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you joke but if you gave me like 200 in game dollars or something to outfit myself to start out i'd always buy a goddamn hacksaw not because it's useful in and of itself BUT BECAUSE I CAN NEVER GET A GODDAMN HACKSAW WHEN I NEED ONE, same as the loving anvil in df.
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Sep 23, 2017 23:12
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I plan on submitting a PR to the project that straight up removes points and point costs from chargen and replaces it with an estimated starting difficulty. Make it more about telling your story and customizing your experience than balancing attempts to min max. Dunno if it will get in but I think that pretty much fixes chargen from my perspective.
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Sep 24, 2017 00:07
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I've been thinking, does boiling water really add anything to the game? Before you find a pot it's incredibly easy to survive off of sodas and the like, and later it just seems like busy work. Things like the cybernetic that lets you juice bodies may still be useful because it lets you fill up entire drums of water with literally zero effort.
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Sep 24, 2017 00:10
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GlyphGryph posted:I plan on submitting a PR to the project that straight up removes points and point costs from chargen and replaces it with an estimated starting difficulty. good idea imo
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Sep 24, 2017 00:14
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girth brooks part 2 posted:I've been thinking, does boiling water really add anything to the game? Before you find a pot it's incredibly easy to survive off of sodas and the like, and later it just seems like busy work. Things like the cybernetic that lets you juice bodies may still be useful because it lets you fill up entire drums of water with literally zero effort. Boiling water is essentially a timesink. You do it, wasting a little bit of your character's day to get safe water to drink and then later your have purifiers and filters to do it fast. Thing is, odds are you'll be making herbal tea and stuff anyway, which doesn't require clean water, making that step a waste of time. In my current game I installed a dirty water tank + funnel to give me essentially infinity dirty water, and just use it in recipes as needed.
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Sep 24, 2017 00:38
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How feasible would it be to add in a point-based system during character generation with different options for starting gear? Like, depending on if a background would logically have allowed you to have gathered specific resources, you can spend points instead on tools, food, ammunition etc. These points would be seperate to character creation points specifically, and would be modified by the starting background you choose.
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Sep 24, 2017 00:40
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I would say if we do that, combine it with my suggestion and then just have a "custom background" option that lets you do the equivalent of a DF prepare carefully. But no point cost, it just doesnt bother giving you a difficulty setting and says "custom start" or something.
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Sep 24, 2017 00:50
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GlyphGryph posted:I plan on submitting a PR to the project that straight up removes points and point costs from chargen and replaces it with an estimated starting difficulty. nightwisher posted:How feasible would it be to add in a point-based system during character generation with different options for starting gear? Like, depending on if a background would logically have allowed you to have gathered specific resources, you can spend points instead on tools, food, ammunition etc. These points would be seperate to character creation points specifically, and would be modified by the starting background you choose. GlyphGryph posted:I would say if we do that, combine it with my suggestion and then just have a "custom background" option that lets you do the equivalent of a DF prepare carefully. But no point cost, it just doesnt bother giving you a difficulty setting and says "custom start" or something. Slime posted:Boiling water is essentially a timesink. You do it, wasting a little bit of your character's day to get safe water to drink and then later your have purifiers and filters to do it fast. Thing is, odds are you'll be making herbal tea and stuff anyway, which doesn't require clean water, making that step a waste of time. In my current game I installed a dirty water tank + funnel to give me essentially infinity dirty water, and just use it in recipes as needed. personally (i do not speak for the whole team of course, so if opinion from others goes against me on this then this will change) i see this as a fine status quo. it goes directly to the heart of how people handle their poo poo in the apocalypse. personally i just pull from the dirty water tank and use one day every year or something to refill the clean water tank with an atomic water filter, because the other days of the year i just drink from the faucet connected to my driver's seat - but making herbal tea once every couple days instead is also 100% fine. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Sep 24, 2017 |
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Sep 24, 2017 01:28
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Slime posted:Boiling water is essentially a timesink. This reminds me, how possible would it be to get some cooking/crafting to work the way Unreal World does it, where you set up the food to be cooked and then come back to it later?
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Sep 24, 2017 04:06
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There was an episode of survivorman where he had a setup with a bit of tubing, a old metal can, and a bottle and basically had it constantly distilling sea water while he was away by setting a fire under it. Something like that would be a good early construction in game. That said, I don't mind that water has a lot of ways to get and obtain, it's not that much busy work. As far as multiple pools, I like them because before with one pool the best way to play was all disadvantages and a high bonus point start and dumping everything into super human stats. What Gryph suggests would probably do the same for me, and I really like it. As for if the game is scifi ADOM or scifi Unrealworld, I say why not both. Why can't I scrabble to survive on an old farmstead and sometimes drive my reinforced tractor to a open portal, dive into the netherium with my shotgun, and come back with goodies, or exotic seeds, or animals? Anyways, I gave a lot of thought to the permadeath thing, and how this game takes a lot of investment in time to get to certain points, like gathering books and reading them and stuff, and had an idea. What if when survivors died they dropped a journal. Finding said journal would teach any new people the skills of the old survivor. Even better if there was a way on death to hop into an ally you made, or even set up some sort of spawn point where you could set out from. It'd make death to peeking around a corner and finding a turret one tile away into a corpse run, rather than a totally new start after a disappointing death, or a simple reload after your last save.
