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CleverRaven / Cataclysm-DDA

Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead. A turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.
http://cataclysmdda.org
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New default 91 days season length - discussion #25439

Closed Robik81 closed 5 years ago

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Default season length was abruptly changed in #25429 before any meaningful discussion could take place.

Describe the solution you'd like
This change has non-trivial consequences and I think it would be better to give people some time to think about it and post their opinions - and already merged and closed PR is probably not the best place for it.

Reasoning behind the change

Describe alternatives you've considered
Crying in the corner.

Additional context
Some points raised by people in the PR thread:

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

My suggestion?

I would go with default season length of 30 days.

Having season conceptually splitted in Early/Mid/Late with 10 days length, because I really liked the suggestion - this do not have to have any consequence in code, except in maybe in UI, showing Early Spring, day 1 instead of current Spring, day 1 etc.

Long events like plant and animal growth would be defined as x per season.

I agree that having unnatural season length brings problems, as short events like movement, crafting etc. takes realistic amount of time and long events would be scaled with season. Discussions if something should be in realistic time or scale with season are inevitable.

Still, I agree with points raised about too long season from gameplay perspective and I think we might just replace one can of worms with another.

FulcrumA commented 5 years ago

Yeah, I wonder what was the reasoning between sudden change to 91 days long seasons. I don't mind it that much, I already set my seasons as somewhat longer but I don't think anyone requested that in particular, anyone could set it longer than previous average and many considered 91 too long.

Seasons being longer than what we had in general is fine with me. I'd like the winter to last a bit requiring either quite some luck and skill to survive or, in case of more default settings - preparation and stocking to get through. It shouldn't be merely aesthetic, but sort of a challenge all in itself, requiring change in approach. Having things spoil in less adjusted manner, so things lasting a year will last a long year I also am fond of, since with earlier shorter seasons some things seemed to be adjusted for their duration and thus rot far too quickly. I would like to ensure that farming is however balanced for this too, allowing a harvest about twice, thrice a year tops without use of fertilizers.

Books being rather quick to study through I don't mind at all. It's one of those things which made realistic would simply make the game not more challenging, but a chore. The difficulty should mostly lie in acquiring a relevant book, not in grinding it at home for a long time, just forcing the player to wait, watching the time pass by and stuffing the character with food/drink before resuming the wait.

I do agree however that the 91 day long seasons affect the variety, making each season last too long, get bothersome and boring. Personally, through experience with trying various season lengths I usually settle at about 60 day long seasons, which do have better divisibility while maintaining pseudo-realistic expectations of the season.

Kelenius commented 5 years ago

unrealistic side effects, such as becoming a master martial artist / mechanic / gunsmith by reading books for a few days. It was sort of just handwaved as taking place over a longer period of time before - but now...

This has little to do with the season length, and is just unrealistic now as before.

game is fundamentally based around 14 day seasons, through loot drops, skill gain rate, monster upgrades versus player power level timings, crop growth, spoilage, time investment required to reach food sustainability, etc.

Loot drops, skills and monster upgrades have nothing to do with the seasons. Crop growth was specifically one of the reasons for this change. I agree that spoilage should be adjusted now, though, but that's also a good change - we're not going to have the arguments about "food spoils in 3 years IRL, so should we put it as 3 in-game years or what".

most players using the defaults will never live to see a winter

And that's a problem how?

and a 91 day winter would be absolutely brutal

You have 180 days to prepare for it. That's three years of gameplay before this change. If a survivor makes it through to three years, they are probably a bionically augmented mutated combat-hardened veteran that can kill a jabberwock by spitting at it, driving a personal deathmobile.

91 days feels bad in terms of divisibility, 90 is more open for sub-season events, Early/Late season division is 45 days. Early/Mid/Late season is 30 days

So what?

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

@Kelenius

I can't help but to think that your tone is somewhat aggressive, which is funny, because these points were not raised by myself, so I should not care.

CoroNaut commented 5 years ago

I see the points you're making. For gathering supplies and whatnot for the winter, sure you have about 3/4 of the year to prepare for winter, and that making the winter 90+ days will be tough to survive just because of length and stored food but, it is more in the realm of the cataclysm.

