Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead now at v0.C Cooper)

[getter77]

v0.4

-Make the battery system bionic only consume as many batteries as necessary to fully power yourself
-Knives can also cauterize wounds now. Requires a lighter.
-Soldering irons (and hotplates, why not) can be used to cauterize wounds, causing pain and removing any bleeding or uninfected bite effects.
-Fixed crash bug in Windows when attacks hit something off-screen?
-Fixed precipitation animation with shifted viewport.
-Can now disassemble items from the examination screen.
-Added colored hinting to the item examination sidebar listing possible actions. e.g., "W" (for "wear") is grayed out if the item isn't wearable.
-Added ability to craft a recipe continuously (until out of materials, etc.).
-Reduce (maybe fully fix) wolf self-attacks.
-Power armor.
-More fitted gear, and a few more pieces made craftable.
-Vehicle-mountable water tanks and kitchen units, implied storage-battery-charging generators.
-Map tiles can now contain up to 64 items.
-Beer has been made weaker, and now appears in kegs in liquor stores and bars.
-Steel jerrycans.
-Any gun can now be used one-handed if you are strong enough.
-Hardcoded frostbite not to occur above freezing temperatures.
-Improved fire's ability to warm the player. Also, standing on fire and being on fire warm up the player.
-Fixed body temperature equalization.
-Sunny and clear weather no longer warm the player underground.
-Standing in water or sewage will increase the rate of heat loss (but not make the player colder)
-The head and torso now lose heat faster than other body parts.
-Body temperature drops as you lose HP.
-Encumberance menu's listing of warmth has been made more colorful.
-Mouth (face) now has appropriate cold and hot diseases.
-The ability to cauterize wounds to heal bites and stop bleeding. (a)ctivate a knife, requires a lighter.
-The ability to craft an item as many times as is possible. Defaults to the + key. (Linux and Mac users will need to assign a key)
-Added M72-LAW. Makes a large explosion and penetrates armour well. One shot only.
-Clothing can be made fitted by (a)pplying a sewing kit.
-Some foods can be heated, hot food grants a larger morale bonus than cold food.
-Ammunition explodes rather than burning.
-Lightstrips, function as weak light providers. Craftable.
-Bandages and First Aid kits no longer show uninjured bodyparts in the menu.
-Some basic professions, more to be added later.

[getter77]

v0.5

Features - Check the changelog for a full list

    -Many new details added to mapgen! New buildings, ruined vehicles on roads, and so on.
    -Much more modding-friendly: MANY bits of data have been moved into data files, rather than being hardcoded in the source.
    -A handful of recipes can be learned from sources other than just leveling your skills.
    -Artifacts should save/load properly now!
    -Assorted UI tweaks and improvements.
    -Weather radio and directional antenna.
    -Rain funnels - first step towards proper rain barrels.
    -Robust Genetics and dodging have both been significantly rebalanced, and should actually be useful.
    -Zombies wear damaged clothing.
    -Tailoring is more important, and string is easier to acquire.
    -New content all around!
    -Numerous bugfixes.

[getter77]

v0.6

Features - Check the changelog for a full list

    -Zombies will revive after a time, if not butchered (or otherwise dealt with).
    -Overkilled monsters now spray gibs around instead of disapearing.
    -Smashing corpses renders them incapable of reviving. (smash action or overkill)
    -Gasoline can be siphoned from vehicles. Requires a rubber hose for now - these are easier to acquire.
    -Most kinds of clothing can be repaired now, using various different materials.
    -Inventory management UI improvements, and a new screen to organize worn items.
    -Reworked the learning system: replaced XP with Focus.
    -Many new buildings.
    -Many new multi-stage missions.
    -Higher-performance (on windows) SDL-based rendering
    -Significantly improved overall performance
    -Vehicle physics significantly improved.
    -Vehicle UI streamlined.
    -Headlights extend much further now.
    -Optionally you can switch to using trigonometric distance instead of rogurelike.  In other words LOS, light, etc are circular instead of square.
    -Sound indicator lets you know how much noise you're making.
    -Turn cost indicator lets you know how long actions take.
    -Mostly remove limits on how many items fit in a tile of ground.
    -Big batch of new archery items, arrows, bows, crossbows, and associated crafting recipes.
    -Numerous bugfixes.

