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[Man of Paper]

So it's been a good bit since I've played and...I can't play. I looked into what's changed since I last played and apparently I have to do some wizardry involving downloading a bunch of crap I'll use for nothing else where too much can go wrong on this iffy rig of mine (6-year old Dell laptop held together by tape and my undying faith in the Omnissiah). Is there some way to play I've somehow overlooked or am I doomed not to touch Cata for an unspecified amount of time?

[Girlinhat]

I... have no idea what you're trying to download.  It comes in a .zip so just unzip it somewhere and run Catacylsm.exe and there you go.  Are you trying to get the source code by accident?

[Sonlirain]

The new version seems to not like me or fullscreen mode
I generated a new world and character... enter the world aaaaand... error no safehouse found. No safehouse no spawn so the game crashed to the desktop.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

There is supposed to be a skill floor for enc penalties. Did that get removed somehow? (Basically, you can get as bad as random chance but no worse)

   From what I saw it is still their, your virtual dice only go down to being d2. The problem is people want to be decent at combat without having ever swung a weapon with intent before.

[chaoticag]

You know, I'm kinda thinking here. How hard would it be to make a weapon tagged with something that gives you a melee skill of 1 or 2 if you have less than that? I'd imagine swinging a sword or a knife around wildly would be harder than swinging a bat or pipe around. There is accuracy as a stat, but it doesn't seem to be as big as having melee skill. It should lessen the impact of fighting smaller creatures while moderately encumbered.

Plus you totally should be able to whack a mole zombie kids. They're prolly the right height for a powerful baseball swing to the head as is. :P

[Werdna]

I can see a bug at the end of player::hit_roll(), but it's not likely to be it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

if (numdice < 1) {
  numdice = 1;
  sides = 8 - encumb(bp_torso);    <--- can result in less than 1 'sides'
 }

There is a floor check for sides, but it's at the top of the function and probably should be moved down here.

It looks to me that in certain scenarios, dodge_roll() is returning a value that is consistently higher than a player's minimum hit_roll().  An 8 STR unskilled, heavily encumbered player with the locker pipe (+3) will be tossing hit_roll=dice(8, 2) against something like a dodge of roughly dice(5, 10) (assuming something like DEX8 dodge=1).  This results in a .6% chance to hit. (source)

The problem is people want to be decent at combat without having ever swung a weapon with intent before.

Jesus, no, I don't.  The problem is the inconsistency between melee and the other forms of combat:

At heavily encumbered and 0 Throwing, I can still hit things with rocks.
At heavily encumbered and 0 Marksmanship/0 SMG, I can still blow away a Zombear at point blank with a Mac 10 on my first try
At heavily encumbered and 0 Archery, I can hit things with arrows more often than not
At heavily encumbered and 0 Melee, OMG, YOU EXPECT TO HIT SOMETHING, WTF?

I've never swung a pipe in anger in my life but I guarantee you I can pick one up and bean you 9 times out of 10 in close quarters.  Maybe 5 times out of 10, with a full hiking pack on.  Not .6%!

[Farce]

So it's been a good bit since I've played and...I can't play. I looked into what's changed since I last played and apparently I have to do some wizardry involving downloading a bunch of crap I'll use for nothing else where too much can go wrong on this iffy rig of mine (6-year old Dell laptop held together by tape and my undying faith in the Omnissiah). Is there some way to play I've somehow overlooked or am I doomed not to touch Cata for an unspecified amount of time?

You're not trying to emulate Linux to run a Linux build of it or something right?  I had to do that for like, the very earliest versions of DDA/last versions of WhalesCata and it was a hilarious adventure of technical wizardry in an operating system I didn't know anything about.

If you're on Windows, though, you can just head on over to the CataclysmDDA website and click either the experimental builds or the stable release for Windows.  It should give you a .zip or a github page that can give you a zip, and then all you gotta do is unpack that shit into the folder of your choice and click the .exe.

But yeah, make sure it's not the source code, and is instead a compiled version.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

The problem is people want to be decent at combat without having ever swung a weapon with intent before.

Jesus, no, I don't.  The problem is the inconsistency between melee and the other forms of combat:

At heavily encumbered and 0 Throwing, I can still hit things with rocks.
At heavily encumbered and 0 Marksmanship/0 SMG, I can still blow away a Zombear at point blank with a Mac 10 on my first try
At heavily encumbered and 0 Archery, I can hit things with arrows more often than not
At heavily encumbered and 0 Melee, OMG, YOU EXPECT TO HIT SOMETHING, WTF?

I've never swung a pipe in anger in my life but I guarantee you I can pick one up and bean you 9 times out of 10 in close quarters.  Maybe 5 times out of 10, with a full hiking pack on.  Not .6%!

   First off no you couldn't, I had enough work with real weapons that you swinging a unbalanced improvised weapon at me with me knowing it would be that .6% or less though I do admit I am not a zombie. As for the other forms of combat throwing needs to be more penalized at higher encumbrance as if anything it would be the most heavily penalized for someone untrained and encumbered, with guns anyone at point blank range can blow away an enemy, and Archery is something that as long as you can hold the bow steady and pull the string its fine encumbrance or no. If you have not worked with real weapons, swung something at something and tried to hit it while it was dodging, or in the least received some sort of physical training while wearing some sort of encumbering gear you really have no argument in this debate.
   I don't know why everyone is suddenly up in arms about this. I have been looking at the attack part of the code for a bit now and it hasn't magically changed except for size. The encumbrance isn't the problem here, the size just needs to be better implemented or people need to realize that hitting an object that is shorter than you which is trying to not be hit is a lot harder in melee.

