[Operation Fix Late Game By Killing You Before You Get There]

Dunno about you, but boredom usually gives me a sort of nervous energy and a desire to get things done, not make me wanna lie down and sleep it off.

Good point! I think what the website I read was referring to was the stuck-in-a-tedious-meeting kind of boring where you're literally nodding off. Perhaps boredom debuffs only happen if you're still doing something boring?

[Operation Fix Late Game By Killing You Before You Get There]

As "Explorator" pointed out, the moment all the negative effects from boredom, exhaustion or depression get reviewed and in place, things will get nastier.

There could be also de-buffs for sitting on the same place for too long (aka, safe house-farming). The character could get increasingly depressed or bored as the days go by. If the game somehow forces you to take the road, we are back again on the right track.

Some of my runs would have ended abruptly if the "exhaustion" feature actually made my character move very slow, or even pass out.

I think I said earlier that I assumed monotony caused boredom - there are a lot of ways that you could work that into the game besides "being indoors -> boredom". Perhaps a novelty meter for [places/foods/reading material/art/&c.] that drains when you interact and fills when you don't?

 

Also, I was trying to find information on the physiology of fatigue a while ago for game design purposes; I can't say I found much, or understood much, but there were some hints in what I saw that might be good to follow up on:

• Boredom (and probably depression) should create temporary fatigue effects until relieved.
• Fatigue is associated with loss of muscle power - even if it's boredom-fatigue. (Which, naturally, is bad if you're near your weight capacity.)
• Extreme fatigue should cause microsleep i.e. nodding off. I figure that would interrupt (or delay) tasks and reduce your ability to pay attention to your surroundings. (May be a good reason not to take so many beta blockers....)

[Combat re-think for the announced big rebalance [OFLGBKYBYGT]]

Secondly, you are right about the knock down from a crouch attack. It would require a loss of strength, due to loss of full body motion. Although, I do think if you were to hit one behind the kneecap you would have a good chance to knock them down.

 

Knees are actually pretty fragile things. You could probably knock down zombies by shattering their patellas and turning them into crawlers.

 

...

[Combat re-think for the announced big rebalance [OFLGBKYBYGT]]

Here's a TL;DR summary of your post if you want to copy-paste, deprav:

 

Two ways to make combat more realistic and deadly:

• As of Build 29, zombies are too weak - if you're completely idle at the controls while a zombie flails at your character, your character should be scratched or bit immediately, not 10 seconds later.
• The game should have two-button combat instead of one-button combat. Have combat stance on a toggle, then have separate attack/swing and defense/shove buttons. Force the player to be aware how close the zombies are getting instead of just spamming the LMB.

 

As for my reaction:

• From the sound of it, zombies should be more dangerous than they are, but people do a lot of stuff reflexively to protect themselves - dodging, jerking out of reach, &c. - and that should probably be automatic without player intervention. Instead of instant-scratch, I would say an untrained person should be able to dodge one ordinary zombie for at least 10 seconds, sometimes dodge two ordinary zombies for 5 seconds, and be pretty much screwed if three or more get in arms-reach ... and however many there are, it should be exhausting rather than body-damaging. And, of course, if you're trying to do something else while dodging (e.g. get a non-broken baseball bat out of your bag), it should be much worse.
• Loving the proposed two-button combat system. In keeping with my thoughts about dodging, above, I think LMB=wind-up-and-swing, RMB=push-and-shove is a good way to conceptualize it for close combat, and LMB=take-aim-and-fire, RMB=swing-or-shove would work for ranged weapons. Other thoughts:
  • If RMB actions don't impair dodging much and LMB actions tank it massively, that would create your don't-swing-wildly penalty very naturally.
  • Per the above, the kitchen knife one-hit-kill attack should be LMB, not RMB, even though it is a point-blank-range attack.
  • I would like outlines on the ground to show you the rough range of attacks with your current weapon when in combat mode - it's a lot harder to see how far away a zombie is in-game than it would be in real life.

