Incline Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - main thread - Fallout1/NEOScavenger older brother.

[thesheeep]

Just adding my voice to go for Bright Nights instead of Dark Days Ahead.

DDA just makes the games needlessly painful to play, simulating every single fucking pocket and volume on every single item. To the point where half the time you spend on moving inventory items around.
And it applies the same "too much simulation" approach to most parts of the game.

Bright Nights is by no means simplistic and still heavily simulationist, but a lot less annoying to play and more focused on things outside of inventory shuffling and fine-grained nutrition management

Also, I strongly recommend using the Catapult launcher for playing, so you won't have to fiddle with manual mod installations, downloads, switching between versions, making data backups (easy to make "save games" with if you don't like going ironman), etc..
Also supports both DDA and Bright Nights and is cross-platform (At least Windows & Linux, maybe OSX later):
https://github.com/qrrk/Catapult

 

[Dadd]

Pockets are fine if you learn the basics. Pockets would be the main reason to play DDA instead of BN, because of their convenience. DDA has other problems, like the Exodii and other poorly made quests.

 

[quaesta]

It is free game made by dudes

Incorrect,

Anyways I enjoy it. Very atmospheric and it's great fun. My favorite part is finding human NPCs and killing them. The second is when you see those tall tree creatures, that aren't hostile to you. I love them because they're horrific creatures (even the description gives them a spooky appearance) but they go around and kill zombies, so they can't be all that bad.

 

[The Jester]

Bah! the game fucking crashes every time I try to choose profession tab :

 

[n0wh3r3]

One of the best games ever.

 

[quaesta]

Bah! the game fucking crashes every time I try to choose profession tab :

IMG_LOADWEBP

Even in my video games, we're still having shitty WEBP problems.
Anyways if you want to try it out, I run 0.G Gaiman and have little trouble on it. Otherwise I'm not sure what's causing the crashes.

 

[The Jester]

Bah! the game fucking crashes every time I try to choose profession tab :

IMG_LOADWEBP

I run 0.G Gaiman

Okay I reinstalled and now everything works perfectly.

 

[quaesta]

Okay I reinstalled and now everything works perfectly.

Have fun. Remember, this game's like real life. And just like real life, intelligence/ranged combat is what made us the kings of this world. And be prepared to die a lot. I wouldn't say it's hard in the sense that it demands careful skill, more that you have to understand the game's language/rhythm in order to do well in it.

 

[The Jester]

Okay I reinstalled and now everything works perfectly.

Have fun. Remember, this game's like real life. And just like real life, intelligence/ranged combat is what made us the kings of this world. And be prepared to die a lot. I wouldn't say it's hard in the sense that it demands careful skill, more that you have to understand the game's language/rhythm in order to do well in it.

"King" Lmao I made an alcoholic cannibal hobo that stinks like shit.

 

[Dadd]

just go minimum int maximum strength

 

[quaesta]

just go minimum int maximum strength

You're turning my brother into a build. Add in black belt, skating and practical jokes and you made him.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Pockets are fine if you learn the basics. Pockets would be the main reason to play DDA instead of BN, because of their convenience. DDA has other problems, like the Exodii and other poorly made quests.

I like pockets in theory, but I wish it could be done easily through one menu only. Moving stuff from one pocket to another isn't quick or intuitive. Conversely, in BN you spend a LOT of time carefully sorting items because there aren't separate containers, so you can't carry a "loot bag". Both systems are still far from perfect, IMO.

Overall, I've warmed up considerably to DDA; I wouldn't say one is clearly superior to the other from a gameplay perspective. If you're starting out, I'll still strongly recommend BN, as it's already complex enough.

 

[vitellus]

i played this, ivan, and stone soup about a decade ago while on a pretty hard roguelike kick for a year or so. project zomboid has a starting scenario (a really bad cdda day) based off the really day day start, wherer you start drunk, naked, and your house is on fire. fucking fantastic from what i remember, but i can't remember if they had npc's a decade ago though...i've played a lot of ascii shit in the intervening years, the decades of gaming is beginning to blend into an rpg pidgin of differing games.

 

[Rean]

Don't compare scam games that are good for an hour like Project Zomboid to Cataclysm.

 

[thesheeep]

Pockets are fine if you learn the basics. Pockets would be the main reason to play DDA instead of BN, because of their convenience.

Ah, yes, the convenience of spending hours moving stuff around manually from pocket to pocket. Or basically having to set up "macros" (forgot the name) for auto pick-up, pocket filling, etc.
You can speed this up somewhat by learning all the different shortcuts in the way-too-many menus, but it's still a significant chunk of time lost on boring inventory tetris and fighting the game putting things where you don't wan't them put. Or the impossibility to use an item without manually removing its container from the container THAT is in from... to see anyone defending this insanity as "convenience" boggles the mind

The entire system crumbles under its own weight and the UI sure as hell can't keep up with it. It would be a problem with a 2D/3D rendered inventory, but an ASCII/sprite one? No way.

