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

Game Talk The Bunker
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Vitamin system needs:

  • blood analysis to check the levels
  • minor bonuses for covering all vitamins: +1 INT, +1 PER, +50% Focus recovery speed, -50% Focus loss speed, other positive changes to Focus formula (pick one or more). Could come as a status effect such as “Healthy Diet”. When it goes away, you’ll know you’re already “missing” something.
  • viewable backlog of consumed food items?
  • overall less food in the world; food is too abundant with default item drop rates
  • less overall vitamin content; not all of ingested vitamins gets absorbed
  • possible unknowability to vitamin deficiency conditions without proper medical/survival skills or a special nutritional guide; the player is just described the scurvy symptoms instead of telling that it’s early stage of scurvy
  • specialized vitamin pills or less effective multivitamins, just to provide more control to the player
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^ these sort of posts are of much greater value. Those that point out specific flaws are also good.

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I’d just like to chime in and say that I am in agreeance with the fact that game play has gotten worse over time.

Perhaps if there was a branch off, Personally I’d like to see the removal of a lot of ‘features’ and bloat that has accumulated.
What I have noticed is that a lot of the devs are taking the middle ground, so to speak and implementing options to enable or disable features. This is great, however the options menu is filling up rather fast. Not to mention mod options, world options, etc.
This could be a really nice game, but it needs some serious reworking, refactoring and polishing.

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does anyone have a patch that fixes the timescale for vitamins and preferably also skill rust to months instead of days or can someone tell me which file i can find the algorithms in?

I think the rate on vitamin loss should be calculated by how long your seasons are
well, your metabolism doesn't change just because you move from earth to mars, but i guess it makes sense balance-wise if you are into farming. wouldn't force it upon players though.

PS: i thought about why someone would create a vitamin requirements system that is as broken as the one in cata and the most logical explanation i could come up with was that some dev is getting paid by an alliance of vitamin producers.

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One thing I don’t understand of the vitamin system, is what was the idea behind the vitamins mechanic? What was its intended purpose? In what way it would benefit the gameplay?

Why it wasn’t first abstracted into something like “nutrients”?

Having a general “nutrients” along with “food”, would make it more intuitive for the player and easier to balance, as simple meals would have “food” value and a low “nutrient” value, while complex meals made with several ingredients would give more “nutrients”.
That would: add another layer of complexity, encourage cooking meals and not just live by chunks of meat, encourage scavenging for cans of food/veggies in the wild/eggs/etc for making complex meals and overall would feel more natural, intuitive and logic. And even punish farmers for growing low nutrition value simple foods, encouraging them to either plant a hell of a lot more crops or scavenge/hunt for additional nutrients in their diet.

In one hand you have the “food” that is just fuel for the body, and in other you have “nutrients” that are needed to have the body work properly.

Whereas going down with the “vitamins” you need to pick a group of them, as you can’t possibly have all vitamins humans can’t make (unless you want to turn CDDA into a Tamagochi game), assign them to each food item, and balance all them. Plus the extra work for the player of having to manage vitamin levels, which food gives what vitamins and in how much quantity, without going past hypervitaminated.

Even from a “realistic” point of view, you normally aren’t taking test to check your vitamin levels, or checking what types of food you eat to get what types of vitamin, unless you are some kind of healthnut person eating activated almonds and kelp noodles.
So even from the “realistic” point of view, how the vitamin system is implemented is not even realistic.

And overall the vitamin system(like the dirty cloth items) only really makes the early game harder, and doesn’t add much but in my opinion a tedium needless micromanaging in mid and late game.

I would advise again to review the CDDA Design Outline, as a reminder that CDDA is not a hardcore-realistic-simulator.

Also, here’s a link to a list of vitamins humans need and how much of them daily, if you are interested in the hardcore-realistic-simulation.

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I never had problems with vitamins.when deficent i in rare cases i pop up some multivitamin i am sure to find up to that point in game.i dont micromanage and watch food by food for vitamin intake.if i lask vitamins c/a i eat fruits/vegetables for others meat.and as i eat vegetable/meat diet in game i dont seem to deve;op problem so much to get message i am blind/have scurvy.
only problems which seem to be ednemic is calcium which diet dont seem to satisfiy as only calcium rich foods are mill/bones which are not part of usual diet in cata.

