NQT Contribution Thread

Hi guys. Here I’m floating some ideas for Cata-DDA additions that I’m looking to make in the next month. Any input on unit amounts or how certain things might best be achieved etc. are much appreciated.

Eyedrops - heals the ‘Boomered’ status. Possible ingredient in Krokodil.

Questions: How many units should be in an eyedrop container? Should you be able to make it with advanced cooking skills?

Krokodil - Easy drug to make (cooking requirement 3?)

Ingredients:
Eyedrops/Iodine
Gasoline
Matchbook (for the red phosphorus)
Codeine

Takes 30 minutes. Inflicts: Opiate for 40 turns, High for 15 turns. Increases morale by 50(?).

Now, in real life, this drug rots the user’s skin off. Is there an already existing mechanic that would simulate this debilitating effect or should a new disease or mutation be made? Perhaps each step could increase the user along the Ugly and/or Weakening Mutation trees?

This stuff is legitimately awful, but it’s a good pain-killer and morale booster and it could be made to be a common drop in some areas or on some monsters (hobo zombies? addict zombies?), so there might sometimes be a tactical use in taking it.

Further Questions:
How many units of eyedrops/iodine/codeine should be used? Did I get the Krokodil recipe correct? Should I call it by its street name or by its chemical name, Desomorphine?

Proper Mushrooms
As it stands, I believe, there are three types of mushrooms that all have the same description and appearance but three different effects. I think a survival skill-related mushroom picking would be good, but I have little idea how I’d implement this.

Suggestion:
Change the name of default mushrooms to ‘unidentified mushroom’. Each time you forage a mushroom, you have a random chance of it being replaced with an identified mushroom, with the chance increasing with your survival skill. I’ve discussed elsewhere the kinds of mushrooms it might be replaced with, but roughly: a few edible tasty mushrooms, a few disgusting but harmless mushrooms, a few hallucinogenic mushrooms, a few poisonous mushrooms, one almost-always-deadly mushroom). There’d be about a several possibilities with different occurrence chances (all based on genuine New England mushrooms). Mushrooms you find in people’s houses would be replaced with the identified ‘field mushroom’ type.

Questions: there’s obviously an issue with how the mushroom system would work. Once picked, if you increase your survival, will you be able to identify the mushrooms you already have? Or should they only be identifiable if you’ve read the appropriate books? How would that be implemented, code-wise?

[quote=“NQT, post:1, topic:3199”]Hi guys. Here I’m floating some ideas for Cata-DDA additions that I’m looking to make in the next month. Any input on unit amounts or how certain things might best be achieved etc. are much appreciated.

Eyedrops - heals the ‘Boomered’ status. Possible ingredient in Krokodil.

Questions: How many units should be in an eyedrop container? Should you be able to make it with advanced cooking skills?[/quote]
A typical eyedropper should have dozens of charges I’d think.
Basic eyedrops are just a saline solution, it’s actually a very easy recipe. (boil water with the right amount of salt and baking soda)
Alternately we could say that quickly clearing boomer bile takes stronger measures, like copious flushing. In that case you’d improvise a watter bottle full of saline solution or something. Not sure which way to go with that.

[quote=“NQT, post:1, topic:3199”]Krokodil - Easy drug to make (cooking requirement 3?)

Ingredients:
Eyedrops/Iodine
Gasoline
Matchbook (for the red phosphorus)
Codeine

Takes 30 minutes. Inflicts: Opiate for 40 turns, High for 15 turns. Increases morale by 50(?).

Now, in real life, this drug rots the user’s skin off. Is there an already existing mechanic that would simulate this debilitating effect or should a new disease or mutation be made? Perhaps each step could increase the user along the Ugly and/or Weakening Mutation trees?

This stuff is legitimately awful, but it’s a good pain-killer and morale booster and it could be made to be a common drop in some areas or on some monsters (hobo zombies? addict zombies?), so there might sometimes be a tactical use in taking it.

Further Questions:
How many units of eyedrops/iodine/codeine should be used? Did I get the Krokodil recipe correct? Should I call it by its street name or by its chemical name, Desomorphine?[/quote]
I’d stick with the street name, I have no idea what the recipe for Krikodil is, I hadn’t heard of it before today.
I don’t think there’s a effect that covers this, I think progressing down the ugly/weakened mutation path would be an acceptable hack, but adding a new long-term disease would be the more correct solution, depends on how much work you want to put into it.

