CrazyEyes

In real life you can beat the shit out of person with a baseball bat and they will live, yes. But they will also use their arms to defend their head, flinch away from blows and generally try to preserve themselves in any way possible. The fact that zombies don't do this probably actually contributes to you hitting them in the skull with one good swing. It doesn't even have to be sideways - especially in the case of the axe - one well-aimed overhead swing at full force would probably brain a zombie.

Yeah, the guillotine was invented because it made executions "clean and humane." Hanging was drawn out and painful, and even decapitations during executions could be botched if the executioner didn't aim right or the axe wasn't sharp enough. I can't cite any sources but I recall this being true. I also recall that the inventor of the guillotine thought that it would actually deter execution when people saw how easily and efficiently life cound be invented. Instead it sparked thousands of executions across France. Again, no sources. Maybe it's more in terms of gameplay than realism that I think a skilled weilder should be able to OHKO a zombie. Then again, the fire axe is a pretty good weapon already. Edited because the bit about the guillotine's inventor being killed in one isn't true as far as i can tell.

I don't think it's just about the AI you'd have to code for the starting NPCs - dumb or not - but about the sheer number of calculations involved in how each one of the zombies is going to react to each one of the survivors in its field of vision and vice versa. If you think about the ways in which a zombie detects and follows you, there's a lot going on, and having to do that for hundreds of new survivors all pathing their way around the city - even if you don't count the ones who have transferred to the metagame - gets scary fast. That's also assuming the NPCs don't have to eat, sleep, drink, or loot and therefore the AI doesn't do anything but path to the nearest empty house and stay there forever. The more realistic their needs and behaiviors come, the more the code grows and you need exponentially more processing power to handle it.

Zombies do get up a lot more often after they're down - almost every time, in fact. Double-tapping zombies is pretty much a necessity unless you want to deal with a crawler in a few seconds. The knife is faster, so it's better for this, killing the zed faster and leaving you less vulnerable during the lengthly swing animation. Also, I believe the one-hit-kill has to be done at approximately kissing distance. it's effective if you can pull it off consistently but if you miss you're a lot more likely to get scratched or bitten. This plus the fact that the knife doesn't really knock back zeds on hit makes for a better balancing act. That said, I wouldn't mind a 20% chance for instant decapitation with a fire axe, or other heavy two-handed bladed weapon. It just makes sense to me. Maybe you'd have to charge your swing to get the chance of decapitaion? That would be a decent way to represent taking careful aim. Here's an idea: For each skill point in the blades category, a weapon capable of decapitation (axe, sword, lawn mower, dental floss, whatever, who cares) gets a 5% chance to decapitate on every hit. Someone at maximum skill would have a 25% chance of lopping a zed's head off with every normal swing. Then, you can charge your swing to add up to an additional 20% to that chance, based on how long you hold the charge without moving. In total, a skilled player weilding an axe and having charged a swing would have a 45% chance of decapitating the zed right there. A player with no skill could still charge their swing for a 20% chance but couldn't decapitate with their regular swings like a skilled player could.

These zombies are intense. Fortunately, this was probably my best start ever. I spawned in the house surrounded by fence and after a bit of looting made my way to the large warehouse. Miraculously, I found a crowbar, hammer and saw there - the first I'd found in a long time. Made my way back to my safehouse and fortified. In between harvesting lumber, I stopped to eat a slice of watermelon and instantly died. 4 days, 9 hours.

I can only imagine the havoc a bandit with a trumpet could wreak on someone's safehouse, leading a horde of zombies right to their doorstep like a post-apocalypse pied piper. I'm for it.

If you were clever about building it I don't see why you couldn't remove the frame in easy-to-reassemble sections instead of disassembling it entirely. Maybe it could depend on your Carpentry skill. Also, requiring nails to place the frame item in the world might be enough to simulate re-construction. I feel like forcing the player to craft the frame again every single time is an unnecessary step.

