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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 )

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.

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.

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

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

:'( Why must the internet destroy everything? 

This is straight up true. The pathing code has been close to functionally identical since about 0.1.5d - I wrote that code so I should know. Don't much like the implication here that we or the moderators are lying on this issue. Anything you are noticing different about the pathing is either illusionary, or was an issue that was there before but you never noticed. Repeat: The pathfinding code is pretty much identically the same as when there were bald 2D zombies walking about the alpha map, beyond stuff like optimization and multithreading..

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

Will there be changes to melee combat? it seems once you knock a zombie down and just keep hitting it with any melee weapon anywhere even its foot it still counts to beating its head. Will there be any way to signify what part of the body you're hitting maybe you could hit a leg and cripple it and turn it into a crawler?

I was wondering what features the developers themselves miss most in PZ?
And beside this: Will there be a way to dry towels in future?