everybody would like THIS to stay and THAT to go away. Luckily, most don’t have a say. I’m quite happy with most aspects of Cata, and that is more than i can say about a lot of games i payed for. Even that crossdressing conundrum, it makes me pause and think, what branch of research does a scientist equipped with 6 bras and a bottle of mutagen 
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Psychological weapons development?
[quote=“Khrysanth, post:39, topic:6138”]On the one hand, no, there really isn’t a functional difference between many of those things. But do you want this game to be only about function? Do you want to have your survivor carrying around “food”, wearing “clothes” and “light armor” while wielding a “club”? I don’t.
I find myself more immersed in this world of ascii characters, more vested in my character, than I do in many other games. One of the reasons are the little details.[/quote]
Part of what brought me here (I’m only a few months old as a player) is the bloat. That’s even how I think about it, with no negative connotation intended. I came here via a link in the Unreal World forums. I love that game for what it is and still play it. I think that game is very similar to this game in a lot of ways, except that it’s very not bloated. In that game I often run around wielding a “spear” (literally, I love playing Seal Tribe) wearing a single set of clothes and building a “log cabin” with just a bed and fireplace. Anyone who has played that game like I have will know there are many detailed areas of the game, and will likely continue to get more detailed, but with only a single main developer, the game will move at a slower pace than Cataclysm.
I think there’s a difference between detail and being able to manage the detail effectively. This game feels a bit like dwarf fortress, where perhaps the culprit isn’t so much the number of items but scaling the UI to keep up with the detail. Example of scaling UI in the right direction: the default crafting menu in 0.9 and that in the current builds with the sub-categories.
Another example of scaling UI that is helping: the colored messages in the logs (experimental branch). I don’t have to constantly read every detail in the log anymore, and I don’t feel like I need to, either. Less strain on my eyes, more time to concentrate on the game.
Anyway, even though I’m a nobody here, I just wanted to say my piece on this sub-topic. What has me love Cataclysm-DDA is all of the content. All of it. I hope it expands over time, and I hope it gets bigger and becomes the Andre the Giant of survival roguelikes. I like to wear my trenchcoat over my bra and panties and flash the eyebots in summertime when I’m bored. Hell, I’m waiting for a dye system so I can dye my clothes and have black boxers and white boxers (yeah right, white in the cataclysm) and tie-dye boxers.
Please don’t go the way of Dungeon Crawl where Mountain Dwarves and Swamp Elves get the axe because they weren’t different enough. On the other hand, I also hope the UI continues to scale so that the management of said details becomes more user friendly, too.
Back to building my secondary base in my Firehouse.
This comment right here demonstrates that you’re not talking about the topic at hand at all, and you’re just grinding your “content bloat” axe. If there WERE a “undergarment” item, and the description varied, it wouldn’t be any easier to address this issue. In reality, it’s far easier to just make new items, so what would the benefit of only having them vary by description be?
What is the difference between the game and reality that makes this simplification acceptable?
Because a camisole is a commonly-worn undergarment and a peignoir is some random piece of lingerie. That having been said, feel free to PR a peignoir.
Because the areas where it makes a difference (dropping things on your foot) isn’t something the game engine models, so in the context of the game engine, there is no difference. You could make a “heavy construction boot” (“steel-shank boot” is too specialized, that would tend to go in the description), but for the time being it’d simply be a heavier boot with higher thickness attribute (therefore higher protection). If we ever added foot-crushing mechanics though, it’d be worth having.
Bla bla bla begging the question, appeal to authority. You haven’t made a case for WHY simply having more items is a bad thing.
[quote=“Rutilant, post:40, topic:6138”]I’d love if I could reduce the clutter in my crafting menu. Like a “Move to Inactive” function for things I know I’m absolutely, positively never going to need.
THAT is the kind of bloat that I’d like to see nixed.[/quote]
That’s valid, and definitely something we can do.
[quote=“borrisb, post:43, topic:6138”]I think there’s a difference between detail and being able to manage the detail effectively. This game feels a bit like dwarf fortress, where perhaps the culprit isn’t so much the number of items but scaling the UI to keep up with the detail. Example of scaling UI in the right direction: the default crafting menu in 0.9 and that in the current builds with the sub-categories.