These really are just the highlights, we incorporated literally hundreds of changes since 0.5.

The Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/568375735/cataclysm-dark-days-ahead-dedicated-developer

So how much do you want, and what are we getting for it?

Our initial goal is just $7,000 dollars, which allow Ethan to dedicate three months of effort to the project. Along with the "time", there are a few other feature obligations that are going to come along with this. The bulk of these three months are going to spent developing the following features:

Full Graphics Support - Cataclysm is a roguelike, and roguelike has traditionally meant the ASCII graphics you'll see in many of the examples above. To be honest, we love that stuff, and many Cataclysm fans do. But others don't - they like pictures, and animations, and things that actually look sort-a kind-a maybe like the objects their supposed to be representing. If you're one of those people, have no fear; full graphical support - for sprites, tilesets, conceivably other graphics things I can't think of - is something we're working on as I type, and Ethan is going to dedicate himself not just to fully implementing it, but doing it well. You'll be able to plug in and play with a variety of community provided graphics packs, many of which already exist and are ready to go. You'll always have the option to play with the traditional text-based interface, if you wish, but gorgeous pictures and adorable little animations will provide an equally enthralling experience.

Extreme Vertical - Right now, Cataclysm is a bit... flat. You can explore underground basement levels, but there are no skyscrapers to climb, no deadly mutant buzzards flying far above your head, and no kicking zombies out of third story windows into an alleyway before jumping across to the opposite roof and opening up on on the crowd in the parking lot below with your m249 light machine gun. You can't do any of that right now, and that's a damned shame! If we reach our goal, one of our priorities is going to be fixing that.

The World Factory and Mod Manager - Right now, you do generate a single basic world depending on the mode you've chosen, and that world exists until you destroy it - but we can do a whole lot more than that. With this tool, you'll be able to manage multiple worlds at the same time, and when you generate a world you'll be able to tweak settings, pull in mods created by other players, and share your world with others in a conveniently packaged form. How cool is that, right? Think zombies are dumb? Replace them all with dinosaurs. It's that simple.

And, of course...
More Monsters, More Locations, More Emergent Lore, and some Serious Bugfixing

Is that it?

No! Well, at least we hope not. Obviously, the other developers will still be putting in what time they can, and with you're help, we hope to manage far more than three months! What we really want is a full year, and we've got a lot we're hoping to accomplish in that time. Yes, that's right, we have... STRETCH GOALS!

Batches of stretch goals will be announced in full as soon as we think we'll hit our target, but here's an inkling of some things that will appear on the list:

Physical rewards! - We're hoping to actually print out and ship out some of the digital rewards as physical goods. Stretch goals will unlock first the physical reward tier itself, and then add more and more items to it as number of items we can afford grows larger!

Stealth - A full stealth system, along with an AI, light level, and notifications rewrite. It's gonna be so sweet.
Research - A knowledge gathering and learning/research system, that will allow you to study and experiment on enemies and objects, and keep journals of what you've found, for a variety of in-game benefits and a good deal of lore.

A Dynamic World - Survivor factions that grow and change, the ability for all of the different monstrous groups to fight amongst themselves and try to expand their territory, portal zones that form connections to other worlds and alter the reality around them in ours, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We're hoping to bring in lots of things to really bring the world of Cataclysm to life.

Improved NPCs - The NPCs in Cataclysm right now are a bit lackluster - they are a bit buggy, disabled by default, and have terrible AI. But we're planning to fix that, on way or another, and more dev time means better NPCs. Deeper dialogue, more complex player interactions, the formation of NPC factions and settlements, and the ability to the player to lead bands of NPCs and give them orders are all things we're hoping to accomplish.