The time between the seasons are also dynamic, meaning that temperature outside slowly changes from warm to cold, and this effect is noticeable in 14 day seasons and will transfer over to 90. I most definitely agree that you can master pretty much everything and be very late game before winter and this should probably be addressed. (like making reading books take 10-20 days instead of 1-2 days.)

As someone who plays with the 30 day seasons and always has, I think that probably 40-50 days is the balance that the cataclysm is made for. 30 days just seems too fast and before you know it, you are passing days left and right crafting or reading, etc.

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

Yeah, I wonder what was the reasoning between sudden change to 91 days long seasons.

I think it was triggered by discussion in #25368 , just my wild guess.

Zireael07 commented 5 years ago

@Robik81: I also guess that the immediate impetus for the change was the discussion there.

91 days perfectly matches the real world year length (and is good for making spoilage realistic), but I found it a bit tedious and usually played with 30-40 days long seasons.

I am not sure how to make farming/animals work with 30 days, but I definitely think that the unrealistic things that got even more visible with the new default (e.g. martial arts) could definitely be made to work with whatever the new default is.

And I agree that the power curve, etc. should be somewhat flattened for the new defaults, whichever it was. It made sense that a winter character in 14 day seasons [roughly 60 days in] is end-game and armed to the gills, but doesn't make sense for a late summer character be end-game in 30 day seasons, let alone for one to be end-game before summer rolls around with 91 day long seasons.

MT-Arnoldussen commented 5 years ago

I think without a good reason not to use shorter season length (I agree with Kelenius' response to the points raised in the OP), it's best to just go with real season lengths, instead of some arbitrary shorter one.

Lorith commented 5 years ago

As someone that has basically always played 90/91 day seasons for multiple years IRL, I like this change, as it makes it more meaningful. Seasons that only last two weeks are silly at best, you barely need any effort to survive since you can get food within a few days with farming and winter barely shows up before it is gone. I agree with the idea to go to 90 for easy division, and many things will certainly need to be rebalanced a bit, but it isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

You have to plan for things instead of just go around without a care in the world for long term things, but aside from that, there isn't much change. The first few days is most of the difficulty, and there is no significant difference in those. You get more time to prepare for winter, even if it is longer, so you can easily preserve a bunch of food beforehand if you plan ahead of time. Games not typically lasting that long is player choice, outside the first few days.

As to the power you can get ingame, it all depends on how you play. It is quite possible to end up practically immortal and able to kill anything within 2-3 days by breaking into an armory in a lab (Not nearly as hard as it sounds - get a pickaxe and a hacksaw) or be struggling to deal with hordes a year or two in if you go for woodland survival. There is no simple way to balance things out, as everyone plays differently.

nexusmrsep commented 5 years ago

This change is more about making a statement more then anything else. Some features tend to develop towards default season length, and that caused and still cause confusion, sometimes resulting in absurd artificialy forced time adjustments of some features. This feature sets a different mindset into action. With an option at hand to shorten your seasons, you no longer have doubts what is the true axis of things that are coded into the game. Take food for example that has its spoil times based on true time lengths. You will no longer be under the impression that some food lasting for 2 seasons is borked, as it will now last 1 month. And if you lower the season length to less, you will understand what happend with prolonged spoil times. Another example is recent dogocalypse, where there was a confusion what time axis has to be applied. Lets set it strait once and for all. And if you prefer other lengths, nothing stands in your way to change that. I personaly would also think twice before choosing 91 days, but thats my personal preference, and on the other hand 15d is so short that I think about winter clothes at the second day of spring.

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

I agree with most of what you wrote @nexusmrsep , except

And if you prefer other lengths, nothing stands in your way to change that.

Not really true if half of the game will be ultimately broken / unusable. Might as well not have that setting at all.

To me, this abrupt change feels more like "Nope, it's too hard to proper implement features to work with variable season length. Let's ditch it."

MT-Arnoldussen commented 5 years ago

Yeah I think that's sort of the point of the change.

