This is ridiculous!

Ok this is going to be a long one so buckle in. I’ve been playing the game for about two weeks straight now and Ive noticed something. In the developers quest for ultra realism and balance they overlooked one minor detail. LIFE IS NOT BALANCED.

What do I mean by this? Well, take food for example. Have you ever tried eating a loaf of bread in one go? Hard isnt it? The bread expands in your stomach and gives you the feeling of being full.Yet in cataclysm you have to eat about 40 million loaves or portions just to get rid of hungry status. Most fruits are at least 70% water. Nothing you can do about that yet why is it in this game I have to eat 700 of them to quench my thirst? The problem with doing things things way is, I get the feeling the crafting system was done via personal choice rather than actual fact.

Base Building

Why is it that I have to start vehicle construction to have a working electric system in a house I am in? Thats stupid. Did the wires in the houses suddenly vanish during the disaster? Why can I not just attatch a generator and assume that because its near a wall that its hooked up to the mains? If anything, houses should themselves be treated as vehicles (i.e working gas, water and electric pipes)

The constrcution menu is deeply flawed and needs some serious attention. If I want to build a bunker/fort in a house or garage that should be an option. I shouldnt have to attatch a military tank to my front door just to be able to turn the damn lights on!

I am not saying everything should be handed to me what I am saying is it shouldnt be this complex. Look at the way they have done things in Rimworld. Yes I know its a different engine but the idea is a solid one. When you want electricity you just run a damn cable through the wall.and attatch it to a solar panel or generator. simple.

NPC Interaction

For the love of Christ this drives me up the wall! Why, when I want to move something from one place to another, I can use the advanced inventory system to do it, yet when i want to give another player something, I have to use the uitterly broken, and stupid store thingy? Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Also I should have the option of telling them which item I want them to use. yes I know you want to treat the NPC’s as individuals but simply put the AI in most games cannot be trusted.

Guns

Now we come to the bane of my life. Yes, I understand guns are quite loud but silencers cut that noise down by quite a lot. Also guns are not that loud. if a gun is fired three miles away from where I am sitting there is now way i am going to hear it. Sounds like that just dont travel that far. Possibly if a building was blown up but even then I highly doubt it. Sound should be louder the closer you are yet as the tiles get further away from the epicentre it should fade. Again if you are going for realism, this is how it works.

Hunger and Thirst

This is possibly one of the more irritating factors of the game yet also one of the more enjoyable. No human being needs to drink 17 times a day. If they do, they needs to consult a doctor because they probably have kidney failure. They say you should drink up to 8 pints of water a day but we all know this is horeshit. Nobody drinks water that many times a day. So why do I have to do it here?

Anyways…

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From what I can tell it should take 2 “charges” of bread to alleviate “hungry” status, 4 for “very hungry”. That’s pretty good for an item of that size and weight. It would take about 2 units of bread to feed the player for a day, but there’s no telling whether a unit is a full loaf or not. Considering its volume, weight and the amount of flour needed to make one, it’s probably more like a third or half of a standard loaf, so consuming a full loaf of bread per day isn’t unreasonable to keep you full, considering that’s all you’re eating.

As for fruit, they may have high water content but the water within is saturated with fats and sugars, so probably isn’t ‘used’ in the same way that normal water is. Also, assuming 70-80% water content, that’s only about .2 of a litre for a unit of blueberries, which is about one tenth of the recommended daily fluid intake. Whether the recommended fluid intake already accounts for the amount of fluid taken in through food or not I don’t know, so it would probably be best to get the opinion of a professional for that one.

A significant amount of thought and effort has gone into the crafting system from what I can tell, but it’s fairly difficult to realistically calculate the actual amount of copper wire used to craft something that doesn’t exist in real life, or the amount of duct tape needed to tape a knife to a stick.

An electric system for buildings is basically down to engine/code restraints. There isn’t currently a way to do that and it would take a lot of effort to put it in, so it’s currently low priority since the vehicle system works. Also, a lot of existing infrastructure probably doesn’t work properly anymore due to lack of upkeep and damage from zombies, eldritch horrors, the Goo, etc.

