Actual snipers/Ghillie suits

I suppose a .22 rifle is good for killing wolves and rats and cougars who don’t have as much health as zombies. And hunting rabbits and squirrels since other guns (and crossbows) tend to gib their corpses into non-existence. So it’s not a bad wilderness weapon. Though god help you if you run into a bear and all you have is that peashooter.

But yeah, there’s usually so much .22 ammo around that you’re better off just extracting the gunpowder.

.22 LR is great to kill zombies too, once your skill is high enough. My trusty Marlin39A would have a thousand notch in his stock if I kept track of such things.

Railgun can be found in bunkers and labs, need UPS and slugs (railgun ammo) in order to fire, silent, which makes it quite powerfull weapon. With combination of rail, plasma, FTK/V-29 you become quite a death machine, but only if you have decent skill in rifles and firearms (~ 3-4 is enough to kill nearly every thingle sonn pf a ***** in sight IF you can supply yourself with THAT amount of ammo, besides fusion charges are quite light), but personally I prefer remington 700.
.22 is perfect for increasing your skill in firearms/pistols/rifles, so I use Marlin and Mosquito for target practice, for hunting rabbits and squirrels better use BB gun.

Maybe something like this?

It’s done, just making sure everything works as it should and it will be in my next Cataclysm: MGS release. It activates automatically with Remington 700, Browning BLR, or if your rifle has sniper conversion. I also plan to make somewhat bigger scope for LAW and RPG-7 rocket launchers. However this is just a graphics, the best part about it you’ll have to try out.

I call it “MOVING TARGETS”. As you move your aim everything else moves too, not just with snipers but any firearm. It makes the whole game much more interesting and tactical, harder too. You can’t just shoot left and right like a cowboy any more, now it takes some planning and thinking to even acquire a target. It also makes recoil and use of burst fire matter more.

There is one additional little feature that goes along with this whole new mechanics, and if you can use it wisely you will see it can overcome most of these new difficulties and balance things out in your favour, but still don’t expect you will be able to go down the street and shoot hundreds of zombies as before. You will get swarmed much quicker, especially with zombies coming from different angles. Ayhow, the new sub-feature is “kneeling shot”. Instead of to move your aim press ‘.’ (pause) to concentrate, take a deep breath and take the kneeling shot, which will double your precision.

Consider this situation for example:

The zombie wants to eat your brains and is moving towards you, what do you do? If you move your aim up to where the zombie currently is he will probably move where your aim currently is, and you will only waste a move while zombie will get closer to your delicious brain. Bad choice. But if you press ‘.’ (pause) you will not only be ready to perform more accurate shot, but the zombie will most likely walk right in front of your aim. Just like in real life, you have to think and plan in advance, you have to account for target motion, predict and compensate accordingly. Naturally then you will see fast targets are much harder to shot now, especially if they stumble a lot or their movement is rather chaotic, like wolfs, rabbits, fast zombies and such.

How does that sound?

P.S.
My thanks to Slax for pointing out this thread and to everyone involved for inspiring me to make what is now my favourite mod in my super-amazing collection of marvellously wonderful mods know as “Cataclysm: MGS”. Meow!

Good to see my idea coming to some use. Looks promising, LazyCat.

You can already clear towns with vanilla bows.

you can clear towns with a piece of wood if you had the time and drugs._.

Only slightly longer than using a gun. You don’t have to make detours to gun shops and spend time finding turrets for ammo. You can handle crowds of zombies in broad daylight with good enough archery skill.

Hello, my name is wolf spider, and I love you

:slight_smile:

Is anyone interested to try sniper & moving targets mod before the release of my next build? To help me test it, see if there is something to balance and tweak if necessary.

You know it, Lazy. Send me a PM.

Ok, I’ll upload it in several hours and post the link here. Unfortunately I’m having some problems with the new buildings I imported from the main branch (church/cathedral, fast food/coffee restaurant and doctor/cubicle office), so I’m throwing that out for this “sniper testing” build. But once I resolve that and get your feedback on “moving targets” and sniper mods I’ll release “official” next build with everything, plus some more (surprise).

Well, assuming that you’ve gotten it to compile, it may be an issue with overrunning the allotted space for oter_id (terrain IDs). The overmap system was poorly designed, way back when, so there’s a cap of (256 - 32) terrain IDs - keeping in mind that each different orientation of a building (north, south, east, west) is a separate ID. In the mainline version, we changed how overmaps are saved, in order to allow lots of added buildings.

