Houses need to know that there is an apocalypse out there

[StopSignal]

So, you see the Post Apocalypse houses. They have seen terrifying things, zombies, cars fleeing, people being chased down a nd devoured, and they are just looking. They do not suffer. Their windows are not broken down by hungry zombies. Their doors clearly weren’t even scratched by that other zombie. The zombies did not even tried to enter, as it seems that all they windows are clean and their doors closed shut. They don’t have blood splatters in their walls. They don’t have the feel that a HUGE thing happened outside. They don’t even have some curtains closed somewhere. It does not feel like something happened. What you think of this?

[EkarusRyndren]

There’s some validity to it but I’ve noticed a lot of furniture in front of doors, which implies someone tried to survive… …still the broken windows, blood, etc would be a nice touch.

[FunsizeNinja123]

I always thought that the furniture spawning on the inside of doors was just a bad generation thing.

[Hyena_Grin]

It’s almost certainly bad generation.

I’d love to see better placement of furniture in houses, so it’s not blocking things. I would also think it’d be interesting if rooms did have bulks of its furniture jammed up against the door, just, y’know, more obviously on purpose.

I would definitely like to see more evidence of panic and chaos and violence. Broken windows, doors left open or smashed, cars embedded in the walls of buildings, fences broken, etc. And as many suggestion threads have said; more bodies, blood, and signs of struggle.

[StopSignal]

Well, not bodies, since they should have been revived. Rotten human meat would work IMO.

[Hyena_Grin]

You find bodies all over the place. Scientists, drug dealers, military. Bodies in hospitals and labs. Why not homes and shops? I’d love to see a bunch of dead bodies outside the mall where people stampeded out during the cataclysm and trampled each other.

I admit I’m not a Cata lore buff and I don’t know EXACTLY what is supposed to happen, but if the game is diverging from the lore then something’s gotta give. I dunno if there’s an explanation in place for the existing bodies, but when I think of a zombie apocalypse I think of plenty of bodies and gore being scattered around. I assume that the brains of the corpses got damaged somehow? I dunno.

Topic for another thread, though.

[StopSignal]

I WANT GOAR.

No, really, even if this is only decoration-wise (But in fact is not, imagine that maybe, some of the closed curtains may save your life or some of the smashed doors make you be seen and killed by zeds) i’d REALLY like to see it implemented. And with this comes more realistic houses, with more rooms and with NORMAL bathrooms and bedrooms, not huge ones. And trash cans outside. And mailboxes. And garages. And trees in front of the thing. And little bushes in front of the windows as deco. IDK.

[Luissen]

+1 to smashed doors, windows, bloody spots and random gore. maybe even let zombies spawn inside

[Leper]

+1 to smashed doors, windows, bloody spots and random gore. maybe even let zombies spawn inside

IIRC zombies may already spawn inside.

[Belteshazzar]

It would be interesting if there were more bodies scattered about, but many would get up once you got near and aggravated them.

Places that were boarded up, obvious sites of unsung last stands, or random outbursts violence would be pretty good too. Some may even come pre burned-out or have vehicles embedded in them.

I imagine that some survivors would actually hole up in and fortify their own lairs to some degree (rather than roaming around aimlessly murdering squirrels with their shoes) perhaps having even succumbed to paranoia or refusing to let you in without good reason.

[Leper]

It would be interesting if there were more bodies scattered about, but many would get up once you got near and aggravated them.

Hey, that seems like a neat idea. If anyone has played Half-Life 2 or any of the subsequent chapters the headcrab zombies do a similar thing, and IMO it would work quite well in Cataclysm.

Lorewise the goo could simply be conserving energy until prey stumbles across it. Ambush predators would be awesome too.

[deadmerits]

Since it goes along the same lines as adding the trashcans and mailboxes and the like… overgrown lawns. After a week, not noticeable, but make it a year and the yards should be overgrown. Waist high grass fields and then guess what… ticks. Anyways the overgrown lawns was first suggested by TDW (IIRC) so not an original thought, but goes along the same immersion fluff line as the other “household” suggestions on this thread.

[Zireael]

I’m all for these little details.

[StopSignal]

The thing is that i have seen a lot of this threads suggesting things like these, but they are never considerated by the coders, and it is okay, because it is just deco for now and more lines of code. But in the future, add it, please.

[i2amroy]

I always thought that the furniture spawning on the inside of doors was just a bad generation thing.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

[kevin.granade]

I want to do pretty much everything suggested in this thread, it’s just potentially a heck of a lot of work.

[dotASC]

Just out of curiosity, what are some of the general issues with it?

As a non-developer, I can see how you’d run into problems having corpses and debris spawn in unrealistic places. On that aspect, I’d be willing to suspend disbelief to just consider it a wonky imagination feeding scenario ala “wow, their’s a pulped corpse inside of this stove! gruesome!” I imagine there’s quite a bit more to it than that from a coder’s perspective.

As far as broken windows etc, maybe windows (or whole house depending on the current technique) can generate with a normal vs ransacked flag. Of course ransacked would be rarer, but in those cases just throw some broken windows, furniture, bodies, etc in the generation and it’d be a pleasant upgrade from the current vanilla houses.

Sorry to beat a dead horse, just genuinely curious about this. It’s mentioned in a lot of threads, but this particular thread seemed to have good enough traction to ask about it here.

Thanks!

[Hyena_Grin]

Hmmm. That ‘ransacked’ comment kinda made me think.

I am not completely sure how houses are generated. But would it be possible to randomly assign a ‘ransacked’ or whatever tag to a room upon generation, so that its contents are strewn about, windows and doors might be broken or damaged, and bodies might be present? And then for rooms that are not ransacked, have intact doors/windows and have most of the items spawn in appropriate places, like in cupboards, on bookshelves, and in dressers.

It’d be nice to have a clear visual distinction between rooms where ‘things have obviously happened’ and rooms that have yet to be touched by the disaster.

[kevin.granade]

This isn’t actually that hard to do in principle, the problem is that the existing house generation code is nearly unreadable for several reasons, to the point where I think the easiest way to move forward is to implement one or more new house generation methods and phase out the current code in favor of the new code.

The problem is, as gnarly and bug-riddled as the current code is, it has a decent number of features, so replacing it with a simple generator is a hard sell, because then we’d be losing features. That and the inherent PITA-ness of mapgen in general conspires to make people not want to work on it.

[Aluminumfoil]

What if you targeted the elements themselves (wall, floor, door, window, etc) and assigned them a probability of replacing themselves with a “damaged” and/or “gore” version of themselves on generation? Depending on the way the map is generated, you might even be able to have a square that turns up “damaged” or “gored” trigger a script that goes the adjacent squares and re-attempts to “damage” or “gore” them at a higher probability, to create randomized contiguous regions of damage and gore. Randomized permutations on this script could allow more complex gore/damage generation models: streaks, blobs, splatter/shrapnel…