Basically, I’m not even going to attempt to cut out all of the flavor items. It’s not worth it.
Nor am I going to argue the point that more items is better, Aslong as download size stays stable.
Uhm… by that logic, tilesets would long ago have happened because of the hordes of people who would play CDDA with tileset, but not without. But it didn’t, because these people were not even interested in giving the game a try long enough to figure out whether with tileset they could enjoy it, much less start developing for it. Similar things are true for content bloat. To say “Everything’s fine, the people who still play the game are fine with our decisions in the last year” is very nearly a tautology anyway, most people aren’t dedicated enough to stick around and argue the case if things they don’t like happen.
In that case something that might help out on this front quite a bit would be the people who are complaining about Content bloat going to the Github and making helpful, constructive comments on pull requests before they go in; because right now most pull requests end up looking like this:
[spoiler]
Here’s my awesome PR.
Contents: Stuff
This looks pretty good from my end, any other views?
This looks awesome! +1 *thumbs up*
Maybe raise the time it takes to rot there, other than that I don't see any problems,1-3 days go by.
Ok, raised that value.1-2 days go by.
Looks good then. Merging.PR is merged and closed. [hr][/spoiler] If nobody bothers to comment on Github PR's then it's difficult for dev's to weigh the opinions of other people. It might be a nigh-clone of a gun already in the game, but if the only comments we get are "This looks awesome" and "small change needed here", then nobody can know that.
As I pointed out before establishment and implementation of balance rules that devs can utilize for new content will go to helping this a lot balance wise, but even so without people offering up their opinions if they don’t like something all we have are those of the dev themself and the PR maker (who obviously wants their content in the game).
Uhm… by that logic, tilesets would long ago have happened because of the hordes of people who would play CDDA with tileset, but not without. But it didn’t, because these people were not even interested in giving the game a try long enough to figure out whether with tileset they could enjoy it, much less start developing for it. Similar things are true for content bloat. To say “Everything’s fine, the people who still play the game are fine with our decisions in the last year” is very nearly a tautology anyway, most people aren’t dedicated enough to stick around and argue the case if things they don’t like happen.[/quote]
Implementing features because you think someone else will like it is counterproductive, you need to implement things you personally understand and are passionate about, otherwise you’re very likely to get it wrong because you don’t understand or care about what you’re doing.
And yea, if no one cared about tiles at all, we shouldn’t have it, but we in fact have a lot of people really passionate about them that are willing to put in a lot of work to make it happen, so we have tilesets. We have the tooling to make a minimal item mod, but no one has stepped forward to do the work*, so it hasn’t happened.
If I believed in the minimal item thing I’d have no problem implementing it, but how am I going to get it right if I don’t even understand why people want it? I personally think it’s a terrible idea, it’s one of my biggest turn-offs for most games that they have a linear set of items that are obviously tailored for the game scenario. I want a big fat sandbox of a game bursting with stuff that has unexpected uses that you have to dig to find, and I want a survival game that’s actually survival-like, where you make do with what you can find instead of having the one obviously correct item to use. If someone else wants to build a mod that strips the items down to a more linear progression, good on them, and I’ve put a good bit of work** into making that easy, but I literally feel incapable of doing the last part correctly.
- John and others have put a lot of work into splitting items out into mods, I don’t mean to disparage that, but obviously it’s not done.
** Not to take undue credit, I worked on it a lot, but GalenEvil and BevapDin did the lion’s share of the work.
I agree with i2amroy here. Would be helpful if people (actual players) can spare a few minutes to go to github and peer-review content PR to see if thing xyz is too similar to thing abc or redundant or op/up blahblahblah.
Would save a lot of time for everyone, duplicate content would get filtered out instead of going into the game and then people complain about it. Remember that a handful of devs cannot possibly check everything, given that they must spend time for actual coding (and merging PRs! That stuff consumes some serious time here).
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:44, topic:5841”]We have the tooling to make a minimal item mod, but no one has stepped forward to do the work*, so it hasn’t happened.