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Sep 24, 2017 04:26
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you'd basically have to do some reality bubble shenanigans. probably not the hardest thing in the world but also one of those things that's pretty easy to mess up if you're not paying attention.Killer-of-Lawyers posted:As for if the game is scifi ADOM or scifi Unrealworld, I say why not both. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Sep 24, 2017 |
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Sep 24, 2017 04:26
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Coolguye posted:you'd basically have to do some reality bubble shenanigans. probably not the hardest thing in the world but also one of those things that's pretty easy to mess up if you're not paying attention. To have something boiling water while you're away? Nah, it'd be like a charcoal kiln, or rotting. That works fine. IT's a timer, I think, and you can attach it to anything now.
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Sep 24, 2017 04:29
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Could you adapt some of the code from survival mode for dollar based equipment? It mostly focuses on weapons and ammo, but there are various crafting bits available through that menu. Also there is already a freeform option in character creation.
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Sep 24, 2017 10:17
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the freeform option is there but it gives you no feedback on what you're doing. the entire point of the idea is to give the player feedback on how hard or easy they're making it for themselves without restricting them in any other way - the current freeform is an advanced mode. it should instead be the beginner mode.
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Sep 24, 2017 18:50
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Coolguye posted:you'd basically have to do some reality bubble shenanigans. probably not the hardest thing in the world but also one of those things that's pretty easy to mess up if you're not paying attention There's already some code to 'fast forward' solar panels and farming when the reality bubble is re entered; the question is how much of that is generic enough to reuse and how much is a one-off hack. I'm not familiar enough with the code base to answer either way. E: And the constructed charcoal kiln as mentioned above, was originally thinking about the recipe kiln. goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Sep 25, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2017 20:22
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Coolguye posted:well personally i think backgrounds as a whole should probably go away to a large extent tbh. let them be something to allow you to have an easy mode or hard mode (like Tweaker is now - someone also suggested Diabetic at one point, where you could have an insulin addiction that never goes away and WILL kill you without you figuring out where to get your medicine), but the distinction between a survivor that starts with a winter coat and a fireman that starts with a fire axe is ultimately so pointless that you're just thumbing through seeing which one gives you an extra point to scrape away, and leads to arguments like that one. i'd rather just give someone the points and figure out a way to let them purchase starting gear instead. I mean, to you maybe. I approach characters far less from a mechanical perspective and far more from a goofiness/RP perspective; I think my most-played start is as a punk with rollerblades, just to zoom around whacking zombies with sticks.
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Sep 26, 2017 07:52
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That owns and sounds like the start of a great story so I kinda feel like the character creation flow shouldn't penalize you for thinking of cool things
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Sep 26, 2017 08:14
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What if you kept the point buy system, including adding in equipment purchasing, but just removed the point limits and have the game give you a difficulty rating based on how many points you spend? Edit: Your tombstone should also note your difficulty rating. DayGloOreo fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 26, 2017 |
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Sep 26, 2017 15:04
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John Lee posted:I mean, to you maybe. I approach characters far less from a mechanical perspective and far more from a goofiness/RP perspective; I think my most-played start is as a punk with rollerblades, just to zoom around whacking zombies with sticks. Yeah my favorite start is the school, for a similar reason. Mechanically it's a decent start because you have access to a lot of supplies, but I just like the narrative of my character being a moody teen having a very bad day at school.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:14
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Players enjoy the game on a spectrum of grognard to fan fiction and its all good. I understand why it'd be easy to think other players are playing the same way as you.
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Sep 27, 2017 00:45
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It's also entertaining because rollerbladers don't have pockets on their Spandex, so they have a max volume capacity of, like, six. But yeah, whatever character creation ends up being, mechanically-pointless options aren't a bad thing. We're thinking of Cataclysm as a way to generate entertaining stories, so having choices that might be Not As Good are still fine. I also wouldn't mind a menu with an expanded list of gimmick starts ranging from the sensible (A mom in a house with a zombie child) to the insane (One-Legged rear end-Kicking Champion, starts with insane martial skill), although those aren't as neat as making your own stories, of course.