Make everything work correctly with real season lengths, set that length to be the default, and stop prioritizing making everything work with shorter lengths.

nexusmrsep commented 5 years ago

@Robik81, thats a valid issue too. So perhaps this will lead to a different conclusion, with default 91d seasons, and proper scaling infrastructure. This would be then a first step to set things right for shorter (optional) seasons.

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

Crosslink to forum

Seasons now 91 days long?

kevingranade commented 5 years ago

I didn't actually intend to merge with no discussion, and I'm happy to continue discussing it now, but just to warn you, the tl;dr for my comments so far is I haven't seen a compelling reason not to stick with 91 days as the default.

Suggestions without rationales aren't helpful, there needs to be a reason to make it the default for everyone. Real-life durations are a clearly consistent default, and if we simply scale everything for real-world durations independently, it works. If you depart from this default, you can accelerate your way through seasons but it has consequences, like inability to copmplete crop cycles, or very long winters.

becoming a master whatever

That's no more sensical if season lengths are shorter. It was never my intent that short seasons implied some kind of time dilation, so the fact that it's being interpreted as such is part of the problem.

game is fundamentally based around 14 day seasons

Need evidence for this rather than a bare assertion it is so. For my part, I've been scaling things for 365 day years for years now.

most players using the defaults will never live to see a winter,

Not a problem, if they want to experience other seasons we have start time options.

a 91 day winter would be absolutely brutal, especially for Winter Start scenarios

Good

91 day seasons means your average survivor run will have no variability in setting, a perma-spring if you will

My understanding is that the average survivor lives less than a week so it's not a change.

Long events like plant and animal growth would be defined as x per season.

This is a nightmare code-wise, it requires careful coordination and thought between every element of the game that has a long duration, and will constantly cause breakage and regressions for certain players, and there's no good way to test everything with all the different settings.

This change is more about making a statement more then anything else.

This is spot-on, having the default be 14 days has confused and hampered development on a consistent basis for years now. IT's also a recognition that from a development point of view, "real-world timescales" have been the goal for years so it just updates the setting to match the reality.

"Nope, it's too hard to proper implement features to work with variable season length. Let's ditch it."

That's also absolutely true. This is a feature that requires an inordinate amount of effort to maintain. We have hundreds of potential features to implement, and this one doesn't make the cut.

Inglonias commented 5 years ago

That's also absolutely true. This is a feature that requires an inordinate amount of effort to maintain. We have hundreds of potential features to implement, and this one doesn't make the cut.

If this is the case, then this merge becomes even more important to discuss before performing, as it changes from "a new default" to "something required". This statement here is, I feel, enough to ask that this change be reverted.

Good

Yeah, no. I'd prefer it if I was able to actually access all these cool endgame features from time to time without having to cheat, or having the game explicitly discourage certain playstyles. You don't get to do that when you yourself are demanding the ability to play a certain way with butchering. (#24878 )

My understanding is that the average survivor lives less than a week so it's not a change.

I feel that this is, in itself, a problem, but that's not related to this issue, so I'll drop it.

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

I didn't actually intend to merge with no discussion

My apologies if my OP sounded like I am blaming you for merging and closing the PR, that was not my intention.




I think if it is stated this clearly, I have no other objection.

My only problem is that my character will either be dead or a demigod before the harvest, so there is no point in farming, or other similar long term activities.

kevingranade commented 5 years ago

If this is the case, then this merge becomes even more important to discuss before performing, as it changes from "a new default" to "something required".

You misunderstand, I've been saying no to this feature for years, this just brings the option in default in line with the lack of scaling support.

I'd prefer it if I was able to actually access all these cool endgame features from time to time without having to cheat, or having the game explicitly discourage certain playstyles.

What cool endgame feature? Winter? Nothing is gated behind season length except more seasons. I might be misunderstanding your comment though.

My only problem is that my character will either be dead or a demigod before the harvest, so there is no point in farming, or other similar long term activities.

Yes there's no reason to embark on long-term activities if you aren't set up to survive in the long-term that's working as expected.

Zireael07 commented 5 years ago

As I said before, the one complaint I can see is endgame level character in summer with 91 day seasons. That's a bit too fast if the game is supposed to be tailored to realistic length seasons.

