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[azmodean]

Is it? I was thinking that CDDA is a community project and that it was picked up (mostly) by the bay12 community after Whales abandoned it.

Yes, it is.  DarklingWolf, GlyphGryph and myself founded the dda project about 5 years ago.
DarklingWolf lost interest and wandered off after about half a year (as you can clearly see on github.
GlyphGryph stuck around longer, but he was never focused that much on the code side of things, as you can see also on github and eventually he lost interest as well.

So for the past 4 years I've been the sole owner of the project.  If that doesn't qualify me to call it "my" game I don't know what would.

You could have put things a lot more tactfully, but eh, we all have our weaknesses. Aside from that, that's a fair point.

I'm not trying to start anything, but I'd like to know for my own reference what I posted that was lacking in tact?

seems to me that it shouldn't be the guns that are inaccurate, it should be the character in context

The question is, do we exaggerate the degree to which guns contribute to inaccuracy, or do we remove accuracy of guns as a differentiator?  While it might be jarring for a "perfect shot" with a Glock 19 to miss at 30 squares, it's even more jarring IMO for a handgun and a sniper rifle to have equivalent accuracy.  You might disagree and say that dda is a short-range game, and rifles just aren't that much better than pistols in that situation, but that outcome seems to be really strange to me.

i havent played cdda in like a couple years but wasn't there some kind of stress stat? the sort of thing that increased from killing child zombies and being out in the rain?

There is not a stat for "grit", you stop caring about killing child zombies and similar specific things, but there's not an overall stat for it.

use that - or something like it - to make it more stressful to do the close range stuff, like kiting zombies with a pistol or otherwise firing at close range, with stress decreasing accuracy.

I think something like this would improve things a lot, but I'm not sure what that would look like offhand.

also i don't remember but didn't you need to hold still and aim for a turn before firing? ie if you had just moved, accuracy was lower?

Yes, that's actually been expanded a lot, you spend time aiming and get a lot of feedback about what it's doing to your chances to hit.  I think this is what triggered a lot of the complaints, because now players are getting feedback about their chances, whereas before it took taking a bunch of shots and guesswork to figure out how likely they were to hit, so it wasn't as obvious a problem.

the long range stuff, like sniping zombies from range, should be effective but require more skills?

That naturally happens with the current system, up close you can tolerate a lot of inaccuracy (bad gun/ammo, low skills, low stats, not aiming much), but to make distant shots you have to eliminate all the sources of inaccuracy, and just one or two can severely limit your effective range.

it's too bad that people can't discuss solutions and issues without becoming so dramatic

Agreed.  Honestly I'd settle for productive discussion AND drama, but usually it's just the drama :/

[azmodean]

Is it? I was thinking that CDDA is a community project and that it was picked up (mostly) by the bay12 community after Whales abandoned it.

Yes, it is.  DarklingWolf, GlyphGryph and myself founded the dda project about 5 years ago.
DarklingWolf lost interest and wandered off after about half a year (as you can clearly see on github.
GlyphGryph stuck around longer, but he was never focused that much on the code side of things, as you can see also on github and eventually he lost interest as well.

So for the past 4 years I've been the sole owner of the project.  If that doesn't qualify me to call it "my" game I don't know what would.

You could have put things a lot more tactfully, but eh, we all have our weaknesses. Aside from that, that's a fair point.

I'm not trying to start anything, but I'd like to know for my own reference what I posted that was lacking in tact?

seems to me that it shouldn't be the guns that are inaccurate, it should be the character in context

The question is, do we exaggerate the degree to which guns contribute to inaccuracy, or do we remove accuracy of guns as a differentiator?  While it might be jarring for a "perfect shot" with a Glock 19 to miss at 30 squares, it's even more jarring IMO for a handgun and a sniper rifle to have equivalent accuracy.  You might disagree and say that dda is a short-range game, and rifles just aren't that much better than pistols in that situation, but that outcome seems to be really strange to me.
Long-term, I have some ideas for extending maximum gun range, but short term there has to be some kind of pretty gross compromise.

i havent played cdda in like a couple years but wasn't there some kind of stress stat? the sort of thing that increased from killing child zombies and being out in the rain?

