Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Edmus]

Looks awesome. PTW.

[DoomOnion]

Jesus Christmas, I thought this project was dead!
It is so glad to see it back on track.
Keep up the good work.

[jakeread1]

This is great fun, even without most of the features. Can't wait until its finished!

[My Name is Immaterial]

PTW. I'll check it out after work. I am very excited for this.

[Pesi]

Moving out and having 3 zombies in your FOV at the start = "You dead, suckah."

You can move out when no one is alive, and of course can't move back.

[Pesi]

Warning : Severe memory leak results in endless Page File Usage growth and renders the game unplayable.

Attempting to end the application with Task Manager resulted in...

ZSS : Not Responding
End Program - ZSS : Not Responding

Soon followed by...

Windows Task Manager : Not Responding

[The Darkling Wolf]

Posting to follow, looks snazzy as hell.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

The big new feature is saving and loading -- saves should even be forwards-compatible with future versions of the game, if I handle things right. Each day the game saves, and you can continue from the main menu to pick up where you left off, or select New Game to start a new game. I still haven't implemented a proper game over, so you can get into a state where you have a saved game, but it's unplayable due to everyone being dead; for now, just pick New Game from the main menu when that happens.

Other changes include some changes to enemies and spawn rates, and more books. I also laid the foundation for a couple new features that aren't complete yet. You can now select Library in the safehouse submenu to see your collection of books picked up on your adventures, and may run into a few rare survivors while fighting zombies. They stand there doing nothing unless you bump into them, in which case they say something friendly (or unfriendly) and then go back to doing nothing. You can press F or 0 (zero) to attack them like any other enemy. Being fragile living things with no equipment, they die pretty easily, and drop nothing but their corpse. Which may actually become hostile later.



http://www.jonathansfox.com/ZSS/zss_python_2-8-2013.zip

Changelog:
- Added autosave and continue support
- Laid groundwork for forward compatibility on save files and map files
- Altered the requirements for a creature to revive as a zombie
- Changed representation, balance, spawn rates of zombies
- Removed nonfunctional "EXP" header from party listing
- Preferred body armor slot over clothes slot when displaying outfit
- Added novels
- Added library screen
- Cleaned up memory leaks
- Fixed bug where people could stay in the raiding party if they starve to death
- Fixed bug where not all items would be picked up from a square at once
- Added initial rare spawns of (very incomplete, do nothing) human survivors

[Jonathan S. Fox]

It would be nice if body armor showed up in the outfit spot at a higher priority then padded clothes.  Best case scenario would be if there was Body Armor (+) to indicate padded outfit underneath.

Done!

Most of the Department Store expansion owes its existence to robust code-documentation (thanks!) and alt-copy-paste (thanks again!).

The LCS XML stuff was done by... Carlos Gustavos? Or one of the other unsung heroes who regularly do cool stuff for the game without calling too much attention to themselves. It's good stuff.

How will players get more squad members?

I am envisioning two main ways: You encounter survivors with your raiding party and talk to them, or they show up at your safehouse and ask to join.

Will a high Health stat offset lacking medical supplies, in similar fashion to how it speeds HP regen in LCS?

Probably; I see medical supplies as an accelerator on healing, rather than a mandatory thing.

Sound-tracking: might a Katana be quieter than a Shotgun blast, so does not alert zeds throughout the area?  (Could be one way to make melee viable.)

I haven't gotten to this yet, but I did a little bit with sound in the earlier graphical version of the game. The idea of shooting attracting zombies is a pretty common trope, so I think it would be cool to have that in. It'd be pretty easy to do too.

Alternate raid locations, with different item weights/risk, etc?  (Could be a good way to reward backers: I'd consider paying to let people raid my former grad-student apartments, and I had some decent gear.  Probably not good safehouse locations though.)

I am definitely thinking of a couple different ways to do this. I don't intend for the game to always be randomly picking your destination and dumping generic items everywhere.

Survival Crisis Z: graphical roguelike that could have been great.  But it ended up Conservative.
Attack of the Paper Zombies!: Open-field, limited-resource RTS: direct the marines to clear out the zombie spawn points.  They upgrade as you progress.

Bottom line: Fox's work on LCS has demonstrated to my satisfaction that he's capable of making, or at least positively developing, a squad-building roguelike/RPG that I'd find worthwhile.  Taking the general concepts of LCS and putting them into the zombie genre strikes me as hella more palatable than the closed-source game for which I wrote the FAQ.  His time & his life, thus his call, though.

I haven't played either of those games. What went wrong with Survival Crisis Z?

I think I missed some context on the second paragraph here. What is this FAQ you wrote?

Moving out and having 3 zombies in your FOV at the start = "You dead, suckah."

You can move out when no one is alive, and of course can't move back.

Warning : Severe memory leak results in endless Page File Usage growth and renders the game unplayable.

