Aftershock - A core content pack to restore removed content and drift the game towards sci-fi

[Slax]

Well, what’s missing? Why isn’t it fun?

Dish out a design doc for yourself and do things whenever you feel like it. I dunno. Personal fork? Big bag of everything and then some released when it’s done™ or never at all.
Just have a good time, I guess.

[Esther]

I’ve already said why I don’t find it fun in previous posts, and while I’d love to do something like a personal fork as a pet project, I’m just not smart enough. I don’t know the engine or its code well enough to manage it, and I’m terrible at pinpointing bugs. When it comes down to it, I’m a content designer, not a backend programmer.

[Trigon]

This is unfortunate, since you’re clearly talented and Aftershock honestly feels like a mod that deserves to run parallel to mainline DDA.

I’m one of those people that really like the hard realism, but as a matter of course I try the alternative big mods, and this one was excellent. I liked it far more than Bright Nights and it still felt like a balanced game experience.

That being said, no game is worth the human cost of someone’s happiness. You deserve to put your sanity first. Especially given that you do this for free.

If you decide to scratch your development itch here then remember one thing; this mod is yours and you shouldn’t be held to the direction of mainline CDDA.

I guess my point is just to do what you want, but at least know that the contributions you made to the codebase and Aftershock were appreciated. You did good work all the while. Take care.

[Esther]

I want to continue additions to mainline Aftershock, but I just don’t feel welcome in doing so. Whenever I make a change to it, I feel like I’m being merely tolerated - that if the mod got too expansive, I would be shut down from making it. Kevin has stated several times that he has “no interest” in maintaining certain features, and I constantly stress that Aftershock is going to hit that list. I would want assurance from a maintainer that that wouldn’t happen before I would feel comfortable working on it again.

Otherwise, I encourage folks to add onto it who aren’t as sensitive as me.

[QuietCoyote]

Will this ever be compatiable with Bright Nights? I really like the content of this mod because it subtlely adds quite a bit, but doesn’t really cross boundries harshly into future post–apcolyptia.

If I do place the two mods together, is there a chance I could mess up a world majorly? Or will it just give nominal errors every so often?

As a fore note, I would like to say sorry if you’ve answered this question already, I’m just super lazy and don’t enjoy reading through every comment.

[Esther]

The two mods will error if you try to load into a world that has both of them right now because they share a bionic in the form of Solar Panels, and mods don’t like duplicate item definitions between them. If you want to use Bright Nights with it, removing all mentions of that bionic from the code of either mod should work fine, but keep the bionic itself ingame as long as the other mod still has the code for it.

[psyxypher]

Honestly, I can see why you stopped. Pretty sure Kevin had the last person who annoyed him killed with an ice pick.

(That’s a joke by the way. Probably. Hopefully.)

[kevin.granade]

I would want assurance from a maintainer that that wouldn’t happen before I would feel comfortable working on it again.

The level of entitlement you’re displaying here is staggering. No, I’m not going to guarantee that I’m going to continue supporting your modifications to my game indefinitely. I’ve given you the output of thousands of hours of work to do with as you will, and you demand more. If you want to make additions to the game that are going to stay in the game, they need to fit in the game. Otherwise you need to commit to maintaining them.

I want to continue additions to mainline Aftershock, but I just don’t feel welcome in doing so.

You could have tried not being an entitled jerk if you wanted to feel welcome. You’ve been disparaging my work on a regular basis for as long as I’ve seen you posting. What did you expect the result of that hostility to be?

[KSchuldorff]

It’s not a good sign when a project lead can’t hold themselves to their own project’s code of conduct. It’s on the project (and in particular, project leadership) to make others feel welcome. It’s your job to do that, even in the code of conduct that CDDA has adopted.

CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/d09a0d20b850331a247bcaf333719f69f539979f/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

You are also standing on the shoulder of every other contributor to CDDA, and the credit ain’t all yours by a long shot.

On a personal note: outbreaks like this on part of the project’s point of contact in the Code of Conduct are why I’ve decided not to contribute to CDDA directly, but to keep my distance.

[Esther]

I didn’t start out actively hostile. I turned hostile when I saw your colors. As a contributor, I would expect unfitting or rejected changes to be handled gracefully. Instead, I witnessed pull requests silently closed after weeks of silence, rejections to things with no concrete reasoning provided whatesoever, and the removal of legitimate and interesting gameplay features for the sake of realism alone - often half-assed and unfinished removals.