[GlyphGryph]

It seems like the problem IS based on size - there was a previous semi-cap to how bad you could be, and the smaller things (even children and rats) are blowing right by what is supposed to be an accuracy floor, because the floor was never designed with that element in mind.

Someone introduced a new system and didn't balance it appropriately, happens all the time.

We did a LOT of work to balance attacking and dodging in the past, and the introduction of a size-based-avoidance-boost undoubtedly throws all of that work out on its ass at the lower end of the curve.

And you know what? I HAVE worked with real weapons, swung at things and tried to hit them, WHILE physically unencumbered, and even at my absolute worst (drunk off my ass), my failure rate is nowhere even CLOSE to as bad as .6%.

Hell, I don't think I could manage that bad with my eyes closed - with any sort of swinging weapon, you have to practically be TRYING to miss that much.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Hell, I don't think I could manage that bad with my eyes closed - with any sort of swinging weapon, you have to practically be TRYING to miss that much.

^ Pretty much this.

Though cyborg dogs should be difficult to hit, I'm finding melee nearly useless lately when my oldest builds were entirely centered on melee, with encumbrance reaching up to 5 and still being useful with certain <100 [preferably <80] speed weaponry.

[Werdna]

First off no you couldn't, I had enough work with real weapons that you swinging a unbalanced improvised weapon at me

Then in game terms, what you are claiming is that you have a decent Dodge skill.  Congrats: you are not your run of the mill DDA zombie. 

As for the other forms of combat throwing needs to be more penalized at higher encumbrance as if anything it would be the most heavily penalized for someone untrained and encumbered, with guns anyone at point blank range can blow away an enemy, and Archery is something that as long as you can hold the bow steady and pull the string its fine encumbrance or no.

In principle, I agree, but since this shit has been pulled on me: No offense, but you have not fired a bow in RL if you think you could pull an arrow, nock, aim, and fire and not be affected by two backpacks and a duffel bag.  You really should not engage in these sorts of debates without any sort of background in archery.  Just curious, was that as obnoxious to you as it was to me? 

... people need to realize that hitting an object that is shorter than you which is trying to not be hit is a lot harder in melee.

Yeah, see, I agree with the 'lot harder', it's just the current scale of that 'lot harder' is dumb. 

[BigD145]

... people need to realize that hitting an object that is shorter than you which is trying to not be hit is a lot harder in melee.

Sure, I'd buy that IF a biped couldn't bend or twist at the waist or spin around on their heels. Yes, a paraplegic would have a hard time hitting something smaller than themselves.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

First off no you couldn't, I had enough work with real weapons that you swinging a unbalanced improvised weapon at me with me knowing it would be that .6% or less though I do admit I am not a zombie.

Then in game terms, what you are claiming is that you have a decent Dodge skill.  Congrats: you are not your run of the mill DDA zombie. 

As for the other forms of combat throwing needs to be more penalized at higher encumbrance as if anything it would be the most heavily penalized for someone untrained and encumbered, with guns anyone at point blank range can blow away an enemy, and Archery is something that as long as you can hold the bow steady and pull the string its fine encumbrance or no.

In principle, I agree, but since this shit has been pulled on me: No offense, but you have not fired a bow in RL if you think you could pull an arrow, nock, aim, and fire and not be affected by two backpacks and a duffel bag.  You really should not engage in these sorts of debates without any sort of background in archery.  Just curious, was that as obnoxious to you as it was to me? 

... people need to realize that hitting an object that is shorter than you which is trying to not be hit is a lot harder in melee.

Yeah, see, I agree with the 'lot harder', it's just the current scale of that 'lot harder' is dumb.

   First I put the rest of my sentence in
   Then I have to say that in fact I have fired numerous bows though since my dad is into guns I mostly have experience with them. When I said you just need to be able to pull the string back and hold steady I was referring to point blank as thats what you used for the gun example though that was probably a fallacy on my part.
   As for your last bit the size thing has nothing to do with how encumbrance works but rather that the size modification is currently broken. Encumbrance works and is balanced, the recently added thing is whats in the wrong. They haven't changed the effects of encumbrance in quite a while so I don't get why suddenly everyone thinks it is the cause of the problem.
   Also this is turning into somewhat of a quote war so we should probably stop soon or Toady may have to get involved. If you can add anything that makes the current argument go forward that is fine but we should probably wrap it up soon.

@BigD145
   Except you apparently haven't swung at something below your waist which was trying to dodge. Part of the problem is that close is they are below your normal line of sight combined with a number of other factors such as balance and what not. Also people already have shown that the current way size works is broken. I am just arguing encumbrance works and has worked so its not the problem and doesn't need rebalancing as it was and still is balanced.

[BigD145]

   Except you apparently haven't swung at something below your waist which was trying to dodge. Part of the problem is that close is they are below your normal line of sight combined with a number of other factors such as balance and what not. Also people already have shown that the current way size works is broken. I am just arguing encumbrance works and has worked so its not the problem and doesn't need rebalancing as it was and still is balanced.

I'm 6'4" and yes, I have swung at things down below my kneecaps. I can very clearly turn my head down to focus below "normal" line of sight. If I bend over I HAVE to change my normal line of sight down towards my feet. Proportionally I have the same reach to certain positions around my body as anyone else with my build but a different height. I'm not crippled. I'm not wearing a neck brace or a cone around my head. I don't have cement encased hands or feet. I'm not paralyzed.

[Tawa]

*snip*
 It's as if walking around with 2 and 3 encumberance is a given, and it's unreasonable to expect their accuracy to be so low at it.
*snip*

Two encumbrance is wearing well-fitting clothes and a military rucksack, or a backpack and coat.

I don't know about you, but I think I can hit children if I'm wearing that, whether they're on me or not.