EDIT: "survive long term" != endgame character mutated and CBMed to the gills

xjosephx commented 5 years ago

I really dislike the idea of 91 day seasons. In my opinion removes the difficulty and challenges of each season because by the time it changes you are a demigod. It is fun when you have to adapt to winter and get warmer clothes and deal with the lack of food/frozen food then for example. But that will not be a problem for somebody with 91 days between seasons because they will be demigods by that time. I believe this is also what was meant by:

game is fundamentally based around 14 day seasons

I also agree farming will be pointless in a realistic timescale. It doesnt take a huge amount of time to get a ups food dehydrator and then just dehydrate a load of bears or ants or whatever and get enough food forever.

latogato commented 5 years ago

I always play as a motorized nomad and plunder the zombie infested world for items and foods, so i can't speak about the stationary base and farming side of the game.

I really don't think long seasons is a good change. Of course i have no experience about it so the followings are my fears about this change.

Gameplay pace First of all, it will change the pace of the game, which is IMHO now excellent. With the 14 days seasons, 1 in-game day worth more or less 1 real life week. It is fun because this allows the short crafting and learning times. It is not realistic but fine (Edit: it turned out crafting, reading and zombie evolution speeds are not scaled to season length at all. Anyway, compared to the short season length the reading and crafting times are believable). Also it gives some urgency in the first seasons to survive, you have to take risks to be mobile asap and be ready for the cold winter.

I'm not against longer seasons but 91 days is too long. I like to feel the time passes, seasons come and go and the zombies slowly change into deadlier form while i slowly overcome all post-apocalyptic problems. I will not feel the difference between spring 30. and spring 60. days, because nothing will change.

Annoyingly slow or too fast advancement If the crafting/learning/zombie evolution speed will be slower (longer), that would make the game much slower for the player. It would be annoying to sit and wait to craft something for hours/days while the game busily calculating the monster movements around our base. If they don't change the speeds then we could craft too many things in short time, also we will skill up too fast and beat the game before the summer. At the end of the year there would be end zombies everywhere.

City sizes and creature quantities The game designed for short seasons and small places. The cities just few houses and they are close to each others, the inhabitants are few but makes the places busy because they are everywhere. The distance and quantities are measured by the passing time, you travel and clear some places and a season passed. With long seasons this illusion is gone. With longer seasons we would need a lot of food, so we have to plunder whole cities to survive.

I feel this change will be an immersion breaker.

MT-Arnoldussen commented 5 years ago

Where does this notion that crafting speed, learning speed and zombie evolution are scaled with season length come from?

edit: From what I can find, the following are scaled with season length:

latogato commented 5 years ago

Where does this notion that crafting speed, learning speed and zombie evolution are scaled with season length come from?

It is an assumption because nobody ever stated - or i never heard of it - otherwise until this change. I'm sure many of us was under that impression this speeds are scaled to the 14 days season length, the few minutes long crafting times and the book reading times made it believable and i have to say it is strange to see it was never intended, it is just accidental. Also as i know it was never addressed as an issue, but anyway it was not a problem until this change, but now it is.

I think the list you wrote are relatively new additions compared to the reading, crafting and zombie evolution, good to see they are planned to scale to the season length.

Lorith commented 5 years ago

What he listed are the only things that really change with season length, aside from underbrush refill time.

Crafting is not, books are not (you are reading a chapter, not the whole book), evolution speed is not, learning speed is not.

MT-Arnoldussen commented 5 years ago

compared to the reading, crafting and zombie evolution

I think you missed my point. those are not scaled with season length, so bringing them up in this topic is irrelevant

CoroNaut commented 5 years ago

What is the rationale behind making the game specifically for 90 day season lengths instead of just sizing everything to whatever number the player wants. If the player wants 10 day seasons, scale it as such, same for 20,30,60,200, etc.

This change is more about making a statement more then anything else.

This is spot-on, having the default be 14 days has confused and hampered development on a consistent basis for years now. IT's also a recognition that from a development point of view, "real-world timescales" have been the goal for years so it just updates the setting to match the reality.

