|
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.
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2017 10:11
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 21:23 |
|
|
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."
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2017 17:34
|
|
|
I just started playing again and I have to ask, what is even the point of zombie evolution? By day 3 I'm pretty sure the only special zombies I haven't seen are necromancers, hulks and some location specific ones. Also I remember why I stopped playing, there's so much busywork and about 1/2 my playtime has been traversing the great apocalypse that is Cataclysm's inventory/crafting UI. I hope one of the things GDA does is add some quality of life things. Here's just some stuff off the top of my head that would be nice to have: Getting rid of thirst probably a good idea, having 2 food clocks adds nothing but micromanagement. If I try to light a fire on a tile with nothing flammable, let me select a flammable object from my inventory. If I'm in a vehicle, my crafting range should extend to the entire vehicle as long as there aren't any hostile creatures in there too. Similarly, let me designate a home area with the same benefit as long as I keep hostiles out. Batch crafting should probably be the default, if I don't want to craft multiples I can just choose to craft 1. Have a quick stack option that takes everything in your inventory and dumps it in the surrounding tiles if there's already a stack of that item there. Have an option to disassemble all of a single item type rather than just one thing or everything. There's probably loads more that could be added but that's what I can think of after ~2 hours of playing.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2017 12:06
|
|
|
Coolguye posted:yeah, the number one way to handle inventory better would be allowing you to put stuff in actual containers instead of just on your person, so you could, for example, carry around a sherpa bag of poo poo and then just drop it and grab it as needed when things get hot. but that's been a target for a long time at this point. there isn't a good way to allow that without making inventory management more annoying up front. Separate inventories for containers would be neat but it would also make the current inventory UI even harder to navigate, it would have to come with a full UI overhaul really. You could get a similar effect with two simple changes though; the ability to mark items as important so they're dropped last when carry capacity goes down and make it so if you pick up a piece of clothing with volume picking up other items takes no time up to the capacity of that clothing. OwlFancier posted:I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with calculating dipersion in arcminutes but it could do with a more useful display to the player about how accurate they can expect to be. It's definitely possible to calculate a % chance to hit from dispersion. The real problem with dispersion is that it makes range pretty much trump every other concern, if you try to make a gun that's decent at medium range it becomes pretty much pinpoint accurate at short range which is really hard to balance. The current builds try to help this with aiming time which is a decent idea, too bad they hosed it up by obfuscating any actual usable information from the player. If I remember right you have like a stability meter and a confidence meter or something which means ???
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2017 06:40
|
|
|
Really I don't know about how accurate to reality dispersion models are. I'm sure people decided on a dispersion model using arcminutes for Cataclysm because arcminutes are what gun companies use to advertise the accuracy of their guns and that's data you can just plug into the game but arcminutes don't really describe the human element of shooting accuracy well. A person who misses by 2 arcminutes at 50 metres won't necessarily miss by 2 arcminutes at 100 metres or 10 metres.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2017 07:09
|
|
|
Coolguye posted:yeah it's hard to say without a corpus of data, which to my knowledge doesn't exist, but it models the bullet trajectory perfectly which is honestly the problem you're trying to solve for here. the human element of anything becomes such a clusterfuck that it's not worth modeling correctly, see also my ridiculously dumb posts itt about actually modeling nutrition and body mechanics with regard to microdamage from the very hard life you're leading in DDA. the same sorts of questions come up when considering the influences of the human element in shooting. I'm not trying to say that we should try to model the human element. My point is that the reason dispersion was chosen over a simple % chance to hit with modifiers was because it's more accurate/realistic. If it happens to not actually be realistic why not just go back to % chances to hit and maybe have a simple dispersion model for misses or something. Plus % chances are easier to balance and understand, realism be damned.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2017 07:30
|
|
|
But that's fine, misses don't have to be balanced, they don't have to be inherently understood by a player. Don't remove dispersion, just don't make the player have to make decisions based on it. Say I'm shooting a zombie 10 tiles away which I'll just assume is 20 metres, the game should tell me that because of my 5 rifles and 4 marksman skill I have a 60% chance to hit, because I'm 10 tiles away I get +10% and because I took a turn to aim I get another +10% giving me an 80% chance to hit. If I shoot and roll a miss, then the dispersion calculation happens and it works out that to miss a 1 metre target at 20 metres I have to miss by ~2.5 degrees so it calculates the trajectory with a 7.5 degree dispersion. Maybe I hit the zombie anyway but I probably don't and it really doesn't matter, it's just a neat thing that the game does, not something core to it's balance which should be easy to understand as a player and adjust as a developer. Edit: Actually I just realised I'm basically saying do what OG Xcom does, if you roll a hit calculate a hit trajectory, if you roll a miss calculate a miss trajectory, don't calculate a trajectory and decide hit or miss from that. Dire Lemming fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Sep 16, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2017 07:50
