Talksintext

After skipping a few major versions, I've come back to see how things go. I am quite impressed. The game is definitely improving, and I especially love the weather systems. Still, some rough spots remain. Ground Aesthetics Visually speaking, this is the weakest aspect of PZ currently. The ground remains generic, static, and fairly uniform throughout the world. It gives a very bland impression, especially since we don't have shadows to break it up. Much needs to be done to add variety to this beyond the erosion system. 1. Much of the world should be in a full state of growth (in certain months). It's rural KY, why is the entire world mowed? This alone would help a bit. 2. There needs to be A LOT more variety in ground cover. Currently, everything looks more or less the same: green suburban lawn. You need to develop additional brushes, like wild forbs/wildgrasses (these will be patchy by nature), forest groundclutter (seedlings, ferns, vines, muddy mossy roots and leaves, shrubs), wetland areas with reeds and tall grasses if not outright swamps, pine needly veils, and so on. Patchiness is key to breaking up the uniformity and making it look natural (minor variations in texture / color / height within a brush). Get fractal. 3. Some sort of ground animation for wind would help a ton, even if it's just pixelart animation. Bonus Suggestions: Glue from Pine Resin Survival craft ability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdX-A0WJWXc UI Needs Love Especially with equipped hand and back / belt items. These should at least be sorted to the top of the equipped list, though a total player inventory UI rework is sorely needed at some point. Zombie Rivers of Doom Meta event: just a massive zombie swarm migration that crosses the entire map and fills cells, destroys just about anything in its path like a tornado (including a player base), and has rare highly dangerous zombies in it. Something that could spice up the late game for sure and would just be cool to see.

I'm curious as to how it could and who's saying that.

Yessss do it. Do it. Do it. It doesn't. Do it.

Well, that swaying part at least. Now... onto gusts... then, zombie raptors. Anyway, looks really good guys, good job A+ would buy again!

Dividing this into a discussion of "just regular wind animations" and "the gust system on top of that": Unless I missed something, all they're adding in are weather systems that move over the map and fog and precip and shaders. I've looked back at all the recent weather vids, and I don't see any of the sprites actually swaying in the wind or anything like that. It's sorely missing in this game (gusts or no gusts), and makes the map just look so static. Understandably it's a good bit of work to execute well, but on the other hand visual wind is extremely common in games (the proposed gust system less so/nonexistent, but easier for someone like Turbo to handle since it's just coding). It would also give the artists something to do once the whole team gets banging on the NPC system once anims are done. Like, it's something new to animate while everyone's busting through coding, so it might work well with their pipeline (not sure what additional art work is planned post-anims). As for how to do it (once you have animations for vegetation in place), it's really not that complicated. You create a tileable raster of wind gust patterns, then abstractly overlay it on the map, moving in the direction of the wind, its speed of course determined by gust speed, and any vegetation models/sprites tagged to "sway in the wind" will do so based on the values of the raster, such that RGB0,0,0 would be "no wind" and RGB 256,256,256 would be "full gust speed", with linear progression between, and that determines the "sway amount" for the model/sprite. Additionally, you can have the difference between gust speed and base speed affect the gamma/grey point of the raster. The additional performance cost over "just standard everything-blows-the-same-amount 'global' wind" animations would be extremely minor, and while this would take some time to code up, it doesn't look like an extreme undertaking, certainly by comparison to the massive overhaul Turbo's been on for months. And yes, trombo, it adds literally nothing to gameplay other than better visuals and immersion, something you can say about an awful lot of things that are included in lots of games, so I'm not sure your negativity is warranted. The benefit is it would certainly look cool/standard for a modern game.

Basically, have gusts of wind spread over vegetation/etc and animate a "swaying" effect, but not all on screen at once (well, excluding base wind effect), so you see "lines" of wind propagating through the world, depending on direction. It seems like it would be easy to do once you got a swaying animation for objects. It wouldn't work in interiors (except curtains on open windows, imagine those blowing about, would look cool), and perhaps not have it be exact lines, but slightly curved crescents that propagate. You guys know what I'm on about, right? I mean, you can get crazy with it (seems like you guys enjoy taking systems a bit further than most games would, which is awesome) and calculate wind shadows from buildings/dense forest and such, and do a whole physics simulation for where the gusts go exactly, but probably a simple system is sufficient. Hopefully something for the swaying can be worked into the massive animations overhaul. It's definitely a lacking visual feature that most games have. Tell you guys what, I'll definitely buy a second copy if you do this. Big money on the line here, big, big money.

