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I am thinking about making a new Goon Days Ahead fork, but before I even start with that I would like to collect a list of things that you guys think need to be changed. The main idea, or rather baseline, that I want to have with it is the following: I don't want to nerf Y because it is better than X. I wanna do the opposite and buff X until it is up to par, and then kinda balance the whole thing around that. A good example would probably be melee vs. guns. Give melee a slight nerf early game, and buff guns across the line to make them actually viable, if you put the effort into finding them. And of course this loving car gear shifting garbage. Gone completely. Just shoot me your ideas on what you generally think needs to be changed and how.
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Sep 12, 2017 11:32
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More Dead Rising series influence would be welcome in my books - both in terms of actual toys available and combo vehicle/weapon design philosophy (fun over realism/"balance" obsession outside extreme cases).
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Sep 12, 2017 11:58
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Kevin Granade looks pretty much exactly how I expected him to. bloateeeeeeee
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Sep 12, 2017 13:04
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a spider covets
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Sep 12, 2017 13:38
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Just brainstorming here, but personally, I would like to see NPCs receive some work, as well as more of a general focus to the game. The refugee center and recently added outpost are a nice start, though it would be nice if you could pick up the quest chain some way other than from the console at an evacuee shelter. This could potentially give radios a use, I guess. I'm rambling at this point, but the ability to turn in quests over a 2-way radio would be awesome. I think there are problems with the amount of random, seemingly tacked-on enemy factions (fungus, netherworld creatures) that feel like they don’t have a justification for being there other than "more content." I also think it would be nice to take overly cumbersome things like the nutrition system and just abstract it to give buffs for, say eating a varied diet, slightly decreasing bone healing times if you get extra calcium, giving you a debuff if you live on nothing but chips and soda, etc. Edit: The crafting menu also needs a serious overhaul from an organisational standpoint. DayGloOreo fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 15:11
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Michaellaneous posted:I am thinking about making a new Goon Days Ahead fork, but before I even start with that I would like to collect a list of things that you guys think need to be changed. Gears have been out of the game for a while, unless they got reintroduced within the last few weeks. Warning: stream of consciousness phone posting ahead. I'd like to see dumb realism focussed stuff that only adds pointless frustration to be removed. Get rid of the cbm painkiller thing. Make it so homemade gunpowder is a thing again in the core release, and that guns get a lot more accurate a la Coolthulhu's patches. Nutrition can stay, but having a healthy and varied diet should provide a bonus for putting in the effort or keeping a supply of multivitamins. Condense the starting scenarios into stuff that anyone halfway decent can survive without getting lucky loot in their starting area. I'm looking at you, Infected start. Earlier access to mutations, and a greater degree of control over them. Maybe have a machine in most labs that'll take a bit of monster meat (tracking what your meat is from for cosmetic purposes is one of a very few 'realism' ideas I'm behind simply because eating a giant cockroach sandwich is post apocalyptic as heck) and give you some beneficial mutations before burning out. Or you can choose to live dangerously and take some negatives in exchange for mutating faster. Negative mutations as a fact of life is bullshit when cybernetics works so drat well already and is fun. Start looking at a proper mid game. I wrote some stuff earlier on that. Spend a minimal amount of time messing with item json files. This is not adding content. Turf out the old artifact system. Ensure that the new one mostly generates stuff that feels like a reward, with the occasional oddball. Make sure that players can see exactly what this crap does without needing to source dive. Delete internal parasites or move them into a mod. Clueless new players desperate enough to eat raw meat are punished enough by the game as it is, ditto anyone who typos while trying to eat their fantastic actually cooked cuisine. And stuff like tetanus from broken windows can go straight to hell if it is still in. Be more generous with recipes. Take a leaf out of neo scavenger and have random ones laying about everywhere. Also if you can naturally figure out how to build a fermenting tank and make a vodka wash, you can drat well figure out a still. Have a challenge to face in the mid and end game. Even if it's just throwing you and your rolling fortress in the spooky zone to see how long you can survive to begin with. Take lessons from Stone Soup's design philosophy when cutting content and having any information hidden from the player. Maybe make the starting scenarios more like UnReal World. Do you want to build a house or a car? Want to be a fisherman with a boat who's been doing pretty okay but now needs to come ashore for supplies? How about fighting your way out a city? Awesome. Here's the tools to get you doing something interesting. Finish the 3d stuff, but keep most buildings fairly low, and add ways to traverse rooftops. This keeps looting nice and easy, and makes it more feasible to live in and traverse dense cities. While we're at it, some underwater content wouldn't go amiss. Ditto making it so that deep water doesn't just work by obscuring units. I'm sick of breaking boats in the middle of the river because of stray salmon or apparently really tall zombies. Better, more logical city and town generation. Also a choice of where you would like to start. I've restarted so many times just to have a river in sight. Fix dumb vehicle stuff like being able to build a boat via fabrication, but not being able to disassemble tiny bits of it because you aren't a mechanic. Get rid of enemies and items that are explicit references to other intellectual property. Boomers and manhacks are jarringly blatant. Things like probability travel, which I want to say is an Angband spell, are okay. Gate "gently caress you" enemies like the Chicken Walker behind huge compounds that give a ton of advance warning and have plenty of loot to boot. Implement qol features discussed in the thread that Kevin rejected, like tools and such having a wider range for crafting when stored in a cabinet. Or keeping track of what items you've seen, and where. Make sure this info is easily visible. Have a building mode where you can plan your structure, see the costs, and build the whole thing from one place. What's the deal with rivtech stuff? It sounds like someone's username and pet project. Some of the stuff is useful but the copy on all the items is just godawful. Tone down vehicle damage at generation, and make air filters etc something you learn by default with mechanics skill. There's currently not much reason to not use a solar car with all the gas guzzlers having broken filters on top of the usual OTHER critical failures (tires, controls, etc) Articulate the design goals of Goon Days Ahead II: the Fun Strikes Back. Do so in a public document and articulate to the wider Cataclysm community why each change we make is more fun. Do the opposite of whatever Kevin is doing. E: I'm happy to contribute if you can throw up a github page and a vs project that actually compiles. Anticheese fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 15:21
