More World Options that influence Items "Power Levels"

[juliawang87]

This is a bit of a personal issue for me because, although I’ve become proficient at CDDA, there have been multiple games I’ve wanted to play but I’ve been too bad at them to get anywhere. There are a number of people in the community who appear to think CDDA needs to be some arbitrary level of difficulty, and that any items in the game that do not maintain an appropriate level of frustration for players needs to be “nerfed” or taken away – as if the success of a new player somehow diminishes their own enjoyment of the game.

However, what if, like city size, zombie spawn rate, and points awarded during character creation, we added a whole slew of options for world creation? Then anyone going on and on about how “OP” solar panels are could select the solar power option and reduce it for “normal” to “low.” Anyone unfamiliar with the game, or wanting a leg up, could change solar power from “normal” to “high.”

These options could cover a huge range of options and provide new players with greater flexibility rather than strictly narrowing our community to Roguelike players only. Not only that, it could offer advanced players a greater challenge. Everything from altering hunger/thirst levels to the spawn rate of certain monsters or guns and ammunition.

For all the arguments this community appears to have over difficulty, this strikes me as a perfect way to appease everyone. The purists can brag about how they’ve set all the options to the most punishing levels, and new players won’t be chased away by conditions that only Roguelike veterans enjoy.

[Cherry]

Options menu!
Finally!

[John_Candlebury]

Ohh God not this discussion again, especially in such a short time interval after the others. This has been brought a lot in the past months, it just boils down to what belongs and doesnt belongs into the game and particularly passive-aggressive statements, nothing worthwhile has actually come out from any of the parties involved; believe me I did try to adress it more seriously in the past, its just not worth the problems, if anything prove your point to the developers in private through email or some other means.

[juliawang87]

Your dismissive attitude and irritable rejection of a sincere attempt to provoke a discussion on the subject is precisely what’s wrong with this community. Why have a place for suggestions if you’re going to act so burdened by the opinion of others? I have seen you shit on so many discussions and any divergent position, I sometimes wonder if you’re capable of being positive about anything. I mean, would it hurt you to be nice?

As for the implementation of such options, how hard could it really be? Where, for example, the option for solar panel strength is rated as 1, 2, or 3, and in the code for the component, you could effectively have…

[if 1, power generated is x/2]
[if 2, power generated is x]
[if 3, power generated is 2*x]

But, no, just act like a jerk, alienate the greater community, and revel in your insular opinions.

[BeigeSand]

Bejeezus dude, chill. Johnny is just giving his two cents, the fact it is spent crapping on your two cents is irrelevant. Suggestions are just that, suggestions, and if someone thinks that a suggestion brought up many times before is slightly annoying, it’s his right to comment on your suggestion. Anyways…

Back to the original point, game balancing is done to make it playable, and unfortunately, being able to change things willy-nilly pretty much wastes the hours of effort devs have put into balancing this game. While I understand some people enjoy being able to play games at low complexity/ high power levels, I don’t think that was ever part of the original appeal for cataclysm/any roguelike ever, and I don’t really see the point putting the time and effort to put it in the game.

[HunterAlpha1]

[quote=“juliawang87, post:4, topic:5125”]Your dismissive attitude and irritable rejection of a sincere attempt to provoke a discussion on the subject is precisely what’s wrong with this community. Why have a place for suggestions if you’re going to act so burdened by the opinion of others? I have seen you shit on so many discussions and any divergent position, I sometimes wonder if you’re capable of being positive about anything. I mean, would it hurt you to be nice?

As for the implementation of such options, how hard could it really be? Where, for example, the option for solar panel strength is rated as 1, 2, or 3, and in the code for the component, you could effectively have…

[if 1, power generated is x/2]
[if 2, power generated is x]
[if 3, power generated is 2*x]

But, no, just act like a jerk, alienate the greater community, and revel in your insular opinions.[/quote]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsJg-tCv18Q 1:40

[juliawang87]

So once again it’s a case of, “That’s not how I play or how I think a Roguelike should be… so it has to be this way and cannot include any options to change it.” I’ve never seen such resistance to making a game more inclusive to a wider range of players. Why bother having options for city size, spawn rates, or character points if the end users are treated as plebeians incapable of making the “right” choices about balancing their game?

Fact remains that people will always continue to say it’s too easy, while others will say it’s too hard. Still more will say, “Don’t touch it – it’s perfect the way it is!” Adjustable options like those I’m recommending would allow devs to respect all three groups simultaneously.

And, yes, I’m getting frustrated but it’s because I see so much negativity and arrogance on here and I hate it. And FWIW I’m not a dude, thank you very much.

