I'm sure this has been well trounced over, but a large part of why you haven't seen a lot of content released for a while was due to the unfortunate circumstances that lead to them losing a large part of their work (and equipment).
As far as balance goes, the game is intentionally not being balanced. Lemmy has said several times (and it's a pretty well-held tenet of alpha programming) that there's no point in balancing a game when everything you balance will likely be changed in the future anyways. I'm sure you're not interested (and don't need) to hear the lecture on alpha games, but the plan is to get all of the basic features functional and then in beta you worry about balancing.
Just for example, there's about another dozen professions partially in the game code unused right now. That's because they're more worried about the profession system working than the professions themselves; that comes in beta. Lemmy has even specifically addressed construction worker being best; they're well aware, it would just be silly to balance the 5 professions we have and then have it all be made worthless when the others get added in beta phase.
It's not a matter of them not being able to handle the work load; that's exactly how an alpha is meant to work. I'm not saying the game shouldn't be criticized; it should, and all of the devs are great at accepting criticism and folding it into their design. But the point is that some of your criticism isn't helpful or accurate, such as that about balance.
Feature creep can devastate games, that's absolutely true. But the PZ devs have a clear plan that they consistently work towards. The suggestion forum is a place for people to throw out ideas, of which a minuscule, microscopic amount might someday be included in the game. I can assure you they don't just pile on every idea they see; most of what is in the "Commonly Suggested Suggestions" list as 'yes's' are things that the devs were planning on implementing from day one that people just happen to make threads about a lot, not because they just say yes to everything in this subforum.
The very condensed version is that I'm not sure you understand what alpha means in programming. I'm not trying to use that as a shield for criticism or unhappiness with the game; that's all valid criticism. What I am saying is that features aren't and shouldn't be balanced until the beta phase of the game. That's just how game design is.
One of my favorite suggestions is the Faction Board, which you can construct from paper, pens, a cork board and possibly a map. Using it, the group leader can create tasks that need to be done such as farming, harvesting logs, or supply runs. Whenever NPCs idle in the safe house, they can take a look at the Faction Board to see what needs doing and the idle survivor with the highest skill in that area will go ahead and do it.
You such a bunch of psycho... Everyone want to burn the wonderfull world Mash & Andy built
Bah....
Anyway, how to make stronger fire.... : function newFire(fire) fire:setLife(9999999); -- make the fire live longer fire:setSpreadDelay(100); -- make the fire spread fasterendEvents.OnNewFire.Add(newFire);Here you go.... Psycho.
lighting, actually building the scene, and drawing the scene
the last is (if enabled) happening on another thread, but the lighting and building the scene is still slow and we're finding few ways to significantly speed it up any further, due to the (I'd liek to think) high graphic fidelity / isometric combo. Isometric makes some very restrictive limitations on how you can build and draw a map, and the smooth lighting on a 3D game or any other perspective could be made much faster just by tinting the verts of the wall poly's. We're having to draw over the wall tiles with another poly, with a ton of slow state changes between each one instead of batching them all up in a super sexy long buffer to the card. Isometric has certain demands that cannot be avoided, and doing the lighting on the walls requires a lot of extra stuff that wouldn't be necessary with a 3D game for example. I think it would much surprise people quite how much is going on under the bonnet to make that smooth lighting work. A crap ton is how much.
Another potential optimization we've considered is drawing all the walls as poly's instead of iso tiles, but the amount of upheaval and work both art and code at this stage would be immense, so it's difficult to imagine when we could implement that. Hindsight is 20/20, we had no godly idea what graphics level we'd be shooting for when we started and were a bit greener when it came to java and opengl.
