winterpyre

oh look, the reason we can t have nice things >.>
 
prolly, its a rather volatile subject and anything your likely to hear here you can find by searching past threads
 

the Devs found out the hard way, that even teasing a tiny piece of info about the NPC development leads to people getting demanding, rude and downright unlovely. so they just chose to spare themselves from getting attacked that way, and adopted a policy of not saying anything at all about the work.

maybe the pilot doesn't know what happening, maybe he just thinks its an intense county wide game of tag and wanted to watch

The players that stop playing because the easy mode is too easy are not players I want, frankly.
 
If they don't have the brains to choose a harder mode then they aren't really worth catering to.

I suggest allowing us to choose which type of sprite is displayed for items on shelves, etc.
 
Right now if you build a bookshelf and fill it with hammers, the sprite that is depicted is that of a shelf of books. However, shelves found in the game-world will show more tool appropriate sprites.
 
How about allowing us to select which sprite is displayed? This way if we build a shelf we can choose if it displays 'tools', 'books', 'cookware', etc
 
Or perhaps have the sprite that is displayed tied to the item type that is placed on it?

maybe the pilot doesn't know what happening, maybe he just thinks its an intense county wide game of tag and wanted to watch

would also be neat if there was a more randomized mode, where zombies were spawned with mix of good and bad aspects and you never knew if you were gonna fight a super strong sprinter or feeble deaf shambler or anything inbetween

would also be neat if there was a more randomized mode, where zombies were spawned with mix of good and bad aspects and you never knew if you were gonna fight a super strong sprinter or feeble deaf shambler or anything inbetween

would be handy though I personally would like for it to be able to be toggled on and off

would be handy though I personally would like for it to be able to be toggled on and off

A while back I wanted to test just how strong a zombie's sense of smell was. To do this I wanted to remove all the zombies' other senses.
I was then perplexed when I found that you could only set their senses to "poor" and never "blind", "deaf" or "anosmic".
I think the option to turn senses off would be a very welcome feature, and as far as I can see, shouldn't be too hard to add (bathroom zombies are already deaf).
 
Also, on the other end of the spectrum, maybe there could be an "intuition" setting or something, where the zombies are telepathic and always know where you are and move towards you. Different levels of intuition would change how much they prioritize moving towards the player. When it is low they can be distracted by noises or smells, when it is high they won't falter moving towards the player. Of course this feature would be off by default.
 
This would allow people to better customise their zombies. Maybe they want blind zombies that have great hearing like the clickers from The Last of Us. Maybe they want weak zombies that slowly march towards your house, promoting a Nomad play style (I can imagine this would be very fun on servers).
 
Tell me what you think.

It would be pretty neat if when you interacted with the various tiles in the world, they could could flash on and off to show exactly which object you're interacting with. I find I often jump over the wrong fence because I'm not sure exactly which fence I'm climbing. Thoughts?

This right here is heartbreaking I hope your able to reclaim some of that joy eventually.
What you guys have put into this game really shows, you guys are doing an amazing job and everyone who frequents the forums knows that.
 
Though I do think king kitteh is on to something....

"Mean no rudeness" meanwhile calling people rude and condescending repeatedly- that doesn't quite fly. I'm sorry you don't feel welcome, but if you were to wander into someone's office in real life, start telling people how to do their jobs, and then call them names- you probably wouldn't feel very welcome there, either. You're more than welcome here, but we do require members of our community to treat each other with respect, whether it's your first post or your thousandth.
 
 
Edit: Here you go, I went and found the relevant bit for you:
 
 
 

HeyI
 
As I said in the post I'm going to finish it  that's not in question.
 
The point is at a game studio, doing a day job for money, some crunch aside, people don't work 12-16 hour days, they work 7.5, 9 till 5 until the end of a project when the crunch begins. You'd also likely have a team of 3-4 in a studio doing AI as extensive as this.  Say 3 people, that's a 21 man hour day.
 
So what happens when one of them gets stuck, has a problem they can't get by? They walk over to the desk of their team mates and say 'hey can you give me a hand'. You go to the technical director of the studio and say you're having a problem with something, and you have meetings with 8 programmers and discuss how to get by the problem. You contact the publisher and see if they have a solution to the problem. Or more likely, you don't have that problem in the first place because you've got the AI from the first 4 games the studio made to draw from, or you have the behaviour system from the AAA engine you've licensed.
 