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Your suggestions are already a step in the right direction, but all things considered, it wouldn’t really help to allievate the root problem: That there’s one type of food that is just plain better than everything else. Without a vitamin system (or something else that would encourage a more varied diet), players will tend to focus on the ‘cheaper’ foods like cooked oatmeal. With your suggestions, they would instead favor the more ‘elaborate’ foods, eschewing the cheaper ones whenever possible. This is bad because either way, a large amount of the cooking recipes become obsolete really fast.

In my opinion, there are two things that need to be done to make this whole thing work. First of all, there needs to be some system that emulates nutrition to force the player to keep a varied diet. While low-level cooking recipes would (in general) offer relatively few nutritients, higher-level food would (generally) have a higher and more balanced nutritional value in addition to other benefits (like preserving vitamins in non-perishable food).

At the same time, the acsessability of those higher-level recipes would need to be restrained, mostly by making it harder to find/produce high-level food (which isn’t to say that some food needs to be easier or more availabe, like milk). As it stands, food isn’t really a concern after the first few days. Hell, even then the biggest problem is finding the right tools to cook, ingredients are plentyful. This would create a situation in which the player would either A) rely on low-level food and accept the disadvantage that this would bring or B) go out of his way to ensure a balanced diet and reap the benefits of it. It goes without saying that the disadvantages of a bad diet shouldn’t be too harsh. After all, you don’t get brittle bones just because you didn’t drink your milk for a few days. On the other hand, following a balanced diet should get you boni that are worth it, to encourage the players to do so.

This would both satisfy the demands from the ‘gameplay’ faction - as it would offer the player a choice on how to approach the problem - as well as the ‘realism’ faction as it would be modeled after reality (at least, roughly). The whole system really isn’t inherently bad - it’s just that it’s badly thought out at the moment. And that is a problem the game has as of late…

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[quote=“mugling, post:320, topic:12504”]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.[/quote]
But what do they add to the gameplay? Like I said in the above post, I don’t see what they actually add, because there are already penalties for doing a poor job with food, and that when you’re doing well on food you generally don’t have vitamin issues at all, or you only have vitamin issues because you haven’t been paying attention to the invisible meters. What does that actually add?

From all your replies I get the feeling that you’re only interested in finding some way to tweak vitamins, but you’re not open at all to the idea that maybe they just aren’t a good idea. I feel that the devs need to be able to consider that sometimes a feature just does not work in any form.

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Vitamin system might be funnier if all the vitamin stats of foods were hidden… Could make a great jawdropper for fresh players. Then remove the “no vitamins” mod, because it would give away their presence. Edit1: Actually… well… I mean, I don’t want to force the vitamin system on anyone, so I find my thoughts to be in conflict. Edit2: Actually leave the “no vitamins” mod. So what if it hints that vitamin intake is to be considered. In case of deficiency, players would have to do some online research or file-diving to determine what they should eat. Probably not a bad thing.

What does vitamin system add to the game?

What does nutrition add to the game?
What does hydration add to the game?
What does health / immune system add to the game?
What does clothing and warmth add to the game?

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This wouldn’t work because you still have to eat the same amount every day. You would either get too much or too little vitamins… Unless… the food vitamin content was scaled as well…?
Edit: Also, food drop rates would have to be scaled as well. I’ve been yammering about this before… that item drop rates shouldn’t fall under one universal item drop rate setting.
Short seasons + default item drops = plenty of food to go around.

Another problem with CDDA and the nutrient system is that there is unrealistic (too high) food variety. Grapes? Oranges? Pears? I doubt they’d grow in NE. Food spoilage times are also unrealistic (too long). They’re also inconsistent - spoilage times are measured in days but also seasons, depending on the food. Also: reality bubble and time stasis. And generally games don’t really last that long that food availability would become a serious concern. Canned food should last 2+ years. Who plays 2-year games with the same character? Not very many, I think. There are also foods that NEVER spoil.

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This wouldn’t work because you still have to eat the same amount every day. You would either get too much or too little vitamins… Unless… the food vitamin content was scaled as well…?
Edit: Also, food drop rates would have to be scaled as well. I’ve been yammering about this before… that item drop rates shouldn’t fall under one universal item drop rate setting.
Short seasons + default item drops = plenty of food to go around.

