Suggested Improvements to HvZ Source?!

[Mr. Three]

>Being able to start a game independently.
>Being able to change moderator status of player accounts.
>A FAQ.
>Continued from above: can you open and close registration at will? If not, you should be able to to account for late-comers and the like.

[Sklover]

>Being able to start a game independently.
>Being able to change moderator status of player accounts.
>A FAQ.
>Continued from above: can you open and close registration at will? If not, you should be able to to account for late-comers and the like.

You should be able to do all of these already.

[Mr. Three]

You should be able to do all of these already.

See why a FAQ might be a good idea, lol?

[torukmakto4]

I'm not a mod, but as one of the veteran players in a game, I hear about moddish stuff a lot and since I think a bit about HVZ behind the scenes nuts/bolts, Source software and stuff, I figured I would mention it. A problem the mods encountered was that New Source zombies are a parent/child model like UNIX processes, where every process except init or equivalent (i.e. OZ) must have a parent process, and killing a process with children causes all of them farther down the tree to also die. On New Source, if you convert a zombie back into a human, apparently all the kills they may have made while zedding are also cured/de-zombified, along with all the people these zombies subsequently killed, and so on... for no apparent reason! At least, this is how I have heard it described - and I know KVZ didn't work that way.

Obviously, this behavior makes it hugely difficult to rehumanize somebody, as in the case of a game with cures, or restoring someone who was accidentally or maliciously killed by i.e. a dropped/lost ID card that was punched in by a random zed.

I heard a story of some poor mod accidentally curing their OZ instead of the mistake kill they were trying to fix... and they slaughtered their entire horde with a single keystroke!

So I must ask, why?

I can't see any situation where this behavior would be potentially useful. Perhaps if one DBAD zombie started a whole kill tree and you wanted to essentially undo their entire influence on the game by rolling back everyone in the tree, it could... but ordinarily, this would just be a massive headache for a game organizer. Why is this such a seemingly deep-seated/structural feature instead of an optional "modify all children of this kill" mode for this purpose, with default behavior being to act like KVZ and leave descendant zombies unaffected by a change in their killer's status?

If I were to host a game or serve as a mod, I would be pushing strongly for self-hosted KVZ usage over New Source and this bug (?) or misfeature is one of the reasons why (zombie statistics' negative effect on zombies' gameplay and sportsmanship at UF are the other, and compulsory Javascript/web2.0 bloat is the third which I have been fed up with as a player.) My fellow squad members think more or less the same.

Is it a programmatic or structural reason related to some advanced capability of New Source?

[Raist]

The Stuff Above

(Disclaimer: I've yet to use the new HvZ Source system; we've been hosting our own KvZ software for a few years now. The following is going to be conjecture.)
What toru just described sounds like they used a tree data structure.

KvZ used a pretty straightforward (MySQL) table. You enter the ID number to report the kill, it finds the row in the table with that ID, and changes the state field from human to zombie. Pretty easy-peasy.

The only reason I can think of that would make that tree structure be useful, would all be what my contractor father-in-law refers to as "cool features".

I would think that it should be fairly straightforward to change the editing scripts so that the human/zombie/deceased state doesn't propagate down the tree from the parent you edit. Trees only become useful when you need them to behave like trees. However, my thoughts on the matter might vary, since I can think of a couple design methods where "just change the script" isn't going to fix the problem.

[Sklover]

I'm not one of the developers, so I really don't know all of the ins and outs on how exactly it works. I'm fairly certain that things don't work as you describe above. I can test just in case, but reviving a zombie should only revive that single zombie rather than all of their subsequent tags. That does not sound right to me at all.

[Catastrophe]

We just finished up the Fall game at Lindenwood University, and I had a few thoughts on the source page I'd like to look into throwing in as suggestions:

- Have the ability to disable starve timers
With the past management, some zombies would starve out and be unable to continue playing. I saw this as unfun, as everyone should be able to play the entire week, even if their schedule prevents them from hunting. I don't mind setting the timers to 120 hours (5 days) so they last the entire week of the game, but it'd be nice to just disable it.