Add to that that everything in modern graphics cards is tailored to rendering 3D stuff, not 2D, and a lot of the assumptions they make about how data is sent becomes incompatible or nowhere as effective with 2D, especially layering on the slightly unorthodox way we had to do the lighting to work on 2D tiles, which isn't a problem generally for 2D games since their graphical requirements are quite low, but the fact that our draw poly count is a ton higher than any 2D game I can think of, with no possibility of z buffering or texture sorting, batching etc due to iso cuts out 99% of the most common ways to vastly optimize an engine. (lets not forget 100s of pathfinding zombies that need to collide with each other and the environment in real time )
As an analogy. Imagine moving 30,000 files from one directory to another, with the requirement of sending emails announcing the next files you are going to move. Most 3D games could just drag select the files in 1,000 file chunks (perhaps organized by file type), Ctrl-X, go to target directory, Ctrl-V. Then send an email about the next 1,000. We have to drag each file across individually, and send an email sabout the next file between each single one. One by one, each with an accompanying email. We can't even sort the directory by file type to make it easier, as each file has to be copied over in a strict order. Perhaps if we're lucky we may occasionally find we can copy 2 or 3 files in one go, but it really is that sucky.
Add onto that the fact java isn't the fastest, and our low spec target audience, and it ends up being frustrating to read people's very very frequent comments essentially saying 'why doesn't this in development java game with a single engine programmer made in a couple of years run as well as this full released AAA C++ 3D game with custom nVidia/ATI optimizations built into the drivers that had 30 people working on the engine alone for 10 years '
Of course there would have been one way to massively speed up the game in practically every regard, but sadly it wasn't suitable to our needs.... I was going to draw a diagram but Paint is a bag of sickening shit and its way too much effort to find another app and install it. In summary, another of the biggest CPU and memory hog generally is the fact that walls aren't a full tile in width..It's possible for you to have two adjacent tiles that cannot be traveled between, next to two adjacent tiles where you can. In fact all 8 directions for each tile need to be considered independently, and there are a myriad of different types of tile that affect these differently (windows can be pathfinded through but have collision, trees cannot be seen through but can be walked through, etc etc etc) instead of just being able to say 'that blocks full, that one's empty, that one's full, that one's empty'. This makes both collision, line of sight, data storage for collision, and pathfinding all have to do way more work and store way more stuff than we would otherwise (as well as rule out a lot of great A* optimizations into the bargain)
It also means either much more data to be loaded/saved, or (as it is now) much more data to be processed post-load. Then how fast do you process that data? too many per frame and low end PCs will suffer (FPS). Too few per frame and high end PCs will suffer. (those dark square chunks as you run, anyone?)
IF we started again, completely from scratch, would we be able to make the game run better? For sure. Sadly it's not really possible to know exactly every challenge you'll face in advance of making a game. Especially your first isometric game engine, first time using java, and first time using opengl, We have to be creative at this stage to get the most we can out of it, until we've got the moneys to help finance more wide sweeping rewrites of stuff without dragging releases to a stand still again.
that's not a rant, per se, I don't really think customers really care why, or that they should, as it's just the end result that matters, I just wanted to get this down as it's a common thing people say that can be a tad frustrating like Crytek engine and a small low budget java indie game's engine as comparable equivalents if your computer runs CoD Ghosts in highest settings, that's a strong indication that you'll have better performance on zomboid than someone who can't, but there is little else of relevance in the comparison of FPS and graphical fidelity as so so so much else could be going on.
But see you're wrong here because adding a mod is not the same as being included in the vanilla game. Not even close. Games aren't rated for content in mods and they aren't judged by them either, but they can be torn apart by their standard features. And personally having unlimited points would make me look at the game with disgust because it's the same trap so many other games fall into: unlimited points makes a points system arbitrary and useless. If there was going to be unlimited points, then they necessarily should have just not made a points system and instead just given you all the perks and called you Superman. It is the necessary, interesting, and meaningful decisions that make gameplay exciting and important.
Like I said above, I oppose it because I think it would be a bad representation of what this game stands for.
The same way you could add "My Little Pony" characters and I wouldn't have to use them, so it wouldn't affect me.
The same way they could add rape to the game and I wouldn't have to do it, so it doesn't affect me.
People would still watch Let's Plays of Joe Schmo on Youtube who doesn't bother to tell anyone he's setting it up to be a Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies simulator and people will go, "huh... another run and gun zombie game. Doesn't get my money."
The "this doesn't affect you so it deserves to be added" argument is a logical fallacy. This idea seems to cross the line on what the game represents to me, which is why I wouldn't like to see it. And also easily modded XD
SchemingDuck reacted to Thuztor in [ANNOUNCE] Turn Based Zomboid Mod