How would you build a building inside another building? I’m not sure how this is an issue. If you mean you want to dig a stairwell down to make an underground bunker that is already fully doable, though you might have to work out a way to destroy the floor first.

The idea is decent, but implementation is probably nigh impossible. Rimworld handles things in a very different manner, and the coding is set up in such a way that the system used is easy to have, while C:DDA is not built in such a way. Consider that vehicles similar to the ones in C:DDA would be nearly impossible in Rimworld.

This is something that is on the to-do list. The devs have a lot to work on and NPCs are fairly low priority considering that they’re such a huge amount of work.

To my knowledge this can already be done. Recruit one and look through the dialogue options, or try activating them and looking at those options.

Supressors cut that noise down by a tiny bit. Using subsonic rounds (which don’t currently exist in the game and are significantly less powerful) reduces it substantially, and even more so when used with a supressor.

For that matter, you cannot reasonably suppress a .50 cal or similarly large calibres. It’s just not feasible. Smaller rounds are comparatively easy to silence, anything of decent size is nearly impossible. For reference, look up the ‘silencer’ once used to bring an artillery piece down to safe levels during testing.

It depends on what kind of gun and what kind of terrain is between you and the gunshot. A large calibre gun fired from the other side of a flat field WOULD be heard for miles. a 22. in dense forest wouldn’t make it far at all.

Also, sound doesn’t travel that far ingame anyway. If memory serves noise is limited to 16 overmap tiles, which would probably be about half a mile at most.

That is exactly how it is handled ingame. Perhaps you’re using the 2-year-old stable version rather than the new experimentals?

For particularly active people that is a reasonable amount of water, and your character spends most of their time on their feet crafting, fighting or walking. You should only have to drink clean water around 6 times per day, about 1.5L which is fairly conservative for an active male.

There actually is a subsonic round in the game. It’s the .22 Conical Ball, and it’s largely useless, as it should be.

@Jimbo_Gee81 Suppressors actually have only a small effect on the total sound of a gunshot. They muffle it somewhat, and make it less likely to damage your hearing, but it can still easily be heard for hundreds of meters unless it’s an extremely low caliber or subsonic round.

With the various construction menu options, much of what you’re wanting would require large sections of the engine to be revamped. You can’t have two different terrain types in a single tile, for example, which is why you can’t build a bunker in a garage. That’s not to say it will never happen, but it’s probably not going to happen soon.

NPCs are definitely a work in progress right now, though there’s a lot of planning being done for improvements to them, most likely after the next stable release. That said, it’s entirely possible to completely control their inventory as long as they’re allied to you, though getting them to equip the proper weapon in combat can sometimes be tricky due to how they prioritize “better” weapons. Something that isn’t immediately obvious: If you look at an NPC with e, and select Sort Armor, you can highlight any worn item and hit U to remove it, placing it in their tradeable inventory (or dropping it on the ground if they have no room.)

An adult male continuously engaged in high physical activity needs about 4 liters of water per day to avoid dehydration. Given that each “dose” of a consumable beverage in CDDA represents 250ml, that’s around 16 drinks of clean water a day, which is significantly less than what you see ingame.

I wasn’t aware that existed. You are however correct about it being useless. While suppressors are great for improving handling and such, they make very little difference to noise without appropriate ammunition.

Having said that, for the purposes of making the game interesting, it might be worth making suppressors more viable, or adding a full conversion system to add internal noise suppression for large guns. Stealth can be important, and that’s basically not a thing for guns right now.

cough 16 drinks cough And like I said, 2 liters is pretty conservative. There just isn’t a system ingame yet to reflect needed food/water based on what you’re doing.

Well, don’t I feel like a colossal derp. I even worked it out in my head to 16 drinks earlier, so no idea how I managed to not only type out 8, but draw conclusions based on it. Clearly I need sleep.

