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The Cheshire Cat posted:The nice thing about a game like Cataclysm is they could put in as many "win conditions" as they want really, since it's a sandbox. I like to think of it along the lines of like, going for extra runes in Crawl. There's no reason to do it other than you want to - but it's a fun challenge. Being able to make some kind of permanent impact on the world like that would be interesting. Although one of the end-game challenges could also be to just travel to an "alternate earth" which literally just drops you into a freshly generated world (undoing any sort of worldwide changes you've done) with whatever you decided to take with you, so you could always "reset" the game if you wanted to. You can implement this yourself by deleting everything but your character save file.
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Aug 17, 2018 11:03
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Cant you just also go off the map edge which generates a new town?
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Aug 17, 2018 14:09
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I'm a super idiot, all this time I never realised you could [m]end things in a vehicle - specifically faulty engines. My fuel efficiency greatly increased once I gutted an engine, pulled its filter out and replaced my APC-RV' diesel engine's faulty filter. Also, I'm annoyed at how much they nerfed solar panels. It's pretty much impossible to power a fridge unless you run the engine constantly.
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Aug 17, 2018 23:05
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PiCroft posted:Also, I'm annoyed at how much they nerfed solar panels. It's pretty much impossible to power a fridge unless you run the engine constantly.
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Aug 18, 2018 00:34
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Telsa Cola posted:Cant you just also go off the map edge which generates a new town? Yes you can always just generate more space but I was thinking specifically in relation to the suggestion I replied to, where by taking certain actions you can permanently eliminate a particular enemy type from appearing in the game.
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Aug 18, 2018 04:45
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Vib Rib posted:Don't tell me they nerfed them again? They've nerfed them so many drat times already. Well, I don't know about "again" since this is the first time I've played in almost a year but I'm pretty sure the last time I played, putting 6-7 or so solar panels on a vehicle was more than enough to run a fridge constantly. I have 8 and it only barely keeps up with a fridge during sunny weather.
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Aug 18, 2018 12:59
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They changed it long ago that they weren’t as efficient unless you were using he improved solar panaels. Also weather affects it so the slightest hint of a cloud may as well be night time.
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Aug 18, 2018 15:00
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It doesn't help that the vehicle mini fridge drains power like nothing else.
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Aug 18, 2018 16:15
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Yeah I think the problem is mainly that certain things are ludicrously power-hungry. You can run a whole electric car with a bunch of primary tools hooked up to a UPS charger, and as long as you've wired in a ton of storage batteries and have lots of solar panels, you'll be fine with occasional stops to read, craft, and scrounge while your car recharges. But God help you if you add a single minifridge to your completely self-sufficient all-purpose solarpunk deathmobile. It's also dumb that UPS charger stations continuously drain power even if there's nothing left to recharge. Where the gently caress is that electricity going? The world's least efficient status LED? 
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Aug 18, 2018 16:49
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Obviously it's important to make the game as unenjoyably realistic as possible. Except when it comes to solar power, of course, then we need to balance it entirely around game systems and not realism. And obviously the best way to balance solar powers is to make them basically useless. Sure, they're uncraftable from scratch, incredibly fragile, bulky, heavy, and have to be salvaged in good condition, but it's also important we make them basically worthless. This fits from a gameworld perspective too, because why the gently caress would anyone use solar panels in a post apocalyptic setting? I sure can't think of any reason why seeking out and salvaging large solar panels in such a world would be the #1 energy priority of basically any industrious survivor or group.
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Aug 18, 2018 17:06
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It's pretty telling how basically every change that moves the game away from being some Command & Conquer-rear end "solar-powered mutant cyborg shoots a laser cannon at battlemechs and throws dynamite at shoggoths" pseudoscience-fiction makes it less fun, tbqh. It's a real shame that these folks accidentally made a genuinely fun game, then started gutting it because it wasn't the game they initially wanted to make, fun be damned.
