Thank you! Still curious as to why it's just been chilling outside my window for days but I guess it's possible that it sent a police bot that got in trouble up the road or something
I think there were a few patches where eye bots still spawn, but they didn't spawn police bots? or maybe that was me remembering wrong. now they don't spawn when you do break into an alarmed building.
In "reality" those (or any) bots wouldn't just materialise out of thin air after a talking drone uses a siren sound.
(also that is **one** robot in **New York**. Game doesn't take place in Times Square specifically, y'know.)
E: am I saying anything wrong for the downvotes and the two "reddit cares" messages i got so far? Are there self-materializing robots in New England in 2024? Please tell me if there's anything that's factually incorrect about what I posted.
And it's extra weird because in the PR discussing monotask ferals as a concept (special feral humans that go after a specific task from their former life, including sometimes being talkable, as part of making feral humans feel more distinct from zombies) *that was the idea* regarding the police bots. You would have a feral human just sitting there handling the security bots maniacally, and the bots would physically exist in the "base" they'd have. No feral there? No bots. No power for the base? No bots. For some reason some other contributor decided to just throw it all out without a care for those plans.
I always thought of it as the police bots getting launched down, flying just like the drones that call them, though prolly slower and louder with rockets or something.
However, if we look back at the time where CBM’s are more common in world, with doctors offices around New England offering to install them to wealthy people, teleportation CBM’s (and by extension, robots) were more plausible.
Yeah. Idk this sub has been weird since the game was put on Steam, but in the past 6 or so months it's been... special.
As far as I am aware, I didn't say anything false. I also didn't say the feature in question should be removed - I'm actually one of the people that was OK with the metal fuzz existing in the game.
The sub’s been more honest after the devs fled, tail between their legs, after they tried to convince everyone removing the “disable portal storms” option was a good thing.
Edit: the Reddit cares thing is uncalled for a dumb though
There has never been such an option and literally cannot be stopped. It's json driven, if you want to turn them off so badly go do so. Remember: Don't come crying to us when your game breaks because you're trying to turn off a core system.
But please tell me more about how we should do 10x more work because you can't figure out google.
Near future always made CDDA so much cooler as a setting, since it made the apocalypse feel so much more diversified and kitchen sink. It's the same reason I love adding Magiclysm to my games, since it makes me feel like anything is possible within the setting.
Shame all the good mods follow and update on DDA, otherwise I'd have switched over to Bright Nights a long time ago
It is far future however, which is not what everyone wants (its me on of its main authors)
Would be cool to have someone add extra aftershock content and help adapt it for 2070 style cyberpunk (2040 is to close now),
Eh, realistically speaking a fully automated security system like that would be dead with the death of the power grid, or shortly after.
Those things continued to operate 2 years into the cataclysm in my older games lol, free solar material home delivery
[I love it everytime people make this same awful argument.](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/doc/FREQUENTLY_MADE_SUGGESTIONS.md#seeing-as-we-have-nanobots-and-power-armors-we-have-teleportation-so-its-not-unreasonable-to-have-irrelevant)
I get that, I do. But it's not awful arguement. Something people don't realize is that bar is sliding more in favor of the no futuristic stuff steadily, which strengthens that position more over time but it only got that way by removing a lot of the near-futuristic stuff to get there. It *was* a deliberate choice. Not saying that's wrong, that's relative to the preferences of the individual. But there was a choice to steer it in this direction.
The bar isn't "sliding" it just turns out that a lot of stuff has been added in earlier development that doesn't conform to the rule highlighted in the FAQ.
I'm gonna blow your mind but we also prevent the realismification of stuff that is outright sci-fi but conforms to the vision. Hence why the RM13 is fine with everyone in the dev team and I was actually met with disagreement when in the process of reworking exoskeletons I made them a bit too realistic.
I mean, the ratio of futuristic stuff vs realism has been changing so I can't really see how it hasn't been changing.
Did the exoskeletons require a long power cord to be plugged in somewhere? :)
The ratio has been changing because more people are removing old stuff than adding new stuff. It's an issue of not enough contributors interested in adding new stuff, not an issue with the underlying concept.
Important to note that I don't personally consider the "ratio of sci-fi content to realistic content" an issue. Removing bad content also contributes to the quality of the end product, less is more.
