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Working Cars should be a RARE Commodity


Eblanc

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I agree that lockpicking shouldn't be an accessible skill to an average person, especially when you start taking into account the fact that most locks you'd find can't be picked without the proper tools even if you did know how.  As Rath says, it is to a degree the problem with "internet kids" who see a video of a lock being picked or do it in Oblivion and think they could apply that to real life.
 

The problem is - and some of you may want to sit down for this - locks aren't meant to be picked.  It's not an intuitive process, and it's not something that's easy to do even with the cheapest of locks.  When you pick a lock, you're exploiting imperfections in the way the lock was machined.  Note that I say "machined" and not "designed".  Again, they are designed to work with specific keys, not crooked bits of metal.  What ends up happening, however, is that when the locks are made the tumblers are not in perfect alignment with each other.  The difference is small, usually less than a degree, but this lets you turn the chamber just far enough to keep one tumbler trapped in the upright position while you work on the next one.
 
How do you know what order the tumblers are in, and how far you need to push each one to lock it?  By touch.  Except you're not touching the tumblers, you're touching the aforementioned bits of bent metal.  This is where the practice comes in - you have to learn what it feels like to hit a tumbler, how much pressure to apply to move it into position, how to tell when the chamber has moved enough to lock the tumbler in place and whether you're even working on the right tumbler in the first place.  And again, this is for simple locks.  The $10 padlock I bought for my locker has five tumblers.  Anyone with the right tools who had an idea of what to do could pick a lock like that through trial and error, but it could take hours.  

 

With months of practice you might be able to spend less than an entire minute on each tumbler, but you can still forget about picking anything more complex without specialized tools and intimate knowlege of the lock's inner workings.  A far cry from the Hollywood vision of someone with a paper clip picking through any lock they wish in mere seconds, and definitely something you want to gamble your life on when time is of the escence.


 
As far as cars are concerned, I definitely think that they should be abundant.  The chalenge will be in maintaining and fueling them.  Keys shouldn't be hard to find.  Even if they're not in the vehicle, you can check logical places for them.  If there's a car in front of a house then go check the house for keys in a drawer or on a zombie.  If you see a car on the highway just check the ignition - I bet a lot of people didn't grab their keys before trying to get away from whatever made them flee their cars.

 

Similarly, I bet a lot of those people also didn't bother to turn their engines off.  If you find a car on the road with the keys in the ignition, chances are it's been on for days or weeks and has certainly run the fuel tank empty and the battery dry.  Given that people don't generally flee individually this would probably lead to you finding long roads gridlocked with useless cars.  Plenty to get across the idea that people were trying to get away from this thing.  Scattered in here and there could be cars the owners turned off before running.  If you're Lucky you might find keys in a few of those, but you still have to deal with the problem of moving other cars out of the way.  Otherwise the best you can do is try to move the fuel and battery to another car.

 

Roads and homes inside towns would have far fewer cars with more in working order to show that whoever had access to a car took it, and any that were left behind were probably not used at all.  Driving around inside a town would have you dealing with far fewer roadblocks and other obstacles, but the noise you make doing it would be a much larger issue than speeding along the open highway.

 

The amount of working cars and available keys could be tweaked to get the appropriate difficulty out of it, and I feel like this is the best way to enforce scarcity while still making it look like the people in town owned more than 20 cars between 3500 people. :P

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Growing up in small town, southern USA I can easily say there's one car or more per household. The US isn't like other countries- the vast majority of our infrastructure was designed with cars in mind, and aside from big cities you really can't get by without them most of the time, as being a very large (area wise) part of the country with very low population density, getting the essentials for living without a car is very difficult. From experience I can guarantee you Muldraugh averages more than one car per household- especially if you include the surrounding farmland. Most farmers have slews of old cars around.

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Let me clear something up: I just wanted to show Eblanc a cool form of lockpicking that is way easier than the bobby pin method.

 

"*Gets Weiser deadbolt from box. Inserts key from same model (but not same key-alike setting). Gives key smack*" Keyed-alike just means that it would have the same key grooves and model. If it has the same model key, from my understanding, the bump key of the same model should work. If not, could you please explain why? (this interests me! sorry!)