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Aug 18, 2018 17:38
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Angry Diplomat posted:I still think the nigh-impossible win condition should be "reach a portal and physically enter the gribbly hell dimension (optional: bring your deathmobile with you), then destroy the gribbly hell dimension" and you have to do it for multiple gribbly hell dimensions and each one eliminates a different threat and requires a different weapon of mass destruction. This was the original plan for the game, and you can find the originator's posts about it in this very thread a while back! (Which I assume YOU know, but others might not)
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Aug 18, 2018 18:01
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I wish I could turn zombies off and keep the mythos horrors and fungus and triffids. The CDDA launcher got me back into playing and writing food recipes. I also understand that the way I play the game is not the one true way to play, that everyone has their own idea of post-apocalyptic fun, and I shouldn't force people to play my way.
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Aug 18, 2018 19:31
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The idea of playing CDDA with no hostile monsters at all is pretty interesting, and I think with enough balance tweaks it could become a "Last Man on Earth" simulator pretty well. I'm also big on the idea of having rare, very threatening encounters in small numbers as opposed to just hordes everywhere at all times. Something where you only run into trouble here and there, but you need to pull out all the stops in nearly every fight you have. There's such a good base here, despite everything. That modularity, I think, is still the game's strong point.
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Aug 18, 2018 21:14
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Vib Rib posted:The idea of playing CDDA with no hostile monsters at all is pretty interesting, and I think with enough balance tweaks it could become a "Last Man on Earth" simulator pretty well. I'd love to play a game that's basically Unreal World with the grognard dial turned up to 12 and there's no other humans around at all. Just you, nature, and the constant struggle to survive. I'm totally unaware of any game which lets you do even rudimentary basic toolmaking such as producing cord from plant fibres, making stone tools and primitive weapons, etc. other than CDDA, but CDDA isn't really designed for the player to actually have to use these kinds of incredibly basic tools since you can easily scavenge something better.
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Aug 18, 2018 22:27
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RabidWeasel posted:I'd love to play a game that's basically Unreal World with the grognard dial turned up to 12 and there's no other humans around at all. Just you, nature, and the constant struggle to survive. I mean, okay, it strains credulity that someone could work up from neolithic tech to smelting and forming iron sheets and building a loving deathmobile out of that
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Aug 19, 2018 00:51
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Vib Rib posted:okay, it strains credulity that someone could work up from neolithic tech to smelting and forming iron sheets and building a loving deathmobile out of that He types, on a keyboard connected to a computer.
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Aug 19, 2018 05:11
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AppleDan posted:He types, on a keyboard connected to a computer.
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Aug 19, 2018 06:22
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Vib Rib posted:...Which I built entirely from scratch, from things I dug up in the wilderness? You didn't?
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Aug 19, 2018 06:32
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yeah i definitely feel the whiplash when i go from stone knives to laser cutters in a few months in games but the reality of the situation is that video games are probably never going to bother with that particular issue because the actual way it works irl is a complete pain in the dick to reason about in a game sense. even if you know how to make the keyboard, the monitor, the processor, etc, and even if you do have sources for the oil, the silicon, the rare earth metals, the copper, the iron, etc that go into them, and then even granting that you had the TOOLS all ready and available...the fiddly tasks that go into mining, smelting, pouring, shaping, assembling, and finishing all the parts mean that you will never be able to actually get it done. the realities of time and space will forbid you from ever putting that computer together. the soldering iron needs cleaning after use. the oil well needs constant checking. the circuit boards must be kept static free during punching and setting. and you, personally, must spend time simply gearing yourself up mentally and physically for all of the myriad demands ahead in the task. it's just not feasible. you basically see regressing technology any time humanity gets too beaten up in a certain area and can't trade to access these tools/parts/skillsets nicely - not because people get dumber, but because they simply do not have the manpower and stored capital to do all the fiddly little loving tasks required to, for example, keep an efficient iron forge going. even if you somehow got a complete and accurate list of all the little tasks that need to be performed at all steps of the supply chain, how would you model the microdamage that happens from doing these things - the cramps, the aches, the minor sprains from pushing it a little too hard? or the mental toll from constantly trying to remember what the hell you need to do next in a 120 step process? nobody cares and nobody wants to deal with that poo poo in a game. even dealing with just assigning tasks to NPC actors/buildings gets loving weird for a lot of people really fast - see the X series of space sim games for an idea of how that shakes out at scale. so the easiest and simplest solution is to fudge the time involved and ignore all the stress put on your body to make it fun. that's what everyone's been doing with tech era stuff like that for decades, and i honestly can't envision that changing unless values held by the people playing change a lot.
