Tips, Tricks, and Newb Questions!

[deoxy]

[quote=“Blackhawk, post:9850, topic:42”][quote=“deoxy, post:9847, topic:42”][quote=“Blackhawk, post:9846, topic:42”]Is anything harder then if you set the zombie spawn at 50.00, max out town size, surrounding start, add fast zombie mod, and nightvision zombies?

I want to see how long I can survive.[/quote]

Unmodded, yeah, that seems about the most insane I can think of.

Somebody did make a mod that made zombies do more damage… I don’t think it ever got mainlined, though.[/quote]
I hope that it’s compatible with experimental, I also decided to max out zombie evolution time, and I lowered item frequency for this play through which I affectionately name: 5 Minute Survival.[/quote]

You think you’ll actually make it 5 minutes? Heh.

Low item frequency will indeed make it even worse (to the point of just plain stupid silliness, I think), but evolution is highly unlikely to matter.

[Blackhawk]

[quote=“deoxy, post:9861, topic:42”][quote=“Blackhawk, post:9850, topic:42”][quote=“deoxy, post:9847, topic:42”][quote=“Blackhawk, post:9846, topic:42”]Is anything harder then if you set the zombie spawn at 50.00, max out town size, surrounding start, add fast zombie mod, and nightvision zombies?

I want to see how long I can survive.[/quote]

Unmodded, yeah, that seems about the most insane I can think of.

Somebody did make a mod that made zombies do more damage… I don’t think it ever got mainlined, though.[/quote]
I hope that it’s compatible with experimental, I also decided to max out zombie evolution time, and I lowered item frequency for this play through which I affectionately name: 5 Minute Survival.[/quote]

You think you’ll actually make it 5 minutes? Heh.

Low item frequency will indeed make it even worse (to the point of just plain stupid silliness, I think), but evolution is highly unlikely to matter.[/quote]
I’ve been blessed by the RNG gods.
First day of Five-Minute Survival resulted in the static NPC that spawns (i’ve also enabled random), this time he spawned with a flamethrower.
He runs outside, spraying and praying and the shelter is on fire.
Proceed to hide in basement whilst he PURGES THE HERESY from the surface.
Two days past, I decide to go on the surface before I die of dehydration and lack of food.
It appears that the zombies chased him further into the city.
I will now be making a AAR.
By the way, does anyone know how to post screenshots on windows 7 without going to Paint?

[blazing_glory]

[quote=“Blackhawk, post:9862, topic:42”]By the way, does anyone know how to post screenshots on windows 7 without going to Paint?[/quote]Unless you get something else for your digital drawing needs, I don’t think so.

I use Paint.net, it’s pretty good* and a better alternative then GIMP for someone lazy like me.

*Better then Microsoft Paint at any rate, I haven’t tried out loads of various image programs so I’m not qualified to judge what’s good and what’s not.

[Valpo]

windows 7?
Simply copy your entire desktop via the the print button or use uh i think it was alt print… maybe shift i forgot but i ll find out and edit the exact command in.
Now you have your chosen part of the sceen in you clipboard which you can paste in wherever you want : like for instance imgur online.

edit:

tested. to copy a single window you need to make it the active window and then press alt print.

[Excaliber]

I did a hospital start and while I was running out of the building there was an npc error. Now I get all this debug info in the text window and I can’t figure out how to turn it off. Halp!

[Random_dragon]

I did a hospital start and while I was running out of the building there was an npc error. Now I get all this debug info in the text window and I can’t figure out how to turn it off. Halp!

Did you hit the tilde ~ key at some point? ;A;

[Excaliber]

Thanks, that fixed it. All those veggie’s decaying messages were driving me nuts.

[Random_dragon]

Is kinda weird that key’s bound, unlike the debug menu that’s forced-unbound by default. Then again, I’ve NEVER found a use for the debug mode. =w=

[Thwap]

Vehicle has multiple pulse laser turrets.
Vehicle has floodlights on all sides.

Turn on overhead lights.
Configure turrets to auto fire.
Turn on turret system.

Go to sleep.
Wake up with zombies banging on the outside of the car, turrets ignoring them.

What gives? Why did I even bother building all this shit?

Apparently wearing a blindfold makes your turrets blind too. Sure wish having floodlights on my roof didn’t magically make it too bright to sleep inside.

[Arek_PL]

i heard that turrets are bugged and ignore light sources

[chevil]

By the way, does anyone know how to post screenshots on windows 7 without going to Paint?

Windows 7 and newer has the snipping tool for taking screenshots. No need to mess around with print screen and paint.

[Eric]

What is it that Zombie Masters do, exactly?

[Random_dragon]

What is it that Zombie Masters do, exactly?

They upgrade nearby zombies into whatever they’d naturally evolve into. Note that the randomly-selected group that basic zeds can upgrade into INCLUDES zombie masters.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

[jcd]

[quote=“Eric, post:9872, topic:42”]What is it that Zombie Masters do, exactly?

