Basic stance system (offshoot of the stealth thread)

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Reading through the stealth thread reminded me of an idea I had a while back. Stances. Right now just 3.

Standing: Plays just like in current game. Allows running.

Crouched: Reduced zombie sight range, Allows hiding behind objects that can normally be seen over (quarterpanels, dumpsters, bushes, small trees, furniture etc.) Increases accuracy of ranged snapfire (bow and gun only). Cuts movement and attack speed in half. Disables running.

Prone: Significant reduction to zombie sight range, allows crawling past uncovered windows without being seen, lets you hide behind “large” dropped objects (think zombie corpses), massive movement speed reduction, melee practically impossible, Large dispersion decrease for guns only. No running obviously.

The time it takes to move between stances would be affected by either encumbrance or the amount of weight that you are carrying.

This would make Day Raiding more fun and tactical while enriching ranged combat with something that people have wanted for a while; Sniping.

Thoughts?

2

Attaching modifiers to the player’s stats is easy and could be hacked in simply as a Combat Style.

Changing NPC stats like sight range on the fly is more difficult, although this might be hacked in by setting the light level around the player.

Changing line of sight blockers on the fly is probably impossible without major code changes.

3

This is very much something I want to add.

I think the best way to handle reduction to sight range is to to modify spotting distance based on how large the target is, and then allow crouching and crawling to adjust effective size for the purposes of spotting (and ranged attacks). This also means crawling zombies will start working like they’re supposed to, creeping up on you a bit and being hard to shoot.

As far as difficulty, Aluminumfoil covered it, the stat changes are easy, the LOS changes are hard.

Specifically, changing the LoS stuff (hiding behind terrain or furniture) requires labelling terrain and furniture with some kind of height indication, and adjusting the LoS code to take it into account. This isn’t TOO hard, but it does require some surgery in some very tricky areas of the code.

4

Rather than “stances”, it should be “movement modes” - you can’t run while prone, so one menu covering them all would be fine.

5

I don’t think it should require a menu. I would set it up so pressing apostrophe stages you down towards prone, while pressing quote (shifted apostrophe) stages you up towards running.

6

When I was doing the sneaking I commented in that thread, I made a crouching branch too. It increases steadiness when aiming, doesn’t let you move, and if I whenever I feel like it, I would make it so it takes one to three turns to toggle it to balance things out.