Bay 12 Games Forum

I've downloaded Puppy Linux, and have almost finished downloading virtual box. I have used Ubuntu and Fedora before so I know my way around Linux some, but I have never used git before. I'm reading through the git manual right now but I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around git-clone etc.

If it's not too much Whales (or anyone else, for that matter), could you please write up a quick tutorial on getting git and copying your git repository and pulling from the git? Many many thanks!

1)  Install git (this depends on your distro)
2)  cd to the directory where you want Cataclysm to be installed (e.g. '~/code')
3)  Run "git clone git://github.com/Whales/Cataclysm.git".  This will probably take a little while.
4)  You're done!  Type "make" to compile as usual.  To pull the latest updates, type "git pull".

EDIT: Depending on your version of git, the commands might be "git clone" and "git pull" with spaces, or "git-clone" and "git-pull".  It's the two-word versions for me, try with the dashes if that doesn't work for you.

There are so many bodies around tutorial room, it makes me a bit nervous Someone started a fire in the basement lol
Can items get damaged? I just found a scratched bike helmet.

Those are probably just people who 'Q'uit the tutorial.  I really need to make it so the tutorial room is reset for each player!
And yes, items get damaged.  Armor sustains damage when monsters hit you, acid damages some items, wood items can be burned, etc. etc.

Some things I'd like to see in the next few updates are more NPCS and shop owners in NPC citys.

Word.  This is a longer-term goal; before I make NPCs a bigger part of the game, I have to make sure their behavior is up to snuff.  Right now they're... a little prone to error spam, crashes, and stupid behavior.

How about you Could get sickness from butchering dead zombies?
Also there could be a raider or gang-like factions that fight with eachother.

Zombies + Gang wars = TEH WINZ

Among my sources of inspiration are Mad Max / The Road Warrior, The Warriors, and Fallout.  Post-apocalyptic gangs are near and dear to my heart!

Question: Did you intend for things to randomly spawn and despawn in basements? If not then we may have a bit of an issue as I went to sleep in an empty basement, woke up to a wolf running around passively and with a message telling me that I 'woke up to lights' despite waking up at 3 in the morning with no lights on in the basement!

Just a heads up for you Whales.

Edit: Also, I recommend toning down the recoil effect, it's a little silly to build up so much bad recoil by firing a small little USP. Or maybe be able to adopt a stance that will significantly reduce recoil but requires you to stand still.

Heh, interesting basement stuff indeed.  The wolf thing is symptomatic of a bigger problem with my monster-generating system, but the light thing I can take of easily.  Thanks for the bug report!

Regarding recoil, what's your strength?  Higher strength makes controlling recoil easier.  Recoil represents how a single shot temporarily throws your aim slightly off alignment; this can be present in even a .22 handgun.  If you ignore recoil, you can fire handguns pretty quickly; recoil limits you to 2 or 3 shots per turn, followed by a pause or movement to reduce it.

This game is cruel. I took illiteracy and I spawned in a house surrounded by libraries filled to the brim with useful reading material.

But those books make such good fire materials!

Acording to alfie the reason the windows version crash is when generating the overmap.

Hmm.  It could be a file input/output issue.  The overmap is just the first thing that tries to open a file (when you generate an overmap it first tries to load an existing one).

I hope it doesn't ever become too much like DF, I love DF but I'd hate to see this game become a multi-NPC micromanagement game, this is kind of hard to explain but I'm okay with base building as long as you just control you, any NPC help would be guided by your communication with them rather than controlling them directly. You would then have the inherent problems any leader would have, dealing with his companions quirks and personalities, having to put the bad apples in line and motivating the lazy people, some may not even listen to you all or consume more rations than you gave the OK for, so on and so fourth.

And ideally this wouldn't be split from the main "adventure mode" at all. Since you would be you and people would be themselves and the directions would be through communication, one would just have to assert leadership in the group and begin from there --- and these construction mechanics for the fort be available to the player as well, so you could do it by yourself on your own on a smaller scale or actually work along side your crew.

Either way it will be an amazing game, but this is just how I feel.

I should clarify; the game will never become a top-down colony management game like DF.  It will always be a one-character game, with no direct control over the actions of anyone else.
By "DF-like" I mean more centered on maintaining one safe location, building defenses, etc.  Ideally this will be left up to the player; growing crops vs. foraging & hunting, building a base vs. living nomadically, etc.  Right now base construction is very limited, and there's no way to sustain resources like food, water, ammo, etc. without foraging, and that inevitably means traveling to new areas.  In the future, I'd like to bring these two playstyles into balance.

