I know aircraft have been suggested many times before, and that the same answer has been given (wait for z-levels), but I’ve come up with an idea for aircraft mechanics if they’re ever added in game. In an old MUD (multi user dungeon) I used to play, it had a functional aircraft system, it worked by simply adding a sky map, and obviously making a level for the sky. You could fly the aircraft by typing commands such as fly north, fly east, takeoff, ect. When you wanted to land it would give you a list of places you could land at within your view out of the cockpit. And if not, simply the message “Damn! You don’t see any place to land”. I was thinking a system like this might be feasible when z-levels are completed?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it here: someone could implement hot air balloons, helicopters, and submarines today. The current z-level support is sufficient to see the terrain one level below you, which is enough for landing, and vehicles can transition z-levels as long as the entire vehicle transitions at the same time. You could even use the current vehicle control commands, along with ‘<’ and ‘>’ to change Z-levels.
The major reason I haven’t done this is because it doesn’t particularly interest me, and because while the changes are relatively straightforward, they’d still be a lot of work and I have a lot of projects that do interest me that are a lot of work already. But if someone else wants to take this on, I’d be happy to share my knowledge and assist them.
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So does that mean plans to implement aircraft/submarines are on the drawing board, just nobody has picked the project up yet?
I’d LOVE to loot an AH-64 Apache. Better start stockpiling fuel now, aircraft are thirsty.
It’s one of the few things not on my to-do list. I don’t know if anyone else has plans to implement it.
I’m just pointing out there’s no huge technical implementation challenge. There’s a lot of stuff a developer would need to do - add the vehicle parts, calculate lift, adjust the falling algorithm so you can be supported by rotors/balloons/water pressure - but it’s all relatively straightforward and doesn’t require a lot of indepth C++ or CDDA knowledge.
At some point, I will probably implement flying vehicles if no one else does first, but that is literally years away.
Don’t even think about it Mark! I need you to build all the things I want, first! It’s taking me ages to get back in the swing of C++, and I was never good at it to begin with.
Hey how much could I bribe you to work on NPC camps faster? 
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You can’t afford my hourly.
Currently, the hold up on faction camps is the PR to move all the data to the basecamp structure is large, complicated, hard to test, harder to write test cases for, and fairly invasive. So I can’t do much else in faction_camp.cpp and basecamp.cpp until it goes through. If you want to help, review and/or test https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/26764
I have a parallel effort to start work on the partial map JSON parser, but it’s also a slog.
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I’d be happy to beta test some of your stuff if it is far enough along. If you can give me a general idea of the kind of things that might affect your changes, make it crash or otherwise bug out, I’ll play with it until I manage to break it.
I’m gonna need to learn a bit more before I can review your code, but I’ll keep plugging away.
Build faction camps. Expand your faction camps. See what doesn’t work.
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the basecamp code has to be merged first, doesn’t it? I have my NPC army ready to start building a new camp as soon as your PR is merged
Same here, I just found about a hundred new followers at an apartment complex, and have been stockpiling materials for a while now. If construction rate is proportional to number of followers assigned to the job, I’ll have a fortress built in a day.
presently you can only assign a single follower to a construction job, unfortunately. However, you can do two things with a large survivor group.
- Send as many as possible on gathering missions to get you wood, vines, etc. Usually this caps at 3 NPCs.
- Set up multiple camps (not sure if this is possible). These extra camps can just be logging/gathering camps for you because currently, infuriatingly, only a single NPC can be out logging at a time. However if you have three or four satellite camps doing logging missions, you’ll get enough material to upgrade your main camp in no time and also really try out some code stuff.
Anything you can leverage numbers for? If not, that should probably be a thing. By the time I’ve finished convincing them all to come out of the apartment and get into the super-carrier transport I’m building outside, I’ll probably have at least a full company of minions. Long term I want to at least have my own battalion.
Well, I have around a dozen minions now. I go like this:
1 camp manager
1 logging at all times
1-2 gathering supplies at all times, often more
2 best warriors with me most of the time
1-2 upgrading main camp and surrounding sites as much as possible
The rest I usually post around the main camp as guards, because I’m tired of having zombies wipe out my main base. Before I upgraded palisade wall HP, a zombie horde could basically flatten the camp in ten minutes. It also gives it a good lived-in look.
When I have stuff to do, I often pull the guards off duty and send them to do it, eg. jobs in the expansions. However the main limiting resource is always how much wood I can get.
I could easily keep probably 20-30 NPCs busy most of the time, counting the guards. For example I never seem to have enough NPCs to build large overmap fortifications while also keeping the base guarded and the supply chain up. More than that, and most of them would spend their time just standing around looking menacing.
I have at least 15 rebuilt/hacked 9mm turrets, and a bunch of 5.56mm ones too. And my base location is pretty far from any area I haven’t utterly pacified. Hordes aren’t going to be a problem.
You can get your minions to build walls and stuff for you? I always wanted to build a big ass concrete curtain wall with pillboxes, barbed wire, etc.
presently it’s palisade walls, but yes, you can actually build very enormous overmap fortifications if you can get the lumber.
You just volunteered to test the PR that merges basecamps and faction camps. You can’t wait until its merge to test the merge. I mean you can, do what you want, that would be useful, but it would be more useful to test it NOW so I can resolve the bugs so that ZhilkinSerg and KevinGranade feel confident in merging it.
Also, nothing in the end user experience for faction camps is supposed to change. This is all infrastructure work. So build faction camps (you can build multiple different ones), build ones without the PR and continue expanding them afterwards, etc.
I’d be happy to in principle… but at this point I don’t know how to do that. Do I need to add it to the source code and compile it? Or is there a way to do it more easily through git?
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Yeah same here. I don’t have a C++ compiler, and no experience using one. I’d need it to be prepackaged to do any testing unfortunately.
You can add my repo as a remote, check out my branch directly, and then compile it. But yes, you’ll need to add my code in order to test my code.
I’m a git command line guy, so I would do this:
git remote add mlangsdorf https://github.com:mlangsdorf/Cataclysm-DDA.git
git fetch mlangsdorf
git checkout -b fc_refactor_3 mlangsdorf/fc_refactor_3
adjust as need for your prefered git client. I don’t use github so don’t ask me. then you would need to compile, which again, I only know Linux and can’t help at all with MSVC.
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