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Sep 28, 2017 04:36
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DayGloOreo posted:What if you kept the point buy system, including adding in equipment purchasing, but just removed the point limits and have the game give you a difficulty rating based on how many points you spend? That's functionally what was proposed, yeah.
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Sep 28, 2017 05:49
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I have some background in C and C++, I'll have a look and try to contribute. But I'm kinda busy with other things, plus I said the same thing back in the GoonDDA days and never did contribute to that.
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Sep 28, 2017 13:46
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I'm definitely a fan of the idea of some of the things that are background timers once you set them up, like the kiln. That brings up another weird thing about C:DDA, some things have multiple ways to do things, and one is just 'better' and the other is weird cruft. Like how there are both kilns-as-buildings and kilns-as-items, with different interfaces, basically. It's been a bit since I played so maybe I'm misremembering, but if you wanted to keep water as a mechanism from a simulation or atmospheric standpoint, what about internally tracking if water is clean/not (rather than just roulette every time). So if someone finds a river that worldgen has defined as clean, and the player susses it out as such (water tester or jsut drinking a ton and not getting sick and noticing the pattern) then maybe they can make use of it. Did rainwater need boiling to drink? I can't recall. Maybe? Should it, really? Edit: I actually LIKE the character gen pretty well, because as long as the disadvantages are well designed, they should always carry SOME risk of applying (if they never apply, they should be worth almost nothing) and it's about thinking what sounds like a funny gimmick to me...or that I think I can do without.
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Sep 28, 2017 20:56
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Rainwater can be tainted and it can make you sick, but it's a pretty small chance (like one in 10 or one in 20, I don't remember which), and water poisoning is minor enough that it's not really something to stress about. I just set up a funnel and drink from a gallon jug until I'm established enough to not care about random zombies, at which point you can live off of vending machines indefinitely.
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Sep 28, 2017 21:03
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Well, the idea from flavor text stuff is that it's polluted, and it's supposed to be so polluted that you sometimes get harmful acid rain, so you could stick a funnel and a barrel outside and collect weak acid water for stuff like batteries or acid bombs sometimes, while also having some potential risk if you don't have gear with environmental protection or a car... but then they took that out of the game because of [reason] and still have frequent references to it despite it basically being a given that it's never coming back into the game. I haven't even seen a mod that puts it back in yet.
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Oct 1, 2017 09:06
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Really given how easy it is to make charcoal water filters I'm surprised there's not a funnel that incorporates one of those and just generates filtered water when it rains. Also for those playing, there's new aiming and gun stuff in. Anyone get a chance to mess with it yet? I don't really use guns enough to get into the details this playthrough.
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Oct 1, 2017 09:27
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KaosMachina posted:Well, the idea from flavor text stuff is that it's polluted, and it's supposed to be so polluted that you sometimes get harmful acid rain, so you could stick a funnel and a barrel outside and collect weak acid water for stuff like batteries or acid bombs sometimes, while also having some potential risk if you don't have gear with environmental protection or a car... but then they took that out of the game because of [reason] and still have frequent references to it despite it basically being a given that it's never coming back into the game. I haven't even seen a mod that puts it back in yet. [reason] is that the AI was completely incapable of handling acid rain and so whenever it occurred it would scour the entire active reality bubble of unlife. Not a problem with the original implementation of dynamic spawns that Whales was using alongside the acid rain, but a bit of a poo poo-show with static spawns.
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Oct 1, 2017 16:17
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TheBlandName posted:[reason] is that the AI was completely incapable of handling acid rain and so whenever it occurred it would scour the entire active reality bubble of unlife. Not a problem with the original implementation of dynamic spawns that Whales was using alongside the acid rain, but a bit of a poo poo-show with static spawns. Couldn't it just, well, not affect most enemies? Except for fungaloids and such perhaps.
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Oct 1, 2017 20:27
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Private Speech posted:Couldn't it just, well, not affect most enemies? Except for fungaloids and such perhaps. Idk man making a zombie is easy making a zombie that's not weak against acid rain is drat near impossible.
