Love this mod, bleeding is a lot more serious a thing than I thought it was going to be and the fema camp was cool.
Are the hordes supposed to be drawn a lot faster and a lot larger? Its how its seemed to be that way for me but I don’t know, didn’t read any of the documentation because I’m lazy.
[quote=“RipRoarinBoogerPenis, post:81, topic:156”]Love this mod, bleeding is a lot more serious a thing than I thought it was going to be and the fema camp was cool.
Are the hordes supposed to be drawn a lot faster and a lot larger? Its how its seemed to be that way for me but I don’t know, didn’t read any of the documentation because I’m lazy.[/quote]
Yes, hordes are greater in number to make up for the fact that we dont have (most of) the special zombies any more. I can adjust it downwards if folks feel its to much.
Also, the interesting thing about FEMA camps and cabins is that they are incredibly dangerous(full of zombies) BUT if you clear out a camp, it should stay cleared out except for a few wandering mobs every so often.
I kinda like the bigger hordes. Also that starting package suggestion sounds interesting. Maybe an option to choose what you did as a career during the end of char gen and it gives a package based off of that?
I would (if at all possible) like a similar system to Dwarf Fortress for your embark package, where you have a certain number of points to put towards gear. This could be melded in with the stats/skills system so that you can deeply customise how you set off.
The only downside I can see is that unless the player had sufficient knowledge of the game they might just end up picking useless things. ALthough I’m all for making RL’s difficult, I find it bad design to make them annoying/unguessable/ an encylcopedia game. Perhaps a small list of things to chose from (with all items being useful-ish), with a short description of each?
Alright, for now (because honestly I am reworking the WHOLE menu system, or at least a lot of it) I have adjusted starting gear. Because temperature is important now, I have started folks with a light jacket(It is spring after all) and an exacto knife. Also, you get a thing of soda. Other than that, you are on your own.
A few other things, I took out that pesky starting NPC as well, because he was a glitchy bastard. And I found another pesky conditional that was making spitter and boomers spawn. If you continue to see boomers or spitters etc let me know.
There should be The following;
Regular Zombie
Decayed Zombie
Fast Zombie
Athletic(Brute) Zombie
I found many Zombies Cops and Grabbers …
Sounds good reduce the zombies spawn in the next version. I think we should achieve a more even level of difficulty through the game, now the game is very complicated in the first two days, after that time becomes quite easy, this was your idea?
Continue testing
Thanks
I was driving into a city with a car, there was no zombies on the way which I came from, I saw zombies up in north and turned back to leave and there was a fucking mountain of zombies! I am pretty sure this is a issue with the game, not with the mod, but could you do something about this? it’s really annoying to have teleporting zombie hordes… 
Also another thing, I was frostbitten at 16 degrees celsius one time… which is something like, I don’t know… freezing in hell??
The (base cataclysm) spawning system works based on how much noise you’re making (for how often and how many it spawns) and the direction you’re moving when the spawn timer ticks down (in order that they’re placed in front of you, forcing you to deal with causing the noise that spawned them)
Oddzball may have altered the things and numbers that spawn, but I don’t think he changed how they spawn.
Temperature is a WIP, so there are lots of bugs with it.
I feel that if the spawning system could change direction (placing zombie hordes behind instead of in front of you) that’d make it a bit more balanced. However, I think it would be muchhhh better if it could just be completely random in placement/no real ‘hordes’. Perhaps, later down the line, zombies could sort of join groups if they ran into each other?
I’m planning on removing the spawning element entirely (for zombies at least) and just having there be hordes of persistent zombies scattered around towns. This would be really disruptive and need a good bit of balancing, so I’m thinking I want to hold off on this feature until after the next release (which has PILES of new features, but just needs some balancing). This way you can also do things like lead zombies away from something you’re interested in, then circle around and be relatively sure that the coast will be clear rather than having to worry about random spawns all the time. Additionally the number of zombies in an area would be massively increased, but should remain manageable since some of the randomness will be taken away.
For some additional background, the problem with spawning monsters behind you is that all you have to do is keep going and you’ll never see any monsters, because they won’t be following you, and you’ll just walk out of range and they’ll despawn without ever interacting with you.
Basically what you need for the spawning thing to work properly is to have the area in which monsters can spawn be much larger than your view range, this isn’t the case in cataclysm, the active area is just a tiny bit larger than the view area, so there’s no room in between for monsters to spawn in without spawing while in range, which means every time there’s a spawn the group comes straight after you.
At night things actually work right because the spawn area IS much larger than your view area, you can walk around past hordes of zombies, and as long as you spot them before they spot you, you can avoid interacting with them for the most part.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:90, topic:156”]I’m planning on removing the spawning element entirely (for zombies at least) and just having there be hordes of persistent zombies scattered around towns. This would be really disruptive and need a good bit of balancing, so I’m thinking I want to hold off on this feature until after the next release (which has PILES of new features, but just needs some balancing). This way you can also do things like lead zombies away from something you’re interested in, then circle around and be relatively sure that the coast will be clear rather than having to worry about random spawns all the time. Additionally the number of zombies in an area would be massively increased, but should remain manageable since some of the randomness will be taken away.
For some additional background, the problem with spawning monsters behind you is that all you have to do is keep going and you’ll never see any monsters, because they won’t be following you, and you’ll just walk out of range and they’ll despawn without ever interacting with you.
Basically what you need for the spawning thing to work properly is to have the area in which monsters can spawn be much larger than your view range, this isn’t the case in cataclysm, the active area is just a tiny bit larger than the view area, so there’s no room in between for monsters to spawn in without spawing while in range, which means every time there’s a spawn the group comes straight after you.
