Mrs_L

Hilariously, I had thought I had recorded the entire interaction with Shadowplay, but forgot I had Barotrauma open behind Project Zomboid. I in fact recorded about 20 minutes' worth of intense Barotrauma main menu footage, with PZ music in the background.

Thank you for the response, but my question thus becomes: if the outline is only meant to be a predictor of success and not reliable, how is one meant to adequately decide for themselves if a swing will hit? Not only does your player character use two or more different randomly decided swing animations, but hits are blatantly not calculated by physical model collision, with instances of spears, blunt objects, and your own bare hands clipping straight through opponents without dealing damage quite common. This is leaving aside the difficulty of judging depth in an isometric game, which by its very nature does not provide depth cues beyond Z-levelling (whether something is in front of or behind another object). I enjoy the promise of PZ as a simulator, I would much rather either the highlight be made trustworthy enough to use as a yes/no indicator of swing success, or it be removed entirely so as not to create the expectation of reliability that isn't fulfilled. Project Zomboid is a refreshingly punishing game for its class, but perhaps the most common and devastating punishment of all, the infection, is attached to a system with major readability issues that need to be addressed before a full release. If the target highlight truly is an unfixable system for one reason or another, I would propose ditching it entirely and allowing the player to manually perform swings of their choice, leaving hit registration entirely to model collision. The readability of an isometric world wouldn't be solved by this, but there would be no more false expectations raised by the target highlight.

But I fail to see how that would feel unfair when the enemy which was highlighted was the one who was hit. If you wanted to hit the other, you should have waited until they were highlighted instead, and failing to attack them was mostly a matter of poor prediction and target selection, not the game being unreliable as it is right now.

I will keep things brief, mostly by pointing to an instance of problematic hitboxes from another game series and the way the developers managed to remediate it. As most of you know, PZ has an issue with zombies flashing green just long enough for you to swing, only for you to miss because you were only just within lateral range of your target and sidestepped for a fraction of a second. In the early days of Team Fortress 2, Spy had a similar problem. When behind an enemy he was in the range and able to backstab for a one-hit kill, his knife would play a signature animation where it would raise and point down ("ready for a backstab"). However, like other classes, there was a (0.25 second) delay on his swing animation, before the backstab would check to see if the spy was still in angle and distance. This led to a horrid number of 'failstabs' and frustration on the part of players who felt cheated out of a hit, when the animation would play but the enemy would turn away just enough to turn it into a regular hit. Spy is a notoriously weak character whose main strength is the ability to backstab opponents; if he fails to backstab, he will almost certainly die immediately to any other character. So, while tightening up some netcode around latency and hitbox rollback, the development team elected to make Spy's backstab instant upon clicking: What You See Is What You Get. This change has never been reverted. I recommend TIS take a cue from this solution with swinging at zombies. If the zombie is highlighted green when you click, they should be hit, no matter how much later the swing comes. This might result in some janky-looking hits, but it's my recommendation that in matters of jank, the player should typically be given the edge; it makes little sense to rule in the favour of a computer-generated opponent that might come by the hundreds and against a character that may encompass hundreds of hours of effort, and has not made an obvious mistake to punish. On a personal note, I will always prize reliable gameplay systems over how a game looks. If realism is a concern, I contest that if you were attempting to hit a person with a baseball bat, effectively doing so may be difficult but landing a hit at all would likely be nowhere near as stringent as PZ generally treats it. I suppose that wasn't as brief as I thought it'd be after all.

I hope so, I would like it if every skill had some powerful benefit to high levels in it. Would definitely contribute to creating those group dynamics too where individuals pick one or two skills to power-level so the entire group has access to some beneficial ability.

It's what it says on the tin. Your buddy gets lacerated twice but you manage to get away? Sure you could just patch them up and hope for the best, or you begin a desperate race against time to get them to a level 8 doctor who can give them more of a fighting chance. It could be based on both the skill (8-10) and how long it's been since the wound's happened, but it would lead to some tense situations and give a real purpose to endgame-tier First Aid, like Cooking 7's rotten food use or high Tailoring letting you make clothes like new.

I'm new to Project Zomboid and its multiplayer. I decided to load into a public server and do my thing, I found an old clinic and started fortifying and stockpiling it, I had everything going pretty well for myself. I tried to claim it. "You must survive for 2 days to claim this." Okay, no big deal, I'll just make it that far. Well I did make it 2 days and returned triumphant and ready to claim my well-earned little fort. Only to walk inside and find out that "this is a spawn location". So I can't claim it ever. And then the server reset like ten minutes later, spawning zeds in hugging distance and killing me. This could have been avoided if the tooltip read something like the following: This area cannot be claimed for the following reasons: -You have not survived for 2 days -This is a spawn location There were other players kind enough to explain the claiming rules to me after the fact, but imagine being someone without that connection. You wouldn't even be able to check if your base were possible to claim until the time had expired. On some servers, this might be even longer than it took me (4 irl hours).

As many people know, food types like chip bags are very much not the meta for the Don't Wake Your Parents raid in IRL (level 4-18). They have a massive sound radius and the sound is prolonged by your own (possible lack) of dexterity, often ending in automatic failure. I literally cannot play Project Zomboid because of the highly unimmersive ability to open a bag of chips without alerting the entire city. For bonus points make them even louder in the dark (cause you can't see.)