Crackerjack

I took a hiatus from the game for awhile so I could come back to extra features and what-have-you, but I'm back now! How is the server doing, lately?

Currently, it's really hard to be a bandit unless you want to be a cold blooded killer. You can't reliably rob someone, since you don't know for sure what they have in their inventory. Your only real recourse is to kill the person and loot them, or if you're a robin-hood type, take their word for it that the rotten orange is really all they have yes really. IMAGINE IT: You're walking down the road, woods on either side of you. Suddenly a bunch of bandits spring out and start beating you with a baseball bat, and/or throwing punches. You fall to the ground after trying to fight them off, and after delivering a few more kicks or punches they empty your inventory and make off with whatever they feel like, leaving you bleeding on the ground, probably unconscious but completely unable to move for a set time. Eventually you can stand up, emptied of your vital supplies, but you're still alive. Rip up your shirt for bandages, lick your wounds, then plot revenge. MECHANICS: It could be another state of PvP. "Brawl". When activated, if you have a non-lethal weapon equipped (Perhaps fists will work as well?) it will deal damage but has a very low chance of outright killing someone. The victim is knocked to the ground after a certain amount of hits/damage, and is unable to move for a set amount of time. The victim can then be looted, but is still alive. If SP, the player could also be knocked unconscious for a few minutes. To indicate someone is in the brawl state, an icon could pop up over the person's head. It could be a fist, or an angry face, or... Something. While in this state, you can immediately switch to lethal - or "classic" PvP as it stands, after 1 second of cool-down, or as soon as you pull out a lethal weapon: Any kind of gun, or "sharp" item. POTENTIAL: I believe this could open up a lot of new interactions in MP and SP. The "furious" moodlet could automatically lock you in the brawl-state, triggering a fist-fight in the middle of the safe-house. You could swing a punch at someone in a disagreement, or make your banditry life possible without having to resort to cold-blooded murder right off the bat. Heck, we could even have fist-fights for the glory of ruling the group, if you want to run it like the Dothraki. Then, when the fist-fight escalates and someone accidentally dies, you'll have a body on your hands and have to figure out how to deal with the fallout...

The server is back up! Wooo! Except no containers reset, and I think some constructions despawned.

Alright! Thank you. Also - I connected fine yesterday, but today all I've been getting is ID_CONNECTION_ATTEMPT_FAILED.

I just joined the server, and it seems fun. However - I'd just like to know how often soft resets are. The biggest server turn-off is when they do a surprise soft reset and I lose all my stockpiles. Since I'm either farming, scavenging, or dumping things into my stockpiles to make room in my bag for more scavenging, I don't tend to hoard important items on me so they survive resets.

Oh no, what ever shall we do without all the shirts, skirts, pants, and jackets on zombies? And the occasional axe, handgun, bullets . . . and delicious apples. I've never been overloaded by looting zombie corpses, nor have I known anyone who has. Perhaps like the post above, we can compromise and have all the clothing become xXtrousersXx and any actual useful item is just dropped on the ground? Is there any evidence this would solve the 'lag', you're trying to overcome? Dropping the item(s) on the ground effectively turns the ground into the container for the items, so a (non-empty) container still exists. And those items on the ground still need to be rendered, so instead of a zombie corpse an item is being rendered instead. From a programmers point of view, rendering an assorted variety of objects on the ground is going to have a far larger negative impact on performance than rendering a collection of near-identical zombie corpses. Wouldn't it make more sense to do some profiling, and be certain of the current cause of the lag you're experiencing before coming up with some possible solutions which may, or may not, just intensify the problem? Edit: abbreviated that initial quotation - it made for a long-looking post When all the zombies are removed from the map, the lag decreases significantly. If you want, you can hold an actual scientific study on this matter but from what I have seen the correlation can't be denied.

Oh no, what ever shall we do without all the shirts, skirts, pants, and jackets on zombies? And the occasional axe, handgun, bullets . . . and delicious apples. I've never been overloaded by looting zombie corpses, nor have I known anyone who has. Perhaps like the post above, we can compromise and have all the clothing become xXtrousersXx and any actual useful item is just dropped on the ground?

