6+ months of agonizing "realism" nerfs have ruined this game

[gamejunky]

maybe total volume used should affect wield time?

Think of the implications (which is what should always be done with ideas). This means the fuller your inventory, the more risk added if you encounter a situation where you have to switch weapons. In turn that means on top of the being limited by what containers you can scrounge/craft (and str requirements) to how long you can do a single run, you’ve got to take into consideration the extra risk implied of filling up your volume to capacity. This makes the player have to decide if they’d rather accept heightened risk or having to run back and forth more times between looting location and their stash. This has an effect on the dynamics of game play and balance. So this will likely trigger having to rebalance other aspects to keep it from becoming an irritating feature. Then after all of that work is done, what did it really add to the game other than more realism?

[_k1]

When it does not require excessive repeated key pressing, realism is acceptable.

If, for example, when you input #repaircar, your @ starts working, until he is hungry, and then drinks protein shake from his waterskin and resumes, until he is tired, and then sleeps and wakes up and resumes, until the car is fully repaired, then the tedium becomes an interesting thing to watch.

[Valpo]

Well that sounds like improvement

[Random_dragon]

None of those are what could be considered “realism nerfs” (which is a bit of a subjective term) to me and really further proves the point of how “realism” is a double-edged sword of where it can enhance or hinder game play depending on how well it is pulled off.

This. See earlier point about realism and its need to add to gameplay.

There have been a shitton of improvements since the last stable build, and many realism-focused features that actually benefit players (hell, that was the objective behind many of my contributions). Problem is there are also many instances of realism additions detracting from gameplay.

Worse is when you implement a realism feature and get it wrong, or fudge it a bit due to gameplay reasons. This is fine if the end result (say it with me) compliments gameplay, but badly-implemented realism is more grating if it isn’t even realistic.

This goes a long way towards explaining why the filthy clothing and vitamin got cited as shining examples of how not to add features. It wasn’t bad enough that they added tedium, or micromanagement, or whatever. It was that they also added inconsistencies and breaks from reality and thus became an example of Misaimed Realism

[mugling]

That’s a confounding argument. Those aren’t related subsystems and people do hold differing opinions about them. Vitamins are still being actively discussed (mostly calcium balance) and are designed to give the food crafting system more depth than the traditional cataclysm diet of oatmeal cooked with toilet water.

I think this thread has probably no run it’s course. There isn’t anything new being added here. As previously pointed out by a multiple authors there have been considerable improvements in the last 6 months and overall the project is in better shape. The core mechanics (aiming, melee, dodging) are all being improved on along with the UI and game internals. Everyone has a differing opinion about what constitutes ‘realism’ and whether this is a good or bad thing and indeed presence of the word at all has often become a sign the meaningful discussion has stalled.

[Coolthulhu]

I’m not sure if the vitamin system can be done right.
It has more than just roots in realism and the only gameplay purpose is “make diet less bland”.

I recall other games doing it by categories. If you fulfill enough categories it’s OK, otherwise you get penalties.
Categories could be grains, vegetables, meat. 2 categories would be enough to avoid the penalty.
Or extended version: grains, vegetables, meat, nuts, dairy. 3 categories needed to avoid penalty.

Of course this would require some pigeonholing and edge cases, but that would still end up simpler than current system, without taking away its gameplay implications.

Tracking all vitamins separately is certainly realistic, but realism never adds to gameplay. It can make the game more flavorful and intuitive, but the best realism can do to gameplay is not making it worse.
Realism is inherently a limitation.

[pisskop]

nah.

We have something that works okay for now. The real limitation on vitamins is that of having to make a foodstuff equal portions of its constituent materials.

i.e.
a cheeseburger is bread, meat, cheese.

Well, its ceertainly not 33% cheese, 33% meat, and 33% bread.

We cant make every item have its own relative nutrition (we could, buuut), so we should be fine with a simplified nutritional system

Id like to start compiling acceptable penalties (weighed towards gameplay than realism) and applying them to my own mod to test it out. But I am a little alzy

[mugling]

I’d rather work on finishing our existing system as opposed to writing something new from scratch (which would probably be the same except with different names for the stats), We need to move away from all the definitions being dependent on item materials though as that’s a little too limiting.

