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[duckman]

"community manager" isn't really a thing, I'm just the only developer still willing to engage with this particular group of players despite stuff like ... Well, like this.

I'm not sure how to interpret stuff like "It doesn't really change that Erk's code diving skills seem a bit sparse for a dev" as anything other than a personal dig? You called me out and then over several posts elaborated on what you perceive as an inadequacy, and then clarified that it is apparently over something from over a year ago that you didn't actually remember. What's your game here? Is this something you consider a normal, neutral interaction with someone?

No that was, 'complaining about the community manager not fulfilling their role', which was very much not neutral. But if you're saying that you have actually never been the community manager for CDDA here, then there's not really anything else to say besides, "Sorry for the trouble."

[Egan_BW]

A community manager would be someone who's being paid by a company to have the role of "community manager" foremost. It's not a concept which really applies to an open source project which anybody can freely contribute to, especially if the person you're talking about is also a contributor. I guess you could have someone who decides to, in their free time, work as a go-between between the developers and the players, but that job is right at the crossroads of hard and thankless and I doubt anyone would want to do it for free.

[scriver]

I agree. It's not right to call erk a "community manager" simply because he runs a thread on a forum (even if that forum is spiritually and historically deeply tied to Cataclysm). He's not. He's just a guy who happens to be on the cataclysm inside who engages with us here on the forums. Don't heap that kind of burden on people, they don't deserve being settled with that kind of weight.

[Egan_BW]

And, you know, being mean to the one person on the "team" who talks to us is a pretty bad idea.

[IonMatrix]

I mean, after all this talk, DOES proficiencys have benefits mechanically? Like you get a boost or something? Or is it all pre-requests and penalties?

Also I agree with Egan here.

[Erk]

Well, in the case of lockpicking and trap detection, I think it is somewhat easier to pick locks and detect traps with the proficiencies than it was before them, although that's tough to put a finger on because I completely rewrote the dice rolling mechanics with them so they work differently now.

With everything else it kinda depends on how you look at it. Many things that were slated to be moved to mods before were kept because I designed the proficiency system to protect them. Knapping and things like that are hard to do unless you know how; rather than make a neolithic tools mod and stripping them from base game, we added a system for knowing how.

After that, we adjusted recipes as we have wanted for years, to represent roughly the fastest you can make things. Then we added nonproficient modifiers to represent the fastest you're likely to make things if you have no idea what you're doing. You could see the proficiency as a penalty, but really if there were no proficiency, then the base time to craft these things would be way longer.

If we didn't have silly stuff like sewing a backpack from rags in ten minutes to start with, in a game about post apocalyptic scavenging, this wouldn't be much of an issue.

A better way to see the benefit though is to consider what we're trying to fix. With proficiency we can fine tune crafting time based on what you know, and we can allow all kinds of complex things that were unreasonably difficult to be craftable with the right stuff. However we are also solving the issue of being able to max out skills in two weeks, in a few ways. There are more things to learn, most of which are much faster to gain than a skill level would be, and learning them provides (often) a bigger and more tangible benefit as well, but to a smaller range of recipes.

Before stable I am hoping to implement at least a small portion of my "books helping proficiencies" proposal where you can get partial boosts to proficiencies from books, mitigating most of the remaining nuisance portion. It might be beyond my coding powers, we'll see. I'm also hoping to use the same code to make it so that as you progress in a proficiency your penalties are reduced, so 90% proficient would reduce your time and fail rates, but that has a lot of bug potential so it's probably going to wait until after stable.

Tl;dr: Mostly proficiencies don't buff things, but that's because previously crafting and skill gain were severely broken. However I am aware that we should have ways of learning proficiencies besides bumbling around trying to figure it out, and we (maybe even I) plan to fix that and improve some other bits.

[Jimmy]

On behalf of a probably more silent majority of the DF community, thanks for sharing the game you contribute to with us Erk. I definitely wouldn't have found it if you didn't make this thread.

