Emton

Not talking about making any house player proof or making it "real life" but in real life if you barricade from the inside of a house a scavenger would not be able to simply remove your barricade from outside the house and put it in his pocket, it would take a long time of noisy destruction and the barricade would be ruined. What I am suggesting is options that allow you to simulate this. If it takes some work to bust into the house then he's gonna naturally think twice about investing the time/noise/tool/fatigue. Also since I understand this is a game for this to work stuff like sledgehammer should be off, fire for safe-houses off, the safehouse door should be locked.

Ok well here's what I was getting at, simple tweaks to the barricading system that solves what are (in my opinion) two issues: Unbarricading is easier than barricading (this goes against the idea of what a barricade is) It's faster to unbarrcide 4 planks than it is to barricade them, I mean, when you unbarricade it yanks all the boards off in the same amount of time (or close to it) as putting up one. Bad immersion, cripples gameplay, because now (in multiplayer) barricading does nothing to keep out players (in my opinion it's would be more interesting if barricades were somewhat effective versus players). I see they added in options for "Safehouses" with disabled looting and tresspass, maybe as a sort of solution but then there's nothing in-between. Either you have unimmersive No tresspass, No looting. Or no real way to secure a house. So my suggestion: Refine the base mechanic so that you unbarricade 1 plank at a time. Keep the vanilla time equal to barricading if that's what you want. Then add the options time to barricade and time to unbarricade (times apply to 1 plank) Then an unbarricade noise modifier (1= same noise level as barricade, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2= makes unbarricading twice as loud as barricade) And finally the unbarricade tool wear modifier (1= same wear as barricade, if any. 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2= tool wears out twice as fast unbarricading) These options let you have immersive safehouses, with sandbox gameplay, players can work to make a somewhat secure house and players can work to loot a safehouse, with both having a risk/reward factor.

Why it adds a lot to the gameplay. You should be careful about where you invest in barricading and it should be somewhat worthwhile (instead of any player with a hammer could wipe out a dozen windows in a minute if he wanted) Right now the mechanic is "neat" but it's flimsy, I mean "barricade" should mean something...

One thing that bugs me is the way barricading works. I think they're too fast to put up and way too fast to take down. If you make barricading take longer and then unbarricading take even longer then you have the option for securing a house better, instead of any player with a hammer being able to obliterate the barricade in 5 secs. So as an example if it took 1 minute to put up 1 piece of barricade it could take 4 minutes to remove 1 piece of barricade. So like 4 minutes to barricade a window and 16 minutes to get through it. In a multiplayer environment this is interesting because now a player has to make the decision of investing time to get into a house or go somewhere else to loot. In addition, unbarricading could create more noise and cause more wear on the tool (like 25% condition for each piece of barricade, so a whole hammer just to get through a window) Well I think these options might be a good compliment or alternative to the safehouse options, giving players slightly better chance to secure a house while keeping the gameplay open.

When you open in Photoshop you should see the circle with the dithered edges. It should be in RGB mode, 8 bits/channel, no alpha channels, pixels in the image can only be solid black or 100% transparent. When you save try using "Save" and not save as or save for web, don't change the layer name or add or remove layers or flatten the image. It should work unless I'm forgetting something... If your original file got corrupted then just delete it and go to Steam, verify game files and it will download a fresh new one for you.

Well I don't know exactly haven't done that yet but I think it's just whatever's in the info file and then set up the folders to correspond with the PZ folders, so maybe look at some other mods to see how they did it.

The visibility bubble is just a png graphic that you find in media/mask_circledithernew.png I didn't change the size but I did shift it so its centered on the character better and I made a new dither pattern for it that I think is just a tiny bit better. https://www.mediafire.com/?if434cbv2oo5u99 Just backup the original mask_circledithernew.png and put that one in if you want to try it. You can definitely change the size of it.

