(Inspired by the thread titled “Let’s talk about the new rechargable UPS system”)
What is the worst change in Cata you’ve seen in YOUR opinion?
Who was the piece of work who thought it’d be a good idea to ask every time if I want to drop my weapon when I apply the “take off” command to it? If I want to drop my weapon, I’ll drop it. If I want to put away my weapon, I would like to put it away without further questions. To the inventory you go, weapon. You might as well prompt the player if he’d want to put away the weapon whenever he’d issue the ‘drop’ command.
I can understand that “putting away a weapon”, or any held item, can be understood in at least three ways, which I believe is the reason why the menu was created. 1) dropping the weapon, 2) putting it in the inventory or 3) sheathing/holstering it. The menu is the wrong approach. What we need is a hotkey for holstering/sheathing the held item.
At most you might create a menu/prompt for PULLING OUT any holstered/sheathed item, because conceivably you could have several full holsters/sheaths. So you’d have a hotkey for “unholster item”, which would conjure up a neat numbered menu of all of your currently holstered items. In case the player already holds an item when giving the unholster command, the unholster should be cancelled with a message like “Drop or put away your currently held item first”. Although I wouldn’t mind if the game defaulted to “putting away” first. Drop only if no room in inventory.
Anyway, that menu, the prompt, is the worst because it’s in my face all the time. Anyone with me on this?
Is there a way to manually set the size of the reality bubble? I don’t know if the client or the hardware would be the cause of critical failure, but if the performance is more weighted on by the hardware then people with beefier rigs could up the range of their bubble.
When compiling the game, you can set make MAPSIZE=<size>. Default is 11. Game isn’t guaranteed to be stable with any other value.
I haven’t seen a single bug report regarding different bubble size. This means that either it is stable enough or totally untested and prone to crashes.
Afaik cata works in some ways like these games where things are simulated outside bubble. That is, at local maploads some things get checked and modified depending on time of day, random spawns etc.
Cata does this for food and solars and funnels, but it could certainly be expanded. It 'd be really nice for NPC’s to adher to a daily timeschedule…
The biggest problem is having partially loaded maps. Note that solars, funnels and food don’t have to “look around”, that’s why they’re easy.
This means we can update them at the moment they’re loaded.
NPCs and monsters already regenerate (and tire, in case of NPCs) outside the bubble, but to get them to move around, we’d need some system to figure out map connections and simplified interactions offscreen. And that won’t be easy for multiple reasons.
Yeah I don’t really like the unyielding menu much. I think it would be much better if it only triggered if, for example, you pressed “W” and w just threw whatever you are carrying into the most appropriate container.
Oh! Warnings for animals that aren’t dangerous. I don’t care if a dog wandered behind a tree and out again, it’s a dog. I don’t need to stop crafting or driving or whatever to hit no to a prompt that says I should stop waiting because a tough zombie popped out of a bush 50 tiles and 70mph behind me.
I would find it interesting if there was a way to edit the desired size of the reality bubble, so if you have a system that can handle simulating reality for miles away, have at it.
The be honest, my biggest pet peeve at the moment? Sewing. It uses so much bloody thread just to make small repairs. This has come up repeatedly, there have been positive leanings towards maybe reducing thread consumption, but no concrete ideas on HOW MUCH to reduce it have come up. -w-
It’s not, which is why it’s proceeding very slowly. That and the huge # of PRs people throw at the project, 300+ PRs in the last month, holy crap. It’s the main thing I’m working on when I’m not merging or bugfixing.
That number is touching one of the most performance critical parts of the entire game, turning it into a number configured at run-time would not only be a pain in the ass code wise, but would likely slow down the game even if you don’t change it.
You may not realize this, but you’re literally asking for the game to do something like 4x as much work to handle this one thing.
tl;dr, there are good reasons the reality bubble is not bigger than it already is, someone might be able to experiment with upping it and see what bugs crop up and how it’s handled performance wise, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
That’s what I was afraid of. It’s one thing to give the player the freedom to handle as much reality as their system can take, but if adding the support for it would bog things down then it isn’t worth it.
I would be fully in favor of it if there was an efficient way to handle it, though. But you know me, given the !!quality!! of my source code edits I wouldn’t have so much as a vague idea for what to SUGGEST, let along how to do it.
The issue with the headlights suddenly materializing out of nowhere and putting you on the spot has almost killed me several times. As far as I can tell, the best solution would be to lower the range of the headlights so that when they DO just sort of manifest, it’s not in a potentially fatal way. Or at least, a slightly less potentially fatal way.