Compared to BN's "here's a list of all your items", which you can filter with the normal inventory, sort and more with advanced one and that's it.
I agree with Gilius Thunderhead it would be nice if you could manually define another inventory to use for certain loot, kind of like having one or two abstract containers, but you still spend drastically less time in your inventory than you do in DDA.

 

[Dadd]

Pockets are fine if you learn the basics. Pockets would be the main reason to play DDA instead of BN, because of their convenience.

Ah, yes, the convenience of spending hours moving stuff around manually from pocket to pocket. Or basically having to set up "macros" (forgot the name) for auto pick-up, pocket filling, etc.
You can speed this up somewhat by learning all the different shortcuts in the way-too-many menus, but it's still a significant chunk of time lost on boring inventory tetris and fighting the game putting things where you don't wan't them put. Or the impossibility to use an item without manually removing its container from the container THAT is in from... to see anyone defending this insanity as "convenience" boggles the mind

The entire system crumbles under its own weight and the UI sure as hell can't keep up with it. It would be a problem with a 2D/3D rendered inventory, but an ASCII/sprite one? No way.

Compared to BN's "here's a list of all your items", which you can filter with the normal inventory, sort and more with advanced one and that's it.
I agree with Gilius Thunderhead it would be nice if you could manually define another inventory to use for certain loot, kind of like having one or two abstract containers, but you still spend drastically less time in your inventory than you do in DDA.

Have you played DDA recently?

 

[thesheeep]

Have you played DDA recently?

A couple months ago. I'm late to the BN party.
There's no saving that pedantic inventory crap.

Also, the inventory may be the worst offender, but DDA stumbles over its own pedanticness in numerous other ways, adding extremely little of gameplay value but many ways of getting in the way of the player.

The added simulation detail is not worth the struggle that comes with it.

 

[Dadd]

Have you played DDA recently?

A couple months ago. There's no saving that pedantic inventory crap.

It takes a few minutes maximum to set up your inventory templates after you find your containers of choice. Then you won't have to modify the setup much again. You can save the templates and use them across characters. Everything you pick up goes where you want it to go, unlike in BN, where, when you start getting enough items in your inventory, it becomes a mess. You can drop specific containers with items that are irrelevant in combat and pick them up after combat, unlike in BN where the "not pockets" system gives you much less control over what you drop.

 

[thesheeep]

It takes a few minutes maximum to set up your inventory templates after you find your containers of choice. Then you won't have to modify the setup much again.

The fact that you need "inventory templates" in a video game is the best q.e.d for my point, so thank you for that.

You can drop specific containers with items that are irrelevant in combat and pick them up after combat, unlike in BN where the "not pockets" system gives you much less control over what you drop.

You don't need full control over what you drop.
https://github.com/cataclysmbnteam/Cataclysm-BN/pull/603#issuecomment-894426524

This has been in since 2021/22, apparently. I'm not sure how much of the idea has made it to the latest stable, but the current way is:

Just drop a backpack or such and the game will take care of the rest, "filling" it with clutter you don't need right now so you lose the weight, to be picked up later again.
I haven't fiddled around with this, because frankly there's no need for it. Dropping a backpack has always worked just fine. Maybe it would be nice to be able to mark things as "never drop this with a container", but again I never had things I needed in combat dropped by the game so I don't even know if that feature might actually exist already.

If you want a quick test for this, start as the pizza delivery guy, which will give you a messenger bag. Drop that bag. You'll see that items that were in your inventory before are now in that bag on the ground.
Keeping in mind that BN has no real concept of "this item is in this container" in your inventory - there's only volume and weight - this means the game decided it was a good idea to put those things in there when dropping the bag. Works for me.

 

[Dadd]

I don't need anything in a video game; I like having control over what I drop.

 

[thesheeep]

I don't need anything in a video game; I like having control over what I drop.

Get help.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Last time I tried DDA I cleared out a science lab on the surface. The game wouldn't reveal if a body had a keycard on it without me standing directly on the body because it was in the wallet. Searching a room for useful items taking literally dozens of extra keystrokes and reading through hundreds of extra lines of text is what drove me to switching to BN branch.

 

[The Jester]

Do you guys use single pool points or separate?

 

[Cologno]

I don't need anything in a video game; I like having control over what I drop.

Get help.

Whoa, he admits he actually drops stuff. That's like telling the one clean guy in a herd of crackheads he's got a problem!

 

[thesheeep]

Do you guys use single pool points or separate?

I prefer single pool, it's just more flexible.

Balance isn't much of a consideration for the starting character in this game since you'll be getting so much stronger pretty quickly anyway.
If you survive the start, that is

I guess pool makes it a bit easier to minmax? But it's not like you can build yourself a "safe" character right from the get-go.