I'd say I enjoyed playing around in that sandbox, despite the flaws, since it's a fun little experience to go craft stuff, run over zombies, and find lots of loot. It's got some flaws, and even more questionable design decisions, but overall it was better than a lot of other shovelware out there, and I definitely can't complain about the price of admission.

I suppose people getting into heated discussion over the game shows it's good enough to generate strong emotional investment in its future. Hopefully that passion continues to drive contributions towards making the game a better experience for players. I can't say I enjoy change for the sake of change, but if adding extra challenge to the game creates more interesting choices for the player, I'd consider that improvement.

[Stench Guzman]

Keep adding proficiencies until it ends up like FATAL

[Erk]

I don't think proficiencies were the problem with FATAL, bro.

If it helps lend perspective, I'm currently looking at athletics skill tying into some labour proficiencies like digging to decrease calorie costs and increase speed relative to the current baseline. Now that the most egregious problems are getting fixed, we'll probably see a few things like that, in areas where there's room for stuff to be easier or faster. I have a feeling the most irritated people won't care about or notice that though...

@Jimmy: no worries man, I know there are plenty of reasonable people here. We have actually had a pretty good thread going for quite a while now, really.

[Damiac]

As to the personal attacks, it had been nice that this thread for the last dozen or so pages had been talking about the game and what's going on in it rather than your personal dislike for the devs...

I generally try to avoid responding to random_dragon...

Yeah you definitely avoid personal attacks, as long as nobody remotely questions your pronouncements.

You are here talking about how your unfinished proficiency system that isn't implemented in any way properly, except that it interferes with a lot of things, is good enough for stable.  Do you expect people to celebrate you've essentially said "Next stable will contain broken half implemented features, which is great because they're my idea".

You're here presenting the dev's vision of CDDA and telling people they're wrong to oppose it. Sorry dude, you just made yourself the spokesman for it. It's not a personal attack to disagree with you.

I don't care about your personal coding skills, I'm sure you can code CDDA content better than I can.

However your contempt for random_dragon is completely misplaced, and makes your call for civility ring hollow.

Are you SURE you're not kevin's alt?

[SOLDIER First]

damn lotta salty bitches in the thread

[Erk]

isn't implemented in any way properly

What do you feel is implemented poorly? For the most part I've had very positive feedback since I cleared up some of the stacking issues, with the exception of a small amount of basically useless feedback like yours that "it sucks and isn't good fix it". If you give me something actionable, there's a chance I can improve it if I haven't already got plans to.

damn lotta salty bitches in the thread

Seems to come with the turf.

[Iceblaster]

I mean, he's not wrong. Proficiencies as they exist essentially act to make things take longer without any real mechanical benefit. Making an item with a proficiency is only just about faster than not, there's no mechanical reason to get proficiencies over making do without.

EDIT: I view it this way, looking at Rimworld's Vanilla Expanded mod set. Everything the core mods add, they have a purpose. If they add a system, they have at least one or two things said system has for benefits over something else, + they usually are able to tie it into their other mods in order to make an overall better product.

I think Cataclysm GENERALLY does a decent enough job -in the broad sense-, however in the micro sense Cataclysm's development is all over the place, with a lot of new features like Proficiencies being taken up by those motivated to work on it, such as yourself, with it then being stopped when the skill ceiling is reached, thus meaning that in order for that system to have proper mechanical benefits and reasons to bother with the system, someone else has to be motivated enough to both:

A: Move in and work with someone else's code.
and
B: Be motivated enough to plan and implement on top of someone else's code things that the original coder may not have even considered.

Thus, leading to a problem  with the development cycle that cannot really be fixed without a total overhaul of the project structure, which is something the head does not necessarily wish to do.

EDIT2: Ideally my preferred implementation of Proficiencies would ofc make things take long, as crafting times are a bit wack(though in other places they are even more wack than reality), HOWEVER, I would also additionally want there to be a reason to want to get said proficiency. Perhaps having a proficiency in firearms means that one can modify their weapon with less skills than what's stated on the mod itself? Perhaps a proficiency in tailoring -or whatever granular thing is being used- lets you modify clothing and repair it for less material, showing that your character is proficient in tailoring and the ability to stretch fabric without losing quality. And obviously add in taking a proficiency at chargen.

