CaptainBinky

Oops - my fault. I fixed the loading of numbers in the "1,0000" format but completely forgot about when writing them out too, and completely failed to notice in the text file you provided . Try this version of the converter: PZ_PLYtoPZconverter.zip

This looks like it's working now That .txt file looks correct to me

Hi @ZaBrat, Heh. I'm guessing in your country, you would write a float in the format 1,00000 rather than 1.00000? Try this version of the tool - I've not ever had to deal with supporting multiple language formats in code before so I'm not entirely sure I've done this correctly but give it a go, see what happens. Thanks PZ_PLYtoPZconverter.zip

@ZaBrat I've attached a version of the tool with more debug output to try and see where this is going wrong. Can you try exporting using this version and copy&paste the console output here please? Thanks PZ_PLYtoPZconverter.zip

I think we would all agree that we would prefer it if the text we wrote about the game, its current state, its planned features, and all the other stuff - text which we were deliberately open about to attempt to prevent issues precisely like this one - did not require clicking "read more" on a box in order to see. But that's the way the Steam Store page is set up, so that's the way it is. Levelling this specific criticism at us as opposed to Valve and the way they designed the store for early access games is a little unfair on this particular point imo.

I don't really follow your example with the railroad station. You say it wasn't aware of you, but in your pictures you're clearly just the other side of a see-through chain-link fence. That the zombie walked around the perimeter until it found a way through seems perfectly reasonable to me. You're also saying that the pathfinding is simultaneously too good and too stupid. If you want less smart zombies, why is not taking the direct line path (even if it involves falling off a balcony) not reasonable? Do you want them clever enough to pathfind or not? (note: I don't code any of this myself, so I don't actually know much about how it works under the bonnet.)

I like how these circle avatars work with my beagle

No-one's called me "Blinky" for a while, so at least there's that

Here is the problem we have: In an ideal world, we would simply simulate a million zombies in real-time - they would all move around the map according to what they see and hear, if they're killed, they're dead permanently. Additional zombies would only ever 'migrate' in from the very edges of the map. No approximation would be going on. I think that we can all agree that this would be the perfect way for the game to operate. I think we also intuitively know that such a system would be impossible for a number of reasons - not just the processing required for the A.I or the ridiculous burden on your net connection in multiplayer, but also the fact that the zombies would need to know about parts of the map which aren't streamed in (even if we made the map a fraction of the size it is, parts of it would still not be in memory at any given location). So that's out as a solution, by miles. So. What can we do? How can we get the huge zombie populations that we need to give a satisfying sensation of being in the zombie apocalypse? Well, on some level, we have to cheat, just like all other games do on some level. Again, in an ideal world, you cheat in a manner which looks to the player as if you're not cheating. When you play games with incredibly sophisticated A.I. and oh my God it's so clever and amazing - this is because they cheated in a way in which it wasn't noticeable. Good job! 10/10 Now we've got a problem. We're a sandbox game. We need to give the player control over how the game operates. We need to let the player customise their experience. This means exposing the controls to the sandbox settings. Now when we cheat, we need to give you a little box in order to customise that cheat. We need to reveal that there is such a thing as migration and respawning. Without the sandbox options, we could have randomised the respawning a little and simply pretended that what you were seeing was migration. Oh! Those zombies were simulated! They must have heard a noise, wandered over, and that explains why this cleared out area now has some zombies in it. With some incredibly well phrased bullshit, we probably could have convinced a number of people that actually somehow we were able to pull off simulating that ridiculous a number of zombies. The more technical amongst you probably would have smelled bullshit - but you wouldn't be able to say exactly how we were bullshitting. Not so with a sandbox game. We have to expose how it works. There's no way we can bullshit our way out of this. And that means, because you know that respawning is something which happens, you're now in the position of thinking that the only explanation for some zombies being somewhere they shouldn't be is because of respawning - sort of Occam's Razor logic. And it puts us in a position where we're having a discussion in terms of those sandbox options, rather than having a general discussion about how the game feels - completely isolated from number in boxes. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back in. Because in an ideal world, all you guys would be talking about how the game feels - and only we developers would be worrying about what numbers go in boxes to make it feel good for you. What can we do about this? Well, we're in Early Access - there's still plenty of room to tweak the actual ways in which respawning happens, when it triggers, all that jazz - to make it feel right. But regardless of what we do, it'll still be exposed in the sandbox settings. We could obfuscate those settings by giving them fairly meaningless names, but that would then make customising sandbox kind of shit - if you're setting options whose effect is unknown. edit: I would also like to mention in this word "cheat" heavy post, that we endevour to cheat as little as possible, obviously. I've banged on about it simply to emphasise the point that it has to happen at some point in this, and almost every game. But the fact that most times, you can see a whopping horde, turn, run off, turn, run back, and there is the same whopping horde shows that we are actually simulating in a non-cheaty way a pretty damn large number of zombies

Thankyou for being decent and friendly in this thread, by the way - it's appreciated. I was kind of expecting something... different to transpire when I clicked it I hope that we can tempt you into keeping an eye on the game as we roll out updates - each major update tends to cause bursts of activity - so it may not be completely necessary to wait until 1.0 Thanks

Well multiplayer games suffer from this generally. You need people on the servers to attract people to the servers, which is a chicken and egg problem This happens with every multiplayer game which doesn't have the userbase of big games like DayZ, H1Z1, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. If Zomboid sells 3 times what it has so far, then maybe we'd have a shot at super-active servers. Perhaps it being an Early Access game partly puts people off, partly it being a 2D isometric game, partly it being a hardcore survival game, partly being a long time in development, etc etc etc. There's no simple answer. I hope that once we hit 1.0 we'll see an influx of activity from a lot of our players who've perhaps not played for a while, waiting for it to come out of Early Access.

How is it dead exactly? We write Mondoids every Monday about what's going on (http://projectzomboid.com/), we've got a subforum where you can see the releases (http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/forum/35-pz-updates/), and a pretty active forum and Steam forum. Do you mean in terms of player numbers on public multiplayer servers?

Of course - if we added a bad smell moodle it wouldn't be specific to one particular thing, it'd be anything which smells bad

If I get my way, then yes As others have mentioned, bad smell is not in itself dangerous so primarily this would be for flavour - but that said, feeling horribly sick because of a disgusting smell can debuff things like perception and therefore, as others have said, encourage the cleanup of corpses from your safehouse etc. Furthermore, if we go with negative "bad smell" moodles, then on the flip side, "nice smell" should be a positive moodle. Cook something tasty? Nice smell. In multiplayer, a nice smell of bacon could lead you to realise a house which looked empty is, in fact, occupied. So if you're trying to stay away from potential raiders, you might actually *want* to scatter some corpses around the streets outside your home to mask that smell of tasty bacon cooking...

This is a really really good suggestion and, even were it to never serve any practical purpose in terms of alerting you to threats, would really help add an extra level of flavour to the world. Odour moodle leading to nautious moodle, etc.