I mean, he's not wrong. Proficiencies as they exist essentially act to make things take longer without any real mechanical benefit. Making an item with a proficiency is only just about faster than not, there's no mechanical reason to get proficiencies over making do without.
You use more materials in general if you don't know what you're doing. They're also a new feature so we're still playing with other things, like making you burn fewer calories if you're more experienced and efficient.
That makes sense, but again it feels like they only exist to add tedium.
EDIT: I view it this way, looking at Rimworld's Vanilla Expanded mod set. Everything the core mods add, they have a purpose. If they add a system, they have at least one or two things said system has for benefits over something else, + they usually are able to tie it into their other mods in order to make an overall better product.
In general proficiencies add a ton of value, unless you expect crafting to behave as it did when it was broken. Crafting something without appropriate proficiencies varies from slightly slower and more likely to fail, through to impossible. The "no value" argument only applies when compared to a system where you could assemble a pair of pants out of a pile of rags in five minutes, sewing by hand. The present crafting speed remains incredibly optimistic even if nonproficient, and phenomenally fast if proficient (and I'd love to hear about cases where this isn't true, so I can fix them). The benefit of learning the proficiency is that you use fewer resources and complete the job faster.[/quote]
While I am all for wacky post apoc sci-fi, it's clear CataclysmDDA's strayed from its initial days and while I dislike that, I can see why there's a need to make things make more sense. However, the value they seem to add is a bit redundant. Makes things take longer at a lower skill if crafting times are an issue. Make having skills above a recipe's start affect crafting time when applicable. Proficiencies are just another subskill without an official skill to their name.
Thus, leading to a problem with the development cycle that cannot really be fixed without a total overhaul of the project structure, which is something the head does not necessarily wish to do.
not just the lead. I don't think you could find a single core contributor that would agree with a more rigid dev cycle.[/quote]
Which imo is the biggest flaw of Laisesz-faire game development, where even if it starts with the intent to keep a motivated group, as the project goes on, people get hostile to the idea of a more focused style of leadership. It's clear CataclysmDDA is suffering as a result, imo. The cycle of 'open contributions' then a feature freeze looks good on paper, however what you get is an unfocused design with a dozen different contributors putting in their own systems to handle something, without any sense of direction outside of vague mission statements.
HOWEVER, I would also additionally want there to be a reason to want to get said proficiency. Perhaps having a proficiency in firearms means that one can modify their weapon with less skills than what's stated on the mod itself? Perhaps a proficiency in tailoring -or whatever granular thing is being used- lets you modify clothing and repair it for less material, showing that your character is proficient in tailoring and the ability to stretch fabric without losing quality. And obviously add in taking a proficiency at chargen.
Some variant on most of that stuff is either in already or planned, but the crafting changes are big paradigm shifts requiring a lot of work in JSON and c++ alike. Full integration of a new feature into every aspect of the game takes a long time and just physically can't be done in one go.
Adding proficiencies to chargen is a little bit loaded but some variant of it will exist fairly soon. I'd love it to fit into stable, but if it doesn't, we're all pretty much in agreement that we need at least something to help out with the initial startup.[/quote]
Tbh that doesn't realllly change what I said, I think implementing something that clearly represents knowledge on a topic and then specifically tying it to professions would be like introducing a new skill and only allowing people the gain it post-chargen without reasonable explanation. Feels like a topic that should've been addressed during the initial spinning up of the idea.
Stuff like this would obviously take time, however it would make me feel less anxious about seeing the fact that the system is ready for stable and that you're ceasing work. Because as it stands, the system does indeed simply exist to make things take longer in an attempt to balance crafting times.
Bear in mind that what I initially said was:
"My main contribution, proficiencies, are arbitrarily at a point now where they could pretty much just be done as is, although I'm still trying to button up a bunch of the nice secondary stuff", and then clarified that that was a bit misspoken and I had meant "the part I can do right now" is almost done. It was meant to be a comment on the progress towards stable, not to whether or not proficiencies are going to continue to be worked on. I have several proficiency related issues outstanding and have been adding more, not ticking them off.
And yeah. It does slow things down. It used to take ten minutes to craft a backpack, and two weeks to become a master tailor. Slowing things down is the express purpose, for sure, and I have been aware since the start that this would be a no-deal for some people. We wanted proficiencies before just flat slowing things down so that there was still progression and steps to gain to make it less severe. I think they do that very well, but I also added several hundred over a couple weeks so I'm sure there are recipes I could do better on.
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Tbh it reads through this entire thing that you seem to think that I hate things being more realistic or prefer things as is. That's not the case at all. I would love to have realism where it matters. It's hard to balance a game and I understand that, but imo this is going in a direction that I don't think it Needs to go.
The backpack issue or the pants issue for example,
could be resolved by making things take longer, the skills gain to become a master tailor
could be resolved by making things take longer, but does it make the game more fun is my main concern when I judge these things.
The backpack issue, as an example, can be considered a case of the game having specific items for every specific scenario, meaning that a crafted backpack and a retail backpack are the same. In the current case, it's resolved by simply making it take longer and require a proficiency to make a backpack. However, I think it'd be a lot more painless to simply have the current recipe changed to represent a makeshift backpack. Same with the pants. We already have a rag tunic, why can't we simply have makeshift pants? While yes, the way CataclysmDDA handles items is a bit deterministic and has specific items for specific recipes, simply redirecting a recipe to instead craft a new item has less growing issues overall, meanwhile leaving proficiencies to represent more specialist topics such as the origianl use-case of Helicopter Pilot and the like.
Besides, if we want to fix the skill gain issue, you'd have to make the game take way longer than it does, aka more like IRL + make the skill gain thing in the debug options a default of like 200%
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Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (Read 124594 times)