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Caidin
Oct 29, 2011
Is now a good time to update, did they fix the item charge kurfuffle I heard about last time I considered it?

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DoubleNegative
Jan 27, 2010

The most virtuous child in the entire world.

worm girl posted:

The fixation on Kevin as this bogeyman of the community is also weird and feels like it verges on harassment a lot of the time.

You know that if I hadn't included that line, he would have received immediate blame for it. Could I have phrased it better? Probably. But also, what is SA if not a little hyperbolic?

worm girl posted:

Why is that shepface, exactly? These NPCs already exist for many things and are super useful, see: Fatima, the blacksmith and gunsmith pair, the ripper doc at Hub 01.

And honestly? Because I, personally, like to do things myself instead of relying on an NPC that is probably nowhere near where I wind up setting up a base. My very first world that I generated, the refugee center was placed far enough away that, for a time, I was led to believe that reaching it was a mid-late game goal.

In my games since, I have seen Hub 01 once, Fatima twice, the gunsmiths maybe three whole times, and I'm pretty sure I've never found the Exodii tower. And that's across dozens of worlds where I've done more than my fair share of wandering!

Vib Rib
Jul 23, 2007

God damn this shit is
fuckin' re-dic-a-liss

🍖🍖😛🍖🍖

worm girl posted:

This change will not seriously affect the game for 90% of players. The PR straight up says it will only take a few days to hit 3 skill and a few weeks to hit 6. I do not know why even the suggestion disruption to the status quo causes everyone to fly into this panicked doom spiral.
For me the reaction is because I think it's a bad change, not that it's a change at all. I understand the thread and community has a tendency to overreact to changes at times but I think making every skillup take longer when it's already grindy, and saying explicitly that very high levels will be "unattainable" for all but the longest lived characters, is a really bad decision. I think it addresses real problems (like reaching endgame too early, where there's nothing worth doing) but this is not the way to do it because it's just the same thing we have now, just stretched way thinner.

worm girl posted:

Why is that shepface, exactly? These NPCs already exist for many things and are super useful, see: Fatima, the blacksmith and gunsmith pair, the ripper doc at Hub 01.
Again, only speaking for myself, and this is only tangential to the skill discussion, but I actually really dislike the gradual shift towards pre-written "story" NPCs. I don't like the Rubik guy, or the Hub01 stuff, and honestly I don't even like dealing with the refugee center and never have. I like the organic randomness of the game, I like the feeling of being a sole survivor, and though I do enjoy interacting with, recruiting, and putting to work NPCs, I prefer when they're random. Doing prewritten, static questlines for characters who are always the same in everyone's playthrough, referring to them as known characters, it just rubs me the wrong way vs how I have always seen the game. Maybe my interpretation is wrong, maybe it was always meant to be like this, but the story characters put me off and I hate that more and more content is being loaded away from the free and open game and onto NPCs, like Rubik being the main way you get cybernetics now.
Putting yet more focus on NPCs, especially "known" and premade NPCs, continues to draw away from the way I personally enjoy the game. My view is not the one universal "true" view or anything like that, but I do have reasons for disliking these changes that aren't just petty and reactionary.

worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?

DoubleNegative posted:

In my games since, I have seen Hub 01 once, Fatima twice, the gunsmiths maybe three whole times, and I'm pretty sure I've never found the Exodii tower. And that's across dozens of worlds where I've done more than my fair share of wandering!

You know the game provides breadcrumbs for all these, right? The computer in the evac shelter will draw a path to the refugee center on your map, and the refugee center has two different ways to learn the exact location of the Exodii. They also will point you to the exact location of Hub 01. This only requires that you do the first mission for Smokes where you kill the zombies in the back bay and the first mission for the Old Guard rep in the office where you kill the three guys in the cabin.

The fact that these locations can sometimes spawn very far from the player's starting location is a known issue and something that is being worked on. The intent is that nothing important will be more than (IIRC) 1.5 overmap squares away in any direction from your start, but coding that kind of stuff is really difficult.

