Feature Request: Better Vehicles

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Hello! I’m basically a neighbor over from the bay12forums. I’ve been browsing ye local list of roguelikes when I discovered this little gem. It stood out to me, and I think everyone will agree, because of the vehicle crafting system. It owns.

So I must sincerely beg you to expand on the existing system and add more stuff. Nothing really in particular, just more of it. Have my wish-list if you’re down for some inspiration:

Mandatory:
⦁ Add documentation for the examine screen when looking at vehicles.
⦁ Explain roughly what the formulas behind K dynamics and mass are.
⦁ Show all liquid and power amounts and their maximum storage as absolute units rather than relative percentages.
⦁ Change fuel use per acceleration burst into mpg or something more usable.

Cool:
⦁ Nerf multi-engine vehicles by reducing fuel economy for every additional engine.
⦁ V10 & V12 engines
In the grim eco-friendly darkness of the near future these are simply legends of the wastelands. Or are they?
⦁ Small turbine
Must be installed on an IC engine. Increases top speeds and decreases fuel consumption.
⦁ Supercharger
Greatly increases acceleration at the cost of slightly higher fuel consumption. Doesn’t increase top speeds.
⦁ Hub motors
Electric motors which go on the wheels.
⦁ Regenerative brakes
Constantly produce small quantities of power irregardless of weather.
⦁ Large turbine
Engine which allows you to burn any burnable fluids to charge storage batteries. (think abrams) Very robust and extremely rare. Varying fuels should produce varying energy outputs.
⦁ Push bar
Safely shove junk, such as cars and people, out of your way.
⦁ Plow
Safely shove junk, such as houses, out of your way.
⦁ Blended ethanol fuels and engines
⦁ Diesel, biodiesel fuel and engines
⦁ Natural gas and engines
⦁ View ports
Install view ports inside of boards and opaque doors. (increase opaque door HP)
⦁ Fuel economy, friction & wheels
More wheels = less fuel economy. Wider wheels = less fuel economy. Poor tire condition = less fuel economy and lesser vehicle performance.
⦁ Caterpillar tracks
Less fuel economy than even the largest wheels, but more indestructable.

Bloat:
⦁ Sound system & speakers
⦁ Transmission
Must be adjacent to an engine. Add manual transmissions and various gears too! Also: proper drifting.
⦁ Axles
First one must be placed on the transmission, optionally be placed adjacent to other axles, and must connect the engine to at least one wheel.
⦁ Fuel line
First one must be placed on the engine, optionally placed adjacent to a fuel line and connect to fuel tanks. It will leak if damaged, creating hazardous gasoline puddles.
⦁ Exhaust line
Must connect the engine with the optional small turbine and muffler. If placed in an internal tile, it will gasify the inside with deadly carbon monoxide.
⦁ Heat exchangers
Radiators of varying grades. Better radiators increase safe speed. Must be mounted on an engine.
⦁ Suspension
Wheels are added to these. Varying types of suspensions which allow your car wheels to traverse over rough terrain (soft) and ones which make you go faster on road (hard,) as well as customizable ones.

Extra bloat:[spoiler]
⦁ Synfuel plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process)
With a high enough cooking, mechanics and INT you can make a steel reactor and distillation column powered by large quantities of electricity (obviously need some generators here because batteries won’t cut it this time) which will convert carbon and hydrogen (electrolyzed from water) into various petroleum fractions (you’re interested in diesel fuel obviously.)

water -electrolysis> hydrogen
tree -furnace> charcoal
hydrogen + charcoal -bergius> natural gas + naphtha + kerosene + diesel
Naptha + kerosene -container> wasteland juice
Diesel engines can burn diesel and kerosene. Ngas engines can burn ngas. Gasoline engines can burn wasteland juice. Gas turbines can burn all five products.

A medium tree or two should fill your gas tank.[/spoiler]

Thank you for your time.

2

A lot of those seem like they’d make vehicles even more overpowered than they already are.

