Packbat

Prescription sunglasses would be a joyous addition, actually.

I think horses in particular would probably not last long without survivors protecting them and caring for them, but they could be an awesome addition eventually.

I don't think it would be impossible to track the intake and retention of a small selection of nutrients - protein, iron, and vitamin C are probably the most important - and produce debuffs accordingly.

*Googles* Apparently, "short-sighted" is the standard in British English. I don't know what priority should be given to making a more faithful rendition of the Kentucky dialect, though.

Link? I tried to find an existing thread - I'd be glad to start commenting there instead. I think the idea is to improve PvP balance. Maybe there should be a "minimum trait" option for Sandbox - positive allowing survivors with more positive traits, negative allowing survivors with more negative traits.

If I understand it correctly, the Panic system is intended to simulate the effects of the fight-or-flight response on the survivor: tunnel vision, degredation of fine motor control (wild swings with close-combat weapons, poor aiming with firearms, impaired stealth when moving), stress, suppression of drowsiness, acceleration of fatigue buildup, burst of strength, slowed digestion of food, faster clotting of blood, &c. (Not all of these are implemented, and I don't know if all of these will be implemented, but they make sense physically.) Based on this, I'd like to suggest a spectrum of traits akin to the Weak/Feeble/Stout/Strong set: Intrepid, Steady, Nervous, and Jumpy. I imagine these traits making the character suffer the negative effects of panic less (or more), but this could be replaced by or combined with making the character panic slower and calm down faster (or vice-versa). Regardless of the details, an Intrepid character would be able to function much better in a terrifying situation than normal, and a Jumpy character would function much more poorly.

As ORMtnMan pointed out, as easy as it is to hit a piece of paper at a target-shooting range, in real life - especially untrained - hitting a human-sized target in a combat situation is going to be quite difficult. I'm quoting EnigmaGrey's PZ experience: ...because I have just been looking up information on accuracy of gunfire by police officers. It's kind of a mish-mash, but drawing primarily on reports from the NYPD (which seem the most scientific in approach), it looks like 33% accuracy with a 9-mm semiautomatic handgun is only slightly worse than real-world police accuracy in firefights - which ranges from less-than-50% at seven yards or closer to less-than-10% at long range. A major contributor to that is what newspaper headline writers refer to as the "Ready-Fire-Aim" method of shooting: much less than a third of police officers reported using the sights on their firearms during discharge incidents involving a hostile human adversary. Assuming that EnigmaGrey's firearm use is somewhat more disciplined than the average Zomboid player, I'd say 1 in 3 sounds dead-on... ...with the caveat that not all hits are kills, of course. If I were the God of Project Zomboid, I would want firearm use to imitate the simulation style of the original X-COM video game: use aiming time and relevant Moodles to determine an angular accuracy, multiply by a random number to turn direction-aimed into direction-of-bullet-trajectory, trace that line to determine what part of what person, zombie, or structure is hit, calculate damage. That might not be feasible, but I would be deliriously happy if I could shot at the zombie ten feet in front of me and accidentally kill a zombie bashing at a door a hundred feet behind it.

Oh heck yes. Let me see if I'm understanding you correctly: instead of automated combat within hand-to-hand range, zombies would have attack animations that the player could identify and interrupt with a block/shove. A stronger shove would still be better (more knockback, longer delay before another attack) but a well-timed shove would also be better, because it would catch the zombie off-balance. Instead of needing enough brute force to push three zombies away at once, a skilled survivor could hold them off with quick parries. In fact, if you were good enough at the game, you wouldn't need a weapon to take on a single zombie: the timing would be a lot tighter, but you could parry a zombie's initial charge, knock it down when it tried to attack again, and literally curb-stomp it to death. I can think of two extensions to that as well: If you are not in combat stance, interacting with a zombie (E or left-click) should a fast block/shove. This makes fleeing easier and evading ambushes possible.You can block while moving to do a running check. That would be the technique for slipping past a zombie guarding a door, per my hypothetical.This is sounding like a pretty solid setup for a two-button brawler combat interface. That's a very good thing.

I think the primary thing beginner mode should havefer is enough time to learn the basics from Spiffo - how to get around, break into houses, carry loot, make ripped-sheet bandages, barricade windows, hang sheets as curtains, etc. Strategy and tactics they can figure out on their own.

Actually, thinking about the crowd-crush phenomenon, I don't think zombies would choose to push over a wall - the only way it would happen is by a horde (game-generated or player-made - can you say "firearms"?) trying to move towards a wall but unable to advance (e.g. if there's one door and all of them are trying to reach it simultaneously). That wouldn't require anything more than keeping track of horde flows to see if they hit logjams.

