Currently I believe Kevin said that z-levels only go up 10 levels.
If you have a hot air balloon thats 3 z-levels tall, it could only go up a few more.
Hardly seems worth it, the overmap sight radius boost you’d get from going up z-levels would be awesome if you could go up say… 50 z-levels and drift with the wind to get to a new area.
I think I recall a conversation with Kevin where he said extending the z-level limit was a bit gnarly but do-able…
Well i personally dont see a reason why one vehicle or plane should be sevearl z levels, seems to just be a hassle, tho it would be very nice to have a drinving fort or 2 storage plane, can the engine handle it?
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The engine can’t handle it currently, because:
- vehicle local positions are stored as points of x,y instead of tripoints of x,y,z
- the vehicle interaction menu doesn’t know how to display and transition between a vehicle’s 0 z-level and a vehicle’s +1 z-level
- it’s possible that there would be weird map interactions when displacing something that it on 2 different z-levels; it should just work but obviously it hasn’t been tested
The first issue is relatively straightforward to fix: change the points to tripoints throughout the vehicle code, add some logic to calculate part neighbors on the Z axis.
The second issue is a UI problem. After you know how the display should look and the buttons should be pressed, hooking them together should be trivial.
The third issue requires a fair bit of bugtesting.
I’m not saying this is a good first issue, but multi z-level vehicles requires less knowledge than the vehicle speed overhaul or amphibious vehicles did, though probably more playtesting. I could do it or help an intermediate CDDA programmer do it, but I’m busy doing other things.
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Mlang I was thinking, some of you guys who do a majority of modding are doing so according to your free time and choose:
Would you guys put in, and implant certain feature, in a given amount of time, all of this given content, if there was payment?
What if we as a community came to an agreement on a number of goals, done within a certain time frame, for a set amount of money, funded through “go fund me”
If the money would not be raised successfully, all money would be returned, there could also be extra prizes for giving extra, like special colours or tags in this discourse, or having your name in the credits, etc.
I think a lot of people would be willing to pay for seeing a push for common desired goals, if all active members gave something like 15-25 dollars each, we could accumulate a bit.
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I’m doing this as a hobby, which in part means I choose what to develop and when.
If you want me to do this semi-professionally so that you can tell me what to develop and when, you can’t afford my rates. Even a quick and easy feature takes 4+ hours, which burns through 30 $15 donations. Something like vehicle z-levels is 30+ hours of work.
Well if your rates i 112.5 $ per hour, and we would want a team of modders, it would go complety over the price we could collect as a community
But anyway thanks for all the great contributions you bring free of charge 
This is why community funding of the project has never been brought up as a serious option, you can’t afford us.
What you CAN do is visit https://www.bountysource.com/teams/cataclysm-dda/issues?tracker_ids=146201 and post bounties for specific issues. Keeping in mind I’m not going to merge something just because it has a bounty, so make sure it’s something that fits in the game before backing it.
Back on topic, if vehicles move outside the current reality bubble, it would be not at all hard to just switch the display over to the 'm’ap menu for large-scale navigation.
Clouds and rendering:
Maybe add it so that if your a set number of levels above the ground, it won’t render in the engine, would make flying at high speeds at high height a smoother experience.
at lower levels 1-3 the ground would render as normal, which could also allow for “dropping” things from the plane, like grenades and bombs.
And at the highest levels the grund tiles would be only visable as either “sky” or “clouded sky”, maybe even add more cloud times for differnct weather, so there would also be “thunder_clouds”, “dark_clouds”, “rain_clouds”, “hurricane”
Dark coulds would limit your overmap seeing,
Thunder clouds would carry the risk of getting hit by thunder, as eletric shocks would spawn at random inside these “thunder_clouds” tiles, probably that could be just a stronger and bigger version of the shocker brutes, and recolored
Rain clouds, hmmm they would turn your character wet unless the plane got a roof and walls? Maybe make steering harder?
Hurricane zones would be a death sentence unless you have a really high mass and jet thrust plan. Otherwise, they would ground your plane, or do damage to its outsides
Yeah, for aircraft you’d want the reality bubble to end a few z-levels below you, so you’d generate an overmap as you fly along, but you wouldn’t load or generate all the contents until you started to come down.
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6 posts were split to a new topic: Random meme derail
Also,about Z levels,it’s possible to attack something in another z-level to make stuff like A-10 wartogs and make weaponazied air vehicles “vianle”
Example: Survivor is piloting a A-10 WARTOG at Z-level 15 (about 15 stories in the air) and shoots the main gun on a zombie brute on Z-level 0 and turns the hulk into red mist.
Is this possible ?
I think you can snipe from rooftops with experimental Z-level vision turned on but I’m not 100% sure of that.
If so, it’d just be more of the same to let people strafe from aircraft.
Though the kind of aircraft a survivor is going to able to realistically maintain is much closer to a Sopwith Camel than an A-10. Even a Cessna 172 is pushing the limits of plausibility.
The survivor can make basically the German WW2 land cruiser prototype,an A-10 is just another car for most Cataclysm survivors ,the difference is that it flies and it’s gun turns things into pink mist but I’m my opinion its more about options,like
I can be reasonable and kill this zombies with melee or I can punch the blob back to the dimension he came with an GAU AVENGER 30MM chain gun
would not work making a vehicle frame that can only be constructed on an “empty space” tile so it can move like a normal vehicle and if you want to stop and land of the below z-level you use an special frame or item that work as a stair (without all the hassle of the repeated construcion of the normal stairs)?