Once again, having the default be 14 or 90 is exactly the same if everything were to scale accordingly, but right now, there is not a lot of code supporting that variability. Don't get me wrong, I support making the default 90, but there will be some issues everywhere (that people are all mentioning above me) to be handled if this goes through (not just variable ones, but you also have to change all 14 day technicalities to 90). Many less issues would come of just supporting variable season length since we already have features that have that. Changing all static variables pertaining to 14 day season lengths can just be updated as we go.

Or is it planned to just remove the variable option altogether?

kevingranade commented 5 years ago

What is the rationale behind making the game specifically for 90 day season lengths instead of just sizing everything to whatever number the player wants.

Quoting my previous reply:

This is a feature that requires an inordinate amount of effort to maintain. We have hundreds of potential features to implement, and this one doesn't make the cut.

Such arbitrary scaling is not simple, it's not easy, and it's not reliable. It also ends up touching huge numbers of different parts of the code.

latogato commented 5 years ago

I think you missed my point. those are not scaled with season length, so bringing them up in this topic is irrelevant

By wrote "they are planned" i meant to refer to the list you wrote.

But bringing up the reading, crafting and zombie evolution is necessary in this topic because - as it turned out - they are not scaled to any(?) season length. Are they scaled to anything?

Lorith commented 5 years ago

Reading scales to intelligence, I think crafting does too. Zombie evolution is not scaled to anything as far as I am aware.

pingpong2011 commented 5 years ago

Did a quick calculation, 5 minutes per day makes it 30 hours per year with 91 day seasons. That's bonkers. It would take hours (2.5 at five minutes per day and 30 days) just to get out of a freezing spring temperature, which will turn away new players. I get "ooohh it's more realistic it's deeper" but that's why the season length was there to begin with. Unless everything else is broken with it, I can be in 8+ deep labs by summer. This is piling on a broken solution to a broken problem if it's to try and fudge bad time code with progression mechanics.

Night-Pryanik commented 5 years ago

which will turn away new players

New players most probably won't even know that there was a default 14 day season and won't complain on slow game progression just because you (old players) get used to the fast pace.

FulcrumA commented 5 years ago

@Night-Pryanik They may however still consider the seasons bit too long for their taste. But then there's still an option of simply adjusting them non-default.

Night-Pryanik commented 5 years ago

But then there's still an option of simply adjusting them non-default.

Exactly. I considered seasons flowing too fast for my taste, and I simply increased it.

Treah commented 5 years ago

The original reason for the 15 day seasons was to have the player experience all of the seasons in a play though, before getting killed by some random event, or just getting bored and starting over.. Has this changed?

CoroNaut commented 5 years ago

What is the rationale behind making the game specifically for 90 day season lengths instead of just sizing everything to whatever number the player wants.

This is a feature that requires an inordinate amount of effort to maintain. We have hundreds of potential features to implement, and this one doesn't make the cut.

Such arbitrary scaling is not simple, it's not easy, and it's not reliable. It also ends up touching huge numbers of different parts of the code.

It will take about the same amount of time to transfer everything over to a static 90 day season length as it would be to transfer everything over to a variable length season length with some additional thinking. If you make a change to something that relies on 90 day or variable day season length, you have to maintain it (or not) in both scenarios.

About it reaching large amounts of code, we already have some problems (listed in above comments) that are variable and static day lengths,yet the game is still well balanced. In the worst case you can just keep lots of stuff static for balance towards 90 day seasons and change some major game play effects over to variable length to keep consistency in playing a n-day season length.

secretfire42 commented 5 years ago

Is this really how you run a project? With bonkers changes that ruin half the game and no discussion paired with blanket, highly authoritarian statements contradicted by literally -years- of discussion and planning obvious to even the most casual observers?

A 1 to 1 system might be good, but what happened to the "no too big changes" Kevin is constantly harping on about? If this is the right way forward, you have a -lot- to change first, probably implementation of "months" instead of just seasons at the very least, and dramatic reworking of a number of systems. It will half work as is, but that's not an improvement.

