VaiN

FYI for anyone running the game in Linux. If the game won't launch from Steam on the IWBUMS branch, it may be due to the following reason I just ran into myself: The "projectzomboid.sh" script that launches the game has bad line endings/format. You can easily fix it by installing the "dos2unix" converter available in most distros and running it on that file. Simple oversite by whoever last saved the file on the current steam IWBUMS branch. And very simple fix that most Linux users probably already know. Figured I'd go ahead and mention it anyway just in case. Thank you, TIS for this very anticipated update. I've been looking forward to the new environmental changes since I first heard the announcement.

how are you testing hotfix #2 on IWBUMS? It still shows my version as Build 27 #1, and I still have the bug with using traps making you walk away from them before interacting. Output from update attempts: If it has been released, I would very much like to test it out. Also, I'm seeing about seven empty servers in the server list but mine doesn't show up even when players are on it. And yes, it is set to public. Is there some sort of trick to it?

Wait.. hotfix #2 wasn't released? Then what update did I just install on my server the other day? Steam had a client update and I also had the message about files not matching.. The server was already on Build 27 #1, and it most certainly installed changes when I ran the update check. I had even made a post on my forum about hotfix #2 being installed because I wouldn't have expected it to be anything else. It's no big deal since after updating it worked fine for everyone, but I'm curious what it was.

Thanks for the update, RingoD. Awesome to have it separate from Muldraugh now. I noticed in survival mode the zombies were still quite scarce. When I switched to sandbox and put zeds to high it seemed to be what I would expect on normal. Really enjoying the map. Keep up the good work. Edit: Scratch that. Played a lot more and they seem to be flooding the streets now lol.

It's not off topic to tell people, in a thread about a server, what they experienced in that server and discussions with the server hoster. But okay, obviously you don't like it when people actually voice their concerns directly or on the forum, so I'll drop it then. Good luck. You'll need it when you push people away like that.

by infinite building i was referring to someone most likely spawning the items to build with, considering they built hundreds of walls and fences without cutting down any trees, and the time it would have taken just to gather all of the wood (even if it was already sawed into planks) would have been a hell of a lot longer than it took them to build it. you can't just carry that much wood around in your pocket ya know. But you wouldn't even let me even talk about it. i wasn't really mad about the death, that was just a reason to stop now instead of later. Really it was just your general "I don't give a fuck" attitude. That's why i decided to stop playing there. I posted the info here so players are aware. They can decide for themselves how they feel about it. I was ready to devote a lot of time into helping your community until you really hammered away about not caring about hacks. Honestly, that's how I took it whether that's what you meant or not. I had a legitimate concern and you shrugged it off. I don't know for sure if he was hacking or not, but you confirmed this isn't the place for me is all. I figured you would want to know why someone who was offering to help would suddenly no longer want to be involved at all.

There was nothing taken out of context. I'm not sure how you could have been talking about DayZ when saying "There aren't even that many garbage bags in the game to make all those rain barrels". Anyways, no sense in arguing about it. As you've stated, there's no way to prove someone hacks.

Actually it's a direct quote that you said repeatedly. "I don't really care if they hack as long as it's not hurting anyone." You also said you were pretty hammered though, so maybe you don't recall. I didn't take anything out of context. I had tried to discuss why non-violent hacks are still bad, but you didn't really let me get a word in edge-wise. You are kind of a hard person to voice chat with that way. Either way, it's your server to do with as you like. And I wish you the best of luck with it.

I'm no longer going to continue playing on this server. I was going about building as usual only to die out of nowhere for reasons unknown. Didn't fall, wasn't injured, didn't drink any cleaning products, didn't have any zeds nearby, nothing that I can think of that could have caused instant death. This has never happened to me on any other server. I'm not going to waste the time reading all those skill books again. I don't blame the host, although lag was probably a factor in one way or another. On another note JonSyn has very clearly stated that he doesn't care if people hack. I can't agree with that. If you are going to allow infinite building, then it might as well be Minecraft in creative mode. It's pointless. In his defense, he can't do anything about it anyway since his kick/ban functions aren't working. Hopefully things will get easier for you after future updates. Disappointing really, as the community that plays here is a good bunch. Thank you, VI and your crew, for your hospitality and letting me join you guys for a bit. You are always welcome to use my TS server if you like. Have fun, everyone.

