There will be problems with 32 floors

[Animalman]

Working with ISO myself reminds me of zomboid.

i forsee an issue with 32 floors. on the Y axis and rendering.
It will let somebody from say, Roxies Gas Station build a vertical tower 32 floors.
This will allow them to see an area of map they are quite far a way from. As it move up vertically with each floor. Thats fine i guess. But they will not have equal view distance of all parts of map at equal distance in all directions. only for their technical 2D coordiates Y position, Whichever it aligned with on the lower floors some distance north of the stucture.. Zombies will be seen on ground and players in low render update states. Max distance render. I think is going to cause a lot of problems
Probably should be abandoned before the menacing problems ahead are to be discovered.
:)

Anyways gon hop for a game. I'l check servers. but prob single player.

[Animalman]

One method to achieve equal view distance all direction
could be use the Players ground floor position.
Every time he goes up a story his view distance increases by an aspect.
So when he is on the 32nd floor his view distance in all directions, counts as if he was on ground floor, but multiplies by the number of floor he is actually on

:)

GL
i forsee even with the great bit of math to prevail here, i still forsee unforeseen consequences to 32 floors. But couldn't define what they might be

I think would hugely effect the main camera. That follow the player in the house and on the floor. to be 32 times the distance, while being 32 times the Y height. You already see the distance, but you don't see anything else but the section that you are near on the vertical axis.

I would conclude there won't be a good way to handle that. And i would be suprised if you guy come out with one.

More questions arise with actually how the viewing is going to work, Since it is light and cell based for your vision. The greater the height there is no benefit to seeing better, and if there was, it wouldn't be strategic or worthwhile to climb a tower of such a height to better survey the city or whatnot.

hmm

If you dropped it i totally get why. Luckily it won't apply to basements. 32 down.

[Nordil(Hun)]

I am guessing they will address it somehow, since they are again having a bit of an engine overhaul because of the NPC-s, and there is talk of the scaling of sight(in which currently bigger resolution players have an advangate) probably they thought about it or are thinking about it. My guess is that they will limit the "expanded sight" a floor would offer. They will not allow max useage, but limit it to a level, where it will show it equally to all directions. And even if in this case there would be "inequalities" you should be able to calculate out the differences, for each tile distance. As in you would just need to apply a correction. It might cause some issues, allthough i think since as you mention 360 degrees sight, it would be the most taxing at that time. And even then you should be able to as to say divide them to 90 degrees or 45 degrees parts, and just rotate them. Which probably would make the calculations easier. Unless i misunderstood your post.

[Animalman]

Without perspective camera seems the limit to isometric is the false height matrix.

The higher you go the less meaningful the height is.

Not sure what will happen with draw distance. At the moment the high rise near the boxing gym, the roof of that guy looking off the edge you see into the baseball stadium. But you can't shoot anything out there. And i would imagine any higher. its just useless.

Aside from say a scenario that was in a sky scraper, i honestly don't think above ground 32 levels is going to work at all.
If we were given a greater view distance, its still useless, because we can't view the angles below us. Like as if we look over the edge of a balcony and vertically down, if the view distance was huge, we just see too much of everything rendering, and it lags and breaks the game.

[Animalman]

One solution could be to allow 32 floors and make no attempt to change view distance, leave as is, and just instead have blips on the minimap showing activity, vehicle, player and zombie. The higher you go the better the blip map, when out in the open or looking in direction. Like a little radar. Could be cool. Make those bases valid. Blipmap Height + Binoculars would blip up on a minimap with huge range in the angle you are looking. Gives you an idea or survey of the city

With Minimap you see the blip is a person.
with binocular you see the blip is a zombie
with short sight you are penalized
with eagle eye you are rewarded

[Lecalat]

Wouldn't it work like..
Vision range is based on the 2D position of the character

But the rendering is based on the isometric position of the character.

Thus you would see buildings far away, but in the typical zomboid isometric view where there is no depth. You can't tell which floor you're on based on the depth.

And you wouldn't see zombies because you're rendering a view further than your view distance can see. Thus everything is slightly greyed out, you only see buildings, not entities.

If it works like this, I don't see what the issue is? I'm pretty sure its how it currently works.

[Animalman]

Its not an issue with smaller buildings but will be an issue on 32 height.
Because of the Orthogonal view there we are at the height of the view distance when on top of the building but the view distance hasn't been shrunk to scale, and is the same scale as any other object at any other height. But we would render in vision the area clearly and be able to see players and stuff. And that's fine
But we are not allowed to see things that are much closer 24 floors lower. :) like the parking lot downstairs if a blue car just turned up. And i'm ontop of a skyscraper i could notice. But because of the Isometric we will never know when living ontop of a building.
There is no advantage to it. There would only be looting challenge. Its okay like this sure.
But doing nothing there to address the immersion breaker is not hitting the standard

The angle off the edge of the building matters aswell. You will never see the parking lot just north of your ground floor from the 32nd floor up. And would the view distance account for the height of the building on the south side? so we can see the south side parking lot. We wouldn't even be able to stretch the distance of the walls, we would be looking at walls and windows down the 22nd floor Things in real life that are impossible to see

