Magic Mark

Awesome!!! I can't wait!
Just one minor detail, I think that the pistol sound is too loud for the outside, it gives this feeling of echo that the sound makes when you're indoors. It would be possible to have a different sound when you shoot outdoors (without the echo)? 

I have always liked the idea of skill trees, but I don't exactly know how this directly adapts within the game in it's current state.   
 
A tree system could force players to make decisions during character progression which would end up with more specialized builds and combinations of skills and traits that would make gameplay very different between playthrus.  But skill trees in regards to say, crafting, it a lot less interesting.  For instance, choosing between woodworking and metalworking, or what kinds of autos you can repair doesn't necessarily make the game "more fun".  
 
In this regard the only thing that makes sense in a skill tree would be to gain specific traits\attributes at certain increments.  For Instance, maybe at level 4 carpentry you can choose to either get a speed boost or a strength boost.  Maybe at level 4 Aiming, you can choose to have higher accuracy at short range vs long range (sniper build vs cqc).  With melee maybe you choose between knockback, strength or speed, and with blades you choose between stealth, speed or slower blade deterioration.
 
This at the very least has the makings of producing more specialized builds over time, as long as it's well balanced and each attribute chosen makes and impact and none of them feel too overpowered.  

 

A very well-written post.
 
I can agree with almost everything you have said here, except that I find some difficulty in defining what counts as a work area to add towards XP growth. That said, I totally agree that having the option to practice something removes a lot of excessive button mashing and repeating the exact same minor processes.
 
For balance, one may consider having practice consume resources, while granting the player an extended growth of that skill over a long period of time.
 
I think reading skip through time faster is a great idea that has little downside for the reason that sleeping uses the same system. I would love to see this implemented.

There is a lot I like about the book system.  It makes books a valuable resource you have to search for, the drawback though is book reading is critical to skill building and it is about the most boring part of the game.  I don't dislike it takes time, since time is a resource attached to zombie migration, hunger, boredom, etc.  How I would change how books work would be to simply make it work similar to sleeping, just with a built in mechanic that would pull you out of the timelapse if a moodle became severe (i.e. you won't read if staving to death, very sick, having a panic attack, etc.) or a zombie was spotted or banging on your house somewhere.  You could choose how long to read in hour increments and it would timelapse for you.
 
 
Another angle that could add more variety to skill progression would be to have static locations contain an XP bonus.  For instance, a hardware store or a rural warehouse contain a special workbench and that is the only way to get a high carpentry XP bonus,  Maybe an electronics store had a maintenance bench in the back for electronics.  An automotive shop for leveling mechanics, shooting range for guns, etc. etc.  The idea of having these XP bonuses would be that they would be worth the time to frequently visit, but given they are static locations scattered through out each town, it would require you to traverse the town to revisit them.  Also to add more complexity, you are required to supply specific materials for each skill building task, electronics parts, wood, ammo, etc. this way you are driven to gather supplies to level these skills up, another reason to explore the map and loot more.   
 
  
 
 
 
 
 

XD I'd like people to get the full experience not use admin powers for everything. Using the screen for referrence sounds like a work around again, which is fine, but it can be seen negatively. I just don't really understand all the criticism for such a simple item lol

I can't tell you how many times friends and I have been trying to lead a relatively new player to a landmark so we can meet up in game. The compass item would function much like a digital watch. Once in your inventory, a small compass would appear in one of the corners of your screen indicating the direction you're facing. It's a bit hard to believe this isn't an item yet. As for where they would spawn, I would suggest them showing up fairly commonly in residential areas, like your spawning locations and more rarely on zombies. Obviously you want the player to find one within the first half a dozen houses they loot because they're especially useful early game. If you're exploring the deep woods to find a cabin it would be very useful as well.

Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or any kind of intervention of sorts. It would be great to see the various community centers around the place get this rare scene. 

Looks awesome! I think the farther zombies shouldn't suddenly give up when the survivor dies, though. Join into the buffet (or at least try), am I right?

Not totally sure what this means, but there's really no "right" when it comes to something creative. It is whatever the artist or designer wants their creation to be.  Naturally, even the developers and founders have differing views of how complex or simplistic systems should be in PZ and have to hash it out. That makes it pretty hard to resent anyone for having a different opinion, at least on the surface.
 
The blacksmithing component was one of those things (only mentioned once in the blog here). Smelting any metal object (forks .etc) into an ingot then converting that into any other metal object, like bullets or a wall. It veered way too far towards the "simple." It didn't represent realistic blacksmithing. The work was done and we had to move on without revising it further, back then. It was honestly a pretty bad and stressful year in real life (also detailed to some extent in prior blogs of that year). 

anims still aren't to the point the first vehicle build was - multiplayer is completely non-functional, the game difficulty balance of the game is completely fubared, it will run like an asthmatic dog with high zombie counts, and anims have been hyped for years longer than vehicles were, so we have to make sure first version doesn't piss people off cause there is 100x more 'it's taken them X long to do' expectation. We're also very much hoping that anims going public will coincide with a sales increase that will pay for all the significant extra resources and money we've put into getting them out there asap, and pushing them out in an underwhelming state would be dangerous to risk muting the excitement and attention it would get. Sadly as much as IWBUMS is a testing beta branch, a huge amount of people take it as the defacto build as soon as it goes public in any way.

As much as testers are positive about them, they just aren't ready for IWBUMS before a few key things, particularly the rotational blending and MP support, as well as some SERIOUS optimization to not cut off the bottom half of our players. But that day is definitely getting closer. We won't keep it in private testing longer than i needs to be, but a few minutes of video simply doesn't tell you the whole story.

