Z-levels are amazing and scary

altindiefanboy · 2015-09-26T17:09:36.000Z

I’m on an x64 Debian system right now, running a version I just compiled from source, with tiles, Lua, and sound support:
I enabled the Tall Buildings mod and the experimental z-level feature on world creation. I made a simple Survivor and spawned in a Evac Shelter with a (static spawned) NPC. I walked out the door to the Shelter and witnessed three Mi-gos slaughter a moose about 15 tiles away, with several human corpses nearby as well. I lose my shit, as any reasonable player would, and decide to hurry up and raid the Shelter’s basement in hopes of finding something quick to grab and leave with, knowing that that Shelter will have to be abandoned until I find a vehicle to run over those Mi-gos with. As I’m in the basement, I hear a bunch of smashing and whatnot coming from above me. Clearly the Mi-gos have just killed the NPC. Yikes. I’m sure I can just wait this out, I doubt they’ll go down the stairs to look for me.
So I wait down there for several in-game minutes and hear progressively more and more noise. I was backed up into a corner of the basement furthest away from the stairs. Suddenly two of the walls around me collapse, leaving piles of limestone and other construction materials around me. Shit. Then a zombie falls down from the floor above. I didn’t even know this stuff was possible! I kill the zombie, but at this point I am deafened from all of the noise around me and I know that I cannot stay here any longer, period. So I go up the stairs, prepared to run like hell.
Here, the Mi-gos must have smashed too many windows and/or walls and collapsed the roof of the Evac Shelter, because they were gone. But worse still was awaiting me up there. When the Mi-gos collapsed the roof, it must have made a huge amount of noise and drew to the area an absolutely huge horde, with an insane number of specials waiting to kill me. The horde was actually a few tiles away from the stairs that I had come up out of, but the rubble severely impeded my movement and they caught up with me within two turns and completely surrounded me on all sides by the fourth turn.
I did not survive an hour in the Cataclysm.

Arek_PL · 2015-09-26T17:31:29.000Z

woah i didnt even know that falling celling can damage floor and make something fall downstairs

Random_dragon · 2015-09-26T17:36:10.000Z

Oh wow. That has to be the most hilarious first post I’ve seen.

The saddest part though is that it means horde mode is presumably even scarier than z-levels.

DG123 · 2015-09-26T18:06:31.000Z

I tried hordes for all of one game before realising they were ridiculous and turning them off.

Arek_PL · 2015-09-26T19:12:34.000Z

why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes? they just spawn on edge of reality bubble and do not move at all only sometimes single zombie get near my base

Random_dragon · 2015-09-26T19:24:38.000Z

Arek_PL:

why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes? they just spawn on edge of reality bubble and do not move at all only sometimes single zombie get near my base

Yes, you are. ;w;

DG123 · 2015-09-26T19:43:48.000Z

Arek_PL:

why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes? they just spawn on edge of reality bubble and do not move at all only sometimes single zombie get near my base

For me, I just found that when I went towards any nearby villages they had hordes in them so I couldn’t explore anywhere. My base itself was fine.

altindiefanboy · 2015-09-26T20:31:23.000Z

Arek_PL:

why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes?

I normally have no problem with them. In 0.C they were a nightmare for me because they seemed to not scale with the static spawn rate, so they were evil no matter what, but in recent builds they seem to scale accordingly, so they are much more manageable. Either that or they just cut them back dramatically, I’m not sure. I’ll have to check in the source. I think I would like separate spawning rates for both static and wander, so I might be digging in the code for that soon anyway.

Arek_PL · 2015-09-26T21:12:21.000Z

for me only threat of horde is that they spawn evoled zombie even on day 1

altindiefanboy · 2015-09-26T22:06:35.000Z

Arek_PL:

for me only threat of horde is that they spawn evoled zombie even on day 1

My workaround for this is to just avoid the hordes for the first few days religiously, staying far far away from them, especially if in the city. I regularly will camp in a house for a day waiting for a horde to clear up if they surround me. Z-levels make this interesting though, because you can camp out in a basement and hear the horde going by, destroying everything in their path, and apparently, occasionally destroying the building above you…

altindiefanboy · 2015-09-26T22:08:47.000Z

[quote=“Random_dragon, post:3, topic:10597”]Oh wow. That has to be the most hilarious first post I’ve seen.

The saddest part though is that it means horde mode is presumably even scarier than z-levels.[/quote]
I made an account specifically to share this experience, because in the past few months since I’ve discovered the game, nothing has been more compelling than this XD
I needed an account anyway, since I’ve been planning on contributing to the source code.

Random_dragon · 2015-09-26T22:14:25.000Z

An excellent start then. Welcome to the forums.

I think my first post was in the “How did you last die” thread, so it seems amusing deaths are a forumite magnet.

And yes, more contributors capable of source tweaks are always handy.

Womble · 2015-09-26T22:36:18.000Z

Arek_PL:

why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes? they just spawn on edge of reality bubble and do not move at all only sometimes single zombie get near my base

After some discussion here I reversed my usual tactics for dealing with hordes and started moving towards them to get Z to spawn, rather than trying to flee from the spawn points. I still lose characters to being stupid, but the rate of “just dying to hordes” dropped markedly.

altindiefanboy · 2015-09-27T03:10:20.000Z

Womble:

[quote=“Arek_PL, post:5, topic:10597”]why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes? they just spawn on edge of reality bubble and do not move at all only sometimes single zombie get near my base

After some discussion here I reversed my usual tactics for dealing with hordes and started moving towards them to get Z to spawn, rather than trying to flee from the spawn points. I still lose characters to being stupid, but the rate of “just dying to hordes” dropped markedly.[/quote]
I think it would be a worthwhile feature to implement some sort of despawning for hordes to prevent that behavior, so that if you leave the group after seeing it the first time, it would return to being a horde on the overmap. I’m not sure how much that would entail programming-wise, but since the population of the horde is already kept track of in the code, I’d imagine that number could be used in despawning, after subtracting any Zs that you already killed.