- John and others have put a lot of work into splitting items out into mods, I don’t mean to disparage that, but obviously it’s not done.[/quote]
Well, I wanted to continue working on those, but the only one I made had such a generally negative response that I chose to abandon the idea, and in all honesty I doubt that anyone other than me uses those. So yeah I don’t think its a worthwhile investment right now.
other than that my general problem with bloat is related to inventory management ( the 5 or so reskins of soda are the perfect example of this, all eating up an individual letter while being technically identical) and poorly thought stats of improvised weapons (the first example that comes to mind are bowling pins and the duct tape mace).
EDIT: I quoted stuff wrong 
[quote=“John Candlebury, post:46, topic:5841”]Well, I wanted to continue working on those, but the only one I made had such a generally negative response that I chose to abandon the idea, and in all honesty I doubt that anyone other than me uses those. So yeah I don’t think its a worthwhile investment right now.
other than that my general problem with bloat is related to inventory management ( the 5 or so reskins of soda are the perfect example of this, all eating up an individual letter while being technically identical) and poorly thought stats of improvised weapons (the first example that comes to mind are bowling pins and the duct tape mace).[/quote]
I think that’s the route of the problem. Forgetting all else, it’s that the community itself is so split on the level of mundane/vanity content, and it’s such a fundamental difference. This is compounded by the weirdly hostile community here (I’m not targeting anyone with that, but in general, the tone is FAR different from somewhere like bay12) so we end up with too almost completely opposite view points.
For many of what I think are good ideas/commits (like John’s awesome work) they’ve been attacked just because people are too precious about their own contributions and can’t see things objectively. This is what people mean about ‘there are no big changes’ - whenever there are some big suggestions/changes, they get shot down/attacked, whereas adding another soda drink re-skin or silly weapon is happily merged.
John, I’d implore you to work on more, although I completely get your reluctance to (as I have also become reluctant too).
(Pretty confident the soda stats vary, seeing as I’m responsible for three of 'em: orange, cranberry, and orange/cola.)
At least John makes an effort on Git. Binky, I’ve not seen any contribution from you aside from sniping at me.
Bay12 is “nicer” because (so far as I can tell), nobody goes around saying that Toady’s work is useless, no-skill, vanity bloat that needs culled. You want to talk dev discipline, show up and either code, or review code, every day for months on end. You want to talk civility, have people constantly submit proposals targeting your work for dimunition or deletion and expect you to approve them.
You don’t get to attack folks and then complain that their failure to appreciate your attacks demonstrates a lack of objectivity and a “weirdly hostile community”.
[quote=“KA101, post:48, topic:5841”]At least John makes an effort on Git. Binky, I’ve not seen any contribution from you aside from sniping at me.
Bay12 is “nicer” because (so far as I can tell), nobody goes around saying that Toady’s work is useless, no-skill, vanity bloat that needs culled. You want to talk dev discipline, show up and either code, or review code, every day for months on end. You want to talk civility, have people constantly submit proposals targeting your work for dimunition or deletion and expect you to approve them.
You don’t get to attack folks and then complain that their failure to appreciate your attacks demonstrates a lack of objectivity and a “weirdly hostile community”.[/quote]
I’ve contributed to github a few times actually. Only small changes, but that’s all I’ve got time to do. As I’ve stated many times before, I appreciate all the work (however small) everyone’s done and none of this is an attack on anyone or their work.
However, you’re proving mine and others point in the offense you’ve taken - you don’t get to code in an open source project and then bemoan people’s reaction when they don’t like it/don’t think it belongs. This is the main part of the problem because contributors feel as though because they’ve done some work it needs to stay in, even if it doesn’t need to/should be, and then shout down any moves to remove/limit the content and generally get hostile. This is why we have the content bloat, because no ones willing to just take an axe to unneeded stuff at the risk of offending people.
That’s also the difference between this and Bay12 - with Bay12 there’s just toady and threetoes and that’s it - you either like it or you don’t, whereas with this you’ve got to put up with other peoples views and their changes. The weirdness is the overly hostile environment about it - most open source projects manage to avoid it, mainly through strong leadership and direction - which are ‘ridiculous suggestions’.