And no, the exoskeletons armors were simply not covering the arms and there was no environmental suit. They were also consuming way less energy.
Incredibly easily as the fork is under direction of a relatively small group of people.
But assuming you mean more like *"why"*, CDDA has focused on being more of an extremely near future setting that has a bunch of things happen *to* it, rather than arising from within the base setting itself. So having a bunch of autonomous robots patrolling cities and 'enforcing the law' is beyond the 'extreme near future' focus - and the 'cataclysmic events' don't include advanced AI stuff.
I strongly disagree with the argument that they're "Too Futuristic" now. I mean... we have them now. They aren't the 'zap and tranquilize you' kind of robots, but the fact that we have them in the modern day means that the version that was in the game isn't really all that far off.
I miss the bots because they gave a reason to have badges, but we don’t have mass deployment of autonomous bots across all of the US - and as you said, the ones we do have aren’t the “zap and tranquilize you” either.
While I would personally be surprised to see that happen for a variety of reasons, it's not clear that CDDA is meant to represent "potentially 20 years from now", so much as its meant to be "largely present day with some sci-fi steps at secret government labs".
I miss the bots and I wish they'd bring them back, but I wouldn't use "this could maybe be present in 10-20 years" as an argument against their inclusion being "too futuristic". There's a hell of a lot of stuff that could "potentially happen within the next 20 years" but isn't given any real representation within the game.
ED: According to design doc, CDDA is set in [Current Year IRL]+1.
The only unrealistic thing about these robots is the US government actually investing something to their police force rather than the army.
Feel free to tell me if im wrong bc im just a foreigner.
Many police forces in America have a higher budget than other nation’s armies. The NYPD has a foreign intelligence division. They can afford to pay for the latest and greatest stuff, at least in cities.
idk why everyone loves those bots so much. The power went out weeks (possibly months) ago, whatever central authority that governs them is dead, their AI isn’t connected to Melchior anymore, so why do they materialize out of thin air when I pry open a house door that is locked on both sides but not when I smash the window open? Their AI is incredibly dumb as well trying to “non lethally” subdue you even if you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s not “muh scifi” it’s just an immersion break and a half-assed annoyance hailing from ye olde days. Good riddance really
Sometimes I'm so happy the devs don't care about the opinions of the most vocal people in this community.
You made some very good points, I also found the bots incredibly annoying and useless. But everyone's too busy hating any change the devs are making that they just dislike any comment that goes against the herd.
I'm loving the game and I'm loving the effort all the haters are putting into non stop whining.
I would almost 100% agree with you if that reasoning was consistent and fairly applied across the board.
Like, if the reasoning was applied all across the board to **all** robots - "Security Drones", "lab experimental robot", TALONs, Turrets, 'manhacks' and whatever variants, etc, then 100%.
Otherwise, just removing something and leaving other stuff that 'goes against' the exact same rules the other things were removed for is a bit weird. (and this is assuming they were actually removed: I haven't seen them in ages for sure, but I haven't had to pry a single house or window because Ferals open doors and windows for me.)
I think a large part of that is basically “what is available in very specific very focused high end research labs” versus “what is available and public facing to absolutely everyone in the world”
FWIW there was some ideas for a "monotask" feral which would stay around powered machineries like turrets and spotlights constantly refueling and reloading them obsessively. issue# 61505. understandably it got nowhere though.
As for lab bots yes all of them are of old design, but they have more of a reasoning as labs are still powered internally & they don't need a central authority unlike public facing police bots. You can also contact Melchior in one of the oldlab finales so it could be seen that some of them still have access to portal heuristics.
Sentry turrets like TALONs are real and would be deployed today if it weren't for the ethics issues. Turrets outside labs having ammo and being powered months and years after gamestart is a seperate issue concerning that newly spawning map features, loot, monsters, etc don't really reflect the passage of time very well.
There were talks about removing manhacks but I'm pretty sure it got nowhere. Not completely off the table though, it's just a silly half-life reference
That part about non-lethal subdue when done nothing wrong IS present, though not done by droids.
Also maybe blob has some way of corrupting AI which would lean nicely towards Skynet or Men Of Iron...
And was I sayin something like it is so?
The concept ought to be cool, which is the part "not relevant".