Maybe you could craft a frame in your inventory out of some number of planks, then place that in the world where you want your wall to be. Mix your cement and use it on the frame, and you get a drying wall. After a day or two (maybe more depending on rain) you could use a hammer or crowbar to recover the frame item and leave behind a solid wall. The frame could then be re-placed in the world and used to build the same structure again.

Your average concrete construction needs to be formed out of solid plywood or stacked planks, with framing and angled braces so that the weight of the liquid cement (especially at the bottom) doesn't cause the frame to burst open (seen it happen). For any decent-sized construction like a wall or floor, you would create a rebar grid inside your wooden form to give the structure extra integrity. Then you'd mix and pour cement (a very exhausting task by yourself) until the frame was filled, wait a day or two and pull the framework off. Basically, cement structures are great but really hard to build. They take a lot of lumber, though you could probably re-use the planks after the fact. Mixing the cement would take a HUGE amount of water though. I don't know what sizes are standard in other places, but around here concrete is usually sold in 60-80 pound bags, the latter requiring just under a gallon (or about three liters) of water to mix properly. Pouring concrete into a mold the size of a sheet of plywood (4 feet by 8 feet) and 6 inches thick would require about thirty large bags. The resulting slab would weigh more than two hundred pounds. Doing some quick math, to make a one-story concrete structure (that is, four walls only) roughly the size of my house you'd need about a thousand large bags of concrete and seven to eight hundred gallons of water (and you thought your crops were thirsty). That's the low estimate, and doesn't take into consideration the hundreds of feet of rebar you'd need. It's possible, of course, but it'd be a hell of an undertaking by yourself - and you'd better hope the water doesn't shut off.

I'd like to see it work like the windows taskbar, where you can drag it to any edge of your screen and the bar automatically sticks to the edge and aligns itself. Then you could mouse over the bar to expand/collapse the window from that direction. Being able to resize windows however you want would be nice too.

This would be a cool idea - like if you had a map you could designate waypoints on it. You could create them in nameable groups, so A, B, C or Indoor Patrol, Fence Patrol, etc. Then, in a dialog or menu option, you could tell NPCs to go patrol waypoint groups you've set up. You could use a similar system for getting NPCs to go guard a spot you've designated on the map, or go loot the building(s) at a waypoint or series of waypoints in town.

I like the idea of a RIP wall if the characters are listed in order of playthrough date and nothing else. I agree that it shouldn't be an encouragement to get a "high score", but having a main menu option where you could look at the names/traits of your previous runs would be a cool feature for me. Heck, if we're too worried about it being a "score" thing we could remove the number of zombies/people killed and just leave it at the name, some basic stats, how they were killed (in terms of mechanichs - infected, fell to their death, bled out, etc.) and maybe a 50-100 character message that you can leave with that entry, written at time of death. I personally don't care how many zombies I've killed so a system like this would suit me just fine. Other people might want a number tally, though I think the devs have spoken against adding any kind of kill counter to the game. I'll go look. Edit: I don't see it mentioned in The Big Nos thread, so I might be imagining that last bit.

It's easy for an FPS - just dip the gun model below the screen and the character reloads it... somehow. It's realistic enough for two pistols - you could tuck one under your arm while you load the other one, for example. This frees up your other hand but also makes you a bit more clumsy, so you need a bit more time to load a clip. You could also just empty both clips then drop your second gun and reload normally. Not sure how you'd implement something like that in the game, though.

