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BayCon

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Everything posted by BayCon

  1. BayCon

    DrivPZr

    YES! This would be a great way to add more challenge for seasoned players like myself. I have a few requests for this. 1. Maybe give us the option to have a separate configuration for zombies at day and night? 2. When we hover over the slider controlling darkness at night, maybe render a frame of a character standing outside with a few world objects of different colors around them so we can see the effect of our settings without having to wait until night time in-game? 3. Maybe have the minimum darkness be the current setting (because it's realistic, but you can still see). For the max darkness, I want it pitch black. Tar black. So black, that it feels like the darkness is a solid entity that can only be broken by light sources. Black hole black. So black, you can't see a single texture or object outside of a small radius in front of your character (about as big as you can see zombies behind you). This would make flashlights so useful and make the night so scary.. 4. Could you add a light attraction setting so that keeping lights on at night can be dangerous unless you have your curtains closed? 5. As others have said, it would be nice to have some cool new options for light sources. I know flame barrels were mentioned and something else. It would be great to have those, as well as torches, flashlights with a smaller radius, the rare flood light, and a few other improvised items.
  2. BayCon

    In My Garage

    I'd prefer to keep my Mondoids, thanks. Also, I'm not sure you've seen some of the hate threads I've seen directed toward the developers. I've seen a good amount since I bought this game in 2014. They're usually in the Steam discussions. The criticisms here are praise by comparison. In some cases, it is "that serious", and they would pop up almost every time the developers said anything about NPC's in a Mondoid (which was already rare at the time). After one thread popped up on Steam in 2015 (which I saw and participated in), they were never mentioned in a Mondoid again. It was bad. Some guy came in and flamed on the developers like crazy, and never answered the thread again. He had a few supporters, but it was mostly people telling him to chill out. It clearly got to the developers because most of them replied multiple times to the thread. Lemmy even wrote a few massive posts in response to this guy, and replied to it again months after it had already been closed. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - EDIT: In fact, here it is: https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/520518053449950851/?ctp=4 I used to be a fanboy of TIS, but now I'm half fanboy and half critic. Even my harshest criticisms (probably the most harsh one I've made as of now is calling guns and pre-patch vehicles "pretty much useless and impractical in-game for their primary use in real life") are nothing compared to this thread. The thread, which was so charmingly titled "The Indie Stone is the worst development team... [I have ever dealt with.]" was released on the same day as this Mondoid: https://projectzomboid.com/blog/2015/08/bank-holiday-apzdisa-mop-up/ This simple mention of NPC's sparked the thread above.
  3. I hate DLC in most games, and can count the DLC packs I've purchased for any game after release on one hand. However, I wouldn't mind supporting TIS by buying DLC for the game after release. It's my favorite game. If they made, say, a whole new map based on another real-life city, but more densely packed, I would buy it. I will say that DLC does hurt the image of a game with a lot of people, myself included. And yeah, Enigma, I would bet my left arm that after all they went through with this game in EA, they will never do it again haha.
  4. BayCon

    In My Garage

    I would just like to point out that it would benefit everyone if we all would just chill out on the more harsh criticisms of TIS' development time. EnigmaGrey might actually be able to get some sleep, the developers themselves can have a few less buckets of sweat to toss out the window at the end of each work day, and most importantly to us who play the game and follow its development, we won't have to deal with another feature being worked on silently because the developers fear being beheaded just for saying its name.
  5. I have normal screenshots. Nothing like the cool ones usually seen in the blog. I've never been in a Mondoid, so it would be cool! But unfortunately they all have draw errors and I won't be running the tech test build anymore because I'm afraid it will mess up my server on the stable branch unless someone can confirm for me that leaving the server closed will make the vehicles branch have no effect on it.
  6. Dang y'all have been breaking this DOWN since page 12. I'm mad I wasn't there to throw my thoughts into the mix lol.
  7. Hey man, good luck on that degree. I absolutely LOVE scientists of pretty much all sorts! When you graduate, get out there and make an make a name for yourself!
  8. Also, has anyone used the car that looks like a corvette yet? I have not even found one, unless you count the "destroyed" car models in pileups. I like that some cars are rarer than others, and I'm not arguing for their current rates to be changed, I just wanna see one in-game, because I haven't found one yet. EDIT: Oh yeah, and Mash's textures for the cars look excellent! I enjoyed Martin's cars up close as well, but at farther zoom levels is when the appeal started to drop for me.