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I am gonna start responding to all of your suggestions so I have my thoughs written down for myself as well. Who was the original developer of Goon Days Ahead? I would like to chat with him a bit. Ignatius M. Meen posted:More Dead Rising series influence would be welcome in my books - both in terms of actual toys available and combo vehicle/weapon design philosophy (fun over realism/"balance" obsession outside extreme cases). I am gonna be honest, my focus for the beginning is purely on fixing the balancing issues and removing the realistic bullshit that makes this game unfun. This being said, I really like the idea of this, and adding crazy recipes for fun weapons is certainly not the most difficult thing. I will get around to do this. DayGloOreo posted:Just brainstorming here, but personally, I would like to see NPCs receive some work, as well as more of a general focus to the game. The refugee center and recently added outpost are a nice start, though it would be nice if you could pick up the quest chain some way other than from the console at an evacuee shelter. This could potentially give radios a use, I guess. I'm rambling at this point, but the ability to turn in quests over a 2-way radio would be awesome. As mentioned above, while NPC interaction would be nice, this would probably be at the very end of my todo list. That being said, I will 100% change the nutrition system to something a bit more sensible. I am not sure if I just strip the entire system out, or just modify it to give a porper nutrion better bonuses, and making the drawbacks of a somewhat bad nutrition a lot less extreme. Anticheese posted:Gears have been out of the game for a while, unless they got reintroduced within the last few weeks. I will do that within the next week or so, once I have my important work-stuff done and a proper development environment set up. As to your suggestions, I like basically all of them, and those that I am a bit spiffy on are the points that I addressed earlier. This whole list you wrote will basically be a small todo because it's great.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:46
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I'd be happy to throw in my lot too provided there isn't a huge barrier to setting up and compiling the project. Last time I tried, I spent a week trying to figure out how to get it to compile in VS, made a very small change, spent another week or so trying to get some VS-specific fixes merged, then gave up. As for the original developer, I think perhaps Killer-of-Lawyers or Anticheese? I took over very briefly, but I stopped as it was a lot to take on for a single dev and the development of the original branch accelerated and moved far away from it too rapidly to keep up.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:52
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Yeah that is also a major issue that I thought about. I will just start working from the latest stable, and then just see how it goes. I will certainly not keep up with their insane update schedule, and implement features when it's right, timewise. Mainly why I wanted to talk to the original CGDA dev, to see how he did it. No reason to reinvent the wheel. Michaellaneous fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 15:54
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PiCroft posted:I'd be happy to throw in my lot too provided there isn't a huge barrier to setting up and compiling the project. Last time I tried, I spent a week trying to figure out how to get it to compile in VS, made a very small change, spent another week or so trying to get some VS-specific fixes merged, then gave up. Really? I managed to get it compiling just fine while making changes, and at the time my previous experience with C++ was like...maybe like two hour's worth of very basic stuff.
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Sep 12, 2017 16:01
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the first step to handling this appropriately would be to get everyone together to pow-wow over a coherent design document and what, exactly, would constitute a 0.D stable release. the fact that this sort of thing was never really agreed to was the first mistake of the current DDA team, and the fact that it wasn't followed just compounded the error. this sort of thing works best if the communication is synchronous. would folks be cool with meeting for a discord call this coming saturday? i'm gonna recommend like 2PM CST, and i can provide both a place and offer to take the notes so we can get our poo poo organized. i can't promise to contribute any development but i absolutely can and will provide infrastructure to make getting poo poo done easier.
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Sep 12, 2017 16:08
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Slime posted:Really? I managed to get it compiling just fine while making changes, and at the time my previous experience with C++ was like...maybe like two hour's worth of very basic stuff. When did you try? This was a few months back. It's possible it got fixed in the interim.
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Sep 12, 2017 16:34
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I don't have a lot of programming experience, but I too feel that Cataclysm has gotten away from what made it so interesting, and I'd love to try and contribute in some fashion.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:37
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I'd be down for helping out in whatever way I can, even though what little I know of coding probably pales in comparison to y'all. Certainly would be happy to provide input though.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:46
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You are all welcome to the Cataclysm: Goonier Days Ahead discord. https://discord.gg/WpS9cbG That also includes ideas people. Developers as well, but it will probably be a while before we get into the meat of things. Coolguye posted:the first step to handling this appropriately would be to get everyone together to pow-wow over a coherent design document and what, exactly, would constitute a 0.D stable release. the fact that this sort of thing was never really agreed to was the first mistake of the current DDA team, and the fact that it wasn't followed just compounded the error. I agree. I have set up a public and a private design document that we start putting poo poo in. Michaellaneous fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 17:47
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When was the last time actual content that moved the game forward at all even came out. Where are the leviathans and portals and vast biomes. Where is anything that isn't pointless busy work.
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Sep 12, 2017 18:10
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I feel like the major first hurdle that needs to be overcome is defining what exactly Cataclysm is meant to be ABOUT. What is the overall point of the game? Is it a sandbox? Then the design goal should be to include a lot of toys to play with an interesting stuff to discover. Is it a survival game? Then the design goal should be about creating a difficult, unrelenting atmosphere that you can slowly tame and master. Is it a Roguelike? Then the design goal should be about setting up a progressive series of challenges with some ultimate "endgame" objective to aim for. Those aren't necessarily exclusive, and there's other options as well, but really my point is the question "What should the player be trying to do?" should be answered before moving on to finer design details.
