Interest in a content/balance fork?

From various discussion threads, it is pretty clear to me that there are at least a few other players who share some of the same dissatisfactions with me:

  • Various situations where you can easily die for annoying reasons(flaming eyes spawn outside shelter on start, jabberwocky ambushing you in forest on day 5 etc.)
  • Large amount of flavor content(food etc.) that turns item-management into more of a hassle than it need be
  • Reinforced by the former, a lack of well-tested and well-balanced equipment and items, making certain equipment and choices unintuitively overpowered and ruining RP for anyone who does not wish to maximize survivability at the cost of RP(example: survivor gear, drug abuse, mutations, bionics etc etc)
  • Harsh penalties to seemingly small mistakes(wearing another piece of clothing that intuitively should be fine to wear suddenly making you useless in combat)
  • Active anti-savescumming measures
  • The game actively hiding information from you for the sake of realism and giving you more of a challenge

This is not supposed to be a discussion over whether this stuff is good or bad. I don’t enjoy it, and others also do not. It is strange for no fork to exist for people like us by now, particularly with the modding system, so I’m just wondering whether there really is no interest, or whether just nobody thought to start work on something like this yet.

Thought about it, for different reason though and decided it is not worth the hassle.

Everyone has different tastes, so you would end doing the fork for small amount of people anyway and some of the stuff you mention is doable by mods. While main fork is in active development and maintained relatively well, that is.

Balancing would be likely welcomed in mainline too… though there might be different opinions of what is balanced and what is not and final decision would not be up to you, which can be an issue.

I don’t know… how Reaper’s fork is doing?

I’m not convinced of that to be honest. A lot of my complaints are that CDDA is too much “unforgiving roguelike” and too little “RP survivalcraft”, and generally the latter should have a much larger potential audience than the former. The point of this thread is basically figuring out which of my mentioned points others don’t agree to, and which points we might find a good compromise on for a collaborative fork.

I’m not convinced of that to be honest. A lot of my complaints are that CDDA is too much “unforgiving roguelike” and too little “RP survivalcraft”, and generally the latter should have a much larger potential audience than the former.[/quote]

Hmm, if you plan to make it different enough, it might bring players that are not even playing CDDA now, that is true.

Well, real life doesn’t have balance. Something will be better than that thing you’re using.

I can completely agree only with harsh encumbrance penalties.

I see immersiveness as main direction for the game. For me it’s more sandbox with bit of RP than roguelike.

Encumbrance penalties need to be less granular so you don’t race up the steps so fast.

Active anti-savescumming measures, Why?
Don’t you have any self control?

Obviously I don’t have a part in the general discussion, but I’d just like to know what the “Active anti-savescumming measures” are.
You can save without exit.
You can exit without save.
There are no measures to hinder backup/restore of saves.
When you die, your most recent save is copied to a graveyard directory, all you have to do to restore it is to copy it back.

If the save/load features don’t work like I just outlined, it’s a bug that I haven’t seen reported.

Indeed, what exactly we are doing that we hadn’t planned to would be nice to know. :stuck_out_tongue:

Indeed, what exactly we are doing that we hadn’t planned to would be nice to know. :P[/quote]

I grabbed the graveyard-saving PR early, as I recall. It saves on death, so to necro your save you’d need to edit it to give you back your HP, remove the imminent C4 detonation, etc. At the time I considered that acceptable as it was still a hella better deal than deletion on death.

I would merge a PR changing that to the “grab last save & move it to graveyard” behavior previously available on Linux, though.

Gameplay balance is something we’re constantly working on improving. What we need to that end is feedback from the players on what’s lacking.

Please define ‘RP’ here, because it obviously doesn’t mean ‘roleplay’; if it meant ‘roleplay’ then you’d be ‘maximizing survivability’ unless you’re roleplaying someone who’s far too idiotic or suicidal to have a functioning survival instinct.

Or someone of extreme badassery like the characters I run