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Jawnycat posted:If you enjoy more nitty gritty and mechanical cruft, DDA is for you like it is for me. I like what BN is doing, but I need my overly complicated pockets system and nutrition and garbage. If you'd rather things be more abstracted and simple with a focus on gameplay first over realism, BN is where to go. Similarly its always fun to figure out you missed a vehicle roof tile when it starts raining and you get soaked.
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Mar 8, 2022 18:00
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habituallyred posted:Probably the only way to keep the BN vs DDA slapfights out of that thread would be a separate BN LP. Some of the most recent updates with the boat cruise are highlighting the systematic suppression of things that let survivors make it past the midgame. So that nobody has to code an endgame. I am somewhat tempted to do a BN LP and maybe have it somewhat collaborative with 1 or 2 other people posting their runs. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Mar 8, 2022 |
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Mar 8, 2022 18:11
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Jawnycat posted:From what I've seen from reading abandoned git pages for DDA mods, the DDA devs are actively hostile to most mod developers behind the scenes. Yeah mods get removed from distribution, obsoleted, or in some cases blocked in the game itself unless the modder kisses the ring. And by kiss the ring I mean cede all design control I wish someone could reprogram these shitheels Clockwork Orange style to make them understand that you finish a game first, then go back and balance the systems. Oh and also maybe that the right way to rebalance in a single-player game is to add more interesting challenges, not nerf existing things into uselessness.
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Mar 8, 2022 19:27
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This is making me think I need to give BN an actual earnest go. Playing on Experimental is kind of fun, but the more tedious systems keep repelling me. I get to approximately the point where I'm collecting loot and are making purposeful trips for stuff I want and then go "okay well know what."
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Mar 8, 2022 20:05
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Yeah that’s always been my signal to re roll my character. There isn’t anything to do once you’re kitted out in survival gear with a deathmobile. (Well, aside from driving through an uncleared town with all your turrets set to auto fire, you need to do that at least once.)
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Mar 8, 2022 20:12
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Most of my characters end after getting bored, engineering a superbike/car with multiple engines and hundreds of miles per hour tospeed and then seeing how long before slamming so hard into a tree/building that everything vaporizes.
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Mar 8, 2022 20:15
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DoubleNegative posted:This is making me think I need to give BN an actual earnest go. Playing on Experimental is kind of fun, but the more tedious systems keep repelling me. I get to approximately the point where I'm collecting loot and are making purposeful trips for stuff I want and then go "okay well know what." While BN is less tedious you will still reach that "okay now what" point Though with all the avaliable mods you can just set some arbitrary goal like having a perpeutal motion machine powered death mobile and dedicate yourself to scouring the labs and such for the materials. Another fairly okay goal is a working set of power armor thats fairly kitted out. There is also an artifact type that closes portals and you could call acquiring that you beating the game.
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Mar 8, 2022 20:20
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Telsa Cola posted:I am somewhat tempted to do a BN LP and maybe have it somewhat collaborative with 1 or 2 other people posting their runs. I don't think I have a full run in me. But I will be happy to post a booze powered cyborg run from start to inevitable death. The only question is whether to install the fantasy class mod and use the sorcerer. Or to cheat in the Whales era random mod combination of Ethanol power and the demolition system. Bank robbery would feature prominently in that second one.
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Mar 8, 2022 20:58
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To me, even more than nutrition, weariness/exhaustion, and the utterly unintuitive disconnect between hunger and calories (plus how you have to balance that against "exertion levels"), the most obvious indicator of CDDA's bullshit is the proficiency crafting system. In addition to the main crafting skills, there are now dozens of specific crafting sub-categories, like stone knapping, fiber twisting, basket weaving, leather joining, and so on, which are scored at 0-100%. New characters will generally start with all of them at 0. The only way to get these proficiencies up is to "complete" is to make crafts that require them. But going from 0-100 on just one proficiency can take literal days of total crafting time. To master fiber twisting you'd have to make something like 60+ distinct crafts taking over half an hour each. In practicality, unless you're doing a wilderness survival challenge run, the only proficiencies that will ever reach 100 are the ones required for extremely time-intensive recipes, like forging a katana, which can take it from 0-100 in a single craft. When a proficiency is not 100%, it will multiply the time a recipe takes to make. Since recipes can have multiple stacking proficiencies, some crafts which already take a good while can take 20x their usual time. In practice, such a long craft can last for solid days. I don't even understand what the point of this system is. For rarely used proficiencies, it just makes recipes take a lot longer. For commonly used or already time-intensive ones, it makes your first craft take insanely long, then any subsequent crafts are normal. What's the benefit to this system? Where's the upside? How is this fun? How is this not already reflected in existing crafting categories? They went through a massive overhaul of the entire crafting system just to make it more tedious and obnoxious. And it sucks, because there's so much cool stuff DDA is doing. There's a practice/training tab under crafting now! You can build training dummies to bring combat skills up, or tinker with very cheap materials to raise your skills instead of just grinding out whatever the most accessible but time-intensive craft at your level is! That's really cool! It's just marred by this other awful bullshit they threw in.
