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[azmodean]

Personally, I'm looking forward to the day that you can create your own town. Get NPCs to show up and start doing things, slowly build up your own self-sufficient settlements with farms and utilities and workshops with proper crafting equipment.

And then fight off hordes of monsters as your settlement attracts them to you, with NPCs manning guard towers, trap corridors, and desperate battles for the survival of humanity.

This piecewise settlement building kind of thing is pretty much my favorite game mechanic EVER (see generally df, Suikiden, D&D stronghold builder's handbook), so yea, that's going to happen, it's only a question of when.

The keymapping is still very much only scratching the surface.  Mapping the default set of keys is pretty straightforward, but once you get into remapping keys triggered from sub-commands and menus it starts turning into a really big task, one we haven't tackled yet.  We're slowly laying the groundwork by finding all the places in the code that need the player to chose a direction or select an option, and making them use a helper function instead of having it open-coded.  When that's done we'll be in a good position to have every keypress in the game be remappable.

I am surprised at what you're seeing with walking and driving keymapping not matching though, in the code it decodes a keypress to an action first, then decides whether to call the "walk in direction" or "steer in direction" function based on whether you're driving, so if you've remapped the key for "move west" to something successfully, it should work fine for "steer left" once you're in a car.

The rain animation has an option to disable it, added because it was interacting badly with ttycast at some point.

Hulks are still present, just relatively rare.  1/1000 zombies that spawn will be a hulk.

Rain, Fire, and computational funtimes:
It's not so much the interaction between the two so much as the fact that both are relatively expensive operations.  They do interact, but not in a way that is combinatorically problematic.

Bug in mugging behavior noted, thanks.  Took a quick look at the NPC "AI" code, and I don't see a way for them to react to you moving OR attacking, might be buried somewhere.

[Girlinhat]

Changing subjects a little, with Z-levels coming out Soon^TM are there immediate plans to include flying vehicles?

It immediately occurs to me that there are two options for flight, and two methods for each.
1: Speed-related flight, namely propellers and jets.
2: Sustained gliding, namely wings and gliding frames.
3: Active hovering, namely helicopters and and VTOL.
4: Lighter-Than-Air, namely hot-air balloons and blimps.

These would ideally be able to interact with wheels without clashing, so you could for instance install VTOL jets on a tank chassis and make limited lifts, or blimp balloons on a quad bike so you could lift from danger a bit, or - most importantly - rockets on a motorcycle so you can fly over buildings.

Vehicles are already aware of momentum, if you're traveling west then it continues coasting west.  This would be important for gliding vehicles, as it should be possible to, for instance, drive a motorocycle forward to gain speed, activate a VTOL jet/rotor to raise into the air, and then use existing momentum with gliding wings to stay aloft while slowly falling and gliding forward.  This would be the most complicated scenario, combining wheels, VTOL, and gliding.

Other combined motors would be relatively easy.  When on the ground, the truck uses regular V6 engines and wheels and whatnot.  When activating flight mode (any method to lift off the surface) then it should stop calculating the ground engines and stop consuming fuel, and start calculating the air engines and wings.  So the truck could be equipped with compressed air tanks and a blimp frame, inflate the balloon, and then use a small propeller to navigate over a river or thick forest before settling down again and turning back to wheels.

The REAL nice addition I'd like to see would be shifting power.  Being able to turn engines on/off, and being able to turn a V8 to power the wheels, then change it and use the SAME engine to power a helicopter rotor would allow for some really fun types of designs and hybrid vehicles.

As a footnote, we should also add a "hovering" tag, which would allow a vehicle to 'fly' at ground level, high enough to ignore piles of rubble and traps, but still low enough to collide with zombies and walls.

ALSO what about amphibious vehicles and boats or submarines?  With Z-levels available, deep rivers could have an under-layer, allowing creative use of submarines, boats, or even just trucks that have a really tall profile and are water-tight and just drive across the riverbed.

[miauw62]

HELICOPTERWARBUS!

[Girlinhat]

HELICOPTERWARBUS!

I'm actually in heavy debate if I want my WARBUS 2.0 to be an economical blimp that can sustain itself in the apocalypse, or a jet-powered flyer that bruises through buildings and hordes and burns through fuel as if you just set an open barrel on fire.

It depends on if we enact proper jet fuel, or if jets run on gasoline.  I somehow don't imagine high-octane jet fuel to be abundant.

[Fniff]

Blimps are the best way to survive a zombie apocalypse. Do it.

[GlyphGryph]

The first priority is getting flying monsters and jetpacks and wings for the player working.

I very very much doubt GalenEvil will be putting any work into flying vehicles. This isn't to say it won't happen, just that it's not on the feature list for calling z-levels done.

Since he will, however, have to work out some implementation for what happens when a vehicle drives out the window of a skyscraper, I'm going to assume that most of the groundwork will be laid, and I wouldn't be surprised if adding flying vehicles later turns out to be pretty simple.

[Girlinhat]

Luckily being open-source, if these things don't get added then we can work on them independently.  If there's framework for moving vehicles over Z-Levels, then it wouldn't be too hard to mod blimp frames and whatnot.

[azmodean]

I think you picked the right breakdown for flight profiles.

Blimps would have basically no issues.

Gliders would probably be fine with some work, either as a worn item (parachutes) or as a in-situ constructable or portable vehicle e.g. a folding glider frame (oh look, I just implemented foldable vehicles last week, how convinient).  That'll be interesting to work out the mechanics of, but dive/climb/left/right might be up to it.  This would basically be relegated to low-altitude jumps from buildings from what I can think of, but I'd be fine to be wrong about that.

