ZehMatt

So is there a chance of getting bigger worlds again? One of the fun aspects of this game has always been large worlds with many players on it. It was quite common with A16 to have up to 64 players on a single map, if I recall correctly the size was reduced due to memory constraints in A17. Despite the fact A16 was utterly buggy most of us probably had the best times on such servers. However my gut tells me that is not on the list of priorities and won't be.

Yes that's me, I'm not sure if I will do it again I'm not really having that much fun playing this game anymore and WalkerSim was always more of a project that I made for myself but shared publicly. Also having to mod a game to make it somewhat fun is just not fun for me 😄

The vehicle physics are also different in horde night, I get to why they did it but that is just wrong in my opinion, at least provide some option to turn it off, let me play the game the way I see fit, when it comes to servers give them the option to have turned on or off, whatever they think is best.

As the title suggests, I don't understand why we are forced to play in a certain way in a sandbox game. I'm talking about Vultures and the vehicles, all of that is also hardcoded and there is no way to easily mod those things without some serious patching, at least have a single function that can be easier to mod by making it return true or false for when it should be active or not.

I did a mod before that changed some of the locking around the chunks/voxels and they actually merged it, maybe if you do smaller mods there could be a chance they put it in.

It's one of those weak designs in the game that I also dislike, ideally the loot already sits there and all the zombies protecting it, whatever item is there could be marked a quest item like many other games do and getting the quest by the trader should allow instant completion which makes the entire thing more believable, this also eliminates duplicate quests in the same POI, a single POI could have multiple things to do, breaking the entire POI should take it off the pool if that makes it impossible to complete. Seeing the entire POI just getting refurbished is quite immersion breaking also in my opinion. Once bandits are in the game they could take over POIs which would explain how POIs are suddenly becoming refurbished and have quests to steal items from them. The floating quest activation marker is also just weird. Given that there is no real end-game I would think that once players looted everything and have done everything that is just the end of it and they can start a new game on a new generated map, there is really no point in sitting on the same map forever, at some point you are just done. Having this all well balanced would give a better feel of progression, at some point there is just nothing to be done and you basically completed the map, this of course would take more effort. Anyway this is as usual just my opinion on what makes a game better.

The only way to somewhat enjoy this game is by using mods, that's just the current state of the game, not everything is bad but for a "survival horde crafting game" its just not nailing it. Also did you just assume because I joined 2017 this forum that I have the game since 2017? No. What has EA to do with this game? Why even bring up EA? Also did I notice those things? I absolutely did and I don't like it, I brought up only the glass jars as that is the most recent change and this is what this thread is about, isn't it? I'm also not surprised that hardcore fans are defending this, I believe that if the worst game ever would be put on Steam there will be always someone defending it no matter how bad it is, shiny graphics don't make a good game. Also I'm just expressing my opinion here, I do realize that they are not going to go back on this, I mean when did the devs ever listen to the community? They made it quite clear that their way is the only way and we must play the game the way they see best.

Removing glass jars was one of the biggest mistakes done to this game, nothing can change my mind on that. Having to use mods to "fix" a game is quite crazy, most people don't even know how to open the file explorer let alone install mods, what kind of nonsense expectation is that? Also this is not about realism but immersion, glass jars vanishing is just dumb, also having played earlier versions knowing what it was like to have them makes this even worse, glass jars had a perfect place in this game, to collect and cook water, what exactly is wrong with that? The only thing that should have been changed is that cooking murky water no longer turns it to clean water, just keep it murky and everything would be fine with the new way of getting clean water, why can't we put the collected clean water in glass jars? Every god damn update 2 good things are added and 10 good things are being destroyed, when I first discovered this game I had really high hopes for it, those hopes are long gone.

This spawn system is quite horrible, it should have the zombies spawned but turned inactive so they don't think/tick/update for when the player is too far away, they can be marked active for when player gets closer or by other events such as noise. POI designers shouldn't have to worry about volumes that spawn zombies, just place the zombies and leave it to the engine to decide, its really not that hard to accomplish.

Seems like the most sensible approach to me as well, read a book to understand the basics and then get better by doing it a lot.

The feedback of users should be treated as a valuable input and not something to mock, you may disagree with what is being said but this is not the way to go about it, in my honest opinion.

Still not safe to drink in reality. Either way the whole glass jar change is nonsensical in my opinion.

I keep saying this, cooking muddy water should have resulted muddy water, not sure how cooking water clears it of dirt.

We'll see what the final version looks like in 2030, I have my doubts that it will be actually a fun sandbox game that it used to be, quite unfortunate that the priorities went into graphics instead of mechanics and performance, have a look at Battlebit Remastered and tell me those people actually care about the graphics rather than the mechanics.

Those are some good points. I think the learning problem could be alleviated by having the city/town/area where the player initially spawns being very mild and just enough resources to get the player going and after that it should be entirely up to the player where its going. Look at most successful games, they all have some sort of tutorial/starting area where the player can learn the basics without being overwhelmed but once you walk away into whatever region there should be no more hand holding, like almost all Fallout games gave you a very safe starting zone but if you dared to walk too far out into the wild you most likely get ruined. It shouldn't be too difficult to have each random generated map a generally safe starting location and the threat level indicator should be removed entirely and rather somehow express the danger in a more natural way, like the sound of many zombies when being outside, the state of the POI and so on, many ways I can think of, this is just lazy.