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Sep 12, 2017 20:30
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The Cheshire Cat posted:I feel like the major first hurdle that needs to be overcome is defining what exactly Cataclysm is meant to be ABOUT. What is the overall point of the game? Is it a sandbox? Then the design goal should be to include a lot of toys to play with an interesting stuff to discover. Is it a survival game? Then the design goal should be about creating a difficult, unrelenting atmosphere that you can slowly tame and master. Is it a Roguelike? Then the design goal should be about setting up a progressive series of challenges with some ultimate "endgame" objective to aim for. Yeah this is exactly what I was going to say, the game currently is a big bundle of different ideas thrown together without any concern about if they make a coherent game experience. Most telling is how messed up the difficulty curve of the game is, if you know what you're doing you can get yourself into a position where you're almost immune to 'regular' threats (normal zombies, starvation, etc) without ever having to expose yourself to any risk, you can then start large scale foraging and making murder vehicles and generally loving around while entirely bypassing the survival aspect of the game. Which is great if you just want to gently caress around, except if this is quite trivially achievable why not just have the game structured so you don't have to go through the 'gradually building up strength' busywork phase? Conversely, if dealing with general survival is supposed to be a meaningful part of the gameplay then you shouldn't be able to bypass it so easily.
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Sep 12, 2017 20:57
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PiCroft posted:I'd be happy to throw in my lot too provided there isn't a huge barrier to setting up and compiling the project. Last time I tried, I spent a week trying to figure out how to get it to compile in VS, made a very small change, spent another week or so trying to get some VS-specific fixes merged, then gave up. All I can take credit for with the original Goon Days Ahead that I can remember is removing the hard intelligence cap on book reading in favour of it taking more time for more complex books. I was happy when that got merged into the main branch of DDA. 
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Sep 12, 2017 21:10
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this is why i was saying we need to get developers who have committed to do work on the project together to make a design document; getting a shared understanding on what is productive work and what isn't is imperative.
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Sep 12, 2017 21:34
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Like this?
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Sep 12, 2017 22:13
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yup! but it should ideally be done with the folks who are actually going to do the work in a call on discord or skype or something so you can actually talk through these requirements as they come up so you resolve contradictions as they come up and you end up with something the most passionate developers are the most passionate about developing. an open document like that is a good start but it's impossible to build lasting consensus without discussion.
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Sep 12, 2017 22:16
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Some ideas that are pretty big-picture-direction agnostic (and yeah I know this is a huge amount of work but I'm assuming infinite programmers): Reliable Unreliability: Change the granularity of item condition to a 100.00% scale; 0% is when the item breaks, each 20% corresponds to an existing pip, with an item reinforcable up to 120%. Then change both damage and repair so you always take durability damage when the item is used, and always repair an amount based on relevant skills, and normalize them so there's no effective statistical change. So say right now your cudgel has a 5% chance to be damaged to chipped (down to 4/5 pips) by a swing - you have a 5% chance to take 20% damage. Instead your cudgel now takes 20%*5% = 1% per swing. Keep the performance plateaus the same (at every 20%) so you can use your cudgel for a while before it gets damaged, and the decision to repair your unexpectedly damaged item or not is shifted to how much condition do you want to bank up in case of emergency. Then similarly, say you have a 5% chance to repair, instead you're repairing 1% per attempt. Then get rid of the chance to damage the item when you're trying to repair it, because repairs should take time and resources and be annoying without breaking your things. Most importantly, this would make repairing something a lot more straightforward than the current low-odds crapshoot which just feels terrible. Tweaking the repair amount up or down or how much skills impact it is also a nice knob for game tuning, if you want to go full milsperg or just want a fun zombie slaughtering romp. Crafting Is Bullshit: Change failure/success in batch crafting to be rolled on each item separately, and with the above tweaks to condition in mind, have failures produce a reduced condition item rather than no item (or consuming the material). Then add a code hook that json can access for when a crafting fails, so you can have dangerous crafts literally blow up in your face or damage your tools (and this is where you can re-implement failures consuming materials on a craft-by-craft basis). Change the entire structure of tool definitions so there's two tags: tool type, and tool quality. The type gates access like it does now, but the quality reduces crafting time with that tool (and maybe have a flag in the json where you can disable this for specific crafts). For crafts that require multiple types of tool, just average the quality. Also get rid of a lot of the useless/niche 'fine hammering' tool qualities unless someone can find a use for them. Something transparent like tool quality as a % modifier to crafting time would be REALLY straightforward for people to see. A great example of why this should be is that a bone needle or wooden needle should be shittier than an actual sewing kit which should be shittier than a functional sewing machine (also wholly phase out 'loading' sewing tools). This would give access to machine shop grade tools like a bandsaw (fast cutting and metal sawing) that can significantly reduce the time to complete tasks. Crafty Crafting: The driving skill is terrible and should be excised. Pull all the regular food cooking recipes out of the 'cooking' skill, let people know them by default, and rename the skill Chemistry. Then bump some of the easier recipes down, including things like guncotton and basic pipe bomb/nailbomb explosives out of fertilizer, so it's useful out of the gate. Significantly bump up spawns of raw materials at appropriate sites like hardware stores or public works (wooden boards, sand, concrete, fertilizer, etc) so you can use the chemistry skill as a regular thing if you want to go the bomb route. Then add a few low level recipes to electronics that let you play with noise - a loud noisemaker on a timer, or a L4D style loudly beeping pipebomb/nailbomb would both be excellent go-tos for dealing with hordes, as well as various contact-triggered items (also electronics crafted) that you can use with the launcher skill - a large area of effect and lower damage would distinguish them from 'better' and more focused explosive materials. Add a functional laptop (and a vehicle mountable version) that can convert batteries and time to software at different skill levels,, then require that software in electronics crafting for appropriately 