I think part of the the hostile environment also comes from the fact that we had LazyCat early in the forum’s development. Trolls attract trolls after all, and while we’ve been getting better in that response I still have seen several people over the past year or so who are needlessly hostile without reason (Inadequate/Clayton come to mind). Prior to LazyCat I can only remember 1-2 times where any admin action was required, and if things got a bit heated they would usually calm down fairly easily. After him… well, we’ve got the environment we’ve got now.
And devs aren’t immune to this either. I think having to deal with someone like LC for months has made many of us dev’s a little bit more touchy about people stating that what we do “isn’t good enough” or “mediocre” then we would have been if we hadn’t had to spend months constantly defending ourselves. I know that I’ve needed to step back and take a few breaths before posting a few times, and I think it’s something that we should all learn to do at times.
This right here is the main reason IMO for being able to support multiple item descriptions. Then we could have 1 soda item that would stack, but still have individualized descriptions (maybe even have support to split an item temporarily so if you wanted to RP a survivor who loved orange soda but hated grape you could). Same with things like chips or tape, and I think it would go a long way towards maintaining the feeling of more content without actually expanding the amount constantly.
I think this also comes down a bit to the complexity of the PR. Adding a new item is a relatively simple review process, the dev looks at it, checks it slightly for balance, and clicks the “merge” button. Done. (Though if we implement balance rules it will get slightly more complex). On the other hand larger content is reviewed more in depth, partially for code consistency but also for idea content. This also opens the PR up for longer, and allows for a more in-depth polling of the opinions of those involved.
Therefore it’s going to seem like the larger PR’s get reviewed more in-depth because truthfully, they are. People contributing more on github and establishing more balance rules for the little things will help this, but it’s pretty much always going to be this way at least a little bit.
I must criticize you guys on this, and on this point only - sometimes you’re acting like it’s some sort of a pop quiz in question here. Even if I was to chip off some of the personal(ity) issues certain members/devs share. The “big_deal” is to wait for feedback, standby some issues and improvements too; the reason behind the “elephant” is that of the “could’ve, should’ve, would’ve” discussion always ending on the LazyCat’s tail. I’m not gonna feed that troll ever again even if it gets personal, and I urge you to reposition yourselves to prior lurker swoops and troll-look-alikes visits, because labeling.wrong.folks.is.bad.
Heck, I’m always crammed with good ideas myself. See if you like this pitch, and always keep an eye on the “if” pattern, no matter how lousy or silly the proposal looks like; if we wrote off this feature as it was already in the game, what would happen?
Look at this example:
[Junk food], [Soda], [Can]
This actually does all the prioritizing work for the player. He’s aware of the nutrition value and (possibly) enclosed crafting material.
[Unknown], [Water], [Plastic bottle]
This one solves the greatest, category issue that’s on the table here; if you prioritize the contents, the player should be aware he’s yet to check the contents and make sure it’s healthy.
[Preserved], [Veggie], [3L jar]
Since spoilage is one of the more important kicks to the survival content, the exact number of portions is subsidiary, really.
So, the flags for foods should be:
- Raw, Preserved, Junk food, Prepared, Dehydrated, Unknown, Spoiled;
- Meat, Veggie, Water, Soda, Beer, Booze, Meal, Powder, Other; … (?)
- Only the declaration relevant to the material should suffice.
I can see this way the colors could play important role when making decisions to use something or not.
I used to think this was a big issue, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s really only a tangential issue from the real problem. I started playing around 0.4 or 0.5. Once I got to the point where I could live and thrive, I built my mega car and explored all of the special buildings and whatnot. Ever since then, it still feels like I’ve already done and seen it all. Some updates have added a couple new places, and some added new items, but it still feels the same. The majority of the content just ends up feeling like another means to the same old end. Now instead of just beef jerky, we also have canned meat, dehydrated meat, and smoked meat, but it’s all just different means to the same end, and it feels like that with almost all the new content. Metalworking just seems like a way to get that sweet weapon, without having to actually look and loot for it. Sure, there have been interesting concepts thrown in, some new buildings (some with unrealized potential, like the hazmat sarcs), and tons of behind the scenes work done. I can certainly appreciate all that, but when it comes to the actual game experience, it still feels like I’ve seen it all.