There is not a stat for "grit", you stop caring about killing child zombies and similar specific things, but there's not an overall stat for it.

use that - or something like it - to make it more stressful to do the close range stuff, like kiting zombies with a pistol or otherwise firing at close range, with stress decreasing accuracy.

I think something like this would improve things a lot, but I'm not sure what that would look like offhand.

also i don't remember but didn't you need to hold still and aim for a turn before firing? ie if you had just moved, accuracy was lower?

Yes, that's actually been expanded a lot, you spend time aiming and get a lot of feedback about what it's doing to your chances to hit.  I think this is what triggered a lot of the complaints, because now players are getting feedback about their chances, whereas before it took taking a bunch of shots and guesswork to figure out how likely they were to hit, so it wasn't as obvious a problem.

the long range stuff, like sniping zombies from range, should be effective but require more skills?

That naturally happens with the current system, up close you can tolerate a lot of inaccuracy (bad gun/ammo, low skills, low stats, not aiming much), but to make distant shots you have to eliminate all the sources of inaccuracy, and just one or two can severely limit your effective range.

it's too bad that people can't discuss solutions and issues without becoming so dramatic

Agreed.  Honestly I'd settle for productive discussion AND drama, but usually it's just the drama :/

[Robsoie]

Is there some planned feature future development for cdda ?
I mean in a similar way to those development arcs Toady has for DF ?

[Random_Dragon]

Oh, so Azmodean is actually Kevin.

So for the past 4 years I've been the sole owner of the project.  If that doesn't qualify me to call it "my" game I don't know what would.

You wouldn't have much of a game if not for all the contributors you take for granted. And developers for that matter. Why do you think Coolthulhu has a fork dedicated to implementing things you disagree with, and seems to argue with your development decisions quite a few times?

[azmodean]

Is there some planned feature future development for cdda ?
I mean in a similar way to those development arcs Toady has for DF ?

Other than what's scattered all over the forums and issue tracker, no.
I've been trying to assemble a bit of that kind of thing here: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/projects but it's not enough content to be usable.

[Robsoie]

Ah even if not enough content, that's still interesting to see what's planned.

[Blood_Librarian]

First off, I am very much in gratitude for your work in the project as a whole. I probably have played a couple hundred hours in the game as a whole and the improvements and changes that you (indirectly or directly) caused by causing at least some semblance of a developer team would probably have been out-right impossible if you had not taken the mantle.

Yes, I have some reservations when it comes to a couple features that I and most of the people I am in regular contact with find less then fun, but that is a bit of a pale shadow to the community that you and your fellow developers have fostered.

As of late, I feel like this community is falling apart, but I am by no means an expert or a contribute, and I have not paid much attention to the game these last six months due to my wavering interest; From the discussion that I have heard, it seems that you have fallen for the trap of Realism versus Immersion, now I don't know anything or wish to know something about this drama since I am too busy writing as a hobby and meming on discord, but maybe It's time to consider if having a game limited by the woes of hardware, UI, and Graphics be realistic according to an often impossible goal of emulating reality, or being immersive. Immersive being a game that follows coherent rules and guidelines that make sense in the games own perception.

One example I can come up with is Shadowrun table-top games; They have an absolutely amazing feel and atmosphere along with actual mechanical flaws that mirror the Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead flaws. At times, it feels like they left a bunch of writers in a room that never talked to each other and told them to go nuts. Each writer wrote lore and mechanics that often, unknowingly, conflicted with a future persons work. And at times, the mechanics and lore they wrote are either esoteric, do not fit into the book they wrote for, or directly diverged from established canon.

I don't know if this example is actually prevalent or not, but I feel like the angle your going for in game mechanics does not fit parts or even the majority of the playerbase.  I feel like this is all caused by the lack of concrete guidelines for how a developer may contribute to the game itself.  Perhaps the existing guidelines should be pushed more strictly?

Regardless, I am very much impressed that you went to the place where practically everyone has disdain for your work and revealed your presence for... I'm not sure what, but impressive anyways.