I might mod it in down the road. I know from doing previous loot mods that the system is mostly moddable. I'm not sure if there's a way to edit the main code so you can take all the containers in a room at once, which is required for such a mod. I never got that into the weeds on modding this game. If the code works like: [i have a new room spawned],[for each singular container run a loot gen script] then it might be hard to do. I need: [i have a new room spawned],[here's a list of all the containers],[take the entire list and run a loot gen script] I would guess it's possible. I don't know. I don't have the game files on my system any more.

The current* loot system has a very rough feel to it, in that you have very random assortments of objects in a given "room" container. As in a kitchen cabinet might have a spoon, a bag of flour, and a hammer in it. I don't know what sorts of kitchens TIS has at home, but it makes me very concerned for them lol I propose a saner loot system with sub-room categories (SRC), like "dishes cabinet" and "food cabinet", even down to the level of "baking cabinet" if we want to go crazy with it. It's all just a few lines of code, so why not? Currently, I believe, when you spawn a room, it randomly assigns objects from a "room list" to each cabinet, based on weightings and roll chances. But that's it, every container gets spawned with the same random crap. Hence spoon, flour, hammer. Instead, when a room is spawned, it should: Step 1: get a list of these real-world containers Step 2: check the room type, then make a list of the appropriate SRC, grabbed from an XML file Step 3: (optional) some of the SRCs should be "mandatory", in that they will all spawn first at least once before going full-random. This way we don't have kitchens with 20 utensil drawers and no actual food, just because the RNG can be crazy some times. Step 4: for each container, randomly choose an SRC type, then fill it with the loot contained within that SRC file (loot generation as it currently is in-game) SRC types would include weightings (so a kitchen might have a 20% chance of food, 10% chance of utensils, 20% chance of dishes, 5% chance of pet food, whatever), and then each type also has a list of loot, weighted also (so "utensils" would be 20% spoons, 20% forks, etc). Here's my very hackish and definitely-not-functional attempt at coding it. This just bothered me so much while playing. I suppose I can mod it in later if you guys don't include it, but I'd rather not, and the as-is system really feels like an "alpha feature" that should be updated for 1.0. *(note that I haven't played for a few releases, as I've been on a gaming hiatus, but I assume this is still the case, and if I'm wrong well I've wasted 30min but at least I'm happy that it's fixed )

First question: they'll continue working for TIS, which will fund another game. NPCs are not really necessary for Zomboid to be "complete". They could expand the map a bit and release the current version as final, and it's more than met whatever objectives they originally had. They'd get a lot of blowback from a no-NPC release, but I don't think it'd tank the studio's chances at another crowdsourced game. And yes, I understand what NPCs are supposed to be. My point was that -at the point they released the unfinished NPC product in this scenario- it might still be in such a simple state which would sort of ruin the game.

I'm sort of happy to let the game keep evolving, rather than have NPCs finished and they release 1.0, on to the next one. That said, I've been putting off playing the game for a while now, because without NPCs or something "more" to the game than a very old and tired map there's little to get me interested. Certainly, a lot of the new systems and traits and such are nice, but I'm still going to find it all a bit pointless without something more than "lone survivor kills lots of zombies and builds up a small fort and loots the same 5 stores again." Anyway, there's not much for the community to talk about for NPCs. We have nothing but a general idea of what's planned.

Perhaps you don't realize what a giant sized bite of coding they've decided to take with this NPC system. Far larger developers have struggled with far lesser AI goals. I would be seriously impressed if they get the NPCs they promised out by the end of the year. Not only do they need NPCs that can avoid getting killed by zombies and react accordingly to ever-changing threats, they need ones that can create dynamic social groupings, fight with teamwork, build forts and safehouses, interact with a player, have the player alter their behaviors, and eventually drive vehicles, know when to move stealthily, etc, etc. Most AI in most video games, even by AAA devs, is a fraction of that, and done in a far far less open world. And then it needs to "feel right", "be fun", and "not be impossible" to deal with for the player. Even if they can get all the code in on time, balancing and testing is going to take months. I'm not saying all this to disparage them, but IF they actually pull through on their promises, the community reaction really shouldn't be "oh, neat, this works okay, but wtf there's a minor bug or annoying behavior". No, the reaction should be, "holy **** this is amazing that you got such a functional system in such a complicated game." And it should be extremely grateful if anything resembling a "decent" NPC system gets introduced, even if it's more limited than what was promised. Other option: they start running low on money, want to move on to a new game, and release whatever they have, or are forced to just can the whole system because it won't fit together right or would just ruin the game with how simple it was.