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Mar 8, 2022 22:09
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Vib Rib posted:When a proficiency is not 100%, it will multiply the time a recipe takes to make. Since recipes can have multiple stacking proficiencies, some crafts which already take a good while can take 20x their usual time. In practice, such a long craft can last for solid days. The proficiency system did change how you have to go about getting to something like a survivor suit, but if you do the practice crafts, work on less intensive--in both time and resource--crafts that use the same proficiency, and keep your focus up, gaining those proficiencies is super quick. Overall I think it mostly feels like busywork if you try to rush to the craft that requires a huge amount of them, and that frustration gets bigger if you try to just power through a craft that requires any more than one you don't have.
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Mar 9, 2022 00:34
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i actually like the proficiency system, mainly because there's not a lot to do with all the crazy high end crafting stuff once you get there and you're nearly invincible. makes it feel like more of an accomplishment. it'd be more annoying if it was some arbitrary gate between me and the fun gameplay i guess, but the early game is the most interesting part of current cataclysm. it does all needs some balancing though, for sure
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Mar 9, 2022 00:37
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As a person who could never get into Cataclysm before, BN has been very nice for me to finally get a grip on things. I've tried going back to DDA, but the amount of bloat there kinda outweighs the additions for me, personally. I get that there's folks out there who want that, it's just not my thing. A certain recently released RPG has me currently drawn away from Cataclysm as a whole, but I'm sure it'll find it's way back into my free time once I'm done with it. Telsa Cola posted:I am somewhat tempted to do a BN LP and maybe have it somewhat collaborative with 1 or 2 other people posting their runs. If you do end up doing one, I might be able to contribute from time to time. I've thought about doing it myself, but I don't have the time right now to lead such a thread on top of the two LPs I'm already running. I still don't know a lot of the game though, I've only got probably 20 hours in it, and that's a generous estimate.
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Mar 9, 2022 00:55
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The proficiency system feels fairly well balanced to me, many proficiencies have a set 'practice' craft that takes one hour (basically a dummy recipe that trains it and makes no useful product while consuming some basic but appropriate materials), for basic proficiencies, two or three crafts of the practice craft will get it. For more advanced it takes like, eight crafts at high focus. Having an appropriate manual on hand (first aid book for practicing wound care for example) boosts the gain even further. For the ones that are real poo poo at learning, like metalworking, some of the NPC's at the refugee center can teach them to you for a fee. I find it fun because before I make my suit of super armor, I have to learn all the bits and bobs of making it, study and practice, gather material not for the suit but for the learning, it makes it a whole journey, even when you have the flat skills, and that's really rewarding to me.
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Mar 9, 2022 01:52
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Jawnycat posted:I find it fun because before I make my suit of super armor, I have to learn all the bits and bobs of making it, study and practice, gather material not for the suit but for the learning, it makes it a whole journey, even when you have the flat skills, and that's really rewarding to me. yeah, this. same
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Mar 9, 2022 01:54
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I prefer tedium to be abstracted as much as possible in games and don't think menu diving is actual gameplay in the first place
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Mar 9, 2022 01:59
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The problem is that you can make a super suit out of trash and all it costs is tedium and button presses. Increasing the amount of tedium and button presses required does not fix that problem.
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Mar 9, 2022 07:43
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Did you know that in BN there's no way to stop auto moving, and that no button presses including 5 will work to stop it? Did you also know that it's possible to glitch the game so your character will spend the rest of eternity trying to go somewhere that they can never reach? 
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Mar 9, 2022 09:12
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BN does have good mod pack support, mostly because the mod pack maintainers have been turned off on the main fork for so long. I really do like some of the complexity of the main, but they keep doing things to the setting, like removing cyborgs and doing that stupid exxodi thing, I really wish we could get back to whales scifi setting. Like main fork Aftershock is probably the closest to what I want, but I still avoid it because Kevin is just a lovely person. Like the guy thinks Karen is a slur, he's just... dumb and petty and really rubs me the wrong way, and has since he took over from gryphglyph.
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Mar 9, 2022 10:18
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They got rid of cyborgs? Why?!
