I have been thinking about the possibility of improving the depth and feeling of your character actually being a living creature by including a couple of visceral features. I believe these would help to better emulate the immediate bodily challenges a survivor would have in a post-apocalyptic world. These include:
More diseases and physiological/pathological conditions. At the moment there are only a few diseases and long term injuries. Adding some common infectious diseases, long term soft-tissue injuries and organ failures with specific symptoms, handicaps and (IRL medically correct) treatments would be welcome. Also having e.g. heart or kidney conditions as traits would be an interesting addition.
Tracking how dirty the player is and flagging him/her and items as dirty as they see enough use. Not being able to clean yourself up would increase the risk of getting infections but also make you more difficult to detect.
Urination and defecation as optionally required functions. Not only would it serve to produce useful components (urine for tanning and as component for making explosives and faeces as fertilizer), having unattended needs (or the act of attending to them) would hinder your ability to perform other tasks simultaneously. (Also, being unable to clean yourself after a number two, would directly reflect on the two previous suggestions.)
I realize that these wouldn´t be everyone´s cup of tea. =)
Many would probably view them just unnecessary additional micromanagement and also constantly reminding the player about the unsavoury side of bodily functions.
Still, as a mod, I think it would significantly add to the immersion of the game, especially in “wilderness challenge” type of games. After all, a zombie apocalypse is supposed to be a little gritty. Please give it some consideration.
Bodilly functions and dirtiness has already been laregly scrapped as concepts. One of the larger reasons given being along the lines of “not adding tedium for the sake of realism” Its important to remember that as a game if the only thing you gain for added realism is more things for the player to manage, it quickly increases tediousnous of the game.
If you wish to build such things into a mod, no one would stop you, and you may even get many people using it. But don’t expect it to get mainlined, or maintained by the core staff of this branch of the project.
The extra diseases might take and get mainlined, depending on how they functioned, it would be interesting to see that side of health get more fleshed out, long as it didn’t veer into the fore mentioned problems.
I guess it´s true such stuff shouldn´t be part of the core content. I thought of these things when I spent some time camping. There might be a certain charm to it for some people, but I admit the allure of the thought may have had something to do with actually being out there in real nature and reading a zombie novels alone in my tent during nighttime =)
Anyway, I mainly drew up the thread just to hear some comments on the idea. If there is support, I´ll look into developing such a mod myself at some point. Will just have to look up the specifics of modding CDDA, but I suppose it can´t be that hard with some development background.
Oh and about the extended health system, I have some ideas about that, but it may be that adding more drugs and treatments adds only tedium for an average player.
It always bothered me personally that there is only one type of antibiotics etc. Then again, having to actually think about microbiology would most likely be attractive only to the players with medical background. After all it´s a game and not internal medicine simulator. Perhaps a “realistic diseases and injuries” mod would be the way to go here too.
The format is made to be very adaptable. I keep intending to get into it but havn’t yet gotten that far. You would likely find a surprising amount of support, and a large audience with any of the aforementioned mods, or all of them wrapped into one. But no one yet, to my knowledge has actually bothered to implement such things, only suggest it surprisingly often. Mods and parts of mods liked by the “core” coders will get mainlined fairly quickly and maintained.
Large parts of the game are JSON ed and there is push to make, and keep the game as entry-level-coder friendly as possible. Attempts to make your own mods will almost only be met with help and assistance from others here, including those that know the more core hard-coded aspects. there are several dozens and dozens of threads dedicated to answering questions of those trying to mod stuff into the game, even simple mods intended only as a learning point and self amusement mods to the game.
Thanks, that sounds good.
I´ve done some coding related to digital signal processing and a little of game development with Unity 3D, but I´ll really have to draw up some design docs first for myself and then take a look at the core code.
Adding a bit to some json files isn´t going to be a problem, but most of this stuff will definitely require properly understanding the current health system and then doing some real coding to implement qualitatively new mechanics.
I´ll read up a bit and when my summer vacation starts, I´ll craft a little practice mod with one of the features. If I manage to get that far, I think I´ll post the design spec and see if someone else is interested in helping out with creating such a nerdy mod =)
As mentioned, dirtiness accumulation and waste disposal have pretty much been solidly shot down due to not being fun, it mostly boils down to “do you have certain resources and the time to use them?”. If you meet those requirements, it’s just tedium, if you don’t you get extra penalties you can’t do much about.
One way I could see that sort of thing being reasonable is if you had some kind of meta-action you can trigger once you establish a base camp, where you enter your home and trigger “make self at home” or similar, which means you change into fresh clothes, clean yourself, maintain tools (including weapons), reload guns and gear, cook and eat food, perform some leisure activities (reading, training, long-term crafting), all of which have practical and/or morale benefits. If it were shortened to such an automated action that consumes time and resources with minimal player direction (e.g. you get prompted when new facilities are available to “add action to your routine”) I could see it being beneficial, but that’s a lot of automation to do.
A plus of this approach is that it might segue into you assigning some of these tasks (tool maintenance, food prep) to NPC companions to do, freeing you up to do more important things.
I’m pretty in favour of deepening the medical system, even to the extent of having multiple varieties of antibiotics that are more or less effective on different infections. The tricky part there is the player needs access to some kind of resource that lets them determine which one to use without having to know all the intricacies of antibiotic interactions. Ideally access to that special knowledge wouldn’t even help, we don’t want to reward/force people for googling symptoms and finding out what antibiotic to use.
I really like the idea of a expanded wound system with burnts, bruises and gashes of distinct severity, and medical items cleaning and sewing wounds, preventing infections and improving regeneration instead of just health bars with insta-healing medkits (excluding the already-present infections, ofc).
Thanks. Is the link for me to make a PR on it? I could do that, but it’s gonna take a few days until I have the free time to figure GitHub out, and I wouldn’t be able to contribute much as I dont know how to code.
Having thought about it, I agree that having to wash up and think when it´s safe to relieve yourself would probably get annoying pretty fast. Perhaps out in the woods I was really thinking more about fun stuff in live action role playing than in a computer game =) The feeling when someone ambushes you from the bushes when you´re focused on trying to pee…
Good to see the medical project is something others have also thought about. In my opinion it wouldn´t be a bad way for learning real life medicine, but of course the information should be available in-game rather than through Googling (even if you learn the right things either way).
I´ll have to give this some more thought from of the perspective of what actually is fun to do more than once.