Zombie Colony is a real time shooter survival strategy game. Scavenge for resources, build your camp, and survive against zombies.
Podcast 002: Episode 2
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Description
Sounds redundant, but it's a very accurate title for recent events.
This mod is epic
Excellent work my friend!
Certainly is taking shape with your new coding ideas!
Keep it up!
1. Add a stone weapon, like in Far Cry, not to harm zombies, but to throw and create some sound distracction.
2. What about a animation for the rebels, showing them to look around from one shoulder to the other, when they killed/lost all targets in vision?
1) Already considered that, Sniper Elite did that too.
2) Them spinning around searching for new targets is a pre-defined Half Life 2 schedule, I didn't do that. Obviously I'll go in and tweak it to look better in the future. (sadly I'm not an animator, but the rebels might have an existing one I can use)
Just checked, sadly the rebels don't have a "looking around" animation. I'll have to see what I can cook up on my own.
Really good idea to make zombies spawn more often near resources; this will also actually help players to find resources - just find a big group of zombies. The new stealth mechanics are very nice too.
Is spawning zombies in different vis leaf better than spawning them a certain distance from the player and out of LoS? I seem to recall that in Hammer you can actually make zombies choose to spawn from different spawn points according to these criteria so I adding that to the AI director might not be too difficult.
56er's idea of a non-damamging weapon to create distractions seems good as I don't imagine you'd have many grenades to spare. Does considering it mean yes or no (or not sure yet)?
How about the rebel-commanding "weapon" being hand signals? You'd just have to do a couple of animations using the pre-existing hand models, and it seems appropriate now that zombies can hear you.
Thank you, the stealth mechanics are quite a pleasant surprise. I didn't realize you can sneak by crouching until I tried it on a zombie. There will be other factors that make zombies crowd up, so in the future seeking out crowds might actually be a bad idea XD
Spawning them in visleafs is less overhead I think, because otherwise the director would need to do a distance calculation and a vision calculation for all players and all survivors (maybe not a vision calculation for the npc's though). This way, the director chooses a node, finds which leaf it's in, and sifts through to see if any players or rebels are inside that leaf. I'll have to do a few tests to make sure it's actually faster.
Lastly, 'considering it' meant I already thought of it, and like the concept of creating distractions, if not with a rock then by some other means. I'm trying to find a simple way that ties that into the game as a whole.
It seems you've edited your post since I replied to it! :p
I love the idea of the rebel commanding weapon being hand signals- I'll see what I can do about animating the hand rigs.
I found your first video to be very interesting and did not even reflect over any monotony. I rather felt your excitement about your progress and ideas. But if you feel that you can improve your presentation then go ahead. Thanks for making the extra effort :)
Great podcast again. All most exciting news you present. Highly impressive.
Some feedback on the running NPCs at 10:05. If possible it would be good if you could make them pick slightly different paths as here they seems to have all found the exact same path to run along.
The change could be in the form of delayed thought process of a zombie and also adding offset in path. A (slightly more intelligent) zombie could be told to walks to the side making an assessment of the situation or head at some other point of interest briefly, like a brief patrol (or better fitting task), before it attacks from an different line of path. If not what you want maybe this at least sparks some new ideas.
Good luck!
Now that sounds simply fantastic.
If I may offer a wish:
Perhaps replace the rebels with random civis and soldier models (Hl1 HD Hecu models for example) or mix em all together.
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