- Have the players agree to a safety waiver on the website as well as provide their phone number
This is probably more of a pipe dream, but I require players to sign a safety waiver so they won't sue if anything were to happen (nothing major yet). I also have them put their cell # so I can contact them to resolve a conflict (and don't store them for anything else). Having to track down individual players when the only form of contact I have is email isn't as effective as I'd like, so it'd be nice if I could use the site directly. If not, no big deal.

- Moderator Inbox
I'd like it to be more email-styled where you can see a history of messages and have a running communication with players instead of just replying or deleting and not being able to see the message later. It also allows all of my Mod team to keep an eye on each other with issues.

Also, this might just be a bug, but one of my mods was unable to use the Message Players function for sending out clues to antidotes. None of the others tried to, but I was just wondering if any other issues of the like had been reported.


Thanks again for everything you guys do with the site - it makes running a game much easier to do.

[Dandelo]

We just finished up the Fall game at Lindenwood University, and I had a few thoughts on the source page I'd like to look into throwing in as suggestions:

- Have the ability to disable starve timers
With the past management, some zombies would starve out and be unable to continue playing. I saw this as unfun, as everyone should be able to play the entire week, even if their schedule prevents them from hunting. I don't mind setting the timers to 120 hours (5 days) so they last the entire week of the game, but it'd be nice to just disable it.

This. We removed starve timers last game. Currently, we'd love it if, instead of punching in two names for 'feed,' the zombie could list two players who get an 'assist' (a separate tally from 'kills').

[Catastrophe]

This. We removed starve timers last game. Currently, we'd love it if, instead of punching in two names for 'feed,' the zombie could list two players who get an 'assist' (a separate tally from 'kills').

I also like that idea to an alternative of feeding.

[Sklover]

Moved from a different thread:

A text message service would be amazing. I was able to go through my email to set it so that I get a text any time I receive an email from hvzsource, but it would be fantastic if I could just get them directly. Super useful for day missions.

It would also be nice if admins could disable the starve function. My university ignores "starving" so that we have more zombies, but watching them get dropped from the system anyway kind of sucks

Thank you guys for the input. I'll review all of this with our dev team.

[legoexpo]

Purdue had an android app with a QR code and we also have feedcode texting (sign up with your phone number, text "NOM *feedcode*" and the person is zombified!

Email [email protected] to ask about it if you're curious.

Joe, if you need me to send it to you so that you can integrate directly, let me know.

[Deathwish]

It is nice that there is a messaging system, but we have noticed in the campus that I am at that it often sends messages to the wrong people (I have noticed this myself), including sending messages to zombies which are only meant for humans (I think this only happened once, but it still did). I am not a moderator at this game, but I am well known within my game.

Also, I found it quite difficult to remember which message was sent when, so I second an e-mail style inbox.

Many Thanks

[oldriku]

We'll be releasing squads, game shrine, and chats (re-release) at the same time. We have squads done and need to finish up the game shrine and reprogram chats. Hopefully over the next month. We have a very limited amount of development time (we all have day jobs).

What's the state of these features? Are they going to be released soon?

[Sklover]

What's the state of these features? Are they going to be released soon?

Squads and Chats are basically done. Just finished the bug fixes last night and have to verify that we didn't break anything else. Should expect a release in about a week. We've put the game shrine on hold.

Edit: Squads and chats are up and live! Hoora!

[oldriku]

Squads and Chats are basically done. Just finished the bug fixes last night and have to verify that we didn't break anything else. Should expect a release in about a week. We've put the game shrine on hold.

Edit: Squads and chats are up and live! Hoora!

It'd be nice if the chat said when each message was sent. This way, when someone said "watch out, there are some zombies over X" you would know if it's still risky to go over there.