By the way, I think they should probably introduce armor into the game - I'm sure that there are motorcyclists in Kentucky, but even if there weren't, there would be leather jackets and gloves around. They wouldn't be 100% protection, obviously, but there would be a chance of a scratch or bite turning into a reduction of Condition on the armor instead.

[Campfire extensions: types of fuel, cooking]

Thanks, Viceroy! The basic concept - a cast-iron pot designed to be put over coals with more coals placed on top - is probably widespread, but it's a bit much to ask humanity to agree on a name for ... well, anything.
 

On a more serious note, the suggestions you made here seems reasonable and could add a little depth to making fire. Also they should allow you to split fires with a shovel.

 
You know what? I think my present thinking accomodates that. I would make a campfire a container which has its own temperature. Here's how I imagine it would go.
 

You just finished reading the "Firemaking for Beginners" skill book. It's time to make the book do double-duty by using it for kindling. You get some logs, drag one over to where you want the fire to be, and use the Build menu to combine the skill book, the log, and a pack of matches to make a Campfire.
 
When you click on the fire to check it in the Inventory window, you see the Campfire symbol in the container list with a black background, the Skill Book rapidly heating to bright red as the "Combusting" bar slowly fills, and the Log still with a black background. Soon, however, you see the background of the Campfire symbol turning red, and after that you see the background of the Log start changing color. After a few in-game minutes, the Log gets warm enough for the "Igniting" bar to appear and start filling, but you notice the "Combusting" bar on the Skill Book is almost full. To make sure that it burns long enough to light, you put one of your three surplus "Advanced Fishing" skill books in the Campfire; after a few seconds, the new book has heated to red, ignites, and shows its own "Combusting" bar. Not long after that, the "Igniting" bar fills on the Log and is replaced by a "Burning" bar; the temperature of the Campfire rises visibly and an "Unpleasantly Hot" moodle appears. You quickly doff your sweater, open a Can of Soup to make a Pot of Soup, and put it in the Campfire.
 
As you wait for the Pot of Soup to finish cooking, the "Burning" bar of the Log fills, and the Log item disappears and is replaced with a Bed of Coals item with a "Combusting" bar. The Campfire temperature drops back down, and you find yourself putting the sweater back on before the Pot of Soup finishes cooking. After you take the Pot of Soup off the fire, you add two more Logs to the fire, step back to a more comfortable distance, make yourself a Bowl of Soup, and start eating.

 
What I see happening internally is the following.

• Each item (and the fire) has a thermal inertia coefficient based on real-world weight and specific heat capacity that says how quickly the item changes temperature. For the STEM people in the audience: I think the most convenient units on this would actually be time^-1 - the highest inertia objects (Logs, Pots of Water, Planks) would have the smallest number, the lowest inertia objects (anything weighing 0.1 or less, Empty Mugs) the highest number.
• At every point in time, each item (and the fire) has a target temperature and an actual temperature. The target temperature will be either be based on its environment (if it is not on fire) or be its burning temperature (if it is). Each tick, all the objects in the container (starting with the highest thermal inertia) would check its target temperature and actual temperature, and move the actual a fraction of the remaining distance towards the target based on its thermal inertia coefficient. (This is why I suggested time^-1 - so that this fraction is just the number stored in the program.)
• Each item on fire also has a radiation temperature. This represents how much extra heat they give to their surroundings (e.g. players standing next to the fire) from their glow. If fires give off light, you can adjust the radiation heat felt by players based on distance using the lighting engine in the graphics card.
• For the campfire, the target temperature is based on a weighted average of the ambient temperature the average item temperature, plus a fraction of the total radiation temperature - that is, the sum of the radiation temperatures of everything in the fire. (Two ways that the Firemaking skill might make things easier for you: reduce the effect of ambient temperature, increase the effect of radiation temperature. This represents building your fire in a more efficient way that focuses the heat where you want it.)
• For items not on fire, the target temperature is the campfire temperature plus a fraction of the total radiation temperature. Note: this is the temperature shown in the Inventory window, not the true campfire temperature - hence the sudden drop when the Burning Log turned into Burning Coals.
• Each item affected by heat would have a temperature threshold at which the bar for being hot ("Cooking", "Burning", "Combusting", and "Igniting" are the ones I've mentioned) would start filling. When that bar fills, the item either turns into a fired version of the item with a new bar (e.g. a Wet Towel would turn into a Dry Towel and start charring) or vanishes into ashes. Ignitable items - which would include, say, Burned Bacon - would have a special Igniting bar that resets if it cools down below the igniting temperature; other bars would remain at whatever point they reached. Tinder materials would have extremely short Igniting bars, but for everything else it would vary - longer for Logs than for Planks or Twigs. Stable materials - e.g. empty cookware, golf clubs, and skeletons - would have no bar.
• As I implied above, a Burning Corpse would turn into Bones, not simply ashes. You can't burn bones on a campfire (although they might have agricultural value when smashed). Also, the Dessicating bar for a corpse would take a really log time to fill.