'smart' items when you're fabricating them. Throw in a bunch of lower level modification crafts, where you take something and make it better; a tazer that can zap people from farther away, a more efficient hotplate or flashlight, higher quality tools, etc. Every crafting skill would ideally be continually useful at every level, making the player want to use the skills beyond "grind to level X so i can make The Thing". The tradeoff should be time - the player can't focus on everything at once, so maybe they just pick up a gun and shoot things instead of fiddling with electronics/chemistry/computers to make elaborate explosive plans. Or maybe not! Choices are good. Also, give players access to auto-learned crafts that are a skill rank above their current, so they always have some grind target to throw materials at if they have nothing better to do. Free Basing: Add an 'power cord' component that can extend a vehicle's shape like frames, but can't hold anything else on the tile or be used as the first tile for a vehicle, and having ANY power cords on the vehicle sets its max velocity to zero and makes it unpull/pushable. It would only exist to extend a vehicle shape for use as a static base, especially for making machine shops and connecting solar grids, etc. Other neat QoL things would be 'tool rack' items that act like a better toolbox, which would be way better on the go than a mobile machine shop which would be heavy as poo poo. Other superheavy items unsuitable for a vehicle would also be welcome to facilitate base building as a distinct thing from vehicle building, like full sized kitchen units or refrigerators or chemistry units. Deathmobiles are fun, but bases should at least have a purpose, even if people are willing to spend more time crafting by forgoing them. No matter how the game goes, an omnipresent danger will probably be part of this, so some infrastructure for bases should probably become something worth considering, and this is way easier than new furniture interaction code. Combat Skill Consolidation: Combat skills right now are stupid and tedious and pointless because they serve only to make certain weapons harder to use and to make your first few days miserable. On top of that, the grinding based nature of the skill design doesn't really work on already niche skills that aren't easily ground (like launchers), and it's insane and stupid that someone who knows how to shoot an SMG like a gun wizard wouldn't automatically be competent in pistols, rifles, or shotguns. One way to fix this would be to consolidate all the combat skills to dodge, marksmanship, melee, and unarmed. A more interesting way to do it, though, would be to get rid of combat skills entirely - balance issues with making a challenging early game versus a challenging late game have almost entirely revolved around how difficult it is for a day 1 survivor to do much versus how a skilled up day 50 survivor is pretty much invincible, and a large part of that is how gear and skills have a multiplicative scalar to player power. Combat styles can be kept by having an experience accumulation mechanic while using that style - you read your kung fu book and get Level 0 kung fu, and while trying it out you learn more about it and get better at it and learn techniques and whatnot like the existing system. And if you later switch to learning krav maga, you aren't automatically an expert at it by just glancing at the book. Hunger Gaming: First, get rid of the existing vitamin system since it's garbage bullshit for idiot babies. Second, the hunger system (like pretty much every survival game's hunger system) loving sucks, being annoying, opaque, unrealistic, and unintuitive. Rebuild it from the ground up, in a way that makes intuitive sense, encourages survival, takes out spikiness of the first few days, etc. This'll require a few systems that interact in a realistic enough way that you shouldn't need to explain them: first, a reservoir of 'energy' in the body, a stomach that can only hold so much at a time, and a metabolism that takes from the stomach and deposits into the reservoir and takes from the reservoir and dumps it out of the body. Hunger is immediate and filling up on crappy junk food will fill you up but not really be able to sustain you over time, while super dense military nutrition bars would get you a full meal in a few bites. If you go hungry, your energy reservoir starts to drain and starts to apply debuffs to reflect ongoing starvation. Actual death from starvation would be difficult to do, but that's fine - you want the player to die from other dangers while trying to get food or water. Similarly, if you get in a nutrition hole and go a few days without eating, you'll need to keep feeding yourself over time to get your body back to normal rather than just eating six pizzas at once and being immediately nourished. It makes enough intuitive sense to be pretty opaque and is complicated enough that calculating exact things is too much work to bother with, plus it fixes problems like the flu making you puke yourself into starvation in just a few hours. 'Energy' is intentionally vague since it's an abstract combination of calories and nutrition. While it's possible to separate energy into calories and nutrition to keep vitamins useful (as a supplement for eating garbage food), that would require a bunch of extra poo poo to make sure the player knows what's going on and that kind of tedious bullshit is Bad Gameplay since it doesn't really push you into making meaningful or interesting decisions. Thirst Is Dumb: Get rid of thirst entirely, including simulacrums of thirst by having water be food of a different sort. Hunger as a gameplay mechanic is good - becoming self sufficient isn't really a thing so you're constantly driven to explore to keep yourself fed, which requires some basic tools, which requires exploring, which requires weapons and armor and consumables to keep exploring. And you need tools and raw materials to get and improve those to get to the better stuff. Eventually you'll have Enough For Now but that's very different from Enough For Forever. Yeah, it's the basic closed gameplay loop of a survival game, but it works. Which is cool! And good! But once that exists, thirst doesn't add anything to the game. The hurdles to getting water are roughly the same as the hurdles to getting food, especially now that you can keep water in pots and pans and whatnot, and it's relatively trivial to become self sufficient through funnels and rain collection alone, much less parking by a river or pool for a bit and boiling a bunch of water into clean water. Thirst provides little more than extra button pushes in terms of crafting and inventory management and equipment to fiddle with, but most importantly it does not meaningfully or interestingly change player behavior. Throw it out, even if the game heads into ~hardcore survival~ territory. Yee~~
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Sep 12, 2017 23:05
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Coolguye posted:yup! but it should ideally be done with the folks who are actually going to do the work in a call on discord or skype or something so you can actually talk through these requirements as they come up so you resolve contradictions as they come up and you end up with something the most passionate developers are the most passionate about developing. No worries. This is the public document. There is actually a private one that people can only comment on. I just wanted one place where all you guys can throw in ideas. Once I have set up the github, found some committed people and started working, I will then make a more coherent design document from all these suggested changes. Slow steps, my friend. I will not just start coding. mormonpartyboat posted:Some ideas that are pretty big-picture-direction agnostic (and yeah I know this is a huge amount of work but I'm assuming infinite programmers): I've taken the liberty of copying your entire post into the doc, because between all these words are some really good ideas. Michaellaneous fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 23:05
