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Author Topic: The Cataclysm games thread.  (Read 114375 times)

Putnam

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #480 on: December 31, 2021, 08:16:39 pm »

I mean, my problem with all that is that I'm someone who kinda just immediately fixes things that annoy me or that I notice are a problem, but only if the problem actually annoys me sufficiently. That last bit is kinda important and not unlikely to be the cause of a lot of these things, and a natural conclusion of people working for no money on an open-source game.

I know I'm not really one of "the devs", cause my contributions are minimal, even if they've improved performance by something like ~10-20% over the last few months (the issues I fixed I tested in a city but they're way more extreme in labs), but, like... in general, when it comes to these problems, all I can think is "If someone were to pay me, I could surely fix a lot of these bugs, but nobody's paying me, and the game is playable the way I play it without fixing them".

Like. My motivation for making the changes I did were:

1. I profiled the game to see if there were low-hanging fruit for optimization, and fixed those low-hanging fruit, caused by a misunderstanding of the particulars of C++ by some dev somewhere in an obscure part of the code that just happens to be called a lot by coincidence
2. Because I kinda love doing optimization, I profiled again after fixing those and found another egregious problem, caused by a misunderstanding of the particulars of C++ by some dev somewhere in an obscure part of the code that is called a lot on purpose
3. I was mildly annoyed by magiclysm spamming while learning spells from books and figured it'd be an easy fix (less easy than expected, took me about 3 hours, but hey)

The one thing tying all these together is that it was doing the kind of programming I specifically enjoy and fixing parts that were catching my attention. Open source games in general work this way, and open source games in general tend to have this sort of problem.

Hell, using myself as an example of how this is not atypical but is definitely bad: I ported bluespace pipes to Citadel station (repository contains NSFW in various nooks) in March. I knew them to be broken since an issue was opened that said they were, and I quickly looked at how they were broken, felt a bit confused as to what was happening, and forgot about it until two weeks ago, in what turned out to be a one-line fix. This happened because the interest in them was low, at least partially because they were completely broken and I had forgotten I added them. Problems like these are extremely common in open-source games, and I kinda suspect Bright Nights is only avoiding them as of now because of how passionate the people over there are.

Random_Dragon

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #481 on: December 31, 2021, 08:38:50 pm »

That's the thing. The root cause isn't "you should have to be fixing other people's bugs" or anything like that. It's more "the person working on a new feature or addition would save themselves and everyone else a lot of hassle if they did the most basic degree of testing what they add, the first time"
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KittyTac

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #482 on: December 31, 2021, 11:55:50 pm »

TBH even though my additions were small (mostly mutation stuff and fixes to oversights) I always playtest everything to see if it's WAD. It's less of a dev problem and more of a general culture problem.

Playtest your changes dammit, for 5 minutes you can save whatever poor contributor comes after you two hours. That's what debug mode is for.
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King Zultan

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #483 on: January 01, 2022, 05:42:26 am »

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
Just gonna say that I play DDA and not Bright Nights.
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teoleo

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #484 on: January 10, 2022, 06:50:30 am »

sorry, basic question:

is possible to use a washing machine? i don't find any mode to interact with the machine.....
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Random_Dragon

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #485 on: January 10, 2022, 11:29:49 am »

sorry, basic question:

is possible to use a washing machine? i don't find any mode to interact with the machine.....

Furniture, no. Vehicle part, yes.
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teoleo

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #486 on: January 10, 2022, 02:33:10 pm »

Thk
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Random_Dragon

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #487 on: January 10, 2022, 04:09:05 pm »

In the meantime, been doing a few things in BN lately. Recently had the rework to fridge contents merged, meaning fridges will now have less food overall but a better variety of items in then. One idea that came up that I should do as a follow-up would be to make it so more produce spawns (like in grocery stores) spawn bundles of produce instead of scattered smatterings of fruit and veg. So for example 4 apples and 3 potatoes instead of an apple, a potato, a pear, a banana, onion, etc.

Another major thing that got merged was finally fixing autoclave items to actually work right.. The total power draw has been reduced a bit, and the types of batteries it can use have been changed. The goal was to push things together from both ends so that it doesn't use more power than its batteries can hold. Before it used 8200 power, and out of all the batteries it could use only the vanishingly rare heavy atomic batteries every actually had enough power to make it work. Now it needs 5500 power and uses most types of storage battery instead of heavy batteries, so the lowest-capacity battery (the one with 7000 power) can actually run it.