I would assume that they wouldn't implement it at all if that were the case, because you are right, there wouldn't be any point. I can go into detail regarding the very important differences to gameplay when considering in-game versus third-party voice chat if you need me to. But immediately dismissing valid points isn't really good for discussion. Edit: Another option instead of implementing their own voice chat system, they could work with Mumble to use the positional-audio features it supports. I'm not sure of the inner workings of it all, but if the player position data can be passed to it then that would at least be a step in the right direction. If it can also adjust the volume along with the position and ignore players too far away then it would work perfectly. And if the game itself is passing that data along they could just have dead players be positioned too far away for anyone to hear too. I know mumble supports plugins but they are coded with C++ which I'm not good with, and they would have to basically 'hack' the position information from memory. That would mean every game update would require a plugin update, and game state considerations such as deaths, sleeping, not being in the game, ect. would not be possible. I still feel that implementing proper in-game voice chat (similar to ARMA/DayZ, PlanetSide2, and others) would be most beneficial. A quick search revealed at least a couple of audio codec wrappers for Java too, but further research would be needed of course.

WTF!? o.O Are you all crazy or something? In-game Voice chat is IMO critical for MP, and there doesn't need to be a 'global' voice chat. If anything it could be an option for the server admin to turn off. Third-party programs don't support positional audio or the random player on an open server. Having this built-in would drastically increase the immersion and realism. I haven't really run into any 'squeekers' in this game yet, but why should the rest of us suffer just because there might be a few of em? If they are annoying then admins can ban them or mute them or something. It's not an MMO or a console shooter where no one can do anything about it. And why would you ever hear a player who is dead? If that's even possible then it's not implemented right. Dead people can't talk. Nor can people magically be heard around the world when they talk. As long as it's implemented in a realistic way then none of those problems would even be problems. Macros are not the same as actually hearing someone. You can't befriend or build trust with text on a screen. It goes without saying that having to stop and type is detrimental to any coordinated efforts. Especially in a survival situation where taking your hand off the mouse can get you killed. There are also a few solutions available (not sure about for java though) that may not require much effort to implement. In-game voice chat is a very very common thing in good multiplayer games. It's something that can benefit many, and those who don't want it can turn it off. And it would be extremely fitting for this game. Any arguments against it are very heavily outweighed by the reasons that make it essential. I'm a bit outraged at the thought that this wasn't a planned feature as soon as multiplayer was even considered.

how about moving this topic to Mod Ideas and Requests since that's where it needs to be then?

Just wanted to say that I'm really not a fan of this safety system. I had a long detailed post typed out, but it sounded too negative. I'll try to keep it more constructive. Safety should mean you are safe. The current system is more like, "everyone is friendly until they stab you in the back", which just doesn't make sense. It should be the other way around, if preserving danger is the intent. As in, "anyone can stab you in the back, except those that are friendly". I'd prefer a faction system instead, where everyone is hostile by default unless you both agree to team up, and everyone else should still be hostile. There should be a far greater warning time before a friendly player can become hostile, while still being vulnerable. Or at least have a setting for it. One second isn't nearly enough for you to roleplay/discuss anything via typing. I'd assume that's intentional. I'd argue that it defeats the purpose of a safety system.

My understanding of server-side scripting doesn't involve any 'modding' per-say. I don't have any interest in modifying the internals of the game directly, I just want to be able to hook into events and interrupt them as needed. Such as locking a player's movement, setting up ranks and custom commands, tracking a player's stats and displaying them on the UI. All of these are things that the dev's shouldn't have to do for us, and scripting would allow us to do. For example just using the return value of an event function. for example, when a player types in chat. return 0/nil = continue as usual, return 1 = don't display it. With something as basic as that you can customize just about anything without having to change any of the internals. Of course I didn't expect any modding to be implemented yet, but I didn't find any posts better suited to the discussion. To me server administration and server-side scripting go hand-in-hand. perhaps I should start a new topic for this?

People sure seem to think they are entitled to being spoiled or something lol. I'm used to having to script all of these features myself. Speaking of which, are there any details somewhere as to support for server-side scripting? I'd like to start settings up my own admin system if possible with custom commands and events, ect. Thanks for all the efforts. MP is looking more promising with each update.

