Messages

1

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead 0.E "Ellison" release is out!

« on: April 01, 2020, 05:21:25 PM »

The Ellison release adds a huge number of features and content that make the world feel more alive. From being able to climb onto building rooftops or hide behind cars, to building a camp for your followers in the wilderness, to exploring the new river and lake systems on a boat or raft, everything is more immersive and consistent. Also more STUFF. I didn’t think we would ever double the number of game entities with a release again, but we did.

We aimed at a 6 month release cycle, and ended up spending 9 months adding features at a breakneck pace and 3 months putting the brakes on and stabilizing. I can’t honestly say that’s a huge disappointment, though toward the end the rest of the development team was really chomping at the bit to get back to feature work, so we’ll need to continue to adjust.

We built a huge amount of infrastructure for having the game check its own consistency, which has and is going to continue to contribute to the amazing pace of feature and content additions we are experiencing. The development team is also larger and at the same time more cohesive than it has ever been before.

Explore all the new features with the release at https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/releases/tag/0.E. Speaking of exploring, the list of available tilesets has shuffled a bit, so this is a great time to find your new favorite.

Long distance automove feature for walking, driving and boating.
Extensive bugfixes to inter-level interactivity, on by default.
Riding animals and animal-pulled vehicles.
More flexible Basecamp construction options.
Default starting date changed to mid-spring for better survivability.
Time advancement is rationalized, a turn is now one second.
Extensive river and lake systems, and boat support for navigating them.
Expanded NPC usefulness and interactivity.
Massive increases in location variety and consistency, especially rooftops.
Expansion of mi-go faction with new enemies and locations.
Batteries now store charge instead of being pseudo-items.
Overhaul and rebalance of martial arts.
Zombie grabbing and biting more manageable and predictable.
Overhauled stamina and damage recovery for grittier gameplay.
Crouching movement mode allows hiding.
Magiclysm and Aftershock mods have first class support within the game.

Finally, see the changelog for the more complete (but still not comprehensive) listing of new features and contents https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/0.E/data/changelog.txt

2

Design / Re: Adaptive Difficulty

« on: November 22, 2014, 09:48:44 AM »

My take on adaptive difficulty is simply letting the player chose their battles.  My game is a sandbox, so I haven't put much thought into how this would interact with a more traditional structured roguelike.
For what it's worth, I get a lot of complaints that the game is too hard, even though combat is nearly always optional, go figure.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead now at v0.B Brin)

« on: November 22, 2014, 09:42:09 AM »

Console version is only ascii, there is no other choice.

4

Design / Re: Damage reduction algorithm - looking for advice

« on: October 10, 2014, 07:42:32 AM »

But the character realizes that the monster will aim for weak points and defends himself accordingly. The monster's probability of landing effective blows against a wary opponent is then best understood as a function of some single average of armor values. The result is an understandable, reasonably realistic model of combat.

Aspirationally you have the same armor value across every location, but aspirationally you have even protection across all attack types, and therefore all attack and defense can be best summed up as a single pair of numbers, right? (reducto ad absurdum)

No, in any interesting system there would be both scarcity and various tradeoffs for different armor types, making the decision of what armor to assign to what body part an interesting tradeoff to make.  Also you can assume a "appropriately wary" player if you like, but if you then allow the player to wear just gauntlets (or just a breastplate, or whatever) and get protection for their entire body, it is not in fact "reasonably realistic".

5

Design / Re: Damage reduction algorithm - looking for advice

« on: October 09, 2014, 01:39:23 AM »

at the cost of a little more complication, you can have the monster evaluate armor and chose to attack body parts based on that evaluation and their abilities, then you get the best of both worlds.

6

Design / Re: Console Grid Size

« on: October 03, 2014, 02:06:18 AM »

If you don't want to dynamically resize*, pick a resolution you want to support, pick a reasonable font size, and see how many rows and columns will fit.

*If you don't, be prepared for players to complain about wasted space and that it won't fit.  Also be aware that you REALLY don't want to write your game fixed size and retrofit resizing into it later, it's really no fun.

7

Design / Re: Retinue - game design pitch

« on: September 27, 2014, 06:53:04 PM »

One question for the mockup, is vision intended to be pervasive, or have you just not implemented LOS yet?

A possible solution for the tedium of having to leapfrog your units one at a time is to have a group movement mode that bunches up some number of units at the cost of being less responsive.  If you encounter an enemy you'll want to switch to moving one unit at a time, but once you clear a room you might want to select all the stragglers and tell them to move to a general area as a single command, which would still be evaluated by the game as a sequence of moves.

