Overhaul and Flesh Out Barry Isherwood's Rescue Mission

[MNG-cataclysm]

Summary

Content "Overhaul and flesh out Barry Isherwood's rescue mission"

Purpose of change

Overhaul Barry Isherwood's rescue mission into a more fleshed-out version. This is a project that @I-am-Erk and I have been designing for a little while now. This stuff should be pretty cool, and there's also multiple parts to this project:
Part 2

Describe the solution

Add a bunch more content to the mission itself, turning it into a more dynamic job with a range of choices on what to do. Many of these are not done yet, but a design document for it can be found here.
More specifically, this redefines the mission line to involve more in-depth decision making and set-piece battles than the basic "go here, talk to this dude, come back".
The mission begins with Barry having been captured a little while ago, and the family is incredibly worried over this. Talking with Chris Isherwood prompts the player to offer their services in getting him out of captivity, which can involve simply going it alone, with your own team, taking Chris along with you, or taking the whole family. Opting to take Chris leads to him spawning at the tower itself and waiting on you to arrive, and you will storm the tower normally with him backing you up. You can also take Lisa along too, with any of these options.
If you choose to take the Isherwood family, this prompts you and Chris to form a plan of attack, which involves the family arriving in a truck and providing covering fire for you. This also allows for several sub-missions to be completed before storming the tower, which can include retrieving riot armor for the family to wear during the attack or getting canvas sacks for Chris to make a firing wall (which is trapped against mi-go attacks). Completing these side missions before beginning the assault drastically improves the chance of success.
After storming the tower and getting Barry out of his cage (this doesn't change much), having the Isherwood's with you allows you to take him back in their truck, finishing the mission. If you went by yourself or just with Chris and/or Lisa, then going within a sufficient distance of the farm with Barry in tow allows you to complete the mission.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Not doing this, and leaving the mission as-is.

Testing

Everything has been tested many times over, and it works.

Additional context

Erk will be working on dialogue for this PR, while I'll cover the rest. This might take a little while, so please be patient.

[I-am-Erk]

I'm very excited to work with you on this. I have a feeling it's gonna be quite awesome.

[MNG-cataclysm]

Thank you Erk, I also get the feeling that this will be awesome!

[I-am-Erk]

First pass on dialogue.

• need to add some new talk topics for plan2, plan_cancel, and plan_gear. I will do that
• should add an option to skip the hour wait on Chris' plan, if you have a high int or per - you can suggest the bare bones and he riffs on it. I will do that.
• Needs linting, better for you to do that.
• I suggest that, rather than moving the Chris NPC to the mi-go tower, we use an update_mapgen to place an alternate version of Chris there. The alternate version should be geared up appropriately for the job. If that Chris dies, we delete the original as well. Same for Lisa. This is a nice easy way to adjust their gear and things. It will mean we need to give them nonrandom appearances but that's OK. If you feel like doing that, go ahead, it's not urgent I don't think.
• I suggest we leave out the part with Luke and a truckful of explosives for now, we've got enough to do for this part already.

[MNG-cataclysm]

We could open a second codevelopment pull request that works on Luke and the explosives truck, along with anything else we might need, if this PR gets too big.

[I-am-Erk]

We could open a second codevelopment pull request that works on Luke and the explosives truck, along with anything else we might need, if this PR gets too big.

Yeah, I think that will definitely be a follow up. The family actually showing up with the truck might be too, we'll have to see.

[MNG-cataclysm]

For this PR, what we have left to do is:

• Add dialogue to Lisa to recruit her to the job.
• Create duplicates of Lisa and Chris that will spawn at the scout tower.
• Add a second route to take Barry back to the farm if the Isherwoods didn't get involved.
• Use EOCs that will cause the Isherwoods to leave if the player leaves the invasion map. This prevents weirdness where duplicate NPCs exist in the world.
• Allow the Isherwoods to retreat if they take too much damage. This prevents the whole family from dying on this mission.
• Have the player teleport back to the farm with the family if they retreat or after you save Barry with the family present.

[I-am-Erk]

I'll come help with the dialogue bits soon, just trying to finish off #73247

[MNG-cataclysm]

We're getting pretty close to being done with this first pass of the mission, the rest of this stuff should be fairly easy to add.

[I-am-Erk]

I haven't tested this out, but I think I've got the dialogue done. did I miss anything, or did you want to flesh more out?

[MNG-cataclysm]

@I-am-Erk
I've highlighted the dialogue topics that still need dialogue lines to be added, it's only about 8 places, so it shouldn't be too much. Also, "TALK_ISHERWOOD_CHRIS_RESCUE_BARRY_PLAN_Cancel" needs to be added.

[MNG-cataclysm]

In regard to fleshing anything out more, I think that we should be good to go right now, and we'll leave any further dialogue additions to future contributors or contributions.

[github-actions]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

Click to expand

• [5 RIOT LEGGUARD] I've got these leg guards to keep people from getting hobbled.

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.

Hints for adding a new word to the dictionary

• If the word is normally in all lowercase, such as the noun word or the verb does, add it in its lower-case form; if the word is a proper noun, such as the surname George, add it in its initial-caps form; if the word is an acronym or has special letter case, such as the acronym CDDA or the unit mW, add it by preserving the case of all the letters. A word in the dictionary will also match its initial-caps form (if the word is in all lowercase) and all-uppercase form, so a word should be added to the dictionary in its normal letter case even if used in a different letter case in a sentence.
• For a word to be added to the dictionary, it should either be a real, properly-spelled modern American English word, a foreign loan word (including romanized foreign names), or a foreign or made-up word that is used consistently and commonly enough in the game. Intentional misspelling (including eye dialect) of a word should not be added unless it has become a common terminology in the game, because while someone may have a legitimate use for it, another person may spell it that way accidentally.

[I-am-Erk]

There's a dynamite item in here that's still not defined, and I don't think we use it yet?

[MNG-cataclysm]

There's a dynamite item in here that's still not defined, and I don't think we use it yet?

That's used in the follow up PR, I just put it in here so everything would be in the files I wanted them in.

[MNG-cataclysm]

@I-am-Erk Don't worry about any errors that pop up, I'll handle the debugging side of things for this.

[Maleclypse]

I'm looking forward to playing this!