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[Mephansteras]

Development question: What are the plans as far as the random non-zombified wildlife?

While having a basically unlimited food supply from squirrels and rabbits is nice, the sheer number of Spiders, Cougers, and Bears that show up is a bit crazy. Especially the number that spawn in areas you've cleared out of zombies.

It got to the point in my last game where my cleared-out town was only marginally less dangerous without the zombies, simply because of all the dangerous wildlife that constantly spawned within it. And since those are spawns and not static (or based on any sort of tile-spawn that could be cleared out) it was impossible to make it any more secure.

I don't mind the spiders and whatnot in general, it's just frustrating that I literally can't make an area truly safe because of them no matter what I do.

Ideally, most actual wild critters (like Cougers) would clear out of an area if you killed/attacked them too often and would only come back after X amount of time passed since the last time you killed/attacked one. Spiders might be less worried about that sort of thing, but you should be able to functionally clear them out of a town by killing them off. Maybe have females have a chance of carrying/depositing an egg sack in a safe/dark spot? That way you could clear out the egg sacks & baby spiders and have the town safe for a bit, with the danger that if you left and came back a good bit later spiders could have repopulated it while you were off-site?

[GalenEvil]

As of right now it's trivial to switch by drag dropping some files and restarting the game and though.

   Trivial is having an option in the options. Dragging and dropping files is not trivial as it requires actual effort which can be messed up by accident. Of course I don't think it needs the options to be honest. Most people will find a tile set or just use ASCII and then stick with what they chose. Of course looking at how the data is stored it seems that the game loads the file tile_config.json and the images tile.png and tinytile.png so if you turned the variables that stored those paths into normal ones and let them be set in the options menu it would be easier and you could keep everything in the gfx folder (Ex I could have default.json default.png tinydefault.png as well as deon.json deon.png and tinydeon.png). Though I will stress that this is probably not needed.

I am planning to add this as part of the mod manager section, actually. I'll be moving things around in regards to tilesets and the json file. Right now, though, you can alter what tileset is pointed at by changing gfx.txt in the data folder. The paths in it assume that the path is relative to the application directory, so you'd write gfx/sometileimage.png in the image section and gfx/sometilejson.json in the json section. You can also have it work with additional nested directories. gfx/deontileset/deontiles.png and gfx/deontileset/deontiles.json

The mod manager will introduce a more graphical way of switching between tilesets added to the gfx/ folder, and will take the names of subfolders within it as the tileset names.

Edit (Addendum):
Along with being able to switch between tilesets more easily I plan to add the ability to stack like-sized tilesets onto one another with a sort of priority loading system. You may want to use Deon's tileset and json as a base, but maybe use someone else's vehicle or item tiles.

[Girlinhat]

On wildlife spawns:
I'd actually like something a bit more meta-game...  When you clear out an area of zombies you could access a menu and 'assess surroundings' and get a message 'the dead seem to be truly dead...' or 'there still seem to be shamblings nearby...' to indicate that the nearby X map tiles are (not) clear.  If enough are clear, then you can declare a safehouse, and there wouldn't be any animal spawns within X * 1.5 radius and it would later enable things like NPC wanderers, zombie migration events, overmap fast-travel, etc...

So as an example, you find a small town, and it has some sort of 50 zombie population.
You kill 20, and assess surroundings, get the message 'this area is still hostile'.
You kill all 50, and assess surroundings, get the message 'the area is secure'.
Bears and whatever still spawn.
You claim one map tile as a Safehouse, because a radius of 10 tiles are empty of zombie population.
Bears and whatever will not spawn in a 15 tile radius now.

When NPCs and such are more fleshed, then this could turn into a fortified base, with farming and rain collection going on.

[i2amroy]

Currently the basic goal is to have statically spawned wildlife that will "reproduce" on a timer (meaning you get more based on the current numbers after X amount of time).

[Edmus]

On wildlife spawns:
I'd actually like something a bit more meta-game...  When you clear out an area of zombies you could access a menu and 'assess surroundings' and get a message 'the dead seem to be truly dead...' or 'there still seem to be shamblings nearby...' to indicate that the nearby X map tiles are (not) clear.  If enough are clear, then you can declare a safehouse, and there wouldn't be any animal spawns within X * 1.5 radius and it would later enable things like NPC wanderers, zombie migration events, overmap fast-travel, etc...

So as an example, you find a small town, and it has some sort of 50 zombie population.
You kill 20, and assess surroundings, get the message 'this area is still hostile'.
You kill all 50, and assess surroundings, get the message 'the area is secure'.
Bears and whatever still spawn.
You claim one map tile as a Safehouse, because a radius of 10 tiles are empty of zombie population.
Bears and whatever will not spawn in a 15 tile radius now.

When NPCs and such are more fleshed, then this could turn into a fortified base, with farming and rain collection going on.

I like that idea, but what about Zombies that might wander in.

[Sharp]

Currently the basic goal is to have statically spawned wildlife that will "reproduce" on a timer (meaning you get more based on the current numbers after X amount of time).

I was thinking something like that. You have to make choices whether you want to cull the population and reduce number or possibly exterminate it. Leave a population for too long and it might reach max size again, exterminate it and there goes a source of meat, fur/chitin etc...

[Girlinhat]

I like that idea, but what about Zombies that might wander in.

