[quote=“secretfire, post:2903, topic:42”]How does TIME work in the game? No matter how long my previous survivor lasted, when she dies, its always day one for the next, and as -far as I can tell- everything they ever did is already done.
I can think of one of two explanations for this.
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Everything my other survivors did is really the work of the chaos of the ‘first night’ and they never existed.
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My other survivors start the day after they died, and the timer is wrong.[/quote]
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The way we handle time between characters is broken, and all your actions retroactively apply on day one of the new survivor’s game.
This is “possible”, but it would require us to store a snapshot of everything the player ever interacts with, including things that happen at a distance. It would be massively impractical.
I’ve considered having a lightcone option, where new characters are spawned far enough away from previous (dead) characters that it would be impossible/impractical for them to reach the effects of the old character before their timelines converged. It’s not actually as hard as you’d think to program as long as you tolerate it breaking in extreme cases like the new character acquiring a vehicle at game start and immediately moving towards the old character at top speed.
Basically when a character dies, they write their location and death time somewhere, new characters using this system would simply read these values to get a list of exclusion zones, and spawn outside any of them. It’s a relatively simple bit of math if you can derive reasonable constants for maximum move rates.
And yes, this would only work if you only have one character active at a time, multiple active characters would simply break the system unless you did some kind of scrambling of coordinates behind the scenes to insert new space between the characters as they progress through time.
A side effect of this would be that save files would grow massively, because new characters would always start in an unexplored area and generate new map content, but that’s probably not too bad.