[quote=“NQT, post:1, topic:3199”]Proper Mushrooms
As it stands, I believe, there are three types of mushrooms that all have the same description and appearance but three different effects. I think a survival skill-related mushroom picking would be good, but I have little idea how I’d implement this.

Suggestion:
Change the name of default mushrooms to ‘unidentified mushroom’. Each time you forage a mushroom, you have a random chance of it being replaced with an identified mushroom, with the chance increasing with your survival skill. I’ve discussed elsewhere the kinds of mushrooms it might be replaced with, but roughly: a few edible tasty mushrooms, a few disgusting but harmless mushrooms, a few hallucinogenic mushrooms, a few poisonous mushrooms, one almost-always-deadly mushroom). There’d be about a several possibilities with different occurrence chances (all based on genuine New England mushrooms). Mushrooms you find in people’s houses would be replaced with the identified ‘field mushroom’ type.

Questions: there’s obviously an issue with how the mushroom system would work. Once picked, if you increase your survival, will you be able to identify the mushrooms you already have? Or should they only be identifiable if you’ve read the appropriate books? How would that be implemented, code-wise?[/quote]
This sounds good. As for implementation I think a forage muchrooms action would be good as a way to practice survival, but that’s just about finding the mushrooms.
I’d make the determination of mushrooms deterministic, so if you have survival 0, you identify nothing, survival 1 would identify some easy to spot ones, etc, all the way up to potentially rare medicinal ones that look like dangerous ones.
For implementing hiding identity on the code, they would have a set of properties that would determine how hard they are to identify and what the appropriate skill is. e.g.

"name" : "tasty mushroom",
"secret_identity" : { "skill" : "survival", "level" : 1, "fake_name" : "unidentified mushroom",
                      "fake_description" : "An unassuming mushroom, it might be delicious, it might be deadly, you're just not sure." },
"description" : "A mushroom you recognise as good to eat.",

(not totally sure my json syntax is right)
If you want a group of items to be confused for each other, you need to be careful to make the names and descriptions identical, but I think that’s beetter than the overhead of having a whole seperate list of fake definitions.
Then in the item display code, you’d check these properties agains the player stats to decide what to display. Also need to potentially hide other stats to avoid giving clues.
This could be generalized to other things, for example if you have a too-low firearms skill, you might not recognise a gun, and it would just be described as “a rifle” and have its stats hidden.

Krokodil
И вам доброго вечера

Whatever, on the topic:
Eyedrops - one bottle usually contains a small amount(about 50 ml or maybe even less) of the medicine, but this amount is enough to use for a loooooooong time due to the dose size.
Drug effect - gives you one of the damaging traits. Decaying, for an instance. You can, of course, rename it to “Rotting”
Mushrooms - that’s can be decided by random function with modifier. I’m bad at C++, and code in python will be an embarrasment to post here.

Krokodil is the Russian name for bathtub desomorphine. The choice of name refers to what it does to the users’ skin around the injection site; after a while gangrene causes the flesh to dry and buckle, hence looking like the skin of a crocodile.

It’s truly nasty stuff, the sort of drug that nobody does for very long because it kills its users within a short span of addiction.

Only issue I see with it in Cataclysm is that, to the best of my research, it’s never been reported to be produced or consumed anywhere in the United States. I don’t know if junkies over here consider it too nasty to use, or if they have their own recipes for bad mojo to cook up/shoot up, but as far as I can tell, krokodil consumption is limited to Russia.

Also, in the real world it’s made from codeine, iodine, and red phosphorus; If I were going to include it I’d make the recipe something like: codeine, matches, iodine tabs, and some sort of good, light organic solvent like vodka or rum.

I like Rivet’s idea for the recipe.

So I’ve started work on this. The code for working eyedrops was a piece of cake, I modelled it all off inhalers (removing Boomered instead of asthma). Treating them as comestibles seemed the most straightforward way, but, uh, the side-effect is that ‘eating’ eyedrops applies them. Maybe this should be done in a different way.

Implementing the recipe for krokodil is straightforward. Making the effects of the drug shouldn’t be too hard. My current thinking is creating a new disease, Necrosis, which the player has a high chance of contracting with krokodil. The point about the drug not being used in the States is true, so rather than having it be a common drop, perhaps have it be an easy recipe and have the pain-killing/high effects be very potent (desomorphine in its pure form is about ten times stronger than regular morphine), to make the risk sometimes seem worth it.

