faatal

Yes, I've seen an artist making changes to other zombies.

I don't know about the status of VR. I think if we did it, it would be basic.

I don't remember seeing Play as Zombie in the Kickstarter and I've not heard it seriously mentioned.

I would guess PVP will be more refined at some point, but I don't think anyone wants to tweak it until features and values are near completion.

We would like a return of horde mode. I have heard about the old version, but not played it.

I put the extra a in there as "fatal" tends to be already used. I started doing that for my WoW characters.

There should be a Beta, but the labels don't really matter. A beta would just be a stable Axx relabeled to B1, then bug fixes for weeks/months and then is gold.

A .5 is planned. Beyond that, none are planned other than if we need to fix major bugs.

We don't know how many more alphas there will be before gold. Way too many variables.

Yes. A shortcut is how I tested it.

It went fine. Skyscraper windows are block models, so they are each a draw call and it uses a sub mesh for trim and glass, so they are actually two draw calls each. They need to be changed to a standard block. We spent more of the time talking about making normal blocks that have opaque and transparent sections and decided we could support that if our mesh naming system handled marking meshes transparent, so that those would end up in the transparent chunk mesh. I have a prototype working of an arch with glass inside the arch. Still thinking on if I like this solution.

We are planning to release a .5.

Don't know.

We can't have it in the Mods folder for installing from the Microsoft store or Game Pass, because MS does not want users changing files in the install location.

We already allow you to specify a location on the command line for data files, which you could specify in the launcher. You can then place a Mods folder there.

-UserDataFolder=x:\7DTDData

It can also be set in the serverconfig.xml file.

Skyscraper windows are expensive and need to be improved. I actually have a meeting tomorrow to discuss with art/design devs.

If we ever add a helicopter, it will fly like a helicopter and be able to hover. A gyrocopter flies like an airplane.

Zombies are random within their sleeper volumes as far as which sleeper blocks they pick and the count of zombies, but it is up to the designers to set. If they put 3 sleeper blocks in a room and set it to spawn 2-3 then there is not many variations available to the spawning code.

Wandering zombies has been discussed and we will probably do some of that, but we have many higher priority tasks to work on currently.

There is actually a bug passed to me today about reset POI helper blocks not being random, so it could be effecting zombie spawns too.

A lot of progress has been made on it, but it has months of work to go.

Bandits counts would scale like zombie counts at a simple ratio of how much overhead they are vs a zombie.

It means zombie will hit blocks that are supporting buildings that they would not hit before. Say you build a bunch of poles and a platform above and stand on it. They will now hit the poles and not just wander around.

I'd like to drive it, but it will not be driveable due to how it was modeled. Opaque windows, no interior and 2 piece attached wheels. It is more efficient that way, but not usable for me.

When a zombie goes to destroy a block for destroy area mode, it would attack it because the block was in the way. On a partial block they would enter it and not attack it because it was not an actual obstacle. Now they know to attack those blocks when there are near them and not just walk inside it.

Maybe. Depends on what you consider scantily.

No. Bandits have their own specific clothes for each bandit type and tier.

1 Yes

2 No. The plan is they will crouch and/or find cover

3 No

4 Yes

5 No talk, but they might use the new system the zombies have, but it is not trivial to set up on each model

6 Nothing to show right now. Still cleaning up zombie systems for bandit use and other bugs like ragdoll problems

They should be able to just like zombies can fight animals.

I don't know.

Still a thing. We have a programmer working on it full time.

Sure, I've looked at it, but it works about as well as Vulkan in Unity. Unity is supposedly making a push to improve DX12 support. I saw it on their roadmap. Maybe next year.

I'm not against decision trees for any reason other than I don't need them for what I want to do. What we have now could be called decision lists, which are lists of tasks that get checked in order. Bandits will probably have more task types added to support new behaviors.

The key thing I'm doing now is a full cleanup of the zombie controller parameters, states and transitions and their avatar controller code, to get ready to be copied for the bandits, as I don't want the bandits starting from some legacy mess.

The number of bandits that are spawned at any one time. Say a bandit takes x2 the performance of a zombie, then I would not want more that half of them in the world compared to the number of zombies a computer can manage and still have a reasonable FPS. Now that does not mean the world will have bandits everywhere. That depends on game play goals. I would like bandits to be rare, because this is a zombie game and 99% of the population is dead or a zombie.

EAI has been optimized over the years I've been working on it and UAI being dead, I have not touched it. I do plan to remove it at some point, but hopefully the bandit framework will be adequate to extend from for modders.

Good bandit performance and numbers is a goal, so they will run adequately on all systems.

It is still in the works. There were some issues with platform changes and then there was a bad merge of some of my changes that they backed out and may end up having to hand merge.