Was just a silly thought, but Cata could totally fit into some sort of space survival sim. How likely could you see it?
You have a choice of a few starting scenarios with various levels of viability, in a setting where a once solarsystem spanning civilization suffered a sudden extreme schism or cataclysm, and is in a somewhat similar situation to catadda but in a space setting.
You’d probably have extra worries, like life support and having to deal with gravity, as well as needing a pressurized environment. Instead of taking place in a bunch of towns it’d take place in some sector of the solar system, and the ground level would be the ‘overworld map’. Instead of direct zlevels, “going down in zlevel” would take you into the location, like if you went down over an asteroid group you’d be on a map of asteroids, or on a moon of a planet you’d be on that moon.
Vehicles or at least some sort of conveyance would probably be much more significance.
The crafting system could probably be kept, just with some additions/removal and re flavouring for the higher tech levels. Could see remote resource gathering drones being useful.
You could also have randomized animals and mobs on the few relatively habitable places.
Instead of moving to another part of new england when you cross past the border, you’d cross into another sector of the solar system. Probably would take more effort.
Stuff like that. One scenario could have you starting on a run down space station, another could start you on a failed moon colony, another you could be on one of the colonized planets that’s gone severely downhill.
Could see the first implementation of car vs car combat.
Decompression and drifting in space would require quite a bit of work to work.
Randomized animals would take another big bit of work. Could be made way easier if their species were pre-generated at start of the game rather than during play.
Then there would be mapgen. Current mapgen doesn’t understand space too well, it prefers flat 2D areas layered on top of each other. Not sure how much work would changing that take.
Car vs. car would be hard. Possibly harder than all of the above combined. Though not necessarily more tedious to implement - could be quite interesting in fact.
That said, allowing players to explore the nether has been a long term goal since pretty much the beginning, which would imply having environments in which the air is not breathable. Once that’s in, getting an abandoned colony would only be an issue of doing a lot of json work
So if nothing horrible happens, at least part of it could be achievable through modding in a few years.
I’ve thought about this before too. What I ended up with is that a lot of the systems in the current game are just off from being what you’d need. Reality bubble is killer as you need the spaceships and tech to constantly update power and environmentals and such.
You could just use a simple orbiting equation and some retroactive checks when entering reality bubble honestly. If you really wanted to be fancy you could just have an offline periodic random-event simulator. Right?
An offline periodic random event generator would be great even for Vanilla CDDA. Like fires breaking out in stoves in houses, bathrooms flooding and random bombardment from the government. But it seems that would have to be somehow limited, as you can’t run a check every time the reality bubble moves (it does every turn).
So how are you going to keep track of all this ‘virtual events’ in the ‘outside’ of reality bubble without having slowdowns or erratic behaviour from said events?
Combination of timer and retroactive stuff.
You’d have a timer, and when that timer ticks, it’d roll for events and store the result. That way the next time the reality bubble comes by or there’s some sort of spare downtime (How often have you gone afk or just sat there and let the game go? It’s turn based. You could have the game detect >1 minute inaction and use that time to process stuff), you can then calculate the result. If it can change the overmap, have the overmap outside of the reality bubble greyed out and update it when the reality bubble enters, as you’re remapping the area.
Olright, so we let fun (fire, sudden decompression) happen any X turns…
Where is the boundary to be drawn for the event to take place?
I mean when I stand at the right place (and boy do I love to do that) I can discover three new map tiles in a few steps if I move close to their boundary.
So in case I’d cause the event to happen once I change map tiles, wouldn’t that produce choppy behaviour?
Can’t think of anything in Vanilla, but in Space you’d run one step further and Suddenly be out of air due to sudden decompression event…