Don’t take this as bashing anyone’s content and contributions. There have been a lot of good additions, but in my opinion, they fall short of what the game really needs to keep it interesting. The real elephant in the room is the lack of goals. Right now everything is driven by the whims of the player, but it never leads or builds to anything. You can explore labs and become a mutated half bear half man, turn yourself into a walking machine, or build up an arsenal large enough to blow up a few small cities, but why? What does it lead up to? There are small scale challenges and mini-boss encounters, but by the time you find them, you’re all but guaranteed to be able to stomp them with no problem. Fix that, and I think a lot of what people feel the major problems are will be fixed with it.
Try opening yet another thread about one of the hot-button issues like “advanced farming” on bay12 and see how chill they are.
You keep harping on a controversial subject, and constantly insult contributors (just because you say it isn’t insulting doesn’t mean it isn’t, including this “weirdly hostile community” garbage), what the hell do you expect?
Yes, you do. That’s equivalent to me saying, “you don’t get to use my free software and complain about it”. What you don’t get to do is tell people what they are and are not allowed to take offense to, not if you want to be taken seriously anyway.
The content is still in because we the contributors think it’s worthwhile. You disagree, and you can do so, but it’s your opinion, not a fact. By the way, since you seem to be impaired in this area, telling people what their motives are is considered extremely rude.
And that’s different from me having the final say how? If you don’t contribute directly you have the exact same ability to influence development here as you do at bay12, which is to try and convince the developer(s) that your idea is a good one.
Heavens forbid you have to “put up with” other people’s views, that must be terrible.
Again, see you generally being insulting and abrasive.
Yes, I obviously think leadership is a terrible idea since I disagree with your opinions on the matter.
Also you never replied, what exactly do you expect me to do that I’m not already doing? “be more leadershipy” isn’t particularly constructive.
[quote=“vache, post:52, topic:5841”]I used to think this was a big issue, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s really only a tangential issue from the real problem. I started playing around 0.4 or 0.5. Once I got to the point where I could live and thrive, I built my mega car and explored all of the special buildings and whatnot. Ever since then, it still feels like I’ve already done and seen it all. Some updates have added a couple new places, and some added new items, but it still feels the same. The majority of the content just ends up feeling like another means to the same old end. Now instead of just beef jerky, we also have canned meat, dehydrated meat, and smoked meat, but it’s all just different means to the same end, and it feels like that with almost all the new content. Metalworking just seems like a way to get that sweet weapon, without having to actually look and loot for it. Sure, there have been interesting concepts thrown in, some new buildings (some with unrealized potential, like the hazmat sarcs), and tons of behind the scenes work done. I can certainly appreciate all that, but when it comes to the actual game experience, it still feels like I’ve seen it all.
Don’t take this as bashing anyone’s content and contributions. There have been a lot of good additions, but in my opinion, they fall short of what the game really needs to keep it interesting. The real elephant in the room is the lack of goals. Right now everything is driven by the whims of the player, but it never leads or builds to anything. You can explore labs and become a mutated half bear half man, turn yourself into a walking machine, or build up an arsenal large enough to blow up a few small cities, but why? What does it lead up to? There are small scale challenges and mini-boss encounters, but by the time you find them, you’re all but guaranteed to be able to stomp them with no problem. Fix that, and I think a lot of what people feel the major problems are will be fixed with it.[/quote]
The truth, it stings. I think all the content enhances the game, but you’re right that if you progress past all the content it breaks the game. I think functoning static hordes will do a lot to alleviate this, and making threats spread and associated mini-quests to stop them will also help, but to satisfy players’ crafings for higher-level content, we’re going to have to keep developing bigger things.
Hordes and world evolution are great ideas that will put pressure on the player, and always tend the direction of the game towards conflict, but I also worry that they may become like zombears and zombie dogs in 0.A where they just become a nuisance rather than a threat.
One thing that I think would go a long way would be a difficulty setting taking into account the different options I suggested in http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=6162.0. A set of scalar values to modify monster and player strength would help the players who want to build and explore, or those who may just be new to the game, while at the same time providing the seasoned vets an easy way to turn up the heat.
