.
Sounds pretty cool. But there would HAVE to be a way to either turn yourself into one or start as one.
terminators would be good for mid to late game spawns. they can track you and never stop. make the game harder. they can break down doors at your shelter. for late game ,you can have them show up with other spawns like zombies, etc… or possibly multiple ones.
Yeah, we need Screamers!
I thought terminators were sent back in time to kill people before they become leaders of rebel groups.
I don’t see any reason why skynet couldn’t send a sniper to kill you.
BTW cataclysm is based on goo which turned everyone to zombies , so the skynet is a little bit too late to cause the apocalypse.
Terminators could spawn after you raid an amount of science labs and military bases.
Example:
[glow=yellow,2,300]You see a bright flash in front of you a portal appears, and a robotic humanoid emerges out of the portal. [/glow]
[glow=red,2,300]Terminator “Prepare to be terminated.”[/glow]
A waaaay better scenario would be if you just randomly run around and see an NPC named John Connor , who then recruits you for his rebel group. Soon after that he brings you to a military bunker which he thought was the skynet , but actually is nuke-proof bunker. You are forced to die by terminator to let Connor escape because the plot says Connor must survive no matter what.
That’s just pure gold.
There will be expanded robots and AI stuff. There will not be any time travel or Skynet-y stuff.
There WILL be a variety of potentially malevolent AI, and more machines to serve as their instruments of “bug removal”, and you will undoubtedly be classified as a bug to remove.
There may be implacable metallic humanoid robots that want to hunt you down, there will definitely be no Terminators™.
Definitely no chunks of plot imported from movies, especially not ones whose rightsholders have large and active legal divisions 
Once we have factions, they’ll probably want to recruit you, eather that or eat/rob/assmilate you.
Then just remove Things, Graboids, boomers, hulks, and Smokers (TRADEMARKED, YO, but where’s the hunter?), Triffids (1951 Jon Windham novel), Biollante (Tojo gonna sue you), CHUDs (New World Pictures might have gone under, but Fox owns them now), and the Amigara Horrors(Junji Ito gonna be mad).
But that’s like, a fourth of the game. Why not just throw it in? It’s not the first time that terminators have been suggested. It just seems like it would fit the subject material.
[quote=“TheGrifter, post:11, topic:2557”]Then just remove Things, Graboids, boomers, hulks, and Smokers (TRADEMARKED, YO, but where’s the hunter?), Triffids (1951 Jon Windham novel), Biollante (Tojo gonna sue you), CHUDs (New World Pictures might have gone under, but Fox owns them now), and the Amigara Horrors(Junji Ito gonna be mad).
But that’s like, a fourth of the game. Why not just throw it in? It’s not the first time that terminators have been suggested. It just seems like it would fit the subject material.[/quote]
You almost make it sound like those are all bad ideas? Most of those monsters could stand to be given a fresh coat of paint and the serial numbers filed off (for example the triffids have been altered to the point of really only needed a name change to be distinct already.)
Hell, I think most of the ‘special undead’ should be folded into a framework for dynamic mutants.
Still, implacable warbots and drones wandering the landscape are a damn good idea. May I suggest that at least some of them actually be friendly,or at least neutral until, or unless their scans indicate you’ve deviated from humanity significantly. It could give a certain risk to accumulating mutations for power if something like this
rolls up autonomously with the prerogative ‘Destroy the Alien, Burn the Mutant, Kill the Communist’
Do you understand how this works? A quick search indicates those aren’t trademarked. It’s not like copyright where it gets automatically applied. They have to apply for a trademark, and it has to be granted. All of those names are absurdly generic, so it’d be quite difficult to get a trademark on them.
Not trademarked.
Not trademarked.
Surprisingly, not trademarked.
Not trademarked.
Like I said, a humanoid hunter-killer robot would just be fine, calling it a Terminator and sticking in references to the movies, bleh.
Belteshazzar pretty much covered it, importing random things from games/movies is something I’d like to avoid. The Triffids and Grabboids should be changed not out of any legal concerns, but because they’re not accurate depections of the creatures.
Personally I’d like to have accurate triffids like from the book, and AFAICT there’s nothing preventing that from happening. The current triffid stuff could be renamed to something else. There’s room for more than one kind of plant monster.
For clarity, triffids would be blind, have good hearing, have a ranged sting attack that’s VERY dangerous (probably similar to a wasp sting in-game, but also causes blindness), have a secondary “attack” that makes a rattling noise that attracts other triffids, and pretty much spawn randomly and sparsely everywhere.
I’d like to see the mutant plants spawn near toxic waste dumps and sarcophaguses and maybe rivers which might have sewage or something radioactive dumped in them , because it makes sense for mutated creatures to have their reason of being mutated right next to them.
I suppose when monsters.cpp is converted to a json file, we’ll be able to have most of the creatures we want in, trade marks or not.
By the way, SPAM really oughtta be changed too under that logic.
I say damn the torpedoes. It’s not like they’re gonna break down your door at night for a freeware game. But it’s your barbecue.
I for one would rather have a mishmash of colliding 80s and 90s movie monsters, a bizaare alternate future where Coca Cola still has cocaine in it, and there’s Meth-Cola. Which, by the way, I came up with before the main version did. I think I also wrote the Fried Spam recipe implemented in the game. Or we just happened to decide on the exact same values.
Cataclysm’s never been too accurate to history, or reverent of trademarks, but it’s been fun. A good play through, from Whales to now.
I imagine future where robots are armed with love and obeying humans as their gods and creators , but yes even if they are overly militarized they’d better shock you with tranquilizer darts and drag you to the police station or if they have long range scanners they would notice your rifle and snipe you from distance with tranquilizers because they have far more superior aiming than anything with liquid eyes can ever have.
[quote=“Belteshazzar, post:12, topic:2557”]
rolls up autonomously with the prerogative ‘Destroy the Alien, Burn the Mutant, Kill the Communist’[/quote]
I just have to say that little tank (or rather, IFV?) is ridiculously cute. I want one. Do you know the model? Do they come in moe anthropomorphised loliko versions?
Oh, I’d feed her and pet her, maybe go for a little walk… we’d have ever so much fun~
AIs would blend nicely with the factions. You could have separate AI factions, using labs as bases, with differing goal and targets (some dislike humans, some dislike mutants, some want to hoard electronic components and are willing to trade…). The AI-labs would be heavily guarded and have an “AI core” as endroom, that you could destroy to down the faction.
I don’t think 2030 is the year robots get advanced enough to create factions and operate without humans (kind of having free will) so there might be overly intelligent computer in science labs coughgladoscough , but probably nowhere else.
The nice thing about an out-of-control AI is that you only need one, then they can just replicate 