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Since people are talking about what they'd like to see, I'd like world reactivity. A fungal tower spawns, great, map is slowly infected. I want to be able to send it the other way by fighting my way to the core of the thing and destroying it, which trips a flag and has the infected terrain reverting back to normal. End game 'fighting the apocalypse' type stuff where you make the world a bit better. I'd also like NPC survivors to be fixed up, especially when you recruit them. Being able to swap out gear and tell them what to use/equip would be nice since I don't remember that being a thing. I'd also like to be able to mark out an area as my base and set NPC's who I recruit/turn up asking for shelter to work, farming or digging defensive ditches or building walls I marked out. I'd like bigger can't-be-built-in-the-back-of-a-deathtrucktank workstations and stuff as well, so you actually have a reason to set up a base - maybe they let you build better quality items, or faster, or in bulk, or at a discount, or make rare stuff. Being able to send NPC's out to scavenge would be cool too. They vanish, then x time periods later they reappear with a bag full of random stuff, with the chance that they'll get ambushed and you need to run off and rescue them from a monster that spawns in when you get near them. Artefacts are too rare for how useless they are. Make them actually worth finding, and if possible add them in the end of mini portal dungeons or something - that'd tie in with the first thing, since you could destabilise the portal by stealing the artefact and helping cut off an eldritch horror invasion route and saving the world and so on. Mutations. Vs bionics they really aren't worth the effort, especially with the negative mutations. Either remove the negative mutations or (and this is what I'd do) buff existing good mutations and add more so they become worth the risk of getting something negative. Add National Guard Depots, buildings that have huge stockpiles of ammo inside them. Make guns not terrible. There's been tons of discussion about this already, and it's all good since it's from people who really understand how the combat system works and why it isn't any good. Personally, I want Gun-Fu, a guns only martial art style.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:39
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Gun Kata or other absurd DoomRL style gun arts would be awesome. Even just un-nerfing guns would probably be enough though. One possible way to deal with the lovely artifacts besides getting rid of them is to make them usable for crafting/modifying items. I definitely agree that genuinely good artifacts should be a reward for the proposed portal dungeons/mines/labs/etc., but I think it'd be neat to take a lovely lightning artifact you'd otherwise leave lying on the ground and use it on your armor to make any enemy that hits you get zapped, or on your gun to give you lightning shots, or to make entirely new and awesome toys that have unique powers. As a bonus if you decide you no longer need one of the genuinely nice artifacts because you found a better one it could be useful for more powerful modifiers/toys than you'd be able to get otherwise.
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Sep 13, 2017 00:16
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it's astonishing how fast that went from a fairly reasonable discussion to a horrible shitshow the second granade showed up
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Sep 13, 2017 00:22
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President Ark posted:it's astonishing how fast that went from a fairly reasonable discussion to a horrible shitshow the second granade showed up Yeah before he showed up there was a lot of back and forth, clarification on the issue, throwing ideas around. Then he turns up with this frankly loving horrible attitude. His very first post was oozing contempt and smug self satisfaction, and then when he was given what he asked for he continued to act like an rear end in a top hat.
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Sep 13, 2017 00:30
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This is sounding really good, I hope it goes well. One thing I think should have a consensus reached early on is the level of abstraction on items people want and how we go about it. For example at the start of the game you can craft the nord, 2-by-sword, nail board, nail bat, barbed wire bat and sharpened rebar. All require 0 fabrication skill, all play a similar role and all are made completely obsolete by the cudgel. There's no real reason for them to exist apart from novelty and to confuse new players. Cooking is similar, there are 4 different recipes for pizza, 4 different recipes for soup (8 technically, since canned soup is separate), 16 (!) different sandwiches and the balance between them... to say it's non-existent would be too kind. How can a meat pizza weigh half as much as a meat pie but be twice as filling? Why is a cucumber sandwich only 2/3 as filling as a vegetable sandwich made with cucumber? This could really do with more generic options. Guns are another point, though that's probably the least of the issues with guns right now. My idea, though it would be difficult to implement at this point, would be to have more generic items with quality modifiers. You can make a nail bat out of a stick and some nails but it's not going to be as good as one made out of an actual baseball bat. No more having a stone hammer, makeshift hammer and hammer as separate items, now they're all hammers, just of differing quality. A pizza made with just cheese and flour would be average, but one made with 4 extra meat/vegetable ingredients would be pretty nice. It would also be nice if the nutrition going into a recipe was vaguely close to the nutrition coming out, looking through the food crafting menu for examples made my head hurt. No wonder I always just stuck with woods soup. I'd love to help with actual coding but I don't know how much help I'd be. I just got stuck for 30 minutes while trying to make stats through skills slightly more sensible because I forgot that lua uses elseif and not else if.
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Sep 13, 2017 10:11
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Dire Lemming posted:This is sounding really good, I hope it goes well. Honestly, I think that would be simplifying this game a little bit too much. Yes, the inconsistencies with food should be fixed, and can be fixed easily, but it is still a role-playing game, so I have no issues with there being a few obsolete choices, etc. But I copied your text into the document for others to discuss.
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Sep 13, 2017 13:28
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If I had to pick a dream outcome, it would be harvesting as much of the gist of what was reckoned as The Plan for San Muerte Survival before it sadly died in limbo about 7 years ago without even an early public release: https://web.archive.org/web/20110611070455/http://sanmuertesurvival.webs.com/ There were inhouse running videos, various design pages outlining things, probably at least a fair bit of it is there somewhere in Wayback machine land across earlier still snapshots than this last one. Of all the Roguelikes that didn't quite happen with the dev vanishing over the years and whatnot, this one always stung rather pointedly among the greatest aches...