If we ever get my suggested feature for making it so a furniture's examine action can be made to optionally require power, then we can skip all this nonsense and just give the player the option to hook them up to their electric grid.

As for some useful recent PRs I've got that are still open:
1. I have a PR up that'll make it so a vehicle part can optionally be told to ignore how heavy the part is and thus skip the lifting requirement. This is being applied primarily to swappable storage batteries used by electric cars, because the ability to quick-swap batteries is basically fucking useless in practice due to still needing lifting requirement. A lil change to how storage battery cases are flavored, in turn enabling a slight bit more complexity to the recipe to balance how much easier it can make electrical vehicle setups, and it all fits into place.
2. More use of the ELECTRIC_GRID flag in a lot of overmap specials. One problem we're still having with the electric grid system is that wiring up two different mapgen tiles is a bit hard to hint to the player that it's something you can do, so making more of the locations that a player might build a static base in come with grid connections already will make things a bit easier on the player.
3. Finally decided to port over a variety of slight tweaks from my MST Extra mod. A good chunk of it is in making some more rock-like items count as sling and staff sling ammo, but there's also birchbark fletching, fixing birch trees being the only ones that don't grow back after harvesting, and porting over my recipe for the stone spear. It should be less trivial and more realismic than the old recipe that DDA obsoleted ages ago, while being less of an unnecessary pain in the ass compared to DDA's current take on the stone spear recipe. Imagine making a weapon you'll only ever use in the early game take level 6 fabrication.

And finally, some recent mod updates I did. First, Arcana stuff:
1. I finally looked into riverside dwellings after someone remarked that one of the vanilla variants is basically the sort of innawoods church that you'd fully expect to be a Cleansing Flame sanctum. So I took two variants that looked interesting, and made arcanist versions of them. One's the aforementioned church style that fit the Cleansing Flame, the other's some kinda serial killer fuccboi shack that fit as fodder for a Sanguine Order variation.
2. Critsy Bear discovered some fun exploits in his BN playthrough as Numerius, in particular abusing stamina recovery effects with Magic Signs. While I nerfed the specific source of stamina recovery he used a while back, I've more recently committed some changes to make the Magic Sign Exertion side effect matter more. Before, if you emptied out a default 10000-unit stamina bar, the secondary fatigue cost would be drawn out over well over 2 and a half hours, meaning you could easily spam spells by waiting for your stamina to recover and get hit with a ton of fatigue cost, but it'd hit you so slowly you might never even notice or realize that's why you seem to be getting tired more. Now it hits you way faster. It's not instant, but it's plenty fast enough to make the side effect actually matter. Related changes include updating citrine incense to favor restoring stamina over fatigue, to dole it out instantly instead of over 15 minutes, and to dole out a total amount of energy more consistent with how you don't use a lot of essence to make the potions it's made from. Finally, that same commit also tweaked the recipes for crafting stuff into essence with the chalice, shuffling things around enough to justify the higher-tier recipe giving 10 essence instead of 5. Main benefit of that is it lets you use crystallized essence as an ingredient, making it less hassle to convert crystalized essence back into essence.
3. Some mapgen fixes and updates for a few locations. A couple arcanist basement variants changed to make them less like plain big single-room boxes, and the weird middle hallway in the hermit's house has been axed in favor of some tweaks to make the first floor more normal-looking. Most useful was fixing up some faction ownership stuff in the rural church, so that when the great hall is added the dorms and kitchen don't get their contents marked as owned, only the shopkeeper's stuff. This gives the player free run of the building, useful since it's right there by the entrance.


And finally, here's a couple Cataclysm++ ideas I sent Noctifer's way recently:
1. The big one was adding a new martial art. This one focuses on strong mutants and cyborgs, encouraging the use of the big heavy weapons that are normally ignored by the metagame for their piss-poor accuracy and DPS. It leans toward a lot of strength-scaling effects as well as movecost and accuracy buffs that help offset the drawbacks of its prefered weapons. In many respects it's a deliberate foil of how Survivor Combatives is currently balanced, i.e. a strength-scaling all-offense style for experienced inhuman survivors vs. an intelligence-scaling, highly survival/defense focused style geared towards more well-rounded survivors.
2. Aside from a few follow-up tweaks to fix things found here and there, the next big related addition was adding the makeshift greatsword item. The main goal here was adding a big, heavy sword-like weapon that fits the martial art style added previously, as none of the weapons added by Cata++ were really suited for the style. It also fills a useful niche as a way to get a decent sword-type weapon without needing a full forging setup, being even simpler than BN's non-garbage interpretation of the hand-forged sword I added a while back (basically DDA's implementation but balanced to actually be ever worth using). The new item thus hits hard and pairs well with Post-Human Combatives, but it's still inferior in terms of DPS than any sword-like weapon that requires forging (while still being superior to the extra-makeshift 2-by-sword weapon family).
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Egan_BW