  9. The new models are bigger? Sweet! By the way, I was wondering what could really be done about the scale of the vehicles. On one hand, vehicle-to-house scaling is fine, but player-to-vehicle scaling is off. The real problem comes with the fact that player-to-house scaling is fine too... I'm interested to see how the developers balanced that out when the animation update finally drops.
  10. Not everyone has a PC that can handle "floods" of zombies, and it still wouldn't be able to even after optimization. Also, there's a difference between "hordes" and nearly every zombie in the city . With this build, I can reach a somewhat stable 24 fps. It's still not comparable to the 60 I used to maintain, but it's getting there. I will say, however, that I like the radius the way it is now. It's almost a full screen, which is more realistic anyway. I still found myself carrying a large horde on my back and having a vehicle-related death. I think a way to keep this radius while still making the car difficult is to have an unforgiving damage model for hitting too many zeds. This is kinda graphic and dark, but if hitting one deer can do this... ...we can make hitting a handful of humans (which weigh on average in between a doe and a male deer), just as punishing to the performance of the car (to be clear I'm not asking for full-body car denting and breaking mechanics lol ;). While I'm for the idea of increasing the Radius of Attraction a little bit, just a teeeeny tiiiny bit , what was present in the old build is not beneficial to gameplay. Driving around to find a house to stay in was not possible because you'd have every zombie in a 3 block radius sweeping through it and breaking all the windows before you can even get out of the car. That's just one example too.
  11. I was going to say the no-staircase sheet rope strategy was risky, but I see you left your door unbarricaded. Actually.. It still is risky bro. Zombies can tear down sheet ropes now so do be careful. I usually make sure the rope is there before exiting, and I make sure there's a rope at every window, so in case some go out, I'll still have some to use.
  12. What you're neglecting to realize is that we're talking about 8 - 10 people who already have their own roadmap, and already have their hands full in achieving their parts. It's unreasonable to expect them to expand the focus of the game in a direction that doesn't fit their original vision and will take many hours of extra work. And for what? It doesn't add anything too meaningful to the gameplay formula. Gamers, for the most part, don't like meaningless RNG reskins or games that are wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle (No Man's Sky and Starbound's criticisms come to mind first). In almost every case I've experienced, RNG systems are inferior to hand-crafted content, and we have enough games that rely heavily on RNG. I'm not interested in having that come to Zomboid, because it cheapens the experience. Part of Zomboid's charm is the fact that most of its content (I won't say all because there are certainly things I don't know) was built with love from the ground-up, and hand-crafted. They even use their own proprietary engine because today's done-to-death Unity and Unreal engines were not readily available to them at the time. Also, when you have a map the size of 2 - 3 real cities, what is the gameplay benefit of changing layouts of buildings? If you want a fresh experience, you're certainly free to travel to one of the 3-4 cities already in the game, and they are adding more areas at a solid pace. On top of that, there are so many full maps added to the base map (in different areas so you can use more than one at once if you would like) made by modders that if you installed each one, it would almost be a completely filled map. It's just meaningless to me. However, the only opinion-based statement I agreed with in this post was the statement about generating empty plots where buildings would be. I had actually thought about how nice that would be several days ago when I saw this area of the Muldraugh map.
  13. Nice! I'll be testing it out when I get the chance (hopefully this evening). Can't wait to see Mash's new textures. I'm a fan of the art she's done for the game.
  14. Oh yes it would, dude, yes it would... You're looking at new models, new properties, new sounds, new sprites, new bugs, new glitches, and hours, and hours, and hours, and hours, and hours of man/woman power (can't forget about the artist Mash! ;D), and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of lines of code. I don't think any one of us who have never developed a game can possibly understand how much work it is and how much time it takes.
  15. I've felt for awhile that most carpentry and sledgehammer activities should attract zombies almost as much as cutting down trees does. As for the "Radius of Attraction" thing, I say that because I have no idea what to call it. I created my own layman's terminology because I don't know what the developers would call it. It's easy to type, and people seem to know what I'm talking about without me having to explain it. I hope it sticks with others too, it would make it easier for everyone to share their thoughts on the Radius of Attraction of any action.