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Oct 1, 2017 21:09
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Sorry if this was already brought up, but have we considered just using an open source role-playing game's ruleset as the core, and focus on creating tools that enable cool stories and creating content for the early-, mid- and late-game? I spent some weeks looking into creating a new scavenging / combat / survival zombie game based off of CDDA (and, of course, in typical goon OCD fashion, burned out after spending weeks researching house-generating algorithms) I didn't get very far in the game, but I did come up with a few maxims: Recycle as much as possible: The city and building generating algorithms seem to work fairly well, at least for a start. Scavenge what we can. Beg / borrow / steal systems: Someone's already come up with a good-enough method of doing guns / melee / unarmed combat. GURPS comes to mind as a system that has a sourcebook for pretty much anything, and its core combat system is just fine, including sensible rules for ranged and close combat. We need to recycle and steal in order to meet the third maxim: Focus on the big picture: CDDA has a lot of cool stuff jammed into a crappy game, and I think everyone here saw its potential. What it didn't have, and what I think caused it to spiral into a shitnado, was a long term goal for the end game. What is the player there to do? If it's just "oh, I dunno, survive and have cool stories", then that was a direct contributor to the grognard sort of bullshit we see the game descending into, now. There has to be an endgame, even if the player is only peripherally aware of it, and ignores it. If the game has an end goal, it will be easier for us to say "that's a great idea, but it's not getting us closer towards the endgame" or "no, that idea will actually make creating endgame content harder" or whatnot. There's nothing in CDDA now to work towards, and I strongly feel that that lack of narrative drive has led to the lack of community focus. Okay, sorry for the rant. But if I was to do anything, it would be a) to make a list of stuff that could be ripped from existing systems and b) determine what the endgame was.
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Oct 2, 2017 01:29
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I recall two ideas bandied about for the endgame, neither of them worked on but still decent starting points: -Going to the nether world and blasting the hell out of the invading forces -Escaping to a space station If real endings had ever been prioritized instead of shoved on the back burner by the people who want nothing more than to pretend-poo poo in the woods forever they'd probably be in by now. Like better NPC AI there was never enough organized interest in making them a reality vs. twiddling with mechanics to make them more 'realistic'. It's not even hard to come up with ideas for end goals beyond those two either, and a framework never had to be more than finding some intel to set your path, putting together whatever doodads made sense to allow your journey of choice, and then fighting a boss to cement your win. It just got stuck at the vague idea stage instead of becoming anything more concretely pushed for.
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Oct 2, 2017 07:06
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The end game has a lot more problems with it than just that. There are no fewer than 3 apocalypse level events going on in the game. 1) The genetic fiddling going on in some of the science labs got out and made the zombies. I've never quite gotten the downlow on how it got out or precisely how it spreads beyond the infection mechanic (which is lol worthy), but that entire thing is man-made. 2) the nether dimension is a half-life 1 sort of situation where yeah some labs were doing some insanely dumb poo poo with no safety guards, but the dimension itself existed long before humans decided to start screwing with it and they needed nothing more than an opportunity to get nuts on humanity. 3) the myloss fungal beds are a straight out alien from space affair and humans had no hand in that crap at all. I do feel like there should be some sort of win condition in the game, but it's difficult to know what to aim for. The whole gently caress off to space thing seems like a low hanging fruit but what does that entail? It's worth having a discussion about I think but there's a lot of poo poo to answer.
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Oct 2, 2017 08:17
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Per the 'lore' everything is transdimensional. One of the transdimensional threats that came across due to the experiments was the black goo which is responsible for the zombies.
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Oct 2, 2017 08:33
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Yeah, the goo is in the water, via the secret labs that have the sewers next to them. The fungus and triffids are also from the same dimension, as well as the acid rain.
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Oct 2, 2017 10:49
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We've already got some weird useless computer system in the mines that generates only death via the current portal system (enemies come out) Maybe look into borrowing a bit from that for ideas.
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Oct 2, 2017 11:35
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I think we could consider "defeat the various forces" (fungals and transdimensionals) and "gently caress off to somewhere else" to be win states that are achievable given the game. For gently caress Off, I've always thought that jumping dimensions to one where the outbreaks never happened was interesting. It could involve finding certain artifacts in labs, gathering raw material, and hooking up enough of the power stations so that you can Activate the Doohicky and win.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:39
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Coolguye posted:I do feel like there should be some sort of win condition in the game, but it's difficult to know what to aim for. The whole gently caress off to space thing seems like a low hanging fruit but what does that entail? It's worth having a discussion about I think but there's a lot of poo poo to answer. Obviously we just need multiple win conditions like a Civ game. I'm voting for diplomatic victory with the zombies! (I'm actually serious that multiple win conditions is a fun thing and enables more stories to be told. That said, I realize the work is actually deciding and implementing the specifics)
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Oct 2, 2017 20:45
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I feel like in a sandboxy game like Cataclysm, the focus should be less on "how to win the game" and more just, challenges to conquer. Like, an example would be the demons/netherworld in Dwarf Fortress. Popping it open if you're unprepared will probably spell doom for your Fortress, but people who know what they're doing have not only beaten back the demon hordes, but them went and colonized hell. Some kind of "you will almost certainly die if you do this" challenge that the player has to intentionally trigger (so it's not just some random bullshit that murders them), but that could theoretically be beaten. Hell, have more than one.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:55
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I want, more than anything else, a way to stop the fungaloids. Like totally remove them from existence even if it is very difficult.
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Oct 2, 2017 21:07
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