In the media/texturepacks folder there are .pack files that you can expand if you use this java program: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/3511-pz-unpacker/ You can see the crops in the Tiles.pack file and edit the existing ones but all the tiles seem to be set up in a very specific way so not sure what it would take to add more.

I made a version for running without shaders which gives some extra contrast and makes the colors appear a little more rich. I did this to get a sort of shader effect without using the shaders because they blow out the highlights...

Ok well here is a screen shot with the shader: http://i.imgur.com/8liVaRX.jpg And no shader: http://i.imgur.com/Qghwmxq.jpg You can see a lot of detail on the bedsheets gets lost, even the pillows almost disappear, the texture on the mirror disappears too, it just looks way off how bright it is. I get it's adding contrast, giving the scene more punch or something but the shader should be smart enough to determine the brightest point (from the tile graphics) and not make it any brighter. If you ask me PZ graphics need all the detail it can get so it should avoid this overexposure. Well i tried changing some of the existing clamp settings in the file and got some changes but not the correct one. Not sure where I should add in a clamp setting maybe around const vec3 colHaze = vec3(63.0 / 255.0, 88.0 / 255.0, 155.0 / 255.0);const vec3 colDawn = vec3(165.0 / 255.0, 127.0 / 255.0, 64.0 / 255.0);const vec3 colDusk = vec3(215.0 / 255.0, 100.0 / 255.0, 13.0 / 255.0);orconst vec4 tint = vec4(1,1,1,1);orgl_FragColor = vec4(col, 1.0);If I knew how to dim the light I'd try that, I tried increasing the "const vec3 AvgLumin = vec3(0.55, 0.55, 0.55);" it only helps a little bit and it makes everything darker. This language is pretty foreign to me I might just have to turn shaders off and try tweaking the tile graphics with photoshop...

Athghggh it's just not good enough still have super bright areas where ever there's a light during the day more so. I've tried changing so many numbers just can't get that bright point highlight to be less, it needs to work like a curve where the highlight is less bright but the shadows and midtones stay where they're at.

I think you're right in the 2nd picture you can see the erosion is more transparent. I think I'll leave it for now and see how it works. Well I like this so far thanks for your help, I think this is an improvement for recovering some of the details in the highlights, also it makes night time more dangerous as it's quite a bit darker. I still wish the devs would tweak it so you get back most if not all of the detail you can see using no shaders though... original http://i.imgur.com/h9JR7kt.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sVtv60v.jpg no shader http://i.imgur.com/4chz0Sf.jpg Here's the erosion you can see the transparency better, I think it looks pretty good, I always thought the game might look better with more transparency like in trees and grass, also more animation, maybe even stuff like bugs that jump around and the ability to catch and eat them, oh I'm such a treasure trove of ideas. http://i.imgur.com/bpU8Fkk.jpg

Ok what I found that's giving a helpful effect is increasing the stuff on this line const vec3 AvgLumin = vec3(0.4, 0.4, 0.4); to .55 and gl_FragColor = vec4(col, 1.0); to .95 http://i.imgur.com/ql9uF1g.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xEyAeYR.jpg no shaders http://i.imgur.com/pNVh7fC.jpg so if you look in those pictures you can see how the tile lines are a little easier to see. I'll keep trying it out and see how it looks in other places.

Ok well the only place gl_FragColor appears in the shaders folder is in screen frag file. "gl_FragColor = vec4(col, 1.0);" vec4 shows up in "const vec4 tint = vec4(1,1,1,1);" I'll mess with the numbers some and see if it has an effect. Edit: It does have an effect I changed the 1's to .1 and it made the scene darker so I'll increase until I get it where it's better but if I knew what each 1 in vec4(1,1,1,1) meant it would help.

Hey would anyone know about modifying the shader, I want to adjust it so the highlights (brightest parts) aren't so bright and overexposed (which makes detail get lost) I found the files in the shader folder but I don't know anything about this GLSL language. Anyone have an idea how to make this adjustment? I have to run with no shader because of this...

