Disable choosing The Anomaly scenario

[Tick-git]

Label: Bug, Anomaly

The Anomaly scenario spawns an additional Monolith, likely via ScenPart_MonolithGeneration, resulting in multiple Monoliths being present in the game. This leads to problems, so this commit disables the scenario entirely instead of warning the user.

89 ScenariosInCategory(ScenarioCategory.FromDef)  This might disable any modded scenarios; I haven’t investigated it yet. In the future, it would be great to support modded ones - I'll note that for later.

[SirrWilliam]

Hello @Tick-git !

Instead of completely removing the scenario from the list, wouldn't it be better to warn the user? If we do remove it, we should at least notify them somehow. Otherwise, they might think their DLC/Mod is broken.

Page_SelectScenario_Multifaction class is basically a copy of Page_SelectScenario. When I previously tried the Android Tiers mod, calling ScenariosInCategory(ScenarioCategory.FromDef) correctly listed the scenarios added by the mod.

If we’re not going to warn the player, we don’t really need the DrawOptionBackgroundReplacement() method (Line 98) we could just use Widgets.DrawOptionBackground() instead.

[Tick-git]

.. correctly listed the scenarios added by the mod.

Ok, nice :)

Instead of completely removing the scenario from the list, wouldn't it be better to warn the user? If we do remove it, we should at least notify them somehow. Otherwise, they might think their DLC/Mod is broken.

Yeah, I see your point. I’m not really sure what happens if two Monoliths are in the game, apart from an error I found while testing and the text in #known-issues on Discord. In my view, we should keep the MP mod as protected against exceptions as possible, and if a user wants to go down that multiple Monolith route, they can do it themselves with the debug tool.
But I don’t know if this is the correct way at all - just wanted to bring the Monolith situation back to how it was before the scenario choosing changes.

Open to suggestions @notfood and @SokyranTheDragon - don’t mind if we scrap the PR entirely.

[notfood]

I don't play multifaction, but I believe it's important to provide users with clear explanations when something isn't working as expected.

[SokyranTheDragon]

For Anomaly, I think it may be just better to make sure no extra monoliths are spawned, rather than disabling an entire scenario. On top of that we'll have to handle scenarios that add monolith that aren't the built-in one - there's a chance someone will just make a custom scenario that does this as well.

However, we may potentially have to do something with Odyssey's gravship start. If I'm not mistaken, the game supports a maximum of 1 gravship in the game, so for safety we may need to disable it (possibly only if there's no gravships in the game already?). Or perhaps some extra check to make sure that the selected scenarios don't use the gravship either, again for custom scenarios.

[Tick-git]

Going to look into that again more deeply. I might have even tested something wrong in the first place - currently, on the dev branch and on 1.6-working by reznal, no extra monolith can be spawned with the scenario (probably #563 is enough - even though I could swear I tested it with that). If that’s really the case - sorry for the confusion and the time spent thinking about it.

[Tick-git]

I'm also going to test whether the "Strange Signal" quest (which appears when there's no monolith in the game and triggers the drop of a new one) can still spawn an extra monolith if it's already active, then a map with a monolith is generated, and only after that the quest is accepted.

[Reznal]

For Anomaly, I think it may be just better to make sure no extra monoliths are spawned, rather than disabling an entire scenario. On top of that we'll have to handle scenarios that add monolith that aren't the built-in one - there's a chance someone will just make a custom scenario that does this as well.

However, we may potentially have to do something with Odyssey's gravship start. If I'm not mistaken, the game supports a maximum of 1 gravship in the game, so for safety we may need to disable it (possibly only if there's no gravships in the game already?). Or perhaps some extra check to make sure that the selected scenarios don't use the gravship either, again for custom scenarios.

I tested this this morning and in vanilla singleplayer you can have multiple gravships :)

[Tick-git]

Going to look into that again more deeply. I might have even tested something wrong in the first place - currently, on the dev branch and on 1.6-working by reznal, no extra monolith can be spawned with the scenario (probably #563 is enough - even though I could swear I tested it with that). If that’s really the case - sorry for the confusion and the time spent thinking about it.

Sooo, I looked into that again. I must have tested this without the GenStep_Monolith.GenerateMonolith patch (#563). ScenPart_MonolithGeneration.PostMapGenerate uses the patched GenStep_Monolith.GenerateMonolith. I should've looked into the code first. Sorry for the confusion.

[Tick-git]

I'm also going to test whether the "Strange Signal" quest (which appears when there's no monolith in the game and triggers the drop of a new one) can still spawn an extra monolith if it's already active, then a map with a monolith is generated, and only after that the quest is accepted.

I'll look into that now and create a separate PR if it's possible to generate two monoliths simultaneously via quest.