EnigmaGrey

Not a bug. Players and zombies trigger alarms; not events.

Not a bug. Vision is tile based plus it is foggy out

The option to disable it is in the server’s settings. Though no idea if it works, as it was added last minute to address complaints, as it is indeed silly/awful. Only heard back from 1-2 people and it wasn’t positive, iirc. Should be a few of then with “knockback” in the name. One for melee, one for ranged, iirc. Give it a go and let us know.

You just have to guard yourself against your own bias. That is, be critical of yourself and what reinforces your belief, not just the thing you feel deserves criticism. So you have a game that sold millions of copies in the last few years, has more players per hour after a year without updates than it did for the 8-9 years, and has exceedingly positive reviews, yet also most of that success comes from people none of us will ever hear from, who played far less than any of us will ever play (at least as forum members). Is it really going to die because of the contents of this thread or the criticism of those YouTube videos? Being a pessimist and someone that works on the game, who got a job because I was unrelentingly critical of the game and worked my way from tech support to management by filling any perceived holes I could, and yet saw it succeed despite my concerns and dour predictions, when I criticize myself and my own response to this, I lean towards “No. it’s more likely these criticisms come from fatigue due to playing the game 10x over those and wanting to reignite the spark with the new update and, in some cases, it comes from hitching one’s star to the game and depending on it to generate more content to survive (finding difficulty in pivoting to other things).” (At least for now — there are limits to everything, just compared to the bad old days, a year is nothing. It’s also year without breaking mods, without destroying saves, without fatigue from small updates, to boot.) When dealing with people, there’s just more than what’s being said. There’s what’s driving it and what it means and what they might have actually meant but couldn’t express clearly, even what they remembered differently from what happened. And worse, it’s mostly personal opinion , all the way down, and therefore inaccurate and imprecise. You can’t just take anything at face value and run with it, even if it agrees with your position (or speaks to one’s anxieties).

“Teams” meaning individual people for the most part. We’re not that big. There’s no need to force everyone into an office. The cost would be astronomical for absolutely no gain. We’d end up losing staff who can’t or won’t move and probably shuttering in a year or two if we were to do that. That’s the way you kill a company, not speed up development. … I don’t see the point in getting into the rest of it. So: We’re slow. We’ll focus on making the best game we can rather than doing things fast and loose. You can see that this has always worked out well despite it being a constant source of complaints, no matter the time between updates, over the past 12 years. You’ll just have to make peace with that.

It’s more like having 30 projects going at once, (some big, some small) because there’s no possible way to have everyone working on a single thing (Different skills, different interests, different reasons for being hired, living in different counties across the globe). Several of those projects come together, and you have yourself a major build. They don’t steal from one another; they don’t delay one or the other. But people who really don’t know insist they must — because more people mean faster, right? No. More people mean wider and deeper, if a large project takes a long time. Many small projects get done.

I mean I got tired of left for dead after around 20 hours so I’m not really sure I buy that (it’s very predictable, just as any non truly random game is), nor am I interested in making an addictive gambling game. (The idea that people might be addicted to PZ is already bad enough …) We’re really not “making an absolute new route” either. This is fleshing out the existing systems for the most part. That’s exactly what I mean about people letting their imaginations run away … Here. 2011 good enough? https://projectzomboid.com/blog/tldr-just-give-me-the-jist/ Why would we not make the most all-encompassing game we can, exactly? Do you just expect us to stagnate and be content with whatever was thought possible in the early years? Just ignore our contemporaries and not compete with them? Live in fear of the nebulous and ill defined “feature creep” in a genre that’s outright expects the widest possible set of features (survival sandbox)? Do you not actually want us to persist and make the best game possible, even when there’s clearly millions of people who want that by the very fact we survived this long? Why does speed (and scope) matter more than making a good game or not?

To get to the point, PZ is a game that most people get around 20 hours out of. There’s maybe 50-60 hours of actual content ( enough to get you through a winter ) otherwise. It took 12 years to get there, mind — to get to the point where only a decade ago, this would have been considered a crazy amount of content for 3x-6x the price. If you end up spending hundreds or thousands of hours playing it or (as people like myself have done) make a job out of it, you’re going to have quite a different view of it, naturally. No game can withstand that level of scrutiny, provide the content necessary to fulfill the desire for novelty, or act as a vehicle to create content for when it’s effectively being played over and over again hundreds of times. And that, at least to me personally, is the main problem in many of those videos. (Ignoring that concerns about b42 often are imagined problems that people then argue for or against because they don’t and can’t have the full picture when it’s not out.) I get that waiting sucks, that we all naturally become bored and jaded with the game, and that the long period of time between updates creates a kind of void where people invent and argue against their own ideas of future content, but it’s never been something we could address. I don’t think anyone can. Prophetizing the game’s death due to an imaginary wave of hate, if only we don’t change the approach that made us successful for the past 12 years, now, will not help anyone or change anything. Please don’t take the game so personally. It’s just one of thousands of great games to play. It’s not your job to “fix” it; it’s not worth investing yourself into; you don’t need to worry about it or try to change its nature. It’s just a game. Now I’m going to go visit the family for the weekend and spend my holiday away from this “whole” PZ thing. I hope you can do the same. Have a Merry Christmas.