You know what might be even better instead of spawning new zombies make it so the existing corpses have a random chance to get reanimated. So after you waste a zombie with a bat it's corpse lies with a random chance to wake up until you dismember or completely burn the corpse. The chance to wake up could be controlled with a curve like: day 1= 0% chance, day 2= 5%, day 3= 10%, day 4= 20%, day 5= 30% day 6= 50% and then tapering down day 7= 45%, day 8=40%, day 9 35%, 30%, 25%, 20%, 15%, 10%, 5%, 1% Or if that doesn't give an endless stream of zombies just make every corpse have a 25% chance to reanimate each day forever. So if you wasted 8 zombies on day 1, 2 zombies would rise up on day 2, on day 3 another 2 would wake up etc etc. And if you want to completely stop them from waking up you should have to dismember them with knives or axes or a chainsaw or whatever you got, or burn them up with gasoline or lighter fluid. Because when I think of zombies I think of them like this creature that's already dead, what's wacking it or shooting it going to do, it should keep coming after you until you completely immobilize it. I wish the zombies would crawl to get after you too that would be pretty cool.

Yea I want to see some of this too, should be able to craft a few kinds of explosives (that have different sizes or effects, like one that has more fire or another that does more shrapnal) would be awesome for laying traps, could have mines too.

I started a new sandbox game with food set to "extremely rare" yet every house I went in I would find at least 3 or 4 cans of food. Well to me that's just not rare enough, does anyone know what I could modify to get less food to spawn, I want to try something like 75% less food cause I want to actually be worried about finding enough food, maybe even once in a while starving to death if I venture too far from the town or be forced once in a while to have to forage and make setting up gardens actually important. Edit: Oh I found out that the amount of food is also controlled by how many months after the apocalypse, so setting to 5 months after seems to give a better balance.

Emton's Gritty PZ Tiles 1.0 http://www.mediafire.com/download/27c26k2e6vkv6c2/GrittyPZtiles1-0.zip Gritty PZ Tiles No Shader 1.0 http://www.mediafire.com/download/gtkgalsc3186ecu/GrittyPZtilesNoShader10.zip *UPDATE* 4-11-15 Now there is a no shader version. This version increases contrast by 10 and reduces brightness by 10. This makes it less washed out when running without the shaders. If you run this version with the shaders then there will be even more contrast and dark areas will be quite dark. Also fixed an error with some erosion plants somehow they ended up way too bright, now they retain their greeny color, not sure what happened with that... No shader version http://i.imgur.com/nSXxskx.jpg Regular Gritty PZ tiles http://i.imgur.com/1LUm4m6.jpg No shader version http://i.imgur.com/KUanqZ0.jpg Regular Gritty PZ Tiles http://i.imgur.com/gXt9HdM.jpg I modified the Project Zomboid tiles to my preference using Photoshop. Changes are as follows: Tiles.pack - Lowered saturation (-50), Increased contrast to compensate for lowering saturation (+5), Added random "gritty" detail to all tiles except Tiles36 and Tiles37 (most flat repeating walls), added Smart Sharpen (50% strength, .3 pixels), corrected what I thought be a bug with "diamond wallpaper" tiles (had a dark line on the edge) Erosion.pack - Lowered saturation (-25, so that now growing grass stands out a little bit from old grass), Increased contrast (+5) UI.pack - Lowered saturation (-25), Increased contrast (+5) To install navigate to ProjectZomboid/media/texturepacks folder, back up the original Tiles.pack, Erosion.pack and UI.pack and drop in the .packs from GrittyPZtiles.zip into the texturepacks folder. That's about it let me know if you like using these tiles or if you have any specific suggestions for adjusting the graphics.

Does this make it easy to extract the graphic files, modify them in a graphic program, save, and repack them so they show up in the game?

I want an easy way to modify the graphics, to be able to open the graphic files, edit them, save, and get them back into the game without much difficulty.