Some thoughts.
Spawning in the same place for all team members has been achieved by editing the spawnpoint file. While this works, and in no way could be considered hard, I'd like to put forward that making some such thing a part of the game creation GUI/settings would be a better option. Let me post the game settings that my group and I are currently using while we learn the game.:
We are learning, and so are using the easiest settings the interface allows us to select, while giving us the best loot currently possible. None of us want to play on public servers, and allowing an in-game day to take up 2 real hours seems good.
On the Basic tab, we see blood moon disabled (new players, remember), and no one wants to be chased down and swarmed, so zombies don't get to move faster than a walk. Air Drops come every day, because reasons.
On the Advanced Tab, we see everything designed for the players to have the easiest time we can arrange, with the exception of leaving the second to last setting set to "ON", as we do want to have new/replacement zombies in our games.
The MultiPlayer Tab is how we roll.
This last Tab, would be where and how I would build my own settings, and just serves as an easy way of showing how it could be implemented in game at some point. Replace the titles amd options to whatever you want, so this notional 5th Tab gives us space for 12 nre options to be implemented in an easy to work with interface.
1) Initial Spawn locations option. Right now, all initial spawn locations are randomly determined, and the players currently have no ability to spawn as a group, so perhaps the first one could be where the player could setup the "Party Spawn" from a list of options.
2) Looking back at the experiences of my and my groups poor characters, I would set the second line to bedroll respawns, where one selectable option would be to keep the most recently laid down bedroll as the only one a player could select, but other options would allow for more than a single bedroll to be active (and therefore selectable for respawning at). My own preferences would be to allow multiple bedrolls to be active, as long as all the others were in the land claim blocks radius of the player. As I understand it, currently any player can have up to three land claim blocks at a given time.
3) About the land claim blocks limit, I would want options here as well. Maybe players might want to just allow folks to have a single claim, but I myself would prefer to have a higher limit, and use a bit of roleplay in the process, say something like, basic 1 land claim block, plus one additional block for each and every trader that their stalwart character has contacted/completed all tier one missions for.
3a) This ties in with the multiple bedroll respawn points idea above, have the more renowned characters being allowed better respawn options than those that don't bother with land claims. If your playstyle is "Back-Pack AD&D" style, no change would be affected by this option, but for those that wanted to build up their respawn options list, by being allowed to select one bedroll from each of their bases, in addition to the one they are presumably laying down before attempting a particularly hard PoI.
Anyway, just a few quick options for the notional "
New Options" Tab in the game creation GuI. I see 12 options max per tab, and if the 5th Tab were to become a thing, how would you folks fill out the remaining 9 potential spaces?
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Back then it used to happily spawn me either in the air, or within terrain blocks, just based exactly on the altitude defined in the xml. The stuck-resolver would likely deal with it, but it's not a great experience.