Exactly. For a game where exploration is one of the key elements especially with all the new POIs this ruins the fun of it, and yes I know I could just use mods but do I have to seriously always mod the game to just have a good time out of the box?

This should be tied to this: Or at least make it an option when starting a new game, please.

I'm inclined to agree on all of the things. Jars just vanishing into oblivion is not about realism but it breaks the expectation which is immersion breaking, just make getting "clean" water hard and boiling dirty water should not turn it into clean water that is just cooked dirty water, quite basic and easy to grasp for players, so why remove the jars? Same can be said about food in cans, where does that can now suddenly go? There is quite a difference between realism and basic expectations. I seriously think that TFP has no idea about game design in general especially if you look at the evidence on how often everything is being changed over and over, I understand that to some degree you have to test and re-evaluate the systems but if you constantly keep doing that it just tells me you have no bloody idea what you are actually doing which is also known as brute force. To me a good game is not a game that has the best graphics in the world but rather well designed game mechanics otherwise we would all have hated the old games which looked pretty @%$# by todays standard but are typically praised to be the best games ever made. There are just so many things wrong with this game and each update I'm hoping it gets better and I stay away from the dev log thread to go into the next version without a bias and every time when it comes to me playing the next update its just massive disappointment. What frustrates me most is that there is this huge potential in a game where you can build and destroy everything but then restricts you in such odd ways just because TFP says so.

Zombies spawning at locations where I just came from was already annoying in earlier versions, now I had the situation where a feral zombie literally spawned right before my eyes and destroyed me on the first night on my first run to test A21. I don't really enjoy always making a mod to have a somewhat more realistic approach to where zombies come from, even something like a minimum distance to the player would help this a lot already. I'm not sure if this is a regression or not but I recall that in A19 it at least checked if the spawn would be in line of sight of the player. Also it would be great if there is something like cool-down for areas where the player just travelled so that when I turn a corner and come back there won't be suddenly a zombie waiting for me, this is pretty immersion breaking in my opinion. For a zombie game this always annoyed me that such fundamental system seems to be ignored somehow or is not properly tested, I can't really say and that is just my opinion on that. I do plan on porting to A21 but I also want to start this from scratch so it will probably take a while, but I shouldn't be also the one having to do that.

Sounds great, one thing I was hoping to get an answer to is does it currently network the velocity and do the animations use that for the walk animations, if this is the case then to me that would be an relatively easy fix to just have the velocity calculated client side based on the position alone which would make it look a lot better already. Assuming it doesn't make it to A21 I will consider to just mod this myself, however this requires EAC to be disabled and the mod would only make sense for multiplayer so thats a bit unfortunate if we have to actually wait for the next release to have somewhat reasonable player animations and the update rate wouldn't even matter then.

Having seen some of the gameplay now for A21 the animations for other players still look floaty as hell, I think that is one of the things that can probably fixed, it seems as if the animation state is not synchronized with the actual player state and the floaty feeling probably comes from interpolating the position, but when animations stop and the character still moves then it just looks weird. One way to compensate for this like the Source Engine/Quake does is to not network the velocity of the player and rather estimate the velocity by using the last known position to calculate the velocity and assuming the animations use the velocity that should make it look a lot better. Would be great if a developer could look into this, perhaps @faatal. I haven't looked into what the game networks so this is mostly guess work but I'm fairly confident that this is the underlying issue as to why characters keep moving but stop animating as it probably just uses the velocity sent from the server, would be also nice to know if I'm wrong.

I also think that it might be a bit too drastic to tell every zombie in that zone to immediately attack the player, instead they can just wake up and be in an aggressive state which would still keep stealth intact. Probably time to make a new mod!

I have to agree with some aspects of what the Op says. I generally disagree with the spawn system for a couple of reasons. 1. The spawn distance is way too short, I suspect this is the limit of how many chunks are loaded, you can see them usually snap into existence especially during horde nights. 2. Zombies in biomes spawn randomly, there is no logic or weight or anything to it, the game should focus on simulating an actual zombie population so when I clear areas they stay clear unless new ones wander in which could be a constant stream from the map border or have the horde night respawn all around the player which gives it also a natural cycle to it. As for the POI zombies, one thing I always had my gripe with in this game has been the Zombies spawning in absurd locations such as the Closets or maybe even in the Ceiling, its somewhat hard to sell that they just willingly hang around in there forever. I also know its planned to have them wandering in POIs which would change everything, then I would however try to avoid static ones.

I do sometimes wish all the things that can be found are without a level and rather have a bigger variety of what can be found. Example I can think of would be a Rusty AK 47 that can potentially jam every few bullets or an ordinary one you could get of a trader, perhaps even have a complete failure where the weapon just explodes to pieces and that is the end of it, this would probably make exploration a bit more fun too.

What about the Zombies? What about the blood moon event? What about the zombies being able to tell material strength? By now you should have realized this game does not aim to be realistic.