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[10ebbor10]

Out of game:
I have no idea where your zombies came from, but if they are of the modern variety (ie biovirus or similair), it would make sense for whoever to have created them to add it. After all, whitout it, zombies would also walk straight to their death (I always imagine zombies as being extremely dumb, incapable of anything but to smash the nearest thing). With the pheromone in place, zombies would "learn" to avoid dangerous things, like cliffs and such. (Note that they still can't recognize things, they know one cliff is dangerous, yet it learns them nothing about the other cliffs.)

In game:

It would allow for interesting behaviour. The detterant would not be that strong, the noise and/or sight of a living being would overrule it. In the following situation:
(The hideout of player A is accessible from two streets. Street A leads directly to a major source of zombies, and is therefore heavily trapped/ defended. Street B just goes around the block, before arriving at the major source of zombies and has neglible defenses. In what I think is the current system, the zombies would move through street A and get slaughtered. With the pheromone system in place, zombies would first go street A and get slaughtered, before the pheromone builds up and route A becomes a less favourable route. They would then switch to route B, and overrun the player's base)

Other useages would be the player deliberatly spreading zombie parts around to get a repulsive layer of pheromones across his base.

Later you could add other things to the system, like the smell of meat and such. That would make the second example even more interesting, as the protective barrier of zombie flesh would, as soon as the phereomone has been broken down, attract more zombies

As I read the about pheromones from wikipedia I stumbled upon the fact that alarm pheromones trigger flight in certain species and aggression in others, like ants, termites and bees. I think alarm pheromones should trigger aggression in zombies, not flight. Boy that would be weak. If pheromones would be included in the game, should they not trigger blood lust in zombies for a few turns if anything? You know, you kill one of those and the others tear doors like paper for a moment. That could be awesome.

A pheromone is basically an excreted hormone. You can have many kind of pheromones and their triggers and  reactions. As for a Berzerk hormone, I feel it would be a it overpowered, due to the tendeny of zombies to arrive in numbers. The fun thing about hormones is that it allows for the zombies to be stupid individually, but act semi intelligent in a group. (Ie, with deadavoiding hormones they will find a path after the first few zombies have died, and such)

Hell, if you made them and put them in some RAW style files, you could change the feel of the entire game by changing only a few things.

As for what direction I'd like, I'd go for 1 or 3. Something semirealistic.

[Immortal]

That pheromone idea sounds great.

As for the style. I agree 1 and 3. I want to scavenge for food and hide while I sleep, maybe set a wire and some tin cans to wake me up when zombies break in my house.

Would it be possible to implement a building part to the game? If I'm on the second floor can I break down walls with a chance to gain wood/drywall/bricks to make another wall? Or even to build a bridge from one roof top to another? Make the action skip time so we aren't capable of deconstructing a whole building in a day though.

Scope of game - I believe we should have the scope of the game go from city center and sprawl out to rural areas? That way we could run from the city where there are tons of zombies to a farm where there are the random stragglers.

[Tuplis]

Alrite so we've basically concluded we don't want an action-heavy roguelike (like doomRL). Alright. Now, since we're going stealth- or survival oriented, I'd personally like to keep it stealth-heavy instead of survival-heavy because I feel the survival-heavy has been done quite well by rogue survivor (and Cataclysm, though I haven't played it that much). Survival doesn't require a specific plot but it does fit the stealth-approach though because now we can give the player all kinds of tough objectives. Also, being a bit more story-driven than the two aforementioned games would probably be a good thing because it would differentiate us.

So this is what I'm proposing:
We start out in a city, Zombies everywhere. You are comparatively weak so you're best off trying to avoid combat. If you need to kill, silent melee skills are preferred to firearms. While in the city, the player could have some tough optional objectives like trying to find and rescue someone from an infested apartment building or something like that. Or perhaps someone is sick and needs meds from the hospital which, of course, is an absolute deathtrap.
Like Immortal proposed, we could then head out to the rural areas where we could perhaps center the game around the player (and his friends?) achieving long-term survival. Since sleeping is, in my opinion, already covered pretty well, I'd abstract it away. We could definitely go for this pheromore thing you seem to be interested in, though.

Opinions?

[Immortal]

I tried the latest version. I feel like the zombies don't come after you, I mean I was 4 four sqaures away and it didn't move for me.
I'd suggest we have them slight you moving from far away.
To counteract them maybe give an option for slow/stealth movement?

As for map generation. I say lets get a map maker made up. Then we can all make segments which the game will intelligently-randomly piece together.

Can't wait for that backlog to turn blue!

[Tuplis]

I tried the latest version. I feel like the zombies don't come after you, I mean I was 4 four sqaures away and it didn't move for me.
I'd suggest we have them slight you moving from far away.
To counteract them maybe give an option for slow/stealth movement?

As for map generation. I say lets get a map maker made up. Then we can all make segments which the game will intelligently-randomly piece together.

Can't wait for that backlog to turn blue!

