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Item mass rebalancing?


ohgodspidersno

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A pair of socks weighs 1 kg, and they still take up 0.3 kg of bulk once they're on your feet? A bullet weighs almost as much as a box of 24 bullets? A notebook with 10 pages weighs five times as much as a journal with 20 pages?

 

There's just a lot of super unbalanced or completely incorrect weights that are pretty annoying to deal with. I never wear t-shirts or socks because they cost a ton of weight, and imho that's just not a choice that the player should ever be compelled to make. RP shouldn't be the only reason I give my character comfy socks.

 

I might just have to make this one myself, but it seems odd that no one else has made it.

 

 

Edited by ohgodspidersno
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The "weight" ingame isn't any weight metric. It's more a case of trying to balance a combination of weight and volume. Even though a sock might not weigh much, you're unlikely to carry 10 of them in your pockets.

The "weight" is also reduced when an item is worn.
It's possible that some of them could use rebalancing but overall it seems alright, unless I am missing something entirely. 

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52 minutes ago, nasKo said:

It's possible that some of them could use rebalancing but overall it seems alright, unless I am missing something entirely. 

 

Almost all clothing items have a weight 1.

 

The first thing I do in the zombie apocalypse is get naked while watching woodcraft. Don't judge me, I'm just doing it because I have to survive!

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6 hours ago, nasKo said:

The "weight" ingame isn't any weight metric. It's more a case of trying to balance a combination of weight and volume. Even though a sock might not weigh much, you're unlikely to carry 10 of them in your pockets.

The "weight" is also reduced when an item is worn.
It's possible that some of them could use rebalancing but overall it seems alright, unless I am missing something entirely. 

 

I mean I do get that but 1 unit still feels like a crazily high amount. Socks weigh 0.3 when worn which is quite significant if you're doing a big haul and need to make choices about what to cut. I can say with great confidence as a human being that the effective bulk of a pair of socks while worn in real life is essentially 0. In fact, I would argue that they increase your carry capacity irl because your feet are more comfortable and your shoes fit better. It's also odd that all clothing items are the same mass. There's no way a pair of no-show socks should be as bulky or heavy as a pair of fireman's overalls.

 

The mass of unboxed bullets also feels wrong. They should weigh more per bullet than they do while boxed, but not several times more.

 

 

Edited by ohgodspidersno
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7 hours ago, nasKo said:

It's possible that some of them could use rebalancing but overall it seems alright, unless I am missing something entirely. 

 

I generally agree but there are some head scratchers here and there. Pasta comes to mind. I guess I understand why rice would be so heavy because you can easily find it in large 5-10 lb bags at stores, but I've never seen a bag of pasta that big in my life, so I'm not sure why pasta weighs the same as rice, and nearly as much as a plank.

 

Wearing socks should be as close to weightlessness as possible. Its minor and I really don't think I've noticed it in game but I think OP is right about it. 

 

Ammo makes sense because it would be hard to carry around a lot of loose ammo. But it'd be nice to get something like a bandolier to make it a little more manageable.

 

Really the bigger problem is that item weight isn't adjusted based on amount left, for most items. I think that would solve most weight issues.

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13 hours ago, muscamole said:

Ammo makes sense because it would be hard to carry around a lot of loose ammo.

 

 

Would it, though? I mean, if you were trying to carry it around in fistfuls, sure, but if it were just loose at the bottom of your bag I feel like it would be one of the easiest things in the world to carry around. Apparently a lot of gun owners in the United States have gotten in trouble when they go overseas because it turns out they had a single loose bullet in their duffel bag that they didn't notice until they got caught by airport security in someplace like Singapore or Egypt. Point being that bullets are basically a fluid that can pretty much fill any gaps in a container.

 

The fact that you can carry anything at all without a bag doesn't make any sense anyway, so we should just balance everything as if it were in a bag. My head canon is that your character's underwear has a built-in security pocket for passports and such. If your character is strong they have big glutes; big glutes = big underwear = big inventory.

 

I finally did the math of what's in the game; a loose bullet is roughly 5x as 'heavy' as a bullet in a box. That's way, way too high.

Edited by ohgodspidersno
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11 hours ago, ohgodspidersno said:

I finally did the math of what's in the game; a loose bullet is roughly 5x as 'heavy' as a bullet in a box. That's way, way too high.

 

I agree that something is wrong with ammo weight, but maybe this points to boxes of ammo being too light rather than bullets being too heavy?

 

 

I actually think this "fluidity" is represented in the game already with the current bullet weight. You can pretty much always toss a few bullets into a bag to fill up whatever space remains, just like you say. 

 

I see what you're saying about how it doesn't make sense that you can carry anything at all without a bag, but I don't know if the answer is to make your body a weight-reducing bag without giving a reason. Maybe the system should be revamped so that equipped clothing + character strength determines on-person carry capacity. Base carry capacity would be lower than it is now, but adding more clothes gives you more. Equipped clothing could give you weight reduction, which would make sense. Holding 20 loose bullets in your pocket would be pretty easy, while holding 20 loose bullets in your hand would be hard.

 

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On 11/20/2019 at 9:11 AM, nasKo said:

The "weight" ingame isn't any weight metric. It's more a case of trying to balance a combination of weight and volume. Even though a sock might not weigh much, you're unlikely to carry 10 of them in your pockets.

The "weight" is also reduced when an item is worn.
It's possible that some of them could use rebalancing but overall it seems alright, unless I am missing something entirely. 

While I understand the logic and think it's a good compromise, I feel it's still pretty out-of-whack in some areas. I'll expound with specifics once I've dealt with my current in-game situation and got back to proper looting. One that I can think of off the top of my head is empty vs full fuel cans - 0.3 vs 5.0 iirc. It might only weigh 300"g" empty, but it takes up the same volume regardless of whether it's filled.

It might be worth rephrasing it as "Mass" rather than "weight", I think players would be quicker to interpret it the way you describe.

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If you're going to balance an inventory system you go by abstractions of mass, volume, or both (if you work at Keen SWH), but not an indecipherable mix of the two with no internal consistency beyond however the person writing the config files at the time "felt" about it. It's just confusing and completely undermines the appeal of both metrics to do it in such a handwaive kind of fashion. Up til now I thought it was purely mass-based (a bag of sugar weighs 1 so I assumed this was our reference kilogram... or pound?) with really wonky numbers because the alleged volume aspect that affects these "weight" numbers is invisible to the player. Axes and rifles still fit inside purses and socks might as well be bricks. What?

 

Choose mass and/or volume, use SI units (even just internally), add whatever modifiers you want on top to tweak carry amounts, then basically never worry about balancing or player confusion again. Measure twice, cut once.

 

And I could absolutely fit ten socks in my pockets with no issues, probably more, they weigh next to nothing and are highly compressible. What kind of socks are you buying, hollowed out bricks?

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Weight of cloth is pretty nice, its hard to balance real-wise.

I mean, yeah, socks are not 1kg, but you are not able to fit a frige in ur backpack either, unlike ingame.

 

They have to make winter severe, so wearing tons of cloth will be a "must have" game move without being able to cary a lot.

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I've written something for it some time ago, let me repeat myself ;) :

 

It needs adding only a single number in items and object stats. Let's call it "cubature" and define as "the longest dimension of an object". If object's cubature is equal to container's capacity, it fills it entirely and nothing else can be put in there; if bigger, there's simply not enough space for it. If cubature is smaller than capacity, you can stuff it up to it's weight limit. I suggest using a book and medkit as a base of "1".

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