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Developer Discussions: Alpha 17


Roland

Developer Discussions: Alpha 17  

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  1. 1. Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

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I don't see how hard it could be to create a grid with virtual zombies and have them wandering around virtually, and then when a player gets close to a virtual zombie a real zombie spawns into game, then when the player gets further the zombie unloads and becomes a virtual zombie again.

 

Remember this moment so you can refer back to it later.... 😉

 

Well, there you have it. Distant zombies confirmed in Alpha 17. All this talk on zombies getting into bases, when the real story is about cats getting out of bags.

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Not if you equipped your vault with an underground garden and limitless water source first ;)

Now if we had persistent zombies (no built in death timers etc.) and the Pimp's could come up with a low cost way to allow them to be there when you do come up then this could be a thing.

Add in more requirements to maintain an underground garden (grow lights, electricity for said lights etc.) and fix the unlimited water bug and we are almost there ;)

 

Lol then it really would be the boring game Roland is talking about.

The garden thing will work because you could have a shaft for light, but the infinite water will be fixed eventually I expect.

Also that didn't address the looting part. Without the looting you would just be in there eating and drinking. Maybe some mining.

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In my assessment granite, as it's been described, comes up short. No matter what shape it takes - a layer between dirt and stone, a liner around tunnels and caverns, single blocks spaced periodically - it can be exploited. You can dig out everything on all sides from the granite, and since it has bedrock-level structural integrity, it will float in air. You can then stand on it and be unreachable to all but a couple zombie types.

 

As I try to think of what property granite is missing to make it work, I keep coming back to the conclusion that one of the most useful things that can be leveraged is a block that is not player craftable. That eliminates any notion of "well I'll just use that magic block to build xyz." Unfortunately it doesn't prevent subtractive building: that is, removing everything that isn't magic blocks to leave a remainder with exploitable magic properties.

 

I'm left reconsidering if "Swiss cheese" is really so bad. As I've said before, even one zombie digging out one vertical shaft would be enough to cause a fundamental change in the horde's ability to reach the player.

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Arts from Joel:[ATTACH=CONFIG]23045[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]23046[/ATTACH]

 

I did catch this while chugging my catchup, and I'm really happy to see both of these. Both bathtubs and 50 pound sacks were on my personal list of world art I'd like to see to fill in what's otherwise conspicuously absent from points of interest. I really hope the sacks are loot containers, because I've already been thinking about all the things you could find in them: bulk quantities of dirt, fertilizer, cement, clay, sand, corn meal, potatoes, pet food...

 

Next suggestion for new world art: a sliding glass door, preferably one that works for both porches and shops.

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Lol then it really would be the boring game Roland is talking about.

The garden thing will work because you could have a shaft for light, but the infinite water will be fixed eventually I expect.

Also that didn't address the looting part. Without the looting you would just be in there eating and drinking. Maybe some mining.

 

To be honest I think people DO actually do this lol

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Well, there you have it. Distant zombies confirmed in Alpha 17. All this talk on zombies getting into bases, when the real story is about cats getting out of bags.

 

Not so...this is hopes and dreams stuff that may or may not come to fruition and maybe not until later. I’m hopeful though.

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A workaround that could work is a debuff called "sunlight deprevation" that the player gets from living underground. The debuff can reduce welness or applies a temp. Debuff to other stats. It can have multiple stages too. It shouldnt kill you but handicap you enough so you dont become a god by living underground. :)

 

Game needs to present more situations where the player has to make hard decisions/tradeoffs based on their actions.

 

this is my favorite of these types of solutions. would also work with the standard stamina hit in the 2nd and 3rd stages.

 

also liked someone's idea about needing to eat healthy foods, i'm sure other games have it, but there is a modpack for minecraft called TerraFirmaCraft, and it had basic food group meters, sure you could survive on say seaweed, but your health (wellness) wouldn't get very high if you weren't well rounded. if we can't do spoilage here, something along those lines would at least provide a variant to eating, and even more reasons to maintain a farm.

 

really good pack, btw and it's got GEOLOGY to satisfy the flavor of the week.

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That's what people living above ground have to deal with all the time. It's exactly the kind of challenge you miss out on when living underground. The way you talk about this like it's something new, I have to wonder if there are some dwarves out there that, because they stay underground, had never even considered the issue of stuff against walls being vulnerable. That would be a shame.

 

 

 

 

Is that really excessive? With an above ground base, you have to defend a minimum of 4 sides of a cube. 5 sides if you're above ground and don't bother to break the ladders, wooden frames, etc. underneath you, and 6 if your roof isn't enclosed.

 

As for pathing bait, that's where bread crumbs could help. You got in there somehow, and you walked through air to do it. So even if you seal off the entrance, there's likely a weak side that's mostly air, unless you go out of your way to make things symmetrical, and hopefully the zombies can use that in their path finding.

 

 

 

You can hear zombies on the other side of terrain the same way you hear them on the other side of a wall, so you know they're coming. And as for not knowing exactly where they're going to break in, because you can't see through the terrain? That's called a fair trade off for making them chew through a hundred blocks of solid material before they can reach you.

 

 

 

Busy work? Really? Is it busy work when a zombie tears down an above ground wall to get in, and you have to repair that wall and things above it? If not, what's the difference?

 

 

It occurs to me, TFP could spawn the zombie underground next to your underground base wall and just SAY that it tunneled from the surface with the dirt filling in behind it, and we wouldn't know the difference. :p

 

 

Broken legs are annoying, but then I break my leg plenty in PoIs, my own mines, or just on steep outdoor terrain. Better to address what makes it annoying in the first place, which IMO is the excessive length of time it takes to heal, even when using the best end-game option in the game to heal it.