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Aug 19, 2018 06:49
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Angry Diplomat posted:It's pretty telling how basically every change that moves the game away from being some Command & Conquer-rear end "solar-powered mutant cyborg shoots a laser cannon at battlemechs and throws dynamite at shoggoths" pseudoscience-fiction makes it less fun, tbqh. It's a real shame that these folks accidentally made a genuinely fun game, then started gutting it because it wasn't the game they initially wanted to make, fun be damned. The saddest thing is that the original creator of the game intended Cataclysm to be exactly that; insane post-apoc mutant cyborg deathmobile shenanigans. The problem is that he din't have the time and energy to keep developing the game, so it got passed onto a pretentious my-way-or-the-highway grognard shitlord, who promptly decided to turn it into Realism Survival Shithouse #857.
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Aug 19, 2018 07:50
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Yeah unfortunately all the people interested in forking/rewriting the game end up drifting away partway through. I guess its more work than it looks like.
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Aug 19, 2018 07:56
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I mean, I'm interested in contributing, but I'm not a software development project lead, and I know far more Python than C++. 
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Aug 19, 2018 08:00
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i was trying to get a clear task list and everything together but I just do not have the time and energy to go back into that particular breach after a full work day.
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Aug 19, 2018 08:18
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We did get a pretty solid consensus on what the game is and should be about. I'm still on the Discord server the thread set up, so if you want to catch up and maybe split the load, I'm game.
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Aug 19, 2018 08:29
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Vib Rib posted:It also, unfortunately, doesn't account for the gaps in the tech tree you can't craft. There's so much you have to salvage. Complicated and great works ultimately need social interaction at which point I'd rather have a Thea sort of framework than trying to hodgepodge it into a roguelike single agent deal. Incidentally I hear Settlements ain't too shabby to give you literally going from rock tools back to modernity.
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Aug 19, 2018 15:42
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Coolguye posted:yeah i definitely feel the whiplash when i go from stone knives to laser cutters in a few months in games but the reality of the situation is that video games are probably never going to bother with that particular issue because the actual way it works irl is a complete pain in the dick to reason about in a game sense. I'm fine with them unrealistically blowing through eras of human advancement or winding up with a laser cutter you built from scratch, since playing fast and loose to make things more fun is what drew me to the game in the first place (see also the aforementioned contrast of grognard "realism" vs cyberdeathmobile sim). I'm more about the ability to craft your way up the tech tree (even as an optional "no scavenge" mode rather than a core rebalance), and less concerned with how realistic it is.
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Aug 19, 2018 18:54
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RabidWeasel posted:I'd love to play a game that's basically Unreal World with the grognard dial turned up to 12 and there's no other humans around at all. Just you, nature, and the constant struggle to survive. Wayward kinda does that but probably would need a bit of modding to get less gamey and more realistic
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Aug 19, 2018 23:06
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RabidWeasel posted:I'd love to play a game that's basically Unreal World with the grognard dial turned up to 12 and there's no other humans around at all. Just you, nature, and the constant struggle to survive. You could always start a youtube channel doing these things in a patch of Australian forest! 
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Aug 19, 2018 23:22
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Vib Rib posted:I'm not really bothered by an unrealistic progression, my point was just more about how there are gaps in the game's tech tree where you can't make a whole bunch of items yourself and have to scavenge them, meaning a "no cities" playthrough will stop really early on the tech trees and prevent you from getting a myriad of useful tools. Sounds like a place where adding some features to the mines would be very useful; especially for getting rare earth metals for those solar panels.
