(Copied from the main forum)
Those of you who are watching the commit log will notice that has resumed; I will be holding it at ~1 commit/day while my work schedule is out of whack. [The server migration motivating 1 commit/week has finished.] Weapon juggling is the immediate target.
Zombie detectors, and noise, are up for a combined overhaul. (I'm trying to find a way to implement police sweeping for z that doesn't cost 39MB of savefile and should "work as designed") What I inherited from alpha 9:
- Very loud noises have a game range of 15 i.e. walking distance half an hour. The only ones you're guaranteed to hear when awake are explosions. The others are not reliably heard as a "message spam prevention" measure. Very loud noises are oblivious to walls.
- Zombie detectors have a detection range of 6 (walking distance 12 minutes). The others have whole-district detection capability. I've already nominated police radios for a major overhaul (not yet completed). Cell phones and blackops trackers have not been scheduled for a major overhaul (yet).
- Neither livings, nor zombies, make significant noise when moving.
From a game logic point of view, the second point requires the third. Otherwise, z detectors approach completely useless. The third point enables the following ambush:
z..
#.#
@..
In order to enter the choke point safely, @ must use a running free move NE to enter the choke point.
In terms of sweeping the district, it would be
very convenient if z were noisy movers. The alternative is playing games with the item memory cache recency times (directing a policeman on "kill orders" to check "sufficiently old locations" would have the desired effect), or a similar boolean-logic taint system, both of which don't look like they would cope well with the last one or two threat on the map. (The 39MB reject would have coped well with that.)