Newspapers - Piece together the story of the Cataclysm (LORE FIXED)

[i2amroy]

Some funny titles, but you might want to check out the lore thread for some more detailed information on exactly what was and wasn’t being passed around to the public.

[Tawarochir]

You do realize you labeled that [quote=“Ice-o-metric, post:2, topic:5909”]the more recents ones being much rarer[/quote]
and then labeled “Year 0 DDA” the most common?

Anyway, I like your idea. Sounds like a neat feature to add.

Sorry if I came off a little negative there

[Ice-o-metric]

Nice catch Tawarochir! Hopefully a neat feature, very flavor-supporting, and I would like to believe small enough in scope so as not to be a hassle to the DEV team.

The idea is to have them end up as equal parts in game lore source and entertainment (like a lighter version of the books in Skyrim) and equal part in game tutorial, helping newer players look for facets of the game they may have overlooked. (Mutagens, CBMs, noise, New Enemy types etc)

And yes, I did start writing before I started reading the lore thread, hopefully I won’t have to rewrite too much, because I feel it kind of flows nicely atm.

[Lorknis]

Not to be rude but every single one of these need to be re-done. In quick summary, no knew about the portals, zombies, or mutants at all. Any information regarding any of those subjects would be put on what’s called a ‘media blacklist’. The government would definitely not let any person besides scientists know about said things since they had a tight control on media.

[Blackopsman9999]

Ahem, you can change lore…
The lore does not have to be constant, especially since then is still under very heavy development.

[KA101]

[quote=“Blackopsman9999, post:8, topic:5909”]Ahem, you can change lore…
The lore does not have to be constant, especially since then is still under very heavy development.[/quote]

Ah. Well, it’s good to see that the folks who complain about “change the lore for my idea” Drawing Board posts actually have something to their claims.

Thing is, the suppression described is pretty much standard procedure for these sorts of things. If you were to find a tabloid or something, it might get the general idea right but even still be dangerously inaccurate.

Some stuff would be discussed: civilian-grade CBMs, for instance, have been covered in the ingame media already. (The recipe book for civilian augs is a detailed review of consumer bionics.) Mutations and mutagen would NOT be covered, as those are lab-fodder and not available on the civilian market.

The reason being that mutagen is basically a catalyst for Blob based forced-growth. Special zeds and the Master effect are other examples of the same general idea: the Blob can alter its host’s body.

In case you weren’t aware, it got into the water supply. Folks who aren’t infected (=dead and stayed corpses) managed to avoid using significant amounts of groundwater (definitely less than 8 glasses per day) for the relevant time pre-Cataclysm. Pre-Cata bottled water, for instance, is safe. However, without Blob in your system, mutagen would be unhealthy at best and infect you with Blob in the bargain.

Thus: Mutants might possibly have become highly exotic Valuable Government Property had the blob remained in containment. Some programs such as PE050 “Alpha” were looking into practical applications, but they were probably also looking for resources given that teleportation was grabbing all the glory.
As it is, though, they never had the chance. :-/

So yeah, keep it to stuff findable in civilian stores and you’ll probably be fine. Power Armor would be written about, but briefly and in non-detailed terms (“wowie, lookit our new toys!”, as a brief outline). Hoping that helps.

[Zaweri_Runewright]

“Cannibal Cold”… It is the Blob causing Zombies.

[Binky]

I really like the idea, but as others have suggested think they should be a lot vaguer and certainly a lot less ‘ROBOTS, DOOM, MUTANTS!’. I don’t think they really need to uncover any lore or point to anything of much use, just show a gradual build up of tensions.

Something general like:

‘YEAR OF THE EARTHQUAKE?: Earthquakes at an all time high. UN geologist Urist McDonally calls urgent conference to discuss the worrying and unnatural frequency of earthquakes’

and if you want something more ‘useful’ for the player (in this case telling them about science labs), something like:
‘SCANDAL IN THE PENTAGON: Commander Urist steps down after rouge research scandal, inspectors find unauthorized and heavily guarded military labs near civilian areas’

[Arek_PL]

i like this idea, some newspapers can be nice tutorial like information to butcher corpses ,sentry near bunker or Towns declared Unsafe and shotgun is useless

[Ice-o-metric]

[quote=“Lorknis, post:7, topic:5909”]Not to be rude but every single one of these need to be re-done.[/quote] Correct! Done.

[quote=“KA101, post:9, topic:5909”]If you were to find a tabloid or something, it might get the general idea right but even still be dangerously inaccurate.[/quote]Good idea! Used this to include more half-right but revealing articles using this formula

[quote=“Binky, post:11, topic:5909”]I don’t think they really need to uncover any lore[/quote] You are technically correct Binky… THE BEST KIND OF CORRECT! That said, at that point it might as well be ‘Feature: Reading novel gives randomly generated plot summary’ The big selling point of the newspapers is that in addition to being interesting, they are also informative

These changes mean information is rarer, as many articles are half misinformationi would recommend instead of random 2-4 reads, set it to 4 reads, to fit everything in i wanted i had to increase the number of article summaries i’d written

[Zireael]

- "LABS BOMBED: In further invasion proof (discounting earlier suggestion of a riot drug) most of New England's scientific labs were bombed simultaniously yesterday. No word yet [i]from the military[/i] about who the aggressors are ."

Rewrote the last sentence a bit.

