Renaming NPCs, mission enhancements, muzzle flashes, special injuries, +more

NPC Renaming

I should be able to rename my companion NPCs or at least give them a nickname. NPCs have random names, but I still occasionally run into (and recruit) several people named TonZa or Alphai or even Dusk Gao. Having two or more companion NPCs with the same name can get quite confusing.

Mission Enhancement: Show Questgiver’s Name

I’ve got several missions from each of my NPC companions. It would be nice to tell if this “Kill 100 Zombies” mission came from a NPC named FrozenFoxy or a NPC named Gattsu or someone else without having to talk to every single companion I have.

Muzzle Flashes

For some reason, muzzle flashes in CDDA aren’t simulated. I fire a gun at night without the muzzle flash briefly illuminating me, but a laser rifle at night gives away my position. I suggest having guns briefly illuminate whoever’s shooting (Whether its the player, a NPC bandit, a turret,etc) for a short amount of time (one turn?), but the muzzle flash shouldn’t be light up an entire football field. Muzzle flashes could be reduced or eliminated with suppressors or flash hiders.

More bleeding

Turret filling me full of lead? NPC Bandit placing a rifle bullet between my eyes that I just barely survive with a sliver of health left? Impaled with a knife spear to the chest? I don’t bleed. It feels weird to get shot or stabbed a bunch of times and not bleed. I can’t even take a bullet to the gut and die a slow, painful death, nor can I do the same to an NPC. Bullets, knives, and spears causing bleeding would be nice. I’ve never seen them do that.

Special injuries

Liberal Crime Squad had a special injury system where teeth could get knocked out, eyes could get destroyed, neck bones and spines could shatter, and lungs, livers, stomachs, kidneys, spleens, etc could get injured. If Cataclysm had something like this (But toned down in some areas, since in LCS you can blast someone’s entire face away or shoot someone’s tongue off, which sounds ridiculous), injuries would have more of a long term effect other than “Massive amounts of pain and having less hit points”.

Something would probably have to be done for the sake of gameplay, though. This would probably be too difficult to play with if it gets in without any adjustments, like somehow recovering from special injuries (Maybe with the Regeneration mutation, or first aid kits having a random chance to heal special injuries).

Throwing From Ground

I should be able to throw stuff from adjacent tiles. I can already activate and read books from adjacent tiles, so why not throw stuff?

NPCs Using Their Skills

In Fallout 2, your party members had skills of their own and could even do things for you (Picking a lock, for example) if their skills were higher than yours. In Cataclysm DDA, your companion NPCs have skills of their own, but can’t do anything requiring a “skill check” for you. The guy following you with actual skill in hacking computers will gladly stand by and watch you fail at hacking a computer.

NPCs with higher skills should offer to handle certain tasks (Hacking, lockpicking, safecracking, etc) for you.

NPC Tactics: Hit and Run

NPCs aren’t that smart when it comes to zombies and melee combat. They just stand there exchanging blows with the zombies rather than doing what the player would do, which would be to smack the zombie and run.

Locking Doors

[c]lose a door from the inside to lock it. Useful for when an angry NPC is chasing you and you want to hide inside a gunstore or something.

As for special injuries: I like Rimworld’s limb system. If nothing goes wrong, I may try implementing something similar after 0.D

Never heard about Rimworld before, and looked at the injury system for it. Seems quite similar-ish to CDDA and Liberal Crime Squad, but even better than those two. That could work.

Interesting, i assume you mean this: http://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Health
I was worried this would conflict with my plans for wounds, but it doesn’t.

What would this look like, a hidden stat attached to actions that decays with wounds?

I’m thinking something simpler than Rimworld, just in the similar style.

For example, if you get wounded in an arm, your “arm performance” stat is lowered.
This could even depend on a type of wound - bashing damage could disable more than hp damage says it “should”, while acid damage could deal tons of pain but not that much performance drop (so that someone on painkillers would function better if burned with acid than when bashed). That’s optional, though.

Losing head functionality would first impair focus and ranged combat (melee mostly unaffected), then would cause unconsciousness (sleep from which you can’t wake up until the status goes away).
Torso functionality would be stamina regen. If ever totally lost, stamina would start dropping and cause suffocation once zeroed. That is assuming the player doesn’t have some tricks to prevent this - such as a nearby NPC with first aid doing CPR until wounds go away (due to regen/timeout, not CPR) or the NPC becomes maximally tired.
Arm functionality would be damage scaling, accuracy (slightly for melee, heavily for ranged) and attack speed. When using one-handed weapon, only the better functionality would be applied, with 2h ones both penalties would apply.
Leg functionality would be walking speed (heavily), dodging (less so) and would replace arm functionality when doing kick attacks (another idea I’d like to implement, this time much easier).

