PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[madmole]

As a suggestion, I'd like to see more practical use for collecting exorbitant amounts of feathers. While they are rather hard to come by early on and used to craft arrows almost exclusively, I find most of the bows obsolete once I am only a few days in and end up having upwards of a couple hundred of them, rendering the crafting of large amounts of arrows more or less useless in the long run and with it, feather collection. Additionally, they are only otherwise good for the puffer coat which is a fairly common drop, and unless I am hurting for currency, I have no use to craft more than one anyways. Could we maybe see a recipe to make something like a wing suit? something you can deploy at high altitude jumps to allow you to briefly soar for a while without taking fall damage as long as you land properly? It would be a great way to invest, say, 500 or so feathers, plus some leather (20?) , wood (20?), and a hefty amount of glue or tape to fix them to the apparatus (~30-50.) It would give us a reason to hoard them while upgrading skills, maybe stick it in a high tier science skill, probably under the vehicles and transportation type skill. For those of us who don't really put much into athletic skills but still want to get around faster than otherwise possible in game. It could also come with its own upgrades, such as pockets for extra storage, a jet booster which you can fill with a small amount of gas to cruise a little further and faster, or even insulation elements to allow better heating or cooling while deployed.

A wing suit / glider would be cool.

 

[Ouch Quit It]

Just turn off loot respawn, and then you have to travel further. Map size won't fix that. Besides I thought you guys have 16k working already with nitrogen?

I do run my server on Vanilla with 15-20 day respawns... for some of the more .."occasional players". But if you do turn them off..an 8k map becomes small very fast with or without vehicles !! I never used nitrogen and would probably blow up my computer trying to install it and make a map and besides most rented servers are locked down to stop you from using larger maps because they are so unstable.. We need bigger maps like before a16 when they were removed/broken.

Coughs * Airport POI * Coughs

 

[madmole]

The fact that POI's like gunshops, hardware stores, pharmacy's, library's and spamway are randomly missing from RWG maps. Probably others too, but I only check the stores in the prefabs.xml. I have made many bug reports on this issue. Even the PREGEN maps are not completely populated with stores.

I already said filling the list of pois before a dup is spawned is on the list.

 

[Blake_]

No stuff is changing a lot yet, so no point.

We did get deco on slopes going, looks great, thanks Faatal!

As The Fun Pimp would say, he is an Animal! Good thing we didn't point out that we need space travel. He would have it working in a weekend.

 

[Guppycur]

A wing suit / glider would be cool.

This is usually where I'd link a YouTube to a hang glider mod but you frown on that, so I'll just say yes, please add one as it is awesome.

 

[agrastiOs]

Each zombie type could still have some ‘flavor’ to their dropped loot - you just have to include some more widely useful stuff, too. What I do is make a “generic zombie backpack” loot list, and then each type of zombie drops a backpack whose contents are split between generic loot and their unique loot.

For instance, the utility/construction worker zombie has a 25% chance of generic loot (per roll - the pack has 1-3 items), and a 75% chance of dropping mining helmets, forged iron, tools, or whatever other ‘flavor’ items he has. The percentages vary based on how unique or ‘flavorful’ the zombie is. Zombie Boe and others with no visible specialty have 100% generic loot.

I will say maintaining this has been the biggest time expenditure for ComSenMod, but it’s been worth it. Prioritizing nurse zombies when you wanted/needed medicine was really fun!

Yeah, I miss searching for nurses to hopefully get antibiotics. A system like the upcoming trader specialization for zombie loot would be sweet! :rapture:

 

[madmole]

Players have been making that argument for years, and I just don't buy it. Two points.

First, over time the AI has had problems in traversing a variety of cases, including

Spoiler

• player underground
  
• player on stilts
  
• player riding
  
• player treading water
  
• broken stairs
  
• broken ladder rung
  
• hatch
  
• can't fit between certain-shaped blocks
  
• can't walk on certain-shaped blocks
  

In every one of these cases, you could have thrown up your hands and said oh well, good enough, exploiters gonna exploit. But you've cultivated a good track record by now. You can put a check mark next to most of these items as fixed. And every time you have, you've made the game better in the process: made another path balanced or at least balance-able.

Second, players aren't finding exploits just out of spite. They find the exploits largely because they've been put in a situation that rewards creative thinking. They are in a survival sandbox game, thrown to the wolves and under pressure to figure out the how of surviving for themselves. In other words, players are pushed into a role where they explore what's at their disposal, and ruthlessly leverage what they can find. That's what a sandbox survival game is all about. So please don't ask us to tie one hand behind our backs, and pretend there's a bigger challenge than there really is. That's poison to the survival thought process.

