Edit: the changes described in this post were implemented in the following release:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/738484519/1471966894875023135/


CD's group of new FakePlayers-related options have prompted more confusion and questions than any other single topic in CD. I specifically mean these options:

• FakePlayers=#
  
• BossFP=#
  
• FleshpoundFP=#
  
• ScrakeFP=#
  
• TrashFP=#
  
• FakePlayersMode=add|replace

That's a pretty ugly list. This arrangement is the product of messy evolution, rather than one-time design. It's easy to see how this could be confusing. Here are some problems with it:

• It's not clear from the names how FakePlayers interacts with the other *FP options. Multiple people thought this is what FakePlayersMode controlled; this is incorrect.
  
• The naming scheme is internally inconsistent ("FP" only abbreviated in some of the options).
  
• FakePlayersMode has caused no end of confusion. It's not clear to people which options it affects (the name makes it sound like just FakePlayers would be affected, but it affects the *FP options too) or what it even does ("add" and "replace" are too cryptic).

I generally avoid changing config options to keep compatibility with old configs. But the situation with fake players options is so bad that I think intervention is warranted.


I propose the following:

• WaveSizeFakes=#
  
• BossHPFakes=#
  
• FleshpoundHPFakes=#
  
• ScrakeHPFakes=#
  
• TrashHPFakes=#
  
• FakesMode=add_with_humans|ignore_humans

Each option controls fake players in one specific aspect of the game, independent of the other aspects. "Aspect" here is wave size, boss hp, etc. FakesMode says whether the aspect's end result includes human players (by adding the Fakes # to the human player count) or ignores human players (by counting only the Fakes #).

Benefits of this approach:

• Internally consistent name scheme ("Fakes" appears in every option in the family)
  
• Makes it clear that old FakePlayers -- now WaveSizeFakes -- does not affect the HP Fakes options
  
• FakesMode=add_with_humans|ignore_humans is less confusing (I hope) than add|replace
  
• No more cryptic "FP" abbreviation

Furthermore, this would be trivial to implement, because it's actually just a mass-rename of existing options. No functional changes inside CD are required, aside from renaming options and converting "add" -> "add_with_humans" and "replace" -> "ignore_humans".

Here's a table showing the explicit correspondence between new and old option names:



I considered several ideas before settling on this one. I even briefly considered abandoning the idea of "fake players" in these options, but I decided that "fake players" as a concept was too deeply entrenched in the KF community for me to walk away.


Those option will be silently ignored. I apologize for the inconvenience. I think the cost of backwards-compatibility is just too steep. If I accidentally introduce a bug specific to a hypothetically backwards-compatible config system, then the cost might even outweigh the benefits.

However, because every one of the old options corresponds exactly to one of the new options, you could convert your config using simple text search-and-replace. It would work identically after conversion.


Chat command shorthands help. For instance, we have !cdfakeplayers and shorthand !cdfp today. This might become !cdwavesizefakes and !cdwsf in the proposal. That's one more character.

The longer option names will still have to be typed in KFGame.ini and on the `open` command-line.