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Mar 9, 2022 10:27
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Anticheese posted:They got rid of cyborgs? Why?! They're not in line with the new lore so they're not part of the base game any more, but there's a packaged in mod which adds them back in so the practical difference is minimal. I was fairly opposed to the Exodii content originally but now that they've been properly fleshed out, I think that they're a good improvement to the game. You can start using low level bionics relatively early on and the good ones are gated behind faction stuff. Previously the gate on bionics was basically "raided a bunch of labs y/n"
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Mar 9, 2022 11:53
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If Cataclysm++ and Aftershock both worked with BN I wouldn't see any reason to play DDA again. Stuff like the end game of Cata++ with the ridiculous hulk sized mutants (At least, with Undeadpeople active. That tileset needs to have someone continue it. The others unfortunately just don't hold a candle to it's quality in one way or another.), bioweapon starts, extra factions, and actual goals (Like the sandbox roadtrip with the other bioweapons to find weapons and vehicles good enough to take out the mutant army.) make it a lot of fun while adding in new optional goals to shoot for. And that's not even touching the items, skills, and similar content those mods add. A lot of the content oriented features DDA's branch has promised have been constantly backburnered (NPC factions that do stuff in the world, building your own base, followers doing stuff in the faction) sometimes for years on end in favor of creating an artificial tedium gate meant to make it harder to get past parts of the game. All of which appears to be to avoid having to actually do the honestly hard work of making enjoyable sandbox or classic Cataclysm content that expands on the experience in a way that isn't pointless tedium. It's to the point where it's obvious that they have no idea what to do outside of just throw some random stuff in that's haphazardly finished at best. And then they go back to reading and misinterpreting wikipedia articles about vitamins and bullet penetration to justify doing some busy work that will inevitably add more unnecessary bullshit to deal with or gently caress up existing mechanics that worked before they touched them. Hell, even the NPC base content and a bit of the faction stuff started out as a mod, as I recall. It wasn't even core content for the game until it got adopted in. Alternatively, if you want a more moral reason to play BN then consider this: For years now people have been telling Kevin and the other coders of DDA that he needs to get his act together while occasionally warning him that if he keeps loving around with the whole "Well then make your own fork of the game.  " excuse whenever criticism of certain features was raised then he'd find out that the people making actual content for DDA like the modders (or old school players that enjoyed what it was before Kevin's fork hosed it up) would inevitably do just that. Which would render him obsolete to large portions of the userbase and likely seriously harm the viability of his fork.He in fact did keep loving around only to find out that since the game is open source the people making mods and decent gameplay didn't need him and any other participating coders as much as he needed them. Now he and his fanbase are pissed that they were treated the same way that a lot of the community were treated over the years --- as something that is irrelevant to the actual progress of the development of the game and which gets no say in the development of one of the more popular forks. Especially since a lot of mod makers are just sick and tired of his assholish personality that lead to him to keep loving over their mods (Again, the mods that added actual content to the game that kept quite a few people coming back.) in ways that were just stupid or regressive. The fact that Kevin has been smugging it up and insisting that people make their own fork (While being viciously protective of the tedium oriented work he puts in, all while making GBS threads on the mod makers that are making content that actually keeps people coming back to play his fork.) when people brought this issue up just makes the whole thing deeply ironic. People have been warning the devs of the DDA branch for years that something like BN was going to happen if they kept acting like this and they just assumed they were untouchable. Jawnycat posted:From what I've seen from reading abandoned git pages for DDA mods, the DDA devs are actively hostile to most mod developers behind the scenes. Yeah, and to be clear, there used to be some incredible mods. Factions and NPC bases started out as a mod for instance. Likewise, you had wild stuff like that one mod that let you be a dedicated roboticist (Like, you could assemble the parts for a bootleg mechanical chicken walker or something like that. And some of the robots were downright wild in their design as you got up in the skill tree.) like you were Dr. Wiley or some sort of hosed up post-apoc Dr. Robotnik. All these mods are gone now, since the DDA folks kept arbitrarily changing things (often making them worse and extremely inaccurate to real life despite their claims of realism) that required rewrites of code that in some cases had mostly been established for years, making it safe to do expansive or creative mods like that without a lot of hassle on the modders part. And that's if they didn't just remove necessary aspects to the mod outright in the name of "realism". So the mod makers quit modding and went to do something more productive with their time. Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Mar 9, 2022 |
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Mar 9, 2022 13:01
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Telsa Cola posted:I am somewhat tempted to do a BN LP and maybe have it somewhat collaborative with 1 or 2 other people posting their runs. I'd follow that LP! I've been enjoying Worm Girl's a lot, I'd love to have more.