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Sep 13, 2017 13:39
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Dire Lemming posted:One thing I think should have a consensus reached early on is the level of abstraction on items people want and how we go about it. For example at the start of the game you can craft the nord, 2-by-sword, nail board, nail bat, barbed wire bat and sharpened rebar. All require 0 fabrication skill, all play a similar role and all are made completely obsolete by the cudgel. There's no real reason for them to exist apart from novelty and to confuse new players. I really dig the novelty aspect of so many choices (in a choose your own mad max cosplay simulator 2017 kind of way), and having some Not Great items is fine as long as they're clearly labeled, but yeah, its a mess of Stuff The biggest offenders are probably: 1) Inherent techniques, especially defensive ones like block or rapid strike, are extremely powerful and overshadow the actual weapon stats until midgame 2) Weapons that can get stuck in the enemy are extremely unrealiable 3) The basic question of 'which weapon does more damage' (ignoring techniques) is a complicated hash of speed plus damage calculations plus the impact of skill and stats, and it sucks So I'd say a melee weapon pass would need to: 1) Get rid of weapons getting stuck in the enemy, it's dumb as dogshit. Weapon blocking is extremely powerful and should probably just be removed (improving baseline dodge instead if necessary for early game survival) except for niche defensive weapons. I'd like the idea of weapon blocking only being useful against weapon attacks (so other survivors and ???) but that's insanely niche. 2) Define certain tiers of Stuff. Caveman stuff < improvised stuff < improved improvised stuff < commercial grade stuff < ~survivor grade~ stuff = ye olde military stuff < miltech stuff < futuretech stuff (or whatever). All melee weapons within those tiers should have the same summed damage numbers (pierce + slash + bash) baseline. Importantly, keep the weapon speed for all weapons the same, baseline, with the exception of Big rear end Two Handers which should have a speed penalty and a damage boost (netting the same DPS) so you attack later but hit like a truck. 3) Define a few categories of weapons that should exist and what benefit they generally provide, and this is where the techs could shine. Knives have rapid strike, piercing weapons have precise strike, slashing weapons have brutal strike, bludgeoning weapons have stuns, spears have reach, that kinda thing. Its here where the aforementioned Big rear end Two Handers get wide strike slapped on to their template. 4) To add more variety to weapons, add more interesting techs rather than changing the baseline stats. A weapon with commercial grade numbers but some cool traits versus a weapon with miltech grade numbers but no cool traits is an Actual Impactful Decision that's interesting to make. Switching from a cudgel to a quarterstaff really isn't. 5) Make sure stats impact weapons in a linear and transparent way. Really doing this justice would take a deep dive in the combat math which I haven't done yet (and things might have already changed), but off the top of my head weapon speed generating from item weight, arbitrary 'to-hit' numbers in the item definitions, and things like the bash cap should all probably just go away. This also includes diving into the code and removing any weird crunch distinctions between damage types, like I think there was something about piercing being inherently armor penetrating but also never actually being inflicted or something like that? 6) Keep all the above as just a general guide. Mutations from the norm are fun, as are weird one-off weapons like the chainsaw lajatang! Its more that the general balance structure should take precedence over sitting down and calculating length of a gladius and comparing its angles of moment to a kopesh or calculating the shear strength of ceramite whatever the gently caress.
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Sep 13, 2017 16:48
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I should be clear that there being too much clutter is my opinion and people are free to disagree, it's just something that should be decided early whether the current level of variety is fine or too much. I think there should be variety and fun yet explicitly impractical options like the chainsaw lajatang available, I just don't think that we really need 4 different flavours of "wood club with metal spikes." I think everything should have a reason for being there. Whether that reason is filling a niche mechanically for a portion of the game or simply being fun to use doesn't matter but it should be better than "someone had 30 minutes spare in 2015 and added this item."
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Sep 13, 2017 17:34
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as much as i'm for simplification of stuff, i'm pretty sure a massive weapon normalization would cause a riot. on some basic level, it doesn't make sense that the same damage, speed, whatever would be offered by a cudgel as it would a 2-by-sword. the point on combat styles being inherent to the weapon rather than the character are great, though - the only thing that people should be worried about with weapons is how much damage they do and how quickly they do it. beyond that, it's all a matter of the wielder. i'd also recommend what i said earlier with regard to dividing up the combat formula - the general skill (melee, ranged) should influence only accuracy, while the specific skill (pistols, unarmed) should influence damage with that specific weapon type (and probably unlock styles or techniques specific to that type). in this way you can understand at a high level what's going on with combat interactions really easily, while still making a dude who's rocking kung-fu not able to pick up a claymore and instantly be awesome with it. this is possible in the current setting.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:53
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Coolguye posted:on some basic level, it doesn't make sense that the same damage, speed, whatever would be offered by a cudgel as it would a 2-by-sword I'd disagree, to be honest. Bear with me. The problem the game faces is more the conceptual space the player walks into. If you have differences in weapons, the player immediately tries to compare those differences and determine which is better for their character. That's cool and fun! But when there's a bunch of raw numbers, that determination starts to suck. You either know the objectively correct answer through running the numbers and/or googling someone else who put in the effort or you don't and you're just guessing. Hell, I'd go so far as to say it is impossible under the current paradigm of ~realism~ driving the numbers to balance a steel knife vs a steel sword vs a steel mace without also producing one objectively correct answer and two idiot traps. If the sword is always better, and the game's philosophy is fine with that, then the solution should be to get rid of the mace and knife. Even if you simplify the math so the average newbie can figure out which is better immediately you run into issues - Baldur's Gate had