[Random_dragon]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:306, topic:12504”]Tracking all vitamins separately is certainly realistic, but realism never adds to gameplay. It can make the game more flavorful and intuitive, but the best realism can do to gameplay is not making it worse.
Realism is inherently a limitation.[/quote]

There are instances were realism can make things better. There are a lot of potential instances where the player is limited by some in-game restriction and goes “hey wait a minute, my life would be so much easier if I could do X, like in real life” and such.

[Coolthulhu]

We have something that works okay for now.

Nope
It is only “working” in the sense that it is incredibly lenient and thus not achieving the intended purpose.
Meaning it isn’t working.

I’d rather work on finishing our existing system

I’m not sure if it can ever be finished.
Oatmeal+water may be bland, but adding vitamins to fix that wasn’t a good idea in retrospect. They turned into a bigger problem than bland optimal food.

Basing them on real life ones was an error here. Real life is horribly designed, tedious and anti-fun.
Could possibly be salvaged by picking a select 2-3 of them and focusing on those.

The problem with bland food mostly results from the fact that acquiring large quantities of food is currently an activity that takes more keypresses that thought.
Vitamins didn’t change that, they only made it so that instead of going to forest, farm or swamp and doing mindless activity in one of them, you do it in 2-3.
In realism vs gameplay, vitamins are all realism.

There are instances were realism can make things better. There are a lot of potential instances where the player is limited by some in-game restriction and goes “hey wait a minute, my life would be so much easier if I could do X, like in real life” and such.

Inspiration is not realism, just like planes are not replicas of birds.

[mugling]

No, I disagree. We only have 5 vitamins and it makes sense to use real-world names rather than arbitrary ones as they player already has some intuition that you can expect to find vitamin C in fruit. The issue is balancing the vitamins so that the player has new goals - for example raiding ants nests for eggs (calcium).

[Random_dragon]

Inspiration is not realism, just like planes are not replicas of birds.

Okay, bad example. :V

My point is really just that a gameplay mechanic can still be both realistic and fun, or that a realistic addition can be actually well-thought-out and good for gameplay.

Though the fact that even you’re now pessimistic about whether realism can mesh with gameplay speaks volumes for how the attitude towards realism in CDDA has changed since I used to contribute. ;w;

[Coolthulhu]

The issue is balancing the vitamins so that the player has new goals - for example raiding ants nests for eggs (calcium).

For as long as we balance those things against realism with ideas like eating a bunch of ground bones to bump calcium (which makes perfect sense IRL), it will end up naturally exploitable.
And if we bump the required numbers enough to make the diet varied, there will be complaints like “2 weeks for full scurvy? that’s not how it works IRL”.
And it has to be short in the game. Otherwise scavenging will fulfill all the needs, thus making the mechanic redundant. We don’t need to punish the farmers, they punish themselves enough.

Maybe if those requirements were graded in a more gamey way it could work. For example, if you go overboard with calcium and proteins, you get fast regen instead of hypervitaminosis.
Or if you could extract vitamins from food with a magitech tool that lets you consume bland goop that satisfies all needs and only notes once in a while “store of calcium in goopmaker is too low”.

Our food UI is pretty horrible and we don’t have a good graded display which would show what to eat to remove current health problems.

My point is really just that a gameplay mechanic can still be both realistic and fun, or that a realistic addition can be actually well-thought-out and good for gameplay.

It can, but realism is always a burden. Depending on mechanic, realism may make perfect sense (driving could probably work with realism rather well, except for random swerving) and thus come “for free”, or be in direct opposition (sniping ranges vs. reality bubble).

[Stormlock]

Vitamins seem like an odd choice to add as a mechanic to me- food is simply too plentiful for it to really matter. Even if you’re a ravenous carnivore, you’ll still do fine by just cooking up spiders or wildlife and scavenging for chicken noodle soup. I’m running a character that can’t eat veggies or fruit and I still have far more canned food than I need, even in a world modded to be mostly in ruins. And frankly that character eats better than I do IRL- I’m a miser that eats mostly cheap junkfood, ramen, pasta, etc. I don’t have scurvy. It being a serious risk for someone with 20 types of canned food and a steady supply of fresh meat would be pretty silly.

Would make more sense for food to be more scarce instead. Especially as time goes on. But really it’s just not that interesting a problem for the long term. Food is always going to be far easier to find than things like endgame character upgrades, equipment, etc. So once you can find yourself the rare stuff, finding common things like food and clothing will be utterly trivial.