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Mar 9, 2022 21:34
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RabidWeasel posted:They're not in line with the new lore so they're not part of the base game any more, but there's a packaged in mod which adds them back in so the practical difference is minimal. Archonex posted:If Cataclysm++ and Aftershock both worked with BN I wouldn't see any reason to play DDA again.
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Mar 10, 2022 03:13
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Aftershock and Cataclysm+++ or whatever many pluses both work and have worked with it for ages. They are both on in my current run.
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Mar 10, 2022 04:13
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Vib Rib posted:Having not played much of CDDA's Exodii content, how do they make bionics more accessible early on? You can just straight up buy them from the faction vendor, there's a tiering system where they'll only sell you certain bionics once you've completed certain missions, but the really low level stuff you can get from day 1. And they can also do the installation for you.
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Mar 10, 2022 09:14
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Telsa Cola posted:Aftershock and Cataclysm+++ or whatever many pluses both work and have worked with it for ages. They are both on in my current run. They're not up to date. Well, Aftershock isn't. It's basically at the stage it was when it was just the scifi added back into Cataclysm. The main DDA version is a more total conversion that's turning the game into a cool exo planet colony. I don't know if +++ is. Is that the one with the bio weapon badges and stuff? It's in the mod pack that's common these days, but once again I'm not sure if it's just a maintained old version or the up to date one. It gets even weirder with mods like arcana, which have two versions each a bit different because of features taken out of CDDA (something with the portals that kevin removed from the game.)
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Mar 10, 2022 10:04
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:They're not up to date. Well, Aftershock isn't. It's basically at the stage it was when it was just the scifi added back into Cataclysm. The main DDA version is a more total conversion that's turning the game into a cool exo planet colony. RabidWeasel posted:You can just straight up buy them from the faction vendor, there's a tiering system where they'll only sell you certain bionics once you've completed certain missions, but the really low level stuff you can get from day 1. And they can also do the installation for you.
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Mar 10, 2022 11:29
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Vib Rib posted:Having not played much of CDDA's Exodii content, how do they make bionics more accessible early on? Killer-of-Lawyers posted:They're not up to date. Well, Aftershock isn't. It's basically at the stage it was when it was just the scifi added back into Cataclysm. The main DDA version is a more total conversion that's turning the game into a cool exo planet colony. When I tried to use Arcana with the latest expermental it didn't work. Ditto for a lot of other mods. Maybe they got updated for compat though? Or maybe it's that I didn't use the right version for Kenan's mod pack?
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Mar 10, 2022 12:39
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Archonex posted:When I tried to use Arcana with the latest expermental it didn't work. Ditto for a lot of other mods. Maybe they got updated for compat though?
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Mar 10, 2022 12:57
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Vib Rib posted:You said Aftershock and Cata++, I have no idea what Arcana's compat or recent update is like for BN but I do know that worked witin the last few months, at least. I'm pretty sure i had to get it from a different Github than Kenan's though. Aftershock and Cata are rolled into that, though i'm thinking the version I played had some incompatibility issues that were probably fixed. That would be why I had problems. In the end I had to settle for just Aftershock, Magiclysm, and some minor mods. Secunom or whatever it's called seemed like a neat mod but it like plenty of other mods didn't work due to crashing the world gen. It'd be nice if we had some sort of central hub to tell us where BN's up to date/functional mods are at. I tried one of the launchers (Which I think also lets you download Kenan's pack.) but ran into the same problem with compatibility issues. Having to trawl the internet for mods one at a time is probably it's biggest downside when compared to DDA. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Mar 10, 2022 |
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Mar 10, 2022 15:24
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Vib Rib posted:Oh drat. Is that like, in a playable state yet, or mostly proof of concept? Last I played was a while ago, it was half there. There were ruins with cryopods, climate and some fauna was different, they had their own weird alien infected that showed up in addition to zombies, there were like, alien laser pistols and stuff in addition to the old standby laser weapons. It was a lot of fun on CDDA experimental when I played it but not wholly there. Archonex posted:When I tried to use Arcana with the latest expermental it didn't work. Ditto for a lot of other mods. Maybe they got updated for compat though? That's because Kenan's modpack doesn't update compatability for CDDA anymore. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmbn/comments/qy7y21/kenan_modpack_going_to_be_bright_nights_exclusive/ TLDR from Kenan themselves: "Thing is, developers along with key contributors often show to have an unexplainable contempt towards 3rd party work"\ You can get the CDDA version of Arcana off of the github for the mod proper, at least last I checked here: https://github.com/chaosvolt/cdda-arcana-mod Just use the Arcana folder, not the Arcana_BN one.
