Movement & zed awareness

[DaiReaver 0]

Hi Rocket,

Firstly i must say I'm thoroughly enjoying the game your putting together, quite frankly for a game at alpha it's very playable and entertaining. Your doing a great job.

Secondly, i have had a few thoughts on movement and the awareness sensors that are used to define when a zed spots you.

Insight: The reason for these thoughts is based on how people would be stealthy and avoid people in real life, we wouldn't just crawl everywhere as it is actually more noisy due to the friction and take a lot of physical effort. Generally we adopt a stealthy crouch to move around but we are more visible and there's the tradeoff... so...

I'll use the following legend: Highspeed(HS), Lowspeed(LS)

note: would be cool if we had 2 speeds for crawling too(if possible)

Crawling(LS) : Visibility (0) Sound (1-2 )

Crawling(HS) : Visibility (1) Sound (4-5 )

Crouched(LS) : Visibility (2) Sound (0) (due to us carefully placing our feet, i.e. no sound, or very little)

Crouched(HS) : Visibility (4) Sound (2-3 )

Upright(LS) : Visibility (5) Sound (3 )

Upright(HS) : Visibility (6) Sound (6 )

What i believe this would do is create the following scenario:

Approach to town: Crawling to avoid being seen, quickly to make ground, then slowly to avoid being heard.

Edge of town: Rise up into a crouch to stealthily walk around, checking corners properly to ensure a zed isn't looking our way,

In town: It would force people to not just casually crawl past zeds without caring, they wait to ensure zeds are not looking before moving... cover to cover. They can always lay down while a zed passes, then once passed they can rise into a crouch again and walk off. (This will also fix the problem of going through some doors where it forces you to stand.. we could safely crouch walk into those wooden houses without every zed in the area hearing and coming for us.)

So the main prinicple being:-

- When you crawl you are less visible but make more rustling noise due to things in our pockets rattling around and the friction between us and the ground and the friction of the clothes over our skin due to the way we move.

- When you crouch, you have much more control over where you put your feet and how softly etc.. but naturally we're a bit more visible, if we rush however our feet stamp harder and cause more noise.

- When your upright, we do have more control of our feet, but still place them a little heavily due to not having our knees bent for control, but of course we are very visible. When we run naturally anything in our pockets moves a lot and our feet stamp much harder.

So thought that may add more tactical thinking behind manouvering. I haven't taken into account modifiers for strafing etc.. but they are slight increases and decreases from base values anyway.

Another concept on awareness: (this one may make you laugh..)

Smell:

We're all running around, crawling around and getting ourselves all sweaty and nasty all the time, don't zed's have a sence of smell? Well there's loads of fountains and little ponds etc... Surely we could wash that grime off our bodies... afterall.... If zed's could smell, surely the worse we smell the more they would be attracted to the scent of our flesh?

So you could always have a radius where our smell comes into play.. and the less you wash, the more appealing you are to the zed's .. It'd make us go into those ponds and wash ourselves.. which will in turn lead to our temperature dropping if we spend too long.. so we'd need to heat ourselves up again without getting too stinky.. :)

There would have to naturally be a careful balance of smell and temperature on that one.. But food for thought. :)

For everyone: Not everyone will agree with these proposals, so all i would ask is that if any of you don't agree, could you suggest any modifications to this concept? or constructive critisizm?

Cheers.

Edit: Oh.. a word on line of sight. At the moment we still keep getting spotted through walls.. even when i've been sat looking through my bag i was spotted through a wall as a zed went past. It couldn't have heard me.. i suppose one possibility could have been it saw through a window.. So 2 solutions: (1) If you can detect when we're inside, drop our visibility no matter the pose right down to 0, with zombies inside being the exception.. they can just see us. (2) allow us to open our bags and check gear while prone.

Not sure if either are feasible, but just thoughts.. I did notice our visibility dropping when in buildings already, might just need a little tweaking.

P.S. If you like the ideas rocket, i can put them in as feature requests for you, just let me know.

[Gonkii 0]

+1 for the crawling/crouch trade off. -1 for the smell x].

The reason I don't like smell is because zombies are rotting (at least in my view of zombies) so they should really have worse eye site and smell by the day. On top of that rotting flesh and feces from when a person dies would be a really strong smell already so they would probably have a hard time smelling anything other then themselves.

My opinion anyways. I really like your first idea though. :angel:

[DaiReaver 0]

Yeah you have a good point about the smell :) Thought it would be amusing.. though with what you just said.. it gave me another idea.. also comical.

Perhaps it's sweet smells they are attracted too, since they dont attack each other with their foul smells... So... Throw a bottle of perfume at a zombie.. then other nearby zombies smell him thinking he's a survivor and attack and eat him, giving you the chance to quickly nip past undetected ;)

[Gonkii 0]

I think you can already kinda do that with whiskey bottles or empty cans thought they don't kill each other, don't take my word for it though i have never tried it myself only heard people mention it a couple times.

[survivor_davey 0]

Just so you know, there already are two crawling speeds. double tap shift while crawling to switch between fast and slow crawl.

[Kolchak (DayZ) 5]

You can check your gear and loot while prone, but you have to have a main weapon equipped, pistol or flashlight will not work. Same with slow crawling, for some reason with a secondary equipped, you cannot crawl slowly no matter what you do, switch to your main and you can go slow or fast.

[DemonGroover 8836]

I think the sounds are too high - do you really make a lot of noise when running/crouching? Sure you will be seen, but heard as if you are running on broken glass?

I think the visibility needs to be high and the sound low. If you walk in front of a Zed he will see you, but step on a road 30m behind him, would he really hear and if he did why couldnt it have been another Zed - how do they know it is a Survivor They could investigate but not aggro all the time

Staying out of their line of sight should be good enough most of the time, unless you do something stupid.

[dublebeanz 1]

also liked the idea of sense of smell and having to wash in ponds which led me to your thread...it would make ponds active areas...but instead of crawling thrugh dirt i thought it could be implemented like this.

zombies are attracted by the smell of death.

a smell bar the same as and audio sight (completes the three senses that locate at distacnce....part of their condition could cause this perception) that increases when u search through a players dead body (how many bodys searched = 1 bar of smell? another questionable variable is the detection range of one bar of smell) and can only be decreased by walking in one of the ponds for a period of time.

..survivors have to decide if a body is worthwhile, which would change depending on their situation, what they can see on the body and how many body searchs have they done since last washing..

..bandits have more places to hunt surviors and each other, will have to decide if a bandage and some painkillers are worth the trouble.

..the sea is polluted with the dead and is no help.

..can always avoid problem by selectivly searching bodys

..killing in self defence has no repercussion.

..banndits have loot as bate this could create a way for survivors to find bandits.

walking into ponds to wash has 5% chance of catching sickness (to harsh?).

could also fill waterbottles at ponds but with a 5% chance of sickness.