a warhammer doing 1d4+1 bashing damage, a mace doing 1d6+1 bashing damage, meaning both 1) a mace is objectively better and 2) there's no haptic difference to the weapons because they play exactly the same. In Pillars of Eternity, those two weapons had the exact same base template (same damage, speed, cost), but the warhammer could use the more advantageous of crush/pierce while the mace could bypass some armor, meaning their relative power shifts on a case by case basis, meaning both 1) there is no objectively better weapon and 2) there's a big haptic difference to the weapons. They feel different, play different, are appropriate for different builds based on what you're going for, etc. So the intent in the proposal is that it's not the numbers that drive differences between types of weapons. Sure, better quality (bokken versus diamond katana) weapons would be the direct source of better numbers and would be tied to/enable a general sense of progression. But it's the inherent techniques (like rapid strike versus reach) that would make the weapons feel different and push you to try different things or set your character up in different ways. A sword at 15 damage would play very differently than a 15 damage knife or a 15 damage mace. And that's why I disagree with the idea that the numbers need to be different - when you look at the difference for a normal person using a knife versus a sword versus a mace, you wouldn't walk away with objective number differences at the granularity of 97 speed versus 94 speed or 16 damage versus 18 damage or whatever. You'd say things like "the knife is faster" (rapid attack) or "the sword cuts big gashes" (brutal strike) or "the mace would rattle the poo poo out of you" (stuns). People perceive things at that high level, so the driving distinctions should be kept at a similarly high level. But yeah, the idea isn't intended to be the complete fix, in any way. Combat (including inherent techniques) obv needs a pass, which is the elephant in the room. On top of that, there's plenty of space for things like Str increasing bashing, Dex increasing piercing, and (Str+Dex)/2 increasing slashing to drive different builds, or character traits that boost specific damage types, or generic weapon combat styles that emphasize certain types of weapons, or whatever. There's a lot of hooks that can make the choices interesting and meaningful at a high level without needing to worry about the crunch. It's just intended to assert a mindset where you maintain a simple core, and derive the complexity from the interactions of those simple things. also riots own 
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Sep 13, 2017 18:55
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I think this sort of goes under the header of 'loving around with the item jsons', but speaking of bloat - can we consider paring down the gun list? Specifically the conventional guns. To clarify - and it's been ages since I played Cataclysm - at one point some mildly autistic gun-enthusiast decided that there needed to be like fifty different types of pistol (along with the other various weapon types). Ultimately that means that most of them had roughly similar statistics and, more importantly, since verisimilitude, they also added the appropriate ammo types for the drat things. This is an issue because thanks to the RNG being RNG, the more different ammo types we have in the game, the less likely it becomes to find ammo for your particular weapon. This makes it super frustrating to loot gun stores (three guns, eight different types of ammo, none of which is actually compatible with the guns you found), directly makes energy weapons even more superior to regular kinetics since power is power and there are so many ways to make batteries or recharge the bigass alphabet soup power cell thing, and just generally makes 'real' guns a PITA to use. Yes, you can always recast the ammo, but that just ultimately adds more meaningless hoops to jump through just to use your shotgun or whatever. My idea would be something like ditching the bazillion-odd roughly-identical-guns-with-different-ammo for about half a dozen different weapon types, each with an universal ammo type that fits all weapons of that particular category: Light pistol: Your basic saturday night special, 9-mil popguns and whatever. Low-ish damage, decently accurate, good clip size - reliable and good for taking out low-level enemies like basic zombies etc, but tends to underperform against most big enemies. Easy to carry around as a backup weapon. Heavy Pistol: The Are You Feeling Lucky Punk guns, actual loving hand cannons, you know what I'm talking about. High stopping power per shot, low ammo capacity per clip/magazine. This is what a starting character would (hope) to use against more heavily armored or just plain bigger targets - ideal for things like most early type special zombies and small robots, plus at least give you a chance against things like brutes or moose. Shotgun: Zombies and shotguns go together like a fist in the eye. Short range, high power, great for slapping down small groups of monsters in tight confines or putting the hurt on bigger monsters. Honestly, shotguns are plain cool and I'm currently sort of leaning towards the design of 'if you had to pick just one gun that would be at least decent almost everywhere, it would probably be a shotgun'. Extra flexible if specialist shotgun ammo are a thing. SMG: The Spray and Pray guns. Basically like a light pistol with gently caress-all accuracy, huge ammo capacity, and burst/full-auto fire modes. Great for thinning out hordes of zombies or other small enemies (black widow nests, anyone?) and maybe things with poo poo armor but oodles of HP, with concentrated fire. Chews through ammo like candy, of course. Probably shares the same ammo type with light pistols. Rifle: Self-explanatory. Slow rate of fire, high stopping power per shot, long range, high accuracy, lowish ammo capacity. Everything from your typical hunting rifles to military sniper weapons and the giant fuckoff anti-materiel weapons like the 50-cal. When you absolutely need to take out a big bastard five city blocks away. Assault Rifle: Also self-explanatory. Medium to long range weapon, most of the stopping power of a rifle paired with most the fire rate of (and superior accuracy to) an SMG. Another great all-rounder weapon type, although ammo should be a little more rare to compensate (share with heavy rifles?). Would honestly also probably include things like actual machine guns, the two aren't ultimately that different (for in-game purposes). The idea is that besides the 'core weapon type', you'd have a bunch of manufacturers with different takes on the gun - manufacturer A likes to make guns that are light and accurate, but have poor magazine capacity, somebody else goes for pure stopping power, another is the Moar Dakka type with burst/full-auto and extended mags on everything, etc etc. These differences would be big enough to make choice between them meaningful, paired with evocative names and descriptions for each combo to make them 'feel' different - say, four or five different options per weapon category, total. Paired with the already existing weapon mod system, that should be plenty enough variety while remaining relatively easy to balance.
