dieffenbachj

Were you sick or infected? When you're sick, I don't know if you're vomitting or just burning up food with a fever, but the fed moodle doesn't stick for more than a couple seconds. Side note of interest: if you're fully fed, your healing rate counteracts your zombification rate. So, when you're turning into a zombie, you can survive indefinitely... so long as you CONSUME EVERYTHING.

The console loads up 62 textures (I note that it is still loading the textures after the game's already launched, maybe it's just missing the main menu background texture?). Then I get two warning 67533: "global variable gl_TexCoord is deprecated after version 120" and "global variable gl_FragColor is deprecated after version 120" Worldscreen:create table 0x1848873994 That's it. No other warnings or errors. It's funny it's binding my Wacom tablet as though it were a gamepad, but that's not really a problem.

I can't play the game at all anymore after updating... clicking any of the launch files (x32, x64, or x32 safe mode) just brings me to a full black screen with the menu music playing.

The "this is a game" argument is a bit... uninformed. Games must balance a lot of different factors in order to be entertaining (assuming entertainment is your goal). Game mechanics have to be fun, sure--and I think the current breaking and entering mechanic is more or less fun (I think it'll be more fun with crowdbars, maybe ropes to climb in open upper story windows, the ability to search the front steps for a "spare key" that many Americans hide in case they lock themselves out of their home, and so on). So mechanics-wise, the argument that "it's a game" is right. The fact that there aren't keys everywhere and the fact that most doors are locked is fairly entertaining. However, mechanics are not the only thing in a game. There's also immersion, provided by stories (emergent or scripted) and aesthetics. Everything about the game--the distribution of items, the presence of junk items, the complex injury damage model, the slow decay of the zombies from fast runners to slow shamblers--is designed to create the feeling of "realness". Of course we know it's not real, but on some level we allow ourselves to enter into this universe. Every time something happens that jars us out of our immersion, we're pulled out of the game and made unhappy. For some people, this break of immersion happens when something animates poorly--so The Indie Stone work very hard to make sure every action is animated, and animated well. Sometimes, immersion breaks when a mechanic doesn't work realistically--like the 'sheet rope instakill' bug. Sometimes, immersion breaks when the story doesn't work realistically. In this case, we sit here scratching our heads thinking "Why would every door on this gigantic house be locked? And who even HAS a lock on their shed, much less actually locks it?", what we understand of reality splits from what we understand of the game story. Immersion is lost, and we get bored or disinterested in the game. For me, my big immersion breaker is that it's impossible to find hammers anywhere. I frequently just spawn a character, run from house to house and shed to shed and shop to shop and warehouse to warehouse, trying to find a single goddamn hammer. When I fail, I get bored and frustrated and just put Zomboid down for the next several days. This ends up being a problem both in the mechanics (the part of the game I want to explore, carpentry, is impossible to reach), and the story (every house, apartment, and place of business I've ever been in has 2-3 hammers tucked somewhere in it, for fixing things, prying things up or hanging up pictures--why can't I find a single one in this goddamn game?) Anyway. Don't criticize someone for coming onto these forums and saying that something is detracting from their enjoyment of the game with the argument 'it's a game, it's supposed to be wonky'. Because no, no it's not; games are allowed to be SLIGHTLY wonky (for instance, nobody complains that Zomboid's trees aren't realistically tall, because it'd obscure vision of the game itself if they were) so long as that wonkiness doesn't interfere with the aesthetics, story, or mechanics of the game. And it's the goal of a game designer to make sure that this never happens. If a single player says "How come all of these doors are locked? There aren't that many locked IRL" than something needs to be done to fix it. The fix isn't necessarily unlock all the doors: the fix might just be DISTRACT from that problem, maybe by providing alternate means of entry (crowbar + door = unlocked door) that make the player completely forget that most doors are locked. Or maybe the problem will fix itself when NPCs get put back into the game; when we're seeing living people running around or building forts every day, we'll never again say "Oh, all these doors are locked but the buildings are empty" because we'll instead be saying "Maybe this is someone's fort... or maybe someone's in there looting and doesn't want to be disturbed..." because both of those things might be true. "It's a game, therefore your complaint is invalid" is just an invalid response though.