When you're a small indie company, working remotely from home, with only one person to do all this, the difference between 'doing it for fun' for 12-16 hours a day,  which is about 2 people worth of 9-5ing, the moment that becomes something, as I say, you have to 'tie yourself to your desk' to do instead of doing it because you enjoy or are interested in it, you CANNOT maintain those kinds of work hours when it's work, or you'll make yourself ill. Imagine working 14 hour days at something you hate, 7 days a week. Every waking moment. No that's not acceptable and I'd be concerned at anyone who thought it was.
 
My point is by turning NPCs into a horrible job one doesn't want to do, you're effectively instantly killing off one entire developer on the NPCs, one that knew everything the other developer did.
 
Now on top of that, you have a problem, you're stuck on something, a complete roadblock you can't figure your way past. Do you walk over to the other AI programmer? They don't exist. The technical director above you? Doesn't exist. Do I ask my collegues? They have never done any of the AI on the game, and beyond general suggestions are unlikely to know the way around a roadblock the person with all the NPC and AI experience is stuck on? So what then? Search the internet?
 
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=behaviour%20trees
 
Oh. Seems the #1 search result is an article by... me. I'm in uncharted territory a lot of the time.
 
Nope, there's only one solution. Put it to one side, stop driving yourself crazy, and work on something else that you CAN progress with. Also something you'll be working as two people on, because you're into it and can work as two people due to having 'day job' you and 'after work hobby' you both working on the same thing. This is how I work, I hit a roadblock, and stew and try and rev my car over it for a while, until it becomes clear its not going anywhere. I can't see the wood for the trees, so I put it to one side and work on something for the game that IS being productive and come back later, where suddenly I have a fresh perspective, and within a bit more struggling will almost always find some new route past the roadblock. Then progress whirs along again.
 
This has been the way I've worked throughout the entire of my indie career, and it works and is the way it has to work for a lot of the time.
 
This is nothing to do with the fact that 'oh its not fun and I want my job to be fun' and feeling entitled to that, I'm not stacking boxes in a warehouse or putting labels on boxes on a conveyor belt. My job requires a great deal of mental discipline, creativity, and many other factors that control how capable I am of navigating through extremely complicated roadblocks, to make creative leaps of imagination to come up with solutions to problems that I have no colleagues or superiors to bail me out, or to collaborate with, that if I google to get an answer, often the answers I need aren't there on the internet. There's no one to turn to, and at the same time I'm having this onslaught on my motivation, mental well being, confidence and stress levels by having to read daily complaints and often insults, second guesses, suspicions, accusations. I can't avoid this, I NEED to read the communities feedback on the game, read problems people are having with the game and so on. Yes of course the NPCs are part of this, but I'm just being honest about how grueling the constant NPC complaining is, and the fact that it's literally hurting development of them severely. This isn't me throwing my toys out the pram and saying 'blergh I don't like that people are being mean so I'm cutting how much I work on them', or feeling entitled because its my own company and I'm not doing a day job, and therefore feel I can get away with doing less if I'm not enjoying it. I put 10x the effort into this company and game, part my own, than I ever did working for some big AAA corporation that didn't give a crap about me.
 
The difference is at a big AAA company, if I hit a roadblock I would have more routes around it that wouldn't necessitate some breathing room and a break from it. Also there'd be a PR guy, several marketing guys, countless other people whose responsibility it would be to read all the stressful and endless complaints that company may be receiving. It's kept away from the developers, its of no direct consequence to them, and they are not weighed down by them in the same way as an Early Access game on Steam where the people running the company and managing the community feedback, and reading the mondoid comments, are the same people sat there in front of a code IDE expected to solve problems and motivate themselves to write hugely complicated NPC systems single handedly.
 
I apologize again that you happened to get the full unload of all this stuff, it's just an unfortunate combination of wrong place, wrong time, and some frustrating comments in your OP but I'll admit you didn't deserve that level. That all aside, this all needed to be said, and you're right, we've put NPC information up in lights on the Steam board and that should be the same here and am a bit confused why this isn't the case, I'll look into it as I'm certain we've had one in the near past, FAQs and all sorts. 
 
