Regarding the removal of the reviving zombies option

Game Talk The Bunker
1

First off, im posting this in the bunker because it is impossible to post polls in the drawing board for some strange reason.

In the most recent build, the option for reviving zombies was removed, something that apparently earned strong disapproval from a part of the community. For ease and for convenience, i am posting this thread here so that the main developers can judge if perhaps it will be better to re-add them.

I am myself in favor of re adding the option because of roleplay reasons and because pulping or butchering zombies is tiresome with increased spawns.

1 Like
2

“Hurr durr we should remove features in a game even though 0% of the actual community wants us to! Hurr durr”

-Kevin Granade

3

Personally, there’s one thing about this I’m not sure about: If you butcher a corpse, can that corpse still rise again?
In my mind, butchering zombie corpses meant making sure that the head was gone, therefore it’ll stay dead. If that’s the case, I don’t really need the option but I can see why some would want it. That said, there are MANY things that could be made into options…and we might end up with 200 tabs and pages of options :slight_smile:

4

The thing is, butchering thousands of corpses is NOT fun. Some people want the option to turn it off, maybe for immersion.

Either way, it doesn’t affect the vanilla players at all, and makes other people want to continue playing.

5

“Huur Durr I use logical fallacies such as strawman and no true scottsman instead of making logical arguments.” --kilozombie

:wink:

6

“Hurr, I don’t know what the strawman argument is so I can use it freely” - me

wait that’s not a valid argument

Nor is insulting my logic solely as yours; you’re still making plenty of people unhappy.

1 Like
7

Well, to be fair no one has still voted in favor of removal so we kinda can rule out the community liked it

Of the fact that only 3 people have voted for the reinclusion i make no comment

8

why would you remove an option? The better question should be: should we default it to off.

9

The option used to be defaulted to revival before the last experimental, when it was apparently removed for balance reasons

10

Balance in a singleplayer, open-source game that anyone can modify.

Right, okay.

1 Like
11

Pointing out that an argument consists entirely of logical fallacies is indeed a valid argument.
“Making people unhappy” is what the poll is intended to establish, you making unsubstantiated statements isn’t helping with that.

12

Maybe I shouldn’t do the meta-arguing. I’ve made my points and feel free to argue with the valid ones.

With such a closely-held community, I just hope you listen to the majority vote.

If the “no” option prevails, then I’m wrong, but until it has, you’re making everyone who voted “yes” unhappy and everyone who voted “no”… well, nothing.

You’re kind of just ruining fun for people without actually gaining much for other people.

13

kemor: Pulping by smashing, butchering, and burning* zombie corpses will all prevent zombies from raising.

“active” corpses’ names will be highlighted in yellow when you look at them (I think in all the different interfaces, but not sure). I think your best bet when a fight is over is to use ‘V’ menu to look around, and this will tell you where all the still-active corpses are.

PRODUCTIVE SOLUTIONS:
What I keep seeing is that people don’t like pulping rather than that they have a problem with zombie revival in general. I am planning on streamlining the pulping thing so it isn’t tedious, and also I’ve been considering making it reflexive, like if there is nothing dangerous in the area, and you step next to a zombie, you’d just whack it and finish it off.
Pulping is s probably harder than it should be, basically representing completely smashing the body to bits (which would take a LOT of work, think of the zombie dismemberment scene near the start of TWD) rather than a targeted coup de gras type thing. One good whack with a nice solid weapon should get the job done as long as your character isn’t hopeless (melee 0 might have issues, but that’s it). If you’re running around with an xacto knife or something, expect issues, but if you use a machete or sledgehammer, it should just be one whack per corpse.
Also there are some other things that should pulp zombies, such as explosions and running over them with a car.

The reason I’m so resistant to disabling the revival thing is that this mechanic is completely central to our type of zombie. Romero and many other zombie types are “pierce the skull” type zombies, but in our interface, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make that happen. Instead, you can take zombies down with completely conventional methods, but they heal anf get back up unless you take extra steps to prevent it. Without this mechanic they aren’t zombies at all, they’re just reskinned goblins or something.

*Be aware that for the time being you have to wait around for the corpses to actually burn if you’re going that route, if you leave the area for a while then come back, the fire and respawn code interact badly, possibly resulting in zombies respawning and getting back out of the fire. They’ll likely be on fire and just fall over again, but now they’re out of the fire and might successfully reanimate the next time. I think your best bet in this case is to use highly flammable stuff like gasoline instead of e.g. wood, the main thing is to have just corpses and fuel in the pyre, and make sure it’s a “raging fire”, not just a “small fire” or “fire”. It actually helps to generate a “raging fire” to have a larger fire, so if you have a pile of 50 corpses, you might want to evenly distribute them across a 3x3 area or so, splash some gasoline around, and then light that sucker and watch it burn. You shouldn’t have to wait around for the fire to die down completely, just long enough to really get going, I’m pretty sure a corpse isn’t going to last long in a raging fire.

14

Pulping should be improved, yes, and burning is a valid way to get rid of corpses-- but we have the debug menu, for Christ’s sake, so why are we afraid to give people this option? As said in the other thread, and done, we can just make it a separate warned option, for access to all these more insidious ones.

15

Kevin I do really believe that it will be most better to keep the option inside the game. Mostly due to this:

I the next official release, we will be getting the brand new and fresh advanced world generator. This feature offers the ability to greatly customize the game in watever way we want, throwing all vanilla lore out of the window. For example if i turn city size to the maximum and make it so that only robots will spawn, the game is no longer about surviving a paranormal outbreak in New England, but about surviving a Robot revolt in a planet wide ecumenopolis, alternatively, if i bump fungal claimed areas (I am assuming that biomes get implemented) the game becomes a simulation of surviving a gone wrong alien colony.,

What I want to say with this is that If we want to role play playing some sort of 28 days later or Romero Apocalypse or WWz scenario, we should be able to, as we could simulate much more insane scenarios.

Other than that, streamlining pulping would be really appreciated

1 Like
16

Will be moving the thing that triggers revival to a flag in the monster definition instead of it just being applied to all zombies, you can then feel free to redefine it out of your zombies, or add it to bees if that’s what you really want. I can’t guarantee this will happen by the time we do the next release though.

17

Thanks man, now that is a great solution.

And it could also meant super hard mode with all those fun fungaloid revivals

18

if you want a reason besides “wahh its too hard” i also just love when games are so customizable. the point is to try to balance the options so that one is not OP over the other, or considered cheating. i dont like the revive option on because i generally turn town size and spawn rate way up and classic zombies on so it would really be a pain to butcher like 300+ zombies per block…

19

QFT.

Why force people to mod a game when it’d be simpler and nicer to just add it as an option?

Please answer me this, Kevin:

Why is the debug menu still in the game?

1 Like
20

Most games have a debug menu (turned off after release) because it is extraordinarily useful for testing and confirming things.