Not sure what the full effects of necrosis should be. Permanently reducing one’s hit point pool for a random limb would be fairly realistic but maybe a bit too cruel. Then again, losing a few points a day isn’t the end of the world but is something that the player would want to fix pretty sharpish. Self-surgery (how?) or antibiotics/Royal Jelly should cure it.

Ooh, fun thought. What if necrosis gives one the zombie pheromone effects, but slowly eats away at the player’s max-HP (until their limbs fall off?

(Incidentally, I can’t currently test properly as I haven’t been able to download a current version of the source (the one straight from github won’t compile). Any clue?)

Look what you did! http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/09/26/first-cases-flesh-eating-drug-krokodil-surface-in-us/?cmpid=cmty_twitter_fn

Oh dear! It’s obviously the zeitgeist.

All the medicines have the side effect that you can eat them, if you want to tackle that go ahead, but it’s not your problem.
The way we typically handle easy but obscure recipes is to have them be learnable from a book or similar, and have an auto-learn at a higher level. In other words it might only take cooking 3 to make if you have a recipe, but coming up with it yourself would take a chemistry expert, more like 7.
Yea super-high painkiller level is a reasonable thing to do with it.
Another thing that’s bugged me for a while is that there’s no real separation between application of the various drugs, IV injection is a rather involved process, and with a lot of drugs you have to cook it before use. Similarly pills take a long time to kick in. Anyway, something else that’s not your problem :slight_smile:
Pain and lowering the max HP for affected limbs seems reasonable for necrosis.
Hmm, Royal Jelly should stop the progress of necrosis, but I’m not sure about it removing the effects entirely, it doesn’t do any healing, just flushes bad stuff from your system, you know? Maybe have the krocodil effect and necrosis be seperate conditions, so royal jelly would cure the first, but not the second. Having said that, if you stop using the necrotic effects should heal over time anyway.

Oh wow, necrosis making zombies ignore you, that’s a huge twist. I’m not sure what I think about that…

RE: building the source, what platform are you on, win, mac, linux? On mac and windows it’s a bit harder to sort out the gettext and SDL dependencies, on linux it generally just works.

I agree with you regarding the source of the recipe (maybe a copy of Vice magazine or a page from an libertine cookbook). I was thinking Royal Jelly could remove the necrosis effect (i.e. continual loss of max hp) but not actually restore the HP. If your gangrenous flesh has sloughed off, you’re not going to get it back any time soon. That said, it would be perhaps a bit too easy to recover from full necrosis if all you had to do is take some antibiotics and have a good night’s rest. Would it be too cruel to implement permanent loss of HP (like, at 2 a day for the limb) that doesn’t recover even after getting rid of necrosis?

I’m generally in favour of more ways to get around enemies than just luring them through a window and wailing on them with a nail-bat, or what have you. I’m in favour of increasing the sneaky or indirect options available while still rewarding the player with skill progression.

(As for source, I’m using windows, building it in CodeBlocks.)

That’s why I suggested splitting the necrosis into two parts, one that causes more damage over time andis healed by jelly, and a second that is caused by the first and heals over time, but not by royal jelly.
Another option is to have “curing” the disease toggle it from the progressive version to the healing version, which is what we have with infected bites / recovering bites right now.

I’m leaning toward allowing severe necrosis to pacify zombies, but I’m not sure how to handle it. Possibly adding an anger trigger for “near rotting enemy” that greatly reduces anger.

I don’t understand the in-game justification for that one. In-game zombies don’t even rot.

They also don’t eat already-dead bodies.

Perhaps smelling the reek of gangrene wafting off your krokodil-ravaged body makes them think you’re no longer a valid target for infection? After all, the goo can’t resurrect something that’s already dead but not ‘infected’ prior to dying.

UPDATE: Eyedrops fully implemented and tested against a severely disappointed Boomer. Recipe for krokodil made and learnable from a new book (VICE magazine). Krokodil is now partially implemented: the painkilling effects were easy to make by modelling it off of heroin.

Now working through necrosis, but the advanced effects (targeted body-parts, like frostbite; progressive lowering of max-hp, zombie pheremone) will require me to have a much greater understanding of disease.cpp. I prefer to use existing code where possible, so rather than reinvent the wheel, does anyone know if these effects are already modelled?

(Also, I saw what I was doing wrong with compiling: the current Code::Blocks project file that’s packaged up with the source is outdated and doesn’t include all the files in the source. After adding in all files in the folder it worked fine.)