Saturday, February 4, 2012

Alpha 8.0 Release!

Just in time!
Check the download page and report the bugs.

ALPHA 8 CHANGE
--------------

Traps and Z-Skills.
Self-defence. A bit more useful followers.
Gangs that act as looters and CHAR Guards that act as guards, rather than them being just another enemy to kill.
Armors helps or hinder escaping Gangs and Police attention.
New shop.

FIXED BUGS
1 (Crash) Destroying a dragged corpse and then moving.
2 (AI) Trying to get an item in a large fortification.
3 (Glitch) Flaslights out of batteries still functioning.
4 (AI) Won't equip a ranged weapon out of ammos even if has ammo in inventory (noticable when you change AI fire directives).
5 (Typos) Various.
6 (Gfx) GDI+ doesn't display some 32 bits PNG properly (fucked up some mods like Deon Apocalypse).
7 (Lack of Nazis) Every decent game should have Nazis.
8 (Glitch) Invading Zombiefieds incorrectly have spawn time 0.
9 (Glitch) Overlays were sometimes not displayed (damage icons, blue popups..)
10 (Trolling) The readme is outdated and mentions a "RS Install.exe". Idiot.
11 (Glitch) PostMortem: difficulty inflation.
12 (Glitch) PostMortem: follower skill upgrade logged as yours.
13 (UI) Sometimes misses a combination of keys (Shift/Ctrl/Alt + key).


GAMEPLAY
- Personal enemies: Self-Defence and Indirect Enemies.
    - Makes the distinction between being the Aggressor or acting in Self-Defence.
    - If X attacks or declares Y as a personal enemy, X is the aggressor and Y is acting in Self-Defence (duh).
    - Killing in Self-Defence is not a murder.
    - Indirect enemies: X is not an aggressor or being aggressed by Y, but they are enemies through their relations (leader or followers are enemies).
    - Indirect enemies are enemies as long as the cause is there (eg: respective leaders or mates are enemies). Once it is gone they are no more enemies.   
- Undead: separate set of upgrade skills for undeads. See skills below.
  When a living is zombified, some of its skills are zombified too.
- Corpses: rising zombies have starting HP proportional to the corpse state.
- Gangs:
    - Start neutral with civilians, but still enemies to Police and Army.
    - Attack people who have items they want.
- Wearing some armors modify the chances to move unnoticed by Police and Gangs.
  - The effect cumulates with the Unsuspicious skill.
  - Hostile outfits = +50% chances; Friendly outfits = -50% chances.
  - Police: Hostile = all bikers armors; Friendly = all police armors.
  - Bikers: Hostile = all police armors and rival gang armor; Friendly = same gang armors.
  - Gangstas: Hostile = all police and bikers armors; Friendly = none.
- CHAR Guards: they now act more like guards.
    - Start neutral to Civilians, Police and Army.
    - But attack anyone who trespass CHAR offices or the CUF.
- Refugees:
    - Some of them arrive in the subway and the sewers too.
    - They get one skill per day - after all, they are supposed to have survived up to this day just like you.
    - More varied items - everything you can find in shops and houses.
    - After Day 7 they might bring more rare items like grenades, army ammo...
- Survivors: the van guys get more skills.
- New Shop: Hunting Shop.
- Standing/climbing on top of cars/fences increase view range.
- VTG: since VTG has no evolution by definition the option is turned off to compute the difficulty properly; to get 100% again setting ZUp Days to 1 is fair.
- Bikers, Gangstas and Soldiers get additional skills depending on the day they arrive.
- Living player starts game with Food and Sleep not maximized, just like NPCs.

NEW GAMEPLAY : Z-SKILLS
- Undead set of skills
  Z-Agile, Z-Strong, Z-Tough: like their living counterpart but lower values.
  Z-Eater: regen more HP from bites/eating corpses.
  Z-Grab: % of chance to prevent any adjacent enemy from moving (passive skill)
  Z-Infector: more infection damage from bites.
  Z-Tracker: improve smell - do not confuse with the item.
- Zombification of skills is straightforward:
    Agile/Strong/Though -> Z-Agile/Z-Strong/Z-Tough
    Light Eater -> Z-Eater
    Light Feet -> Z-LightFeet
- Z-Grab, Z-Infector and Z-Tracker must be learned as zombie.

