Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (fork)
Role: Upstream bug fixes; developed mods in personal fork.
Last involved: Late 2020
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world. Players must explore and survive while defending against zombies and countless other monstrosities in a limitless, procedurally-generated world. Items can be scavenged and crafted; structures built; farms cultivated; vehicles repaired and modified. The player can install advanced bionic enhancements, and even mutate.
Upstream Bug Fixes
Cataclysm: Dark Days ahead is a highly-active open source project with hundreds of contributors over the years. My contributions to the upstream project are fairly minor:
- I traced the source of the mystery of fresh ingredients cooking into rotten food to an underflow error during calculations involving unsigned integers.
- I suggested the fix to reduce lightstrip duration from years (!!!) to days.
My Personal Fork
I have a personal fork of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, based on version 0.E stable, before the inclusion of nested containers and mandatory Z-levels. I've made over a hundred individual changes to the game to tweak it to how I like it to be played; here are some of the highlights:
- Greatly improved support for bitmap fonts, particularly for anti-aliasing and blending. This allows players to bypass the game's in-built font rendering and replace it with their own choices, right down to the pixel.
- Allow household item density to be separately configured; reduce it for a more scavenging-focused game!
- Reduce massive abundance of ammo from turrets and freely-available fresh water from forests and swamps.
- Fix overly-tight limits on aiming speed based on firearm volume so that gun mods that improve aiming speed can actually do so.
- Add 'S' key to armor sorting screen to reposition armor by layer.
- Allow reviving corpses to be sorted at the top of the visible items sidebar list.
- Fix 'ghost' trails of dragged vehicles in map memory.
- Dozens of minor user interface and quality-of-life tweaks.
My personal fork of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead on Github, and the commit log with all of my changes.