What I think this system would bring to the game would be:
The choice to use a single-handed weapon over 2h ones, for reliability
Meaningful bionic limbs (much more resistant to functionality loss, but at slot cost and possibly regen problems)
Motivation to have the kick martial arts
Cool gimmicks

I’m not sure if I actually want all of that, though. I don’t want to make the “get armor pierced, die nearly instantly” thing worse - it’s fine in an inherently team game like Rimworld, but here it could be pretty annoying if every gut punch made you rely on allies.
IVAN has a limb system where losing a limb typically means running away (if limb was arm) or teleporting (if limb was leg), except when you can pray for a god to give you a golem limb made of steel. Since we don’t have blob gods to gift player brute limbs and teleport is a rare, limited item that often makes the situation much worse, we shouldn’t go the IVAN route. And Rimworld route is not that far from it.

Thanks for confirming, that’s what I thought it would be like, but my question was more about whether we’d go through the code and add multipliers for limb condition to all the success calculations, or go through and add hooks that let arbitrary wounds say that they’re applying penalties to various actions, or something else. If you haven’t planned that far it’s no problem, just wondering what you had in mind.

Agreed both that it would have those effects and that we want those effects.

I feel like the solution to this is to make those debilitating wounds hard for most monsters to score. A brute or a hulk might break a healthy player’s arm with a single shot, but for a zombie to score a hit like that should require the player to already be seriously weakened from more minor wounds.
That having been said, even accumulation of severe bruising and/or cuts to an arm could be enough to make it beneficial for a player to switch to a one-handed weapon to avoid the penaltes.
My idea for most of these wounds was that the player would want to retreat from combat to apply first aid pretty regularly, at which point the wounds are still there, but the penalties are mostly negated. Waiting for the wounds to heal completely before returning to combat would would take progibitive amounts of time, encouraging players to tough it out at least enough to secure some necessary supplies before retreating to rest.

I’d say at first the former. Later, if someone expressed the will to add new limbs with weird conditions for them, the extra effort would be justified.

To make it more generic, we could avoid checking “arm_performance( need_both )” and instead try to write it as “best_part_performance( bp_type_arms, 2, allow_occupied )” so that we could easily change the system in the future. For example, if dual wielding gets added and we want a spider guy to wield 2 daggers, a rifle, a pistol and a shield and then some of his limbs break.

I feel like the solution to this is to make those debilitating wounds hard for most monsters to score. A brute or a hulk might break a healthy player's arm with a single shot, but for a zombie to score a hit like that should require the player to already be seriously weakened from more minor wounds.

I’d rather try to approach it from a different direction: make the wounds more debilitating as the adrenaline wears off. Make them swell, get weakly infected (nothing deadly, but enough to raise pain and drop performance a bit), add nausea from damaged organs and so on. So that a hard fight leaves you in bed, even if you feel fine by the end of it. As opposed to fights ending “with shield or on shield”.
To promote a bit more risky gameplay, because currently the gameplay is slow and pragmatic - avoiding getting hurt is easy and also mandatory. Risk vs. reward, not “risk and no reward” vs. “reward and no risk”.

These aren’t contradictory, we could do both.

That’s part of what I wanted to change, making avoiding all damage very difficult, but also manageable. Dodge/block/armor would mitigate damage, but rarely eliminate it, on the other hand the resulting wounds would need to generally allow the player to keep going.

i support this idea, rimworld like wound system would be realy nice, i realy liked rimworld health system, it was realy detailed yet still game like and it generated interesing gameplay, it would probaly require to modify most of existing healing items but i think its good direction

Interesting regarding the health injury conversation.

My main concern is “Awake” healing. Only do my broken bones heal when I am asleep…because this makes sense why??? I should get a fraction of healing increase while asleep over the already “awake” healing that should be going on.

Not just an opinion. It really just makes sense. Meanwhile, healing items should be needed only to increase the modifier of the “awake/sleep” heal process. So do away with instant healing items, where exceptions apply such as the stimpack injections/patches and whatever else similar(bionics and magic mods etc.).

PLEASE tell me that will be the future and I shall be happy(because that is your lot in life…to make me happy…sarcasm =P).