[Egan_BW]

The question is, do we exaggerate the degree to which guns contribute to inaccuracy, or do we remove accuracy of guns as a differentiator?  While it might be jarring for a "perfect shot" with a Glock 19 to miss at 30 squares, it's even more jarring IMO for a handgun and a sniper rifle to have equivalent accuracy.  You might disagree and say that dda is a short-range game, and rifles just aren't that much better than pistols in that situation, but that outcome seems to be really strange to me.
Long-term, I have some ideas for extending maximum gun range, but short term there has to be some kind of pretty gross compromise.

I wouldn't really mind if they were the same in terms of accuracy. CDDA is more of a survival game than a shooting game anyway, and damage done is enough to differentiate between guns. I guess if you wanted to make pistols not obsolete you could make them aim faster at really close range or something.
In most FPS games pistols are fairly accurate out to the ranges you'd almost always be fighting at, so you're not really subverting people's expectations either.

[duckman]

I wouldn't say the community is falling apart just yet. This portion of it has definitely drifted away though.

My personal peeve is still that completely useless Kel-tec KSG volume adjustment by kolsurma that didn't even do what it said it was trying to do. It increases the final volume of the gun by 0.01 liters, so that did an excellent job of not making it so the "KSG second barrel and primary now show same stats" unless a change was made elsewhere since then to make it work.

[azmodean]

Hrm... I'll have to have a think on that, maybe we can just set everything to be IRL accurate and let the chips fall where they may.
Then as we incrementally add features to increase engagement ranges they act as buffs to long range capable weapons.
That's what I want to do in the first place, but I talked myself into other issues being important enough to require compromising.

We'll see, might just do this.

And yes, "community falling apart" is kind of ridiculous, there is still very healthy discussion and development happening on github, and plenty of engagement on the forums, and now it's spidering out to a bunch of other places (Discord servers, reddit, etc).

[Blood_Librarian]

All I ever hear are third-party accounts of whats happening to the community at large, so I perfectly accept that there may be bias in my statement as to whether or not the community is falling apart because at the moment the last time I actually visted the forums was when it used the horrid black and white theme.

Personally, my opinion is that the game should somewhat follow what someone would expect to happen in relation to firearms;

Pistols should be able to fast and easily lock onto close targets at the expense of being less then easy to use in longer ranges.

Automatics that cannot be classified as a rifle nor a pistol should firmly be in the middle range; not quite easily usable in close ranges and not quite accurate as maybe even a pistol, but able to put rounds down range.

Rifles should be the be-all end all for long range engagements, but are unwieldy in super close environs and fast moving targets.

Grenades, grenade launchers, rockets should be overkill, and are gods fist.

Crossbows  should be equivalent to rifles at the expense of taking time to use.

Bows should be equivalent to pistols in terms of functionality unless it is some kind of war bow that only a dude with trashcans for arms can use. Think an elf who sends a dozen arrows down range before fleeing and repeating.

Shotguns of course, are the pistols big brother in terms of low-medium engagements, but buckshot should still be able to ping or spatter combatants in long ranges. The best option for taking down unarmored targets.

When I say short range I mean 1-7~ tiles away from the player, or maybe close enough that the tile would be in view with default screen resolutions if they weren't (L)ooking. Medium range should be around 5-8 tiles away from the default ranges, and long range is anywhere from the border of see able conditions all the way down to the 10 tiles away from default graphics showing.


sticking to real-life accuracy rules in a game where one square varies in its actual size is a bit silly (Tankbots and racoons both take one slot). If we take the more "gamey" approach of sticking to stereotypes in terms of accuracy and fall of ranges, I feel like the game would be funner to play because it allows a little bit of progression. Most of the time, accuracy in real life comes with repeated use. Personally, I have found that in range conditions, your accuracy increase as you fire hundreds and hundreds of rounds in practice, as you gain proficiency and familiarity with the fire arm. I will hate this system if it were transplanted into Cataclysm DDA. I would rather favor a more materialistic approach, where items equal power, and skills are a little bit secondary to that.

Bear in mind that I have not actually played the game in sixth months, so I may actually be pulling most of this nonsense out of my ass instead of experience.

[Gentlefish]

I'm glad to hear the community is still healthy, and super excited that this thread picked back up! I was worried ol' B12 got abandoned.

