Filthy clothes?

Game Talk The Bunker
61

The morale penalty for wearing a few articles of clothing is not that huge, mixed with some rain it might cause you to be unable to craft in certain situations. If you don’t like the tedium of messing with dirty clothes then don’t use them, go loot a house or a clothing store. Ideally you don’t want to be using the clothing you get off zombies anyways, unless it’s military or police gear from the respecting zombies in which case you either decide to use the dirty gear and take the morale hit until you find a way to fix that or you simply move on.

It’s the decision between using sub-optimal gear or risking your hide to get stuff that’s better for you. Before the addition of this you could get some really good equipment with little to no effort. I would love to see some of the other suggestions be applied to the Filthy mechanic, such as masking your scent from zombies, having a higher risk of infection, and possibly even being a detriment to the hidden health stat. Walking around covered in rotting gore cannot be good for your health.

Does the morale penalty change for the type of clothing worn? Does wearing a filthy gas mask affect your morale more than wearing filthy boots? If not I’d totally like to see that added.

62

I’ve been playing the experimental builds on and off for some time… And the one thing I’ve noticed is that the “Verisimilitude for the sake of verisimilitude” mantra is alive and growing stronger in the gameplay.

I’ve seen similar debates on various forums talking about tabletop RPG design, especially the older games. “Realism” is huge misnomer in development, because everything you are designing in a game is an abstraction of reality to some extent. You can never really achieve realism in such a gross abstraction of a reality. Despite this, you should have mechanics to simulate some elements of reality. The question to ask when adding mechanics to take up the space that abstraction currently holds is: “Do these mechanics add anything to the game overall that the abstraction isn’t already handling?”

To me at least: Finding horribly damaged clothes off a zombie… I just assumed their condition was already an indicator of their cleanliness state. So before, the condition could easily hint to the cleanliness state of the object. Now, with the addition of the separate indicator, it doesn’t really add anything new to the game except a massive time and effort sinkhole that most people are going to avoid or bypass. The condition abstraction was already handling it well enough. This is like a fiddly, special-case rule in a tabletop RPG that most game masters and players completely avoid using because it just doesn’t add anything to the game overall.

RPG example: Grappling rules in D&D 3.5, a very long, complicated process that everyone avoided because it just wasn’t worth it. Now look at Pathfinder Combat Maneuver Defense and Bonus rules, a big abstraction and simplification of D&D 3.5 grappling rules… but it was practical and didn’t deter people from using them and it made elements of reality useful into the game.

The same thing with lifting equipment. Before: “Let’s just assume you are using a jack, cinder blocks, rolled the thing to a well you can get under, piled dirt underneath the rest of the frame, there’s more than 4 wheels on the thing so it’s pretty stable as is, or… simply didn’t give a shit, yanked the wheel right off and let the axel crash into the dirt.” After: “Now I can only use a set of boom cranes to get anything of significant weight off…” By adding these lifting mechanics… you are in a way removing perfectly valid and “realistic” methods for accomplishing the same task, hence making the game… less “realistic”.

Oh well, the game is going that “Verisimilitude for the sake of verisimilitude” direction at full speed. It’s open source, might be time for a fork.

63

Clearly you should read coolthulhu posts more. He seems to not do this. And well, most other devs do seem open to arguments from cool and others saying it isn’t fun. There is one big difference between most people saying they don’t like something, and the devs who add realism. The latter provides code. And for some reason devs listen more to people who contribute.

So, come and help me on the wiki. For example.

64

I think im one of the few people who do likes magazines.

New vehicle light system is unusable · Issue #17273 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub Known issue. (Have not tested the new system btw, nor looked at this thread just an FYI).

Yeah, and this ‘feature’ has been in the game forever. There are probably more people (even devs) who want to have this changed. But time is limited. So not really all that fair to use it as an example of stuff getting worse.

65

[quote=“Soyweiser, post:63, topic:12072”]Clearly you should read coolthulhu posts more. He seems to not do this. And well, most other devs do seem open to arguments from cool and others saying it isn’t fun. There is one big difference between most people saying they don’t like something, and the devs who add realism. The latter provides code. And for some reason devs listen more to people who contribute.

So, come and help me on the wiki. For example.[/quote]

Unfortunately, the only way I can see to contribute meaningfully is to fork the project and take it away from the direction it is going. But, I play Cataclysm to get my mind off the development projects I already have going. I have made some attempts before in bug reports to suggest fixes, but they did their own thing anyway. So, I see no way the game is currently going to change it’s development course. I’m just accepting it’ll hit the “No Fun” mark for me in the near future, and I’ll just find or make something else.

But, I still had to say that I’ve seen this pattern of things before and maybe someone will take heed.