[Ice-o-metric]

Thanks Zireael, made the change.

Potential algorithm for Article-Picking: (hidden because boring to most)

[spoiler]Let totalArticles be the number of article choices for a given period, or ‘pool’ of article choices

Let prevArticle be either the last article chosen, or -1 if none have been chosen (assuming numbering starts at 0)

Let articlesChosen be the number of articles already chosen to appear in this newspaper (starting at 0)

Determine articlesLeft (the number of articles required to complete) by taking 4, and reducing it by articlesChosen

Determine the lowerBound (the smallest number of article id we can pick) by adding 1 to the prevArticle (This way we can never get the article directly afterwards, meaning we can put sequels next to eachother in the article pool, and be sure they will never end up in the same newspaper. This also means the -1 it starts at becomes 0, the lowest choice)

Determine the upperBound by doubling articlesLeft and taking that number away from totalArticles (we need that many articles left to choose, and we can’t pick the articles next to them, so 2x that number must be left at the end)

Choose an article in between upperBound and lowerBound. That article becomes the new prevArticle, add to articlesChosen. If we have 4 articles chosen we are done[/spoiler]

[KA101]

[quote=“Zireael, post:14, topic:5909”]

- “LABS BOMBED: In further invasion proof (discounting earlier suggestion of a riot drug) most of New England’s scientific labs were bombed simultaniously yesterday. No word yet from the military about who the aggressors are .”

Rewrote the last sentence a bit.[/quote]

Heh?!

At that point the actual Cataclysm (zed population passes the “tipping point”: more zeds than LEO/military can contain) is in progress, if I understand you correctly? If that makes the papers, it’s the last issue before the presses went offline (evacuations/zed hits, etc).

[Ice-o-metric]

Hmm. Yeah, could be. Still at that point, they outnumber military, but not necessarily civilians, so it could still make it to print, but as you say, only just.

Plus if that were the last newspaper released that would be cool, also rather telling. That said, the message of that article is one of the least obvious, so we wouldn’t lose much if dropping it from the list better portrayed the timeline.

So what do you think KA101? Is the system I described for dynamically generating the newspapers viable? Would it take much to implement? And does it offer enough to players to warrant taking time away from other initiatives?

[KA101]

[quote=“Ice-o-metric, post:17, topic:5909”]Hmm. Yeah, could be. Still at that point, they outnumber military, but not necessarily civilians, so it could still make it to print, but as you say, only just.

Plus if that were the last newspaper released that would be cool, also rather telling. That said, the message of that article is one of the least obvious, so we wouldn’t lose much if dropping it from the list better portrayed the timeline.

So what do you think KA101? Is the system I described for dynamically generating the newspapers viable? Would it take much to implement? And does it offer enough to players to warrant taking time away from other initiatives?[/quote]

I think BevapDin has code in the PR-hopper that would work for these, but I’m not sure I understand it enough to merge. (Got a clarification-request out.) Haven’t gone through each-and-every article you’ve written, but the general idea seems interesting. Keep it around.

[Ice-o-metric]

That sounds promising! I wish I knew more so I could rewrite the article list in JSON to maybe save a dev some time.

[KA101]

That sounds promising! I wish I knew more so I could rewrite the article list in JSON to maybe save a dev some time.

Just merged about three hours ago.

[Ice-o-metric]

Just had a look at the merge request, and tried to glean what i could by examining the ‘Files Changed’ code… Just a few quick questions

At the minute the objects coded in that merge are effectively single-page single-message objects? That’s fine if it is, by this stage most newspapers would have been blown to individual sheets by now, and if I really want, I can tell the item spawn code to generate a bunch of pages in the same place (pretty much what a newspaper is, although perhaps minus the order and somewhat more difficult to pick up… on the plus side though, much easier to seperate)

Secondly the item would need to be added to each location’s item-spawn-list that I would like individual sheets to show up, and if i would like whole papers to show up i’ll need to write an item-class, am i right?

[BevapDin]

[quote=“Ice-o-metric, post:21, topic:5909”]Just had a look at the merge request, and tried to glean what i could by examining the ‘Files Changed’ code… Just a few quick questions

At the minute the objects coded in that merge are effectively single-page single-message objects? That’s fine if it is, by this stage most newspapers would have been blown to individual sheets by now, and if I really want, I can tell the item spawn code to generate a bunch of pages in the same place (pretty much what a newspaper is, although perhaps minus the order and somewhat more difficult to pick up… on the plus side though, much easier to seperate)

Secondly the item would need to be added to each location’s item-spawn-list that I would like individual sheets to show up, and if i would like whole papers to show up i’ll need to write an item-class, am i right?[/quote]

The message can be as long and as big as you want. It will be displayed as the description of the item. The item information screen can be scrolled (’<’ and ‘>’) so the text length should be no problem.

Second question: yes, there is for example an item group “trash_forest” that is used to create trash when searching an undershrub.

You can use the fliers as template.

[Ice-o-metric]

[quote=“Ice-o-metric, post:21, topic:5909”]At the minute the objects coded in that merge are effectively single-page single-message objects?

The message can be as long and as big as you want. It will be displayed as the description of the item. The item information screen can be scrolled (’<’ and ‘>’) so the text length should be no problem.[/quote]
All I meant was that it doesnt/can’t break it into sections that you get from multiple read-throughs