Oh no, what ever shall we do without all the shirts, skirts, pants, and jackets on zombies?

I've gotten into multiplayer recently, and while I absolutely adore Muldraugh being picked clean and generally being filled with blood and corpses, having over 500,000 corpses on the server (with more added all the time) is making servers much more lagtastic and choppy than when they first started up. The server I play on frequently is working on a mod that allows players to bury, burn, or chop up corpses. A mod that attempts to delete zombie corpses after a period of time was too difficult to create. I think that it would be a boon to multiplayer if corpses disappeared after a period of time, maybe an in-game week, to cut down on the hundreds of thousands of 'containers' that the game has to keep track of as well as the items inside them. This could be 'optional', with a varying amount of time it takes for a corpse to decay fully and disappear. I notice a similarity to the problem in dwarf fortress, with rotted items and corpses piling up and piling up until your FPS just gives up and starts to cry. Deleting all the rotten garbage en-masse shows remarkable boosts to the FPS once again; the same with resetting servers on PZ when the entire population of Kentucky is rotting in the streets. tl;dr makes corpses go away after awhile to save us all from another source of lag

Oh, okay! That explains it. I suppose it's a sacrifice of realism for practicality! But it does bring up the future issue of how cars will take corners...

With the coming arrival of NPC's and the current usage of multiplayer, we've now got a bunch of current and potential plot power with murder, revenge, and assassinations. Therefore, it would be very useful to have the ability to 'inspect' a corpse and try to see how it died. Perhaps not with zombies, because knowing what killed a bunch of zombies I can't see a use for, plus giving zombie corpses more information to store would probably just eat up more serverspace. No, this would be for human players or NPC's who had died. It would be helpful in making an assumption of what killed Jerry if you found him dead in his house, and he was for sure either killed by Pete the friendly but suspicious NPC with a fire axe, or PwnNewbs93, the erratic human player with a golf club "A dead body here... It looks like his head was bashed in." "A corpse... Riddled with stab wounds." "Poor guy... Filled with bullets." "Can't see any wounds... Must have been sick." "Oh geeze, someone took an axe to his skull."

If you mean to tell me that being tile-based means you can't have things look rounded or have smooth edges, then yur argument has very little ground to stand on. http://i.imgur.com/dUaper6.png http://i.imgur.com/zsIVD3u.png http://i.imgur.com/csH2dHp.png http://i.imgur.com/gD4b8ia.png http://i.imgur.com/dUaper6.png

I actually had two suggestions and didn't want to make two topics. My first suggestion is that a "roof" tile is buildable, with conditions being that it must be above a floor tile and connected to a wall or another roof tile. It's a little strange that I need to build staircases next to all the huts I build for people (in multiplayer) just to floor the ceiling, or just not bothering and having everyone live in a roofless hovel that still somehow keeps them dry. The second suggestion is for the map. Currently the roads just sort of immediately jut and make acute angles. IRL roads curve at varying degrees; trying to drive in Muldraugh on the current roads would lead to a lot of accidents.

Since I don't really want to explain to every newcomer and then reexplain 5 times I'm just going to write up how things work in Enclave. 1. If a house is plastered, it's owned by someone. Try to not enter houses that aren't yours without reason. 2. Don't steal. If you need something take it from the public storehouse. If you need food forage for berries or ask for a meal. 3. Never reveal the location of Enclave. Secrecy is the best defense against raiders and thieves. 4. Don't murder; regular laws of civilized society still stand. However: 5. PvP must always be turned off. That means the two axes on the bottom right must be on green. The only people with PvP on are bandits and raiders, and we shoot those on sight. 6. Any new citizens must be handled by the Mayor, and be processed through the lumberyard for safety of Enclave, since it's so far away. 7. Stay safe, don't get lost, work together. Citizen list (That I remember I know I'm forgetting 2 people here: Crackerjack (The Mayor) TheDoctor (Housed)TheGuy(Housed)James (Housed)Kabalerror (Housed)Kurious (Immigrating) Xaroan (Housed) MattyK (Housed)

I know, I was being facetious. I've got a little settlement going but so far it only has myself and another person. If I get up to 5 citizens I'll name it Enclave and have a proper clan.