Vib Rib posted:

For me the reaction is because I think it's a bad change, not that it's a change at all. I understand the thread and community has a tendency to overreact to changes at times but I think making every skillup take longer when it's already grindy, and saying explicitly that very high levels will be "unattainable" for all but the longest lived characters, is a really bad decision. I think it addresses real problems (like reaching endgame too early, where there's nothing worth doing) but this is not the way to do it because it's just the same thing we have now, just stretched way thinner.

Let's take a look at my LP character, Mellifera Kraus.



Mellifera is on day 13 of her adventure, meaning that zombies have only just begun to evolve and the first portal storm hasn't happened yet. She has 9 intelligence, meaning she has a mild learning penalty, and she started with 0 in almost all skills. I have not really taken time to knuckle down and seriously train any skills, I've just been playing naturally as you can see in the 12 episode LP, which represents I think about 12 hours of gameplay, possibly less - this time would have gone by way faster if I'd been grinding skills, but instead I have spent most of it doing more adventuring and combat because that's much more interesting for viewers.

She still has 4 in marksmanship, blunt, melee, and dodge. She has 3 archery. She nearly has 3 handguns. She has 3 fabrication, and the only reason it's not higher is because I haven't really had cause to use it. It could get up to 6 in a day or two. She has 6 tailoring, which is enough to make a survivor suit and only just shy of making the most complex and powerful craftable armors in the game. And I haven't really been making any special effort to grind those skills up. I crafted a couple of items (a replacement pair of underwear and like an apron or something) just to get tailoring up to 4 so I could make a leather armor cuirass, and sewing that cuirass alone took me to 6. I have a half-finished holster that would probably get me to 7, at which point I could make a single survivor trenchcoat and get to 8.

This is still the early game and I've essentially mastered one of the most important crafting skills. I'm going to keep playing this character to show off the breadth of content the game has to offer, but as far as skills are concerned, her progression is essentially finished. Yeah she'll get another couple ranks of melee and fab, and if I want to make mutagens (but pretty much only if I want to do that, which I don't really need to since they're lootable) I may take a couple days to get her applied science up, but that's it. That could all be done before Summer. And then what? What is the point of effectively maxing out my character's skills before the game even starts throwing midgame monsters at me? Why shouldn't that take longer?

This claim that the game is being stretched thinner doesn't really hold up when there have been tons of quests and boss monsters added. You have the Void Spider, the new Hell's Raiders base, the New England Great Revival (22 unique NPCs and loving 46 quests!) multiple Hub 01 quests, several new basecamp constructions, portal storm dungeons, artifacts, CBMs, mutation lines, and stronger and more diverse monsters added throughout the enemy evolution line. There is a new dungeon-type location consisting of a walled-in complex with a bunch of hostile army deserters to tackle. And this is all just in the last year!

Vib Rib posted:

Again, only speaking for myself, and this is only tangential to the skill discussion, but I actually really dislike the gradual shift towards pre-written "story" NPCs. I don't like the Rubik guy, or the Hub01 stuff, and honestly I don't even like dealing with the refugee center and never have. I like the organic randomness of the game, I like the feeling of being a sole survivor, and though I do enjoy interacting with, recruiting, and putting to work NPCs, I prefer when they're random. Doing prewritten, static questlines for characters who are always the same in everyone's playthrough, referring to them as known characters, it just rubs me the wrong way vs how I have always seen the game.

That is valid and I have at times felt the same way, unfortunately your expectations are not lining up with the core design philosophy of the game, which was never meant to make the player into a sole survivor. You are one of many in a world of persistent characters and factions that are only going to become more impactful as their content is fleshed out according to what has been outlined in the design document for many years. You'll always be able to gently caress off and just kill monsters on your own, but solo survival is just one aspect of the game.

Regardless, you will not be forced to deal with static NPCs for skill progression. Random NPCs will be an option. Per the dreaded PR:

I-am-Erk posted:

Adjust recruitable NPC skills. Diversify our starting dynamic NPC stat blocks so that there are many more of them and they have more specific skills. Rather than meeting a "cowboy" you'd meet a "plumber" with appropriate skills and proficiencies. This is a big one and also should be a pretty fun one. it could go along with giving NPCs some unique character and dialogue.

