[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

5 hours ago, KhaineGB said:

No it's not. UMA works absolutely fine.

Metahuman is NOT THE SAME THING. At all.

One generates custom characters, including clothing. that cannot be changed at runtime.

The other is a completely customizable system and only looks as good/bad as the assets you provide to it.

That screenshot was the non-HD, free assets that came with UMA that I very quickly experimented with. There's a ton of high quality race packs, skin packs, hair packs, etc for UMA on the unity store.

They share more in common then the total of their differences. Metahuman is only in early preview and it will do more than UMA when it is further along. You can already apply your own clothing articles and mods to the models, do you understand how modeling works? UMA has poor documentation and takes a lot of time to intergrate and actually make content with. You can shill for it all you want but it is jank and looks like @%$# out of the box. Yeah maybe if someone spends years making all the shaders, materials and maps they can look good but so can anything with that time, dur. It is faster and easier for the developers to make their own models, without some weird pipeline in the way.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

10 hours ago, KhaineGB said:

Don't be stupid.

Metahuman looks good and is a modern system. UMA is outdated and ugly

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

8 hours ago, KhaineGB said:

The new UMA skeleton, high defintion skin maps, etc honestly look incredible.

Maybe for 2008

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

10 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

Is it not?

Not really, especially when it comes to this type of content. Maybe if it was a simple xml job but it isnt. 7 Days is easy to reconfigure and add simple items to. Scripting a new AI with custom scripts and so on is much more complicated to mod in.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

6 hours ago, Roland said:

 

And as I've said countless times, I'm not against enhancing AAZ with visual cues that show a reason why the zombies woke which wasn't your fault, making them randomly happen, or making it a response to a failed stealth check. I have zero problem with that. My objection is to the idea that AAZ are bad design and that they ruin stealth or invalidate points spent on stealth. Even in their current form, I disagree with that whole premise. This is not a stealth game. It has an agility branch with one aspect being stealth skills that can enhance what the player can already do natively without spending any perk points. The point is to explore a POI and there are a number of tactical choices the player can make as they do that. Looting a POI without a single enemy ever waking up is not one of the design goals even if it may be a personal player goal. But then that is like playing a racing sim and having a personal goal of walking around the entire track and then saying the game is poorly designed because the developers don't allow that to happen even though their goal was always to have players in cars racing and not for players to go for a stroll.

 

So I'm all in for your idea to add a stealth check to the game and make that check harder to pass in some zones and easier in others. But that won't satisfy people who be upset everytime the check fails. Most likely the stealth check won't be visible anyway so players will still get mad that the room "inexplicably" woke up. They certainly won't blame their own failure..lol

 

 

Here is where you are very very wrong. There are a few vociferous people in this forum who are calling for exactly that. They want 100% removal and no halfway compromise will satisfy them. In this very thread there are examples of people saying that AAZ should not exist at all.

 

 

Technically, they already are consistent with how the rest of the game works. There currently are zero stealth checks as in d20 style checks. It is all trigger based. If you step on the trash at a certain distance it triggers wake up. If you jump off that ledge within a certain distance it triggers. There are no probability rolls modified by your perks. There is a distance at which a zombie can see you when it is dark. If you are within that range they will see you. There is no probability roll. If you are outside the range they will not see you. The perks simply adjust the ranges and the triggers and the duration of time the zombies target you.

 

I have a feeling that if the Pimps changed from simple triggers to probability rolls it would just anger the people who want full control to remain in their own hands even more. Can you imagine the rage from someone who feels like they did everything right but then a probability roll screwed them over anyway? But I'm still on board with it since I prefer chance creating hairy situations that I must react to. I think the player being able to control every aspect of their environment is the more boring gameplay. So, yeah. Probability rolls vs stealth skills. Let's do it.

 

 

There are times when I respond to you specifically because I disagree with some specific aspect of what you wrote-- as in the idea that retreat-hide-emerge is some sort of false tactic. But most of the time I am responding to the general group who is against AAZ and want them removed and see them as stealth destroyers instead of stealth game changers. So maybe when I am speaking in general terms you think I'm still talking to you personally? <shrug> You think I'm a puppet bot of the developers anyway so I really don't care what you expect of me. Your assumptions and expectations are skewed.

I think AAZ is a good first step but it needs to be polished into something better. You could easily implement a static creature that triggers the aggression volume. If the stealthy player is good enough and has the power for it, they can kill it fast, otherwise it sounds the alarm. It wouldn't be hard to model and texture a mass of flesh. One simple shader and script could animate the verts of the base mesh and tenticles coming off of it. Three sounds and a bit of code funtionality later and you have something awesome. If your game was easy to mod, I would add the new NPC myself for free. Something like so...