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[King Zultan]

I think you could run a cataclysm based game with out that much effort, I mean you don't have to emulate the game completely you could skip things that aren't that important or at least simplify them to make it easier on you and to reduce book keeping.

[heydude6]

Thing is, there are only two things that separate Cataclysm from a generic zombie game.

The first is the Apocalypse kitchen-sink setting. It’s not just zombies, it’s Migo’s and Triffids. Rogue military robots run astray (ie. the chicken walker) and old junji-ito esque horrors recently unearthed. Fungaloids that eat your lungs and mutant insects larger than they should be. Cybernetics are rare, but mainstream. Mutation serums are a closely kept secret, and police stations are a technological nightmare.

The second is that insane attention to detail. You can craft almost anything assuming you have the appropriate tools and knowledge. You can build the fortress of your dreams, or a Death-mobile that surpasses anything that would ever come out of Mad Max. Or maybe just kill a moose, and tan it’s hide to make a beautiful wwinter parka.

If you want to cut out the latter, then you better focus like hell on the former. It’s the more interesting part anyway, if only the devs could see that.

[Egan_BW]

A game with a GM can achieve better fine detail than even a videogame which focuses on that, and has the ability to cut out that detail when not needed. Going through all of cata's crafting systems on a pencil and paper would be pretty pointless, because all those systems don't exist to be fun to interact with, they exist because their results are fun, and you don't have a GM to just decide what you're able to build or not thus needing a complicated system for the computer to handle basically the same thing in a more tedious way.

[KittyTac]

A game with a GM can achieve better fine detail than even a videogame which focuses on that, and has the ability to cut out that detail when not needed. Going through all of cata's crafting systems on a pencil and paper would be pretty pointless, because all those systems don't exist to be fun to interact with, they exist because their results are fun, and you don't have a GM to just decide what you're able to build or not thus needing a complicated system for the computer to handle basically the same thing in a more tedious way.

Yeah. It would be dumb to move the entire crafting system. I'm not going to make it as complex as the video game because that would be impossible to run. Even though I like the attention to detail in CDDA, I'm not insane enough for that.

[Egan_BW]

That's good to hear, because some people are.

[Salmeuk]

Thing is, there are only two things that separate Cataclysm from a generic zombie game.

The first is the Apocalypse kitchen-sink setting. It’s not just zombies, it’s Migo’s and Triffids. Rogue military robots run astray (ie. the chicken walker) and old junji-ito esque horrors recently unearthed. Fungaloids that eat your lungs and mutant insects larger than they should be. Cybernetics are rare, but mainstream. Mutation serums are a closely kept secret, and police stations are a technological nightmare.

The second is that insane attention to detail. You can craft almost anything assuming you have the appropriate tools and knowledge. You can build the fortress of your dreams, or a Death-mobile that surpasses anything that would ever come out of Mad Max. Or maybe just kill a moose, and tan it’s hide to make a beautiful wwinter parka.

If you want to cut out the latter, then you better focus like hell on the former. It’s the more interesting part anyway, if only the devs could see that.

very much agreed, though this will not be read or understood by those who need to hear it the most. I like the point about insane detail. It captures the limitless posibilities of a tabletop RPG - to an extent.

You know one of the first things new TTRPG players do is destroy something they shouldn't. Most games, there is a limit to the destruction, but in the Cataclysm sandbox you can literally pick apart entire buildings into constituent parts, in order to craft or build something new. AMAZING and no other game quite reaches this level.

but like many crafting survival games these days - there is literally no point beyond RP. The game has these optimum routes through tedious early game mechanics that are all but necessary to follow, with the only drama involved being that of the "missing the one item I need to progress" variety which is not to taste. I acknowledge there is a certain joy to the first steps here, but it all feels a bit pointless on the second and third go-around without something else driving you.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

this is a bad pun, since driving / vehicle repair in this game is quite fun actually and adds the depth I want from this kind of game.

The progress made on the settlement or colony features was really in the right direction. More depth to the NPC characters would give more reason to play in alternate styles, and add a certain roguelike diceroll encounter that could make things more interesting. give us a reason to survive the apocalypse, make friends... mere survival is so passé

[MCreeper]

Trying Bright Nights. Discovered that calories not only was needless and confusing change, it was also half-baked change.  Hopefully there aren't many items stuck on the old system.

[Random_Dragon]

Serving size is pretty wacky sometimes yeah, and BN inherited most of the calorie and nutrition overhauls that Korg (read: the guy who wrote nested containers and the stomach/weightgain mechanics) did. Coolthulhu reverted most of the stomach nonsense that made it into BN but calories may still be fucky due to that.

[KittyTac]

Trying Bright Nights. Discovered that calories not only was needless and confusing change, it was also half-baked change.  Hopefully there aren't many items stuck on the old system.

Is that canned food with a spoilage time? Huh?

[Random_Dragon]

The glass jar is unsealed (already opened) so it being vulnerable to spoilage would be expected.

[KittyTac]

The glass jar is unsealed (already opened) so it being vulnerable to spoilage would be expected.

See I know that, it's just that in DDA pickled veggies spoil way faster than 2 seasons and so I drew the wrong conclusion.