[SenorOcho]

In fact, maybe a good trait would be [organized] and [disorganized]. which increase or decrease wielding times by a percentage.

I would think this would be a good replacement for the traits that increase/decrease total volume, rather than a call for new ones.

On nutrition:
I don’t know how many involved with development have played it, but maybe something closer to UnReal World’s system might be workable?

[deoxy]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:313, topic:12504”]For as long as we balance those things against realism with ideas like eating a bunch of ground bones to bump calcium (which makes perfect sense IRL), it will end up naturally exploitable.
And if we bump the required numbers enough to make the diet varied, there will be complaints like “2 weeks for full scurvy? that’s not how it works IRL”.
And it has to be short in the game. Otherwise scavenging will fulfill all the needs, thus making the mechanic redundant. We don’t need to punish the farmers, they punish themselves enough.[/quote]

The problem, as I’ve pointed out several times, is that most serious vitamin problems are, historically speaking, actually HARD to get - that is, people generally avoided them BY ACCIDENT.

Scurvy, for example - it was essentially classified as a sailor’s disease, because that’s the only time people actually got it, and they didn’t even know what caused it!

Sure, it would be BETTER for you to have just the right mix, but it takes serious “only eat one thing” dedication to get real problems.

If you’re trying to avoid “bland late game food”, having something that happens if you live on ONLY a certain type of diet for a long time isn’t a bad idea (live on ONLY cooked meat products, yes, you eventually get scurvy), but one other food product every week ought to be sufficient, generally speaking.

Make it so you need at least one meat product and one vegetable/fruit product each week, and bam, you’re 90% there. Anything else gets silly REAL fast.

[Coolthulhu]

Make it so you need at least one meat product and one vegetable/fruit product each week, and bam, you’re 90% there. Anything else gets silly REAL fast.

That’s the problem: it adds nothing to the game.
If you’re eating bland food, you’re probably at the point in game where you can easily eat varied food, just don’t want to bother because it’s a lot of extra checking and keypressing.
And to make it matter, we’d need to make it so that you need to be trying to avoid it. And that would make it unrealistic, since scurvy in 3 days is not how it happens IRL. And also seasonal problems, where winters and springs would be scurvy time because you can’t get vitC.

It’s a clear case of realism vs gameplay. And vitamins are all realism, no gameplay. And because of how they’re designed, changing them to gameplay would ruin the realism part.

[Rot]

I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this or anything but vitamins imo aren’t really that bad, it just needs some serious rebalancing.

I think the rate on vitamin loss should be calculated by how long your seasons are, for example a person with 91 day seasons will have a slower vitamin/mineral loss then someone with 14 day seasons.

Anyway if also like to mention the distinction between fat-soluble vs water-soluble vitamins.

From what I have gathered, vitamin C, and B12 is water soluble while vitamin A is fat soluble.
Calcium acts like a fat-soluble vitamin, meaning that it tends to stay in the body longer and act as a slow release type of deal. I believe iron is the same way.

However you can still have a years worth of B12 in your liver (I’m assuming it would stay so providing you have a sedimentary lifestyle) and even vitamin C deficiency takes a couple months to kick in.

[PoeSalesman]

I see nothing good in vitamins. When I’m doing well on food, I generally have a variety already, which I suppose was meant to be the challenge there? But all that does is require me to pay attention to random messages since vitamins are hidden and deal with the tedium of blindly balancing them, which takes no effort. When I’m doing poorly on food I already deal with starvation, which is far enough balance as far as I’m concerned, all the vitamin balancing and associated penalties are nothing more than insult to injury since I’m already suffering for doing a poor job with resource gathering.

Is this just meant to be a feature to make ant mounds valuable? I hear them come up a lot while discussing vitamins. Why not add something interesting to them other than just plain boring eggs? I can just beat around the woods or find a spider house (which are by far more common than ants in any game I’ve played, many have had zero in the starting area or 10 or so surrounding large towns) to get some if I really need them. Just about every other unique map feature has some sort of rare loot that can show up.

[mugling]

Realism shouldn’t really come into it. Good gameplay is what matters. Our current implementation of guns is based upon reality but isn’t realistic. Like I said earlier it’s become a watch word, eg. ‘I don’t like this idea - ITS UNREALISTIC’. The reverse also occurs where people defend bad gameplay as realistic. Such selective application of the word is unhelpful.

Vitamins need adjustments to rate and availability to become good gameplay - realism has very little significance in that process.