There are ways you can make the game more challenging AND realistic AND have this tied to the new food system: Whatever happens, you should be required to have a higher caloric intake than your base needs in order to gain strength. It's practically impossible in reality to gain muscle without gaining fat, meaning having more calories than necessary. Obviously, higher protein is necessary, but besides that a lack of caloric surplus basically prevents the body from adding lean muscle mass. So strength increase should be tied both to activity AND caloric/protein intake being above "normal". Also, activity (like sprinting/swinging) should increase caloric needs (and of course these activities are needed for a strength increase as well). So if you were sprinting/swinging all day, maybe double the caloric needs, then work back from that to see how much a single swing/sprint would add. Also, a caloric deficit should reduce strength over time, as the body consumes muscle mass to maintain itself

It's totally 3D terrain and flowing physx water and rainbows.

It would be very resource intensive (both dev time but more importantly CPU time and RAM footprint) for all 100+ zombies you might have in play to each have their personal map of the world constantly cataloged and updated. You basically need to have 100s of maps saved to RAM/disk and have the CPU spend time each cycle to update where each zombie is looking and what it sees. Tell me one other game that has this feature. I am aware of none. Every game I've ever played has had the AI pathfinding had full awareness of the level geometry. Just turn off pathfinding altogether if you don't want it. Amazingly the devs gave you that option, because they're awesome and give us tons of options to play how we want. There is literally nothing to complain about, aside perhaps from some bug on your end.

Thanks for the answers! I feel greedy for getting 4 different questions answered

Good idea. I like combat having more than 1 button. Given we barely use the keyboard at all, there's certainly a lot of spare keys sitting around for alternative attack types.

Regarding NPC meta population: 1) How is the number, spawning, and caching of NPCs going to be handled? I mean, are all NPCs going to be spawned at world initiation as unique objects that build up histories and stats, OR are they going to be handled more like zombies currently (ie interchangeable, randomized at cell load, and otherwise static or abstracted when not loaded)? Are these going to be Dwarf Fortress NPCs or more like GTA NPCs? If the former, can you tell us more about how their lives will be abstracted? 2) How adjustable will starting NPC population counts be? Also, how will the NPC population interact with the zombie population? For instance, I would love to start a world with 99:1 NPCs:zombies and watch as the NPCs are slowly killed off or zombified during play, ending up with like 1:99 NPC:zed. 3) Will new NPCs be spawned after world initiation, like zombies are now, or will you be able to effectively depopulate the map of all NPCs? Will we be able to adjust this to our liking, ala the current zombie population system? 4) How moddable is the NPC system going to be for us?

Well, that's how I do it, it doesn't mean that's how the system was intended to be used. Most players want ever increasing zombie hordes. You can always do something like: start = 0.25 pop = 1.0 peak = 50 / 365 days respawn = 10%/day It'd just keep getting more and more insane and be unsurvivable after a while without a skyfort.