Assuming the knight can kill each of the two nearby enemies with a single hit, can he just step forward and take them both out, or are you limited to a single attack per move?  If not, how do you decide which?

8

Programming / Re: Theory about popularity of languages

« on: September 18, 2014, 03:34:10 AM »

Some (or more like most) languages have roots in hacky environments like unix/linux with complex setup rituals only few people are willing to withstand

Hahah, that's a good one, you DO know that c and c++ were developed for and on UNIX, right?  ...right?

Also calling UNIX a 'hacky' environment, as opposed to Windows of all things, wow.

9

Programming / Re: Writer needs Coder

« on: September 14, 2014, 08:47:15 PM »

Seconding mushrom patch's derision in more detail.  Ideas are easy, the design and implementation are 99% or more of the work.  You have a much better chance of powering through studying coding and doing it yourself than having a competent programmer make a game from your ideas.

10

Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Anti-racism and science

« on: August 27, 2014, 02:52:10 PM »

And then it drops right back down again...

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Anti-racism and science

« on: August 27, 2014, 06:00:58 AM »

Now I've seen everything, spam that elevated the level of discourse

12

Design / Re: Positional Combat System

« on: August 25, 2014, 04:22:41 AM »

Interesting, do you have a list of the different attack types?  I'm having a little trouble imagining what the move combinations are based on, if I understand correctly, previous move, current move, and facing.  Especially since I assume the directions are relative rather than absolute, in other words it's important that you're advancing toward a monster, not that you're specifically moving north.

Are any of the attacks en passant? as in, you attack in a direction other than the direction you are moving?

A scenario I could imagine, tell me if this is something like what you're talking about (monster doesn't move for simplicity)
Monster three squares to your north.
Move north twice, since the second move brings you adjacent, you lunge and hit the monster.
Move west anticipating a counterattack, you sidestep, possibly gaining a bonus to dodging, or a speed bonus.
Move north again, since it's a move adjacent to an enemy after a sidestep, you slash in passing, possibly with a speed or dodge bonus.
Moving north in the same direction as the slash gives a significant speed bonus with which you disengage with the monster.

With luck you hit the monster twice without being hit yourself, and you can now set up another pass.

13

Development Process & non-technical / Re: Copyright and Licensing: Nothing to fear but fear itself?

« on: August 15, 2014, 01:25:32 AM »

One thing to note about CC licenses and software, the copyleft 'share-alike' version has a critical flaw with regard to software, they don't require distribution of source code, so it simply does not work, because someone can release binaries without source, effectively defeating the purpose of copyleft.

If you want to use one of the 'noncomercial' variants, that should more or less do what you want, though I'm personally not a fan of that clause, I treat it as simply 'non free' and generally ignore anything with this license (like I do with most commercial works).

CC 'by attribution' is also unaffected by being applied to software, modifiers and redistributors are prohibited from removing attribution present in the work.

CC-ND is dead to me, it might as well be all rights reserved.

Writing your own license merely indicates intent, they will generally not hold up in court.  You may or may not care.

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Development Process & non-technical / Re: Copyright and Licensing: Nothing to fear but fear itself?

« on: August 14, 2014, 06:24:33 AM »

I've never seen my wife play a game less than ten years old on anything but a "thin client." Most people play facebook games, cell phone games, or no games.

You realize you're addressing a group of roguelike fans arguing about a software license right?  What about that makes you think ad populum is going to get you anywhere?  This is a group of people who at best* only check the state of the mainstream to check where NOT to go, and more likely simply ignore it.

*For the sake of your argument.

15

Programming / Re: Refreshing only on Keypress

« on: August 12, 2014, 04:36:23 AM »

1. I was having massive difficulty with the constant looping, despite it being setup to work that way naturally. For example, if I press "right" then my @ would sometimes move 2 or even 3 squares over. This was due to the constant looping. If you didn't release the key before the next loop it would count it as 2 (or 3) keypresses.

Alright. That is easy enough to fix with time delays and things, but I started getting nervous that everything I tried to implement would become a lot more complicated than it needed to be by unnecessarily looping.

Separating concerns simplifies things, it's having your code trying to do everything at once that's complicated.
If you have an input loop that polls for keypresses, you can handle delay, repeat, keybinding, etc all in one small chunk of code, and the rest of your code just operates on unambiguous commands returned by your input handler.
DDA inherited this same problem from the original Cataclysm, I added a wrapper that consumes all repeated keypresses and it cleared right up.
https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/src/input.cpp#L1074