There are already PRs in to do this. Like actual ones with code and content, not just long-term discussion posts. Erk just added a Machinehead random NPC profession that will put guys who know how to make composite-armored nitro trucks into the world for you to track down and recruit. But you won't even need to do that, because the PR specifically states that you should still be able to reach the top tier of skill levels via solo play if you really want to, and that those upper echelons should feel less necessary for a normal playthrough, i.e. things that every player commonly wants to craft probably shouldn't be locked behind 8 skill unless they're really that difficult.

There was also a recent PR by the way that added the ability to designate NPCs to craft things by themselves via the & menu. So like if you have an 8 fab 8 tailoring guy in your NPC crew, you can say "please make me a heavy survivor suit" and he will do that while you gently caress off and do something more interesting. That is already in the game.

worm girl fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Aug 18, 2023

Dandywalken
Feb 11, 2014

quote:

the New England Great Revival (22 unique NPCs and loving 46 quests!)

Whoa, whats this?

Dandywalken fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Aug 18, 2023

worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?

Dandywalken posted:

Whoa, whats this?

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/62061

I haven't had a chance to personally explore their stuff, but they appear to be a church community who banded together to survive the End Times. They hate mutants and view them as Satanic, but are otherwise pretty friendly.

There's a priest there who you can confess your sins to for a substantial mood buff that can reportedly offset the (currently very silly) "murdered an innocent" penalty.

Vib Rib
Jul 23, 2007

God damn this shit is
fuckin' re-dic-a-liss

🍖🍖😛🍖🍖
You can think progression is too fast now and also that the solution they came up with for this problem is also bad.

worm girl posted:

That is valid and I have at times felt the same way, unfortunately your expectations are not lining up with the core design philosophy of the game, which was never meant to make the player into a sole survivor. You are one of many in a world of persistent characters and factions that are only going to become more impactful as their content is fleshed out according to what has been outlined in the design document for many years.
Okay. I still think it sucks.
We've both acknowledged I want something different out of the game, I'm just saying I think this is a terrible direction to go in when you have so much obvious and invested focus on the random and generated aspect but then all the major NPCs are the same every time and even have their own prewritten names and stories.

E: I guess it's more accurate to say I don't mind the named NPCs and prewritten "questlines" like this is Fallout, I just wish they weren't basically required for some things, like cybernetics. I don't know what was so wrong with the old system that it needed gating.

Vib Rib fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Aug 18, 2023

ComradePyro
Oct 6, 2009
I really appreciate the game being talked about in specific ways that provide insight and not just the usual broad generalizations and knee-jerk reactions, thanks worm girl.

remember when "innawoods" was a meme to signal which side of the game development direction divide you were on? that sucked lol

SKULL.GIF
Jan 20, 2017


worm girl posted:

Mellifera is on day 13 of her adventure, meaning that zombies have only just begun to evolve and the first portal storm hasn't happened yet.

I deliberately play with slower evolution and I'm fairly sure I've seen the first evolution stages (zappers, brutes, shrieklings) by around day 8 or so. Portal storms typically happen around day 5-6 for me.

luchadornado
Oct 7, 2004

A boombox is not a toy!

quote:

Rather than meeting a "cowboy" you'd meet a "plumber" with appropriate skills and proficiencies. This is a big one and also should be a pretty fun one.

For years, I've wanted to RP randomly meeting plumbers in dark alleys and someone finally listened.

luchadornado
Oct 7, 2004

A boombox is not a toy!

worm girl posted:

That is valid and I have at times felt the same way, unfortunately your expectations are not lining up with the core design philosophy of the game, which was never meant to make the player into a sole survivor. You are one of many in a world of persistent characters and factions that are only going to become more impactful as their content is fleshed out according to what has been outlined in the design document for many years. You'll always be able to gently caress off and just kill monsters on your own, but solo survival is just one aspect of the game[...]

There was also a recent PR by the way that added the ability to designate NPCs to craft things by themselves via the & menu. So like if you have an 8 fab 8 tailoring guy in your NPC crew, you can say "please make me a heavy survivor suit" and he will do that while you gently caress off and do something more interesting. That is already in the game.

