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[Sime]

Isn't static spawning in CDDA a design flaw that adds nothing to the game  apart from computational waste and inflexibility of narrative, and constitutes a  step backwards from older roguelikes that dynamically spawn their monsters to serve a narrative?

[Arcvasti]

I think that static spawning is important in C:DDA because it's a clear measure of progess. You can clear out an area of zombies and make it safe, instead of fighting an eternal battle. Ideally there would still be dynamic dangers like rampaging hordes of zombies as well, so stuff like traps and defensible bases become important, but you need to have the ability to actually establish yourself and make a clear difference in the game world first.

[scourge728]

Yeah, I like being able to render an area safe of zombies..

[Egan_BW]

If you lock a zombie in a metal closet with no way in or out, there should still be one zombie in there when you return. Not 0, or 2, or 32. That's what you're getting with dynamic spawns; things spawning in random places that don't make sense, and monsters disappearing the moment you walk far enough away. It makes the world less credible, and removes some things you can plan around with static spawns.

Ideally creatures would wander around when you're not looking if they have an unblocked path, and even set off traps or fight each other in a kind of abstracted way. Unfortunately we don't have that yet, and may never have it in a game that's not made by toady one.

[Random_Dragon]

Don't forget dynamic NPCs spawning inside your sealed-up base, stealing all your chicharrones, then telling you that your house is their turf. XP

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, the only way I can really countenance playing with dynamic spawns is when I'm playing a perma-nomad character who isn't likely to come back to places often, if at all. Otherwise it's way too SoD-breaking for my taste.

[Sime]

I don't see why it would be difficult to prevent dynamic spawns from teleporting zombies into  or out of where they shouldn't go.  All the game needs to do is monitor the tiles that are within closed boundaries, for example by using a flood-fill algorithm.

[Broseph Stalin]

Don't forget dynamic NPCs spawning inside your sealed-up base, stealing all your chicharrones, then telling you that your house is their turf. XP

Yeah that one's a real pain in the ass, AI could use a little love in a couple places. For example when I agreed to help a stranger find an inhaler our moment of human cooperation after the catalysm lost some of it's luster when he went into my trunk, stole half of my food, and I had to shoot him in the face. 

[Egan_BW]

Seems like a difficult design/AI problem. You want to be able to tell friendly NPCs not to loot stuff from your own stash, but it's also a little broken to give the player the ability to just point at anything and say "you can't have that, it's mine".

Or well, maybe it would be fine if you HAD that ability, but NPCs would try to figure out if you're bullshitting them. "Yeah sure, this abandoned lab full of mi-gos is totally your home base, and everything here belongs to you. Riiiight."
Which is, uh, obviously not something easy for AI to figure out. :v

[Descan]

If the game had some way to track player usage/modification of an area (constructions/digging trenches, how much time you've slept in an area, how much crafting you've engaged in in that area, time spent reading, movement of items around and/or into storage bins/etc) then yeah, the NPC could ad-hoc say that "Oh, yeah, this is probably your base, it looks really lived-in" vs "dude you've been here for two days and all you've done is shoot a couple zombies, the fuck you mean that it's 'yours'?" It's probably a lot to code and simply making a craftable/constructable "home beacon" or something would be easier, but if you want it more dynamic and less 'gamey,' the former is probably better. Not that I'd know how to even code the latter, let alone the former.

Maybe also with a decay modifier so that if you stop using an area for weeks at a time, the NPCs can say "Hey this place looks abandoned, let's see what's good," and steal your shit that you left in an outpost without a guard or anything.

Similarly, if items that have been moved/created have a tag saying so, then the player saying "That pile of food is mine," when it consists of all the food you've scavenged, created, and farmed, vs saying "everything in that grocery store is mine."

[Robsoie]

Wouldn't using the zone manager with the key Y (not y)  helps to prevent a npc to pickup all the loot you accumulated ?



In the same time, the npc spawning system is so extremely very low by default (unless it's been changed recently as my cdda build is a couple of weeks old) that i'm not sure you can actually find a dynamically spawned NPC anywhere (i sure never did with the default settings, until i set it up to 100 that seems to bring back the older versions of CDDA normal npc spawn rate)

[Robsoie]

On a visit to the other side of the town with a companion npc, we ran into a fight between another npc and a group of zombies.
While my friendly npc went to fight in melee, i started to rain crossbow bolts death from a safe enough distance.

It worked nice, the undead were falling , until i saw something coming on the screen.



Never saw this one before in version i used to play, so i checked before doing anything that my character would regret.
https://old.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/comments/9hn82z/skeletal_juggernauts/

ok, i really should have checked what monsters were around in the right screen instead of only focusing on the left one, should have seen this one coming from afar .
I managed to run away fast enough, but we lost the npc that was fighting by himself and my companion managed to catch up with me but was badly injured.

I guess i'll come back to this part of the city when i'll have found something highly damaging or a rocket launcher for this kind of abomination.
Too bad there's no working car around to ram into this thing.

[Random_Dragon]

Well, quite a lot of improvements have been made to the game so far. Mlangsdorf most notably has been making NPC dialogue far more flexible from a JSON standpoint, opening up a lot of hardcoded stuff to be moved to JSON, and giving modders more to play with. Butchering overhaul is also pretty much 100% sorted out, and freezing is closer to working fully.

[Edited out as it was kinda really fucking unnecessary]

Also, 0.D is getting closer. Will likely be wrapped up either sometime near the end of the year, or early into next year. Can be hard to tell as new bugs can be hard to predict, which is pretty much universal to all experimental projects and perfectly understandable.

[ZebioLizard2]

He continues to be such a likable person.

So far though I've been having issues keeping a proper base in my own game. First time trying to settle down then attempt a nomadic life by car.

[Random_Dragon]

Though with respect to this thread, he has a point in that I have been rather harsh here, though my intentions aren't sabotage. Hence resurrecting the thread to post a status update. All concerns aside, a lot of good work by Alan, Mark, Nexus, and others is being done. Recent discussion also led to one obscure bug that would've been bad to see slip through getting spotted, though it likely would've been confirmed and marked for 0.D anyway, it's always good to bring it up while there's plenty of time.