Stuff like this would obviously take time, however it would make me feel less anxious about seeing the fact that the system is ready for stable and that you're ceasing work. Because as it stands, the system does indeed simply exist to make things take longer in an attempt to balance crafting times.

[Egan_BW]

I guess I don't really see why proficiencies need to be a seperate mechanic from skills, when they both represent the same thing. Why not just have skills for all the things you're adding proficiencies for? We already have seperate skills for things like rifles, submachine guns, and shotguns.

It seems a little bit like needless mechanic bloat when we already have a mechanic to do that.

[Erk]

I mean, he's not wrong. Proficiencies as they exist essentially act to make things take longer without any real mechanical benefit. Making an item with a proficiency is only just about faster than not, there's no mechanical reason to get proficiencies over making do without.

You use more materials in general if you don't know what you're doing. They're also a new feature so we're still playing with other things, like making you burn fewer calories if you're more experienced and efficient.

EDIT: I view it this way, looking at Rimworld's Vanilla Expanded mod set. Everything the core mods add, they have a purpose. If they add a system, they have at least one or two things said system has for benefits over something else, + they usually are able to tie it into their other mods in order to make an overall better product.

In general proficiencies add a ton of value, unless you expect crafting to behave as it did when it was broken. Crafting something without appropriate proficiencies varies from slightly slower and more likely to fail, through to impossible. The "no value" argument only applies when compared to a system where you could assemble a pair of pants out of a pile of rags in five minutes, sewing by hand. The present crafting speed remains incredibly optimistic even if nonproficient, and phenomenally fast if proficient (and I'd love to hear about cases where this isn't true, so I can fix them). The benefit of learning the proficiency is that you use fewer resources and complete the job faster.

Thus, leading to a problem  with the development cycle that cannot really be fixed without a total overhaul of the project structure, which is something the head does not necessarily wish to do.

not just the lead. I don't think you could find a single core contributor that would agree with a more rigid dev cycle.

HOWEVER, I would also additionally want there to be a reason to want to get said proficiency. Perhaps having a proficiency in firearms means that one can modify their weapon with less skills than what's stated on the mod itself? Perhaps a proficiency in tailoring -or whatever granular thing is being used- lets you modify clothing and repair it for less material, showing that your character is proficient in tailoring and the ability to stretch fabric without losing quality. And obviously add in taking a proficiency at chargen.

Some variant on most of that stuff is either in already or planned, but the crafting changes are big paradigm shifts requiring a lot of work in JSON and c++ alike. Full integration of a new feature into every aspect of the game takes a long time and just physically can't be done in one go.

Adding proficiencies to chargen is a little bit loaded but some variant of it will exist fairly soon. I'd love it to fit into stable, but if it doesn't, we're all pretty much in agreement that we need at least something to help out with the initial startup.

Stuff like this would obviously take time, however it would make me feel less anxious about seeing the fact that the system is ready for stable and that you're ceasing work. Because as it stands, the system does indeed simply exist to make things take longer in an attempt to balance crafting times.

Bear in mind that what I initially said was:
"My main contribution, proficiencies, are arbitrarily at a point now where they could pretty much just be done as is, although I'm still trying to button up a bunch of the nice secondary stuff", and then clarified that that was a bit misspoken and I had meant "the part I can do right now" is almost done. It was meant to be a comment on the progress towards stable, not to whether or not proficiencies are going to continue to be worked on. I have several proficiency related issues outstanding and have been adding more, not ticking them off.

And yeah. It does slow things down. It used to take ten minutes to craft a backpack, and two weeks to become a master tailor. Slowing things down is the express purpose, for sure, and I have been aware since the start that this would be a no-deal for some people. We wanted proficiencies before just flat slowing things down so that there was still progression and steps to gain to make it less severe. I think they do that very well, but I also added several hundred over a couple weeks so I'm sure there are recipes I could do better on.