I feel like the cell phone could be used as a better way of communication. Perhaps if you give a cell phone to your companions you can chat with them. Or maybe you could use it to contact special phone numbers, such as 911, or maybe you could upgrade it with a transistor so you could find people in your area.
Apps would be neat as well, such as a ‘Pong’ Game, to increase your morale, or a GPS app to find hospitals or police offices around you.
So what do you think?
I’m sure by the time most zombies appeared, all 911 operators are dead.
Until NPCs are smarter, why would you ever want to find NPCs…
[quote=“supergameman, post:1, topic:6763”]Apps would be neat as well, such as a ‘Pong’ Game, to increase your morale, or a GPS app to find hospitals or police offices around you.
So what do you think?[/quote]
We have a handheld game player in game, so there’s that. A GPS wouldn’t work without satellites… But I’m sure we had a conversation about satellites and how they would/wouldn’t work…
Isn’t 911 semi automated already? Anyhow a special interaction calling 911 ingame should be a decent the devs think of everything moment. Not that anything has to actually happen after all the menu navigation.
AFAIK Gps satellites will remain functional up to 180 days after receiving the last instruction from their command centers (assuming that the process is not fully automated by 2040) and I think mid earth orbits take centuries to decay, though the system would become more inaccurate with time.
Satphones use satellites in geosynchronous orbit which, unless they collide with something, can remain in orbit for thousands of years/forever though they would slightly change their positions relative to earth surface without upkeep. However I don’t think that affects the satellite phone networks considerably
[quote=“John Candlebury, post:3, topic:6763”]Isn’t 911 semi automated already? Anyhow a special interaction calling 911 ingame should be a decent the devs think of everything moment. Not that anything has to actually happen after all the menu navigation.
AFAIK Gps satellites will remain functional up to 180 days after receiving the last instruction from their command centers (assuming that the process is not fully automated by 2040) and I think mid earth orbits take centuries to decay, though the system would become more inaccurate with time.
Satphones use satellites in geosynchronous orbit which, unless they collide with something, can remain in orbit for thousands of years/forever though they would slightly change their positions relative to earth surface without upkeep. However I don’t think that affects the satellite phone networks considerably[/quote]
Yeah, calling an emergency number in-game would likely be auto-routed to a call center, which might well be abandoned…or not. Total automation is unlikely, as trained human operators are generally better than a computer at flexing in emergencies–especially since DDA!computing hasn’t developed known-sentient/reliable AI*. Any faction looking to recruit/obtain/exploit survivors could do worse than having someone monitoring the emergency bands.
Acidia’s got the feds as a faction, so they’d be able to keep the networks alive.
GPS is US military, FWIW, and IIRC they like to obfuscate it when things go sour. Acidia’s fed-faction would be able to bypass that (Lab/military terminals probably could too), but civilian models would be accurate to the quarter-mile or so, rather than the meter.
*Closest is the Melchior network seen in labs, and IIRC that’s a personality program, not sentient–and not likely to awaken either.
Functional cell phones would be a great addition IMO, as would the ability to order an NPC to guard an area and to designate a place you want them to meet you at. This could lead the way to ordering NPCs to auto-loot an area, or farm or set up base defenses. It’d be nice not to have to constantly go out and reset all my bear traps by hand myself.