[system]

I personally agree with Julia. I wouldn’t mind an option to make gas pumps ∞, or to increase tool spawns, or even reduce tough zombie and zombear spawns.

[Ironstone]

Back to the original point, game balancing is done to make it playable, and unfortunately, being able to change things willy-nilly pretty much wastes the hours of effort devs have put into balancing this game. While I understand some people enjoy being able to play games at low complexity/ high power levels, I don't think that was ever part of the original appeal for cataclysm/any roguelike ever, and I don't really see the point putting the time and effort to put it in the game.

I beg to differ. If “balancing” the game was the dev’s main focus, I seriously doubt they’d have moved as many things to json’s as they have. They seem to be striving to make it more open to the casual modder which means easier for each of us to set the difficulty level at which we play in various ways. The fact that you can edit the jsons and add your own mods grants the ability to change those settings willy nilly. An options menu would only make it friendlier for new players. The learning curve is a bit steep after all.

I also can’t blame juliawang87 for being a bit frustrated at the “I think this game should be played in X way and only X way” tone. I’ve seen the same sort of response to the suggestion that steam engines or wood gas be added as option in the game because it would make it too easy to procure fuel. Hilariously enough this was after defending the solar panel nerf as necessary for realism. Wood gas was and is a realistic internal combustion fuel.

I’ve seen the same sort of pique associated with other roguelike games over people backing up their saves up to and including how to prevent players from avoiding permadeath for any reason including game glitches.

In short , more options equals more openess to varying play styles, which in turn means more players and more potential growth for the game. Try and keep in mind how I or you play Cata has no impact on how anyone else does, nor should it.

[system]

I’m currently modding in stirling engines. I will try and get a PR up, once it gets through I’ll laugh at your faces for thinking they would never get added.

[KA101]

OK. Yeah, I like options. I like 'em a LOT. (I was first visible here for vehemently arguing against the deprecation of Dynamic Spawn.)

I also found Cata comparatively accessible as compared to Nethack or GearHead2; it’s refreshingly free of mechanics which punish the player for developing xyr character “improperly”, “gotchas”, and difficulty for difficulty’s sake. I think it ought to stay that way.

Making everything optional could well break our ability to balance the game. I don’t worry about that too much. We can balance to the default, and let folks who disagree with our balance alter their defaults as they see fit. Keeps 'em happy and keeps Cata accessible for everyone.
And with practice, you’ll find the settings that are right for you: our hardcore Survivalists can turn city-gen and item spawns down, and feel proud in their furs, bows, etc; action fans can turn items and critters up, and blast/burn/maim screenloads of zeds; RPers can tune either as desired, and run their characters to whatever spec they see fit; gamers can tweak it to be as challenging as possible, and exult in their skills; devs can turn off zeds when they’d just get in the way, and actually diagnose/fix things in a reasonable time.

Somehow we–generally–keep everyone at no more than a low grumble about how they’d make the game better. (And sometimes those grumbles get merged into mainline, so grumbly players can be a good thing!)

I’m not interested in standardizing the game, whether for “Balance” or to make it more of a “Roguelike”. Yeah, there are skills involved in playing Cata, and you’ll find your character tends to survive longer if you pay attention to your games. But there’s no need to make the game a competitive sport, open leaderboards, or hold annual tournaments. I don’t even know how you’d keep score–there’s no successful-end condition, and mere survival for survival’s sake can be extended to an exercise in tedium.

As for the coding angle, some factors are more easily optioned than others. Right now we’re not interested in breaking things up because there’s a Stable long overdue and I’d kinda like to get it out.

So we can then break the code adding bigger and better things. And if you’d like to look into option-expansion, I shan’t tell you “no”. Certain options may not be the best idea or the easiest to code, but in general options bear thinking about.

[i2amroy]

Generally here’s my idea on this:
“Adding content that is able to be edited by the player (i.e. json file editing) is a good thing, but spending countless dev hours adding things to an options menu that very few people will use as well as decreasing moddability (due to the option menu being more hardcoded) is bad.”

If you want to edit solar panels you should be able to drop into the json files, pull up solar panels, and change the power generation number. That would be a good thing. Adding it to an options menu, wasting large amounts of dev time because people aren’t willing to take 3 minutes to look around in the json files (or download a mod from someone who has) isn’t a good thing.

And if anyone wants to argue that learning how to mod json files is really hard I’m going to have to kindly disagree. If you take a look around the json files some 99% of it literally says exactly what it does; doing a find in a text editor and changing a single number or making a small tweak is extremely easy.

[BeigeSand]

[quote=“juliawang87, post:7, topic:5125”]So once again it’s a case of, “That’s not how I play or how I think a Roguelike should be… so it has to be this way and cannot include any options to change it.” I’ve never seen such resistance to making a game more inclusive to a wider range of players. Why bother having options for city size, spawn rates, or character points if the end users are treated as plebeians incapable of making the “right” choices about balancing their game?

