CrazyEyes

Maybe there could be extra character traits in the future that change our ability to deal with heat/cold? Something like "Runs Hot - 25% less penalty from heat" or whatever.

It'd be awesome if there were eventually a mechanic for your character's eyes adjusting to the light. Walking from a brightly lit room into a dark one would leave you fumbling around in total darkness, but at night after your eyes have adjusted you can see everything much more clearly, albeit with muted colors and not nearly as far. I do think it's a little too dark at night sometimes but mostly it makes sense. Outside, with the moon and stars, you'd be able to see a little. Shut up in your house with no electricity and the windows purposefully sealed, however, it could very well be impossible to see anything. This is tempered somewhat by a lack of desire to play the game hunched over the desk with my face an inch from the monitor. I'll have to try the shader thing, thanks for the tip.

I didn't say running around. I wasn't being disingenouous - I meant I literally ran to the next house on the block and the heat moodle maxed out. I don't think running around in summer won't make you hot, and I certainly wasn't calling for the heat mechanic to be removed. I'll admit I didn't consider it being mid-July in the south, but it still seems like something isn't working quite right.

Agreed, my character should not be suffering borderline heat stroke because he ran to the next house over on the block with a sweater on.

Fixed this for you.

I don't think zeds can see through doors regardless of whether they have windows or not.

Have you ever opened a box of microwaveable or ready-bake food or whatever and thrown away the box, then realized you needed the instructions on the box to know how to cook it and had to dig the box out of the garbage? Well, when our PZ characters open seed pouches, they immediately kneel down, light the seed packet on fire and release it to the wind while whispering a prayer to the Harvest Gods. Every single time.

But what you did wasn't forging, you used (power?) tools to work on a piece of scrap metal. That's perfectly plausible; the act of creating entirely new weapons or tools from ore is not - at least for a layman. As an aside, wow, how long did it take you guys to type out those arguments? Since at this point you seem to just be disagreeing with each other in an extremely verbose way (though I admit to skimming heavily towards the end), maybe you could give it a rest for those of us who are interested in the subject but don't want to plow though several walls of text. I'd like to see basic metalworking added to the game, but I'm on board with the idea that actual honest-to-goodness forging is a little outside the scope of the game. Besides, as Rathlord pointed out, anything you could make after months of expensive trial and error at a forge - if you could make it at all - would be far easier to create out of lumber and/or scrap metal. Zeraphine confirmed that he was able to make simple tools using an anvil, metalworking tools, and some scrap metal. Considering how hard it would be to get smithing supplies (they don't sell ore at Spiffo's ), the incredibly steep learning curve to using them, and the comparitive ease of constructing the exact same tools in a different way, why would there be a reason to add forging to the game? I just don't see it. Edit: Just read this: That's actually pretty interesting. Do you have pictures of the forge or its construction? How exactly did you build it and what temperatures could it reach? The hottest thing I've looked into making for my backyard is a pizza oven and it would have had to be made out of special brick that wouldn't crack in the heat (or concrete, which would be easy to get but harder to shape). I'd be interested to know if something like a homemade backyard forge is possible.

Wouldn't it just figure to invest tons of money on every survival precaution convievable only to be at ground zero when the infection breaks out. Oh, the stinging backhand of irony.

We'll have generators and stuff eventually, so it won't be the only source of power, but since solar is silent and runs on the sun and not a finite supply of fuel it would still be a pretty desirable location. Although it does beg the question of what happened to the person living there. If they were so prepared for the apocalypse they'd have a much better chance at survival than everyone else and they'd certainly have no reason to leave. If you ask me it'd be nice to see a house like this in SP or MP, but it should already be mostly picked clean by the bandits that must have come straight to the best-stocked house in the city, killed the owner and taken everything they could carry. Remember that the start of the game does not coincide with the start of the zombie outbreak - especially in MP - so it's reasonable to expect that some looting of high-value targets has already taken place. You'd still have a good setup with the solar power, farmland, and maybe a well on the property, so there's a reason to want to live in the house, but there aren't so many resources there that it becomes everyone's first and only destination.

Do zombies in this game even hunt by smell? This might change in the future, but I was under the impression that, at least for now, they hunt based exculsively on sight and hearing. If they do start to sniff you out, pouring bleach on your tracks might make a decent zombie deterrent. Assuming they're stupid enough that they file smells as "prey" or "not prey," bleach would certainly fall in the latter category and thus they wouldn't be able to follow your tracks or sniff out your safehouse. I wouldn't worry about humans noticing the smell and using it to locate you - if you have a safehouse you're trying to protect, chances are there are more telltale signs that someone lives there, like fences/walls or boarded-up windows.

I like it; it's a believably realistic way to manage the cleanup of blood on a large scale (how many players are really going to want to bleach and scrub the entire outdoors). Plus it would keep towns from deteriorating into blood-soaked hellholes where a player has to render hundreds of decals at a time just to walk down the street. Easier on players, easier on the server. I'm all for it. Obviously indoor blood would remain where it is without a player actively cleaning it.