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Mar 10, 2022 23:22
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Last I played was a while ago, it was half there. There were ruins with cryopods, climate and some fauna was different, they had their own weird alien infected that showed up in addition to zombies, there were like, alien laser pistols and stuff in addition to the old standby laser weapons. It was a lot of fun on CDDA experimental when I played it but not wholly there. I was talking about compatibility issues with Bright Nights, not CDDA/Kevin's fork. Archonex fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Mar 10, 2022 |
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Mar 10, 2022 23:47
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Archonex posted:I was talking about compatibility issues with Bright Nights, not CDDA/Kevin's fork. When is the last time you tried? I ask because they are constantly updating them and I havent had any real issues in the past 6 months Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 00:43
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Telsa Cola posted:When is the last time you tried? Two or three weeks ago.
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Mar 11, 2022 00:50
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Archonex posted:Two or three weeks ago. Ill poke around at it when I get home. The biggest issue I remember having is that they forgot a comma or line seperator in one of the text files and it would throw an error for that item but still let you play.
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Mar 11, 2022 00:53
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Github isn't bad for this purpose, but a single central repository for up to date mods and the last (verified) compatible version listed with them would go a long way to sustainability. Unfortunately that'd be more work on the backend and more work for the modmakers to shoulder, so I understand why that's not really happening.
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Mar 11, 2022 01:36
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This FAQ entry may provide further illumination as to why Kenan went over to BN-only, as it's mostly talking about him. It was less "Kenan is discouraged from posting mods" and more a "Kenan, being a human, is not able to keep up with DDA's development and his mods are becoming an unplayable mess as massive system changes in the base game go unaccounted for by the mod." Another modder (Fuji) quit around the same time, possibly prompting Kenan to do the same, after joining in on SomeDeadGuy's transphobic hissy fit about devs injecting leftist gender ideology into the game. I had a much bigger post but I think it might have violated the "do not import drama" rule that this forum has so I'll leave it at that. Jawnycat posted:My current biggest complaint for DDA is that there are so many loving buildings that don't have a roof when they should. Why has nobody fixed this yet. I'm always "ahh yeah, this place'd make a nice thematic base for my dude/roleplay" and then the entire place doesn't have a ceiling. They just fixed the hunting lodge. As for why nobody's fixed all of it yet, it's boring and hard and everyone's busy with stuff that is more interesting to them. Maleclypse posted:It is roughly based and a smaller scale on the main building of a 70’s hunting estate that a friend’s family bought in a bankruptcy auction. Those are in fact representing the random open room hot tub from when they first bought the place. So the three variants were designed to be “swinger pad”, drug distribution, and cannibals with the above floors looking pretty similar no matter what and the basement having the key. I always wondered what the gently caress was going on with that map. worm girl fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 09:14
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I'm not sure who's take I'm buying more over any drama around Kevin, the guy is so toxic and I've been at odds with him for so long that well is absolutely poisoned for me. That said, there are a lot of mods in those modpacks that probably aren't getting updated properly so I can see that being part of the problem, but I also know that a lot of the times it's not just 'we updated things and it needs a refactor' and 'we dropped support for this feature because I don't like it' which happened with arcana before. That FAQ entry is part of the problem, honestly. It reads snarkier than the average goon post, and I can see why everyone is at each other's throat all the time when that's the usual way they talk about each other. Probably a bigger issue is that there's not a lot of documentation for the older mods and what they change exactly, which makes picking mods difficult. (I think there are two build your own robots mods that are in most of the packs, for example. Hell if I know what each does exactly without diving into the JSONS. and I did enough of that back in the Goon Days Ahead years.) Edit: Also now that I think about it, if you do have evidence that Bright Nights is run by a bunch of transphobes, and CDDA isn't then I'd like to know. That's not importing drama, that's informing everyone. gently caress transphobes, I knew about the dead people guy already, but your post seems like it might go beyond just them? Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 17:27
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Is there a way to use the auto sort function to separate damaged from "healthy"? I've been setting up a permanent base in a wooden fort and I'm realizing just how much of my crap is in bad condition. Being able to automatically sort it off to the side for recycling or mending would be helpful.
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Mar 12, 2022 17:42
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:That FAQ entry is part of the problem, honestly. It reads snarkier than the average goon post, and I can see why everyone is at each other's throat all the time when that's the usual way they talk about each other. It's certainly possible that my brain has just been poisoned to the point of not being able to detect it anymore, but I'm not sure how I see the snark in the linked FAQ section after reading it for the first time. It mostly just seems like a pretty reasonable breakdown of why mods and modpacks tend to have compatibility issues with the basegame and why they can cause problems with the new player experience?
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Mar 12, 2022 20:48
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