Ok, new problem, I'm getting a fatal error; morale data.h no such file or directory

My bad, forgot to add the file to the repo.  Fixed, thanks

Hello Whales,

One suggestion would be adding in attics to houses. They'd only have 1 entrance and would make a good stake out. And the diseases, being around corpses to long could cause disease.

Also can you burn down buildings?

And how do you compile this amazing game, on windows?

One cool thing would also be mines. Areas near towns that were used for coal and are now abandoned or could contain a whole host NPC's or zombies living in there.

And with the walled cities, could there be ways to sabotage the city? Like with disease, as in placing a zombie corpse in their water or food areas.

It would also be cool if you could grow your own crops in the wilderness. Like appletrees and your own blueberry bushes and strawberries. (I am aware blueberry bushes and strawberry bushes are already in the game.)

And on the evil side,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You could add in the ability to be a prostitute at the cities. (I mean hey everybody is desperate in the Apocalypse Aka Fallout 2)

Thanks for viewing this Whales and being the most awesome game dev!

I've considered attics and second floors, however there's a host of technical issues that would need to be addressed.
Windows support is coming!  In... the future.
Mines are a very cool idea.  Underground areas of interest are important!  I'll add them in sooner or later.
City sabotage is a good idea, hopefully one day it'll be a mission factions can assign to you.
Crop growing is a planned addition, once the game moves in a DF-type direction.
Prositution and other unsavory routes are planned.  I hope to make basic subsistance a difficult goal to achieve, forcing the player to do whatever it takes!

Quote from: Whales on June 26, 2011, 06:39:17 pm

Quote from: Vorbicon on June 26, 2011, 06:33:45 pm

Hrmm... weird. Just as a zombie and a triffid were barging in through the library window, I'm now under a barrage of debug messages each turn, relating to the actions of NPC's? Stuff like   Debug: NPC Kim Smith: target = -1, danger = 0

Damn NPCs, launching their debug message attacks!  Hit ~ to turn debug messages off.  Save your game and re-load to delete NPCs (I may add a "nuke NPCs" key in the future )

I've had multiple NPCs spawned with the spawn NPC debug key, and they made an infinite loop that made me have to exit the game. I realize that you probably won't get as many NPCs as I had via spawning (like 6), but an option to exit the debug mode during a message would be nice.

Well, the idea is that NPCs occasionally get themselves trapped in an infinite loop.  When they notice this happening, they'll switch debug mode on so that the player can examine what's causing this infinite loop before exiting the game.  Thus, turning debug mode off in this case wouldn't escape you from the infinite loop.  I'll see if I can figure out a smart time for NPCs to kill themselves in order to escape from an infinite logic loop.

Hrmm... weird. Just as a zombie and a triffid were barging in through the library window, I'm now under a barrage of debug messages each turn, relating to the actions of NPC's? Stuff like   Debug: NPC Kim Smith: target = -1, danger = 0

Damn NPCs, launching their debug message attacks!  Hit ~ to turn debug messages off.  Save your game and re-load to delete NPCs (I may add a "nuke NPCs" key in the future )

Developer--->10 or so friends--->Bay12--->~500 or so people--->ModDB/SomethingAwful--->10,000 or so people

Something like that.

Funnily enough, I've already been posted on SomethingAwful.  The unilateral response was whining about how there's no Windows version and PuTTY is hard.  Clearly the Bay12 community is smarter and more patient (but I knew that already).

So if someone is in the same vicinity as us, are we able to see them or sense them in any way?  And if they are picking up items, do those items just magically disappear?

No, there's no direct player/player interaction (yet).  This can make for some funny overlaps in timelines.  Terrain is loaded when you get close to it, and saved when you leave it.  If you're in a house, and I come in and drop a bunch of stuff, and then you leave, when you leave you'll save the version you see, without my stuff in it, and that stuff will disappear forever.
Fortunately, since the world is huge, this kind of thing rarely if ever happens.

Looks like an encrypted/not plaintext file to me. (Sorta like if you open up a .exe file or something in a Linux text editor.)

No, the overmap save files (o.#.#.#) are in fact plaintext.  That huge string of characters on the first line refers to different terrain types.  Below that, the "Z 3 6 310 2 52" lines mean "A group of monsters, type 3 (3 is zombies), with radius 6 and population 310, centered at (2, 52)".  The 't' lines are locations of towns, 'R' is roads leading out of this section of map, and 'T' are the locations of radio towers.
That said, I can't tell what's wrong with this overmap!  alfie275, if you want to email me a backtrace I'd appreciate it.