This is great, because I hate thinking of myself as a drunken frog mutant kung fu expert having to become an expert tailor. However, if that's the "core design philosophy of the game", incredibly useful PRs like this probably should have been implemented long ago. This functionality should also be more accessible, as I enjoy recruiting NPCs and yet have still never noticed they could do this. Core design components shouldn't require experimental builds, watching PRs, and lurking the subreddits.

It's a free, open-source game so if people are really bothered they could contribute, but like, some of these criticisms are valid. If people didn't bitch about things they enjoyed, these forums would be pretty drat empty.

SKULL.GIF
Jan 20, 2017


What I like about the dev team's engagement with the community is that they deliberately forced the enablement of certain features so they could get feedback, but at the same time they're very public about disregarding feedback they interpret as too negative.

Dandywalken
Feb 11, 2014

Ive never had to interact with companions. This sounds like a good reason to!

Vib Rib
Jul 23, 2007

God damn this shit is
fuckin' re-dic-a-liss

🍖🍖😛🍖🍖
How high should NPC spawn rate be set, anyway? For years the default was like, 0.2, and I would go months without seeing anyone.

Mountain Lightning
Aug 8, 2008

Romance Dawn For
The New World!

Vib Rib posted:

How high should NPC spawn rate be set, anyway? For years the default was like, 0.2, and I would go months without seeing anyone.

So for most of my runs, I play with it set to 2, which is double(?) what it normally is. Combined with watching a few LPs, I think I know why you might not be seeing them.

Best that I can tell, if the game decides it is time to spawn an NPC, it places them randomly within your viewable area on the map or possibly within your reality bubble. Some are 'static' and don't move, some are going to move however they want, and a few seem to beeline towards you. And these NPCs can be anything from bandits and muggers (more common seemingly on the 'No Hope' mod, unsurprisingly) to guys busting in going 'Oh no my Mom is a zombie and also the Jabberwock, also can you give me an inhaler?' Playing with the Innawoods mod, it is very noticeable to see some guy randomly run up to my cave demanding Spurge Tea for their asthma, as well as other NPCs because unless you did something weird, Innawoods doesn't have that many zombies early on.

The problem is, if they're within your reality bubble, that means the zombies and local hostiles can see them and 'interact' with them, and if they're moving, they don't have too many problems with moving through dangerous areas. I've seen quite a few NPCs spawn while I'm raiding or trying to clear sections of a city, so they're on screen (or more likely on the map) for about a minute before the local zombies give them a boot massage, because NPCs are often bad about fighting or have some real odd equipment choices. Similarly, I've had NPCs spawn near my base who then had the misfortune to run past the local giant wasp hive or whatever nearby threat there is and get turbo-murdered that way.

(And watching Rycon's 'Innawoods' videos, the game has no problems spawning NPCs in serious danger zones, as seen with several NPCs he spotted on the map spawning near the dangerous dinosaur-zombie filled river, though that might just be because the game is unable to recognize those danger zones. Similarly, watching Worm Girl's videos, the sole NPC she found was in a cave nearby that had spiders that I believed bit the Hell out of him and her character once she got them in the reality bubble, though it's been a bit since I watched that video.)

There are other sorts of 'random' NPC, basically static with a somewhat prebuilt story, but spawned randomly into an appropriate locale. I can only think of two off-hand at this time. There's a 'Healer' NPC in Magiclysm who spawns on the second floor of Magic Shops, who has a real annoying quest where their often combat-incapable and under-armed rear end wants to tag along while you kill fifty zombies and thus usually bites it unless you know what's coming. And a few times I've encountered a barricaded restaurant with a cook hiding out in the kitchen... who come to think of it, I think Worm Girl encountered them in the LP, with Father Kelly? Either way, those NPCs are slightly more likely to survive since they're in a relatively safe space and unlikely to move... unless random luck causes them to step outside once they're in the reality bubble because the game made a noise and they investigated the Mi-Go outside making party horn noises.