Hey man, no biggie. Math is hard, particularly with a lack of sleep. Took me a few tries too.

It would be cool to have a functional power grid in existing houses, powered by solar or diesel generators. But taking into account that it’s not implemented, I suspect that it’s a rather hard thing to do.
@Jimbo_Gee81 most of the balance in this game comes from simulating something to a viable degree rather than just using a simplistic system with numbers that just work. This is the reason why I play Cataclysm DDA more than Rimworld. Rimworld is a good game but by placing accessibility and being visually pleasing it never reached a complexity of Dwarf Fortress from which it was inspired. I choose “weird” base building in Cataclysm with 50 other features that expand gameplay over ability to put wires into walls in Rimworld.
Don’t want to belittle your complains but I guess you have no idea how this game started and how far it developed in last years.

I can wake up in the morning and go spear fishing in scuba suit with my custom made gun boat :smiley:
Or cruise neighborhood town in electric scooter shooting uzi left and right. Or do a complete wilderness scenario and sacrifice some woodland creatures to please RNG gods for finding a plastic bottle in a bush.
How about some cyborg scenario with over a 100 different CBMs that actually do something interesting instead of +5 to Charisma and +2 to Strength? Or mutated into something that barely any artist would be able to put on paper just from description of deformities you have.

“Silencers” - there is no such thing in real-life, devices you are talking about are called suppressors and without subsonic ammunition they can only mask flash of a gun fire. Supersonic bullets will still create quite some noise and only few guns have truly silent operation mechanisms. The point of suppressor is not to turn you into a ninja like it’s done in the movies but to make it harder to identify your position by a gun fire.
The world of Cataclysm have to be a pretty silent one - no cars and airplanes, no random street noise. Even not very loud sound but one that brakes monotone could be heard much easier than a shotgun shot in the middle of modern Manhattan.

First off, Guns ARE that loud. Why do you think the bill to de-regulate suppressors is called the “Hearing Protection Act”? An AR-15 going off is far more than enough to give you permanent hearing damage without protection, but the game is merciful in this regard and doesn’t simulate being permanently crippled.

Second, a “silenced” gunshot is still pretty freaking loud.

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Honest to Christ! you’d think I was asking for a rocket to the moon! “it cant be done” YES IT FUCKING CAN. Boards on vehicles are impassable right? yet when you examine them the game recognises that you have various items in that space. Why are walls not the same. still impassable yet smashable. its not fucking difficult.

Secondly no guns are not that loud. If I fire a gun where I am sitting YOU WILL NOT hear it three miles away. Go back to school kids you missed a science lesson. With traffic noise and other mabient noises the gunshot simply will not reach your ears. The only thing that would is a nuclear explosion. What the game is telling me is if i fire a gun it generates 400+ square tiles of noise. Thats far enough away that you would hear the noise two small towns away? Would you like to have another go at making a fool out of yourself? Its a bang not an explosion.

The code is open, you can study it, add this feature and make a pull request or add it as a mod.

When I served in army we used ak-74 and I still remember how my ears ringed after making just couple of shots without ear plugs. Nowadays, I have a shooting range about kilometer away from the office and I can hear gun shots all the way when I’m outside of the building, despite having not too busy or large highway just 100 meters away, the highway is still to loud to keep windows open. If someone is using a pistol I most likely wouldn’t hear it, but guys here are either using modern military rifles (that they got after their army service) or older battle rifles like SIG SG 550.
Firearms can easily reach 120db and higher, shooting a full caliber rifle or a shotgun in closed space can permanently damage your hearing. Shooting a pistol in closed space without plugs will make your ears ring for a while. So please demonstrate your knowledge of physics and I will go with this:

Take into account that decibels are non-linear.
100 dB
image
120 dB
image
the game limits sound propagation to 400 tiles (?) while each tile is like 1-2 meters (I guess again).