Also, I've been waiting for three years for you guys to fix spring temperature and it has -never happened-. How will this help? Alternatively, will you rebalance the game to increase default density of monsters/items/buildings and slow crafting and skill gain?

Because 90 days is well past the endgame. You've spent years balancing this game, and this is essentially a major reset. Perhaps warranted, but should this be a single pull request with no prep work? Is there a plan to follow up on it?

If you go to a preset MA mapgen, and come up with a plan to rebalance --everything-- around that, and this is part of it, great. Cool. Neat.

If this is just an arbitrary whim thrown out with no plan or discussion - WTH?

kevingranade commented 5 years ago

The original reason for the 15 day seasons was to have the player experience all of the seasons in a play though, before getting killed by some random event, or just getting bored and starting over.. Has this changed?

Yes, you can either set start time with an option or jump ahead with the debug menu.

Treah commented 5 years ago

@kevingranade I see, I was unaware there was never an option to not change starting season. TBH I never used the 15day seasons as I have always found them way too short. Also is everyone aware you can change this to like whatever you want so this is only a discussion around changing what the default is and also scaling right?

Regilith commented 5 years ago

I'm just going to reiterate and expand what I said in the PR.

This is a massive change to the game's pacing. A lot of interactions were based upon the 14 day season, like movement, crafting, skilling, healing, reading, upgrades, construction, power curve - all of which were predicated on the notion of taking ingame "weeks" to do.

I am a fan of 90-day seasons, and I often personally use them over the default 14. But without adjusting the times for all these things to better align with IRL speeds, A survivor is going to be a mutant ascended CBM-filled demigod within 60-days, before the zombies start upgrading, before spring ends, taking all of 2 months or so to accomplish. There is no real point to farming, as you will never need to stockpile food for a winter which will never come. What's the point of having summer-only berries, when your character will have transcended food? What's the point of the world evolving as you play, when players will get bored and quit before spring ends?

I think adding the 90-day PR was premature. These values need to be adjusted before we should default to real-life values. It's going to break a lot of in-game pacings and interactions. If you want to make the game realistic in terms of days, I'm all for it, but there needs to be a balance in the power-progression curve. Make injuries be more debilitating and last longer, have food and ammo be less common, make combat more punishing, make crafting and skilling take much longer. For realism, the first zombie upgrades should start taking place after the first year, so have the player be only marginally better than they started 360 days ago. If you scale every interaction and action by a factor of 7 to pseudo-adjust it right now... I don't need to explain why that would make the game completely unplayable.

If you want to go realistic, you would need to massively improve NPC AI to help the player with tedious tasks, protection if you are debilitated, automatic world looting, to make the game enjoyable over 360 day spans, Rim-World style.

I'm guessing it was added to set a standard, and all these adjustments will occur over the course of the next few months. But these adjustments should not be introduced 5 hours after a PR is introduced - these massive game adjustments need to be well thought out, well tested, and well discussed before introduction into mainline.

Arguments about "just change the starting season / season length in options" are moot because, as Kevin stated, all the game logic will be based around the 90-day season, and this would break game balance as soon as you adjust it.

I want the game to have 360 day seasons. I want to scrounge, barely surviving, barely living though fights, relying on NPCs to survive through the apocalypse, make a base, defend against other NPC factions, fight mega-bosses from the nether, and slowly progress to a demigod level as the threats facing New England consolidate and grow stronger. What I don't want is for the game to get stale before spring has ended, a unrealistic grind to god tier - alone - and grow bored and make another character. 90-days without readjustment exaggerates that.

If you won't revert it, please at least focus and make a concerted effort towards adjusting the pacing issues.

Robik81 commented 5 years ago

Also is everyone aware you can change this to like whatever you want?

I am wondering as well, but in reverse, if you will.

Is everyone aware that yes, you can change the season length, for now, but as long event features will be developed with support for default season length exclusively, changing of this setting will be more and more nonviable.

Zireael07 commented 5 years ago

A couple people pointed out exactly what I said, that a demigod by the beginning of summer makes the game's pacing be off with the new 91 days seasons. That's the only real problem with the new default.

nexusmrsep commented 5 years ago

Must agree with @Robik81 here. What first looked like a change of scope, now seems like a step back. I'm ok with the change of default time axis, and ok with declaring that RL 365 d par year is new default balancing point for any time based features.