|
|
|
DayGloOreo posted:Kevin is continuing to do everything he can to turn this game into an unfun mess. I think this is probably the best example of how little Kevin understands about making games. Note that he could have just said "no bird mutants can't fly" but instead he gave a list of sacrifices needed to be able to fly without any consideration as to the advantages of actually being able to fly or how the game would be played by a player who couldn't interact with some major features of the game. He never thinks about whether something is necessary to add or enjoyable to interact with, the only important thing to him is whether it fits with his incredibly flawed view of the world.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2018 09:33
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:There's a Stats Through Skulls mod. Obviously the solution is stat gains through black magic. Stats through skills is neat but it has the problem that you can make your character overpowered very quickly just by reading beginner books because every skill increases your stats. I think it would work better if your stats were only increased by your best 3 skills for each stat.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2019 02:46
|
|
|
So I've been playing with the latest experimental and I just have to share the absolute insanity that is gun mods now. So say you wanted to mod your gun to be faster to aim at close ranges, what would you add? Red dot sight? A laser sight? Nope, you'd add a folding stock obviously. See a folding stock decreases the size of the weapon The volume and weight of a gun affect how quick it is to aim which sort of makes sense but the influence of volume and weight on aim speed are so huge that they render the aim speed stats of different sights basically irrelevant. In fact because adding mods slightly increases a weapon's weight adding a laser sight which is meant to make the gun faster to aim can actually make it slower. What this boils down to is that folding stock is the one good mod now unless you're making a sniper rifle. Every other mod will generally make the gun slower to aim which is the only important stat against anything that's closer than 20 tiles.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2020 07:39
|
|
|
Actually apart from the mods thing guns seem OP as hell right now, literally every soldier/military zombie carries a .223 rifle or machine gun with around 15 rounds in it. You can get a lot of the same ammo scavenging from military vehicle turrets too and if you take out a turret in a lab (use grenades if you don't have amazing armour) you'll get its entire 1600 rounds of ammo which basically means you can go wild and shoot everything now. I'm not actually as down on Cataclysm as my earlier post might have implied, the mod thing is dumb and likely caused by people with no grasp on reality wanting realism but this new playthrough has been more fun than the last time I played back in 0.C experimentals. NPCs are great now. CBMs are annoying but it made me actually recruit an NPC in the first place so there's that. Vitamins weren't the horrible chore I expected them to be, I've never seen any vitamin deficiencies on a 100 day character and I haven't been trying to hit 100% RDIs every day or anything. I agree they shouldn't be in the game but they weren't horrible, just irrelevant. The new nutrition system itself isn't bad either, the only problem is that they give you a worse than useless fullness meter rather than actual information on your nutrition probably because realism again. Vehicles are much better than they were when I last played. My 20 ton military-composite-armoured rolling hoboshack can run into things at 60km/h+ without breaking anything internal which is a massive improvement to my playstyle. Magiclysm is amazing top to bottom (except the magic gun mods  )Also they finally added a late game targeted purifier so maybe I'll actually use mutagens now. They're still worse than CBMs in pretty much every way but they're at least less bad now. Basically game is mostly good, just some really dumb decisions that I had to metagame around.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2020 18:41
|
|
|
Ok having played more with Magiclysm I will say it has one pretty glaring flaw. One of the things I really like about bionics in this is that there are two ways to progress with them, gaining more powerful CBMs and gaining more power storage. Getting new CBMs is reliant on random loot so you can be unlucky and go through lab after lab never getting anything useful and that can suck. However because you'll also be finding power storage in those same labs you'll still be getting stronger and so it doesn't feel like a waste of time even if you're unlucky. Magic doesn't work the same way, mana is determined by intelligence and a couple of mutations so it's hard to increase with a hard cap on how high you can go. So you're just at the mercy of RNG on whether you get any more powerful when you're searching for new magic stuff. This wouldn't really be a problem by itself but Magiclysm has basically set itself up as opposed to bionics, bionic power lowers your mana and mana is finite so you have to keep your bionic power quite low if you want to be able to cast spells. So now not only is progression in Magiclysm purely dependent on RNG but if you want to use it you have to give up the consistent progression of bionics as well which is really making the late game drag because I come out of 90% of trips basically empty handed. Suspect Bucket posted:What the hell are these messages I'm getting about strugling to wake up? I've been eating boiled dandelion greens and fruit. What does this stupid god damned game want from me? Check your weight under your stats in the character screen, there are messages for getting too skinny about your stomach being empty but there's no notification for gaining weight as far as I know, you just have to check every now and again.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2020 08:22