66

3 bugs reported, 2 of which have been fixed. The other one is still open, so if somebody cares it could still be fixed. So dunno people seem pretty open to your suggestions. You seem a bit … quick to judge tbh. But that is alright.

Myself, I don’t often see a push for “verisimilitude”, btw. I more often see a push for higher difficulty by veteran players, making it almost impossible for newbies to get into the game. Which is quite a bigger problem. In my opinion at least. (Think the darkest dungeon had that problem, but other games I tried had the same issue).

67

[quote=“Soyweiser, post:66, topic:12072”]3 bugs reported, 2 of which have been fixed. The other one is still open, so if somebody cares it could still be fixed. So dunno people seem pretty open to your suggestions. You seem a bit … quick to judge tbh. But that is alright.

Myself, I don’t often see a push for “verisimilitude”, btw. I more often see a push for higher difficulty by veteran players, making it almost impossible for newbies to get into the game. Which is quite a bigger problem. In my opinion at least. (Think the darkest dungeon had that problem, but other games I tried had the same issue).[/quote]

I am a bit quick to judge at times, but only when certain key words are in the initial response. I’m also very reserved these days on the hills I want to attempt to die on.

High difficulty is necessarily not a bad thing… It’s all about how that difficulty is achieved: Do you present an interesting, solvable challenge… Or spikey, brick wall of “F U, That’s Why! ™” It’s very easy to drop that brick wall and call it a day, but much harder to create honest, good challenge. Filthy clothes really just seems like a brick wall. It’s another time/resource/effort sink in a process that really didn’t need another sink hole to begin with. It’s the type of stuff the reminds me of GregTech mods from Minecraft… additional steps to reach the exact same goal with no added benefit. There’s nothing really to game in the mechanic… it’s literally just more busy work. Gun magazines, on the other hand, can be gamed to provide the player an advantage in the game, like quick reloading… hence some benefit to using the system rather than just merely putting more steps to achieve the same goal.

The lift requirements are presently just more busy work: To do the same, but now with more effort required. I think people would be more inclined to accept things like boom cranes and such if there were other benefits… Like being able to tow vehicles, pulling doors off houses, ripping vault doors off in banks, clothes-lining zombies, ripping the supports out from a building, pulling trees down, etc… If someone has to spend more time and effort to do what they did before, you better give them something more in return in added capabilities or gameplay.

As for clothing cleanliness… I think it should be ejected out of the current game until they are ready to rework clothing condition status from a linear gauge to a condition list that contains all the damage done and good things. (Bullet hole, rip, stain, leather padding, decals, etc…) And then work character traits to appropriately match the change. (Some character may like ripped and worn clothing for the looks… or not care about stains and dirt.) And have accessible systems in place to handle manipulating those condition items. That is a far more interesting system that opens up gameplay elements and gives players more options to game.

68

Clothing decals actually sounds like a really cool idea, actually.

69

I agree, which is why I added the solar panel upgrades when they were nerfed way in the past (iirc, there was a similar shitstorm with the solar nerfs, lot of complaining but nobody doing something, so I added solar tiers). And recently, some maintenance work on this, fixed the lab ends where the quantums spawned. (Seems they didn’t deal well with the death explosions. So nowadays you might even be able to get a few).

That is why I try to suggest that people not only complain, or die on a hill to use your metaphor, and try to help out. (Edit: CDDA has a long history of rather obnoxious people who refuse to help, or only want to help on their specific terms (Lazycat for example). So it is not surprising that there is hostility from some people towards people who only complain and not help (only trying to explain here, not pointing fingers to current people btw)).

70

Taking a casual dive into the code base, I think there may be a way to expand the clothing condition system to support a condition list and status setup. Presently, an item has a string list of tags. If that string list could be reworked to support something along the lines of a simple (string,char) struct, you could easily implement the foundation to support an item tag with status number system that can be expanded to support a variety of things. Would have to look at the code base more to see how used the item_tag thing is used and how much effort it would take… But it might still be work even moderate effort to rework.

What does a String, Char struct open up? A Flag and Status system.

For example with the whole clothing cleanliness bit…
You have these string flag for various status effects:
Dirt
Slime
Stain
BoomerBile
Water

Now for each effect, you have levels within the -128 to 0 to 127 a standard char variable provides. So on an example T-shirt:
Dirt, 1
Water, 1

Slightly dirty, slightly wet. Nothing to be worried about. You write functions to judge character demeanor by searching the item_tags for key things and weighing their statuses. So, a clean freak might have a lower tolerance than a “Nasty Mutha” who could have layers for dirt caked on and may even like it.

Now you tumble on the ground in a rainstorm, that same T-shirt:
Dirt, 5
Water, 10

Got some dirt on that shirt and a lot of water. But, there is hope… you can wash off the dirt.
Dirt, 1
Water, 20

Now dry that shirt off or let it dry on it’s own.