 

I apologize for not quoting you the entire way either. I was just trying to get the main points. I thought about it today and I would imagine not everyone would know how to tell which bullets fit in which gun. I actually know an experienced hunter who put the wrong bullets in the wrong box after reloading them. Long story short, he got a pretty nasty burn across his face. Again, not that anything like this should be implemented into the game, I just like sharing knowledge.

 

I'm glad me and Rathlord are on the same side this time! I come from a small suburban/urban town in the northeast US and I would say almost everyone's families own at least two cars. Then again, you could play it off as a lot of people got up and out of there as soon as it happened so there aren't a lot of cars in towards the city. Then you could have a few towards the outside edges of the road/map.

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I certainly agree that it may not be practical to have a car for every house in the game actually extant during gameplay, but I don't think a huge artificial limit is called for, either. A good mix of wrecked cars, ones without keys, and ones with no charge/fuel would be the optimal way to do it, methinks.

 

Further, as with houses, I can't really get behind the idea of tracking keys for every individual car either. Even if some cars didn't have keys, trying to keep them sorted (and having the game sort them) is both a burden on the player and the engine, and sounds rather un-fun from a game perspective. I still hold the best way to do it would be to just have some cars "without keys" that you can loot, scavenge, siphon, etc. and some cars "with keys" that you can potentially drive. Since it makes sense people might leave their keys in the car frequently, this would not be that big of a stretch of the imagination.

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As far as cars are concerned, I definitely think that they should be abundant.  The chalenge will be in maintaining and fueling them.  Keys shouldn't be hard to find.  Even if they're not in the vehicle, you can check logical places for them.  If there's a car in front of a house then go check the house for keys in a drawer or on a zombie.  If you see a car on the highway just check the ignition - I bet a lot of people didn't grab their keys before trying to get away from whatever made them flee their cars.

 

Similarly, I bet a lot of those people also didn't bother to turn their engines off.  If you find a car on the road with the keys in the ignition, chances are it's been on for days or weeks and has certainly run the fuel tank empty and the battery dry.  Given that people don't generally flee individually this would probably lead to you finding long roads gridlocked with useless cars.  Plenty to get across the idea that people were trying to get away from this thing.  Scattered in here and there could be cars the owners turned off before running.  If you're Lucky you might find keys in a few of those, but you still have to deal with the problem of moving other cars out of the way.  Otherwise the best you can do is try to move the fuel and battery to another car.

 

Roads and homes inside towns would have far fewer cars with more in working order to show that whoever had access to a car took it, and any that were left behind were probably not used at all.  Driving around inside a town would have you dealing with far fewer roadblocks and other obstacles, but the noise you make doing it would be a much larger issue than speeding along the open highway.

 

The amount of working cars and available keys could be tweaked to get the appropriate difficulty out of it, and I feel like this is the best way to enforce scarcity while still making it look like the people in town owned more than 20 cars between 3500 people. :P

 

On that note, I'm wondering whether it'd be useful to be location specific. For example, vehicles within residential areas may have even been left running, considering the fact if one were to try and escape their cars if the horde overwhelmed them. Keys would probably be left in them. On the other hand, on the highways, if you find vehicles stopped there it's highly likely that the reason they stopped and left was to walk onwards, perhaps the car ran out of fuel (do Americans call it gas?). They wouldn't have necessarily have left in a mad rush; they would have taken their keys with them and locked the car.

 

Personally my logic tells me that the majority of vehicles would be found in such a state on highways. The way I picture an apocalypse of the zombie kind, the majority of people would have jumped in their vehicles and attempted to leave straight away. Sure, there'd be general chaos and a few crashes, blocking a few road ways, but most people would have made it out. Hence, in terms of abandoned vehicles, there'd be more on highways.

That's not considering 'extra' vehicles a lot of households would have. 

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(do Americans call it gas?)

 

More often than not, but you wouldn't get any funny looks calling it fuel, either, like as not. On the whole I concur- that, and cars still happily parked in garages probably don't have keys, whilst work trucks and the like might still have them.

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Isn't there a military quarantine around Muldragh almost as soon as the infection breaks out (and well before the game starts)?  It's possible the roads are crammed with the cars of people who tried to drive away only to find a tank guarding the highway.