Pretty much? Anything else, based on hindsight, inevitably has trade-offs or situations that made it impossible to happen earlier in development. The staff available now doesn't become available earlier; the money made now doesn't somehow get made earlier; the lessons learned in the past don't relearn themselves today. That's always the dilemma with "what ifs." All TIS really could have done differently comes down to communication (and maybe embracing marketing instead of word of mouth): maybe being more humble early on would have prevented TIS from setting itself up to "fail" at its own self-imposed goals. Maybe they should have taken the publishing deal in 2014 and surrendered control / moved on with the game in a "good enough" state instead of what they originally wanted to do. That sort of thing: hide, conceal, fake it -- give the impression of speed or achieving your goals without really doing it. It's not as though we don't see this time and time again in the game industry: companies hide information from the user, aside from what's useful for marketing purposes, and pretend things are going just swell right up to release. And sure, the result is a disappointing game that doesn't meet its original goals, but what does it matter? The money is made back, people don't care enough en masse to seemingly stop buying the games that do it. I can only guess offers a sense of closure you don't get with a game that tells you upfront "It'll take as long as it takes." One you don't feel like you're waiting for it, the other you do; one is spent; the other has potential. So on and so forth. Edit: I guess if you wanted a list of practical stuff, it'd be something like TIS could have stuck with XNA instead of acting on Microsoft's decision to nix it TIS could have finished PAWS instead of starting a new game (PZ) TIS could have picked a prebuilt engine (but would have inevitably run into the limits of something like Unity for this style of game, especially in 2011) TIS could have foregone supporting multiple platforms (something Java promised to be able to handle gracefully, but didn't really for games) and a web-based version of the game (the pre-release game was an applet) TIS could have stuck with C# -- the thing they knew -- instead of using Java TIS could have built the game engine's architecture with an Entity Component System (the new hotness in 2020) instead of inheritance (good ol' OOP) TIS could have foregone OpenGL and OpenAL, which had some pretty severe compatibility issues later in life TIS could have opted not to install an auto-updater for the game, costing them significant money when it was abused by pirates TIS could have abused "free file hosting" opportunities to try and save money when updating the game outside of Desura TIS could have used a different payment provider instead of Google Wallet and PayPal to avoid having issues when those services deemed selling incomplete games problematic (naturally that policy didn't stick around for very long ) TIS could have had a better backup solution when they moved in 2011 (remember, at this point, they were basically bedroom coders, living in an apartment, not offices or Big Corp) TIS could have avoided any GNU code to avoid copy-left trolls TIS could have dropped most of their requirements for a Steam release and entered early access ~10 months earlier (also takes care of file hosting) That sort of thing ate up a lot of time and ate into what little money they had early on, imo. It gets less possible to "save time" as things progressed and the game saw more success. TIS could have been more direct that their goals were based on getting a publisher (while they were being actively courted by one) TIS could have gone corporate and taken (a) the publisher's deal TIS could have used GIT differently to avoid issues with long commit times and binary files (or never used GIT at all, opting for SVN, Plastic SCM, and other alternatives) And then it gets just weird: TIS could have avoided supporting mods (Lua, especially built on top of Java, is -not great- in terms of performance and does fragment the game development somewhat) TIS could have been satisfied with the release of MP in 2014 (or 2016 -- but 2016 was basically Project Zomboid: Together w/ the implementation of Steam co-op) and called it done; anything not done would just be done post-launch or as DLC to keep the company afloat (or not) TIS could have just bluntly taken mod content instead of hiring modders as devs, as some advocate and even insist on TIS could have pivoted to making expansions or sequels out of the subsequent big updates that followed this point (in-game coop hosting; cars; weather; the animations update; the MP re-release; and now animals) I don't think there's much else they could have done that wouldn't require cosmic forces conspiring to help them earlier, such as certain staff members being available much earlier in production than they were, so I don't think there's much point going down that particular rabbit hole.

I mean, I’m afraid I have to agree with Win on this one. The thread is basically “if you don’t do it how I want, you’ll fail” after a considerable number of suggests and other criticisms, seemingly in the same vein over the past month. I really would suggest just taking a break from the game. It’ll come on its own time and in its own way. It need not be forced.