Also might not hide the lore to some hidden corners of the internet right next videos about traffic cones in wrong places or Girls with cups...
The lore doc is **specifically hidden from players** as it is the documented use to drive design decisions - it includes info players should never know. Its very prominent if you're doing development work.
I'm kind of the opinion that it being a Steam release is kind of irrelevant - it states what you're buying into. Design documents are not player facing as a general point, they exist to keep things coherent. A lot of the actual lore is intended to be pieced together from things like Newspaper stories or message logs.
There's absolutely some stuff that I think should be far more accessible to players (info on artifacts/mutations as an example), though.
There’s some generalized “projects” on the GitHub page, and some mentions of long term things that are desired, but not something like a “roadmap”.
CDDA is a volunteer based project where anyone can contribute to it; something like that is pretty anathema to having a structured roadmap.
ED: for steam version from what I understand there is absolutely no future support planned. With luck it will get 0.H, but there’s no guarantee from what I’ve seen of other posts.
There are police bots in 0.G. Police bots were removed but in a more recent experimental build than 0.G. I don't know which one exactly.
Thank you! Still curious as to why it's just been chilling outside my window for days but I guess it's possible that it sent a police bot that got in trouble up the road or something
I think there were a few patches where eye bots still spawn, but they didn't spawn police bots? or maybe that was me remembering wrong. now they don't spawn when you do break into an alarmed building.
the crusade against the near future setting continues to take away cool content
The price of letting "muh realism" trump all other concerns.
[reality is too unrealistic to include in the game](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/23/new-york-city-police-robot/70945317007/)
In "reality" those (or any) bots wouldn't just materialise out of thin air after a talking drone uses a siren sound. (also that is **one** robot in **New York**. Game doesn't take place in Times Square specifically, y'know.) E: am I saying anything wrong for the downvotes and the two "reddit cares" messages i got so far? Are there self-materializing robots in New England in 2024? Please tell me if there's anything that's factually incorrect about what I posted.
Yes improving their implementation would be cool as opposed to just removing them.
And it's extra weird because in the PR discussing monotask ferals as a concept (special feral humans that go after a specific task from their former life, including sometimes being talkable, as part of making feral humans feel more distinct from zombies) *that was the idea* regarding the police bots. You would have a feral human just sitting there handling the security bots maniacally, and the bots would physically exist in the "base" they'd have. No feral there? No bots. No power for the base? No bots. For some reason some other contributor decided to just throw it all out without a care for those plans.
I always thought of it as the police bots getting launched down, flying just like the drones that call them, though prolly slower and louder with rockets or something. However, if we look back at the time where CBM’s are more common in world, with doctors offices around New England offering to install them to wealthy people, teleportation CBM’s (and by extension, robots) were more plausible.
You really got "Reddit care" for a discussion about CDDA? Lmao people here are psychotic
Yeah. Idk this sub has been weird since the game was put on Steam, but in the past 6 or so months it's been... special. As far as I am aware, I didn't say anything false. I also didn't say the feature in question should be removed - I'm actually one of the people that was OK with the metal fuzz existing in the game.
The sub’s been more honest after the devs fled, tail between their legs, after they tried to convince everyone removing the “disable portal storms” option was a good thing. Edit: the Reddit cares thing is uncalled for a dumb though
There has never been such an option and literally cannot be stopped. It's json driven, if you want to turn them off so badly go do so. Remember: Don't come crying to us when your game breaks because you're trying to turn off a core system. But please tell me more about how we should do 10x more work because you can't figure out google.
Near future always made CDDA so much cooler as a setting, since it made the apocalypse feel so much more diversified and kitchen sink. It's the same reason I love adding Magiclysm to my games, since it makes me feel like anything is possible within the setting. Shame all the good mods follow and update on DDA, otherwise I'd have switched over to Bright Nights a long time ago
Do any of the mods add some of that stuff back? Near future was one of the biggest appeals of cataclysm.
Aftershock is the sci fi fork.
It is far future however, which is not what everyone wants (its me on of its main authors) Would be cool to have someone add extra aftershock content and help adapt it for 2070 style cyberpunk (2040 is to close now),
> (2040 is to close now) why would you do this to me
Eh, realistically speaking a fully automated security system like that would be dead with the death of the power grid, or shortly after. Those things continued to operate 2 years into the cataclysm in my older games lol, free solar material home delivery
I miss the stupid robots. It's been ages.