Other than getting screwed by spawning into a crowd of zombies, these should be fixed. For memory leaks, most of the game is cleanly garbage collected, but I had a couple of objects that call into a C library to allocate memory, and forgot to call into the library to release the memory again when the objects were destroyed. The only case where I could figure out that it could cause this sort of catastrophic level of memory usage was if you idled on the combat screen for a really long time, since one of these leaky objects was created and destroyed regularly on that screen, even if you aren't doing anything. There were smaller leaks that occurred every time you sent out your raiding party, but these alone couldn't have caused the issue you described.

[a1s]

Weapon durability/ammo isn't viable at the current state IMO because there's no way to recover/replenish it, and no way to expect what weapons will be available to replace depleted weapons.  Too Awesome To Use sets in, especially when one can't change weapons on-site.

Each character carries a sidearm for exactly that reason.

Until/unless there are sustainable ways to keep a squad going outside of raids, PLEASE NO item-trolling zombies in the raids.  It's not much of a gamble if you *need* that crate of MREs to keep the squad alive. 

But that's the best part- you must *need* the supplies to make the gamble, it's not like you won't be expecting it after the first time or two. The power of the trap needs to be appropriate to the loot though- trapper zombies shouldn't just spawn on a single first-aid kit.

Sound-tracking: might a Katana be quieter than a Shotgun blast, so does not alert zeds throughout the area?  (Could be one way to make melee viable.)

The other would be ammo, or even additional exp- it's a lot easier to pull a trigger then to cut a zombie down with a sword. I highly recommend the game Wasteland (heads up: it's from 198 for inspiration.

[Pesi]

New version:

Spawning on a square with loot doesn't pick it up.
Zombies with both legs blown off can still move without issues.
F-shooting with a zombie and a human within view targeted the human first. (Wut?)

[a1s]

F-shooting with a zombie and a human within view targeted the human first. (Wut?)

Also saw this. Did you also see the human before you did the zombie?

Characters. seem to prefer the 9mm to the shotgun. Is that intended?

[KA101]

OK.  SCZ required player-controlled torture to progress the plot (two separate occasions), routinely sent things sour despite the player's best efforts, and denied the player the ability to influence the plot; I wrote the FAQ on it so after that slog I'm hoping for better here.

Problem with sidearms is that they too would be subject to degradation.  Fists are ineffective IME.  If weapons must be made limited-use, best to make it comparable to LCS and leave melee weapons invulnerable.

I suspect a1s & I have different definitions of "gamble".  Gambling IMO involves deciding whether I can afford to risk what I've got for something that I don't need but would be nice to have.  I'm understanding a1s' definition to mean doing something risky, whether or not I need the beneficial result.  Forced-choices aren't gambles, IMO, and given the penalties for starvation, lack of food/water qualifies as forcing a choice.

(Now, a fresh, loaded Shotgun, on the other hand, could be acceptable as a bait item.  Cf. Alien: Resurrection.)

Looks like generic XP are out; not sure if Fox wants to retain the Juice/skillXP system or not.  Wasteland was at last check not open-source or freeware.  My day job prevents taking advantage of Underdogs, etc.  Sorry.

[a1s]

I suspect a1s & I have different definitions of "gamble".  Gambling IMO involves deciding whether I can afford to risk what I've got for something that I don't need but would be nice to have.  I'm understanding a1s' definition to mean doing something risky, whether or not I need the beneficial result.

I fail to grasp the difference. Is it that in your version you have something physical that may become lost to you?

Forced-choices aren't gambles, IMO, and given the penalties for starvation, lack of food/water qualifies as forcing a choice.

It's not a forced choice. Not usually anyway. Imagine this:
You're foraging in an abandoned building and come across what looks like a backpack full of stuff. There's an unopened can of condensed milk sticking out of it. If you get it, this one item might make your trip break even. On the other hand, you know that grabbing too-good-to-be-true item stashes is exactly what made Johnson lose his left arm to the elbow. But if you don't, you might run into zombies anyway. Also there might not even be any food here- maybe whoever was gathering it put it in that backpack. And left  . It could happen. So what do you do?
The point of gambles is that you go for high risk, high reward options. If the player already has more stuff then they need, doing such gambles in unnecessary. If they are starving all the time, it's unavoidable. But if they're only starving one night a week- they have a choice.

  Wasteland was at last check not open-source or freeware.

You're right. I keep forgetting games from over 20 years ago aren't free. And it's not even on GOG  . the 3 ideas are:
-The world has ended, ammo is now scarce. Don't use it when you don't need to and diversify your ammo use.
-It's easier to pull a trigger then it is to sword someone to death. Melee gives more EXP.
-Harder checks= more skill advancement. Like LCS.

[mainiac]

A zombie

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

came back to life

Twice!  Twice!

I love this game.   

Going forward I'd like to see either the zombies be tougher or see them start travelling in packs.  It would also be nice if there were easy locations for the early game without many zombies but these would quickly run out of loot.  Difficulty curves and whatnot.

For a non-raid location I'd suggest that there be a simple exchange that would let you exchange water for food and vice versa but not at a 1-1 rate.