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Jimbo_Gee81, you need to calm down a little. You’re playing an open-source game that generates absolutely zero income for anyone that’s in a deeply incomplete state. Base building and NPCs are underdeveloped, yes. If you want them improved, learn C++.

Re: sound. Cataclysm calculates sound at a distance accurately, but does not account for obstacles. This means that the system works well for short distances, where clear lines of sight with at most one semi-permeable obstacle in the way are the rule, but poorly over very long distances, where hills and buildings and ground cover should ablate and distort the sound. Further, the only thing that makes sounds audible outside of the reality bubble is the player, which creates a further barrier to realism. I assume gunshots attracting distant hordes is the source of your frustration, because it’s literally impossible for you to hear anything farther than (I think) 100 squares away.

Just to mention, this game is NOT based in today’s world. It’s in the future, I don’t think it is a specified amount in the future, but there is working mutagen, crazy bionics, and AI police bots. Either we were visited by aliens recently or chances are this is quite a ways away.
That said, realistically, in Cataclysm DDA it would make some sense for there to be a legit ‘silencer’ by then, and maybe (at least for military grade ones) guns have somehow been changed so they aren’t so loud naturally. Possibly with less kick too.
Now, I agree with many things you have all said, you are correct with gun noises, silencers and many other things. But you are basing this all on how things work in today’s time, not however many years it is that the Cataclysm is. Things can change people, they can change a lot. Have you see how fast technological development is now-a-days?

Don’t forget, some ordinary .45 ACP rounds are subsonic and cheap IRL

@redxlaser15

Just to mention, this game is NOT based in today’s world. It’s in the future, I don’t think it is a specified amount in the future, but there is working mutagen, crazy bionics, and AI police bots. Either we were visited by aliens recently or chances are this is quite a ways away.

Kevin said that the game is based in the present day, with sci-fi stuff found in labs. From what I heard, Whales Cataclysm was based in the future, and some people have been merging things based on that. I personally like the future start, since it allows developers to create items to fill in the game balance gaps caused by strict adherence to present technology and society.

If it can be done, do it. You clearly don’t understand how difficult a task this would be.

Vehicle tiles ingame are completely different to wall tiles for various reasons, and they’re handled in very different ways. Doing it that way would cause more problems than it would fix.

As mentioned, there is no traffic noises and very little for ambient sounds.

It is an explosion, how do you think guns work?

It’s feasible that new technology could be developed or employed, but the fact is that firing a bullet produces A LOT of hot gas, which has to be released. That produces a lot of flames, noise and kick. Plus you just sent a chunk of lead out at over the speed of sound, so you always have to deal with the sonic boom. Physically speaking, there’s not a whole lot you can do to make a gun quieter or easier to handle.

Im playing a game that generates zero income? What does that have to do with anything when half the shit in the game is broken? It generates zero income? so people dont get donations? yeah you might wanna re-think that last one because Ill bet my next paycheck they do.

Clearly it doesnt generate sound/physics/anything realisticly because its based on movie references as I have stated about 40 thousand times. buy a loaf of bread and see how many slices you can eat before you stop wanting to eat them. I guarantee you wont make it halfway through the loaf.

Ever seen coolhand luke? the 50 hardboiled egg scene? Impossible in real life. Eggs and bread EXPAND IN YOUR STOMACH that is a solid fact.Yet in this game its an everday action.

I am perfectly calm thank you very much however I do not need a bunch of wikipedia students trying to tell me how sound works. I went to school I understand it perfectly well thanks. But seeing as you want me to break this down for you I am more than happy to do so…

If I drop a penny on a pavement/sidewalk and you are standing next to me you would hear it. it makes a distinct noise. However, were you to be standing three streets away, lets call that distance 500 yards. You wouldnt. unless you had the hearing of a dog. It is exactly the same principle with guns the larger the calibre, the more noise they make thus, the further away that sound can be heard. so firing a normal gun in CDDA should not attract zombies from over 400 tiles away because in reality, they shouldn’t be able to hear it. Should I fire anything larger however(RPG,Minigun,Nuke etc.), it would be a different story.