I have a bunch of other ideas, but that's already enough for a post. Let me know if it is confusing how confusing it is.

 

Edit: I would also like to apologize for not hiding the game mechanics under some kind of tag - I don't know which one to use.

[Campfire extensions: types of fuel, cooking]

@Impetiso: If I'm understanding your suggestion correctly, in terms of game mechanics, campfires et al. would operate as double-containers: a Fuel container and a Food container. As long as the Fuel container had a fire in it, whatever you put in the Food container would cook. That's roughly what I was imagining as well.

That said, weirdly, I feel as if it might be better to do the opposite. Think about it: when you cook a Raw Steak, first the temperature rises, then a Cooking meter appears, then - when it's done - a Burning meter appears. What if you handled fire the same way?

 

...I have to think this through. I'll be back.

[Operation Fix Late Game By Killing You Before You Get There]

I would love for looting to feel as tense as it was as a newbie again. A simple tweak that would help immensely here is to make 'e' actions reset your weapon timer and temporarily slow you. Right now you can charge your melee weapon and open a door while backing away, making hidden zombies a non-threat. If opening that door slowed you and made you lower your weapon (you did have to grasp the doorknob after all), suddenly things have become much more dangerous.

 

That's brilliant. I already disliked the telepathic-mouse-cursor style for door closing, curtain drawing, etc. - this would fix that immersion problem and bring some needed danger at the same time.

 

And as Akiruu said, more indoor zombies with better hiding please. Zombies can't open doors by default and hiding at home should have been common in such an apocalypse, so why are most houses completely empty with their curtains open?

 

Indoor zombies should be more common, but it would actually make sense of the starting situation if there were an evacuation ordered and you decided to disobey. I don't know the situation in Muldraugh, but up my way the roads are simply not built to handle all the cars that would be trying to make their way out of town ... and a massive gridlock that drives people out of the cars to walk on foot is a perfect recipe for outdoor zombies en masse.

 

(Not to mention the way the presence of vehicles adds to the crawler hazard. Is there a crouch key? )

[Panic/Stress decreases needs]

Separate Moodles and physical status. If I were implementing it, any moodle with a lower intensity than your current Panic level other than Bleeding, Injured, Endurance, and Heavy Load would simply not be displayed, regardless of your true status. In an extreme panic? Hunger and thirst would be increasing at an accelerated rate, but unless you were starving or dying of thirst, you wouldn't see it ... and all the debuffs would apply exactly as much as they would if you knew about them.

 

I'm pretty sure that's the best model for what's going on, anyway. In fact, maybe Bleeding and Injured moodles should be hidden as well - if you've just survived a car accident, are you going to notice that you hurt your leg?

[Campfire extensions: types of fuel, cooking]

Earlier today I realized that I had a bunch of PZ ideas, and after throwing out the ones that are redundant with everyone else's suggestions I realized there was still a big one left: more sophisticated campfire mechanics, especially for cooking.