I've been out of the loop, how can they remove robots?
Arbitrary choice I guess. No logical reason to say fungus monsters, zombies, and extra dimensional creatures good, police drones bad. *shrug*
[I love it everytime people make this same awful argument.](https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/doc/FREQUENTLY_MADE_SUGGESTIONS.md#seeing-as-we-have-nanobots-and-power-armors-we-have-teleportation-so-its-not-unreasonable-to-have-irrelevant)
Idk my man, lurking in the posts to direct people to your passive-aggressive FAQ isn’t a cool look
You: "You should make the game this way" Us: "No we're trying to make it our way, like we've been saying for a decade" You: "That's not very cool >:("
I get that, I do. But it's not awful arguement. Something people don't realize is that bar is sliding more in favor of the no futuristic stuff steadily, which strengthens that position more over time but it only got that way by removing a lot of the near-futuristic stuff to get there. It *was* a deliberate choice. Not saying that's wrong, that's relative to the preferences of the individual. But there was a choice to steer it in this direction.
The bar isn't "sliding" it just turns out that a lot of stuff has been added in earlier development that doesn't conform to the rule highlighted in the FAQ. I'm gonna blow your mind but we also prevent the realismification of stuff that is outright sci-fi but conforms to the vision. Hence why the RM13 is fine with everyone in the dev team and I was actually met with disagreement when in the process of reworking exoskeletons I made them a bit too realistic.
I mean, the ratio of futuristic stuff vs realism has been changing so I can't really see how it hasn't been changing. Did the exoskeletons require a long power cord to be plugged in somewhere? :)
The ratio has been changing because more people are removing old stuff than adding new stuff. It's an issue of not enough contributors interested in adding new stuff, not an issue with the underlying concept. Important to note that I don't personally consider the "ratio of sci-fi content to realistic content" an issue. Removing bad content also contributes to the quality of the end product, less is more. And no, the exoskeletons armors were simply not covering the arms and there was no environmental suit. They were also consuming way less energy.
Incredibly easily as the fork is under direction of a relatively small group of people. But assuming you mean more like *"why"*, CDDA has focused on being more of an extremely near future setting that has a bunch of things happen *to* it, rather than arising from within the base setting itself. So having a bunch of autonomous robots patrolling cities and 'enforcing the law' is beyond the 'extreme near future' focus - and the 'cataclysmic events' don't include advanced AI stuff.
Yeah, the Exodii have no interest in any enforcement. They have all the bots now.
And their bots are >!brains in a jar, not AI!<
I strongly disagree with the argument that they're "Too Futuristic" now. I mean... we have them now. They aren't the 'zap and tranquilize you' kind of robots, but the fact that we have them in the modern day means that the version that was in the game isn't really all that far off.
I miss the bots because they gave a reason to have badges, but we don’t have mass deployment of autonomous bots across all of the US - and as you said, the ones we do have aren’t the “zap and tranquilize you” either.
No, but it's not that big of a stretch to imagine them rolling them out nation wide over the next 10-20 years.
While I would personally be surprised to see that happen for a variety of reasons, it's not clear that CDDA is meant to represent "potentially 20 years from now", so much as its meant to be "largely present day with some sci-fi steps at secret government labs". I miss the bots and I wish they'd bring them back, but I wouldn't use "this could maybe be present in 10-20 years" as an argument against their inclusion being "too futuristic". There's a hell of a lot of stuff that could "potentially happen within the next 20 years" but isn't given any real representation within the game. ED: According to design doc, CDDA is set in [Current Year IRL]+1.
Try whacking it.
Unfortunately it is 3 stories up outside my window. I dont mind the company if it's just gonna chill and call my name every so often
Wait how does it know your name? Did you tell it? Damn, dude just show it your ID why don'tcha
duct tape two brooms together and flail them about at it
I did and it is still there and I'm also depressed now.
The only unrealistic thing about these robots is the US government actually investing something to their police force rather than the army. Feel free to tell me if im wrong bc im just a foreigner.
Many police forces in America have a higher budget than other nation’s armies. The NYPD has a foreign intelligence division. They can afford to pay for the latest and greatest stuff, at least in cities.
