a summary of problems that still exist in the actual version

Just an extra fyi, I tested horizontal elevator loading distance briefly on a multiplayer dedicated server, and I found at block 80, the elevator start point would unload and make the elevator vanish. It loads back in at block 78.

And for vertical on dedicated server, 79th block down it disappears, back on 78th.

just downloaded and activated this amazing mod, my up and down elevator is fuxxing fantastic.. but for some reason my left to right elevator isnt snapping to anything.. i even went and placed foundation in a line with walls every 10 foundations, and it wouldt even snap to that.. it did before i activated the mod..

so im thinking something got broken somewhere with the left to right elevator, which is a huge bummer for me cause i got this mod specifically for that =(

any help would be greatly appreciated