Another problem with CDDA and the nutrient system is that there is unrealistic (too high) food variety. Grapes? Oranges? Pears? I doubt they’d grow in NE. Food spoilage times are also unrealistic (too long). They’re also inconsistent - spoilage times are measured in days but also seasons, depending on the food. Also: reality bubble and time stasis. And generally games don’t really last that long that food availability would become a serious concern. Canned food should last 2+ years. Who plays 2-year games with the same character? Not very many, I think. There are also foods that NEVER spoil.[/quote]

I play 3-5 years fairly regularly. Any food that last longer than a few months is just given “forever”, and that’s close enough for the vast majority of people.

In a real apocalypse (say, a plague that killed 95%+ of people) there would be PLENTY of food for a long time, simply living on canned goods. Survival gets hard when that runs out, because the people that know how to make more are all dead.

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That’s just display, the actual rot time shouldn’t chance if you have different timed seasons.

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i think in recent experimentals food spoils even when you are away.
you can still make meat jerky and powdered milk out of it though. no idea why this is the case, i’d expect all food to have a isPerished bool that gets set to true when the timer runs out or if it is made from rotten food.
also i would add a “would you really like to use XYZ (rotten)” message.
but maybe in the time where c:dda takes place people just got used to eating heavily processed rotten meat thanks to awesome free trade agreements like TTIP, CETA, TPP, and those that are responsible for much of the suffering in africa.
or maybe in the future people are immune to toxins and can only get sick from bacteria.

One thing I don't understand of the vitamin system, is what was the idea behind the vitamins mechanic? What was its intended purpose? In what way it would benefit the gameplay?
I would like to know the rationale behind it too because i don't think my vitamin-pharma-conspiracy is 100% correct. can someone post a link to where whoever introduced it explains his decision and why a few days without milk erode your bones, ignoring the fact that two motherfucking thirds of humans can't drink milk and most of them don't cook bone broth either?
What does nutrition add to the game? What does hydration add to the game? What does health / immune system add to the game? What does clothing and warmth add to the game?
You would probably have to ask a game designer about the reasons, but those things are things that people actually want. People mod their morrowind to add those requirements (immune system and warmth are brilliant ideas, gotta check out if those already exist). People don't mod their game to add a requirement to pee and poop regularly and wipe their bums with comfy toilet paper, because that's just annoying.

While i don’t condemn having it optionally for people who want their video games to feel like a second job it shouldn’t be part of main game unless there are some really good reasons or lots of people want it.

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It’s mostly an UI problem that results from a technical problem, which can’t be fixed without running into a performance problem. I’m pretty sure my latest PR will fix the performance problem, so that we could get to fixing the technical problem and then the UI problem will be easy.

The UI problem is that we can’t easily (for technical reasons) let the player pick rotten/non-rotten ingredients.
In many cases it makes sense to use the rotten ingredient - for example to craft things that won’t be eaten, will be eaten by a mutant who doesn’t care or when the rot effect would be too weak to matter.
We can’t just pass the rotten flag without a check, because food can easily rot during craft and jerky has a long craft time and because it’s often hard to tell which food items will be used for crafting.

So we need that rotten/non-rotten check on the UI.

Good news is that a proper fix for this will also allow easily passing around different kinds of data, for example allowing human flesh in recipes that weren’t specifically written as cannibalistic, but without losing the cannibalism flag. In this case trying to craft with human flesh would inform the player that the new food item would be cannibalistic. Same for poisonous meat.

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  • That’s actually a fair point although at the time I don’t recall many people opposing the addition. It wasn’t highly requested either. I think most of us just watched curiously.
  • The ease of addition may have been a factor. The biggest work may have been just researching and adding the vitamin contents of the various foods and meals.
  • I personally at one point pointed out that no other game has detailed nutrient system, so, uhhh, I’m not sure if that triggered something…
  • Obviously the system didn’t turn out universally welcomed, hence “no vitamins” mod came (or is it “no nutrients”?). It’s debatable if the element should come as an optional “vitamins mod” or “no vitamins mod”. It’d be a nightmare scenario if everything came as a mod. Features do have to be mainlined i.e. added to the game by default.
  • Vitamins are a part of health, and this is a game that already had diseases and mutations - health related stuff. An infection is part of the game’s basic setup (“plot”). One motivation for vitamin addition could’ve been future potential - to enable further creativity down the road regarding diseases and mutations.
  • The addition may have been simply motivated by a desire to model deficiencies, and to let them have (potentially irreparable) consequences when mixed with the sci-fi elements.
  • It could’ve been just a case of “creative high”. When your inspiration and creativity kick in, you don’t ask whether people want the thing. You stop only if enough people are against the thing that you’re doing. The “creative high” is a mad and wonderful thing. All you really think about is “This is goddamn glorious. People will love this, and if they don’t, they’ll either learn to love it, or they can go to hell for all I care. Muhahaha!” Another part of it is curiosity and exploration - the mentality that “I absolutely have to see how this works out… or how it fails. So we can all learn from it.”
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I’d like to make some serious suggestions on implementing/fixing vitamin, food variety, and stat’s/moral buff’s/debuff’s.