NEW GAMEPLAY : TRAPS
- Traps are items.
- Activate a trap, drop it on the floor and anyone/anything who/which enters the tile might trigger the trap (even yourself).
- Stacks: activating/dropping only activates/drop one trap of the stack.
- A triggered trap can deal damage and/or make loud noises and/or trap the victim in the tile.
- Some traps need to be manually activated (use), other traps activates automatically when dropped on the ground.
- Some traps desactivate when triggered, they have to be re-activated.
- Some traps can be stacked together.
- Since traps are just items, you can put many of them in the same tile.
- To escape a trap, just try to move.
- Armors do not protect from traps!
- Some map objects allows you to safely move over traps.
- Pushing some map objects on traps triggers them.
- 4 Traps available : Empty Cans, Spikes, Barbed Wire and Bear Trap.

SKILLS
- new Light Feet/Z-Light Feet: improve chances to avoid/escape a trap.
- Unsuspicious : helps evade gangs attention too (in addition to help avoiding the police)
- Z-Agile: undeads can jump (Agile too).
- Z-Strong: undeads can push (Strong too).

FOLLOWERS
- New Order: Sleep Now - they will sleep right where they are until fully rested.
- New Order: Start/Stop following.
- New Order: Where are you?
- Pushing help: followers will automatically help pushing objects.
    - They must be idle or following you, awake and adjacent to the pushed object.
    - Each helping follower takes a share of the stamina cost and spend normal action points.
    - Eg: pushing a 100 weight object with the help of one follower = 50 sta cost you and him.

OPTIONS
- new options to control undead skill upgrades
    - "Undead Upgrade Days" which days the zombifieds get a new skill, or disable it entirely.
    - "Rats Skill Upgrade" whether rats do get skills upgrade or not...
    - "Skeleton Skill Upgrade" ...skeletons...
    - "Shamblers Skill Upgrade" ...and shamblers.
- Difficulty: population density is a much more important factor as larger maps are easier.

UI
- Armor description: say to which faction/gangs the armor looks hostile/friendly.
- Options screen: renamed and reorganized stuff.
- Infection not displayed for undeads.

ITEMS
- Grenade stacking limit upped to 6.
- New Armor: Hunter Vest. Pretty crappy but neutral.

AI
- Undeads: Pursuing undeads will try to move around a local obstacle.
- Civilians: Setup traps in spots they think are interesting and emote why they chose this spot.
- Livings: Sometimes try to avoid stepping on damaging activated traps. Sometimes not.
- Livings: Improved ranged weapon selection logic.
- Livings: Improved melee weapon selection logic.
- Livings: Tweaked large fortification spot selection logic.
- Exploration: slight bias to prefer exploring outside during the day, and inside during the night.
- Improved Fight or Flee logic.

GFX
- Redraw melee/ranged hit icons and draw damage value in the center of the tile.
- Blood splatters are cleaned up after some time.
- Blood on corpses.

OPTIMIZATION
- Data size.

MODDING
- Skills.csv: the new skills.
- Traps.csv: have fun; careful not to create inescapable traps...
- Note: The 3 new skins gfx are not used yet...


Have fun!
And remember, die with a smile!
 

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

8.0 soon

ALPHA 8.0 SOON
In a few days hopefully, maybe saturday/sunday. Depends how much real-life interfere and how many retarded bugs I find. I'll leave the not-so retarded bugs to you.

Summary of the readme:
Traps(*) and Z-Skills.
Self-defence.
Gangs that act as looters and CHAR Guards that act as guards, rather than them being just another enemy to kill.
Armors helps or hinder escaping Gangs and Police attention.
New shop(**)
 (*) not the 4chan kind. real traps. i mean the ones you can use. uh that sounded wrong. ah nevermind.
(**) same old floor plan sorry I'm too lazy to make news ones


STORIES/AAR/VIDEOS

Some people are crazy enough about RS to write complex stories, extremely detailled aars and make videos of them playing in their basement alone in the dark with only one can of food left while vomitting blood.
Ok maybe not.
  • This fellow MadZab has Play Diary of RS here and here, as well as other games.
  • How many cans does one girl need? Just ask elisebambi.
  • There is quite a nice set of videos on youtube for various past or current versions of the game, PlumpHelmet punk had a nice serie going on last year.
  • I might do some new videos, but I'm afraid I'll have to break into code every five minutes or so to check something.

End of post.