(If I sound critical, I am a bit. While I like the NPCs and the NPC system, I hate the fact that I have to drop everything to go try and save these guys when they spawn, because the NPCs either don't have the skills or the gear to fight and the game saw fit to drop them within a block of a Collapsed Tower or something. I definitely get it's a hard problem to fix or balance, because if you make the NPCs more robust and able to handle the threats, that suddenly makes any hostile NPCs that much more of a threat to players. And they're already pretty bad if one randomly is bandit or prone to hostility and they spawned with a rifle or something.)

So the TL;DR version?
1. The game is probably spawning a fair amount of NPCs depending on your settings.
2. Said NPCs are probably spawning in dangerous zones or making a beeline to you, even if that involves running through a Triffid Grove or something.
3. You're not seeing those NPCs because they're dying, or they panic and try to flee the area because the game spawned them near a Fungal Tower or something.

Potential player-side solutions?
1. Check your Map more. You can see NPCs a lot of the time within your viewable area, i.e. what the game figures your character can naturally see.
2. Scout more. Even if you've gone up the radio tower with binoculars, maybe do it again. Similarly, check out places you've looted before outside of cities, like rural homes or hunting lodges. You might get surprised when you check your map up there and find out some guy moved into that rural house you looted and then ignored weeks ago.
3. Make sure any base or other place you linger at for a long while isn't in a dangerous area. Again, if an NPC is going for you, they're not exactly bright enough to notice they're wandering through the nearby ant zone you settled near for bug farming and will either flee or get demolished.
4. If you're going for an NPC or you suspect you might encounter one, carry a spare (non-firearm) weapon or at least the tools to make a basic one like a cudgel or a quarterstaff or a wooden spear. NPC equipment is a hodgepodge, and for every NPC spawned that has an M4 or a homemade pike, you'll find some moron who is wielding a pot despite it being months into the Apocalypse. And you don't want the rifle guy firing off if you found him in the city, not unless you're planning on going loud yourself.

worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?
I always just see NPCs chilling out in cabins and other secluded shelters. You see a lot if you travel around. They can also show up in areas you've already explored.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

worm girl posted:

I always just see NPCs chilling out in cabins and other secluded shelters. You see a lot if you travel around. They can also show up in areas you've already explored.

Ive seen all of those except for the last situation. Is that new or just rare?

worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?

Synthbuttrange posted:

Ive seen all of those except for the last situation. Is that new or just rare?

It happened a lot in Gray's playthrough in my LP thread, so it's not new. I don't think it's particularly rare either. In that run I actually started ignoring NPCs because there were too many of them scattered around after a year or so.

thatbastardken
Apr 23, 2010

A contract signed by a minor is not binding!

Leif. posted:

For those of you running electric vehicles, what kind of motor would you put in a small bike? Context: I'm trying to build an electric motorcycle in 3 tiles (wheel/seat/wheel). It's got cargo and solar on the two end panels, and the engine/battery in the middle. I tried putting in the super electric motor paired with a large storage battery and I think it's way too much overkill -- battery drain is like 300%+ per hour, draining in 20 minutes just idling, and doing a single U-turn kills 10% of my battery. Plus makes it too heavy to drag around. What's a good middle ground? I don't need it to actually achieve superbike speeds, I'd be fine if it capped out at 60-80, but I need it to last long enough to do stuff and then get back to my mothership deathmobile.

I've been going ok with a tiny motor and medium battery, top speed is lower than you want but range is ok.

Pigbuster
Sep 12, 2010

Fun Shoe

Pigbuster posted:

Oh sweet, they added dropping items off ledges to crush zombies below, that's been in the works for so long I forgot about it

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/65125

Warning: this change has made it so that if you shoot and kill a wasp that's flying directly above you, the corpse will fall onto you and pulp your head into your shoulders :lol:

RabidWeasel
Aug 4, 2007

Cultures thrive on their myths and legends...and snuggles!

Pigbuster posted:

Warning: this change has made it so that if you shoot and kill a wasp that's flying directly above you, the corpse will fall onto you and pulp your head into your shoulders :lol:

One of the funniest bug reports I've seen for a while tbh

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

The steps between 1 and maybe 3 in most skills are utterly pointless because you can learn them in a very short amount of time with minimal inputs, so personally I would just get rid of them and then stretch the rest of the scale to match. Essentially start at level 3 in everything and work from there.