It’s all about this -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_appetite

That’s how it (roughly) works IRL and also happens to be a candidate to an interesting game mechanic that could work.

In short: Your body knows if there’s some nutritional deficiency creeping out. It makes you crave for specific kind’s of food, flavor, color, smell. It is partially innate/partially learned from the food availability from where you live and your food experience/body memory from what you have eaten all your life. It just works.

Game mechanics

[ul][li]Implementing/Fixing Vitamins tracking[/li][/ul]

Initially we could have something as simple as this:

“You feel you could have some fruit juice… maybe just about anything with some fruit.”
“You remember how good your gramma used to make that meat and bones soup…”
“You suddenly crave that horrible vegetable smoothie your aunt used to make when you was a kid.”
“Ahhh, I’d really like to have some “fish-like” food.”
“You remember some old-fashioned advertising about that incredibly frying pan with a juice meat on top, on a sunday’s family get-together. Although you surely miss your relatives, all you can remember really is that steak.”
“Although this meal tasted good and filled you up, you feel you don’t want anything with meat for a while.”

What’s obviously going on here is your body signaling early stages of “something going on”. It could get more direct hints if things get worse.

These kind of messages could easily be jsonised (lots and lots of community contributed different hint’s about some deficiency/excess going on). It add’s flavor (pun intended), and don’t make you “count you calories/nutrients” chore on some hidden stat’s.

Give it some moral bonus (or any other kind of incentive) if you fulfill your cravings and voi-lá - a somewhat acceptable (even fun and challenging) “Vitamin” system.

[ul][li]Food Variety[/li][/ul]

Make the game keep track of your previously eaten food in the last few days. Each time (e.g) you eat the same food in a short time frame (day or so maybe), make that recipe less desirable. Eventually, apply an increasingly higher morale debuf. It has filled you up, it has the right nutrients (or you are just alright), but you are becoming sick of that same food again and again for the last meals.

As the time passes, decreases the “unlikeability” back to normal.

Give a (additional) morale/stat buff every time you make a new cooking recipe you haven’t eat yet or haven’t for a while.

Every once in a while, at the start of the day, suggest some random meal craving “quest” that requires a very specific recipe (harder to make is better) that gives a very good morale or stat buff, for all the day.

[ul][li]Crafting UI modification[/li][/ul]

For all the suggested “craving” things, make a modification on the crafting menu that makes visually easier to find the “most likely wanted” food. Maybe color saturation towards green if it’s more likely, red if it’s becoming undesirable.

I think it address most of the problems we all come to think about the vitamin system. It doesn’t need to be discarded.

If it happen to you guys to like this idea, we can make a separate topic to discuss the balance issues and make this happen. It maybe better to suggest on github too.

Sorry all the language weirdness. :smiley:

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Adonai, that’s some fairly neat ideas!

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food can easily rot during craft
what, your meat rots while you are frying it? :D i hadn't considered that. auto-recognizing cannibalistic recipes is good though.
It'd be a nightmare scenario if everything came as a mod.
as a morrowind and minetest player i disagree. it's only a problem if your engine can't handle the mods because of performance issues. also some dev pointed out that it is much easier to maintain mods that add content than to maintain blacklists.

i agree that vitamin deficiencies should manifest as cravings like irl.
and if actual penalties are applied for not eating healthy it should be on a more realistic timescale. most of the time cata characters already eat healthier than the majority people in neoliberal countries, and studies repeatedly show that people do not benefit from vitamin supplements.

also there should be more sources for calcium, insects for example (unless all insects on earth turned into monsters?).

