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Getting back to the NPCs


Johnny

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Please don't start pushing for NPCs. They are incredibly complex, and they'll only be released when they're ready, and not before

Yeah, I know, Sorry. Not the best use of words as I know that NPCs are hard to code in. But just getting a bit excited :)

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Pff, if you go back to 2011 and manually search the old forums, you'll see it was me that started the Soon revolution at TIS.

Now, give me my royalties check.

 

Trademarks are useless, you need to get that registered trademark if you want to be raking in the dough.

 

Soon®

 

Now it's mine. Give me MY royalty checks.

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Read the latest blog post. I saw that they are adding fishing, and also getting to work on NPCs! Yay! A lot of people will be satisfied. I guess AI will be improved, and all these things that are improved from the old NPCs. But again... We may have the NPCs soon! 

 

I'm really pleased to hear this. I think PZ is the only game that'll really give me that TWD experience. Sure I loved TellTales narrative, I really got drawn in but I could only affect it so much.

 

With PZ the story will be how I shape it.

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Yeah, I know, Sorry. Not the best use of words as I know that NPCs are hard to code in. But just getting a bit excited :)

 

I've no idea why you're apologizing. You're in general discussion. Generally discussing NPC's.

 

Bad Johnny, how could you!

I'm actually more excited about fishing!

 

Whenever I've done anything like fishing in a game before I feel terribly depressed. I think to myself;

 

Shouldn't I just, I dunno, go fishing?

 

edit: I'd just like to add. Regardless of how much fun it is or is not. If fishing were not present in PZ it would've been a major oversight. It fleshes out the game well.

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guys, i hate to tell ya but those of us in the Atari Test Drive Unlimited forums were copyrighting the word "Soon" back in 08-09 to refer to the proposed time period Atari would release TDU2.

 

 

please donate my royalties to The Home for Wayward Zombies.

after all, not all of them want to eat flesh. some just want a place to fit in.

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But if you went real fishing, you wouldn't catch a virtual fish. :(

 

True, but I would have dinner :)

 

Then you'd have to skin it, gut it, clean it and cook it. And then there's that whole "outdoors" thing you'd have to deal with. Better to do virtual fishing while eating delivery pizza and watching tv.

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Then you'd have to skin it, gut it, clean it and cook it. And then there's that whole "outdoors" thing you'd have to deal with. Better to do virtual fishing while eating delivery pizza and watching tv.

 

Very true. I think I'd take fresh caught/cooked fish over a pizza though. Papa Johns would give a run for it's money though.

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guys, i hate to tell ya but those of us in the Atari Test Drive Unlimited forums were copyrighting the word "Soon" back in 08-09 to refer to the proposed time period Atari would release TDU2.

please donate my royalties to The Home for Wayward Zombies.

after all, not all of them want to eat flesh. some just want a place to fit in.

Like Shaun of the Dead's Ed https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=SZZMU4yiFqH7yAGjlYG4DQ&url=http://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DLiCq5yJchPA&cd=6&ved=0CDgQuAIwBQ&usg=AFQjCNH5mWF5tE8-9Z6HFF4GmSJFzSQGoA&sig2=cWO4tym825Jat8tM8UBhZw
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I rather think NPCs won't arrive until the game is pretty much feature complete. They have to code NPCs such that they interact with all intended features and they can't know that until they're done adding new features.

 

It's incredibly complicated to write an AI in the first place; it's a 5x more complicated to add new features in later and have them work properly with everything else. Much easier to know what features NPCs will need to interact with then code them accordingly; not add NPCs then later add all the features they'll need to use and code for them later.

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Yea only problem with that logic is they keep on adding stuff in so using that as an excuse to push the npc date back is like stabbing themselves in the foot. Usually within a development team you have people working on multiple things but you don't push back major features for minor additions pretty much never. The best way to go about it would be to finish up npcs so they can interact with major game mechanics, and then update them for the minor stuff.

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Yea only problem with that logic is they keep on adding stuff in so using that as an excuse to push the npc date back is like stabbing themselves in the foot.

 

Yeah but the stuff they've added has been widely requested and was bound to bring PZ a lot of free publicity

 

Look everyone an extremely cheap multiplayer zombie game!

 

The punters would come running. Also, it's shoot yourself in the foot. If you're stabbing yourself in the foot then there is something seriously wrong there :P

 

Usually within a development team you have people working on multiple things but you don't push back major features for minor additions pretty much never. The best way to go about it would be to finish up npcs so they can interact with major game mechanics, and then update them for the minor stuff.

 

I think it's important to appreciate how small the team is. This isn't a triple A game and it doesn't have it's funding.

 

http://projectzomboid.com/blog/about-us/

 

Patience Daniel-son!

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Yea only problem with that logic is they keep on adding stuff in so using that as an excuse to push the npc date back is like stabbing themselves in the foot. Usually within a development team you have people working on multiple things but you don't push back major features for minor additions pretty much never. The best way to go about it would be to finish up npcs so they can interact with major game mechanics, and then update them for the minor stuff.

That's called feature creep and every studio suffers from it at some point.

 

It wouldn't be the best way to go because the developers would have to basically rewrite NPCs every time something major was added which a huge net loss of development time. I mean huge.

 

The cooking overhaul is a major feature. Could you imagine programming your NPCs to use the old system and then having to re-code them to use the new system? It's a net waste of work. A huge net waste of work.

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