Something... Off-Putting About Vehicles...

[Ten Said Yes]

I get that y'all wanna keep things 'balanced' and 'intense' and all... and that's great. Believe me, I love the intensity of the game so far be it from me to be calling for something overpowered... but vehicles just feel... wrong to me.

I've recently started playing with the vehicles now that they've been put out into the IWBUMS level of accessibility and... again, I know WHY... but there's something innately off-putting about hitting a zombie at between 35-45mph with a Step Van and having them fail to even get KNOCKED DOWN.

Like I said... I get it... you don't want cars to become this super-unbalanced thing that essentially makes the game world un-scary. But here's the thing... they shouldn't be toothless either. Getting hit by a moving vehicle is HELLA deadly, and it should be doubly true when the thing you're ramming into isn't smart enough to dodge out of the way and has several months worth of decomposing well under-way.

There's got to be something better than where they're at now... make it damage the vehicle more... make it so they're more likely to come back as crawlers... anything... but please, for the love of all that is good in the world... don't let me see another zombie getting clipped at 70mph by a light transportation truck, wobble, and then turn around to keep coming, and maybe don't slow my freight-train-on-wheels to a crawl because it impacted something a fraction of its mass?

Human bodies don't stop trucks or vans. Brakes do, because trucks are driven by people who tend to view ramming into human bodies as a bad thing. Human bodies might do DAMAGE... even SEVERE damage, depending on the mass of the human... but said body is going to be a mangled wreck and said vehicle is going to keep on going like it just mashed a gnat on the windshield

Anyway... it just feels wrong. But that's what the test builds are for, right? To get people to try the vehicles out and give you their thoughts and opinions and tell you if everything's working right. Well, apart from this one nagging thing? I love them. I think it feels amazingly natural to drive. It takes a little getting used to, but the angle grows on you after a while and you begin to get a feel for a certain vehicle's capabilities after a while.

[print]

yes hitting a zombie at 35-45 mph should undoubdetdly sling the zombie, but it should also have the chance to do crippling damage to many vehicles. not certain, but some chance.

[the-phil]

When I hit a zombie head on at 50 and up in my truck I get the butterknife stab sound killing the zombie and get some decent damage to my hood and windshield. Slamming on my breaks and swerving while hitting them at 30 and under usually knocks them over and does minimal damage to the vehicle. Had a few zombies laying under my truck and they didn't get up until I moved the vehicle.

There are a lot of minor adjustments being done in the LUA files with each patch.

Edit: IWBUMS or Vehicle WIP? IWBUMS should be the latest and greatest.

[Ten Said Yes]

I'm rockin' the IWBUMS build at the moment, so it should be up to date awesomesauce. I was just playing, and I can safely say that while I managed to score a few messy kills with my new pickup truck doing about 50... I hit a great many of them along my trips between towns and the vast majority barely even registered the impact (despite making the noise and groaning angrily)

I don't know why I've had less success than you... but even still... there's just something jarring about the vehicle mechanics that I can't quite put into more precise words than that it feels wrong. Maybe there's just not enough feedback to convey that this is a vehicle that just plowed into a reanimated human corpse. Maybe they just do too little damage.

It's something, whatever it is...