  16. I agree with this entirely. The first two paragraphs definitely point out the flaws of my last message. As for paragraph 4, that's part of what I've come to enjoy Zomboid for (how long everything can take, watching your character grow in skill as a reward for simply surviving a long time), though you are certainly right that there are is not enough incentive to reach level 10 on most skills, due to the fact that content and mechanics still needs to be filled in to make use of those higher levels in some areas. I agree with paragraph 5 too. Honestly, I'm very excited to finally play a game with permadeath, and an in-depth health system like Zomboid's where crashing can be just as risky and damaging as in real life. On top of your basic broken bones, lodged glass, etc., I'd like to see something like permanent (or if that's too unforgiving, crippling for a good amount of time) back problems that put you in pain with higher carrying loads or other chronic physical issues for really bad crashes. So, I'd like to ask you a question. Do you think it would be reasonable for cars to share the radius of attraction of chopping down trees? In case you never paid attention to it, it's nearly a full screen at the farthest zoom. This way we won't have to deal with zombies migrating from blocks away, but it can still be a decent radius of attraction. Or, do you think that's too small. I know you've proposed other solutions here, but I'm just wondering what would be a reasonable base radius for you, without taking other variables into account (RPM, engine type, condition, etc.)
  17. An idle car is even quieter than one in motion. However, when a car successfully starts, some of them can be loud, so, fair enough. Other than the fact that they still aren't loud enough have the current radius of attraction they do, I won't try to maneuver my way out of that one. NOTE: I just read this back, and to be honest, I seem like an arse. I just want everyone to know that I get passionate when debating and I don't mean any harm or insult anyone. I appreciate all the work Enigma has done to keep this community clean, and this is by no means a personal attack. We just disagree on one mechanic of a game, and I don't want anyone to think I see this as anything more than that. I repeat, I have nothing personal against Enigma. I actually like him, we just disagree on this. Cheers. See this is reasonable. When we debated a little bit in the another thread, your arguments amounted to "Stop whining and learn to adapt, they're fine as-is." You didn't seem to express the idea that there was any room for improvement. I might be mistaken, or I might have misinterpreted your messages, but I didn't get any sense that you wanted any changes. I disagree with the statement that "[It] is otherwise fine for Survival." I don't believe that, without even leaving the same block, or exceeding school zone speed, that I should have a Radius of Attraction of about 3 - 4 blocks. I will never change my opinion on that. Knowing TIS and their love for torturing the player, I know that the use and maintenance of vehicles was going to be a challenge, and I was looking forward to that. Hard-to-acquire parts needing to be replaced, the increasing rarity of fuel later in the game, and so on. What I had not anticipated, on the other hand, was the use of the cheapest form of challenge in any zombie game: the oh-so dreaded horde... Because I know TIS is more talented and crafty than that. I'd seen that talent when they started to punish me for thinking I could climb through a window I had just broken without getting glass stuck in my hand. I'd appreciated that creativity when I was crippled with a ridiculously slow walking speed for 2 in-game weeks for accidentally jumping from a second-floor balcony. I had come to admire all of the ways that the player can screw themselves over when I started a fire in my house, was put on the run in the middle of the night, became tired, had hordes on my tail constantly (this was before I found out how to lead them away and lose them, or use what I call The Lasso Method - creating a line of zombies, and wrapping them around buildings or homes you won't find yourself entering any time soon.) It just felt cheap to use hordes as the greatest threat to the player's use of cars, when I know TIS is capable of doing so much more. Here are some examples of what I would do if I knew a lick about programming this game (though I may sound like it, I don't want to come off as a guy who thinks he knows more than the experts). - Worn or damaged tires from accelerating too quickly. - Terrible injuries from crashing (which I know are coming) such as anywhere from a few scratches, to multiple fractures, scratches, and deep wounds all over the body. - Wearing your engine or muffler from accelerating too abruptly. - Leaving a car's heater or headlights on will make you come back to an empty battery. - Excess damage to the sides of the car can cause doors to jam, including the trunk in the back. - [For after animation build] Crashing at a high enough speed can cause you to fly through the windshield if you haven't got a seatbelt on. These are just a few examples of making the cars more difficult to use in a much less contrived way than "Start that engine. I dare you. It's gonna look like Comic Con out here boi. Do it. I dare you." BUUUUUUT I know it's just a test build, so I'll just chill out on this until we get a final build.