 

 

 

As natural as it is to run appliances via on-off switch, I would love to have a separate "Fuel" window for charcoal grills, wood stoves, and campfires for one simple reason: different materials burn differently. Drawing from my old BSA experience, I'd suggest having a simple binary split between tinder and fuel. Tinder would include books, magazines, newspapers, tissues, sturdy sticks, and twigs (the last of these you can forage from the woods), be ignited by anything - matches, lighter, or bow-drill fire starter - burn for not-very-long, and leave only ashes. Fuel would include logs and planks, be ignited by the tinder, burn for a long time, and produce coals ... which is key, because (a) you can bank the fire, which will let you start it many hours later with nothing but tinder and fuel, and (b) coals are what you use to cook on.

 

On which note: it always felt weird to me that there was no difference between stovetop, oven, and campfire for cooking purposes. A microwave egg is as different from a fried egg as a fried egg is from a boiled egg. My "make everyone carry around potholders" idea is probably ridiculous, but a simple split between frying and baking seems natural: ovens and microwaves do baking, and stoves, grills, and campfires do frying ... with one exception.

 

The exception - and I love it, it just feels so Project Zomboid - is the cooking implement that Americans call a "Dutch Oven", other Anglophones call a "Casserole Dish", and French call a "Cocotte": a nine-kilogram (twenty-pound) cast-iron pot that has legs so it can sit above coals and a lid with a lip so you can pile coals on top. It is exactly the kind of absurd thing that I'd love to see more of: terrible in the early game (all it is good for is baking or carrying water, and it's way heavier than a baking pan and a cooking pot combined), awesome in the late game (oh, the power went out three years ago? That's a shame. Here, have some berry cobbler).

 

And, of course, dev's choice whether to let people use the lid separate from the pot as a frying pan.

 

So, yeah, that's the best suggestion I've got. Hope it's amusing.

[Operation Fix Late Game By Killing You Before You Get There]

My points about food balance:

1) we need to tweak some numbers. 1 tomato or any other vege can keep you for a day ( by eating 1/4 each time). which is unreal.Imo it must be something about 75-100 hunger points for a day.

2) the well feed buff dont last long enough to make it worth it. Make it last a day or a half so eating more than we need might be a good option before long scavenge run.

3) high lvl cook need more benefits. like some bonus hunger reduction when meaking a nice meal ( 10+10 + 10 = 45 for high lvl cook) and/or well feed buff last longer if the meal is prepered by high lvl cook.

4) if you keep eating junk food , canned food you might get a debuff for a few days. It would be another reason to make a soup / salad and not eat those veges one by one of keep eating crisps / canned food all the time.

 

New player here (paid my five pounds in March 2012 but forgot I had until last month). I was really happy when I saw your post, because I've been thinking along similar lines in two ways, actually.

 

a. Boredom is not just about being indoors or eating stale food: in RL, I hate eating the same food day after day even if it's fresh and delicious. In fact, when boredom penalties first showed up on the food in-game, I thought it was because I'd spent the past week eating watermelon and was sick of it.

 

b. Malnutrition. Honest-to-goodness, this is the first thing that I thought of when I saw the top post of this thread. Let people chain-smoke cigarettes or eat raw coffee beans if they want to stay awake - make people chew daily vitamins as their first line of defense against scurvy, rickets, and every other deficiency disease you can think of, then watch them scramble desperately to find sources of their missing nutrients after the pills run out.

 

 

Regarding your (1): I just looked in my kitchen, and a bag of chips or box of cereal contains about ~1200 kcal, a can of soup ~200 kcal, a small tin of tuna ~100 kcal ... and a typical survivor is probably going to be burning 2000 kcal if they spend the entire day reading skill books and 3000 kcal or more if they're out working and fighting. That said, I think it would also be awesome to have the moodles tied to subjective caloric experience instead of actual stored energy: drink a soda, feel like a king for ten minutes, but eat three steaks and feel pretty good all day.

 

On which note: I think the Exertion debuff should probably go away faster if you've got a well-fed moodle. That makes sense with the idea of sport drinks, too: fast jolt of calories to replace the spent nutrients in the muscles.