This is supposed to be near future, so I would expect that there would at least be a lunar colony established. So what happened to them? They are isolated enough that the triffids and fungus can’t reach them, and given how fast things deteriorated between the outbreak of the blob and total collapse, anybody left up there should be uncontaminated. If the colony was somewhat self sufficient, they could survive for an extended period unaided.
They would probably send someone to find out what the hell is going on after a while. A scenario that starts out like Planet Of The Apes would be fun.
An interesting potential end game goal would be to secure a launch site, and evacuate as many survivors as possible to a lunar colony.
Alternatively, given the bleak setting (and infection of all humans with the blob) evacuation might be impractical and the endgame objective could be to secure a mass driver facility and launch enough supplies, seeds, medicine, equipment, etc to the unaffected lunar colony, to ensure humanity’s long term survival.
If we wanted to be REALLLY bleak, the evacuation or final resupply might be followed by a mass bombardment from orbital WMDs or something, to destroy the biosphere and deny our enemies the use of the planet. Literal scorched earth tactics.
A lunar base sounds like it would be a loooooooooong way away. That said, spacesuits and some space gear could make for a really fun starting scenario, something along the lines of:
“6 months of being stuck on the ISS and the last transmission you get is a guy getting his face ripped off by a zombie. Supplies were limited, so you and the rest of the crew were forced to return to Earth by any means necessary, meaning a semi-controlled descent in a jettisoned section of the station. Now you’ll get to find out if your suit can handle zombie bites.”
Well, the way orbital mechanics work, you don’t go straight to the moon, you just get into an orbit where the moon comes to you. If you are willing to wait longer for an intercept, the less energy you need to a certain extent. So at the very least the cargo launch by mass driver would be doable, as long as the facility was intact.
Sorry, I meant it would be a long way away in development. As in, it would basically require all new mapgen, a bunch of new mechanics, etc. Well, depending on how you did it I suppose…
Obviously the moon is pretty far away, but that’s a nonissue when we can strap ourselves to thousands of tons of high-explosives.
I LOVE IT. I had some similar thoughts, but I didn’t think they would fit well enough with the setting. Insufficient grimdark. My survivor would help bankroll that project in a new york minute.
Then you’ll need to read the documents in the doc/ directory about whatever you’re trying to do.
NPC dialogues are easier to write than they used to be, the mechanism is well documented, and I can easily be convinced to write support code if there’s something else you need the dialogue code to do[1].
[1] I’m super busy, so start contributing before you ask for stuff, but anyone with a record of contributions who needs a dialogue extension just needs to tell me what they need.
Thanks. What if I wanted to do something like a series of random “life story” blurbs for NPCs to have? Would that be easy to implement? Actually nevermind, I’m sure what I have in mind would be. I’ll see what I can think of
The spoiler Kevin linked to mentioned the Melchior system, I.E a special computer than can be found in labs. It should probably be easy enough to code in a text dump similar to those on the normal lab computers and have it explain a bunch of stuff, or even spit out some paper files that explain it all. Recordings that could be downloaded and played on those tablet PCs maybe?
Pink Floyd aside. What about the Dark Side of The Moon?
Space stations in orbit are a novel stepping stone. But having the moon be a larger platform makes sense for the grand scale of things.
I have to wonder what fun and escapades would those lost souls in orbit and on the moon would be dealing with if portals have opened on earth? If crap poured onto earth. A safe space to experiment would naturally be where few humans exist. A space colony on the moon. If things fell apart on earth to such horrors…how messed up are things on the moon? 0_0
Dialogue in CDDA is made up of talk_topics which consist of a dynamic_line that the NPC says and 1 or more responses that the player responds with. Each response has a topic field, which is the next talk_topic in the dialogue tree.
Currently, I don’t see a good way to assign a random starting talk_topic to an NPC, but if you came up with some life story dialogue trees, I would figure out a way to hook them in.