You may notice some subtle differences between the two small, balanced combat axes used in that video and an average fire axe. Fighting with two small one-handed weapons like that is fine, but as you say, it is only for advanced fighters. Sets of weapons like this would be unusual to begin with, and most of the trained owners probably opted to use theirs when the apocalypse happened. It's not impossible to hit two stationary targets from 10 feet away, no. I'd like to see him doing this while the cutouts are trying to eat him while he's moving too. Plus this really only works until you have to reload. The main problem I see with dual weilding, aside from the difficulty of implementing it, is how little of a practical effect you get. Since you can't dual-wield the heavy weapons that do useful things like knock zombies back, you're stuck using small, intimate slashing or stabbing weapons against a wall of hungry flesh that does not know pain. Anyone who's tried to fend off a group of zombies with a Kitten knife knows how that story ends. The only time I see this being really useful is in being able to dual-weild a second pistol for the purposes of emptying two clips at something instead of just one. Of course, then you have to reload, and your hands are full. You could still reload both while "holding" them, but maybe each clip would take like 20-50% longer to insert to represent your hands being awkwardly full.\ (Edit: "Kitten" knife is a typo I refuse to fix.)

It depends on how big the ripples were. Giant waves taking up an entire side of the screen might be appropriate for faraway, general sounds like a helicopter or a group of zombies walking. As the sound got closer, less obstructed, louder, and/or repeated itself, the ripples should shrink to give you a better idea of where the sound is coming from. I skimmed the other thread, and Rath did make some good points about gunshots specifically. i still think we need a way to tell the player where gunfire is coming from in-game, if only as a fair and reasonable warning of imminent danger. Perhaps a reasonable compromise would be that any sound the player initially wouldn't be able to determine the source of creates no ripples at all, and then if it repeats itself (more gunshots, automatic fire, cries for help, etc.) the player starts to get an indication of where it's coming from. What I'd really like for the sound indicator to come from wherever that player heard the noise. For example, if I'm sitting in my room with the window cracked, everything I hear outside sounds like it's coming from the direction of the window relative to me. That's where the sound is the loudest and so that's where my ears tell me it's coming from. I'd like this because it adds a layer of tension to barricading yourself up in a house. Any sound coming from outside (not loud enough to go through walls, like yelling or a car) would only be visualized as sound coming from the windows. You wouldn't "see" zombies moving around outside unless you risk taking a look to identify where they are. If you're upstairs, any real or imagined sound from below would just come from the stairway, and you'd have to decide if you wanted to go down and check it out. If you're in a room with the door closed, anything you can hear is just coming from the door. Imagine the suspense of trying to decide if those footsteps your hear from outside your room are imaginary or a zombie, and opening the door only to find that now they're coming from downstairs....

That'd be a cool idea. I like the idea of coming across someone's journal and following it back to a safehouse or stash of items. Being able to leave notes for other players would be great too. You could even use it as a kind of zombie defense, setting up lots of traps but leaving a note for humans explaining how to get by. Or leave a note that leads humans into a trap! It opens an entire world of possibilities.

You don't really need this; you can already keep items organized by category in the containers you bring them home in (food bag, water bag, weapon bag, etc.). Once you do that it's simple enough to drag them into their respective containers in your safehouse. If time is an issue, pause. Any inventory commands you issue while the game is paused will be filled out automatically in order once you resume time.

If you simplified the system it could probably work. Given the isometric nature of the game, you could probably shave those 16 angles down to 8 and have less segments per angle. The probelm seems to be the sheer number of zombies - as Rathlord said, you could potentially have hundreds on-screen at once. In DayZ - which this system seems to have been lifted from - you'd be limited to no more than 20-30 at a time even in the largest cities. The 128 Marios demo doesn't seem to apply to this situation. It looks impressive for its time, but all the AI is really doing is running a block to the edge of the map and then throwing it. The Marios constantly collide, too. If you watch the demo closely you can often see them slam into each other, pause to recalculate their path, then start moving again. Also, many of them are still seated when the demo ends, having not done a single thing. It's more an example of powerful rendering than good AI.

I'm really, really good at getting lost. I think this is a great idea - maybe having the map in your primary or secondary slot could open a window with a map you can drag around, zoom and draw on. It wouldn't automatically follow the player or anything like that, you'd still have to get your bearings using landmarks and manually move the map view to whatever you wanted to look at.