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #488 on: January 10, 2022, 04:28:20 pm »

...couldn't really be called a sword, it was more like a giant, jagged chunk of iron...
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Random_Dragon

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #489 on: January 10, 2022, 04:55:58 pm »

...couldn't really be called a sword, it was more like a giant, jagged chunk of iron...

Yesss. Either that vibe or New Vegas bumper swords.

Though the item is made using a vehicle frame technically, so bumper sword wouldn't be entirely fitting. Idea was that'd be the most logical, readily available post-apoc source of a good, long piece of half-decent steel. Seemed like the best option for a survivor to use as a source of material that could hypothetically be converted into a sword-like weapon without needing forging or welding, based off how ladder frames tend to be.

That reminds me, one of these days it'd be tempting to bring back leaf springs, or some other way to get the vanilla blade item with nothing more than a wrench and/or hacksaw. Right now blades are fairly hard to get ahold of, with it often being easier to salvage from from broadswords/machetes than it is it find and strip a lawnmower, which effectively makes the makeshift machete a moot point.
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KittyTac

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #490 on: January 11, 2022, 11:36:17 am »

I should keep making Ultica sprites, some mutations don't have them currently, as well as a bunch of wielded containers and the mining helmet.
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Random_Dragon

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #491 on: January 13, 2022, 11:34:16 pm »

Couple smol things to add lately:
1. A while back it was suggested to have monster harvest in BN set it so harvested CBMs would be non-sterile, but no longer filthy and faulty. Hashed out a PR to make bionics harvested from NPCs behave the same way. Getting regular CBMs to no longer have filthiness and faults was the easy part, but power storage CBMs were handled differently, spawning with no flags (which in game terms means sterile and ready to install). Thanks to some code help we managed to get the latter working too, so now power storage from NPCs will be non-sterile and need packing to sterilize.
2. During a recent playthrough, I realized I could fuck myself over via the "lost power capacity" installation complication, as it could go into the negatives. Worse, saving while in that state is a Bad Idea. Fixing that turned out to be surprisingly trivial if/else work. Just tell it to zero out the power if the result would otherwise be negative. Along the way I realized that losing power storage was not the normal complication, but meant to be a fallback for if you have all the available faulty CBMs. Simple enough matter to fix that, turns out part of the code got a flag name wrong. And one final addition, if you DO have every last faulty bionic in the game, AND you have zero power storage, you no longer get away scot-free but instead have the failure downgraded to the second-worst complication (which just damages you).
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Sharp

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #492 on: January 15, 2022, 05:23:01 pm »

Does BrightNights have the weight system? I can't see if my character thinks they are obese or not but I do see number on bathroom scales change so it looks like it is, what I'm not sure though is if there is any malus from being obese, it looks like there can be from being malnourished.

And just to confirm that it doesn't have the vitamins stuff in it right?

Edit: Also realised I'm a dumbass. I thought I made my character obese by using scales but I was weighing myself with all my gear, hope the intermittent fasting hasn't give my character any problems.

Another Edit: Is zombies smashing vehicles bugged? I've lured a bunch of zombies into a hippie van and they aren't smashing the shit out of it. Doors, bushes, windows, walls and fences still seem to be getting smashed, just not vehicles.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2022, 07:42:17 pm by Sharp »
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duckman

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #493 on: January 15, 2022, 09:36:32 pm »

Vehicle parts all have individual armor values. The obviously fragile stuff, like windshields and headlights will break right away, but most of the sturdy stuff is functionally indestructible as far as regular zeds are concerned.
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KittyTac

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Re: The Cataclysm games thread.
« Reply #494 on: January 15, 2022, 11:09:41 pm »

It's not indestructible, just takes a while to break. Unarmored quarterpanels and boards can 100% be broken. And yes, BN has no vitamins.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2022, 11:11:33 pm by KittyTac »
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