The only exception I think would be combat skills perhaps which seem more balanced around a steady progression rate.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Aug 20, 2023

Vib Rib
Jul 23, 2007

God damn this shit is
fuckin' re-dic-a-liss

🍖🍖😛🍖🍖

Pigbuster posted:

Warning: this change has made it so that if you shoot and kill a wasp that's flying directly above you, the corpse will fall onto you and pulp your head into your shoulders :lol:
If there was any way to give the player agency over this, it would actually be kinda cool. Unfortunately there's not really much to controlling an engagement once you get into melee range.
Also why is it so hard for my character to spot creatures in the air? I'll see 50 zombies piled up chasing a wasp 3 z-levels up but they won't show up in my viewed monster list.

OwlFancier posted:

The only exception I think would be combat skills perhaps which seem more balanced around a steady progression rate.
I just wish combat skills wouldn't "cap out" on difficulty, personally. I hate fighting my way through a city block sized horde and then seeing that my dodge skill didn't increase at all because that doesn't count as worthwhile practice anymore.
That said there's probably high level practice for dodge by now, I just haven't kept up with that. But the game has really impressed me with all the practices and exercises you can do if you have the right equipment!

Sab Sabbington
Sep 18, 2016

In my restless dreams I see that town...

Flagstaff, Arizona

Synthbuttrange posted:

Ive seen all of those except for the last situation. Is that new or just rare?

IIRC there was a change made recently* that made LMOE shelters more likely to have groups of NPCs inside of them, making them more dangerous--and way more fun to clear.

Otherwise it's been so long since I've played on the vanilla NPC spawn rate I can't recall what it was like, but whatever No Hope has always had it set to makes them quite frequent so you could just mirror that if you want to consistently see (mostly hostile) survivors.

*This could be anytime in the past 6-18 months, I can't remember

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Eh, honestly the practice things are a bit crap too honestly. Like dodge, you can train it ridiculously easily by bouncing a ball of a wall, but actually fighting people barely moves it.

So what it actually translates to is "find ball, become harder to hit" which is just... daft?

The game is absurdly simulationist but the practice mechanics combined with generally crap skill progression means that it ends up playing basically like finding health and energy upgrades in a metroidvania or something. It's very incongruous and I would prefer if it just wasn't in the game and instead it had actually decent progression by doing things?

Or running around and fighting/working all day doesn't train your athletics but doing pushups for a while does. Makes little sense what capability this is actually simulating? Being good at pushups and solitary dodgeball makes more of a material difference to your ability to fight people than successfully killing hundreds of people.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Aug 21, 2023

megane
Jun 20, 2008



Really the thing it reminds me of the most is victory dancing, a long-removed mechanic (exploit?) in DCSS. Exp would theoretically go into the skills you were using, but in practice it would almost always be distributed in ways you didn't want. So, instead, you'd turn all skill training off, pool the experience, and then go hide in a safe place and miscast fireballs at the wall for a thousand turns to train your fire magic.

worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?

Pigbuster posted:

Warning: this change has made it so that if you shoot and kill a wasp that's flying directly above you, the corpse will fall onto you and pulp your head into your shoulders :lol:

They should change this for obvious reasons, but otoh all my most memorable experiences in this game have been dying due to something insane happening.

SKULL.GIF
Jan 20, 2017


Getting a hankering to play some Cata again soon, did they optimize the item charge rework yet? I haven't updated my experimental in about a month, and the commit log is impenetrably poorly-documented.

Sab Sabbington
Sep 18, 2016

In my restless dreams I see that town...

Flagstaff, Arizona

OwlFancier posted:

The game is absurdly simulationist but the practice mechanics combined with generally crap skill progression means that it ends up playing basically like finding health and energy upgrades in a metroidvania or something. It's very incongruous and I would prefer if it just wasn't in the game and instead it had actually decent progression by doing things?

