Pills
The player who picks these up, gets faster speed for a brief period of time. I’ve actually noticed a bug in it, while playing last…it is supposed to give them full health for a brief period of time and so that needs to be fixed! You try to think of everything…lol
Zombie Blood
VALVe could use this one in L4D/2 …A player picks up Zombie Blood and it makes him invisible to the Zombies – they don’t target him.
In Left4DoD, players have found this incredibly useful for capping those difficult last flags like in Avalanche or Anzio.
The items are Zombie drops.
The Pills drop 1 in every 10 while the Zombie Blood drops with a 1 in 50 chance. You pick them up, you use them.
Now I hear some of you saying, why can’t I keep them, to use whenever I want?
Well there’s a reason for that.
In DoD:S, I am unable to add extra weapons/items, draw a hand holding it, give it a slot, add it to the next item on the mousewheel. It’s just not do-able with SourceMod. I would need to completely re-write the game and add my own stuff in C++.
Ah, you say, why not create a command like use_blood or something?
I learned from my experience with DoDS:RPG, 3 years ago, that multiple binds for players drive them crazy. Servers can’t create the binds since the server has no access to the client’s config. So players have to create the binds themselves. Binding a key to use_blood or use_pills would be simply off-putting and not user-friendly. The whole point of the game is to keep it as simple as possible – so that anyone can walk in, shoot Zombies with no binding.
So the current method is far simpler and a more rewarding experience.
Besides, the added randomness makes it so much more fun!
Still to do this week:
Achievements: heading for the bath to have a good think about that one
Voices specifically for helping players identify the Emo coming
There are a couple of bugs that I have been neglecting for the past few weeks while I’ve been updating TheVille.Org’s web server and stats.
One of these is the gas glitch. The Gasman dies, the gas cloud dissipates and yet in certain areas on the map, players still experience the gas effect, usually because the Gasman’s timer has not killed itself. So I rewrote the way it happens.
Now it should be much more reliable and it also means less resources are being used by the server.
At one point, during testing, I also made the gas choke the player, causing damage. Maybe this might be preferable to just having your vision buggered up, but I left it out simply because players wouldn’t know why they were getting damage.
The Molotovs had been annoying me for a while. One of those “Damn I must fix that” things!
I rewrote the whole routine so that now players get credited with a Molotov kill. I also shortened the time it takes to burn a Zombie.
I have had one or two requests to do something about the Molotov in spawn, where a griefer burns his team. Immature and not in the spirit of co-op. So to counteract this, any Molotov in spawn does not burst into flames. I may look at hooking it into the TK system.
The fact is that this is a friendly fire game, much like L4D is. I want it to remain friendly fire so that we can keep ‘The Infected One’.
Another issue has been a small problem with waypointing.
I had it that if a bot jumped twice, and couldn’t reach the target, it would forget the target and go to the next point. But for some inexplicable reason, they would suddenly appear in the middle of the map and drop down. It happened in Avalanche and Donner, specifically.
So I removed that part of the code and now they just forget the target, look for the next waypoint and keep moving.
The code is stable and running well and soon, I’ll move it up from Beta.
VALVe started it and they are pretty much the gods of gaming, as far as I’m concerned. Their development in the past couple of years has been well thought out and at times, I’m left speechless by the humor and genius that they put into their games.
Achievements are a clever way of keeping people in servers. They need to be achievable yet not something you can do right away.
So I was thinking of a bunch of Left4DoD achievements that I’d like to start incorporating into the game:
Win a knife fight with The Infected One
Kill 100,000 Zombies
Kill a Tank with a pistol
Kill 3 Witches in the same life
Get an Emo to kill 6 of his own team while killing you
Stevo, as talented as ever, has put together a short trailer for Left4DoD!
What can I say, the guy is great at this stuff and the video is just awesome!