I agree on the points about better documentation, and displaying things in absolute values where possible, but a lot of things seem like they’d just make vehicles better in the sense of more powerful.

I quite like the current tradeoff between efficiency, power, space, and durability.

I’d prefer if vehicles rewarded good design rather than sticking more ‘make everything better’ parts on it.

3

Vehicles don’t need anymore buffing, other than the option of car horns to honk honk and draw in enemies. And AC/Heaters. And CD players/boomboxes. And dice to hang from the rear view mirror. And cup holders. And jacuzzis/grand pianos. But that’s mostly flavor >_>

What WOULD actually be useful would be to codify the statistics of vehicle components as thoroughly as personal armor and weapon values are codified. Is Spiked Armor Plating better than Heavy Armor Plating? I don’t know, I assume Heavy Armor Plating is more durable because it’s a lot heavier and requires a lot more components, but maybe the spiked armor plating does extra damage modifier? I don’t know, and I don’t want to go looking it up in the wiki cause I have somehow not spoiled TOO much of this game. So integrating this info more clearly would be cool.

4

That’s like stating that the BFG9000 is overpowered in doomRL. It can be scaled with rarity and better baddies.

5

Generally something like a BFG is scaled by giving you specific, and limited amounts of ammunition. That doesn’t work so much with random drops, as making things rare simply makes them grindy, or overpowered if you happen to stumble on one.

DoomRL is also not quite comparable, as DoomRL is a linear game, you play through to the end and you can’t keep going back and looking for more ammo for it. The point of cataclysm is kind of that you can’t win, as such. You spend a lot of your time going back and looking for more stuff, so again, it presents problems for the rarity/power balance model.

Also, it’s not quite like saying the BFG9000 is overpowered, it’s you saying that the BFG9000 needs to be more ammo efficient and harder to break and do more damage and become even more the universal solution to everything in the game.

You can’t really balance it with tougher monsters because vehicles are already quite capable of driving straight through an entire town, removing all buildings and enemies in the way, and incurring only moderate damage in the process. Anything strong enough to oppose a vehicle, especially a vehicle with some of the modifications you’ve proposed, would end up being completely unassailable by non-vehicular means.

Basically, vehicles are god mode at the moment, they don’t need more high-tier additions to make them even more god mode than they already are.

I agree with the changes to the interface and some of the more innocuous additions seem fine, but things that you just stick onto the vehicle and it runs universally better, that seems a bit unreasonable.

6

Immobile bloobs of flesh in the roads anyone? Add wear/tear on parts. Acid rain ruins your day?

7

In any case I feel that some of those (killdozer parts to be exact) would only marginally make them more overpowered. I also feel that increasing complexity and realism of the vehicle system outweighs any possible drawbacks.

The vehicle system should be balanced another way: chiefly by adding more end-game baddies and challenges which only seasoned road warriors can stand up to. This should come after the vehicle system is more fleshed out.

8

Just make parts take more damage. Add damage dispersal so if the frame right in front of the engine is damaged so is the engine. Make acid rain fuck up frames.

9

hey hey hey , what kind of crap future is this?

Flying cars! sub orbital planes! turbo jet boats! time travel helicopters!

Now that’s future i say.

10

Welcome and thanks!

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]So I must sincerely beg you to expand on the existing system and add more stuff. Nothing really in particular, just more of it. Have my wish-list if you’re down for some inspiration:

⦁ Add documentation for the examine screen when looking at vehicles.
⦁ Explain roughly what the formulas behind K dynamics and mass are.
⦁ Show all liquid and power amounts and their maximum storage as absolute units rather than relative percentages.[/quote]
All sensible.