You lead the game, Kevin, but the vast majority of additions and creations aren’t yours. They’re the product of a large amount of independent contributors over a long amount of time. I don’t find it an unreasonable expectation that I be treated like a human being in my works, but every interaction I’ve had from you during contributions have been negative or indifferent, even from the get-go where I was very neutral and compliant in my changes.

Does it make me entitled to want my voice to mean something as a contributor? Maybe it does. But I think it makes you just as childish as I am entitled to claim the project is yours and yours alone and to show the lack of professionalism you have shown and continue to show on a regular basis in pull requests, commits, and Discord from both personal viewings and anecdotal evidence.

[Sethfcm]

I made an account, after having not made one since the Discourse move, just to chip in that I agree with you Esther, this game is the result of many peoples work, and honestly without the active modding and contributive community it wouldn’t be 1/5th what it is today.

Realism is nice and all, but Cataclysm started as a game that ‘appears’ to be a zombie survival game, and is really a game about surviving the breakdown of our reality as we know it. It’s never been super heavy on realism. What it was heavy on was simulated survival, which is not the same thing. Yes you have to eat, drink, sleep, and take care of your health, but those things were there for the challenge and for the immersion, not to hold us to a standard of ‘what is realistic’ or ‘what is possible’.

And as you pointed out, these changes and the general design direction were made and shifted without any kind of earnest polling or feedback that I can see or was aware of, and when you a contributor simply try to return removed content and want the assurance that it won’t be simply broken continuously by random ‘cleaning’ i.e pruning of code that they no longer see a need for but is necessary for your work and other modders work, Kevin accuses you of entitlement.

Here’s the thing, the game is hardly ‘huge’ it’s under 120mb, there isn’t a need to remove functionality or content to conserve space. I could see a code efficiency argument, but then adding some kind of backwards compatibility is a necessity, or at least a concise explanation of how to readily port things over to handle the new code. Otherwise many people will just avoid the newer builds in order to play with the content they enjoy.

Anyways, I’ve droned on here, but perhaps a point has been made about how passionate people can be over anything, including CBM crafting, and Bone Armor (Which I enjoy visually and mechanically.)

Oh and a note, moving posts from here to another thread which I can’t even access isn’t transperant Kevin, if you want Player Directed Development then keep the discussion in a thread that players can access. This account is new, so maybe it has an age restriction, but that’s ridiculous, plenty of people play without making an account here.

[Esther]

For better or not, friend, he’s a moderator, and his character hasn’t shown that he’s above suppression.

[Esther]

I want to break the long silence here by saying that, despite my personal disagreements with the way things are handled in baseline and the direction it’s taking, the recent Magiclysm mod has told me that my own paranoia has somewhat shrouded my thinking when in reality mods are very much unconstrained by those worries. I’ve started to understand that, as long as a mod in mainline is at the very least worked on in a semi-active manner, it isn’t at immediate threat of rejection for any reason.

For that reason, depending on how I’m feeling in the next few days (going to be having school-related things start up soon), I may or may not be making additions to the mod. I’ve spoken with Poragon (the community Aftershock creator) about this already, because I don’t think it would be proper of me to take it back without asking first. I just wanted to let y’all know.

Edit: My thoughts on what Aftershock really is has also had some time to ferment a bit during my hiatus, and so I updated the core principles in the OP to reflect that I no longer want the mod to be exclusively about science-fantasy stuff, but moreso anything that would fit well within the base game, but that realism, imbalance, or other reasons would otherwise shut down. I don’t intend to *remove* that sciencey stuff, but I don’t intend to focus wholly on it, either.

[TheZoneWizard]

I do not play this and sat back like Mikey J munchin my popcorn in thriller. What it looks like is mod whatever you want. Kevin doesn’t care as long as the code trappings you need are not removed for no apparent point as a slight against any modders(Unless this is being done…which is not thebest way to make the game user friendly…but I dunno if this is being done as some suggest).

Do whatever you want. The last thing this place needs is one less contributor. Then we end up with fewer players because a bug was up someones @$$ for one reason or another on whatever side was taken.

Cheers mate.

[TooDAMNMuch]

so what does the aftershock and bright nights merge mean? was there that much overlapping content?

[mlangsdorf]

There were two mods for “non-realistic, cut content” without maintainers. The developers decided to merge them so there was only one mod to worry about when making changes to the game engine that might require mods to be updated.

[TooDAMNMuch]

ah i see, good to know, thanks.

[Bio]

to avoid having to look through a mountain of replies could we have the link to the most updated version posted above?

[anothersimulacrum]

Here you go! (You don’t need this link, Aftershock is updated with the game.)