Improved Infrastructure - You can already build houses and cars, but it's a fairly limited process for fixed structures. Vertical construction, excavation, and wiring up areas with power are all on the radar. I'm sure you've all been craving the ability to leave your own unique mark on the world, in the form of your own expansive, personal research lab, or, and this is more likely from my experience with the internets, a huge nuclear-powered light up phallic object. Either way, we want you to be able to make that happen.

More details to come!

[Eben]

I hope your Kickstarter comes out nicely, it would be great to see some massive progress in a short time!

Also, please don't make the physical rewards shirts or other clothing, they pretty much kill dev time and cost. Don't forget you'll have to pay taxes on that Kickstarter income!

[youtoo]

game is completely open source and code is on GIT. modders are encouraged. Core coders try to work with modders to role your mods to the main branch.

so if you want to help out and add stuff your welcome to join. Most of the current mods have had most of their stuff roled to the main branch.

There are nightly builds so its in constant development.

so coders are welcome.

[getter77]

v0.7 with 4 days remaining in the successful Kickstarter with the first stretch goal already met!

The Lindqvist release is dominated by substantial support for i18n. Large swaths of the text strings are gettext annotated and ready for translation. Also this release brings unicode support for text messages, though unicode map rendering is still in progress. Other major new features include a plethora of new advanced bionics, an item autopickup feature, and moddable item spawn lists. See the changelog for the other awesome new features and bugfixes.

Features:
---
Use ncursesw and gettext for i18n support and expanded character palette.
Configurable Autopickup feature.
Configurable item spawning lists, now with more configurable spawn frequencies.
Probability Travel Bionic (walk through walls!)
Railgun Bionic (throw metal items at the speed of electricity!)
Flashbang bionic.
Shockwave Generator bionic.
Chain Lightning bionic.
Artificial Night bionic.
Streamlined lumberjacking tasks.
Splints are now craftable and (slowly!) heal broken limbs.
Recover CBMs from butchered player corpses
Small game arrow.
Spoiled (rotten) items will now be removed from the map after twice the time it takes to spoil.
Lit torches set enemies on fire.
Toggled Metabolic Interchange bionic, active power sources.
Changed Optimist to be more thematic and balanced.
Morale effects have more flexible durations.
Extensively reworked fire handling, e.g. campfires should last a more reasonable duration.
Preserve martial art style selection across wielding/unwielding weapons.
Simulate alt+number input for SDL version.
Quicksave command.
Added basic sludge crawler monster
More crafting recipes.
Stash knives in your boots.
Folding bicycle you can stash in a trunk.
New improvised guns.
More survival-ish foods.
Added some more heavy pistols and ammunition.
New Improvised lockpick!
Floatation Vest.
Added wine and a new shirt.
Towels.
Fuzzy time display, and precise time with wristwatch item.

Bugfixes:
---
Multiple gates near one handle work correctly.
Made wild Jabberwocks much more rare.
Fix turrets shuffing around when off map.
Prevent gibbing from low-damage sources.
House generation fixes.
Allow deconstruction of refrigerators.
More consistent road placement.
Make mongroups die propperly, even if the queen dies at a distance
Monsters killed by wide attacks drop corpses/loot
Fix solar panel power production on vehicles.
Cleanup tire changing activity.
Fix stunlock caused by counterattacks.
Keep Jabberwocks from spawning in classic mode.
Fix turret drops.
Extensive text handling fixes.
Menu beautification.
Allow saving while in a vehicle.
Fix div0 on bad option setting.

[Legend]

Has Full Screen made it in yet?

[Kevin Granade]

I'm not sure what you mean by full screen, the default is ncursesw, so fullscreen your terminal program.  Can you be more specific about what you mean?

