Changes to scent, zombies, zombie dogs, noise, and hiding in town

[infectedmochi]

Here’s hoping this change will bring a much needed atmosphere for the game, the atmosphere of playing hide and seek with zombies and trying to figure out whether they actually have picked up your scent and heading toward your position.

Imagine the tension!

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Pst, make dogs bark when they find you? Maybe shriekers as well?

[kevin.granade]

Yea that’s the plan, shriekers do it already, and REALLY loud. oof, running into a shrieker at night in a town, that’d be a BAD time. Dogs could howl when they start tracking you… heh heh.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Will this be in a new experimental or are you guys going to be tweaking it before merging it?

[i2amroy]

Will this be in a new experimental or are you guys going to be tweaking it before merging it?

It’ll most likely follow the exact same progression as any other large PR; first an enterprising coder makes it and places it into a [WIP] pull request so it can begin being tested/reviewed while being worked on. Then eventually it will be deemed “ready” and merged into the mainline experimental builds just like anything else.

[vultures]

Please consider the upper treshold for Hardcore mode, but it should however be a kick in the nuts if you intentionally fail to sneak like you obviously should.

[kevin.granade]

I want to add the hesitation feature and probably the slower diffusion change, then people can throw rocks at it and tell me what a terrible person I am (not really, you can’t throw rocks on the internet). Other stuff we’ve brought up can probably wait for another PR, expecially since we’re trying to hammer out a bunch of bugs in the next week or so to make a haloween release. There IS an automatically built linux/SDL image at http://ci.narc.ro/job/Cataclysm-PullRequests/1971/artifact/cataclysmdda-0.8.tar.gz if you want to try out the current state of it.

Please consider the upper treshold for Hardcore mode, but it should however be a kick in the nuts if you intentionally fail to sneak like you obviously should.

I’m not sure I understand, do you mean if you’re not being sneaky you should attract more attention? Once there’s a sneaky gait you can use to actually sneak, I think running at the current speed will cause more noise, so there’ll be that.

[Zireael]

I think something that the game isn't taking into account is that you can't really tell where a scent is going to be stronger. A dog can't 'see' smells ten feet away from it. It has to go to that spot and smell it to see if it's stronger. That's why you see dogs sniffing back and forth, backtracking, checking different spots. They are trying to find where the scent is strongest. To do that they need to physically be in that location.

The only information a zombie or any other smelling creature should have is ‘what does the tile I am on right now smell like.’

Then simply have the zombie move until the scent is weaker (and then stop and move somewhere else) or stronger. They keep moving, avoiding weaker smells while seeking stronger smells. If the code can be put together to give the zombies a search pattern, then this should result in a faaairly realistic search behavior that doesn’t lead them directly to the player.

Basically, the zombie will remain in the strongest scent area that it can. It will not move to a weaker scent area unless it has exhausted all tiles it can reach without moving to a lower scent area. The zombie would also have the tendency to follow the path that is working the best for them. So if you run in a straight line, the zombie will probably not have too much difficulty following in a straight line behind you. but if you do large zigzagging maneuvers then it might take them significantly longer as each ‘turn’ would mess up their search pattern.

This could result in some interesting behavior where, due to decay, a zombie outside a house the player is not in, might end up breaking down the door to the house because he has already searched everywhere else and the door is the only tile left to check before he moves on.

This could well get very difficult. I have very, very minimal coding skill and I suspect that efficient, reliable search patterns can be quite complicated. But I thought I’d throw it out there nonetheless.

This sounds very similar to A* pathfinding, you know.

[youtoo]

if we are going to make sound more important, we could add ‘flatulents’ as a negative trait and ‘beans’ as a food that can make you rather noisy?

[infectedmochi]

if we are going to make sound more important, we could add ‘flatulents’ as a negative trait and ‘beans’ as a food that can make you rather noisy?

Now the apocalypse is complete!

On a more serious note: There are a ton of things which can make noise and give your position away (footstep!), a flatulent is the probably last thing I’d worry about in a zombie apocalypse.

[kevin.granade]

So I accidentally merged my WIP branch, so the sensitivity thresholds are in the latest experimental. Just FYI.

[i2amroy]

So I accidentally merged my WIP branch, so the sensitivity thresholds are in the latest experimental. Just FYI.

Kevin, there’s a reason we use WIP tags you know! (It’s obviously so some other dev doesn’t merge our works in progress :P).

[GlyphGryph]

On the hand, it both works and adds to the game experience as far as I can tell, so we’ll call it a no-harm no-foul this time.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

So I accidentally merged my WIP branch, so the sensitivity thresholds are in the latest experimental. Just FYI.

And there was much rejoicing.
I am ok with this.

[FunsizeNinja123]

Was gonna laugh if Kevin broke the game.

Nothing against you guys, but it would be funneh

[system]

Just a reminder, but weren’t you going to implement… dormant zombies?

[kevin.granade]

[quote=“FunsizeNinja123, post:77, topic:3591”]Was gonna laugh if Kevin broke the game.

Nothing against you guys, but it would be funneh :D[/quote]
Heh, heh, yea, good thing that’s NEVER happened <_<’

[system]

Kevin
Breaking the game
Well, then we’d have no “granade” item.

[vultures]

The Granade of the Broken Kevin or the Ballad of the Broken Granade, what’s the difference.

[Iosyn]

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:1, topic:3591”]So, the current scent mechanics are … weird. And nonintuitive. And don’t, imo, make for particularly fun gameplay.

Your character sort of has this intense bubble of scent around him at all times, and it both builds and fades incredibly quickly. It also doesn’t even fill the viewable area at the lowest level.

So I think: Scent needs to build more slowly on neighboring squares, diffusing from high level squares. Scent needs to last longer, with high level squares the player has actually passed through lasting a day or more. Eventually, if a player spend several days in an area, scent should permeate it and any spawning monster with a keen sense of smell should know the player is there.

I also think zombies should no longer have such a good sense of smell. In fact, I’d favour removing it for detecting normal player smell completely. Zombie dogs however, would keep their keen sense of smell, and follow scent trails.

Since zombie dogs can’t (or shouldn’t be able to) knock down doors or otherwise overcome barriers, if the path for following a scent trail leads through one, they should start howling and otherwise making noise, attracting a mass of zombies capable of pushing through (but also warning the player that their hidey place has been compromised)

What do people think?[/quote]

Yeah, rotting corpses that can smell you over their own decomposing flesh is a bit immersion breaking. Zombie dogs howling does seem like a good idea, maybe nerf their speed/attack or HP or something, but have them howl repeatedly when on the hunt to draw a crowd to ya.