What I'm not ok with is a silent removal of season scaling options by declaring that nothing will be done to support automatic rescaling of features that will break with scaling. Either make it official, or don't go that way at all. Don't hide it under the counter, cut out the scaling option from the menu, and cut away the scaling mechanics. Changing seasons and saying "you can scale it down but it will break many major features, if not now then perhaps later" is not fair toward players who righfully expect consistent working features. Making a feature avalaible and deliberate saying "here you go, use it, but it will not work for you" is a no go.

Other way would be allowing further development of scaling, even if this would be hard and painfull, with adding developer guidelines how to do it, where to do it, etc. Perhaps to push it toward some unified guidelines there should be some trimming of the said option. For example only a choice of monthly 30d seasons or 3 month 91d seasons should be enforced to make scaling more consistent within the code and to avoid other problems with fluent changes. Declaring "we now have two time scales and everything should be scalable to this" is far better then fluent scale and no guidelines. I know that with downgraded scale some wacky things may be present but that can be also presented to the player, who would then know where downscaling works well and where it doesnt, at least untill relevant features would be balanced to both scales.

kevingranade commented 5 years ago

I'm 100% ok with removing the option and locking season lengths to 91 days.

Other way would be allowing further development of scaling, even if this would be hard and painfull, with adding developer guidelines how to do it, where to do it, etc.

I said

This is a feature that requires an inordinate amount of effort to maintain.

And I made it clear from the very beginning that I have no interest in expending the effort necessary to make this work. This touches too much code and screws with way too much game balance for it to be a worthwhile undertaking.

SunshineDistillery commented 5 years ago

I'm not for or against the changes, but I wanted to make a few points:

Inglonias commented 5 years ago

And I made it clear from the very beginning that I have no interest in expending the effort necessary to make this work. This touches too much code and screws with way too much game balance for it to be a worthwhile undertaking.

That hasn't stopped you before from not only requesting a fix, but preventing a stable version release until it's fixed, as in #23189 . Unlike in that situation, this one actually has far reaching implications for all players. That exploit is really only applicable to players who actively try to break things. Best I can tell, efforts to refactor vehicle code are in response to that issue, with the ultimate goal of fixing it. (You also still haven't removed the "good first issue" flag from that bug, which, given what is known about its cause, is a grievous mistake at best, and a malicious lie at worst)

Furthermore, saying it's too hard doesn't mean you get to take the lazy approach out. If you want to make 91 day seasons mandatory, fine, I'd learn to live with it. I've learned to live with temperature and bionics changes that I didn't like either. I even learned to live with the knife spear nerf. But actually put some effort into it. Fix the issues other people here have brought up with difficulty scaling, pacing, and zombie evolution. If not now, then make a commitment to doing so before you make 91 day seasons the mandatory standard for everyone.

From where I sit, this change looks like "Oh, and seasons are 91 days now, screw you" with no real rhyme or reason besides "scaling is too hard and also muh realism".

You also don't get to say it's too hard and touches too much without presenting some concrete evidence yourself. I don't feel that it's fair to hold others to that standard but not yourself just because you're the one who took the initiative to fork the project. You've started to present some evidence already by mentioning crop growth, but as far as I can tell, that's all you've done. Start by explaining why we can't just scale crop growth times by season length. Justify it a little bit. Name some other areas of the code that are made more difficult by scaling. I'm going to do my best to keep an open mind here. I personally play with 30 day seasons (and typically die before day 10 of spring anyhow)

I'm making this comment with the assumption that 91 day seasons are going to be made mandatory in the near future, which is the part of this I actually have a problem with. If the proper work is put into it, and we make a project of it, I'd be more open to the change. If I am wrong about my main assumption, tell me, but that's where I see this going.

Incidentally, this is becoming one of the most commented issues on this project, so that's fun.