In other news, the kickstarter is finished, even clearing the first stretch goal, so now, BACK TO WORK!

[getter77]

v0.8

In honor of improved graphics (tile support) and the ability to generate a game with huge cities full of egregious numbers of zombies, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead version 0.8 is titled "Romero".  This release also comes with complete or near-complete Russian and Chinese translations, a player memorial file, save compatibility moving forward, and probably the most frequently requested feature of the game, shopping carts.

Features:
---
Intelligence dependent skill rust option.
Uncanny Dodge CBM
Weight management rework, weight now in grams.
If the player is overloaded, the strain causes pain.
Display option for metric vs imperial vehicle speed.
Beanbag rounds for shotguns and grenade launchers.
Added headlights that can be aimed at installation time.
Active bionics.
Throw single items from stacks instead of whole stack.
Updated many menus to updated menu system that provides acrolling, filtering and more unified hotkeys.
Crafting overhaul, crafting no longer trains combat skills and vice versa.
Reworked rain protection, items now have waterproof flags.
Crafting recipes you can actually perform bubble to the top of the list.
New laser weapons.
Pneumatic weapons.
Narrow sidebar option.
Support unicode character names.
Aim-related gunmods.
Automatically adjust aim path if the default path is blocked by something.
Play Now game start for one-click game initiation.
Rework encumbrance to remove nonsensical negative encumbrance.
Loosen strictness of encumbrance in general.
Heated melee weapons.
Plastic item crafting.
Option overhaul with new tabbed menu.
Swimming now makes you wet.
Wetness can be a good thing when it's hot and you're properly attired.
Wetness effects asjusted by some mutations.
Portable Game system now usable, has playable games snake, sokoban, and robotfindskitten.
Vehicle components, vehicles, mutations and traits are moddable in json.
fruit bushes spawn in groups.
Significant rebalance of fire, emits less smoke, and small fires should burn longer.
Basic farming support.
Welding rig vehicle component.
When in a square with clothes and bedding, sleeping players will use them for warmth.
Corpse-filled pits cause less or no damage.
Adrenaline shot item.
Nerfed Adrenaline rush effect, no more bullettime.
Small vehicles are draggable and pushable. Added shopping carts.
Funnel now directs rain into container in the same square during rain.
Mutation dreams.
Siphon water out of vehicles with water tanks.
Ice labs.
Vehicle collisions based on SCIENCE!
Streamlined selecting same ammo over and over again.
Blacksmithing.
Pickling and other food preservation techniques.
Re-enabled mouth encumbrance.
Caseless ammunition and guns.
New heavy weapons.
More features spawning in houses.
Significantly reduced map save size.
Lots of professions.
Many many items and crafting recipes.
Energy weapon special effects.
Scrollbars in many list menus.
Vehicles can spawn smashed into each other.

Bugfixes:
---
Mouse cursor hiding.
Terminal text display fixes.
Very significant performance improvements.
Removed input delay.
Allow exiting from long-term activities like wait.
All titlebars should use the correct version number.
Remove busywaitin WinGDI build. (caused 100% CPU usage)
No more "nothing" map tiles.
Hand out letters to bionics so more than a few are usable.
Monsters no longer attack themselves.
Fatal hunger/thirst/fatigue detected correctly.
Major monster handling performance improvements to make 50x zombies work.
Nerfed smoke inhalation.
Major performance increase in mapgen to make huge cities generate before the heat death of the universe.
Rain and acid rain doesn't bother you when underwater.
Batched raycasting optimization.
Fixed old inventory letter overlapping bug.
Use shadowcasting algorithm for fast and accurate fov calculation.
Vehicles no longer spawn floating above water.
Loaded ammo, such as nails in a nailgun can be used for crafting.
Light from items more consistent.

[Nikolai]

The website (http://en.cataclysmdda.com/) seems only to have up to version 0.7.1 posted.  Can you tell us when to expect that 0.8 will be available?  (Or am I simply looking in the wrong spot?)