Regarding your last quoting myself back at me, I fail to see the relevance. I know that many people want different things from the game, and that's why we're developing lots of different things for the game. I can't control the resources we have and what roadblocks we hit, or what particular team members have what particular specialities and what combination of the things that need doing happen to be suited to what developers. We get complaints for working on 'cosmetic stuff' instead of NPCs by people who seemingly don't understand that someone who does art has absolutely no way of helping in the development of AI behaviours. I've been in the industry including indie for 15-16 years, and I know who needs to be doing what, but we're not ARK we don't have several teams all working on this, there's just a few of us strewn around the planet. Even so we specifically enlisted the help of a third party company to do all the VOIP so that it would not effect any of the current game development whatsoever, but there is literally nothing I can do to get NPCs out faster than they are apart from putting myself in an early grave first, and as much as I'd find that non-preferable that's also a good way to ensure NPCs never come out.
 
 

No, that wouldn't be hard to code. And if you had enough respect for the people you were addressing, you would have read his DIRECT RESPONSE TO THIS EXACT IDEA. You're more than welcome to post your opinions here, but I'd recommend not being so rude as to ignore the dev who took time out of his day to address you. When you fail to actually read what he wrote, you're wasting his time and all of ours.
 
Edit: In fact, survivors like that were already in the game at one point, but were removed to be reworked. What you're suggesting would be actually going backwards.

Your OP insinuated that you were disappointed that other features were being worked on when NPCs still aren't done. Your second post (especially before the edit) was just rude, condescending and unneeded (in my opinion).
 
And they've already stated the reasons they don't want to add half complete NPCs to the game and they have the right to make that decision.
 
People not understanding the development process and who works on what is why we're in this mess to begin with. As those same people will come and accuse other features of being the reason they don't have NPCs when in fact they're being worked on by completely different people. You're posts have simply added to this load and I think this response is directed towards more than just you.

Simply put, please try to realize where the devs are coming from before posting possibly hurtful/aggressive things. Let's all try to be lovely and understanding if we can

Is there a plan to implement crack doors and windows so we can see how much time we have before the zombie gets in?

Speaking of bookshelves, there is a little glitch in the game when you place a window frame, then place a bookshelf in front of it it allows you to right click on it and jump through and jump back, it hid my base for a whole Redboid wipe.

person: "dang I got scratched, at least its not a bit lol"
doc: "nope, that's infected i can tell"
person: "WHAT, no way im not even bleeding!!"
doc: "yeah sorry bad luck, here take this shotgun and go over there"
 
 
XD

I probably sound more down in my mournful walls of text than I am actually. I wear my heart on my sleeve and am quite open on such things, it gets to me a lot sometimes, but rest assured I'm not like depressed or anything I'm just grumpy and sad and stressed about it. I appreciate the lovely words just want to make it clear I wasn't fishing, I just like having the truth out there on how stuff is and how it affects people.

Yep, or you could encourage them to act suicidally for your own sake by making them believe they're I'll

I suppose he should be able to, though if the guy is legitimately infected the symptoms will only get worse over time.
This might actually be pretty neat could be a way to get someone to not act recklessly and waste supplies long enough to kill put them out of their misery while they're not looking.

Hello there, I'd like to share a thought I have and hear your opinion about it
 
I think that the game would be more immersive if every character was hypochondriac by default, I hate that I can tell if I'm dead or not way too earlier than expected, I'll just redo the character before he dies, it feels like cutting emotionals link to it (and so does literally everyone I met by now).
I'd like to suffer more.
 
If every character was hypochondriac by default then you'd have to hope, and hope may hurts.
To balance things out for players that don't wanna waste time we could add a positive trait (+2) that allows a player to know if he's actually infected or not (per it could be a skill locked to doctors and nurses).
 
That's my idea, what's your opinion?
(P-please b-be g-gentle)

Sprinting / running has been completely redone from scratch in the animation build. We'll look into rebalancing the levels of sprint and pacing and whatever else along with it.