Clearly the people who deleop this game, while doing a very admirable job are lazy. If you are going to take on a project like this at least make it less annoying to play. If I appear to get angry, its because I am sick of people telling me something cant be done when we all know that translates to “nobody can be bothered”. The game has reached its peak development wise it now needs to be refined into a much better game. The whole electricity thing has me annoyed. Rather than just being able to stick a generator down near a wall and have the game assume im plugged into the mains like the real world, I have to trick the game into thinking im building a fucking car in which I have to put frames down (which I cannot then build anything on top of like a wall/window to stop people entering) couple this with the fact that this whole process makes the tilesets look hideous and messy. And there you have my bone of contention.

Do you know what an “Acceptable Break from Reality” is?

What is a “Normal Gun”? Also, as we’ve explained, guns are super loud. 400 tiles is roughly 400 meters, and most guns will generate a loud enough noise that you can hear the explosion over that distance, especially if it’s totally quiet over that distance.

In order: Yes, the game generates zero income. I think it’s a problem too, but for different reasons. That also means this game is effectively a side project for everyone involved, they can’t devote 100% of their time to this. Third, only you think these things are “broken”. Fourth, no, to my knowledge, there is no Patreon or similar page for this game.

Finally, I’ll take you up on that bet. I’ll take the money in cash, please.

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The devs make little to nothing. You can set a bounty on Github to give them some money if something is completed, but that’s never been done to my knowledge. They do everything in their spare time as volunteers, so if something is ‘broken’ someone needs to go do it in their own time for free. And that’s assuming it is broken, which nothing you’ve said is.

I’d be happy to take your paycheck via Paypal, assuming Psy is willing to share.

It’s not based on movie references and the bread in game isn’t a full loaf, as I mentioned. And it only takes 2-4 slices to fill you in the game. Can’t you read?

I’ve never heard of eggs expanding in your stomach, nor could I find anything to support that. It’s not represented in game because it’s not important. You’d be perfectly fine to eat 2 or 3 slices of bread without consequence.

Clearly not, or we wouldn’t be arguing about being able to hear something louder than a jet engine from a few streets away.

“Normal gun” is entirely relative. Small calibre guns like a .22 or .38 aren’t very loud and wouldn’t be heard very far away. They can also be easily suppressed. Large calibres like .308 or .50 are VERY loud and can be heard from a VERY long way away, assuming a reasonably clear landscape like the perfectly flat plains and extremely wide roads in Cataclysm. Those are both represented in game and modelled realistically. I don’t know how you’re determining that a zombie can hear a gunshot from 400 tiles away, but you’re clearly doing it wrong. Even hordes should only be able to hear about 200-250 tiles if memory serves.

If they’re so lazy then go learn to code and develop the game. Show them how it’s done. Otherwise quit bitching and being wrong or piss off. You’re just making yourself look foolish.

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Just FYI, if your feedback can be fairly described as a rant, it has a lot lower chance to be acted on, or even read.
DO:
Be specific about what happened, and what you expected to happen.
DON’T:
Use hyperbole, if your post includes the words “millions” or “miles”, you’re obviously exaggerating.
Use insulting language. If someone says you did something “stupid”, the natural tendency is to stop listening/reading, which is certainly what I did here.

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Wow! That’s what I would call ‘bitching’. Almost make me wanna slap you.

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-Honestly, I read this thread because it’s funny in a way. Jimbo is wining and crying and complaining like an idiot and insisting he is correct when multiple others prove him wrong. #Hilariousdolt
-I never realized this was in present day time! Man, I wish I could have been one of the people that saw the aliens! What were they they like? Where did they come from? Etc. etc.
-Whether it’s in modern time day or not it still could make sense for in a sci-fi scene that gunshot explosions could be silenced. At least for some of the ‘quieter’ guns. I never use guns myself simply because I like the idea of being as close to being a ninja-crossbower as I can!