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Isn't there a military quarantine around Muldragh almost as soon as the infection breaks out (and well before the game starts)?  It's possible the roads are crammed with the cars of people who tried to drive away only to find a tank guarding the highway.

That's what I'd like to believe, yes. But until it's in, there will always be a certain amount of guesstimation.
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can hotwire any dodge truck from 90 to the first dodge made with a flat head screw driver and a crow bar.

break the steering lock by hooking the crowbar in the steering wheel and forcing it to turn till it breaks, break the ignition locking pin with a flat head or just rip its cylinder out and jump the starter under the truck.

wont have any gauges or lights but itll drive.

been hotwiring junkers since i was a lil guy, and i know damn well the south is fulla clasics.

and you can do this with just about anything without a electronic brain.

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Let me clear something up: I just wanted to show Eblanc a cool form of lockpicking that is way easier than the bobby pin method.

 

"*Gets Weiser deadbolt from box. Inserts key from same model (but not same key-alike setting). Gives key smack*" Keyed-alike just means that it would have the same key grooves and model. If it has the same model key, from my understanding, the bump key of the same model should work. If not, could you please explain why? (this interests me! sorry!

 

 

I`m not being ignorant. But I think it`s best if you`re curious to do the research on your own, just to avoid adding irrelevant information to the thread.

 

I`ll explain a bit, it is quite complicated to explain, but illl try to summarize.

 

What you see on the video is a regular lock with regular tumbles, New locks have security tumblers on which if one of those individual tumbler gets pushed up too far up, it wont come down, or certain tumblers that are very loose so they kind of float and the positioning has to be extremely precise. 

 

also any medium size key that looks somewhat different probably has a different "unique" system. Example, most big apartment keys. 

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Realistically you should not be able to properly use cars inside towns at all since there would be too many abandonded/wrecked cars blocking streets. At least highway must be a total disaster to navigate trough. Am I right?

 

Also what would stop players from just driving "outside" map boundaries when given enough gas? Invisible walls? Artificial wreck piles? Military outpostes forcing anything back into Quarantine zone with guns?

 

As a side note, average Joe can't hotwire a car.

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Realistically you should not be able to properly use cars inside towns at all since there would be too many abandonded/wrecked cars blocking streets. At least highway must be a total disaster to navigate trough. Am I right?

 

Also what would stop players from just driving "outside" map boundaries when given enough gas? Invisible walls? Artificial wreck piles? Military outpostes forcing anything back into Quarantine zone with guns?

 

As a side note, average Joe can't hotwire a car.

 

Realistically you should not be able to properly use cars inside towns at all since there would be too many abandonded/wrecked cars blocking streets. At least highway must be a total disaster to navigate trough. Am I right?

 

Also what would stop players from just driving "outside" map boundaries when given enough gas? Invisible walls? Artificial wreck piles? Military outpostes forcing anything back into Quarantine zone with guns?

 

As a side note, average Joe can't hotwire a car.

 

Trees should stop you from driving away. I feel like not ALL streets of the city are going to be blocked off, there should be some way to navigate in the town.

 

Btw, I agree with pillows talk comment, It reinforces my idea of abundance without being easy to get a vehicle nor without breaking the realistic factor.

 

I think a new skill should be added. Mechanics. Which should give more information about a car as you progress with it.

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your spoiler is true Rath, but have we ever narrowed it down to the possible decade the game takes place in? the recent inclusion of Laserdisc as loot kind of takes us back in time several years. i know the cars still had the OBD computers (25 years in auto dealership experience) but the odds may actually slightly improve of finding an older car you could hotwire.

 

Fair enough about the time frame, I'm not sure exactly when the swap was made to full electrical systems. Still, it's not something that most people actually have a damn clue about doing and I'm highly opposed to it being a "skill" in a game that's about average people. It's another one of a long line of things Hollywood has blasphemed that every internet kid thinks they could totally do (see also guns, lock picking) and I admittedly have a bit of a crusade against these things.

 

They could make a "Automobiles for dummies" book that gives the you a perk that allows you to hotwire cars. Or you could make being a mechanic in its entirety a skill and have hotwiring come with a higher level. Point is, there are ways around it. 