Please don’t go the way of Dungeon Crawl where Mountain Dwarves and Swamp Elves get the axe because they weren’t different enough. On the other hand, I also hope the UI continues to scale so that the management of said details becomes more user friendly, too.[/quote]
This is what I’ve said all along, having a lot of variety isn’t a problem as long as you manage it, and that’s exactly what we’re working toward.
The zombies aren’t cross dressers, they all ripped out of their clothes when they turned, and what they’re wearing now is what stuck to their body when they started lumbering around
I don’t actually have a horse in this race. I don’t know what epic battles are being fought over your project, but I have no intention of joining them. Also, I apologize for not being clearer; I’m not complaining about content bloat , per se, but rather the uneven content bloat. There’s no organized system of taxonomy. For example, why have a small handful of alcoholic beverages been singled out of a list of literally thousands? I can find triple sec but not cointreau. I can find wild apple but not peach schnapps.
My suggestion is that there be an organized system for introducing new material such that a category is populated in a logical fashion. You’d have “drinks” for example, then alcoholic and non-alcoholic. Then you’d break down alcoholic drinks into beers and spirits. Beers would be broken down into ales, pilseners, and stouts. Then each ale, pilsener, and stout could be broken down into individual styles (“Belgian ale” as it exists now, for example), and then each style into brands if desired. This way, as the level of detail increases, there’s a logical way to populate the particular level of the taxonomic pyramid at the same time, in a way which makes logical sense. This also allows for “placeholder” items for categories which have not yet been fully developed, and a way to see at a glance which taxonomic niches have not yet been populated. When someone wants to add “wild apple,” for instance, this person can see that they need to add a handful of other liqueurs as well at the same time.
Setting up a structure like this helps keep the project organized and removes much of the arbitrariness of random contributions. You could even set up rules to encourage speciation, such as: No new item can be added to an entirely new taxonomic level of detail without at least four other alternatives and variations.
Gateway. We were the original beta-test site for LPmud. I think it still actually exists over at Gatewaymud.org. If you happen to drop by, the projects I have the fondest memories of coding are the Shortbred Guild, the Astral Plane, big chunks of Callis, the rune system for the Vikings, and the Gentlemen’s Club. Tell one of the admin to clone you a Frobozz Instant Party in a Can and the interactive stripper. Those are mine too. 
you’re a maniac, hope you know it 
“let’s bloat them equally” :DDDDD
Organisation makes sense, and would make seeing where there are “gaps” in content would be useful for developers.
Setting up a structure like this helps keep the project organized and removes much of the arbitrariness of random contributions. You could even set up rules to encourage speciation, such as: No new item can be added to an entirely new taxonomic level of detail without at least four other alternatives and variations.
Encouraging the filling in of gaps is one thing, but I don’t feel that requiring it should be a thing - quality can suffer when people feel forced to do what they see as an unimportant task.
Gateway. We were the original beta-test site for LPmud. I think it still actually exists over at Gatewaymud.org. If you happen to drop by, the projects I have the fondest memories of coding are the Shortbred Guild, the Astral Plane, big chunks of Callis, the rune system for the Vikings, and the Gentlemen's Club. Tell one of the admin to clone you a Frobozz Instant Party in a Can and the interactive stripper. Those are mine too. ;)
I dimly recall Gateway though my LP of choice was, and remains, RetroMud.
We do seem to be rather far from the original topic of cross-dressing zombies (who have no gender and thus can’t cross-dress.)
The selection problem is a subjective matter of choosing which particular items you consider representative, nothing you’ve proposed would change this in any way. If you feel like promulgating such a taxonomy, feel free.
It removes absolutely none of the arbitrariness, it just pushes it up a level into the arbitrarily-defined hierarchy.
Until you’ve responded to my previous points, further discussion is meaningless, I’m not here to be talked at.
Right. Been a slice. Have a nice game. I’ll let myself out.