I d have to read more into it on github to say any more on this.
What do most of the other contributers think?
Just to set the record straight, when I was talking about maintaining bodily functions, I was being facetious. It’s my way of saying too much realism is shit.
Reminder, from the “bad ideas” thread:
[quote=“Random_dragon, post:1983, topic:3101”]Would go well with the “random paraphilia” trait someone suggested. o3o
Also, another suggestion. Make car maintenance every bit as irksome as it is in real life. Top off the oil or the engine starts fucking itself up. Top up the brakes or enjoy crashing a lot. Keep the radiator filled or you overheat. Busted axle, Fun.
Battery damage corroded the terminal wires? Better hope future cars don’t use the complex terminal assemblies a lot of new cars these days use. Serpentine belt wore out? You need a specific set of tools to replace those, and better hope it didn’t go out because the A/C compressor froze up.[/quote]
No idea is too shit to be included.
IIRC, Whales was never a DDA developer. Didn’t Kevin and others took his original “Cataclysm project” and created DDA? It seems that he doesn’t like his game turned into DDA and started working on his own fork, Cataclysm 2 ((Cataclysm 2 | Its nice see you back and working on continuing...), but unfortunately there are no updates on the project for almost a year so it’s probably dead now.
Whales made a game, and for reasons I was not around for, left to work on another project. It was my understanding that CDDA was a fork/mod of this game by Darklingwolf, and GlyphGryph/Kevin signed on close after, contributing to our forum and our game’s code respectively. Since then, people have come and gone in their levels of contribution. KA101 did massive contributions later, starting with extensive additions to the mutation trees in game. There are new contributors that I don’t recognize yet. Seems less like one massive community project, and more like a revolving door to me.
My timeline may be incorrect. Regardless, discussing ‘ownership’ is not really getting us very far. At least this long stack of pages is a good repository for what the general fanbase doesn’t want in their game.
[quote=“Pthalocy, post:225, topic:12504”]Whales made a game, and for reasons I was not around for, left to work on another project. It was my understanding that CDDA was a fork/mod of this game by Darklingwolf, and GlyphGryph/Kevin signed on close after, contributing to our forum and our game’s code respectively. Since then, people have come and gone in their levels of contribution. KA101 did massive contributions later, starting with extensive additions to the mutation trees in game. There are new contributors that I don’t recognize yet. Seems less like one massive community project, and more like a revolving door to me.
My timeline may be incorrect. Regardless, discussing ‘ownership’ is not really getting us very far. At least this long stack of pages is a good repository for what the general fanbase doesn’t want in their game.[/quote]
That’s pretty much how I recall things. As you say, who “owns” it isn’t too relevant, but the effects that has on the dev process kinda is.
Well, sometimes stripping off stuff from a game makes it actually more enjoyable, in a game design sense! So talking about stuff we don’t want can help, as long as we are being good critics.
Ico is a great example, where it was going to have a huge world and and towns and a whole system of buying stuff, and it was stripped down to the game it is today, and it benefited from that!
Well he’s correct it isn’t a democracy and I’m not aware of him having said it’s an autocracy either. In open source projects those who contribute the most inevitably get the greatest say in the projects direction. Kevin has contributed a lot so his opinion remains relevant. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of his viewpoints but panning someone who isn’t present to defend themselves is unfair.
The dev team avoids open confrontation between it’s members to reduce this risk. Only an active developer with irreconcilable differences is likely to fork and that would be for their own reasons - not to champion ideas they read on a forum.
[quote=“Valpo, post:207, topic:12504”]Thats a good thing. The community usualy wants things that are poorly thought through. It is better if the devs decide what is good for the project.
The community should only serve as inspiration and feedback . It should not have any deciding power.[/quote]
Magazines is a good example. <5% of posters aggressively opposed this and claimed to represent 100% of the players whilst doing so. Now almost everybody is in favor of it. As a result anyone who claims to both represent the entire playerbase and to reliably predict the future has no influence on the developers at all.
Don’t assume this will always be the case though. Filthy clothes, for example, were also protested with vigor on the forums but were actually disliked by the greater part of the playerbase.
If feedback on the forums/etc. is simply going to be treated as white noise, then I hope you’re at least prepared to remove controversial features from the game when they are legitimately disliked by the playerbase (e.g. filthy clothes).
Absolutely. If an idea is universally unpopular it will be reconsidered and indeed this occurred with filthy clothing.
Posts that claim to represent everyone, predict the apocalypse or from posters that are repeatedly and needlessly aggressive are white noise. Those posters then complain we don’t listen to the forums whereas actually we just don’t listen to them.
If it’s concise, on-topic and civil you have an excellent chance of discussing it with a developer. OTOH if all you do is shitpost and claim to be leaving every week then you can hardly be surprised if nobody wants to engage with you.
Well said.
Absolutely. If an idea is universally unpopular it will be reconsidered and indeed this occurred with filthy clothing.
Posts that claim to represent everyone, predict the apocalypse or from posters that are repeatedly and needlessly aggressive are white noise. Those posters then complain we don’t listen to the forums whereas actually we just don’t listen to them.
If it’s concise, on-topic and civil you have an excellent chance of discussing it with a developer. OTOH if all you do is shitpost and claim to be leaving every week then you can hardly be surprised if nobody wants to engage with you.[/quote]
Yeah, I never really understood what the whole “leaving the forum in protest” thing is supposed to accomplish. I’ve seen it on literally every forum I’ve ever participated on. Without fail there’s a subset of people who think that depriving others of their presence will somehow change the established dynamics on the forum in question.