Now I'm sure this has been discussed, but how much work would it take to have an "effective range" tied to each gun and modified by stats to increase at both spectrums (min and max range)? Rifles should not be accurate at all in close range like shotguns or pistols, but they should outshine them at a distance.

...Heck, I think I smell a summer project if I can ever demystify the codebase.

[azmodean]

@Blood_Librarian: I don't disagree with the overall "feel" you're describing for different classes of weapons, but that has to be turned into numbers of some kind in order to make it enforceable.  As for avoiding realism, well that's pretty much the opposite of my design goal for the game. I want the various classes of guns to be messy and overlap just like they do IRL, because to me that's more interesting than establishing artificial distinctions between weapons.

I'm glad to hear the community is still healthy, and super excited that this thread picked back up! I was worried ol' B12 got abandoned.

Honestly the issue is that this thread got toxic and I was avoiding it, but when I saw a potential new player asking about it, I couldn't leave them hanging without at least trying to clear the air.

Now I'm sure this has been discussed, but how much work would it take to have an "effective range" tied to each gun and modified by stats to increase at both spectrums (min and max range)? Rifles should not be accurate at all in close range like shotguns or pistols, but they should outshine them at a distance.

Except for the fact that it's inverted, that's basically how it works.  Guns have a number (dispersion) that says what their maximum deflection is when fired from a bench, and player deficiencies like low skill just add to that.  This number is a bit more nuanced than "max range" because your chance to hit decays as distance increases, but you can still calculate something like, "maximum range that guarantees a hit", or even "range where player has 70% chance to hit".

Specifically concerning "fast and short ranged" vs "slow and long ranged" weapons, this is my proposal: https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/breaking-the-more-accurate-weapons-are-always-better-disfunction/14067

If you want to look into it, take a look at this PR: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/22756 and this issue: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/22753 for the current state of development.  The PR isn't mergeable and doesn't do the right thing in general, but what it does do is compile some "effective range" stats for various weapons that we can use as goals.

[Damiac]

I see at the end of that back and forth about gun accuracy was that the alternative was mentioned as being able to be a mod.  Was that outright rejected, or would it just need to be proposed as a mod rather than a direct game update?

I mean, I get what you're saying, to a point.  The reality bubble is so small even a small handgun can hit easily at max range if you use real life stats.  That makes more accurate guns rather pointless. 

But scaling based on the most accurate gun in the game at max range, then scaling down from there, is just grading the guns on a curve.  Why does the existence of super duper sniper rifle +accuracy 100 make my glock pistol not able to hit at an arms length?  You're trading one supposed problem (I've never heard anyone complain about it, but whatever) for a new problem (And lots of people seem to agree the new behavior is much worse)

So, good for you that you can keep cata:dda going the way you want, but honestly it sounds like the way you want to go (And the way you've been pushing for a long time) is toward stuff like this, things that nobody except you considers a problem.  And hell, it's your project, go nuts! But I think most of the people here, at least the ones discussing this lately, really are more interested in fun over realism.  The guns felt fine before, pistols worked at shortish ranges, rifles longer, I just don't see the problem there.  Filthy clothing, just uglied up the game and for some reason it's so hard to wash!

To tell the truth, what I want is the same cataclysm from a year ago (or 3) but with all the little quality of life fixes, changes, and so on.  But none of the 'realistic' vehicle stuff (cranes and such), none of the realistic gun stuff, no filthy clothes stuff, etc.  But I'm just a lazy jerk who posts what he wants in a thread.

I guess if developers have completely different goals for this project, then it only makes sense to branch off, rather than trying to push the same project in different directions.  I just want to put it out there that there's a lot of people who don't care much about 'realism' as long as things are internally consistent enough to be logical, so maybe the devs that prefer that direction need to branch out. 

[Random_Dragon]

To tell the truth, what I want is the same cataclysm from a year ago (or 3) but with all the little quality of life fixes, changes, and so on.  But none of the 'realistic' vehicle stuff (cranes and such), none of the realistic gun stuff, no filthy clothes stuff, etc.  But I'm just a lazy jerk who posts what he wants in a thread.

A good chunk of the community would agree with you. Fucks sake even many of the devs would agree.