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

Game Talk The Lab
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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.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Player directed development

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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ah i see, good to know, thanks.

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

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

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Save won’t load in build 9837 because of an error

DEBUG : Error: data/mods//Aftershock/items/afs_armor.json: line 24:18: duplicate entry in json object

“material_thickness”: 2,
“flags”: [ “BELTED”, “ONLY_ONE”, “LEAK_DAM” ],
“looks_like”:
^
“portal”
},
{

FUNCTION : bool main_menu::load_character_tab()
FILE : src/main_menu.cpp
LINE : 1015

Already mentioned it on github but is anyone clear on what it wants changed so I can get playing sooner?

Edit: Wait, I think I see the issue. It has two looks like entries, mollie pack and portal.

Okay, yeah it loads now. Just delete one of the two “looks_like” entries. I didn’t see the second at first glance because the error message seemed to be directing me at something within that specific line of code rather than saying the entire line needed to be gone.

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Man, the frequency in tension that I keep seeing in threads is getting concerning.

Either way I’m super glad you chose to continue working with this, Esther. I really enjoy the option to mod back in nice features that were once present. I hope to see it grow further!

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tbh i haven’t seen esther work on it in a couple months. i believe that person has put it down again. someone else seemed to express interest in adding more stuff though, so the mod isn’t dead.