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Sep 13, 2017 18:56
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there's a mod in the standard download that replaces all the gunsperg guns with just like 9mm pistols or whatever. i'm not sure what the community consensus would be, but i personally would be all for just making that mod the standard and making gunsperg mode the mod. i think part of the reason guns get ignored by a lot of people is that they immediately know what a machete is, but when you see "VZ229" or whatever the gently caress your eyes just immediately roll into the back of your head.mormonpartyboat posted:I'd disagree, to be honest. Bear with me. like maybe you throw a bone to the people who feel this waters things down by just shoving all the current itemization into a standard packaged mod as per above, but the actual goal is to less make a bunch of things that have identical numbers, and more to consolidate things that are too similar. i can definitely get behind that but one would have to be careful about distinguishing between things that are traditionally found versus crafted. the early game's difficulty and tension is frequently defined by what you find in the first 24 hours, and getting rid of useless but found poo poo like butter knives and forks would make it proportionally MORE likely to find useful and found stuff like butcher knives. obviously though stuff like a 2-by-sword, cudgel, etc though are never found and it's harmless to simply provide different ways to make a serviceable club and say they can all be turned into crude swords/nords given the right material. also, worth noting that something like this would need to be fully done and considered before any sort of combat revamp could even be remotely worked with; i'd argue the itemization matters to the overall combat feel much more than the skill distributions or formulae, which are all implementation details that nobody truly cares about. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 19:27
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As strange as it might seem the melee weapon skills are something I really love about CDDA even though you don't actually do anything to make them work - they make the combat feel a bit more fun and dynamic and make you feel really rewarded for getting your weapon skills up, finding a new weapon, or learning a new style, moreso than just doing more damage when you hit a guy.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:04
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Coolguye posted:it kinda sounds like i misinterpreted your idea, given this post? so from the baldur's gate analogy it almost seems like you're suggesting you get rid of all of the crazy itemization of bullshit like the 2-by-sword and just collect all of the similar things under 'club', so you'd have 5 recipes to make 1 club rather than 5 recipes to make 5 different club-like things. You can make a makeshift crowbar, a 2-by-sword, and a makeshift knife. Each of them has an attack speed of 100 and a damage of 15 (split between damage types appropriately). Later, you find/forge a mace, a broadsword, and a combat knife. Each of these is identical to their makeshift counterpart, except they have the damage bumped up to 22. In both cases, the knife has a chance to quick attack, the bludgeon has a chance to stun, the sword has a chance to deal extra damage. So of things from the same quality level, there's no objectively better weapon, while a combat knife is always better than a makeshift knife. Then you have stat scaling, fighting styles, character traits (say, one that gives +2 damage on attacks, whch would benefit fast weapons like knives more than slow weapons like two handers), etc. to help differentiate, on top of weird weapons that break the mold. This would let you actually keep most of the crazy itemization bullshit without exploding the difficulty of choosing what weapons to use, so like a 2-by-sword and nord and a crude sword would all deal 15 damage and have brutal attack, but the nord deals mostly piercing while the 2-by-sword deals mostly bashing and the crude sword deals mostly slashing. And if there's 100% redundant poo poo that can't be differentiated, then yeah, pull some of it out. Coolguye posted:i can definitely get behind that but one would have to be careful about distinguishing between things that are traditionally found versus crafted. the early game's difficulty and tension is frequently defined by what you find in the first 24 hours, and getting rid of useless but found poo poo like butter knives and forks would make it proportionally MORE likely to find useful and found stuff like butcher knives. obviously though stuff like a 2-by-sword, cudgel, etc though are never found and it's harmless to simply provide different ways to make a serviceable club and say they can all be turned into crude swords/nords given the right material. I like clutter from an atmosphere standpoint! So I'm perfectly fine with the butter knives and forks and other worldbuilding detritus existing, since the player never sits down and compares cutlery to their sword. Clutter with weapons is even good, because of how many different character concepts the game can pull in - if players like a nord over a 2-by-sword for aesthetic reasons, cool, more power to them. That variety owns. Problem's that the item clutter begets intellectual clutter because of each item's bespoke stats. Like take those two swords in the current build and try to tell me which is better from the stats: 2-by-sword Volume: 5 Weight: 1.32 lbs/0.60 kg Bash: 12 Cut: 1 To-hit bonus: +1 Moves per attack: 95 Damage per move: 0.14 crude sword Volume: 8 Weight: 2.43 lbs/1.10 kg Bash: 6 Cut: 14 To-hit bonus: -1 Moves per attack: 115 Damage per move: 0.17 The crude sword obviously deals more damage per move, but it's got a lower to-hit bonus (which gives you how much higher a miss % chance again?) and is above the 100 speed breakpoint which is can cause problems if you're attacking second, and you have to worry about the crude sword being stuck in the target. The nord is in a similar boat. It's obvious there's differences between the weapons and that those differences matter and that there's an objectively correct answer as to which is better, but the player isn't able to actually figure out the implications based on what they're given. If they really care about getting the right answer, they have to google it or alt tab and do a bunch of math and code diving. And on top of that, all three of those makeshift swords are obviously worse than any of the Actual Swords you can come across. So the expected player response to the different makeshift swords is a "who cares about the minor differences" and they pick whatever they like best aesthetically/arbitrarily, so nitpicked stats don't matter anyway. Just normalize the stats and let the player focus on the game and stabbing zombies and looking cool while doing so. i know i'm an ~ideas guy~ golem so plz excuse the prolix
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Sep 13, 2017 21:06
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How about : look for consensus on design goals, but also see whether consensus is even possible or necessary. Suppose some players just want "okay, found 'gun' and 'bullets' so I'm good to go" and others do want a bazillion redundant guns and useless ammo types for no reason. So: choose one standard and make the alternatives optional and/or roll them into mods. Maybe I'm just a crazy engineer in thinking the "rigorous but as streamlined as possible" approach would be a good standard because then there are fewer moving parts for everything else to have to mesh with, and you can glue on as many additions as necessary AFTER you make something that actually works.
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Sep 13, 2017 21:26
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