It's like this. I think. Because we haven't gotten a clear explanation, and as far as I know nobody not on the dev team has dug into the code to give us the exact equation. Maybe I missed it, though, or forgot it. Whatever, here's my best attempt: You set pop multiplier to 1 (ie you don't touch it). You have "normal zombies" now, just the standard amount. If you set start multiplier to 0.5, then you start with 50% that many. If you set the respawn rate to 10%/day, then after 5 days you'll have the 100% normal amount of zombies. Good up till this point? If you set pop multiplier to 0.2 (you reduce it), then you have "low zombies". If you set start multiplier to 1, then you start with 20% of normal zombies, and it stays that way (since you started with 100% of your total pop desired). Good? Now comes in the peak multiplier. This has a date attached to it, when you want the peak to be reached. If you set it to 1 day, then the game will start to try reaching peak on the second day. It will do this based on your respawn settings. So let's say you had normal zombies AND a 1.0 start multiplier. Then you set peak to 4.0 after 15 days (with 10%/day respawn). That means that the game would see the "total pop desired" each day as: day 0: 100% of normal day 5: 200% of normal day 10: 300% of normal day 15: 400% of normal day 20: 400% of normal day 5000: 400% of normal k? So each day the game wasn't at 400%, it would spawn 10% more (as per settings). Now let's say you start with pop multiplier at 2.0, start at 0.5, and peak at 5.0 after 30 days. Desired Pop... initiation: 100% of normal (2.0 x 0.5) day 0: 200% of normal (2.0, the start is just to set the starting amount in each cell) day 5: 367% of normal ((we start with 200%, then add (5.0x2.0-1.0)/30 each day, which is 33%/day here) day 15: 700% of normal day 30: 1000% of normal (5.0 x 2.0 = 10.0, or 1000%) day 300: 1000% (you're at peak, it stays here forever) Now, for the actual zombie count, it depends on whether a cell has reached its desired pop and how fast you're respawning if it hasn't (and how many you've killed or have migrated, but we'll ignore that for simplicity). So, if we set 100%/day, then each day the full amount will be respawned. However, if we set 10%/day, then it's going to be playing catch up in our above example. For that, we would get: Actual Zombie Count: initiation: 100% (2.0 x 1.0 start) day 5: 250% (100% start + 10% day 1 x 233 + 10% day 2 x 267% + 10% day 3 x 300% + 10% day 4 x 333% + 10% day 5 x 367%) ...And I'm not doing any more math! But you hopefully get the point now. Anyway, that's how *I* understand the math to work. Let a dev strike me down with his furious actual-equation-lightning-bolt should I be wrong.

They're both cheap. My house rules include the provision that you must always be able to be reached by zeds wherever you are.

population multiplier: old "zombie intensity" - how many zombies you want to begin with. start multiplier: how much of the "population mutliplier" you want at game start (it will slowly increase) peak multiplier: how many zombies you want at X days (and forever after) k? What I like to do is set a very high pop multiplier, a low start multiplier, and a very very low peak multiplier after 3mo, with about 10%/day refill. This means you start off a bit easy, then by day 10 you're totally swarmed, which slowly dies off over the next months (which I make winter) until you're left with just a few stragglers. It's sort of the opposite of how the system is supposed to work (peak should be highest amount), but I don't care, I still do have a peak, just by using the pop multiplier creatively instead. I guess that's more confusing. Just pay attention to the first few lines.

I also hope we don't have a karma system, and that each NPC has a unique "mind" and awareness of the world and its history. I also hope we have KoS NPCs, at least as an option. Now, of course, these sorts of bandits would have a high chance of being killed themselves as the world progresses (since they're initiating combat a lot), and such sociopathy isn't common anyway, so they should be rare, but they should still be out there. Ultimately, need and desperation can change a person, and you might expect the ratio of such sociopaths to normal NPCs to increase over time, at least among solo NPCs (but also small groups).

So ...say ......we ......all? No, art is not some minor task and probably accounts for some 70% of game budgets ;p Not ruling it out but if I were an artist responsible for the masses of tile art for this game that comment would have turned my gut into a churn Well, perhaps it's a little harder than that The other option was to open it up to modding, so that the game will spawn any X by X tile art within a category (eg "bathtub") into a map position randomly upon the first chunk initialization. That way the community can fill in additional content and not worry about doing tedious map editing for the 5,000,000 chunks you'll have in the game by the time it's "finished". Just an easy 5min coding job, I'm sure

Somewhat OT but very related: Are we going to get an increase in props for the coming map expansion, or is what we see in this video it for the final game? I mean, one bath tub model, one shower model, one or two chair models, one bookcase model, etc, etc? One of the reasons the world feels so monotonous currently is this repetitiveness of props (as well as brick wall color and similar layouts of course). It seems like such a minor task to expand upon the current set (some pixel art and a few prop traits right), I hope we get more OR that the devs include a system that will allow more to be seamlessly added in later on* *Such as ANY 2x1 bathtub model can be spawned at initial chunk spawn in a "2x1 bathtub" slot (randomly) if modded/dev added bathtub models are placed in a given folder. I've seen other games do something like this, and it helps a lot, as well as being very modder-friendly.

Yeah, I'm more interested in that moving stuff system being tossed in soon, plus a major map update, than NPCs. I have come to peace with the lack of NPCs, and will just be happy when they're in. As I've said before, I'm fully happy to wait since it means more content and a dragged out development timeline (both positives, I like more development time so long as it's stable, which this game is).