Fact remains that people will always continue to say it’s too easy, while others will say it’s too hard. Still more will say, “Don’t touch it – it’s perfect the way it is!” Adjustable options like those I’m recommending would allow devs to respect all three groups simultaneously.

And, yes, I’m getting frustrated but it’s because I see so much negativity and arrogance on here and I hate it. And FWIW I’m not a dude, thank you very much.[/quote]
I gave my opinion as opposed to yours and you flip the table because I didn’t 100% support your idea. If we’re being honest, my opinion probably isn’t worth half a damn in the grand scheme of things. If you want to make a PR or convince a coder who can to do it, then it’ll probably make it into the game if it doesn’t bork things up. I just personally don’t think it’s worth the effort, ergo I posted my opinion.

B)You seem to forget we are the internet, no matter how perfectly easy/ impossibly hard we can customize the game, someone’s going to whine about all the extra menu options.

C) I believe in gender equality.

D) Cataclysm DDA is probably the single most accommodating/inclusive roguelike I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.

[dwarfkoala]

One thing I feel that should be pushed for is more moddability,but I personally don’t feel that the sheer amount of coding effort required to make options really work should be put into that instead of something like expanding the capabilities of the engine in better ways.

Natureswitness, for example, created a PR that made ammo recovery chance json-defined instead of hardcoded. This means that you can mod in new arrows or harpoons or whatever and only deal with the easy-to-use jsons instead of the game code itself when determining how likely it is that you’ll be able to recover it. I think that’s a more efficient step in the right direction than hardcoded options.

[FunsizeNinja123]

There’s too much stuff about to (and being) pushed into mod packs. What, we’re going to have everything toggleable from now on?

[Soyweiser]

You do realize that a lot of this “moah options” stuff is just accessible via the mod files right? the .json text files.

Making large parts of the game be editable from inside the game would be a bit of a nightmare. (creating a good UI for that … brrr, not fun, loads of work, introduces more bugs, if you add a new clothing option somewhere in the game? Now you have to edit the code, the json files, the ingame editor for the json files, the json documentation, the ingame editor documentation (and if a dev forgets one, it creates problems down the line)). And, developer time is limited. Every hour that goes into debugging an options screen made for people who cannot edit text files, is one hour not spend on other stuff. () (*). It also creates a larger barrier of entry for developers. (I see some irony here). Your inclusionism is a LOT of work. If you can convince a dev to work on it fine. But I hear that there is a connection between herding devs and herding cats.

An external editor specific for cataclysm could work. (like: http://en.cataclysmdda.com/pages/16/display the catamodder). But it needs to be updated between versions (like 0.9 etc). And will not work for the experimental builds.

And even if we put all the different values tweakable in options files some balance issues will not be fixed. As there are some game mechanics that are currently broken. (iirc, currently the headshots by turrets who can almost ignore armor, Z’s not doing damage if you walk around with enough clothing and skill). This makes certain situations result in instant failure (the turrets (*), and others simply a cakewalk. (Running into town fully clothed and skilled, and you have no problems).

Regarding the solar nerf, I was actually working on a system to change parts of it around. Now you could find nerfed solar panels (but more, as we undid part of the nerf). And could find a recipe for upgraded solar panels. And if you are very lucky even find super solar panels. So for three tiers of solars. This way we create a tiered system, some goals, reward exploring, etc. You can still edit the .json files and undo the solar nerf. (pretty easily actually). Or you could use the cheat menu to give yourself the super solars.

would it hurt you to be nice?

Excuse me?

A lot of these myopic and narcissistic attitudes are really casting a negative pall on this community.

You ain’t acting so nice yourself. (single quote, you also call others jerks, snarky, angry etc). I understand that you are a bit angry yourself. But please stop the personal attacks. People are trying to help and understand you.

So once again it’s a case of, “That’s not how I play or how I think a Roguelike should be… so it has to be this way and cannot include any options to change it.” I’ve never seen such resistance to making a game more inclusive to a wider range of players. Why bother having options for city size, spawn rates, or character points if the end users are treated as plebeians incapable of making the “right” choices about balancing their game?

End users treated as plebeians? I’m sorry but you are getting the wrong impression here. People are working pretty hard to try and find bugs, add more moddability, etc. Almost all the bugs reported here on the forums are quickly made into issues on the issuetracker and fixed, the irc channel is a very helpful place for new players, and modders, etc. And even more fun. The end users ARE people who can balance their own game. Either by editing the json files, making bug reports, making issues on github, adding code on github, or the very technical, just making their own game from the code. It just requires a bit of work.