|
|
|
Vib Rib posted:There's probably an easy enough way to mod Magiclysm (or a modular addon for it) that removes the conflict with bionics, so you can be a cyberwizard. Likewise it would be harder but probably still feasible to make some sort of consumeable permanent mana capacity upgrade, in the form of potions, reagents, gems, or what have you. Might be worth looking into, as modding for the game is surprisingly simple and any mods would be included as editable source. I tried looking and as far as I can tell mana is hardcoded so it would be more effort than I'm willing to put in. edit: there is a value mutations can have called mana_modifier which is defined through .json so now I'm just adding that to a random mutation my character has to offset my bionic power, good enough for now. Dire Lemming fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Feb 5, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2020 12:18
|
|
|
Oh well actually jokes on me, I had been keeping my bionic power around 500 because of Magiclysm but apparently there's a bionic power cap of 2100 now so I guess I take everything back about it being a well designed late game progression system.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2020 12:42
|
|
|
Vib Rib posted:Wait, it's a mod, right? I assumed the whole thing would be defined through .json. Does Cataclysm support other formats for mods now? A lot of the mods that are included in the core download have hardcoded elements or are entirely hardcoded with the .json only turning it on or off. Actually it's annoying, I had a custom setup for stats through skills last time I played but it's hardcoded now and while its not using the old 1 stat per 3 skill levels it's still bad, just in a different way.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2020 14:27
|
|
|
Sinatrapod posted:On one hand, this hurts because putting together your full Survivor Outfit always felt like a cool milestone, a real "I'm on my way" moment. That's really more of a problem with everything else rather than a problem with survivor armour. All of the other top tier armours have some combination of high encumberance, no storage or less than 100% coverage. Survivor armour is basically the only armour that's better than being unencumbered.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 11:22
|
|
|
Leal posted:The other 50% will have a hole in the pocket I fully expect this rework to either contain or lead to having items fall out of damaged bags for maximum annoyance.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2020 08:38
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Yes. Bandages and gauze are the same, bandages just have a higher percent chance to stop bleeding. With some skill makeshift bandages become pretty easy and useful, and can be boiled costing no disinfectant to make. Multivitamins don't increase your health score anymore, in fact currently they do nothing because the negative effects for vitamin deficiencies are apparently turned off now even if you're not using simplified nutrition. The best way to increase your health other than the leukocyte breeder is protein shakes which are pretty easy to make as long as you have a food dehydrator.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2020 07:44
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:What does it mean when "You feel that your body needs more nutritious food"? I ate a bunch and it's still spamming me with it, does it mean that I need more meat? I'm pretty sure that's just the first message you get telling you that you're getting below a healthy weight. There's like a 1 day delay between eating food and it actually having an impact on your stored calories so it will take a bit for the message to go away even if you've eaten more than enough.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2020 12:35
|
|
|
Angry Diplomat posted:My current character ate too many crow eggs and became overweight, so I spent the next two days just shotgunning water out of a bucket and everything worked out fine. I was chugging like twenty liters of water a day, it was loving insane. I'm pretty sure being hungry doesn't actually have any effect on your character anymore so you can just stay at very hungry for as long as you need to. Of course they'll probably implement mood/focus/pain penalties for being hungry eventually and Cataclysm will finally be "Poor Person in a Food Desert Simulator" as it was always meant to be.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2020 17:21
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Is there a way to see what's affecting my base movement cost? It's 109 and I don't know why. (my encumbrance affects Running cost, not walking) Encumbrance affected running speed before running was even a thing, it definitely affects both and they should probably change that description. I'm pretty sure the encumbrance descriptions haven't been updated since .C though so it's probably not going to happen, arm encumbrance actually affects combat pretty severely now but still has no actual effects listed in its description.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2020 16:06