  18. That's just not necessary. It's not. Perhaps, like some said, you can attach the attraction to the RPM. On top of that, you could make the noise much lower, but make zombie attraction vary based on how fast you're going using motion attraction. Basically, zombies which are looking at you are more likely to detect you. I still maintain that cars in real life aren't that loud, and that's because their sound profile is mostly low-frequency hums and growls at everyday speeds. I hear one outside as of writing this, but all I can hear is just the bass of the engine (which I estimate to be ~20 - 40 hz) because I'm indoors. No way you're ("You" being, a dead hunk of meat with motor skills and basic navigational intelligence) hearing that 3 - 5 blocks down and through several buildings in a way which can allow you to pinpoint its location (much less determine it's something worth investigating among the other ambient sounds outdoors) like the super zombies are right now. Unless all of the zombies have the ears of mastering engineers, it just doesn't make sense. EDIT: I just heard another car. My dad was pulling into our garage and I didn't even hear his car. Just the garage opening and closing. Honestly, if they don't decrease the noise. I don't really lose anything. I would love to use these things and maintain one, but I've done well for a long time without them, and I can continue to do so if the risk outweighs the reward too dramatically (risk over reward sums up Zomboid pretty well, but it's never been this unforgiving).
  19. I would not have taken a dive into acoustic science too much to back up my argument, partially because logic is my expertise (and while I thoroughly study acoustics, I have yet to dive into the way certain frequencies interact with the brain and subject matter along those lines), and also because I wouldn't be too concerned with including scientific research to back up something I consider to be simple enough not to warrant said knowledge. However, as someone who is also excessively verbose in his speaking, I'd like to ask you not to hold back on your scientific explanations if you choose to post here again because I really enjoyed reading what you already left here, and it is great to see that some people think on a higher level for something related to video games. I was literally, and figuratively, reading into your every word.
  20. Haha, I've been there. Not the whole stranded in the wilderness while dying thing, but desperately eating just to get more time with my character. Pace yourself on that save! I don't see cars coming to the stable branch in at least another few weeks.
  21. Reverse the sound levels of the vehicles and broken glass and that'll be fine with me. Honestly, a car being driven can be heard farther away than a broken window, but a breaking window is a more jarring sound than the low hum of an engine. By the way, I wanna reply to all of these awesome messages but I have my own essay, no, trilogy of novels worth of thoughts in response to each one and every time I see another long one I have less and less motivation to do it. Give me time to work up the motivation and I'll give detailed replies to all of the longer messages. xD
  22. Get ready for an essay because I don't know how to express my thoughts in a concise manner lol. I tried for 15 minutes going at max speed to lose the zeds on my tail so my character could sleep. I was on the road in the middle of Muldraugh and WP, and was trying to get to the NE end of the map going all the way from Rosewood. I rounded corners, made sharp turns into open fields, waited until no more zombies were coming into view ahead of me and turned off the vehicle to try to hide, but escaping them was impossible. And since my framerate was getting lower and lower throughout the entire journey, it seemed like I was keeping the attention of most of the zombies I had on my tail. I understand you are closer to the developers than we are and this can be kind of personal, because I'm sure you've been there through their struggles and long nights and it can seem like we're attacking them or slinging feces on all of the hard work they've done on these things for the past few years, but I can assure you that's not where I'm coming from, and while I don't want to speak for Sly_Wolfy, I don't think that's where he's coming from either. There are two main points here. 1. Cars aren't so loud in real life that they would attract the attention of everyone in a 3 - 5 block radius, EXCLUDING that rare jerk with the sports car who wants everyone to hear his engine, or someone who's speeding like crazy. They need balance. Perhaps cars with larger engines, or cars going at higher speeds would attract more zombies, but their current radius of attraction is too massive (and seems to be controlled by no other variable than whether the engine is on or not) for them to be useful. Perform this test. Step 1: Spawn some bags and drop them on the ground. Step 2: Fire 3 - 5 shotgun blasts in the middle of West Point. The area with the joined shops. The bleeding heart of West Point. Step 3: Try to grab some loot from at least 5 stores. Step 4: Try to fill the bags. There you go. You've simulated what it's like to try to use vehicles as a moving storage container. Except the difference is that the vehicles attract zombies like the helicopter event. I've tried leading zombies away after the helicopter event and it is extremely, extremely difficult. I would lead maybe 50 away, come back, and see they had already been replaced. The vehicles have a similar effect. 