I would very much like to see Marijuana cultivation as a mod. As for the paranoia argument, you could make it similar to that trait agoraphobia or whatever, where you would be paranoid outside, but not inside. It should remove all nausia and boredom (even staring at a wall while high can be entertaining), and add drowsiness and slight hunger. The drowsiness itself is enough for reducing awareness. If you are growing the stuff in your back yard without any fancy hydroponic system ect, then it's probably not going to be very potent. As such the effects should ware off rather quickly too. I'd image excessive use of painkillers and sleeping tablets would have negative longterm effects too, and just as with those, any such long term effects of weed shouldn't really apply in this game either. I'd imagine in any apocalyptic scenario you would see an increase in drug usage of all types available. After all, it's a pretty stressful situation. In the USA, marijuana is extremely available, and it's easy to grow (the non-potent stuff at least). As far as looting and gettings started, I could imagine finding a rare bag of seeds in someone's dresser or closet. Probably wouldn't find too much of the actual drug though. Maybe rarely on some zeds. I was honestly very suprised the mod wasn't already created. Edit: Forgot to mention it should add a slight decrease to unhappiness but not as much as boredom. And for another negative effect it could make your character cough after consumption, potentially attracting some unwanted attention.

I haven't messed with git, but I know it works with remote directories and such. It has a large community too, so if git isn't directly supported I'd be willing to bet there's a plugin for it. Hadn't seen Glider before, thanks for sharing that. Looks like it has some fancy features, but doesn't mention any Linux support unfortunately. The downside of full featured IDE's for modding is that they don't have references to the functions provided by the game and so they'll raise flags for stuff that isn't defined. Unless of course you can add those definitions. Really just a simple syntax editor is all you need for modding projects.

Well, that answers my question. Didn't realize it was using it's own interpreter instead of using the actual Lua interpreter. That definitely makes more sense. Sorry for wasting your time.

Is there somewhere I can read up on what all is available from Lua and what isn't? If we have access to dostring() then I supposed we could just load a file as a string and use that. Just kind of seems silly to disable I/O if the only intention is security (I assume that's why). Since Lua is easily sandboxed, and all the functions can be overridden, you can easily replace parameters to control the paths... local _io = ioorlocal _io.open = io.open... function io.open(path,mode) -- do whatever you want with the path, return error if outside mod/lua directory, ect return _io.open(path,mode)endThis way you can replace the original functions without having to rewrite it since the original one is only defined locally. And you have full control over the path. There are valid reasons to allow the script to access any path too. For example if you are hosting more than one multiplayer server. If you can tell it to dofile() to a specific location then you can have all servers use the same scripts in whatever directory structure you want. Then you don't have to update all servers separately when you change something. This could also be server-only so that client mods can't access the file system, and server admins can control their own. Some of the script systems I have developed for other games would get up to 3MB+ in size as it allows the freedom to create something as complex as you like. I was also hosting 10 different servers using the same scripts but running different maps and game modes. If I had to have the scripts separate that would be ten times the amount of data. At least in Linux you can use symlinks if you have to, but why make things more difficult than they need to be? I hope you can understand my concern.

I'm glad I stumbled across this post. Not having Lua I/O is a no-go for me. I assume this also means no access to dofile() and loadfile(), correct? I always save data as Lua tables and use loadfile() to get it back. It's the fastest and easiest way I know of. Reading/writing text files and having to re-interpret them is just creating a pointless bottleneck in Lua. I hope this is just a limitation of the Lua wrapper used in Java (or just Java itself) and not actually intentional.

I've used IntelliJ before but it was a bit clunky with Lua in my opinion. Same with Eclipse and the like. Lua doesn't really need an IDE. If you are looking for a great alternative editor for Lua I very highly recommend Sublime Text. I've used it extensively for Lua, including CGILua (Lua-based web scripting) and LuaSS (a custom Lua-based CSS pre-processor I made including a custom build script), and complete custom admin/gameplay/mod systems for other games I've hosted servers for. It has support for projects, multiple selections/editing, a ton of cusomization/themes, basic autocomplete, and it's insanely fast. Also it's cross-platform and trial version is free forever without limitations. You can find syntax highlighting for just about any programming/scripting/markup language you can think of. The first thing I'd recommend doing is installing the "Lua Dev" plugin for automatic, on-the-fly syntax checking. I've tried many different editors/IDEs for Lua, but Sublime Text is hands down the best I've used so far. And since I'm constantly switching between Linux and Windows, I need one that's cross-platform, and this one fits the bill perfectly for me. Just thought I would share, since I've run into quite a few coders that still hadn't heard of it. Of course, as always, it's important to use whatever works best for you.

I have to very strongly vote against automatically removing the corpses. With no corpses it takes a lot away from the game as it would leave it too clean. The high amount of bodies is a display of progress and your survival skills. It's also one of my favorite features. I would absolutely love a way to (re)move the corpses that is lore-friendly too though, so they aren't stinking up my stronghold. It's still beta so I'm sure there will be optimizations and performance increases as they work on it.