*necropost* I hadn't thought of doing different levels of phobia - I think that's definitely a good idea - but I wanted to suggest shifting away from the literal definition towards the medical definitions. Pulling from Wikipedia because I Am Not A Doctor... Claustrophobia: Reading this description, what I am imagining is claustrophobia being based on two things: Local airflow. If you are outdoors, this will be automatically taken care of; indoors, in a non-air-conditioned space, this will rely upon the number of open doors and windows to the outdoors or to other ventilated rooms. (Note that an open window with closed curtains would barely improve air circulation.) Larger spaces will take longer to air out if they have been sealed for a long time (e.g. if no-one has been in the warehouse for months), but not actually require more open windows to remain airy.Perceived safety of escape routes. Depending on degree of claustrophobia, this requirement could be anywhere from "I circled the house before going in, and there weren't any nearby zombies" to "there's an open window right next to me and no zombies visible - and I know because I checked within the last ten minutes" - more claustrophobic means that you need to be closer to your exit and more recently assured of its safety. The AI pathfinding algorithms will probably help here.However intense the claustrophobia is, the degree of panic that it creates should be based on how strongly it is triggered. Reading at home with the windows closed, the curtains open, and no zombies nearby might cause slight panic; looting a tiny container with a single door inside a windowless storage facility, and you're flirting with extreme. Agoraphobia: What I'm seeing as most possible to implement here is perceiving locations as "safe" based on there being no way for zombies to get in - doors closed and barricaded, windows closed and barricaded, surrounded by walls, etc. If it has been cleared and kept cleared, there aren't many ways for zombies to get there, and it is familiar, even a relatively open space could be perceived as "safe", but: Zombies would be frightening even when seen from a distance;Wooded areas would be frightening because they could contain zombies that can't be seen;Exits you can't see are frightening because zombies could be coming in through them.Open spaces are frightening because there are too many directions a threat could be coming from.et cetera. Looking at everything, I actually think that you could implement these two things simultaneously ... and it would be absolutely horrifyingly difficult to keep from panicking. The only way would be to be in a safehouse with a safe route to another safehouse pretty much always. Maybe you could get away with sleeping in the living room on the first floor if you knew zombies couldn't prevent you from running to an upstairs saferoom with a sheet rope exit, though.

Looking at Wikipedia, going from sunlight to darkness, you get considerable improvement in 5 minutes and full adaptation in 20-30; from darkness to sunlight, full adaptation takes about 5 minutes. That's workable on PZ timescales.

I like the idea of unsafe water supplies. I don't know how obvious it should be that water is safe or unsafe - that might be a good use of higher-level Cooking skill, to improve your ability to tell.

In addition, being overheated for too long should make your clothes get wet from sweating.

I'm not a meteorologist (obviously), but looking at weather records, I found there was some heavy rain that passed through Fort Knox the night of Sept. 10th and looked at the radar images on http://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/ - from that, I couldn't see anything hit West Point or Muldraugh that didn't hit the other within ten minutes. Given the accelerated timescale of the game, the devs can probably treat the area as uniform for weather purposes and be done with it.

During the summer (or if you heat it up in advance), diesel engines can run moderately well on straight vegetable oil. Making vegetable oil would probably be hard, tiring, high-Farming-skill work without specialized equipment, but if you can find a diesel vehicle (hopefully a car, more likely a pickup truck or van), you should be able to run it that way.

When the idea of zombies breaking walls was mentioned in the OFLGBKYBYGT thread, I did some Google searches trying to answer this question. As I said in the other thread, a mob of zombies could probably be reasonably modeled like one would a panicked mob of human beings ... which suggests that a mob pressing against a wall should apply a force between 40% and 75% of their total weight to it, and probably closer to the top of that range than not. And while I don't know about brick, I believe the numbers I saw for structural load-bearing wooden walls said that, when it came to calculating safety versus wind, allowed less than a thousand pounds per foot in total pressure. My estimate is that a horde would only need to be somewhere between eight and twenty zombies deep to push down a brand new built-to-code pre-apocalypse wall, and very few player-built walls would be nearly that strong.

Evaporation of water seems like it should be a thing, too. Having that as a serious issue in irrigation systems would probably make things difficult, too. Also, water contamination. Imagine getting a fungus in your irrigation tank.