Indeed the initial post of this thread follows that format:
[ul][li]Claims predicting the future is doomed[/li]
[li]Aggressive tone and deliberate offense[/li]
[li]Threat to leave[/li][/ul]
God, no! The threat to leave is not about that! It’s a statement. Bit like people who go on a hunger strike or set themselves on fire. It tries to convey the message that “This will not stand, and I will be the first to go, and others might turn away as well, and I want you to be aware of this emerging trend, so that you have a chance of changing your ways before things escalate too far.”
And after a disappointed person is gone, he starts trash-talking the game to any other gamer whom he might come across in the future, or perhaps even worse, he says nothing, and in doing so he does his small part to make sure the game gets forgotten.
Now I’ve threatened to leave once or twice in the way back past NOT WITH CDDA, but with other projects/communities. It’s almost an inevitable phase, a path of thought that we’re all very likely to go down at some point, at least when faced with persistent disappointment bordering bitterness. At the very least we explore the option of leaving the thing behind.
One does not threaten to leave if one does not love the thing that he threatens to leave.
Moving on. The thing about democracy vs. autocracy/dictatorship. What if we had two development lines of CDDA? One with Kevin’s dictatorship and one with democratic approach?
I don’t think Ive ever threatened any community or developer with my leaving. I usually just leave quietly if the game doesn’t draw me in/doesn’t draw me in anymore, if I have hope for it I point out a few things I think would improve it/ bugs ive run into etc… in a polite and helpful manor. If I want to leave, then I just leave. If the game doesn’t interest me enough to play then I don’t waste further time with it whining and complaining about it, I go searching for a game that has whatever the last one was missing, key elements etc… that make or break it.
Um… I am not sure what everyone is complaining about w/ kev. If you hate it so much, go make your own fork… or just stay and make your own mods that go the way you want. They don’t have to be official cannon, mainlined or even official unofficial mods to have the right to exist.
Moving on. The thing about democracy vs. autocracy/dictatorship. What if we had two development lines of CDDA? One with Kevin’s dictatorship and one with democratic approach?
[/quote]
Wouldn’t work. It would require devs to update and support two separate codebase which would be a pain in the ass for eveyone.
Throwing your toys out has nothing to do with self-sacrifice and in any case this is a game so have some sense of proportionality!
Another prophecy of doom if we don’t acquiesce to your viewpoint. You’ve done this before - magazines would be a good example. Bonus marks for going for maximum offense when starting this thread.
I suppose it depends on the individual - I’m sure most people are good natured and would just move on instead.
Why are we back to this - it looks like you want to make a land grab? Asking who owns an open source project is kind of missing the point.
I come back to check on news about a new stable release(as I’m still playing Cooper), and check the lastest stable for almost two years now, althou I barely played 0.B and most of my playing is with 0.C.
Gotta say that it looks like contributors don’t coordinate among themselves, and whoever people has power to accept a PR doesn’t seem to communicate with the others.
And in my opinion, a lot of stuff seems to happen on GitHub, between the whoever small group of contributors that are active at the time. Thing likes “The Drawing Board - Suggestions, Comments, and Future Plans” are underutilized by the active contributors at the time, making once again, that one contributor does X and another does X by doing XY and having some conflicting PRs, or discussions about core mechanics being in GitHub by just a handful of the active contributors instead of discussing, exterminating and evaluating it in the forum, where it would remain archive for everyone to re-examine, instead of diving through the GitHub issues.
I also think that the C:DDA Design Outline has been totally ignored by now, specially as it states and I quote the design outline:
The Rule of Fun is prime: if it isn’t fun, you shouldn’t be doing it.
And finally, another thing I don’t understand, is why all the “hardcore realism” mechanics aren’t introduced as mod, instead of forcing them as core mechanic. It seems that now everyone thinks that CDDA is a hardcore realism simulator, I again quote:
We consider DDA a freeform, post-apocalypse, [i][b]low-intensity[/b][/i], reality-based, roguelike, with a focus on survival-sim elements and a heavy emphasis on scavenging.Low-intensity means that the game is not constantly high-pressure, and not every move must be precisely calculated. It’s OK to relax and enjoy it; there will be aspects that you need not mess with, and that’s OK. Someone else will like those, and maybe even dislike the aspects that you enjoy. But there’s enough to go around. We neither need nor want competition for the “best” DDA player, and don’t even know how we’d define that. The Rule of Fun is prime: if it isn’t fun, you shouldn’t be doing it. That said, super-intense stuff may happen (and it may happen when you don’t want it to!) but the overall experience should come at you at whatever pace you choose to pursue. It should be just as possible to lead a slow and careful life in harmony with nature outside the cities as it is to make crazy laser-slinging assaults on superscience labs.
So again, it seems that everything now is about realism, and not about post-apoc stuff, scavenging, mid and specially late game content. It looks like soon we’ll have to hoard TP to do tactical poops behind a bush and then plash some ammonia to disguise the smell to not attract critters.
So again, why the powers at be(squidman, gunperson, knade etc) don’t just try to devise a way to coordinate and communicate easily and coherent between the bazillion temporal and not-so-temporal contributors and specially between themselves, as they are the ones that have the actual power to decide what goes into the main branch and what doesnt?
Sheltered is a published, commercial game about living in a fall-out shelter and you have to build, use, and clean toilets so CDDA is too late for that. Which is another good reason to not add bodily functions to CDDA.
Sheltered is a published, commercial game about living in a fall-out shelter and you have to build, use, and clean toilets so CDDA is too late for that. Which is another good reason to not add bodily functions to CDDA.[/quote]
Because it is on the theme and it goes with with the design of management of a place. CDDA is not that.
Also it would get really annoying. Just think about it in a serious, design focused point of view. Even I thought it was a good idea until I really thought about it, a long time ago.
Not to derail, so I’ll go back: Alec White, I’m pretty much with you on this one.
Maybe we should start giving the design doc the importance it should.