If they were only easier to find, sandbags would be a great defense against people with guns. I mean, come on, it's dirt in a bag, can we really only put it in one specific bag that's really rare for no apparent reason? I bet the dozen or so duffelbags and backpacks I have stashed would work just fine. Barbed wire, on the other hand, almost seems like too much of a pain to bother with no matter how much you could get. If you want to leave your base at all you have to leave an opening in the barbed wire to get in and out, and then the thieves will just use that. And if you plan to stay holed up in your base forever wooden walls are what you want - they completley block movement and line of sight when built correctly. Surround your base with those and it'll keep players and zombies out far more effectively than a fence they can vault right over at the cost of a single scratch,

This probably belongs in suggestions, but I think it's a great idea. It doesn't make sense that I can have matches, a lighter and a bottle of booze but I can't start a fire without an oven.

That's only useful if you are willing and able to kill other players the instant you see them. If not, all you're doing is broadcasting "I'm a threat, watch out for me" to any player who can see you. That gives them time to see you coming and defend themselves or flee. I think it's much more of an advantage to use the Safety system to get close to people and get them to relax around you, work together for a while to earn their trust - then wait for a good moment to slip out of their sight long enough to ready your axe.

That's what I thought, though I was kind of hoping the server would be smart enough to know if the string you typed in matches more than one person's name and could just tell you to be more specific, but would work if there was only one user with "crazy" in their name. That way nobody can name themselves "Mizkitlitzpatrick" or something just to be annoying to kick/ban. Or "IIIIIlllIIllllIIIIIllIIlIlIlIlIIIll".

Edit: Ninja'd. So, will banning someone by username require you to type in their full name or just part of it? For example, if I typed "/banuser crazy=Too good." would that ban me if I'm using the name CrazyEyes?

I'd be very interested in getting in on this, I used to play TnB RP in Gmod and it was great to be with a community that was more interested in playing the game and developing their characters than shooting each other all the time (well, most of the time ). It'd be awesome to be on a PZ server where the shoot-on-sight mentality is discouraged and you can feel like it's safe to leave supplies at your base if you have to, say, log out for 16 hours to sleep and work. Steam Name: CrazyEyes326 Profile Link: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197988817232/

I don't think it would encourage people to AFK for very long; letting your character sleep for ten minutes would be the equivelant of an eight-hour rest at which point the benefits could cap out. Getting to a remote area of the world would take time, too, and at some point the (moderate) buff ceases to be worth the amount of time you're putting into getting it. I agree that it's unrealistic, just not more so than not needing to sleep at all. And in practice, you still don't need sleep, it just gives you a buff in eachange for leaving your character vulnerable for a short while. I can see how this would break immersion in terms of ceasing to think of sleep as a requirement and instead seeing it as a way to get a bonus - instead of thinking "I need to sleep because I'm tired" the player thinks "I'll sleep for three minutes to boost my stamina and then go looting". Maybe not sleeping is a better idea overall, but I dislike that it entirely negates one of the major vulnerabilities we are supposed to have. I like the feeling of every night being a gamble that nothing followed me home or that my defenses will hold up or that a horde won't walk onto my street while I'm asleep.

For a large multiplayer server I think changing how tiredness and sleep work for your character would be better than removing the mechanic entirely. What I'm thinking is that tiredness should be removed, but not sleep. Instead of your character getting sleepy over the course of the day you are awake 24/7; the way games like Skyrim handle it. Instead of needing to sleep you have the option of sleeping, which would provide a small bonus in addition to the usual benefits like increased healing and less hunger. Maybe you could get a 5% boost to stamina for every in-game hour spent asleep or something. The bonus would last around 24 in-game hours before dissapearing. It has the benefit of giving you a reason to sleep while avoiding the time-skipping issue. Your need to sleep wouldn't be dictated by the in-game clock so neither would the timing of any "sleep breaks" you choose to take. You could have your character hop in bed for a few hours while you go make a quick sandwich or something. At regular speed a five-minute break for you is a four-hour nap for your character. Of course, if someone has been following you, five minutes is all they need... The only drawback I can think of is that waiting to sleep would be seriously boring. This sort of encourages the player to go AFK or do something else for a few minutes which in turn leaves their character more vulnerable - which is what the developers want. Conversely, players could chose to remain at the game while their character is alseep to listen for every bump or crash and decide if they need to get up, fast. This would be boring but their characters would be safer. What do you guys think? If the buff from sleeping were meaningful but not great, do you think you'd elect to make your character sleep - possibly putting them in danger - for that bonus?

That must be a bug; sounds like it buffed my HP so high the counter rolled over and killed me. Better go report it.

You dont say? I know, nuts, right? I expected it to be some sort of buff.

You know that feeling you get when you take a really hard game and turn on all the cheats and just take out your frustration on it? That's what this looks like.

I will take delicious pie over cake any day.

It's possible to draw the zombies away from cells you plan on inhabiting. Go way way way outside of town, like to one of the farms or something. Stay there for a few nights, let the meta-events draw zombies to you and shotgun-murder any groups of them you see. This noise should draw all the zombies on the map closer and closer to you, emptying out the cells where you plan on living. If you can get around the superhorde accumulating where you are and make it back to town you should find it nearly deserted of zombies. It will only buy you a couple days of looting before the meta-events draw the zombies back, though.