Yes. Members from General Arcade work on the mp side of the game. The rest of works on sp/the engine itself, baring areas that bleed into one another (like admin tools or ui). We’re all going as fast as we can, but we’re not going to metaphorically flog the staff bloody and to the point of unconsciousness to go slightly faster … and still be called “too slow” anyway.

To be clear, are the bugs you’re referring to things that those mods fix? Because if so, a lot of those seem counter to the vanilla game vs “fixing” it. That is, I think overall your take on what is fitting simply doesn’t match ours. I guess I just don’t want you to feel like you’re tilting at windmills here, so I apologize if I’m confusing two separate things (bugs vs qol mods).

And when it comes to mods, as Puppers, and Maddan touches on … Well. Sometimes we’re just going to disagree. The dev team has its own goals and tolerance for the game’s systems and what you may consider bugs or poor design (take bites being 100% fatal — awful design … shame that’s a fundamental part of the game’s lore). We’re not always going to be on the same page with millions of players or tens of thousands of modders. It’s simply not possible make everyone happy and we’d be insane to try. Take both mods and the vanilla game as they are rather than try to pit them against each other or try to force one to be like the other. That is, sometimes all that we can do is respect each others’ decisions for why they do something and get on with it. Sometimes you can’t square the circle.

Our success came from being both ambitious and thorough, which naturally means being slow. I get that, to those who’ve played the game considerably more than the average, that the bloom eventually falls off the rose, but that doesn’t mean changing our approach now is the right choice or that the game is dying. We’ve heard it every single day for 12 years yet every build is ultimately more successful than the last and we have suffered from alternative approaches, be it smaller and/or faster builds or multiple simultaneous builds at once. That does not mean the game doesn’t have flaws or shortcoming (assuredly, we’re well aware of them and are addressing them as fast as possible as part of build 42), but there comes a point where people need to move on and play other games. A good tell is when you start feeling contempt for something you once enjoyed. We all get there eventually, no matter the game or the development methodology behind it. Take a break, have some fun, and don’t worry about us.

Could just not kill yourself by excessive exercise and let it happen naturally though a well paced routine. You know. Like in reality.

Do what OP did, but for nVidia then. Remove mods, turn off gysnc and disable any possible setting that promise optimizations. With a total of two people in two years reporting this, it’s anyone’s guess as to what it could be, unfortunately.

Changed my mind; not interested in micromanaging it. Let chaos reign.

It seems to be working fine here. What problem are you having? If it's just the Windows Smart Screen prompt, click More Info, then it'll let you run it.

If you're hosting in-game: You can't really do this without having two separate accounts, as Steam usually only allows one copy of a game to run at a time. If this is the case, you should probably look at setting up a dedicated server instead. It's not tied to a steam account, unlike the client, so you can have multiple servers running and a client that can connect to them at the same time.

Yeah, we need to look at anonymizing the logs in general. It's on our list.

If you go into Options -> Keybindings -> and find the UI section, you should see an unpopulated action called "Toggle UI." While you can't bind the mouse to this, you'd at least be able to hide it with a keypress without having to code anything. If you want to try and automate it in some way, take a look at ISUIHandler.lua.

... Are you on a much older build of the game? The automatically generated servertest_SandboxVars.lua contains comments explaining all the settings in detail. Here's one snippet: StartTime = 2, -- Default = 0-30 Days -- 1 = Instant -- 2 = 0-30 Days -- 3 = 0-2 Months -- 4 = 0-6 Months -- 5 = 0-1 Year -- 6 = 0-5 Years -- 7 = 2-6 Months The wiki is largely fine. If you find discrepancies or lapses, feel free to contribute to it. We already provide quite a bit of documentation as part of the game, the various forums, and as hosts to the community wiki. It's your choice to ignore it and just assume "it's wrong," if it suits you, but you'll just burn yourself out from frustration if you don't adjust your expectations. It's simply very rare to find high quality documentation in this world and expecting it to be part of an indie game that's not even finished is a bit much, frankly. Hopefully the wiki isn't wrong because you've playing/working with a much older build of the game, right? That'd be something after making these posts, lol.

Sorry, but what's the typo here? Even sticking it into something like Grammarly has it come back clean, aside from the suggestion to tack "It" to the front of it.

They're still distinct monitors. You'd need to use nVidia's or Radeon's software to merge them into a single cohesive monitor for the game to stretch across both when in full screen. Windows cannot do this for you. And definitely try changing display settings in windows with the game running. That's a recipe for disaster.

I just don't think most, if anyone, would expect an ini file to work that way, even if I understand the desire to customize and organize it yourself. I'm all for making it more orderly, organized, and providing clearer comments where appropriate, just the rest of this suggestion feels like an opportunity to shoot ourselves in the foot.