Please stop typing every word in bold. It hurts the eyes T.T

 

Just because Muldraugh is a small town doesn't mean it'll have less than one car per house. A car is damn near essential for everyday living, so it stands to reason most households will have a car or two, even if it's an incredibly old, beat up one.

aaaand it's kentucky. You know there's 2-5 people in each house and they all have huge trucks.

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Btw, I agree with pillows talk comment, It reinforces my idea of abundance without being easy to get a vehicle nor without breaking the realistic factor.

 

I've decided to start referring to all of my posts as "pillow talk". :D

 

They could make a "Automobiles for dummies" book that gives the you a perk that allows you to hotwire cars. Or you could make being a mechanic in its entirety a skill and have hotwiring come with a higher level. Point is, there are ways around it.

"Automobiles for Dummies" isn't going to contain information on how to rewire a car to get it to start. Even if it did, the process would be unique for every different model and make of any given car. As Rath said, it hasn't been about breaking open the dashboard and touching two wires together since the 80s. You need to actually bypass the system the car normally uses to start, which means rewiring components, which means understanding what those components do and the kind of voltage and current they need to operate so that you don't blow every fuse in the car when you clip on a jumper.

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Hotwiring a car is not that complex, there will be more than enough car thieves and teens around come the apocalypse to figure it out, if you are suggesting it is IMPOSSIBLE then it is not, it certainly can be difficult but not impossible, just like carpentry it is a skill, a skill that starts off down right terrible. It would take a in-game hour or more the first bunch of times. Until you get used to it. Again everyone keeps going on about this elusive semi-retarded "average joe". Tell me, how many of you "average joes" can build a multi story house out of logs that are magically cut into precise planks with just a regular old saw?

 

My point is that it can be a skill that progresses, in the start you suck at it, you can only hotwire old cars and it takes a long time, as your skill progresses you will find the time it takes to drop down and the variety of cars that can be hotwired will grow.  Dismissing a skill that exists as impossible is quite frankly an arbitrary limit. How on earth is trapping a skill but hotwiring is impossible? I sincerely doubt your average joe would know more about making traps than he does about cars.

 

When our skill is 0 there is a chance of failing or setting off an alarm, when it is 5 you can still fail but you can retry more often. This would add something to the actual gameplay and make it more fun, instead of just limiting what you can do to survive. After all you might be an average joe, but after months of survival and trial and error you SHOULD be able to enhance your own capabilities. Just like carpentry, just like fishing, just like trapping. You start off without knowledge on it and it grows gradually.

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Probably repeating, but some thoughts:
 

  • most have tried escaping the city by car, so very few cars are actually located around the houses
  • there are roadblocks in cities and on motorways caused by car accidents, which effectively causes cars to appear in multitudes
  • most cars have gas left, some have none (they've been left running)
  • some car batteries are dead as their headlights (and whatnot) have been left on
  • some cars don't have keys in them so you can not drive them
  • crashing into anything (zombies or other obstacles) is not a good idea as your car will quickly break down and you get injured in the process

(tophat)

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Hotwiring a car is not that complex, there will be more than enough car thieves and teens around come the apocalypse to figure it out, if you are suggesting it is IMPOSSIBLE then it is not, it certainly can be difficult but not impossible, just like carpentry it is a skill, a skill that starts off down right terrible. It would take a in-game hour or more the first bunch of times. Until you get used to it. Again everyone keeps going on about this elusive semi-retarded "average joe". Tell me, how many of you "average joes" can build a multi story house out of logs that are magically cut into precise planks with just a regular old saw?

 

My point is that it can be a skill that progresses, in the start you suck at it, you can only hotwire old cars and it takes a long time, as your skill progresses you will find the time it takes to drop down and the variety of cars that can be hotwired will grow.  Dismissing a skill that exists as impossible is quite frankly an arbitrary limit. How on earth is trapping a skill but hotwiring is impossible? I sincerely doubt your average joe would know more about making traps than he does about cars.

 

When our skill is 0 there is a chance of failing or setting off an alarm, when it is 5 you can still fail but you can retry more often. This would add something to the actual gameplay and make it more fun, instead of just limiting what you can do to survive. After all you might be an average joe, but after months of survival and trial and error you SHOULD be able to enhance your own capabilities. Just like carpentry, just like fishing, just like trapping. You start off without knowledge on it and it grows gradually.