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Realistic timescale here is a paradox because of the year day count mismatch.
Days have realistic length, 24hrs.
Weeks do not exist. (Or at best are ambiguous)
Months do not exist. (Instead, we have seasons)
Years do not have realistic length by default, and for a good reason, causing a dilemma.

A handful of us plays with 365-day year length, but most find/expect it to have certain unpleasant downsides.

Is there a solution to that? Is there a way to minimize the unpleasantness of 365-day years? Would all travel then become too fast? Could the map generator accommodate for more realistic intercity distances? Would driving become a chore, and if it would, is there a way around that? Would all characters reach their potential within a month or two? Crafting times could be increased to compensate. Reading times could be increased. There could be other timesinks to get the days of the long year flow by faster. Or would it cause too much processing and therefore slow down the performance? Is there a way around THAT then?

What is the proper way to perceive time?

That, in fact, is a possible motive for the nutrient model addition. Gamers aren’t known for their healthy lifestyle or diet, although some are more conscious about it. To exaggerate it, CDDA doubles as an educational tool and a diet simulator for the best possible target audience. Believe me, I’ve learned a LOT via CDDA - a little about food and a lot about… a variety of stuff. It’s like about… increasing the awareness. Expanding one’s own horizons with minimal effort. The usual internets stuffs.

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If the options screen is becoming bloated and hard to navigate, perhaps it would be nice if I added a search function to that as well.

I mean, this is getting silly, but having the ability to search for whatever you want in any part of the interface has a value. I’ve written three different search guis in the last month for the game.

The time that you spend in the game looking for what you want is inherently wasted, so therefore the search has to be a good thing. I don’t mean searching for as in the exploration aspect, as that’s among the best parts, but futzing around on the GUI looking for the right button or finding one item or one type of item in a stack of forty thousand items.

This goes for the vehicle gui too, looking for a specific engine, I couldn’t be arsed to search for the specific part that you want.

I also fixed the recipe search so that you can search by name, skill used, component required, quality provided, quality required. This reduced your time that you required to find what you know exists, but would otherwise need time to search for.

Can any of you really justify calling this “Bloat”?

Bloat is a word that’s thrown around a lot. It’s not about the complexity of the game, which tends upwards, but about the amount of bullshit that’s required to do something.

Does it take thirty seconds to find the recipe, item, or part that you want to interact with? That’s bloat.

Bloat is a more “Serious” adjective to use to describe bad game features.

Bloat in the context of most software refers to the weight of the software, the amount of resources that are required for it to function. The game is bloated, it is a very heavy game if you build it with lua support and tiles.

The text version is faster to load, lighter on your resources, which would be enough if it was 2002 and you have around five hundred megs of ram.

The text version is less responsive, less pretty, even if you “like” the text. It provides superior hints for gameplay purposes. Playing with the chesthole tileset, you can see if your character has armor equipped and even some of the mutations show up on it. Is that bloat?

No, because those visual cues are helpful if you like them. They reveal state that has relevance to the game that would require going through a bunch of screens to make sure that you have all your armor equipped for your street samurai approach to taking down zombies.

It helps you see if your character has picked up a new mutation in the process of screwing about in the hazardous waste sites.

This makes the game heavier and slower to load, but if you don’t like having to go through a bunch of screens to check the state that exists in the game, then it is no doubt valuable.

This game is not a unix tool, it is not single purpose, it has no real “utility”, and its complexity makes it more fulfilling when you come about to understanding it.

I try to take time when writing code for the game to ensure that it doesn’t slow the game down during the game play, as slowing down the flow of gameplay would reduce the value of the gameplay.

The code I’ve written probably increases the size of the game in memory by around 500 kb if you have an immense number of items around you.

These features are not bloat in any reasonable scenario, hell you ought to be able to run it on a raspberry pi, so long as none of the libraries it uses have some mysterious dependency issue on ARM.

What’s more, the code that made clothing filthy probably took around 30 lines of code. This is a drop in the ocean.

It’s not bloat. It is at worst a bad game feature. Hell I don’t even disagree with it, it’s just another reason that I view the zombies as a source of easy cloth material rather than a clothing store.

Calling features bloat isn’t right. Features can be implemented in a bloated way, but in general a good (technical) implementation should be able to avoid most of that.