Unfortunately, it’s several bad design decisions piled on top of each other, and we’ve only fixed one out of at least two design flaws.

Here it is. Also, try driving a car.

DOWNLOAD (03. May): MGSmod rev.30b

  • TESTING: “moving targets” and sniping mod

Well, assuming that you’ve gotten it to compile, it may be an issue with overrunning the allotted space for oter_id (terrain IDs). The overmap system was poorly designed, way back when, so there’s a cap of (256 - 32) terrain IDs - keeping in mind that each different orientation of a building (north, south, east, west) is a separate ID. In the mainline version, we changed how overmaps are saved, in order to allow lots of added buildings.

Unfortunately, it’s several bad design decisions piled on top of each other, and we’ve only fixed one out of at least two design flaws.[/quote]

Ok, thanks. Everything seems to work fine two out of three times when the new overmap is created. When it doesn’t work z-levels gets screwed and I get a house basement instead of shelter basement or no way down at all. It definitively smells like the problem has something to do with enumeration of those overmap tiles. Anyway, where/how is that 255 limit set?

It’s in overmap::save and overmap::open, plus a debugmsg call in the overmap constructor (IIRC). Check out commits f889246 and b1b0d50, they’re the two relevant ones.

It’s a silly and artificial limit, but it did allow for hacky optimization that ended up masking inefficiencies elsewhere in the code.

[quote=“Soron, post:56, topic:1020”]It’s in overmap::save and overmap::open, plus a debugmsg call in the overmap constructor (IIRC). Check out commits f889246 and b1b0d50, they’re the two relevant ones.

It’s a silly and artificial limit, but it did allow for hacky optimization that ended up masking inefficiencies elsewhere in the code.[/quote]

That seems is just for loading and saving the map, do you know if it has any impact when generating new map? Are there actually more than 255 overmap tiles?

Who even needs a piece of wood. If you find a wreck or any large pile of debris you can just run circles around it while zombies of all types slash themselves to pieces in the wreckage. I did this with a character, it felt like cheating.

Zombie games aren’t supposed to be hard all the time, they’re supposed to be hard when you let your guard down, make a serious mistake, or just plain do something stupid. So I’m okay with it being possible to clear a town with a bow or a piece of wood. If you’re smart and prepared, it’s not even that hard. And yet I still die from time to time. Because I let my guard down, made a serious mistake, or just plain did something stupid.

[quote=“LazyCat, post:57, topic:1020”][quote=“Soron, post:56, topic:1020”]It’s in overmap::save and overmap::open, plus a debugmsg call in the overmap constructor (IIRC). Check out commits f889246 and b1b0d50, they’re the two relevant ones.

It’s a silly and artificial limit, but it did allow for hacky optimization that ended up masking inefficiencies elsewhere in the code.[/quote]

That seems is just for loading and saving the map, do you know if it has any impact when generating new map? Are there actually more than 255 overmap tiles?[/quote]

I know that in mainline, we’ve gone over the 256-32 limit (it’s NOT 255, it’s 256-32). You’ll need to check how many entries are in the oter_id enum (in omdata.h) to see if that’s true in your build, as well. Part of the reason there are so many overmap terrain types is because each rotated version of a building gets a different oter_id, which leads to a lot of bloat.

The only issue we were encountering was with saving and loading, but saving and loading happens multiple times during a single play session (due to the way the game is coded). Dunno if it’s what was causing your issues, but I do know that you need to change how overmaps are saved and loaded if you exceed 256-32 entries in the oter_id enum.

[quote=“Soron, post:59, topic:1020”]I know that in mainline, we’ve gone over the 256-32 limit (it’s NOT 255, it’s 256-32). You’ll need to check how many entries are in the oter_id enum (in omdata.h) to see if that’s true in your build, as well. Part of the reason there are so many overmap terrain types is because each rotated version of a building gets a different oter_id, which leads to a lot of bloat.

The only issue we were encountering was with saving and loading, but saving and loading happens multiple times during a single play session (due to the way the game is coded). Dunno if it’s what was causing your issues, but I do know that you need to change how overmaps are saved and loaded if you exceed 256-32 entries in the oter_id enum.[/quote]

Ok, thanks.