That's different.  If you lure zombies from 16 tiles away and bring them towards your safehouse, that's not a zombie that's spawned in the safe zone.  There's two types of zombie population:
1: The zombies on the screen
2: The unlisted number of 'regional population' that will spawn when you enter the area.
When you head into a new town, you can find the closest gas station and clear it out - all the screen-zombies are dead - and then head to the clothing store a bit aways.  When you return to the gas station, there might be new zombies - the regional-zombies have become screen-zombies.

For my idea, when you clear out the REGIONAL zombies, then nothing will spawn in your front lawn.  You can still get them following you, but the safe zone should be large enough that nothing spawns on the edge of the screen, which is the whole point.  The safe area should be big enough that when you stand in the center, nothing spawns, but it's still easily possible to lure things in, and then have to deal with resurrecting zombies and whatnot...

[azmodean]

Now that I think about it, what we'll probably need to do is add a check every time you build or destroy terrain that blocks movement (boo, this probably will not be fun) that checks the current submap tile for whether it blocks movement across the tile, and in which directions??? and if so, mark it as such on the overmap sot hat as we're moving zombie (and other) hordes around on the overmap scale, it blocks properly.  I was hoping to avoid this, but I don't see any way around it.  Building a wall isn't that frequent, it's all the checks when walls are destroyed I'm kind of dreading

[GlyphGryph]

Well, we could always delay the checks instead of doing them immediately when a wall is destroyed. It's not like it is likely to ever have immediate results, since the player will be on the square when the walls are destroyed.

It's like when you do drawing code, you don't redraw the entire thing the moment something changes, you just note that it changed, and when the next reasonable opportunity to redraw comes up you let it know "yep, something changed." and it redoes the check for everything.

It could very well be enough to run the check only when a player leaves the area (and only if they destroyed or built walls).

[Girlinhat]

Well, there's a difference.  When a wall is built, it might finish a wall and turn 'open' into 'closed'.  If a tile is already 'closed' then it cannot become 'closed' again and there's no need to check.  Similarly, if you destroy a wall, it might turn a tile from 'closed' to 'open' but if the tile is already 'open' then it can't become 'more open'.

Essentially, if the player builds a around a city, and it gets breached, there's no point in checking for more breaches.

[azmodean]

oh duh, my brain wasn't working, we'd just mark the tile dirty and do the check once when it's unloaded.
Already planning on offloading a bunch of bookkeepping onto map tile load/unload.  So yea, there'd just be an algorithm that checks navigability of the tile and it gets run when a map tile is unloaded.  Possibly even allowing for traps to be "pseudo-blocking", so if you have contiguous walls and traps blocking navagability, things would move across, but be forced onto the traps.  Of course that isn't going to do much to zombies unless it obliterates them...

Re: "breaching", the blockage is per-tile, so we won't be checking continuity for an entire perimiter or something.  Imagine it like this, if you zoom out of the normal map scale to the overmap scale (conviniently what you see on the map display), one tile is now just a single square of terrain, and hordes navigate around on it on relatively long timescales (not sure what scale exactly, basically a horde would have an "overmap move speed").  Some tiles, like deep water for terrestrial animals, are already blocking, so on the overmap scale that kind of horde wouldn't be able to cross that tile.  Building contiguous wals across a tile would mark that tile as non-navigible to non-flying creatures, there might be a directionality thing, but it'd be much easier to just say the tile is blocked off entirely.  That way we don't have to worry about the potentially NP-hard problem of determining connected-ness.

This means, for example, that you could have gaps all over the place but still block movement.  The thing is, I'd rather it act a little funny than either delay the feature (potentially by a LOT) or not have it at all.

[Girlinhat]

Yeah, I don't really see any -reason- to have directional blocking.  Sure, you might be actually able to travel parallel to the wall in the same tile, but if that's the case then the tiles adjacent would be open to movement as well.  So it's kind of a moot point.

Also, you only have to check for a breach if the wall is secure.
If secure -> check for breach
If breached -> don't check, we already know it's breached!

You don't care how many holes are in the wall, so as soon as one hole is located then stop checking!

[CognitiveDissonance]

In terms of declaring areas safe, I would like to offer support for the randomly occurring "spawn spot" such as spider nests. The reason I think it's a great idea is because it would add goals to players, and that is always a good thing.

[Fniff]

Another fun part might be, when NPCs get fixed, having survivors migrate over to your "safe zone" and choosing whether to let them in or keep them out. Could even segment into a late-game town simulator thing.

[Graknorke]

I like that idea, but what about Zombies that might wander in.

That's different.  If you lure zombies from 16 tiles away and bring them towards your safehouse, that's not a zombie that's spawned in the safe zone.  There's two types of zombie population:
1: The zombies on the screen
2: The unlisted number of 'regional population' that will spawn when you enter the area.
When you head into a new town, you can find the closest gas station and clear it out - all the screen-zombies are dead - and then head to the clothing store a bit aways.  When you return to the gas station, there might be new zombies - the regional-zombies have become screen-zombies.

For my idea, when you clear out the REGIONAL zombies, then nothing will spawn in your front lawn.  You can still get them following you, but the safe zone should be large enough that nothing spawns on the edge of the screen, which is the whole point.  The safe area should be big enough that when you stand in the center, nothing spawns, but it's still easily possible to lure things in, and then have to deal with resurrecting zombies and whatnot...

So doing away with static spawn?