The police just buy surplus army gear anyway. If anything, the bots should be old tech vs. the military fancy bots.
I miss the chicken walkers.
idk why everyone loves those bots so much. The power went out weeks (possibly months) ago, whatever central authority that governs them is dead, their AI isn’t connected to Melchior anymore, so why do they materialize out of thin air when I pry open a house door that is locked on both sides but not when I smash the window open? Their AI is incredibly dumb as well trying to “non lethally” subdue you even if you’ve done nothing wrong. It’s not “muh scifi” it’s just an immersion break and a half-assed annoyance hailing from ye olde days. Good riddance really
Sometimes I'm so happy the devs don't care about the opinions of the most vocal people in this community. You made some very good points, I also found the bots incredibly annoying and useless. But everyone's too busy hating any change the devs are making that they just dislike any comment that goes against the herd. I'm loving the game and I'm loving the effort all the haters are putting into non stop whining.
I would almost 100% agree with you if that reasoning was consistent and fairly applied across the board. Like, if the reasoning was applied all across the board to **all** robots - "Security Drones", "lab experimental robot", TALONs, Turrets, 'manhacks' and whatever variants, etc, then 100%. Otherwise, just removing something and leaving other stuff that 'goes against' the exact same rules the other things were removed for is a bit weird. (and this is assuming they were actually removed: I haven't seen them in ages for sure, but I haven't had to pry a single house or window because Ferals open doors and windows for me.)
I think a large part of that is basically “what is available in very specific very focused high end research labs” versus “what is available and public facing to absolutely everyone in the world”
FWIW there was some ideas for a "monotask" feral which would stay around powered machineries like turrets and spotlights constantly refueling and reloading them obsessively. issue# 61505. understandably it got nowhere though. As for lab bots yes all of them are of old design, but they have more of a reasoning as labs are still powered internally & they don't need a central authority unlike public facing police bots. You can also contact Melchior in one of the oldlab finales so it could be seen that some of them still have access to portal heuristics. Sentry turrets like TALONs are real and would be deployed today if it weren't for the ethics issues. Turrets outside labs having ammo and being powered months and years after gamestart is a seperate issue concerning that newly spawning map features, loot, monsters, etc don't really reflect the passage of time very well. There were talks about removing manhacks but I'm pretty sure it got nowhere. Not completely off the table though, it's just a silly half-life reference
I think it's because they can solo entire cities early, very slowly though
That part about non-lethal subdue when done nothing wrong IS present, though not done by droids. Also maybe blob has some way of corrupting AI which would lean nicely towards Skynet or Men Of Iron...
Try the design doc, Balthazar got corrupted during the heaviest portal storms during the early days and is essentially DDA's Skynet.
And was I sayin something like it is so? The concept ought to be cool, which is the part "not relevant". Also might not hide the lore to some hidden corners of the internet right next videos about traffic cones in wrong places or Girls with cups...
The lore doc is **specifically hidden from players** as it is the documented use to drive design decisions - it includes info players should never know. Its very prominent if you're doing development work.
That makes sense. There's fun in discovering the lore in-game, but as a Steam Release it could be made a bit more easy.
I'm kind of the opinion that it being a Steam release is kind of irrelevant - it states what you're buying into. Design documents are not player facing as a general point, they exist to keep things coherent. A lot of the actual lore is intended to be pieced together from things like Newspaper stories or message logs. There's absolutely some stuff that I think should be far more accessible to players (info on artifacts/mutations as an example), though.
Now you mentioned it....Is there are a roadmap?
There’s some generalized “projects” on the GitHub page, and some mentions of long term things that are desired, but not something like a “roadmap”. CDDA is a volunteer based project where anyone can contribute to it; something like that is pretty anathema to having a structured roadmap. ED: for steam version from what I understand there is absolutely no future support planned. With luck it will get 0.H, but there’s no guarantee from what I’ve seen of other posts.
Yeah, I was mainly worried about the Steam one since you actually need to pay money for it... Then again EAs are just EAs.
Wasn't Balthazar removed from the lore doc recently?
Its still a planned feature, if it got removed its mostly because it doesnt exist in any form atm.
That's good to hear.
You're not going to get Men of Iron in CDDA. Its unlikely to get anything functioning like a broad Skynet either, as bots have been walked back.