CrazyEyes

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".

And none of this would be found in real-life Muldragh, KY, a town of about 1000 people (as of 2012) with no actual museums.  The closest one is the General Geroge Patton Museum in Fort Knox.  Granted, that's only about four miles away, but you're not very likely to find civil war replica weapons there either.

...You guys do know that revolvers are still made, right? Why on Gods green earth would you need an old one from the old wild west when they still make metal six-shot revolvers?

Pretty sure the topic title is "Working Cars should be a RARE Commodity."  I agree that working vehicles should be rare but I don't think vehicles themselves should be.  This thread is full of ideas on how to create challenge and scarcity even while having lots of cars on the server.  Any performance issues they create are going to be minimal and only cause real problems if your computer already can't handle the game - which sounds like it's the case: 

Anyways, how hard would it really be to generate particular keys for particular cars?  Each key could just have like an 8-character string (10,000 cars should be enough ) that's unique and matched to a particular car in the world.  A car can only be started with these keys if the strings match.
 
Make the keys spawn in one of three locations: inside the nearest house, on a random zombie nearby, or inside the car itself.  At that point the server's work is done and it's no more resource-consuming than any of the other loot that's sitting in containers constantly.  It's up to the player to track down the keys and try them on nearby cars.

Why would you have to label them? I understand that would make it more convienent for gameplay and all, but from a standpoint of realism almost nobody would have their keys labelled. Even so, keys usually modelled after the car company's logo. Even if we can't tell which individual keys are which this would give you an idea of what kinds of cars to be on the lookout for. If we don't want to have different manufacturers then we could have different types of keys for sedans, trucks, SUVs... you guys get the idea.
Beyond that you'd just have to hope there's a logical place you can check if you find a set of keys. If you get keys from a house (or from a zombie in a house) try any cars outside. If you get keys from a zombie outside, check any abandoned cars in the general vicinity. There would be few enough cars in town that you'd have a decent chance of matching a set of keys to a car.
On the highways and outside of town it'd be a different story. You might find keys on a zombie with no cars in sight, or with a bunch of cars gridlocked nearby and no way to quickly know which car they are for or whether the car is boxed in or even there.
I think keys should be renamable so that players can keep better trak of their own keys, but that is about as far as I think that needs to go. I don't see a need to lead the player directly to the thing the key unlocks, although having a zombie spawn with a wallet and home address would be pretty cool.
 

You know, the biggest performance issue for many players is the zombies. Think how much memory would be freed up for stuff like keys if we took the zombies out!

The biggest problem with keys is this: How do you show the player which car they are belonging to? Actually I had the same problem in my lockpicking mod a while back. People suggested to implement keys for houses which could be found in the world / on zombies, yet there isn't a good way to tell the player "hey this key here belongs to a house at X10010 Y10050".
 
It would work if the keys are already in the car, or if you find them inside of a house with the car being outside. I honestly can't think of any good way to make it work - even in a semi-realistic way.
 
Totally insane and impractical (but cool) would be the implementation of proper street names all around the map. The player could then find wallets containing the ID / Adress of destroyed zombies. If you find a key on them you can then walk to their home and see if it fits - if you are lucky you might even find a car there.
 
But then again, player's would probably argue why so many people left their cars at home in the zombocalypse.
 
I don't know I think I could live with learning "hot wiring" from books, or once your mechanical skill is high enough. It's one of those things where gameplay clashes with realism.
 
 
 
I think we should leave out NPCs too ... I fear they will take a toll on performance
 
 
So you say that you are wrong and lazy? How ironic... :S
 
Anyway, to put a full stop behind this. If you have a problem with people who don't speak perfect english you might have picked the wrong community to stay in. We welcome people from all over the world and language should never be a barrier for becoming a part of the community. It is okay to tell someone if you can't understand something they said - but we also want you to use your brain to try and understand the meaning (we all do it everyday).
 
All in all be lovely and we won't have a problem.

The extent of modularisation I was thinking of was something along the lines of replacing/repairing entire systems at once. Something like having a specific set of complete/working parts together in order for the vehicle to function, with different types of vehicles needing different parts - A bike needing a complete frame and two wheels (unpunctured and not damaged); A scooter needing two wheels, an engine (electric or petrol, maybe even found from a lawnmower or something), a frame, and probably some brakes or controlling mechanisms; A car needing a complete chassis, four wheels, an engine, a minimum of one seat, a steering wheel or control mechanisms.
 
While I don't think that example would be a good idea to incorporate into PZ, it kind of describes the sort of modularisation I'd support being brought in along with vehicles, to both uphold the gamey realism currently in the game, and also reduce the technical knowledge or skill sets required in the real world to accomplish the same tasks.
This way all the vehicles have the potential to be fully functioning, but when encountered, the vast majority are deficient of one or more 'parts', rendering them more as lootable junk/obstacles.
 
Lastly, with regard to the comment about RAM usage... well, it's not really relevant to the number of potentially functioning vehicles, or even the number of fully functioning vehicles, but the implementation of such a system.
Just as an off-the-top-of-my-head example, broken vehicles may be nothing more than containers - the same as a wardrobe, crate, or zombie corpse - which when containing the appropriate vehicle parts are converted into a functional vehicle.

