This is more of a thought experiment than anything else at the moment, but wouldn’t it be a fun(and probably very difficult) scenario if you were to play as one of the people who ended up stranded on an alien world?
I don’t think the portals are one-way tears in space(currently they’re unstable spacial anomolies but they were once used for travel), so in my mind it would be entirely reasonable for someone to have gone through a portal on the day of the cataclysm and ended up lost on the other side due to it closing or them being blocked from going back by some sort of monster. It would be hard to survive there, and you’d probably constantly need to produce a breathable medium of air or slowly die of the poisonous atmosphere. Most people’s first tries would also fail misserably due to them not knowing what is safe to eat and what not, and to think of all the horrible new monstrocities you’ll have to survive.
I know it’ll need an entire new set of tiles, flora, fauna, etc to make it work but it’ll be a fun alternative for most people i believe.
that was my thought too, make the portals work like stairs/elevators, since creating a secondary map (like the nether of minecraft) seems pretty hard if you dont know any c++
Mmmm… If someone were to do that they might as well just make it an underworld scenario where the surface is unreachable and you have to try to survive underground. No sunlight, only a few tunnels like rivers that connect large pockets of open space and mini-biomes and the rest you have to dig out, hostile and friendly troglodytes and other trapped survivors, and a boost to mining speed just to make it bearable.
I suppose worldgen and other systems is handled by c++ then? Unfortunate but understandable. If it were jsonized so that it points to a specific folder for resources to use and give and option of a world type to use on world generation then it might be a relatively(still a high work load) simple thing to mod in a different worldgen if someone wanted to spend months on it. Perhaps also add an “atmosphere_effect” thing that would be “none” for the normal worldgen but “gas_poison intensity 1” for the alien world to constantly apply a low poison effect to the characters so that you’d always need a gas mask or greater just to not constantly lose chest health, or anything covering your mouth to lower the overall effect to a manageable but still worrisome level. There would probably also be some helpful flora that you could sleep and live near to tide you over until you had a healthy supply of gas filters.
There is something similar - Underground Structures in Dorf Life by Chaosvolt, the mod is really awesome and locations are literally infested with whatever you can find there, right now it’s the closest thing that we have to alien worlds type of environments, oh and Mi-Go encampments…
The furniture might be invisible but the gas won’t be if how the game currently handles gas is any indication. Gas is very much a visible thing in CDDA and would obscure a lot of the ground and other things a player might want to see. It would work for something like this where we could see everything sticking out but not the ground itself…
Pro for difficulty, con for enjoyability. And if it was furniture releasing the gas then the player would eventually replace or destroy as much as they need and render the danger factor a matter of patience.
I see your point about using the labs as a template for underground generation but I wouldn’t know how to manipulate that and would first need to look into how someone might do so without messing with labs as they are.
@Gilliph I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking. If you’re asking if there would be more than 1 alternative worldgen if it could be modded in its entirety I’d say it’s all up to the community. If you’re wanting a minecraft nether portal thing so that you could have the normal world while playing as well an option to go into a portal and explore a different world in the same save, it’s not an impossibility I’d imagine but it would present its own issues.
Ah sorry, I think I may be confused here, Or not making sense.
Aren’t there multiple dimensions for each of the different alien factions? Mycus, Plant, Blob, Nether?
All this talk about portals and going to the other side and being there; another dimension right?
Will this be focused on the Nether or one of the others?
Everything here hinges on whether or not the entirety of the game’s worldgen is or is not moddable, and if it isn’t, then whether or not it becomes moddable. If it is or becomes moddable then I know that I, at the very least, would try to make it so that you’d be able to generate a world to play on that would be similar to at least one of the possible originating worlds of earth’s invaders. Probably the mi-go’s environment or “nether” as you call it, due to us already having some semblance of an idea as to how it is and what it would look like.
An optional worldgen would include its own scenarios to fit it, like you being a stranded power armor trooper or researcher with a hazmat suit. It wouldn’t make much sense for there to be an LMOE or evac shelter survivor scenario on an alien or completely underground world.
It would be nice to make it so that the player can eventually stabilize one of the portals and use them to visit the other worlds and use new materials for further crafting progression, and to give players another level of challenge for them to overcome once they’re bored with earth’s things, but I don’t think that is ever going to be a thing without some groundwork laid by the devs or someone who knows c++.
from what i saw on the json of dorf life from chaosvolt, everything he uses is json to alterate the undeground generation, so making the portal scenario start would only be need to made way underground, along with the tweaks and sprites for it (like making that overmap level unmineable) and things to make it nether like, and making the stabilized portal work like an elevator to the normal overmap.