You're welcome! That said, I want to emphasize for the record that all the numbers above are ~100% pulled out of my ass. Googling for information on clothing and comfort turned up a concept from thermal comfort research of clothing insulation, measured in clo: on average, a sedentary person wearing 1 clo in a 70 degree Fahrenheit (21 degree Celsius) room will be comfortable. It'd probably be better to set up clothing temperatures on that scale instead. ...actually, I think that would feasible. The devs would probably want to add traits to adjust temperature comfort and sensitivity (some people walk around in T-shirts while it's snowing outside, other people put on a winter coat when it hits 60 F), but as long as clothing temperature modifiers were adjusted based on level of activity, you could probably handle all of that pretty well. In fact, if you take walking-around-and-doing-things as the baseline for metabolic activity (i.e. 2 met, instead of 1 met), the effective change of temperature in degrees Fahrenheit for many garments would be of a similar order of magnitude as the current numbers for clothes in-game: Mandatory underwear (not shown): 1 FShoes: 0.5 FSkirt (assuming thin): 3.6 FPants (assuming thick): 6.2 FVest (assuming thin): 3.4 FBlouse (assuming lightweight, long sleeves): 3.9 FSweater: 9.4 F...and comfort occurs if clothes temperature plus environmental temperature is within a few degrees of ... 86 F? Also: double clothing temp for hard exertion (e.g. digging holes, sawing wood), two-thirds for passive activity (e.g. reading a book), two-fifths for sleeping. I think this would change my suggestions for what clothing to include.

If we take crowd disasters as a reference, I would expect zombie hordes to push over walls, rather than shatter them. Quoting from the link: "Experiments to determine concentrated forces on guardrails due to leaning and pushing have shown that force of 30% to 75% of participant weight can occur." Taking the high end of the range, that'd be about 130 lb (62 kg) per zombie pushing towards a given length of wall. If an entire horde starts heading in the same direction all at once - say, if a gunshot is fired on the far side of a wall - the ones near the wall might be trying to move sideways, but the force from the rest could easily push down a wall. Probably wouldn't need to be more than ten zombies deep to do it.

On the subject of invincible fortifications: I'm not familiar with the Erosion mod, but if your walls tend to rot away over time (slowly if built on concrete, quickly if built on dirt), that would force the player to do patrols, temporary patches a la barricades, and eventually tear down and rebuild. Combine that with Spacejunk's suggestion that zombies tend to drift towards sound over time, and you have disaster awaiting anyone who thinks their defenses will protect them forever.

Given that dev time isn't free, I think it'd be best to come up with a short wishlist first and extend later if desired. Where possible, I have attempted to use American English names primarily and list British, Australian, and South African names in parentheses, but my Washington-Baltimore-Arlington metropolitan area vocabulary may differ from that used in the Elizabethtown metropolitan area (where Muldraugh and West Point are). Thinking about aesthetics and mechanics, for clothing slots, my priorities would be: Outerwear (coats and sweaters, worn over most clothing). Head (hats and caps) Neck (scarves, bandanas, ties). Socks (incl. long underwear)....and for individual items: Boots. Common, military colors (tan, green, brown, black), warm (+5). Major foot protection against biting, scratches, fire, other hazards. Small penalty to movement speed. Sneakers (a.k.a. trainers, running shoes, tackies). Common, variety of colors, warmish (+3). Some foot protection. Small boost to speed. Flip-flops (a.k.a. thongs, slops - cheap sandals). Common, variety of colors, minimal warmth (+1). Minimal to no foot protection. Significant penalty to speed. Baseball cap. Common, variety of colors (incl. forest camo), minimal warmth (+1?). Reduces hyperthermia effect of sunny weather. Campaign hat. Uncommon (primarily found with police or park service uniforms), military colors, warm (+5). Reduces hyperthermia effect of sunny weather, hypothermia effect of wind. Significantly slows wetting from rain. Knit cap (a.k.a. (to)boggan, stocking cap, watch cap, beanie, tuque, ...). Common, variety of colors (incl. forest camo), very warm (+10). Slightly reduces hypothermia effect of wind. Raincoat (a.k.a. rain jacket, slicker - also including windbreakers). Common, variety of colors (incl. forest camo), warm (+5). Reduces hypothermia effect of wind - reduction stacks with hat. Reduced hyperthermia effect (-2) representing ability to wear unzipped. Significantly slows wetting from rain - slowing stacks with campaign hat for near-total protection. Leather jacket (a.k.a. motorcycle jacket). Neither common nor uncommon, brown or black, very warm (+10). Reduced hyperthermia effect (-4) representing ability to wear unbuttoned. Major protection against scratches and bites. Otherwise like raincoat. Ski jacket (a.k.a. snow jacket, parka). Neither common nor uncommon, variety of colors, exceptionally warm (+20). Reduced hyperthermia effect (-10) representing ability to open zipper and vents. Moderate protection against scratches and bites. Otherwise like raincoat. Sweatpants (a.k.a. tracksuit bottoms, jogging bottoms, tracky daks). Common, variety of colors, very warm (+12). Otherwise like pants. Winter scarf (a.k.a. muffler, neck-wrap). Neither common nor uncommon, variety of colors, very warm (+10). Reduces hypothermia effect of wind. Socks. Common, variety of colors, little warmth (+2). Small penalty to speed if worn without shoes, small boost to speed if worn with shoes (protects against blisters).Other possibilities that I like for purely aesthetic reasons: T-shirt. Common, variety of colors, not too warm (+5). As far as game mechanics are concerned, identical to the vest, but with a different model.Button-down shirt (a.k.a. button-up shirt, button-front shirt, button shirt, dress shirt). Common, variety of colors, not too warm (+6). Identical to blouse, but with a different model.Blazer (a.k.a. sport coat/jacket, sports coat/jacket, tweed coat/jacket). Neither common nor uncommon, variety of colors, not too warm (+6). Reduced hyperthermia effect (-1) representing ability to wear unbuttoned. Otherwise like sweater, but with a different model.Fedora. Uncommon, limited colors (black, grey, tan, dark brown). Identical to campaign hat, but with a different model.Cowboy hat. Uncommon, military colors plus grey. Identical to campaign hat, but with a different model.Police cap (also worn by security guards). Uncommon, blue or black. Identical to baseball cap, but with a different model.Bandana (a.k.a. kerchief). Uncommon, variety of colors, warmish (+3). No other effects.Necktie. Common, variety of colors, little warmth (+2). No other effects.Heels (a.k.a pumps, court shoes). Neither common nor uncommon, variety of colors, little warmth (+2). Little foot protection. Significant penalty to speed.Tights (a.k.a. hose, pantyhose, leggings). Neither common nor uncommon, variety of colors, minimal warmth (+1). Otherwise like socks.Winter socks. Neither common nor uncommon, variety of colors, warm (+6). Otherwise like socks.Whatever options go into the game, though, I'd want the clothes to work identically on every character, male or female. That doesn't seem like it should be difficult to implement mechanically, and a lot of players will get a huge kick out of it (including me).