[Lecalat]

Originally posted by Animalman:

Its not an issue with smaller buildings but will be an issue on 32 height.
Because of the Orthogonal view there we are at the height of the view distance when on top of the building but the view distance hasn't been shrunk to scale, and is the same scale as any other object at any other height. But we would render in vision the area clearly and be able to see players and stuff. And that's fine
But we are not allowed to see things that are much closer 24 floors lower. :) like the parking lot downstairs if a blue car just turned up. And i'm ontop of a skyscraper i could notice. But because of the Isometric we will never know when living ontop of a building.
There is no advantage to it. There would only be looting challenge. Its okay like this sure.
But doing nothing there to address the immersion breaker is not hitting the standard

Yeah I'm pretty sure they would not be increasing view distance, thus having more entities in the game at once, etc. It's always been an isometric game with no sense of depth at all, so I doubt that is going to change.
It's probably going to work just the way it does right now when you're in a tall building. Except we will now be 32 floors above instead of whatever the limit currently is.

[Coolranch]

They'll probably just maintain a visual cutoff after a certain height where fog obscures the surrounding area, while allowing you to see the portions of nearby buildings that reach to the same height. It's an acceptable tradeoff.

[Animalman]

Functional Elevators could help

But still not a fan of the idea of being that high and still feeling claustrophobic. Limited in vision. Radar blips is really all i got for it. Since we the minimap can already zoom out to a relevant distance, all its gotta do is blip up objects that are in those regions at the direction to some foraging system of accuracy. Like turning the minimap into a giant information forager, I see something ??? Zombie Crowd, Bing, I see something ??? Red Car, But if an actual player comes in, that range be nice to see them coming down the highway. Not literally render them. but to blip them on the radar while i have bbq on the roof overlooking in the direction of the highway

Would be so cool actually

Blip see ??? Smoke Signal
Place Smoke Signal
:)

[Great_Puffer]

Originally posted by Animalman:

Functional Elevators could help

But still not a fan of the idea of being that high and still feeling claustrophobic. Limited in vision. Radar blips is really all i got for it. Since we the minimap can already zoom out to a relevant distance, all its gotta do is blip up objects that are in those regions at the direction to some foraging system of accuracy. Like turning the minimap into a giant information forager, I see something ??? Zombie Crowd, Bing, I see something ??? Red Car, But if an actual player comes in, that range be nice to see them coming down the highway. Not literally render them. but to blip them on the radar while i have bbq on the roof overlooking in the direction of the highway

Would be so cool actually

Blip see ??? Smoke Signal
Place Smoke Signal
:)

yeah all of those could help

[mb]

Originally posted by Animalman:

Working with ISO myself reminds me of zomboid.

i forsee an issue with 32 floors. on the Y axis and rendering.
It will let somebody from say, Roxies Gas Station build a vertical tower 32 floors.
This will allow them to see an area of map they are quite far a way from. As it move up vertically with each floor. Thats fine i guess. But they will not have equal view distance of all parts of map at equal distance in all directions. only for their technical 2D coordiates Y position, Whichever it aligned with on the lower floors some distance north of the stucture.. Zombies will be seen on ground and players in low render update states. Max distance render. I think is going to cause a lot of problems
Probably should be abandoned before the menacing problems ahead are to be discovered.
:)

Assign hard caps to view distance in all x,y,z axes.

Hypothetical example: characters can only view 100 tiles in any direction on x, y, or z axis. Character climbed to floor +32? From that position, character can now only view the ground floor up to 68 tiles away. etc (my math isn't accurate here but you get the idea)

Problem solved, since now view/render distance is the same area regardless of player position on any axis

[Animalman]

I think it will all be okay

https://ibb.co/wRSF5b4

see the image i make example of how high its going to be.
nearly

32 is ok
read image notes

[Coolranch]

Another question could be about realistic travel time versus the default 1 hour day. Presuming the building is totally clear; you don't have to sneak around, stop and fight, etc.. how long will it take to walk or jog from top to bottom??

Obviously doing this in real life would be a workout, but it wouldn't take hours.

I also wonder if stairs will be given a conditional modifier to account for fitness and/or strength. Maybe they already do and I'm unaware. There is a medical test they sometimes do to gauge cardiac health, where the goal is to walk up something like 4 flights of stairs in under a minute.

[Animalman]

Asthmatic maybe exhausting climbing it

Yeah it can work in the end. But i really wanna have player advantage of being able to really colonel your surroundings, up on a high rise make high rise really competitive for bases. Blip the minimap for obvious human activity. Looking down the highway having a vantage to see if someones coming from the checkpoint down the road. And for intercepting long distance communication. Like looking at the horizon. The higher you are the more view of the horizon you have. Sure you couldn't spot everything because of obstacles, but you could see most open area's such as roads.

Like you'd see people looking like ants, for sure couldn't identify a human from a zombie without aid. But a moving car another story.

Could make walkietalkies worth while if you had a faction with a spotter on the roof, alerting ground troops to intercept. :P

[Animalman]

Got a suprise for you

here
https://youtu.be/j2UyiBo3yJQ

a
Isometric Perpsective Camera.