Since we don’t have solid definitions of either “miles” or “gallons” in the game engine, I’m skeptical about this achieving anything. Also MPG is a bit of a farce in reality, you only ever have a given MPG in a very specific situation, rating it for the apocalypse is completely absurd, especially considering how much time you’re going to spend driving over rubble and off road, which completely wrecks it. Finally it’s not a number the player fundamentally has access to.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]Cool:
⦁ Nerf multi-engine vehicles by reducing fuel economy for every additional engine.[/quote]
It already does this, when the total power for the vehicle is calculated, it applies a scaling factor that reduces total power with each additional engine, the formula is: pwr = pwr * 4 / (4 + cnt -1); Reduced power means the engines have to trigger more often, and therefore burn more fuel and make more noise.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ V10 & V12 engines
In the grim eco-friendly darkness of the near future these are simply legends of the wastelands. Or are they?
⦁ Small turbine
Must be installed on an IC engine. Increases top speeds and decreases fuel consumption.
⦁ Supercharger
Greatly increases acceleration at the cost of slightly higher fuel consumption. Doesn’t increase top speeds.
⦁ Hub motors
Electric motors which go on the wheels.
⦁ Regenerative brakes
Constantly produce small quantities of power irregardless of weather.
⦁ Large turbine
Engine which allows you to burn any burnable fluids to charge storage batteries. (think abrams) Very robust and extremely rare. Varying fuels should produce varying energy outputs.[/quote]
All certanly feasable and desireable, though for the really large engines we probably don’t want to add them until we have the garage thing done. Short description is once you’re dealing with components too large to lift, you really need to be using a workshop with large tools like a lifts and hoists, and I’m hesitant to add even bigger engines before that’s in place.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ Push bar
Safely shove junk, such as cars and people, out of your way.
⦁ Plow
Safely shove junk, such as houses, out of your way.[/quote]
Just stick frames and armored boards on the front of the vehicle, I’m not sure what a specialized part for this would add.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ Blended ethanol fuels and engines
⦁ Diesel, biodiesel fuel and engines
⦁ Natural gas and engines[/quote]
Alternate fuels I’m on board with, see below.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ View ports
Install view ports inside of boards and opaque doors. (increase opaque door HP)[/quote]
This just don’t make sense with the component system we have, though we can certainly add “board with porthole” components and similar. Even with that, it’s a bit tricky to handle, as there’s currently no way to have a “restricted view”, components either block LOS or they don’t.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ Fuel economy, friction & wheels
More wheels = less fuel economy. Wider wheels = less fuel economy. Poor tire condition = less fuel economy and lesser vehicle performance.[/quote]
The physics system is currently pretty rudimentary, will be keeping this in mind when it’s overhauled.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ Caterpillar tracks
Less fuel economy than even the largest wheels, but more indestructable.[/quote]
More indestructable is a bit odd, but whatever :slight_smile: Treads are on the list, very tough, high traction, low speed.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]Bloat:
⦁ Sound system & speakers
⦁ Transmission
Must be adjacent to an engine. Add manual transmissions and various gears too! Also: proper drifting.
⦁ Axles
First one must be placed on the transmission, optionally be placed adjacent to other axles, and must connect the engine to at least one wheel.
⦁ Fuel line
First one must be placed on the engine, optionally placed adjacent to a fuel line and connect to fuel tanks. It will leak if damaged, creating hazardous gasoline puddles.
⦁ Exhaust line
Must connect the engine with the optional small turbine and muffler. If placed in an internal tile, it will gasify the inside with deadly carbon monoxide.[/quote]
All of the “Must be adjacent to a” is a non-starter, I’m not interested in making vehicle design a puzzle mini-game where you have to route various resources all over the place. That’s assumed to be handled, but not explicitly.
A transmission might become a seperate part in order to be a place to manipulate gear ratios and power/speed ratios. Also they might act as the linkage between different engines, so adding multiple engines might not be that hard, but linking up a bunch of engines to a transmission so they can all drive the wheels at the same time would be. So for example if you had a simple clutch system that let you use a gasoline engine OR an electric motor might be simple, but linking them together would require a harder to find/build/install transmission.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ Heat exchangers
Radiators of varying grades. Better radiators increase safe speed. Must be mounted on an engine.[/quote]
If we do this, it’d probably be via a generic engine tuning operation rather than adding new components, it doesn’t seem to add much.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]⦁ Suspension
Wheels are added to these. Varying types of suspensions which allow your car wheels to traverse over rough terrain (soft) and ones which make you go faster on road (hard,) as well as customizable ones.[/quote]
The whole wheel thing is due to be overhauled, I want to split them up into a seperate axle and wheel. Axle quality would include suspension quality, contributing to things like off-road capability, and be difficult to install. Wheels would be easy to replace, and also contribute properties. I’m not sure there’s enough benefit to swapping out tires on wheels, as the supply of wheels is pretty much inexaustable.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:2268”]Extra bloat:
⦁ Synfuel plant (Bergius process - Wikipedia)
With a high enough cooking, mechanics and INT you can make a steel reactor and distillation column powered by large quantities of electricity (obviously need some generators here because batteries won’t cut it this time) which will convert carbon and hydrogen (electrolyzed from water) into various petroleum fractions (you’re interested in diesel fuel obviously.)