At night things actually work right because the spawn area IS much larger than your view area, you can walk around past hordes of zombies, and as long as you spot them before they spot you, you can avoid interacting with them for the most part.[/quote]
you know… i could do that right now technically, but damn, they way I cam thinking about doing it is a lot of work tbh…
I posted in suggestions about static spawns. Have zombies save per tile. If a zombie despawns in a tile, have it saved to the spawn pool for that tile. All zombies in the tile you are in and the surrounding tiles should be spawned. The number of tiles that should be force spawned should be determined by how much resources it would use up. As you make noise of course it’ll attract surrounding tiles’s zombies towards you. If your noise would reach non spawned tiles then spawn the non-spawned tiles spawn pool and pull a function to have them hear the noise. As you move away from tiles, if the zombies are idle then they should despawn. Of course you probably should have it so if you move far enough away that they despawn no matter what or else you’d get a huge number of zombies spawned in. Like if you jetted through town on a bike with a 6L engine. 
I’ve coded some and this makes sense to me. Hopefully it does to you. I tried to keep the system simple yet allowing zombie’s positions to be persistent. So this could allow things to happen like spawning a zombie that despawned outside a house spawn inside a house, but I figured it would allow for less data over head as you wouldn’t be saving exact coordinates for every zombie. Instead you’d have a per room pool. This would also allow things like making distractions. Setup a timed explosive on the ground in part of town. Have it go off in five mins. Hide in a house close to where you want to loot. The explosive goes off and pulls most of the zombies in the area towards it. Then you get to looting and high tail it out of town.
Registered to say I am in love with this version of Cataclysm. Excellent excellent work so far to all involved, both in the main project and this branch. I’ve gotten more hours of enjoyment from this game than probably any other in recent memory, no matter the platform.
With that out of the way; I ventured into a hospital since I have avoided them forever. Met some special zombies - boomers, spitters, grabbers. I was just wondering - bug or feature? I kind of liked the weirdo zombies being still in hospitals, but I notice you’ve removed most of the other gonzo content so figured I report my experience.
Off to loot.
Very interesting insight into the mechanics Kevin, I had no idea how it actually worked so great to know a bit more about it!
Static spawns do sound like a huge improvement, and it’d make a lot more sense to the player/gameplay and allow for more tactical gameplay. However I can imagine the balancing issues would be huge. For one, you could just get a car and mow them all down which would leave you with a pretty safe place to loot/live. Infact, no matter how many zombies there were, you could probably just kill them all off if you found a good place to kill them/weapons/whatever.
Miloch’s example sounds good (and sort of gets round that problem), but I do quite like the idea of having them truly ‘static’ with a few roving hordes and possibly the odd spawn to make sure it never gets too empty.
[quote=“whw4, post:93, topic:156”]Registered to say I am in love with this version of Cataclysm. Excellent excellent work so far to all involved, both in the main project and this branch. I’ve gotten more hours of enjoyment from this game than probably any other in recent memory, no matter the platform.
With that out of the way; I ventured into a hospital since I have avoided them forever. Met some special zombies - boomers, spitters, grabbers. I was just wondering - bug or feature? I kind of liked the weirdo zombies being still in hospitals, but I notice you’ve removed most of the other gonzo content so figured I report my experience.
Off to loot.[/quote]
I found that little spawn piece and fixed it. Hospitals will be full of corpses and regular zombies now.
But you wont see the fix till the next release.
I am actually holding off on the next release because one of the coders, BurnZeZ has added an exciting feature and I want to make sure it is scalable so some of our folks on not so good computers are still able to play.
That feature is extended view windows.
Right now your view window is 12 tiles square, and feels very limited. BurnZeZ, has essentially given us the options to make that render window bigger. So more view area for you! Which is awesome. You can almost double the size of the window on a 1080P monitor. The text will be smaller but you can see more.
There are still a few issues with it though, as well as if you don’t have a 1080p monitor the window would be to big to fit on your screen, so that’s a small problem.
I got the feature working on Windows machines, but it is a little more complex there because we cant resize our window on the fly.
There are also some nice adjustments to the temp mod by shoes I am waiting on finalization, so it isn’t as harsh. New items, and all kinds of new features.
But all of this will have to wait just a bit before release so everyone has an enjoyable experience.
Maybe this weekend, but no promises.
As to static spawns. I can do it. FEMA camps have static spawns already, its just a matter of implementing it on a global scale.
Awesome. Just want to say good work! Are many of your features going to be ported back to the main build?
@Miloch, I know Kevin has talked about porting a lot of features over and I’m sure more and more will become implemented in the main branch over time - CZS seems to be a big hit!
Thanks for all your continued work Oddzball, it’s great to see this continually moving forward.
No problem.
On a sad note, I did happen to lose a weeks worth of coding.
I had a bug I just couldn’t fix so I scraped what I was working on in order to go back to a more stable build.
Lucky for me though most of the stuff now that I know exactly what I want to do will be easier to integrate.
I figured I would hold of on a new build until after DDA release their next build, as its become slightly time consuming to merge code with them some of the time.
Best of luck to you Oddballz.
Right now your view window is 12 tiles square, and feels very limited. BurnZeZ, has essentially given us the options to make that render window bigger. So more view area for you! Which is awesome. You can almost double the size of the window on a 1080P monitor. The text will be smaller but you can see more.
One cannot simply redefine SEEX and SEEY constants