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Aug 19, 2018 23:59
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Anticheese posted:You could always start a youtube channel doing these things in a patch of Australian forest! Watching Primitive Technology videos is what made me realise that there's actually a lot more scope for people to make poo poo with absolutely no infrastructure than I ever realised. It seemed like it could make a great premise for a game.
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Aug 20, 2018 07:27
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For an advanced version there’s also Cody’s Lab. He’s a bit up the tech tree in terms of stuff he uses but he still does a shitload of things like “gonna enrich some uranium in my backyard”.
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Aug 20, 2018 18:43
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Yeah Cody's Lab is a lot more CDDA territory.
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Aug 20, 2018 20:44
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I haven't actually looked at the source code for the game but from what I've heard of people discussing it, one of the big problems is that it's an enormous chunk of spaghetti code. There's been hundreds of pulls and reworks and downright hacks and other lazy dumb programmer tricks to get a desired behavior out of a given system, and some of the things you really want to be able to modify (like the map generation logic) has been hardcoded into the main executive. Fixing the Cataclysm codebase is a shitlot of work and I'm beginning to think it'd honestly be easier, faster, and smarter to just take the systems and ideas we do like and start over from scratch. Of course this is easy to say as a goon who knows only the very basics of coding, doesn't really have the time for a big elaborate project, and just likes to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Edit: I'm pretty sure this is exactly why/how the game's sort of stagnated. Any coders actually worth their salt take one look at the engine and run screaming, so pretty much the only option left to the playerbase is 'gently caress around with .jsons'. Paired with a healthy dose of 'if we make the game impenetrable and Drake_263 fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Aug 22, 2018 |
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Aug 21, 2018 08:14
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So I'm playing a newish experimental and they changed the color of shocker brutes from blue to white. Not a huge deal after the initial surprise when one snuck up on me but in case anybody hadn't realized yet that might not be a harmless skeleton coming your way. Personally I don't love shockers simply because the most effective way to combat them prior to having a dedicated vehicle is to set your pants on fire and then stand completely still while it electrocutes you and that just doesn't seem intuitive to me but whatever it worked and that's all I can ask for.
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Aug 22, 2018 21:48
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i've never found shockers that different from any other zombie so long as your weapon is nonconductive like don't try to punch them, but a cudgel kills them just as easy as it kills every other deadhead.
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Aug 22, 2018 22:44
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So I did a little testing and found that I was generally wrong and shockers really aren't so bad with a bit of melee skill and a cudgel; hell I almost took out a shocker brute after the two test shockers I spawned. The problem is I'm always so weighed down with firefighter clothes or armor that I'm not getting my attacks in quickly enough and a first day survivor with no equipment is actually better equipped to handle them then I expected. I don't really know if this changes my opinion on the matter since the combo of a ranged attack (making luring them very unappealing) and the fact that shockers/brutes so often spawn in crowded hordes means that losing the armor for the confrontation is kind of a no go but it is definitely something I'll take into account from now on.
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Aug 23, 2018 09:43
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My problem with shockers/shocker brutes is that they stun you for several rounds, pummel you, and then shock you again almost right after so even with a non-conductive weapon I end up spending most of the fight seeing stars.
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Aug 23, 2018 13:21
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well part of it is that you are wearing firefighter clothing? firefighter clothing is really not that great for movin' around clothes precisely because they are so heavy. i'd butcher that out, save the nomex, weave the kevlar into your duster, weave some leather in there too for good measure, bob's your uncle for standard attacks. ultimately you'll get to light survivor armor and that's the real goal, but a reinforced duster will protect you plenty well and leave you fast enough to cleave your way through most threats.
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Aug 23, 2018 16:33
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If you're doing melee, keep your torso encumbrance below 25 for goodness sake. The only thing I can't melee down (L7s/L6s skill, but true as early as ~L3ish) is Skeletal Juggernauts, since I have to max a damage roll to deal any damage whatsoever. I used a Wood Axe (lumberjack profession) for most of my game, now running a Scimitar I pretty much just have to run back to my car and run them over
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Aug 24, 2018 07:36
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