[Random_Dragon]

See I know that, it's just that in DDA pickled veggies spoil way faster than 2 seasons and so I drew the wrong conclusion.

How much that menu decides is a "season" or "year" depends on that world's season length, which can be set to anywhere from 14 days to 120 days if I recall. The default value is 91 days in DDA, while BN uses 14 days, which is what was the default value in the very old days of DDA.

The spoils_in value of the item SHOULD be the same in both versions because I don't recall any changes that would affect that. So the cause is most likely your current save having much shorter season length than what was the norm in DDA, ergo an item that spoils in (for example) 28 days will be labeled as lasting 2 seasons in that world, when in a 91-day-season world it'd be referred to as less than a season.

[Random_Dragon]

In the meantime, I did some recent testing of the DDA version of Arcana, and hashed out my findings. I posted the details over on their subreddit here, but the overview of it is:

• Both the actual bugs I found turned out to be DDA fucky-wuckies I could not only confirm had nothing to do with Arcana, but could find and replicate using vanilla examples.
• So as of this writing, I've yet to find any new bugs or shit I need to fix in the DDA version of Arcana.
• I still got some non-bug (for now) shit I can and should update regardless, because my todo list expands on into infinity.
• It's been a rough month...I mean technically a rough whole fucking living apocalypse, but this past month in particular I been slackin'
• Ergo pester me about Arcana bugs in either version if you find any, because finding every fucky-wucky on my own was hard even when the world wasn't ending.

[Putnam]

At least one version of Cataclysm is fixing stuff rather than making more bugs.

it would be wise to expend your energy on being positive toward your preferred fork instead of complaining about the one you don't play

i would post all the bugfixes from the last few days on DDA but that would be spammy so instead i'll just link the tag search

[Random_Dragon]

People already get enough shit from the devs whenever anyone raises a grumble about any of their endless examples of failing to do the bare-minimum of playtesting. One thing that a lot of people seem to fail to grasp is that there's an underlying root problem here, and citing "look at how many bugs are being fixed" is one example of that.

Hell, literally the last post I made contains and example of an error message that should have been trivial to verify. and comes up in vanilla contexts where stuff behaving oddly is not expected, but no one figured out the underlying issue on their own, at least in the actual project's community. Maleclypse was kind enough to report the two actual problems as these two issues, but that was after discussion of findings on Kenan's modder server that he was privy to. Maleclypse was thus in a position to be able relay what others found, but he shouldn't have to be the one stuck with that. It's not his bug, so is it fair to him that he ends up being the one who ends up being the first person to get the ball rolling on the fix?

The long-running theme in Cataclysm's development has been one of cultivating an attitude of "break now, fix later" and that is exactly why there are so many problems that need to be fixed. Because "fix later" tends to get passed off to other people, meaning at best it gets passed on to people who are less familiar with the relevant code and JSON, at worst it stays broken. Hell, about 90% of stuff we have to do over in Bright Nights has been "fixing weird shit that DDA broke in some way and never bothered to fix" and the like.


Now don't get me wrong here, it is reasonable to acknowledge that it's just physically not possible for the people working on a PR to spot every flaw and problem that might come up. The phrase "There's no such thing as too much playtesting" is a literal truth, you can't obtain it. But, it's still good practice to try to double-check your work, ask for assistance with confirming potential problems whenever needed, listen to feedback if someone finds a problem, and prioritize the order of actions that's the least disruptive to getting your code functional.

It's something everyone struggles to uphold, but the complaints ultimately start because the community has come to believe that DDA's devs have actively encouraged a degree of personal responsibility for their code, even among themselves, that is below an acceptable standard. And the ever-expanding list of bugs is indicative of that.

The reason you want to try and get it right, as much as possible, the first time isn't simply because it's a nice thing to do for the sake of other people's time. Whenever this sort of thing happens, no matter the project, haste makes waste. You neglect a basic test, then more time gets wasted in the process

Even if you don't give a shit that saving 5 minutes of your time might go on to cost multiple people an hour or more of their time, that still means more man-hours are spent in a way that can turn a hundred PRs, a few hundred cases of "eh I can let someone else handle this," into hundreds of issues that eat up thousands upon thousands of hours of time for everyone involved. And every person who wants to actually contribute to the project, who also adds to that problem, suffers for it.


And I don't even care about the drama, the salt, the shitposting various devs, contributors, and players made, the arguments, whatever. The biggest problem is that people brush that off as just one problem among many that the community as a whole has, or worse (especially if they're a dev who would perceive it as laying blame at their feet, as if it wasn't a systemic problem that can neither be caused nor fixed by one single person) dismiss it as nonsense, or refuse to make the barest minimum of acknowledgement that it's something that'd ideally be avoided.

I've seen devs basically go "well it's my time, why should I give a fuck" which misses the whole-ass point I'm making here. Yes, it IS your time. It's your time being wasted in amounts so much greater than the time that was saved initially, because you're not even remotely the only person doing it without thinking. It's not something you can just clamp down on and purge from a project, nor should it be seen as a herculean task that needs a fundamental shift in attitude to correct. It's just "remember it's a potential problem, acknowledge perfection is unobtainable, but just do what little extra you can and encourage others to think ahead in the same manner"