 

 

 

With all that said, digging straight down seems fine. In fact it's how I've always been picturing digging would work - the zombie's go-to approach when it can't find a path and it's higher than the player. I still picture it as a specialist digger zombie instead of a horde trying to coordinate their animations, but the functionality is the same.

 

We long winded people rarely get responded to.

 

Just know... I skimmed... And I'm pretty sure you're wrong. But I'm on my phone now pooping and don't like long winded writing on a virtual keyboard...

 

So...

 

At least know you're not ignored. ❤️

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To be honest I think people DO actually do this lol

 

i've done this, but more for decoration. think that might have been the only time i've done an underfarm.

 

3affcf33f1.jpg

 

i love being topside, i just afk too much to always be there ^_^

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It occurs to me, TFP could spawn the zombie underground next to your underground base wall and just SAY that it tunneled from the surface with the dirt filling in behind it, and we wouldn't know the difference. :p

 

Not really, you could place concrete walls near the surface and in the lateral accesses. So you couldn't SAY that it tunneled from the surface (unless you're going to say that the zed's used a concrete mixers to repair the player placed walls).^^

 

A spawn next to my underground base is essentially the same as a spawn on my head. To me, there is just one crucial difference: In the latter case, you can see that the game cheats you (so actually, it's an honest solution) whereas underground spawns feel as if the devs take me for a fool.

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I don't see how hard it could be to create a grid with virtual zombies and have them wandering around virtually, and then when a player gets close to a virtual zombie a real zombie spawns into game, then when the player gets further the zombie unloads and becomes a virtual zombie again.

 

What's the difference between a virtual zombie and a real zombie? What resource is being saved by making them "virtual"?

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What's the difference between a virtual zombie and a real zombie? What resource is being saved by making them "virtual"?

 

Some kind of logic i would have thought... the virtual ones are just moving from point A to point B with no stimuli until you enter the frey then the code starts to kick in.

 

Edit: What i just said is nonsense lol it's late.....errr maybe textures.

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What's the difference between a virtual zombie and a real zombie? What resource is being saved by making them "virtual"?

 

Rendering at a minimum. Drawing them on screen even if so far away you can only see a spec.

 

AI pathfinding too. Unlikely a virtual zombie outside of usable range should be taking up CPU cycles figuring out where to wander off too.

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But speaking of wandering zombies.

 

I still think the world feels too empty since the introduction of sleepers. Could we possibly have smaller wandering hordes that are more frequent but don't always necessarily come to your last known position etc.

 

Just need the game to feel more alive.

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Lol then it really would be the boring game Roland is talking about.

The garden thing will work because you could have a shaft for light, but the infinite water will be fixed eventually I expect.

Also that didn't address the looting part. Without the looting you would just be in there eating and drinking. Maybe some mining.

 

Late game I don't bother looting buildings. Cars, maybe, for plenty of oil and brass, but buildings? What for?

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That is the regrettable part of the current state of the game. I WANT to build there but I won't until it joins the rest of the survival game. It sucks having to ignore an entire biome because it currently exists outside of the zombie survival game. If zombies couldn't enter the Plains biome and never spawned there and if in fact all I had to do was step five paces into the Plains biome and be perfectly completely 100% safe there I wouldn't build there either but wouldn't exactly call it not a big deal....

 

Hopefully someday the underworld biome will join the rest of the game.

 

Roland, I have died more times from falling down one of my elaborate pits than anything else. So, for me, digging down is almost a guarantee that I will be starting a new game soon. :)

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Late game I don't bother looting buildings. Cars, maybe, for plenty of oil and brass, but buildings? What for?

 

That's at a minimum part of the loot balance issues. There needs to be a way to scale up loot with a player level. Real late game should be more about these mini dungeons just for the sake of doing them. But if they had mad stacks of Duke coins, that'd be pretty awesome too. I kinda hope treasure hunting dies and finding crazy good loot becomes a real game play rich task.

 

Treasure hunting turned into abandoned bandit base hunting would be way cooler.

 

Basic homes having only basic materials for loot but the tops of sky scrapers is where you get your AK-47. Weapon stores are now home to bad ass bandits. Stuff like that.

 

AND loot respawn is directly tied to POI zombie respawn!

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What's the difference between a virtual zombie and a real zombie? What resource is being saved by making them "virtual"?

 

At the very least it would be realistic.

You can have a two dimensional array representing ALL cells (or chunks) in the map with the number of zombies. Done!

 

Now if you want to get fancy, have an array for each zombie type (or just one three dimensional array), so if you leave a cell that had 6 Z-dogs and come back the next day, you STILL have 6 Z-dogs to deal with! :)

 

You can then have a zombie migration system based on the 7 day horde!

Didn't kill the blood moon horde? Bad move, because they are now your neighbors! Hiding underground and not killing the blood hordes is a fast track to getting yourself royally screwed!

 

:)

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At the very least it would be realistic.

You can have a two dimensional array representing ALL cells in the map with the number of zombies. Done!

 

Now if you want to get fancy, have an array for each zombie type, so if you leave a cell that had 6 Z-dogs and come back the next day, you STILL have 6 Z-dogs to deal with! :)

 

You can then have a zombie migration system based on the 7 day horde!

Didn't kill the blood moon horde? Bad move, because they are now your neighbors! Hiding underground and not killing the blood hordes is a fast track to getting royally screwed!

 

:)

 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. You can "fake it" by having zombies appear near a player, but the illusion doesn't hold up after a while. Virtual zombies maintain a presence of zombies in the world without the chunks having to be loaded and without the zombies actually being in the game, just an x,y,z coordinate of where they should be if you happen to travel there. For zombies that are near you that you can see and interact with I don't think there's much resources to be saved, unless you got really creative for distant zombies where they are missing AI routines like someone suggested, but they can still take a sniper shot to the head in a convincing way.

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