Postbiomes mod concept discussion

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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Hello there, I have a mod idea I’d like to implement and I’d love to hear some criticism from actual players.

Originally, I wanted to make a war torn city variation (near ruined buildings with mostly burnt insides + high levels of demolished military tech, transports and corpses + possibly remains of randomly selected enemy force with additional structures (that’s CDDA so humans never win) + unique NPCs like survived squad that fortified themselves in the basement or last bastions of resistance) which will be ideal for early game near suicidal military looting and quite a viable late game high threat zone to explore. But this ultimately is just a lame Necropolis clone, that will likely wreck the balance due to comparably low overall threat and much higher spawn chance.

So, a new concept was born: a global Postbiome system that overlays areas on top of the existing map and uniquely modifies already present overmap cells. The most obvious appeal is that, assuming the core system is already online, with little to no efforts any biome may be drastically changed both visually and mechanically, adding even more variations to already pretty damn impressive pool of locations. Furthermore, this enables better “biome” interconnections making the world more immersive and unified.

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Let’s assume that the red cycle is the outline of the generated overlay area. The type will be “decimated battlefield”, since I’ve already established the concept for it.
The generation may be done in the following way and order:

  • Location of the main objective is selected, preferably a complex building somewhere in the epicenter (08.07.2021 “Battle for the Shed” accident).
  • Makeshift command center/Officer vehicle is being placed far away from potential points of interest if possible.
  • Support units/vehicles/fortifications are being generated to provide some cover for the command unit.
  • Main battlefield is being created around the main objective, complete with corpses and demolished machinery from both sides.
  • Procedural structure-location dependent destruction is being applied to the entire area (for example buildings near the main objective should be absolutely leveled whereas the far edges may remain intact).

Steps may be skipped or replaced with selected from the list ones, so some sort of global procedural scenario generation might be possible too.

So yeah, will love to hear suggestions/opinions on the concept in general and the example in particular if that’s even doable with build-in modding tools of course.

P.S. I haven’t legitimately played CDDA in a while and haven’t caught up yet with all the new features and mods, so I’m sorry in advance if this exact system was already implemented.

4 Likes
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This concept was brought up to the table at least few times, and is one of the best features I’d personally like to see in 0.G.

You should definitely check out the proof of concept work of ZhilkinSerg at GitHub for that matter. And some discussions here too.

For it to work it needs an overlay for the overlap and post processing functionality. The latter is already in game mostly in form of map extras, and other post processing functions that actually change the existing preloaded map chunks. The former is more tricky to implement, would have to be JSONized for modding purposes, but very important if you want to impact more than one overmap block.

It has immense potential for improving content - think:

  • nuked cities,
  • flooded cities,
  • burned cities,
  • cities reclaimed by nature,
  • cities overrun by specific mobs or bandits (fortified cities)

And that’s just from the top of my head. Not to mention that it brings unpredictability to the otherwise obvious world map.

If you’re up to it - by all means go for it.

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Well, that’s great news.
Having examples will be truly invaluable, especially considering the fact that I have 0 experience in CDDA modding so far. Thanks!

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Damn, thanks!
Though, just to be clear, I’m currently knee deep in another project and will be for a while, so unfortunately won’t be able to dive here any time soon. The whole thread was more like a possibility check and my god does the CDDA community care. Cheers, really appreciated.