I mean the good news is that progression is steadily getting filled out as new dungeons, challenges, and questlines are added. We've seen quite a bit of this over the past year or so, and it--at least conceptually and as an expectation in the future--better manages how things like gear progression plays out.

Overall I think the practice mechanics and things like professions are an excellent skeleton for how skill progression will look once it gets more work, and for now any of the real problems (except Skill Rust, which sucks) are a victim of how piecemeal community contributions end up advancing some core ideas partially without seeing them finished right away.

Incidentally, I think the most recent PR that was pitched that people were losing their poo poo over actually addresses these problems as part of its baseline goal and my prediction is it'll end up being something that actually hugely improves playability when it actually gets put together.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I'm extremely skeptical that the game can overcome the conflict between being a game and being a simulation, I think it has, if anything, gone further in both directions over time and the systems do not interact well.

luchadornado
Oct 7, 2004

A boombox is not a toy!

OwlFancier posted:

I'm extremely skeptical that the game can overcome the conflict between being a game and being a simulation, I think it has, if anything, gone further in both directions over time and the systems do not interact well.

Yeah, this is a great way of summing it up. On the one hand you have people calculating the physics of what things can realistically fit up your butt, and the other hand you have Rubik.

quote:

Aye, us'n can fix ye good, if'n ye're tassed to repay it in kind.

I think I'm going to go kill that idiot in my next playthrough - he sucks.

luchadornado fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Aug 23, 2023

Pigbuster
Sep 12, 2010

Fun Shoe

SKULL.GIF posted:

Getting a hankering to play some Cata again soon, did they optimize the item charge rework yet? I haven't updated my experimental in about a month, and the commit log is impenetrably poorly-documented.

It’s still pretty rough, but I’m actually working on it. I’ve gotten my dev branch to the point where you can run around just fine even with pockets full of 20,000 pills, so hopefully I can get those changes submitted soon.

Now, if you try to actually interact with that mass of pills the game will still come to a crawl, but baby steps. I’m finding optimization is actually pretty satisfying to work on. One big surprise is that the pills all having individual random rot values actually isn’t causing any slowdown; the slowdown comes from things like the game constantly iterating through all your items to find if any of them is a watch/UPS/thermometer/etc.

SKULL.GIF
Jan 20, 2017


Pigbuster posted:

the slowdown comes from things like the game constantly iterating through all your items to find if any of them is a watch/UPS/thermometer/etc.

Ohhh nooo

luchadornado
Oct 7, 2004

A boombox is not a toy!

I gave frog mutant more dex (because frogs are dexterous as poo poo), mucus adhesion (can stick to walls and climb them), and a leap that keeps you in the air. Frog is actually worth it now because they can climb and jump across building with the greatest of ease.

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

Friendly Neighborhood Frog-Man.

Griz
May 21, 2001


Pigbuster posted:

It’s still pretty rough, but I’m actually working on it. I’ve gotten my dev branch to the point where you can run around just fine even with pockets full of 20,000 pills, so hopefully I can get those changes submitted soon.

there was an update last week that massively sped up interactions with huge stacks of identical items

check out my crazy OP evac shelter npc

yeah you can just live here forever and teach me stuff whenever it's off cooldown

SKULL.GIF
Jan 20, 2017


I bit the bullet and updated my experimental. Noticed that now all survivors start with a default loadout of backgrounds: Driving License, Simple Home Cooking, Computer Literate, Social Skills, High School Graduate, Mundane Survival. This gives them skill rank 1 in applied sciences, computers, electronics, fabrication, food handling, healthcare, mechanics, social, and vehicles.

Guess 0 really does mean 0 now.

Dandywalken
Feb 11, 2014

Interesting!

SKULL.GIF
Jan 20, 2017


Man the new experimental has a ton of screen flickering when moving around.

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Vib Rib
Jul 23, 2007

God damn this shit is
fuckin' re-dic-a-liss

🍖🍖😛🍖🍖

Griz posted:

there was an update last week that massively sped up interactions with huge stacks of identical items

check out my crazy OP evac shelter npc

yeah you can just live here forever and teach me stuff whenever it's off cooldown
...A gun-obsessed Redditor who's also insanely suave?

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