Skip to main content

Pwning my favorite game

Hectoberfest part 2: Pwning my favorite game

While I have used various open source programs in daily bases, I have never imagined to be the one contributing to it. It has been the reason why I got interested in computer, so that was always my holy grail, but it was not until recently I could see myself as someone standing with the giants. Turns out, I can stand on their shoulders. What a view! Anyways, for my second PR, I decided to work on one of my favorite game:Cataclysm-DDA. It is about time my survivor got himself some rocket fuels!

Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead

This is a rouge-like survival game. Your character is spawned in the middle of an unfriendly, zombie-infested world. Depending on the difficulty, you may spawn anywhere from a relatively safe bunker to neck-to-neck with the next-door, undead-and-hungry neighbors. The goal is to utilize every object and knowledge to gain an upper hand and survive. The player has the world at the disposal to craft and use.

Specific Issue

Rocket fuel is one of the consumable used in the game. It is relatively easy to learn with some limited purpose. The problem is that zinc, one of the components used to craft the chemical, spawns in only one location, school chem lab, that is often relatively difficult to reach until the player reaches much higher level. To provide a balanced game play, an issue was opened requesting to increase availability of zinc.

Approach

First, I looked up zinc. With the assumption that the world tries to closely mimic a real-life town, I wanted to know where we would find zinc in any form in our lives. After some search, it turns out, zinc is very popular in creating metal molds and used in many industries such as automobiles. In different chemical forms, zinc is also used in wide range of common products such as paint. With this information, I decided to add zinc to the hardware stores, Cataclysm world-wide. I also decided other chemistry-related locations may have zinc for various purposes, adding zinc to chem_home and chem_lab locations.

Alternative

As mentioned, zinc is a component in various items such as paint, and paint exists in the Cataclysm world. As chemical crafting plays a big role in the game, it would also be interesting to add a recipe that would turn paints or other object into zinc and other compound.

Conclusion

This was much easier fix but was an interesting general learning experience. Perhaps, for my next pull request, I might try to implement the recipe idea to increase zinc availability.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project: Boost-free goblins

The headache: Boost Don't take me wrongly: Boost library is a powerful set of tools for bleeding-edge technology. Much of it gets absorbed into the C++ Standard Libraries. The problem lies in our project being inactive for 7 years, which means it is relying on a library that is 7 years behind. Installing such an old library is a chore, and securing a pre-built package is problematic at best. The project is even incompatible with the later versions of Boost. It may have once given the original developers a powerful technology to propel their project in the past, but now we are stuck with clock stopped at 2011. Along with libtcod being stuck also in 2012, dealing with Boost is critical to bringing the project up-to-date. Options There are several ways to address the issue. Option 1 : Upgrade We can read each related source code, research how Boost has modified the relevant function calls, and either fix the expected return type or required input type, This may lead to mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Vehicles with a Broken Frame

Browsing through github projects in C/C++ Trying to find ways to link up the goblin_camp project with more automated testers, I started looking around the Readme.md files of other C/C++ projects in github. From neovim, I found AppVeyor, and although I have not yet set it up, it promises to supplement Travis CI with Windows test builds. I also found Coverity Scan, which might be a way for us to scan the large, preexisting code and fix goblin_camp. Then, from Cataclysm-DDA, I found Bounty Source . The icon had a dollar figures on it, so I assumed it was some sort of funnily-named fund raising site. It was, but with a twist. Show Me The Money Apparently, this site is designed to help the project by having people put down money into a pot to fix certain issues listed in Github. Some of the issues were very popular: enough people contributed to the pot of 250 dollars. I would also imagine those are tough ones. I found myself a less-popular, 4 year-old issue of 15 dollars . I am mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Project: Boost-free Goblins, part 3

Ready, Aim, and Fire After the battle-cry , and then calming down to make some preparation , I decided to take the shot. The target: boost::shared_ptr. To Action A quick search turns up that shared_ptr is supported in the STL's memory library since c++11. Well, that seems like an easy task. Let's take our script for a spin. tools/boostrm.sh shared_ptr memory Now I have a bunch of std::shared_ptr replacing the boost variant. Seems like everything is in good order. After pushing it into the github to have Travis CI do the honors of compiling it, turns out, some boost::weak_ptr, apparently derived from boost::shared_ptr, was being casted into boost::shared_ptr, and they are not compatible with std::shared_ptr since that's not what they inherited. Well, after a bit of research, it seems the weak_ptr has a STL version. It seems like weak_ptr needs to go, too. tools/boostrm.sh weak_ptr memory After another push into github, and another build run by Travis CI, it tu...
Post a Comment
Read more