 

No. I'm so sick of people using this as an excuse for bad ideas. Carpentry, trapping, fishing. These are all physical puzzles that you can look at, wrap your mind around, and figure out. Hotwiring a modern vehicle is not like that. If you don't know how to do it ahead of time and you have no knowledge of electrical engineering you can't just figure it out. No one figured out how to hotwire a modern car by just flipping wires around- electrical engineers figured it out and told people/put the information on the internet. Some cars it's flat impossible to hotwire like that.

 

This is how you hotwire a car:

 

http://www.wikihow.com/Hotwire-a-Car

 

Note that method one and two don't any car built in the last two decades. Note that number three doesn't work on any car with an electrical brain because it will still just shut it down permanently. You have to actually rewire the entire electrical system to get around it.

 

Physical skills that require no foreknowledge ≠ skills that require technical knowledge to even begin. This comparison is incredibly broken all around and it's an excuse I see used every single time something unrealistic is brought up.

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JTloODq.jpg

 

That's a picture of a very simple circiut we're building in my Electrics class right now.  Go ahead and study it for a while, then tell me which components you need to bypass in order to get the speaker to emit a constant tone instead of an oscillating one.  I'll wait.

 

That's the problem with what is being suggested - electricial engineering is ludicrously complex and requires years of study to really get the hang of.  The circiut pictured above is nothing compared to some of the wiring you'd find in a car.  Say what you will about carpentry and trapping (which are purely mechanichal skills that anyone can learn to do if they put in the time and effort), but it is impossible for someone with no education on electricity and without a completed circiut diagram of the car's electronics to just hotwire a car simply through trial and error or "practice."  

 

You have to not only know beforehand what you're dealing with, but you have to know the math to figure out what you're doing to the circiut.  Short out the wrong resistor and current will jump to the point where fuses start to open.  Accidentally reverse the polarity of a circiut and at best it will cease to operate - at worst some of your components can literally explode.

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Probably repeating, but some thoughts:

 

  • most have tried escaping the city by car, so very few cars are actually located around the houses
  • there are roadblocks in cities and on motorways caused by car accidents, which effectively causes cars to appear in multitudes
  • most cars have gas left, some have none (they've been left running)
  • some car batteries are dead as their headlights (and whatnot) have been left on
  • some cars don't have keys in them so you can not drive them
  • crashing into anything (zombies or other obstacles) is not a good idea as your car will quickly break down and you get injured in the process

(tophat)

 

It is repeated material, but It seems a bit more summarized. I like this ideas.

 

If not cars I would not mind seeing bikes being usable. I would also love wheelbarrows and wagons XD.

 

bicycles already ARE a yes. Please read the common suggestions thread.

 

 

===================================================================================

I THINK I SPEAK FOR MOST OF US HERE WHO WANT A FAIR AND BALANCED GAME AND WE ALL CAN AGREE THAT HOT WIRING A VEHICLE IS NOT A SIMPLE PROCESS BOTH LEARNING OR DOING.

===================================================================================

 
Make this question to yourself. Can I hotwire a car, NOW?
 
If the answer is No.
 
Then i really think you don't have a valid argument. 
 
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
trying to explain to everyone else "how simple it would be if you were a single survivor in the zombie apocalypse you could totally pull off hot wiring a vehicle"
 
Stop thinking like a little boy and being so optimistic. If Hell break lose most of all of us would be dead.
 
Do you live in a city? if you do, then there is a high chance of you being dead. 
You live in a house thats safe? Well sure, but what if the outbreaks happens when you're outside, buying groceries, at work etc..
Your safe in your house? if its a 1 floor with windows and no tall fence around you, you'll be dead eventually.
i think the only people that have a chance are people who are in apartments or secure houses. everybody else wont last long.
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Calling someone childish is one of those "Not Lovely" things. Let's not.

 

I didn't call anyone childish. And I wasn't being specific at all. I was being very general,

P.S. I seriously forgot who it is that suggested against it.

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So calling someone unmature is bad? What about arguing o:? (I'm not trying to start anything just wondering)

 

Also if hotwiring is added make it a skill really difficult to level up .1% chance to actually work.

Electrical tape should fix the wires that don't work for multiple tries :).

 

Worse case scenario is cutting all the wires and connecting them all for a explosion xD

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