Thanks for your time.

[getter77]

The link for "current" there above it may well do the trick, otherwise there tends to be a bit of a gap on frontpage updating still it would seem.  Otherwise:

http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=3254.0   should definitely have it all laid bare.

[Kevin Granade]

Hmm, experimental builds still say 0.7.1 eh? I'll have to look into the reason for that.  The different -current binaries are in fact 0.8.

[getter77]

v0.9 Ma

The Ma release is characterized by polish and preparedness. We've put more effort into stabilizing Cataclysm than in any previous release, and taken the time to support saves from 0.8. There's loads of new content - items ranging from survivor suits to RPG-7s, new mutations and new vehicles, loads of recipes including the ability to smith your own tools from scratch, and a few new enemies to round it out.

Highlights:
---
World Factory: Multiple worlds managed at once.
New mutation categories.
TsuTiles.
Basic mouse support in SDL builds.
Vehicle construction system rework.
Backward compatibility with 0.8 saves.
Unbelievable amount of new content.

Features:
---
New mutation categories.
Blob drops are semi-useful.
World Factory: Multiple worlds managed at once.
Single keypress pulping.
Better Basements.
Dynamically swap between text and tiles, and among tilesets.
Funnels catch water when the player is far away.
TsuTiles.
Curvy roads.
Zombears.
V menu now lists monsters too.
Emergency vehicles.
Shia's back.
Doors tougher, but zombies can pile on when trying to bash through them.
Spawning monsters in packs.
Shopping carts are driveable.
Basic mouse support in SDL builds.
Food dehydrator.
Some clothes have hoods that are used automatically if there's no hat in the way.
Only prompt to confirm butchering if there are hostiles nearby.
Books have chapters.
Better furniture dragging interface with 'G'rab.
More cart types, hot dog, welding, luggage; swivel chairs.
Track more stuff for memorial file.
Basic tool quality support for more streamlined crafting recipes.
Fungaloid rework.
Vehicle workbench like components act like tools.
Huge pile o books.
Furniture and terrain definitions moved to json.
Survivor armor.
Large numbers of wild animals.
Power system for vehicles and battery components.
Reinforced vehicle components.
Vehicle construction system rework.
Multi-square vehicle doors.
Make vehicles more resilient to damage and better able to smash through obstacles.
Vehicle spawns have personality added in various ways.
Removed action interruption from drug cravings.
Ludicrous numbers of new foods.
Vehicle horns.
Backward compatibility with 0.8 saves.
Stylish trait.
Pickup partial stacks.
Flaming weapons.
Too many new professions to list.
Diseases can now be bodypart specific (bleeding, bites).
Reworked martial arts framework. Arts are no longer pseudo-items, and can be mostly defined in json.
RPG-7.
Reworked and streamlined bionics failure chance and install UI.
Streamlined continuous reading.

Bugfixes:
---
Monsters that don't take damage no longer leave blood trails.
Broken gas tanks act broken.
Highlighting lines in tiles mode.
Show all sounds made by player.
Disassemble items with charges properly.
Suppress smoke warning when you have a gas mask.
Stims work again.
Menu cleanups all over.
Better in-city detection for roads.
Funnel filling.
Step on visible trap warning.
Vomiting lethality nerfed.
Better ignore monster for now feature.
Massive audit of item values by Rivet.
Prevent input overbuffering when it's raining.
Eating related bugs.
Hallucination fixes.
Vehicle mounted turrets.
Crafting consuming containers with contents.
Prevents many actions from passing through walls.
Weird handling of cancelled item use.
Gunmods with firing modes.
Stabilized monster coordinates.
Many fixes in defense mode.
Charge rifle charging.

[Kevin Granade]

We ran into a compiler bug affecting windows builds, it's sorted out now.

[getter77]

That's quick work there---nicely done.