Honestly I don't see any reason why all cars everywhere can't just be driven from the start. Most of them would likely need heavy, time consuming repairs to become functional (with a distinct lack of spare parts to get them functional) to balance things out. But for the most part I just see no reason why a working car has to be a rare thing. I mean most of them are gonna be torn apart for their metals or left abandoned by the side of the road without a passing glance anyway. Maybe this car needs a spare tire or that car needs a new battery. Maybe that one has a faulty alternator or that one needs a new spark plug. It's a good way of limiting the ability to use cars without making some insanely huge deal out of it.
 
I like the idea of using a set of keys to keep cars from being activated, but that should be as a way to keep an "owned" vehicle from being taken without first dealing with the person who owns the keys. (Examples: Having to kill or rob a survivor before stealing their car. Having to lift the keys from their pocket. Or having to loot it from their zombie if they were torn down by a horde and you need a quick way to escape your overrun base). I dislike the idea of having to find keys for an ownerless car abandoned by the side of the road since that feels needlessly complicated for a game. Realistic, yes, but needlessly complicated.

And, to boot, it's not like you can pick up where you left off on the next car because every make and every model is wired completely differently.

That's a picture of a very simple circiut we're building in my Electrics class right now.  Go ahead and study it for a while, then tell me which components you need to bypass in order to get the speaker to emit a constant tone instead of an oscillating one.  I'll wait.
 
That's the problem with what is being suggested - electricial engineering is ludicrously complex and requires years of study to really get the hang of.  The circiut pictured above is nothing compared to some of the wiring you'd find in a car.  Say what you will about carpentry and trapping (which are purely mechanichal skills that anyone can learn to do if they put in the time and effort), but it is impossible for someone with no education on electricity and without a completed circiut diagram of the car's electronics to just hotwire a car simply through trial and error or "practice."  
 
You have to not only know beforehand what you're dealing with, but you have to know the math to figure out what you're doing to the circiut.  Short out the wrong resistor and current will jump to the point where fuses start to open.  Accidentally reverse the polarity of a circiut and at best it will cease to operate - at worst some of your components can literally explode.

That's a picture of a very simple circiut we're building in my Electrics class right now.  Go ahead and study it for a while, then tell me which components you need to bypass in order to get the speaker to emit a constant tone instead of an oscillating one.  I'll wait.
 
That's the problem with what is being suggested - electricial engineering is ludicrously complex and requires years of study to really get the hang of.  The circiut pictured above is nothing compared to some of the wiring you'd find in a car.  Say what you will about carpentry and trapping (which are purely mechanichal skills that anyone can learn to do if they put in the time and effort), but it is impossible for someone with no education on electricity and without a completed circiut diagram of the car's electronics to just hotwire a car simply through trial and error or "practice."  
 
You have to not only know beforehand what you're dealing with, but you have to know the math to figure out what you're doing to the circiut.  Short out the wrong resistor and current will jump to the point where fuses start to open.  Accidentally reverse the polarity of a circiut and at best it will cease to operate - at worst some of your components can literally explode.

Too many pages to read...
 
I am not a mechanic but i know much more than the average joe and i KNOW i wouldnt be able to hotwire a car or fix one unless someone teaches me to.
 
Talk about battery problems, spark plugs problems, filters problems, non working pumps... Give me a bicycle and i'm a happy camper!

I've decided to start referring to all of my posts as "pillow talk".
 

"Automobiles for Dummies" isn't going to contain information on how to rewire a car to get it to start. Even if it did, the process would be unique for every different model and make of any given car. As Rath said, it hasn't been about breaking open the dashboard and touching two wires together since the 80s. You need to actually bypass the system the car normally uses to start, which means rewiring components, which means understanding what those components do and the kind of voltage and current they need to operate so that you don't blow every fuse in the car when you clip on a jumper.

Isn't there a military quarantine around Muldragh almost as soon as the infection breaks out (and well before the game starts)?  It's possible the roads are crammed with the cars of people who tried to drive away only to find a tank guarding the highway.

I agree that lockpicking shouldn't be an accessible skill to an average person, especially when you start taking into account the fact that most locks you'd find can't be picked without the proper tools even if you did know how.  As Rath says, it is to a degree the problem with "internet kids" who see a video of a lock being picked or do it in Oblivion and think they could apply that to real life.
 


 
As far as cars are concerned, I definitely think that they should be abundant.  The chalenge will be in maintaining and fueling them.  Keys shouldn't be hard to find.  Even if they're not in the vehicle, you can check logical places for them.  If there's a car in front of a house then go check the house for keys in a drawer or on a zombie.  If you see a car on the highway just check the ignition - I bet a lot of people didn't grab their keys before trying to get away from whatever made them flee their cars.
 
Similarly, I bet a lot of those people also didn't bother to turn their engines off.  If you find a car on the road with the keys in the ignition, chances are it's been on for days or weeks and has certainly run the fuel tank empty and the battery dry.  Given that people don't generally flee individually this would probably lead to you finding long roads gridlocked with useless cars.  Plenty to get across the idea that people were trying to get away from this thing.  Scattered in here and there could be cars the owners turned off before running.  If you're Lucky you might find keys in a few of those, but you still have to deal with the problem of moving other cars out of the way.  Otherwise the best you can do is try to move the fuel and battery to another car.
 