I actually looked up a University of Kentucky PDF about home gardening a while back - it seems to have a lot of the data that you're talking about, especially in the "One Garden Plot: Three Garden Seasons" chapter. Going through the crops that exist in-game, only radishes can be grown from seed in as little as a month, and of the remaining, only broccoli in less than two ... and broccoli is supposed to be started indoors and transplanted. ...you know, I didn't look at this PDF before. If there are any gardener-slash-game-designers reading, you could probably make some truly awesome contributions to Project Zomboid by pulling out various practical suggestions (e.g. the vegetable storing advice) and boiling them down into usable game mechanics.

I'd rather not make the player hold down RMB to defend - if you're in combat stance at all, you're either on the defensive or on the offensive - but the point about passivity is a good one. Actually, it might make sense to say that you are only dodging if you are moving - if (for example) you're trying to stop a zombie from getting through a doorway while your friend grabs emergency supplies, dodging is not exactly an option, but if you're trying to get past that zombie to run away, you might be able to evade its initial swipe and get through before it can swipe again.

Reading my suggestion again, I think we might be closer in opinion than I thought. I can't see the justification for a guaranteed instant scratch unless your character is caught completely off guard - after all, if we're talking about the classic Romero-style zombie, their hand-to-hand combat skills are going to be roughly equivalent to a toddler's - but a zombie that does grab you is major trouble. In my mind, the zombie threat scale looks something like this: Oblivious: no threat - can sneak past or avoid entirely. Following: potential threat - can be evaded or attacked with a ranged weapon. Approaching: imminent threat - either flee now, shoot now, or start swinging with a reach weapon (baseball bat, golf club, &c.). Attacking: actual threat - needs to be shoved away or killed immediately. Grappling: physically holding on, pulling, tearing, and biting - needs to be pulled off, and it may already be too late.What I was getting at with the "passive dodge" proposal is that a zombie doesn't skip straight from 3 to 5 the moment it gets within arm's reach. In ideal circumstances - say, a single zombie plainly visible in front of your character, no distractions - it would not take too much luck to avoid being bitten or grabbed for ten seconds at two feet away even without training. (Scratches ... well, you can probably avoid that for a second or two. Probably.) If a zombie has started a grapple, a scratch is basically guaranteed whatever you do and a bite is likely every second it can hold on ... but an immediate grapple is only likely if you didn't know the zombie was there before it reached you (and even then you might get away with just a scratch).