I meant to hyperlink the picture of planters used in the article, but yeah, I can agree with that. Not so much on your roof collapsing on you, but that's where I was going with being unable to have soil/planters on low level carpentry structures or house roofs.

I meant to hyperlink the picture of planters used in the article, but yeah, I can agree with that. Not so much on your roof collapsing on you, but that's where I was going with being unable to have soil/planters on low level carpentry structures or house roofs.

45 minute days would be awesome!! (Or maybe be able to add a manual input.)
There are 13-23 hour day lengths that i feel like not many people use.
But 45 minutes would be awesome. 

I think its cool to have a rooftop garden and having some pots or planters to help transport some crops to other locations if needed to protect from a threat.
 
its a good idea.

Being able to mix animal feces and/or guano with soil and letting it compost would be a great mechanic, because planting stuff straight in the ground often times doesn't work as well as you'd hope. Just a thought though *shrugs*

To me, it makes no sense how you are somehow able to just pour a bunch of dirt on a concrete roof and suddenly bam, you've got yourself some crops. I think a more logical step would be implementing planter boxes, like raised garden beds so you can grow crops on roofs or on concrete/non-soil surfaces. Plots, planters, boxes...anything like that would be more immersive and make more sense.

Yup, pretty much. They could even let us reuse existing planters in the game. Just get rid of decorative plant and sow some delicious potatoes in there.
 
i.e.
 
https://map.projectzomboid.com/?#0.46337634952777745,0.10404227320468437,580.618556701031

I think placing soil deep enough on a roof is perfectly logical, from someone who's grown crops before. You're not trying to grow a bunch of trees or anything, small crops like the ones in the game are perfectly reasonable. Something that comes to mind is the hanging gardens that are on display at Disney World in Florida. They grow that shit literally sideways on trellises so I don't think making a garden on a roof is unreasonable. Have you seen how big weeds can get only having roots like 5-6 inches into the dirt? Pretty gosh-darn big.
 
Planters or dirt floor, it's all the same really. As long as you have a place to walk. 

One cubic yard could do wonders on a roof, considering crops need more depth than they do width or length of the space they're planted it. You use wood and section it off. make it the planks 7 inches tall. That's five increments of height, less than a cubic yard. Make those planks the length of a cubic yard, 36 inches, and make the width with another piece of wood with the same dimensions and space them out 6 inches apart. You now have 6 sections of soil that are 36 inches long, and 5 sections of soil that are 7 inches tall, so you could now look at it like this: one section of soil to grow crops in would be 36 inches long, 7 inches tall, and 6 inches wide. Perfectly reasonable to grow crops in. If my math is correct, you have, now, 30 sections of soil to use, and if you design your roof to hold the soil, so you're right, something engineered for crops on a roof would be fine. But that's kinda the point here, no? All the previous calculations aside, if you designed a roof to bear the multi ton weight of having crops, it would work, and in a situation like in PZ, that is definitely practical, now, whether or not that aspect is accurately depicted in PZ is a different matter, and I would agree that just a flat roof with nothing but soil on it would probably collapse the roofs in this game. 
 
It could be done though, and I'll never not believe in the creative realism you guys use in the game. I'm sure if necessary, the time could be taken to add weight loads for buildings, but does anyone want to get that deep into it? Probably not lol.

Directly on you is a bad gameplay idea, but a lightning strike near you on a 1/1000 chance, that can cause a fire and if the tiles where the strike goes are flammable it can spread, can be the cherry on the top for our lovely storms

No.
 
 
 
Also, Thunder is the sound. Lightning is the part that strikes people.
 

I would like it if this function was tied to the "Erosion" mechanic. Meaning that Day 1 of the outbreak would look almost similar to the "clean" world you have... But over the weeks and months you might stumble upon a house that was a defensive structure or an overturned/burned out car wreck that wasn't there a month ago. 
 
I imagine something similar would happen with the inclusion of NPCs if they function in an independent type of manner. Maybe now when you hear the random gunshots, you can explore the direction of sound and find a corpse being devoured by a horde or having already been reanimated. 
 
There is a really cool mod on the SteamWorkshop  called "Post-Apocalyptic Sprites" which adds the random gore and broken furniture around the map(inside houses), the only problem is it replaces EVERYTHING with no procedural kind of function for it to degrade and become a deranged nightmare world over time instead of instantly. 

This looks great! One issue, though.
 
My only note is that the pickup truck is now far too small in comparison to the other vehicles. It definitely needs a little bit of an upscale. It also should ride a little higher than that in terms of ride height, but size is the more obvious concern. Example:
 

 
For reference, in the collision with the compact hatchback, it is clear that both vehicles are the same size, even though realistically the pickup would be much bigger. 
 
Source: My father restored one of these (1981 1500) and I know all too well just how much harder it is to park one of these compared to my 2005 pursuit based on size alone. 

I was just thinking that it'd be nice to have a starting trait, maybe called "Gun enthusiast" or some such that'd add +1 to aiming and maybe +1 to reloading.  So far as I know, in the current vanilla game the only way to raise your starting level of aiming is by choosing either the Police Officer profession or the Veteran profession... but c'mon!  This is rural Kentucky we're talking about; lots of kids grow up shootin'!

This looks great! One issue, though.
 
My only note is that the pickup truck is now far too small in comparison to the other vehicles. It definitely needs a little bit of an upscale. It also should ride a little higher than that in terms of ride height, but size is the more obvious concern. Example:
 

 
For reference, in the collision with the compact hatchback, it is clear that both vehicles are the same size, even though realistically the pickup would be much bigger. 
 
Source: My father restored one of these (1981 1500) and I know all too well just how much harder it is to park one of these compared to my 2005 pursuit based on size alone.