Mirrors

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When I'm in a bathroom (or other room with a mirror I suppose), I think it could be cool if your line-of-sight would show Zed's standing behind you. The amount of times i've been looting in a bathroom and a quiet Z has been hiding in a dark corner that I could have sworn I checked (!) and has lunged at me! Yikes!

 

But yeah, if I'm facing a mirror, maybe I should be able to see behind myself? What do people think? Would it just be too confusing? Or could it save precious seconds in a life-threatening moment?

[Rathlord]

Would probably be nightmarishly hard to implement for not much benefit to be honest. It's not a bad idea, but from a programming standpoint I wouldn't call it feasible.

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Good point. Well made

[ApolloDiaspora]

Not a bad idea. but the only way I could see it working is by erasing the out-of-view fog as if the player was standing where the mirror is, and facing back in the direction of the player. Just add the revealed area to the player's existing field of view, perhaps with a slight decrease in your ability to see (i.e: Objects from the mirror's FOV are a little faded, and take a while to come into focus, much like running around at night time with an exhausted character). That could be invaluable if you could surround a safehouse with mirrored sticks, for example, but I can picture it being a programming nightmare.

 

Just think about it. Everytime the character moves, their field of view and angle to the mirror changes, which causes the mirror's field of view and angle to the player to change. Chaining up a ton of mirrors to look at a wide area could slow the game to a crawl. That being said, and this is just me pulling ideas out of my ass with no experience with how the game is coded, if the devs could ever implement the ability for multiple players to see the field-of-view-cones of other players on screen (this would purely be for testing reasons of course, imagine how it would break immersion), it probably wouldn't be much more of a step to code in mirrors as dummy players.

 

 

TANGENT: Having a craftable mirror on a stick to poke around corners could be a VERY useful tool in PZ, depending on how stealthy you want to be. Still stuck with the problem of dynamically moving another viewpoint and adding it to the player's own however.

[silents429]

Would probably be nightmarishly hard to implement for not much benefit to be honest. It's not a bad idea, but from a programming standpoint I wouldn't call it feasible.

This stressed me out just trying to imagine coding it 

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The last thing I wanted to do was induce coder panic 

[dra6o0n]

It's not a coding issue, it's resource management as PZ can run into delays due to attempting to add certain things resulted in loss of performance.

[Rathlord]

It's not a coding issue, it's resource management as PZ can run into delays due to attempting to add certain things resulted in loss of performance.

 

That's not particularly accurate.

[silents429]

It's not a coding issue, it's resource management as PZ can run into delays due to attempting to add certain things resulted in loss of performance.

Wat? What a dumb thing to think?

[dra6o0n]

Well typing extra lines of code will have barely noticable performance loss.

But running loops and causing bugs in them would have far greater impact.

 

Having unnecessary loops to check something after adding new content in, instead of integrating that into pre-existing loops, means you are doubling the work the client is doing, just to do a little extra.

 

Since it's in Java, constantly creating 'new' objects for some function, rather than recycling older objects into new ones, would also increase resources used. It also puts a strain on the garbage collector and that extra code gets thrown into memory, and is a extra junk that has to be taken out by the GC.

 

You can pre-emph that by 'recycling' your old object into a new 'object' again, which clears all the variables and such in the old objects.

 

Object obj = new Object(var1, var2, var3);

... After the obj is used up completely...

obj = new Object(var4, var5, var6);

 

This is just a basic example of the concept, not how the devs aren't doing it lol.

I'm pretty sure to manage the hundreds of zombies they already have to use something similar in concept.

I saw custom libraries referenced by the client when running their test builds for online, so I know it's something like that.

 

Quite frankly, there exists a language called J# which is basically a 'Java' variant done by Microsoft lol, as a way to allow people to port it over to use their language instead... I've heard it does have performance increase from that language alone, but not sure how much.