But, there are other aspects this opens up…
Damage marks:
Slash
Rip
Tear
Bullet_Hole
Burn

Each damage aspect affects the properties of the clothing apart from just strict condition change. Slashes reduce heat properties, but not so much on the coverage. Bullet_Holes affect the coverage and heat properties slightly. Rips reduce coverage. Burns reduce the maximum condition the item can be repaired to. Coupled with a Status elements you can maintain the aspect but negate the bad effects. Hence, you can patch up the bullet_holes, but keep their look… since you could have characters that like that look and it may be useful for intimidating NPCs.

Fixing bullet holes completely (Higher skill required)
Bullet_Hole, 5 -> Bullet_Hole, 3

Fixing a bullet hole by patching (Simple enough skill required)
Bullet_Hole, 1 -> Bullet_Hole_Patched, 1

There are good things you can do with clothing:
Pressed - A nice pressed shirt for the professionals
Cleaned - A good clean pair of underwear
Dry-Cleaned - Getting all fancy now?
Dried - Nothing like a good pair of freshly dried socks.
Decal_X - You own or faction specific decal for pride and identification
Decoration - Just because it’s the apocalypse doesn’t mean arts and crafts aren’t allowed, good practice and allows you to bring back audacious Christmas sweaters!
Reinforced - Existed before, but instead of a simple condition level, you can have multiple levels of reinforcement based on your skill level to get clothing levels of toughness to withstand more damage.
Tailored - You can have more levels of the clothes being fitted to you. Master tailors will be able to work on clothes and greatly reduce encumbrance levels by fitting them to their exact dimensions.

And, you can customize the appearance of the items in the game:
Red - The general amount of red in the item’s color
Green - The general amount of green in the item’s color
Blue - The general amount of blue in the item’s color
Pattern_X - Clothing patterns
Writing_X - "Your Message Here"
Image_X - “Your Picture Here”

This system would allow enough flexibility and game expansion to allow both negative and position elements of different degrees to be had, while still providing options for players to game. For example, early game… clothing from zombies wouldn’t be that bad since the apocalypse just got started. But later game clothing from zombies will probably be more nasty and deteriorated. Hopefully, the player has either found or made their own good clothing and would be able to handle scavenging at this point. And this would make clothing from buildings and shops more valuable since it’ll probably have pressed, cleaned, dried, and other conditions. And you can even reward those will higher skill levels by allowing higher levels of tailoring fit and reinforce clothing to greater degrees and allow those characters to salvage and fix clothing faster and better.

Plus it opens up the floor for the modders to have some fun.

But this is just one random idea so far…

71

I suggest reconsidering carefully any flags that affect clothing over time while outside of inventory, else arbitrarily massive clothing piles left from a total zombie slaughter may eat an unnecessarily large amount of processing power just by existing.

72

Sorry the whole system was a bit to tl;dr for me atm. But consider that any additions made must also be backwards compatible. In other words, there needs to be a system that updates the old cloths (say 0.C) into the new system. So it can be quite a pain to implement this. (Just a word of warning).

But feel free to try and create such a system.

73

[quote=“Soyweiser, post:72, topic:12072”]Sorry the whole system was a bit to tl;dr for me atm. But consider that any additions made must also be backwards compatible. In other words, there needs to be a system that updates the old cloths (say 0.C) into the new system. So it can be quite a pain to implement this. (Just a word of warning).

But feel free to try and create such a system.[/quote]I hadn’t figured that the game was meant to be 100% backwards compatible between major builds? I must’ve missed something.

74

[quote author=Soyweiser link=topic=12802.msg280502#msg280502 date=1470430138]

I think im one of the few people who do likes magazines.

Mags are great. I still carry loose ammo to reload when I have the time. But I like having a few clips able to be worn in bandoliers or clip holding clothing. It is cool =)

Now if we only had pissing and pooping!
“You have held in to long and $h!t your pants! (adds Filthy to pants). You feel relieved…yet unhappy >_>”
“Piss: Fill container? → Yes. —> You now have a full bottle of your own piss!”
“Zoo Monkey Throw(special atteck). Take dump = ammo → throw!!(adds Filthy to gloves worn)”

Oh the disturbing qualities for such improvements. FUN! :wink:

75

Tactical “dump” pouch

76

I think it might even be backwards compatible with various save files from back to 0.A or earlier right now. But as you can always slowly upgrade, lot of that code is going to be ripped out in 0.D. But it should be backwards compatible to 0.C for sure. (If I read the github posts correctly).

77

Sorry, i haven’t been here or updated the game in a while, is the filth system the same, or has it changed in any way?