It's obviously not balanced yet.. and it shouldn't be, either. When I add more ways for them to sense / better ai, any balancing effort will have to be redone. Plus you can actually increase their sight by editing the monster files. Beware though that they see through the walls.
I am, however, very happy with the flocking. Currently if you want to "finish" the game by killing the reaper, you'll have to travel a pretty long distance. You're usually very likely to attract at least a couple of the big packs of zombies if you're not very careful. That's definitely a feature I like about the game already.
Someone also already proposed the mapmaker. Currently there is a quite complete map making scripting system available, although I'm quite shit with making interfaces (and don't really care to do one either) and that's what a map maker basically is. If anyone wants to volunteer, I'd be sure to give them a special recognition in the credits.

[Tuplis]

Hey guys!

Sorry for the downtime, been way too busy the past couple days. Anyways, here's a big one for y'all!

- Implemented monster hearing.
- Tiles now have the field <NoiseMitigation> which determines how much a tile can dampen the sound. (default 1)
- Creatures have <SoundThreshold> field which determines how loud the sound needs to be for them to register it. (default 1)
- Creatures have a target system based on the priority of whatever they sense. A player sighting amounts up to 100000 priority atm, which is a shitload and they'll never give up after seeing you you can lose them tho if they can't see you after reaching wherever you were when they saw you.

I removed line of sight and sight range temporarily so you can appreciate the sight of the whole map walking towards you after you fire a weapon (firing a gun generates 1000 noise/priority)

Tomorrow: smell!

[Tuplis]

Smelling released!

Only zombies can smell right now, and it might need more balancing. However, I just made it so that npc's can no longer see through walls since they can hear and smell. Try it out! You can still see the whole map.

edit: I think I forgot to update the xml files. Edit the xml files and set the <Smell> field of the player to 800 or so and you'll have the monsters tracking your scent

[Tuplis]

Hey hey,

another version is out. There are two things, basically..
1) Made smell propagate in a way that makes more sense. Read the changelog if you want to.
2) Sight range no longer matters when monsters find targets by smelling and hearing. They'll pick the tile with the smelliest or loudest signal within line of sight and go there.

The player still has unlimited vision for now. If you use the debug, you can look for the debug lines where monsters detect sounds/smells.

Test, please

[khantin]

I think it would be neat to have varying speeds for different units (ie zombies move slightly faster than humans), along with stamina and a toggle-able sprint/jog mode. 

[Tuplis]

I think it would be neat to have varying speeds for different units (ie zombies move slightly faster than humans), along with stamina and a toggle-able sprint/jog mode.

Units already have a varying speed. Creatures have the <GlobalSpeed> field in their xml that affects how much it costs them to take an action. Currently, the player's speed is 100, a normal zombie's speed is 80 and a dog's speed is 160. This means a dog gets twice the moves compared to a zombie.

I added the sprint-mode in the backlog. Can you think of any negative effects sprinting could have? Here's the things I'm thinking so far:
- Limited running time/stamina (Khantin's idea obviously)
- Running generates noise and attracts zombies
- Running lowers armor rating -> you take more damage

[10ebbor10]

I'd say a combination of 1 and 2.

It drains stamina, and depending on the terrain you run on ,creates noice. (snow would be no noise, gravel or rubble quite a lot).

[Thief^]

Snow's very noisy, on the ground it freezes into crunchy mounds of ice.

[khantin]

Well, if this is going to be a survival type game and smell is already worked in, you could make it so that being at low stamina increases your smell (sweating and what not) and eventually lead that into some sort of cleanliness arc where you need items or water sources to remove stink/remove infections.  It's a bit out there, but *I* think it would be kind of cool.

[Tuplis]

Well, if this is going to be a survival type game and smell is already worked in, you could make it so that being at low stamina increases your smell (sweating and what not) and eventually lead that into some sort of cleanliness arc where you need items or water sources to remove stink/remove infections.  It's a bit out there, but *I* think it would be kind of cool.

Holy shit, that's seriously a GREAT idea! I'd thought about deodorants (or antiperspirants rather) reducing the smell characters generate but this is awesome!

[Tuplis]

Hey guys.

I've been doing some thinking again. I reviewed the backlog shuffled it around a bit since the blue lines seemed to be taking up a lot of space. Ever since we refined the scope a few days ago, I've looked at the backlog items and I've seen features that just don't seem super relevant at this stage. So, I though I'd throw a few more questions in the air to stimulate some discussion again.

What should we do to make the game feel more purposeful? Right now there's obviously the two quests that give some sort of direction but it's really not much. We should have something driving the playing experience a little bit more.

Here's what I'm thinking. I'm just throwing these off the top of my head:

- Build enough maps to make it feel more like a world. We could have people making the maps and/or I could write the random generator. However, I'm still not sure what kind of a generator to make since at least I'm not sure if we'll want the city areas or rural areas more. Maybe I'll eventually have to write both.
- Add proper support for npc's and enable communicating with them.
- Finish or at least flesh out the quest system
- Add game mechanics that make the game feel more like the type of game we're trying to make it ( mostly about short-term survival, constant suspense and mechanics that encourage stealth and avoiding contact )
- Add Story

As I think about these topics, I notice they're not very well represented in the backlog which admittedly is a mistake by me. What do you guys think the focus should be right now?