Helicopers or other powered VTOL would probably be pretty prohibitive fuel wise, these things eat a completely absurd amount of fuel.  An exception would be ultralight-sized or smaller VTOL aircraft, which would still use a lot of fuel and have a relatively short range, but might be feasable for some things.  This includes worn devices like a jetpack rather than a vehicle.  As for sticking helicopter blades on your warbus to give it a flight ability, I guess we could do that, but with a reasonable fuel consumption rate you're going to be relegated to very short flights in any sizeable vehicle.  We have some tenative plans for making construction materials factor into vehicle parameters, so if you were careful to keep it light and relatively this might not be all that bad.  Making it light of course would go against making it tough, so there's that.

Velocity-based flight (fixed wing or e.g. gyrocopter) is kind of problematic.  It's like with the VTOL issue, but actually worse.  What happens is with a pretty tiny/light aircraft, you can have a pretty reasonable stall/cruise/max speed, but anything bigger/heavier than a Cessna or so and you start hitting stall/cruise/max speeds that do really bad things to the game engine.  Also the wingspans start getting pretty ridiculous, the afforementioned cesna has a wingspan 5-7 times the width of a typical car, so there'd be issues with clearance pretty much anywhere outside of an airport location.

Something I just thought of.  We're planning tenatively to have 10 levels above ground level to limit system load, but if you go up from lvl 10, we can just have you jump to an overmap interface, which better manages the speed, hrm.

So I started this post intending to explain why we can't do it, and ended up convincing myself that it might work as long as the aircraft stay small.  Also the reasons large aircraft would be problematic would be natural reasons, so as you scale them up they'd just get more and more problematic to operate, but you'd be fine to keep trying.

It still requires a lot of cleanup to the vehicle system to make it reasonable, and all kinds of fun integration stuff with z-levels, also I don't have any plans to work on it any time soon.

Also just to be clear, I don't envision any kind of sophisticated flight model ever, just dive/climb/left/right/accelerate/decelerate, some basic procedural calculations for lift/weight and lateral thrust/weight, etc.

[majikero]

Can we at least get a balloon flight?

[Girlinhat]

Yeah, all we really need is being able to move the vehicle according to its direction of travel, and being able to guide it up and down.  No one expects very complicated air simulations - basic movement is really enough.

Balloons are the most feasible option, of course, but you should allow players to use extremely fuel-hogging engines if they feel masochistic about fuel consumption (might want to include a fuel tank for high-octane fuel that weighs less per volume, and can be crafted/refined from gasoline?).  You could make a basic bi-plane, probably, but make semi-realistic issues over wingspan.  The player will quickly realize that they can't really make a semi truck into a rigid-wing airplane simply for the size of the thing, and that's ok.  You can handwave it after that by planting superalloys, antigravity sacks, intertial dampners, or crazier things like "alien radiation added to metal plating makes it weigh less!"

Ultimately though, there comes 2 choices, which is very similar to land-based vehicles!  1: you go small and economical, a motorbike with wings.  2: You go big and expensive, a semi truck with antigravity orbs.  The big point though, is to just toss out options and let the player figure it out.  It may be obviously impossible to use rigid wings to fly due to vehicle size restrictions, but if you just add them the players may surprise you with a wooden glider frame using a lawnmower engine and propeller!

[Knight of Fools]

Can we at least get a balloon flight?

I read that as "Water balloon fight" for a second. Would make for some interesting combat options...

[Lightningfalcon]

All I want is a blimp.  And the ability to mount rocket launchers and bomb dispensers on it. 

[Girlinhat]

(oh look, I just implemented foldable vehicles last week, how convinient)

This actually interests me GREATLY.  I want to know more about this please.

[jhxmt]

On flight (or, rather, on Z-levels): any early thoughts on how falling damage (both giving and receiving) might work?  While I love the innate quirkiness of it, the 'DF model' of falling from any height but landing on a kitten is survivable is a little bit...odd.    Wonderful for plotting escapes from high towers if you don't like cats, though.

Edit: sensibleness (it's a word).

[Girlinhat]

On flight (or, rather, on Z-levels): any early thoughts on how falling damage (both giving and receiving) might work?  While I love the innate quirkiness of it, the 'DF model' of falling from any height but landing on a kitten is survivable is a little bit...odd.    Wonderful for plotting escapes from high towers if you don't like cats, though.

Suggest you edit your post and JUST leave this intact.  Ignore the troll, continue constructive conversation.

I think the best way to handle falling damage would be to measure vertical speed in feet per second (or meters or whatever) - a unit of measure smaller than a tile.  This gives more control over falling damage, as you can jump from a single story building roof easily, but jumping off a 10 story rooftop wouldn't be measured as 10z fall - it would be measured according to your ending travel speed.  This becomes most relevant when you compare to vehicles.  If a tile is split in height, you can assume that any monster can reach a tile on the same z-level, but you could add some unique quirks, like a plane flying very low at 1 foot above the ground might avoid a bear trap, and 5 feet above the ground might avoid fences.

Then you just assume a tile is 10 feet tall or so.  Standing on a flat roof on Z+1 would be a 10 foot drop.  Standing atop a table atop a flat roof would be 13 foot?  Standing on a countertop (3 foot tall?) might give you a melee advantage to enemies who are on the floor.  Measuring the current height of creatures would allow for some interesting ideas, but might be too much effort.