And please realize you are now telling others how to play the game. “this is OP and should not be in the game” is just as much as telling others how to play the game as “if you don’t like it don’t use it”.

There is even a way you can help the game, apart from complaining. Even if you think the game is perfect and should not be changed, there is still a lot of work that can be done on the wiki. http://www.wiki.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?title=Main_Page (And yeah, im beating a dead horse here, nobody wants to edit the wiki).

Let me end this rant with this, you say you cannot change the options. I say you can, using the .json files. Now go ahead and try that. If you would like so, please make some documentation (for the wiki) about how to edit the .json files. And if you then find any bugs (im sure there are). We can fix them, and if you do not find any bugs. We have a nice guide how to edit the .json files, on the wiki. So other players have an easier time editing the game to their liking. (I’m asking you to make the path so to speak, not to walk the path somebody else already made).

*: the ‘roguelike’ advice is, to just not approach turrets, and always be very careful around doors in labs (where turrets spawn not in the open). I disagree with that notion. There is no reason you should get instakilled by opening a door, and I consider it a bit of a bug.
**: totally unrelated, but there was a guy who was angry at the developers of dominions 4 because they didn’t include an ingame text editor, and he had to download/find a text editor himself and he didn’t want to. Apparently it was the obligation of the devs to provide text editors if they provided moddability via text files.
***: Funny fact, the JSON_FLAGS.md documentation is already a bit outdated as it doesn’t even contain all flags. Adding more code to document and maintain will only make it worse.
Ps: I’m not true dev of cata, I only provide some code, issues and rants. I am however an opinionated dickhead, who can be active here on the forums.

[system]

Quit being shilters.
SHIIIIIIITLEEEEEEEERSSSSS.

[One-Eyed_Jack]

Part of “accessibility” involves not presenting the new player with a lot of options that have unclear effects. Going through a list of global variables, finding one for solar panels, and changing it to 1.5 (or whatever) is not something that a new player is likely to do of their own accord, and if you have spawn variables for a lot more things then it becomes even more complicated and confusing. As mentioned, creating a UI would be very hard, but even if it were implemented well you’d have a very large amount of things you would need to learn before even starting the game. There is already a learning curve for the game itself (although less of than one than many roguelikes I’ve played.) Adding an exhaustive list of world options would really only benefit experienced players.

Additionally, there is, in practice, a difference between having a game set at “hard mode” with an “easy mode” mod and having a game set at “easy mode” with a “hard mode” mod. Players, especially new players, will likely try the game with whatever its default settings are, so that should be representative of what the game is trying to put forward as a whole (the terms “easy mode” and “hard mode” have some prejudicial content, too, but I think it’d be a good idea to set that aside).

Modularity is a great asset to any game, because it allows users to play it as they see fit . At the same time, it shouldn’t be necessary to enjoy the game.

Also, there’s devmode if all you want to do is spawn more solar panels.

[Uneron]

Part of “accessibility” involves not presenting the new player with a lot of options that have unclear effects. Going through a list of global variables, finding one for solar panels, and changing it to 1.5 (or whatever) is not something that a new player is likely to do of their own accord, and if you have spawn variables for a lot more things then it becomes even more complicated and confusing. As mentioned, creating a UI would be very hard, but even if it were implemented well you’d have a very large amount of things you would need to learn before even starting the game. There is already a learning curve for the game itself (although less of than one than many roguelikes I’ve played.) Adding an exhaustive list of world options would really only benefit experienced players.

Hear, hear! I recently introduced someone new to the game and the actual start of the game was the most confusing part to him. ‘What are black roads? How does city size matter?’ etc. Also there are like a billion traits, many of them with little effect. Adding an option for every little thing is not the way to go.

[Soyweiser]

[quote=“One-Eyed Jack, post:18, topic:5125”]Part of “accessibility” involves not presenting the new player with a lot of options that have unclear effects. Going through a list of global variables, finding one for solar panels, and changing it to 1.5 (or whatever) is not something that a new player is likely to do of their own accord, and if you have spawn variables for a lot more things then it becomes even more complicated and confusing. As mentioned, creating a UI would be very hard, but even if it were implemented well you’d have a very large amount of things you would need to learn before even starting the game. There is already a learning curve for the game itself (although less of than one than many roguelikes I’ve played.) Adding an exhaustive list of world options would really only benefit experienced players.

Hear, hear! I recently introduced someone new to the game and the actual start of the game was the most confusing part to him. ‘What are black roads? How does city size matter?’ etc. Also there are like a billion traits, many of them with little effect. Adding an option for every little thing is not the way to go.[/quote]

So… a play now (generate default world, generate reasonable char) would be a good function?