They upgrade nearby zombies into whatever they’d naturally evolve into. Note that the randomly-selected group that basic zeds can upgrade into INCLUDES zombie masters.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.[/quote]

And Necromancers. And Hulks…

[Random_dragon]

Still, upgrading into zombie masters is what takes a bad day and turns it into a clusterfuck. X3

[Dishonored_Archer]

Playing experimental since two weeks, how do you deal with those pesky corrosive zombies asides using purifying fire on them, used a rivtech machine gun with the .22LR caliber, and Buda… those things have like gallons and gallons of acid in their bodies enough to stunlock me and eat my legs, not to mention their spit attack is worse than the actual Spitter zombie.

As a side note for some reason grenades and pipe bombs are actually inflicting little to no damage even to zombies standing on them, it is a bug or am i missing something?

[deoxy]

[quote=“Dishonored Archer, post:9876, topic:42”]Playing experimental since two weeks, how do you deal with those pesky corrosive zombies asides using purifying fire on them, used a rivtech machine gun with the .22LR caliber, and Buda… those things have like gallons and gallons of acid in their bodies enough to stunlock me and eat my legs, not to mention their spit attack is worse than the actual Spitter zombie.

As a side note for some reason grenades and pipe bombs are actually inflicting little to no damage even to zombies standing on them, it is a bug or am i missing something?[/quote]

Explosions are broken right now. They do large damage over a huge area… but only to stuff. Players and mobs don’t take hardly any.

[SkyeAuroline]

Explosions are broken right now. They do large damage over a huge area… but only to stuff. Players and mobs don’t take hardly any.

I wouldn’t apply this to grenades. I just got absolutely NUKED by a guy with grenades on my last life. They’re still pretty deadly.

[Catfoodbob]

[quote=“deoxy, post:9877, topic:42”]Explosions are broken right now. They do large damage over a huge area… but only to stuff. Players and mobs don’t take hardly any.

I wouldn’t apply this to grenades. I just got absolutely NUKED by a guy with grenades on my last life. They’re still pretty deadly.[/quote]

also holding a RDX canister while lit will ruin your day

[kevin.granade]

Yeah. I get that some people have played this game to utter death and need challenges but not all of us! Stable feels easy at times - til you die. I guess you can save scum but I’m not into that. I like some increase in challenge but I’m not a big fan of tedium and I feel like some of the changes are more towards tedium - but I’m barely rolling with it, so we’ll see how it goes.

None of those things were intended to increase difficulty, it’s just various changes to make things more consistent and less “gotcha” like. Ideally the difficulty would overall be fairly hard, but the ramp-up would be more gradual, and without things that will outright kill you without you making some serious mistakes first. However, something that qualifies as a serious mistake is not running away when you have the opportunity to do so.

Is there some feedback for experimental thread?

Sadly the main thread in the announcements subforum is for ANNOUNCING changes, not discussing them. I wish we had a designated thread for that, along with a thread for announcing and discussing new PRs.

There’s an entire sub-forum for this, feel free to open threads. There’s a very good reason there’s not an official “experimental feedback” thread or thread soliciting balance feedback, it would get clogged up with all kinds of suggestions and feature requests that aren’t actually on topic, see the Needful things thread for this in action.

I’m especially not liking zombies dancing around in combat as if they had brains and agility - it’s silly - and already tedious - hope this is turned into an option or someone mods it out. I could see the more mutant-oriented zombies having this, but not your generic “brains” zombies.

If you mean the new stumbling behavior, it’s exactly the opposite of them having “brains and agility”, they are literally unable to walk in a straight line, and instead stumble around in the general direction of their target.

It seems like a lot of changes being made to the game are reactions to how the game is played more so than expanding on the game (while there’s plenty of new too) - dunno if that’s good or bad. As someone new to the game and who found stable to be pretty amazing (after hearing so much good about the game) I don’t know that major changes are necessary? /shrug

None of the recent changes are in reaction to how the game is played, they are improvements to various systems that haven’t been touched in a long time, and didn’t work as intended in the first place. Lighting, vision, and movement have been heavily overhauled so that they are more consistent and understandable than they used to be from the implementation side. Some of this is implementing behavior (stumbling works mostly as intended now), some is fixing bugs (player <-> monster vision is almost always symmetric now, no more turrets shooting a player that can’t see them), and some is clearing a path for future improvements (lighting and vision overhauls have reduced the amount of duplicated code and updated internal APIs). Balance changes have been mostly incidental. Night vision changes were initially accidental, but left in, being unable to read in total darkness was an intentional change I made because that’s how it was supposed to work in the first place, and I totally rewrote the code handling it.

Re-balance is something I usually associate with the worst of modding (since it’s a pet peeve of mine when modders think they know what’s best for someone else’s game design - I happen to be a (non-game) developer)) or with failed games needing major work.

That’s an odd point of view to have. DDA is in a constant state of update and improvement, so it’s a given that the game balance is going to drift over time, so we periodically need to do specific balance changes to bring it back to the desired level of difficulty.