Sunday, March 22, 2009

Plague 3.22

I havent had much time this weekend for coding, so the only real difference this release is the addition of issuing commands with "v" (go, follow). At the moment I have still made it so that sims that cant see you pick a new leader and wander off, but I think I'll make it so that if you have issued a command they will keep it util you let them go.  Thoughts?

I've also toned down the difficulty (quite a lot really) by giving some starting pistols as weapons.

The other thing is I've made a project page at PyedPypers, should be good for using the forum there instead of the comments here. It's still pre-release so some things aren't working quite right, but it looks very promising.
  • Allowed player to issue stop/go commands with “v”. v toggles between “go” and “follow”. Followers will go to where the mouse cursor is. 
  • Gave sims starting weapons (pistols for now). Game is much easier now. Will make it harder later again by reducing the number of starting guns. 
  • Changed map creation parameters to give (what I think are slightly) better maps.

8 comments:

sean said...

Ok, I stopped messing around with the menu thing long enough to post it here.

I originally started writing it around 3.18 but I pasted all the changes to 3.22 this morning and it worked just fine. There's a text file in the zip with the specifics.

sean said...

I also had an idea for a low effort, high return feature. It's (I think) trivial to have 1 menu option change a whole pile of gameplay settings to create new 'scenarios'. Examples would be stuff like you start with a shotgun, no other survivors, no grenades, and 100 fast zombies. Or 100 survivors, 5 pistols, no pickups, and a few massive zombies.

It would require moving weapon_dict from top_up_weapons() to constants.py (easy), and allow Game_Tactical to create zombies as well as hives (AFAIK it did this in older versions?)

Benedict Carter said...

Hi Sean,

Sweet, will review and incorporate tonight.

Yes, pre-defined scenarios are an excellent idea and as you say the return will be great.

Game_tactical previously did make zombies (once upon a time there werent zombie hives), if the function isnt it will take no time to write it.

I was also thinking of offering about sets of gameplay options (including options that changed health, running speed, ammo capacity, etc), so you could pick "arcade", "realism", "fun" type modes.

You could then mix and match scenarios and modes.

The last step (not tonight I'm guessing) would be to let the player pick all options as a custom scenario/custom mode (they can by editing the files, but thats too much work for most users).

Thanks! Any thoughts on things like a standard copyright notice?

Benedict Carter said...

Wow Sean, you are a legend. I'll release this straight away with no amendments. This is so very cool. Plague actually looks like a "real" game now!

Benedict Carter said...

Whoops, turns out I was wrong, I couldn't help but add a *little* more to what you've done. Thanks Sean.

Benedict Carter said...

oh yes, game_tactical now has top_up_zombies again, so the "starting zombies" option now works.

I note you have a ValueError if the value of an option <= 0. Any particular reason why we dont change that to check < 0 to only disallow negative numbers?

sean said...

Glad to hear it works.

If you just hit enter without entering any numbers, you get a blank string -> ValueError. I decided to raise one for negative ints as well since there was already code to handle it. At least I'm pretty sure that's what I was thinking...

Also, I was checking <= 0 so that you couldn't accidently set 0 survivors, but I guess there's a good case to have any other option set to 0. Eventualy, I think it'd be nice to give each option a range of allowable values, and let the user know what they are.

sean said...

A few other things:
I've played a few games with survivors=3 and nothing else changed and I think it's the best balance the game has had so far. There's few enough survivors that they don't get in the way, but their firepower is absolutly necessary early on. Massive zombies are downright terrifying, and as long as you don't pick up anything more powerful than a shotgun the difficulty stays high without being outrageous.

The biggest problem for me is that the stamina doesn't really feel right. It seems I keep being exhausted at very strange times (whenever I actually need to run away.)

For copyright, I've never had a problem with GPL. Never really given it much thought beyond that. My name on pyedpypers is 'stup' if you want to add me to the project there.