2. The dip in performance that massive hordes cause will have negative effects on gameplay. Since PZ is not very graphically demanding, it has allowed players like me with normal computers to play it with decent or even good performance without having to compromise settings. Having hordes like that constantly following you is going to make the game annoying for some with mid-to-low range PC's, and unplayable for people with computers like mine. Oh, and using guns as actual weapons in this game is like taking out a loan for 10 thousand dollars every year to try and help pay off your debt lol. For every zombie you shoot, you have the potential to attract anywhere from 10 to 100 more. That's useful for drawing zombies away from the inner city to loot it, but as a weapon, it is impractical. I only have 250 hours. That's pretty small compared to some people in this community, so I admit that there's something I might not be seeing, but where I stand now, I would only ever use a gun as a noisemaker unless I'm running nolanritchie's suppressor mod. Even then, RNJesus is not friendly to early level gun users even if you take beta blockers and stand still for 1 - 2 seconds before each shot. It took a whole 15 round magazine to try to take out 3 zombies with a pistol. I was using the suppressor mod, but still.. The ol' trusty hunting knife/screwdriver/kitchen knife don't miss their 1-hit kill unless you do. I want to have mostly myself to blame for missing attacks. EDIT: Oh yeah, and after driving a car not even one block in the center of West Point, I was able to find a mostly deserted city when I drove away from the hordes I drew in. The only zombies remaining were the ones that could not reach me for one reason or another, but even they were trying. It's too much, man.
  23. It might be because I have extremely high-quality headphones, but I don't need to play with my volume so loud that gunshots hurt my ears in order to hear everything else. I learned the hard way not to crank up the volume in a game to hear ambient noises. I've learned to just turn up the ambient sound slider if needed. Either way, that's beside the point. I'm not against the hordes of zombies that guns attract, because I live in the country and hear those things popping off from time to time and I know they can be heard from quite a ways away. I'm against the lack of alternatives. There are no bows, crossbows, or ranged weapons outside of the guns, and there isn't even a suppressor. Even if you made it as rare as the sledgehammer or rarer, I think there should be suppressors out there somewhere to reward those who search hard enough for it. However, the developers have said that will not happen, so your best bet is nolanritchie keeping his suppressors mod up to date. For vehicles, though, I think usability is essential for this game. Guns are completely optional to a character's survival as of now, but due to the sheer size (and how realistically sized this map is) and quality of immersion that this map provides, it would be ideal for every survivor to have the option to attempt to obtain and maintain ownership of a vehicle. I think guns will only start to approach the level of necessity to survival when NPC's are added to this game. Even playing nolanritchie's "Survivors!" mod, I found that it was pretty much required for a player to carry a gun and tweezers at all times when I had a playthrough with great potential ended by a group of Marauders with shotguns, forcing me to run into the heart of West Point and grab tweezers to remove bullets from my body, and ultimately leading to my untimely death.
  24. Are you suggesting we have more indoor zombies? I'm not sure how I'd feel about that. Although, it would be nice to have each house have a chance of having a broken window or two so we can draw the conclusion that some zombies broke out of their homes.
  25. Yeah dude, I'm too lazy to remember where I last said this. Shoot, it was probably in this very thread, but I'm gonna say it again. This is directed to both of you who I'm replying to right now. I'm afraid that in an attempt to balance these things, they're going to be one-purpose tools in their use just as guns are in this game. What's that one purpose (excluding the shotgun)? To manipulate the population of zombies. Can you take out hordes of zombies in this game with guns, yes, but is it worth the hundreds more you'll attract in doing so? In most cases, no. I'm worried that cars will become the same way if they don't nerf the noise attraction. Can you use them to go from Point A to Point B in a smaller amount of time than you would on foot? Yes, but is it worth having the entire city (drive these things in West Point and it feels like the entire city is coming down on you) riding your bumper indefinitely? No. It would be a real shame if all the waiting for this feature was for nothing because they were not viable tools in the end. Now, the only reason I'm pushing this so hard is because I know the developers have stuck to their guns (lame pun intended) on not adding suppressors to this game, so I'm worried they might not change the cars either. Now, this is a test build, so we'll see. It's even worse for us poor people. I'm on a craptop and even in the last build, which doesn't suffer from performance issues, hordes this size drop me from 60 fps to 30 fps and below. At some point, it'll become an issue of balance and performance.
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