FulcrumA commented 5 years ago

Removing the season variability option will just cause issues of another kind, with community. People still want to play with seasons of particular length no matter the issues that may cause, as long as it's voluntary thing and they'll get a warning that it may break thing, I'd leave it in. Hell, I wouldn't even mind leaving certain scalability as an optional, default-off thing - as mechanics slowly outgrows it it may be not overtly helpful but many people will still enjoy it, for whatever reason from preference for quicker changing aesthetics to succession games - and there may be those who'd rather maintain it than get rid of it.

All social media discussing this issue prove that changing it is one thing, but actively taking things out to prevent players from enjoying the option is just generating discontent and outcry that could easily be avoided. There may be practical benefits to it but when it apparently hits and pushes away considerable portion of the community - bigger than many other controversial changes till now - then it doesn't serve the game, just individuals.

pingpong2011 commented 5 years ago

I'm going to say a thing that needs to be repeated: the argument given for this change is "the game scaling is off and times aren't right". Fix the way time works. It's been brought up before, ""why aren't things tied to consistent time units?". If you want something to be "per season", why is that not there? Surely if changing the seasons to 91 days doesn't require changing massive amounts of the code base, you could just as easily tie it to a time_per_season * seasons_in_day variables, unless there has been absolutely no tying of timers to variable units and all this crap is hard-coded i.e. evolution happens day 20 stuff regrows day 60 etc.

But days don't make sense!. Emphasize: days. We know how long seasons are. If you want to scale things, scale them to seasons: 1/3rd of a season is a month, 1/30th of that is a day, etc. Don't throw a fit because the game being fun has less preference than "realism". Having runtime-derived proportioned values to seasons also introduces another obvious thing: scales will be individually selectable. Someone's upset farmings too fast? Ok they set crop growth rates to .5 scale. Someone thinks it's too slow? Ok 1.2. Zombie evolution too fast? Same thing. Reading times too slow? Same thing. I would EXPECT this behavior. Don't like the decimals? Change it to fractions. Change the default season length to 15 days (not a big change, but watch!). Season length->6 : 1. Crafting times 1:6, Reading 1:6, etc. Game runs and calculates rates. There, now the seasons are ninety days long with same game speed. One single world customization menu versus changing and breaking things consistently for all users except you.

Night-Pryanik commented 5 years ago

One single world customization menu

Oh, you think it's so easy to implement. How cute! One single world customization menu means tons of work to implement, tons of work to balance and tons of work to maintain, not to mean all kinds of issues with this. And all this for what? For the sake ungrateful users that complain most of the time on most of the changes?

kevingranade commented 5 years ago

Furthermore, saying it's too hard doesn't mean you get to take the lazy approach out.

Yes, it does.

You also don't get to say it's too hard and touches too much without presenting some concrete evidence yourself.

Yes I do, if you check, I did.

I'm making this comment with the assumption that 91 day seasons are going to be made mandatory in the near future

That's kind of a bizarre thing to do considering I've consistently said otherwise, but hey, feel free to ignore what I'm saying, and I'll do the same for you.

Treah commented 5 years ago

I think the main contention here Night-Prynik is not users thinking something is simple to implement but rather frustration that things have been scaled already to a 91 day seasons "before" it was a default. The game had a variable season length and all of the dev's were aware of this but choose to ignore it and hard code a set time rather then being flexible to variable time. I haven't done extensive work in the code so I am honestly just guessing with some of this but the responses lead me to this conclusion. You cannot expect users to suddenly want to play one way when before they had options ( even if things were broken with variable length) the perception was there that it was an option. It was also an option for quite some time. I would be curious if the majority of players are using 90 days seasons rather then something different. I myself have always played with 30 day ones as I found the 90 day ones very long. I am in no way saying that I disagree with anyone here, I actually agree with both sides oddly enough. But both sides are guilty of things here. One is expecting people that work on this in their free time to build maintain and code things that take extensive time with little payoff , and the other is expecting people to all fall into one play style that may not be the majority of players.

Is perhaps a compromise to have a set restricted option such as 15, 30, and 90 day options? I am unsure if that would minimize the amount of code and work needed to convert over. Or if it would just be the same as having it completely variable?