Arek_PL · 2015-09-27T05:59:12.000Z

altindiefanboy:

[quote=“Womble, post:13, topic:10597”][quote=“Arek_PL, post:5, topic:10597”]why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes? they just spawn on edge of reality bubble and do not move at all only sometimes single zombie get near my base

After some discussion here I reversed my usual tactics for dealing with hordes and started moving towards them to get Z to spawn, rather than trying to flee from the spawn points. I still lose characters to being stupid, but the rate of “just dying to hordes” dropped markedly.[/quote]
I think it would be a worthwhile feature to implement some sort of despawning for hordes to prevent that behavior, so that if you leave the group after seeing it the first time, it would return to being a horde on the overmap. I’m not sure how much that would entail programming-wise, but since the population of the horde is already kept track of in the code, I’d imagine that number could be used in despawning, after subtracting any Zs that you already killed.[/quote]
maybe new “horde” flag for zombies spawned from horde? zombies with this flag should turn into horde when they exit player reality bubble? this need new larger bubble what looks for horde zombies and make them horde again

jcd · 2015-09-27T12:13:25.000Z

Arek_PL:

[quote=“altindiefanboy, post:14, topic:10597”][quote=“Womble, post:13, topic:10597”][quote=“Arek_PL, post:5, topic:10597”]why i am only one who do not have problems with hordes? they just spawn on edge of reality bubble and do not move at all only sometimes single zombie get near my base

After some discussion here I reversed my usual tactics for dealing with hordes and started moving towards them to get Z to spawn, rather than trying to flee from the spawn points. I still lose characters to being stupid, but the rate of “just dying to hordes” dropped markedly.[/quote]
I think it would be a worthwhile feature to implement some sort of despawning for hordes to prevent that behavior, so that if you leave the group after seeing it the first time, it would return to being a horde on the overmap. I’m not sure how much that would entail programming-wise, but since the population of the horde is already kept track of in the code, I’d imagine that number could be used in despawning, after subtracting any Zs that you already killed.[/quote]
maybe new “horde” flag for zombies spawned from horde? zombies with this flag should turn into horde when they exit player reality bubble? this need new larger bubble what looks for horde zombies and make them horde again[/quote]

This would work, but iirc from the relevant github discussion, the dev team does not want to have Zeds explicitly belonging to a horde (and i agree with the logic). Rather zeds should join/leave a horde depending on luck/noise/other stuff, so no “horde” flag.

The problem with this would be how to handle zeds trapped (eg. in bulidings) without expending prohibitive amounts of CPU.
IIRC Kevin is working on it so it will get done eventually.

Foffy123 · 2015-09-27T14:28:18.000Z

Arek_PL:

woah i didnt even know that falling celling can damage floor and make something fall downstairs

I noticed this with tall buildings/experimental z-levels and debug mode. I was filling up a Main Battle Tank that I had spawned with mininukes, eventually after enough mininukes you actually start to destroy the ground below you, creating holes in the ground. Eventually I managed to make holes in the ground even below that, which was interesting.

Arek_PL · 2015-09-27T15:08:33.000Z

Foffy123:

[quote=“Arek_PL, post:2, topic:10597”]woah i didnt even know that falling celling can damage floor and make something fall downstairs

I noticed this with tall buildings/experimental z-levels and debug mode. I was filling up a Main Battle Tank that I had spawned with mininukes, eventually after enough mininukes you actually start to destroy the ground below you, creating holes in the ground. Eventually I managed to make holes in the ground even below that, which was interesting.[/quote]

even single mininuke can make hole in ground but first time i hear about colapsing buidling causing damage to floor below

deoxy · 2015-09-27T21:07:29.000Z

I’m really enjoying the new z-level stuff, on the whole, but there are a few shortcomings:

-it appears that turrets sometimes shoot across z-levels in labs - I find zombie corpses in places where there was nothing to kill them, and the animations suggest so, as well.

-holes that zombies can fall through are great, but the interface doesn’t seem to give any indication of where those holes actually are, especially not from below. It also seems to be impossible to view other z-levels, even when you should be able to see them (looking down off of a roof, for instance).

-barring really good luck or the occasional closed loot area, lab loot rooms are almost impossible so get to in time to save to loot from exploding secubots. This is both silly (secubots shouldn’t run over the dissectors in the room they are set to guard… and why are there even dissectors THERE?!?) and exceedingly frustrating. admittedly, this is both a z-level thing AND an “explosions are broken” thing, the latter of which seems to have been improved in recent experimental builds (yay!).

-“vehicles” that span z-levels should now be possible. Yeah, that’s a big order, I’m sure, but it would be REALLY nice for non-vehicular vehicles (solar arrays to provide power in stationary bases, for instance)

I can think of a few other things along the lines of that last one, but that’s really additional new features. On the whole, it seems to be progressing very well - thanks devs!

Coolthulhu · 2015-09-28T03:17:18.000Z

deoxy:

-holes that zombies can fall through are great, but the interface doesn’t seem to give any indication of where those holes actually are, especially not from below. It also seems to be impossible to view other z-levels, even when you should be able to see them (looking down off of a roof, for instance).

This one is actually being worked on right now.