water -electrolysis> hydrogen
tree -furnace> charcoal
hydrogen + charcoal -bergius> natural gas + naphtha + kerosene + diesel
Naptha + kerosene -container> wasteland juice
Diesel engines can burn diesel and kerosene. Ngas engines can burn ngas. Gasoline engines can burn wasteland juice. Gas turbines can burn all five products.

A medium tree or two should fill your gas tank.

Thank you for your time.[/quote]
Overall I’m for alternate fuels, the engine-handling infrastructure needs to be cleaned up a bit to make adding more of them feasable, and then its a simple matter of adding different components to handle the various combinations of fuel, and overhauling liquid handling to sometimes allow mixing fuels.

Also yea, vehicles don’t take enough damage from impacts, and it should spread about a bit and not just hit the one component that makes contact, not for a major impact anyway.

11

Makes sense. Whatever your plans are I’m sure it will own.

12

I’m not so sure about this one. I mean when was the last time you got into a car and the dashboard said “You have 12 gallons left?” Car meters tend to just be on a empty-full meter, even a lot of the newer electric cars still give the amount of power they have remaining in percent, not in Kilojoules or some other unit measurement.

13

When was the last time you installed your petrol tank yourself, thus knowing its exact capacity?

The point is, in real life, you should have a general idea how far your car will go with how many bars on the meter, you have an absolute measurement there. Plus you fill it from a petrol pump and you fill it in liters, so you know how far on the meter represents, say, 10 liters of fuel.

But in cataclysm because you’re supposed to modify vehicles a lot, you can’t really get a feel for how far you will go very easily, especially as it’s a game and so distances are a bit confusing.

Numbers should mean things, at the moment you just have a nondescript percentage which is different for every vehicle and it’s hard to tell how that relates to say, a gallon jug of petrol, or a jerry can, or how fast that will go down.

Absolute values would help a lot with making sense of what’s happening with the vehicle, it would make the game more playable.

14

I’m not so sure about this one. I mean when was the last time you got into a car and the dashboard said “You have 12 gallons left?” Car meters tend to just be on a empty-full meter, even a lot of the newer electric cars still give the amount of power they have remaining in percent, not in Kilojoules or some other unit measurement.[/quote]
Documentation exists for everything in the modern world. You’d just refer to the car manual/bottom of the battery to get the capacity in watt hours, discounting battery condition. Same for gasoline tanks. If you actually hold a gasoline tank you’d just use a ruler to get its external dimensions, subtract dead space at the top, and assume 1/3" thin walls.

15
Same for gasoline tanks. If you actually hold a gasoline tank you'd just use a ruler to get its external dimensions, subtract dead space at the top, and assume 1/3" thin walls.
Yeah, or just look at the plate where you weld the pipe onto the tank itself for markings on tank capacity. Or drain it, then look at the gas station's pump gauge until you get a hint.