|
|
|
The hobo stove is an item that runs off charges so it completely sidesteps the problem of fires.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2020 03:40
|
|
|
Dirk the Average posted:For some reason a bleak apocalypse brought on by a disease is relatable to current events. Also the world steadily getting worse with every new announcement from the people in power.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2020 07:41
|
|
|
Artifacts are base game and yeah they pretty much all have horrible side-effects that completely overshadow any benefit they might give.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2020 03:46
|
|
|
So did anyone else notice robust genetics got removed? Did the way mutations are rolled get changed with it or is everyone just twice as likely to get a bad mutation as a good one now?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2020 01:51
|
|
|
Unfortunately no matter how tough you make your vehicle smashing through wrecks and other cars is always going to be risky. It will work sometimes but the vehicle movement code is wonky and often you'll get into situations where your vehicle is trying to push another vehicle through itself. When that happens parts just tend to evaporate no matter how strong they are or what speed you're going.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2020 16:52
|
|
|
Manager Hoyden posted:Huh. Turns out it's a bugged vehicle. A swivel chair is colliding with the floor for eternity. I'm pretty sure it's a bug with single tile vehicles being pushed by zombies, the only way I've found to fix it is debug teleport to it and destroy the vehicle completely.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2021 10:59
|
|
|
Manager Hoyden posted:I would if I could. Interacting with these vehicles (I've found a few now) is mercilessly slow and I'm not sure how long it would need to sit and work to remove that last piece. Or I guess c4 it, but for some reason they are crazy resistant to damage. Explosives do a lot of damage but rarely destroy parts completely. Instead get a sledgehammer and debug your strength to something silly then just smash it a bunch.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2021 02:35
|
|
|
It's a system designed to slow down the game basically. As you work you get weary which makes you work slower and also attack slower I think? Anyway it's another system to drag out the game to the desired 90 day season timescale without actually adding content to fill that time. It's also another reason to play Bright Nights instead.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2021 10:05
|
|
|
RazzleDazzleHour posted:A basilisk that instakills you if you use the look button to examine it because technically that would constitute as making eye contact This would be a much better game if the devs were committed to Nethack-style "walking over a cockatrice corpse while blind and not wearing gloves turns you to stone because you identify items by touch" realism rather than survivalist/tacticool realism.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2021 05:53
|
|
|
A sawn-off .50 sniper rifle with pistol grip has become an invaluable part of my endgame kit. So dumb yet so effective.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2021 00:22
|
|
|
Xand_Man posted:As like, a holdout pistol? Depending on how much .50 ammo I have either a holdout pistol or main short range gun. Far better against kevlar hulks and skeletal juggs than any 5.56 rifle and also can destroy metal doors so you don't need to carry a jackhammer down into labs if you fail a door hack.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2021 02:11
|
|
|
Pretty sure pistol grip is from the Cata+ mod though, a folding stock is the best you'd get in vanilla.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2021 01:43
|
|
|
Spell experience is influenced by intelligence and focus, so cast all your int buffs before training and do it when you've got 100+ focus. Also look for magic schools if you want spells, they usually have a bunch of books in a library plus some magic items. You're right that Magiclysm's balance is all over the place though, it's why I stopped using it. Pretty much everything is either completely useless or destroys everything in the base game and even internal balance is pretty much non-existent. Like there's a level 5 spell for each stat that gives +4 to it for a moderate duration, then there's a level 4 spell that's cheaper and lasts longer and gives +4 to dex and int and +20 speed. The balance issue ruins the "picking one school locks out another" system too since there's basically a correct and very obvious choice if you're just going for power rather than a theme.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2021 02:10
|
|
|
Biggest vehicle I've ever done was a 7x13, 3x9 internal space with 2 layers thick armour all around. It was great having both every vehicle crafting station and a ton of storage. Then I got a storage dimension from blazemod and it ended up being half empty and despite the armour it couldn't really ram anything out of the way. I'll probably go for smaller in the future but it was a fun project scavenging military and solar vehicles while my deathmobile protected me with its turrets.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2021 03:41
|
|
|
I'm waiting with baited breath for the day they add realistic fuel age and battery/rubber degradation mechanics for vehicles.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2022 04:56
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 21:23 |
|
|
Cataclysm: Urine for a bad time
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2023 11:34
|
|