Another would be having difficult, “gated” content. Difficult enough that without some combination of advanced skills, powerful weapons, bionics, or mutations, the player will not be expected to survive, and gated in the sense that the player won’t have to face them until they are ready and choose to. These should obviously be high-risk, high-reward. I imagine science labs and mines sort of filling this role right now, but they’re still not risky enough IMO.
A third idea I have would require a pretty big overhaul to mapgen, so that it could better support things like themed areas, interaction between areas, and more structured, but still randomly generated, areas. This way you could more easily generate complicated structures like a lab in ways that make sense: a small compound outside, a set of offices, a security checkpoint, a set of airlocked areas where research was conducted, sample storage, all arranged in a semi sane manner. Then to build on that, suppose you have to explore the office enough to find a pass key to get to the security area, then to get through the checkpoint you have to kill the zombies in the area and hack a computer to disable the lockdown (this should have multiple solutions too), and so on. Essentially, the mapgen process should be more aware of what it’s built and what it’s building, and how it should fit together.
Working portals to the respective linked worlds would also go quite a ways on this idea, since it would allow higher level players to “take the fight to the X”, by pushing the fight back into one of the already fungalized or triffid controlled worlds.
I just can’t buy the story pinpointed on the edge where the label is “We can’t make games for gamers, we don’t play 'em either”.
I still believe CataDDA has strategic-line quality burried somewhere within. The need to prioritize and mind resources, nevertheless in the solo ambient is gamewise and not session-wide, and it’s the underbelly for every open/close-quarters experience… do you see how this justifies the content-end expansion? The lore’s been assesed multiple times and one doesn’t just go and type - “This really doesn’t suit my character’s progress”. I understand the mirage of a huge, central challenge is still out there; it bugs me whereas most of the backers for the ‘quest’ embedding component in the game just can’t live up to that spirit. Just wanna know, is it so hard to visualize a working water treatment plant in cohesion with some surplus power for the encampment? Don’t you also think that destroying or controlling the plague and the portals should require some PU ammount? The “plug” for such, improved content could be embodied in some unique content, such as certain prototypes needed for the abovementioned facilities.
I really see constant exploring, upgrades and !survival! to be critical in order to improve on the game essentials.
Having only one way to get through seems excessively linear (as you imply with the multiple-solutions note), but I’m very much in favor of the underlying idea. Random labs aren’t terribly convincing.
“Balance” is just a hobgoblin. There will be balance no matter what you do. The problem is, the balance may not produce the atmosphere you’re striving to create. So, for example, I frowned when I discovered all the sci-fi stuff in the game. I was looking for a zombie horror survival roguelike, and while I’m enjoying DDA, you got some chocolate in my peanut butter with the cyborg parts. Fortunately I can switch “classic zombies” on and ignore the cyborg stuff so I can tolerate it pretty well, but it’s a perfect example of what I mean, where the decision to throw stuff into the soup should be less concerned with “balance” and more concerned with mood and theme.
Acid rain? Killer mooses? Waddling around with 10 layers of clothes and 15 backpacks? I don’t remember seeing that on The Walking Dead…
It’s not, it’s part of the intended Cataclysm apocalypse scenario lore. Just like how our zombies are made by ooze from another dimension reanimating and controlling their bodies, not by disease or magic.
As for dealing with it, that was the idea of the mod system. If you find yourself not liking bionics you can mod them out, and then the system was designed so that you could easily share your mod files; if you don’t like bionics there’s bound to be at least one other player who feels the same way.
Not wanting to barge in overmuch, but real elephant in the room is: [move]Code Bloat[/move]
fun statistics; only since 0.A the code grew by 10k lines…
it now stands at 175kloc…
in comparison it was ~100kloc at 0.5… (and if some of it has been moved to .json, then it’s almost 100% growth rate)
that’s a non-trivial project to wrap oneself about, no wander GalenEvil was lost in translation.
with such scarce developer resources achieving major and “moving forward” refactoring and adding new functionality on sounder bases is a pipe dream unless you freeze the code base and devote yourselves singularly to major important rewrites, which will have to take several months, even if you already know your way around the code. as it goes now there is a slim chance of someone turning up out of the blue and handing you z-levels or NPCs or other interesting mapgen, engine subsystems when the target keeps on crawling on in a brownian-like motions.
my $0.0001,
eai