About Cataclysm and the Kickstarter? Developer Q&A questions thread

We’re hoping to do an update soon for the Kickstarter where we respond to a number of questions from our supporters, and we’ll need a base of questions to pull from to make that interesting. Ask us anything - from questions about the game in general, to specific questions about the Kickstarter project, or questions about us as individuals. This is your opportunity to get your questions seen and answered, and while we probably won’t answer every question, we’ll be doing our best to put together something interesting, and hopefully you’ll come away knowing more about who we are and where Cataclysm is going should the Kickstarter succeed.

Questions will be answered by myselff (Kevin McKayven), our technical lead (Kevin Granade), and one of our coders for the project, Sean McLaughlin. If you’d like questions answered by someone else involved with the project, we can try to pull that off as well - just let me know, and I’ll see if I can get them to weigh in.

So what is that you want to know, folks?

What’s McLaughlin’s callsign? I don’t recognize that name.

The newer buildings seem like they just displace the old ones. Are there any plans to weight mapgen to simulate denser cities?

Probably an oversight/typo: is the Roll Call supposed to be limited only to those who specifically opt for it? It doesn’t say that it’s included in higher tiers.

@KA101: That would be me. Hi there! :smiley:

What made you choose the new tier “costs”? since now it seems that people who would support would give more but gain less than the people who have already supported the game.

Yea shop spawning is simply round-robin, with over 20 shop types now, we do need to look into weighting them. There is a seperate mechanic for number of houses vs shops.

Here is a question for you.

What made you decied on the order of operations for the full timer. In the extras it goes something like
Scenarios -> Stealth -> Vision -> Monster infighting -> Z levels -> Inventory -> Biomes -> Physical merchandice

Why this order? I personally would say that stealth should come before scenarios, and that container based inventory should come before something else. I know that the individuals users have opinions on the order and it might not align with what you have.

Because of the limited number of keys, couldn’t we just scroll using the arrow keys, number pad or some crazy asorcion of letters to go through all our items and bionics? It would be pleasing to everyone who “Hates the item holding limit of 75 and wants it to die in a fire”, and I could use all my bionics which i totaly didn’t use debug mode for

I hate the item holding limit too. I’d prefer the inventory to come just after scenarios.

I hope I’m posting in the correct thread here.

I just came to the realisation that only those who backed via Kick-Starter are privy to updates post the last public release, late July, of v0.7.1 Lindqvist.

Is there an opportunity for people like me who discovered this game too late to contribute via Kick-Starter, or whatever other reason, to become part of the ‘regular updates group’ by means of donation or other means?

Uh, the Git repo is publicly accessible. I’m miffed that I couldn’t just directly sponsor a building, and we don’t get this dev journal thingy, but anyone can continue messing with the code.

[quote=“Sarge, post:9, topic:1974”]I hope I’m posting in the correct thread here.

I just came to the realisation that only those who backed via Kick-Starter are privy to updates post the last public release, late July, of v0.7.1 Lindqvist.

Is there an opportunity for people like me who discovered this game too late to contribute via Kick-Starter, or whatever other reason, to become part of the ‘regular updates group’ by means of donation or other means?[/quote]

We’d love to take your money, but not under false pretenses :wink:
There will be regular releases for the duration of the kickstarter work and beyond.
The updates that the backers get are dev journal posts about the progress of the dev work.

Where can I get the latest versions then, I can’t seem to find it (I am really not very good at it though).

And where can I donate if that is still possible and become privy to the dev notes?

If you look at the main page, (en.cataclysmdda.com), along the right side, there is a section labelled “Experimental Builds”, these are updated every time we merge something to the official branch, usually several times a day. Also as we do new releases they’ll appear there, as well as a notice on the forums and probably a notice to kickstarter backers as well. 0.7.1 is still the latest release.

Thanks kindly… and how can I go about making a donation?