Roads and homes inside towns would have far fewer cars with more in working order to show that whoever had access to a car took it, and any that were left behind were probably not used at all.  Driving around inside a town would have you dealing with far fewer roadblocks and other obstacles, but the noise you make doing it would be a much larger issue than speeding along the open highway.
 
The amount of working cars and available keys could be tweaked to get the appropriate difficulty out of it, and I feel like this is the best way to enforce scarcity while still making it look like the people in town owned more than 20 cars between 3500 people.

I agree that lockpicking shouldn't be an accessible skill to an average person, especially when you start taking into account the fact that most locks you'd find can't be picked without the proper tools even if you did know how.  As Rath says, it is to a degree the problem with "internet kids" who see a video of a lock being picked or do it in Oblivion and think they could apply that to real life.
 


 
As far as cars are concerned, I definitely think that they should be abundant.  The chalenge will be in maintaining and fueling them.  Keys shouldn't be hard to find.  Even if they're not in the vehicle, you can check logical places for them.  If there's a car in front of a house then go check the house for keys in a drawer or on a zombie.  If you see a car on the highway just check the ignition - I bet a lot of people didn't grab their keys before trying to get away from whatever made them flee their cars.
 
Similarly, I bet a lot of those people also didn't bother to turn their engines off.  If you find a car on the road with the keys in the ignition, chances are it's been on for days or weeks and has certainly run the fuel tank empty and the battery dry.  Given that people don't generally flee individually this would probably lead to you finding long roads gridlocked with useless cars.  Plenty to get across the idea that people were trying to get away from this thing.  Scattered in here and there could be cars the owners turned off before running.  If you're Lucky you might find keys in a few of those, but you still have to deal with the problem of moving other cars out of the way.  Otherwise the best you can do is try to move the fuel and battery to another car.
 
Roads and homes inside towns would have far fewer cars with more in working order to show that whoever had access to a car took it, and any that were left behind were probably not used at all.  Driving around inside a town would have you dealing with far fewer roadblocks and other obstacles, but the noise you make doing it would be a much larger issue than speeding along the open highway.
 
The amount of working cars and available keys could be tweaked to get the appropriate difficulty out of it, and I feel like this is the best way to enforce scarcity while still making it look like the people in town owned more than 20 cars between 3500 people.

Can anybody else vouch for this?
 
I don't really have experience with guns. So I wouldn't know. I still don't think people would know, or try to mess with it.
 
If I was on the apocalypse, and I miraculously got a gun. I really wouldn't fuck with it. What if I can't put it back together, or what if i do it wrong? if it's not broken don't fix it, it's my policy. plus i assume you need other tools as well? a screwdriver? maybe something else?
 
 
I just did a bit of reading.
 
Apparently, it depends on the gun, true semi-automatics should be cleaned constantly, while bolt action guns and rifles like revolvers or SKS can take a lot of abuse.
 
It also mentions that if you're using the gun every other day with quality ammo you should NOT clean it. 
https://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070707221427AAQxPPm

If it's meaningless why did you bother triple-posting to tear him down? That very last paragraph summed it up pretty succintly. Nobody wants to read 700 words when 50 will do.

Anyway.

Weapon degradation, yay, bladed weapons can get dull and blunt weapons can get bent out of shape or cracked. Dull bladed weapons wouldn't penetrate your enemy as far, thus making it harder to make that all-important brain damage happen. A blunt weapon with a bend or break in it might "give" a little bit every time you hit something with it, reducing the force transferred to whatever you're striking.

Guns that are used improperly should require cleaning if you don't want them to jam at a critical moment. Smooth and rifled barrels (dirty or otherwise) will both put holes in whatever you're shooting at within the relatively short distances at which we will be fighting most of our zombies. I figure it's not worth splitting hairs over that particular point when we all agree that your weapon jamming is a much bigger and more realistic concern.

Edit:
 

Oh man, this. I know how to handle a gun safely and I've shot them a few times in my life, but if I had to disassemble one without any instruction I'd be nervous as all hell. I figure they're made do be durable and thus wouldn't have loads of tiny parts. But anyone who's taken a pen apart only to have the spring fly off into a corner unexpectedly knows what I'm talking about.
 
I could probably figure it out but I'd also probably only attempt it in a situation where the gun was going to be useless to me anyway, like if it started to jam.

Fixed this for you.

Fixed this for you.

Or wall in someone's safehouse with corpses.  

That hubble telescope is pretty awesome.  I should get something like that to put on my next mission so I can have a camera pointed at the planet I'm orbiting.
 
Jool Sattelite Probe

Fixed this for you.

idea about axes and stuff found on dead zed:
 
imagine someone tries to kill a zed with an axe. hits it in the stomach or robcagge or whatnot. axe gets stuck (it alsmost certainly was no experienced axewielder), human dies to zed.
would the zed remove the axe ? no, why bother ....