Lets not exaggerate what I said. We'll continue to fix major exploits but at some point its diminishing return and users who want a challenge can exhibit some self control or move on. There will always be some new exploit and we can't be fixing those in 2025.

 

[madmole]

Threading water luckily is one of the exploits that can be fixed relatively easy by taking a look at reality. There are not that many people that can thread water all night in their soaked full gear with backpack in cold water. Hypothermia, stamina loss and then drowning are usually the results in such situations. I remember a streaming using it once to beat my mod and then I added some buffs that made swimming for longer times very dangerous, causing hypothermia among others.

But I agree overal, exploits need to be addressed and turned into something that could work for say a limited time or against a certain challenge only. It is not necessarily a bad thing zombies cannot get to the player all the time, but when a big horde hits they need to have some ability to get to the player, damage him or bring the player to them by bringing down the structure they are on. There are improvements to be made to those things for sure, its better than it was, yes, but you can easily still climb on any POI roof and be safe, even from a bloodmoon horde.

Yeah we just need to put a stamina cost to treading water.

 

[madmole]

I would suggest all zombies float on water. This makes players wanting to hide would need to stay submerged for a long period or try evading them "floaters". Adding debuffs like hypothermia or swimming fatigue may be good, but considering it against a lack of breath is different. Players will not be able to float in one spot for long (at least underwater), so they won't be 100% safe.

I'd rather see them swim, so there is no safe place.

 

[madmole]

if they dont breath and dont have air in their lungs how the #$@! do they make all those noises!!! to the point once their heads are shot off they still make noise for 10 seconds...

IMO zombies breath out of habit, but don't need to breath. Oxygen isn't needed for muscle contractions, or function.

 

[Odetta]

Yeah we just need to put a stamina cost to treading water.

Do you guys not have vultures in your hordes. The water exploit stops being a thing after the first horde if you're lucky. Water is already a pain in the ass, now you essentially want to make it the new rad zone.

Having zombies being able to "climb" up and down in water is much more interesting. Especially for water bases.

 

[Odetta]

I'd rather see them swim, so there is no safe place.

Yes.

 

[madmole]

This is usually where I'd link a YouTube to a hang glider mod but you frown in that, so I'll just say yes, please add one as it is awesome.

Not going to happen just because I think its cool.

 

[JamesKirk]

IMO zombies breath out of habit, but don't need to breath. Oxygen isn't needed for muscle contractions, or function.

Only for some seconds. Or do you think your heart (a contracting muscle) continues beating when you are out of oxygen?

No biologic metazoan can live without oxygen. (Ok except for the little thing, Henneguya salminicola, israelian scientists published an article upon this week).

 

[Gnomaana]

IMO zombies breath out of habit, but don't need to breath. Oxygen isn't needed for muscle contractions, or function.

Not entirely accurate. It's not directly used up but, without Oxygen, ATP(that IS directly used up) would run out rather quickly.

 

[Adam the Waster]

IMO zombies breath out of habit, but don't need to breath. Oxygen isn't needed for muscle contractions, or function.

that makes sense. Because some zombies (Mainly the Hazmat zombie) can breather with his suit on even though the Air in the Tank is Probably out.

But i would love to see Zombies Swim to you. if your on the lake Ground. they will run, if your swimming on the surface they swim

 

[madmole]

Only for some seconds. Or do you think your heart (a contracting muscle) continues beating when you are out of oxygen?

No biologic metazoan can live without oxygen. (Ok except for the little thing, Henneguya salminicola, israelian scientists published an article upon this week).

Ok well then we can say a zombies metabolic rate or heart beat is so slow that they could go underwater for hours at a time like a turtle.

 

[The Gronk]

A corpse doesn't need to breathe to float. The RMS Carpathia reported having to navigate aroumd floating corpses while looking for survivors of the titanic.

The determining factors are mostly fat/muscle ratio. My father has a lot more fat than me... he floats, I don't.

Fun fact!

Due to the differences in fat distribution women tend to float on their back while men tend float on thier front if they're unconcious.

 

[Odetta]

Ok well then we can say a zombies metabolic rate or heart beat is so slow that they could go underwater for hours at a time like a turtle.

Or the virus/bacteria produces it's own oxygen from the decaying gasses around it.

 

[Tin]

Ok well then we can say a zombies metabolic rate or heart beat is so slow that they could go underwater for hours at a time like a turtle.

Or when they became zombiefied, their cells mutated and they can now utilize combined oxygen as well.