I don't know if this is just me and friends, but whenever I host a server, everyone except me sees Arachnas in their default model pose (as in standing upright with hands in a "T" fashion and having no animations). Today I joined this French server posted somewhere earlier and (since I was not the host anymore) I had the same problem. Didn't cause much trouble in killing them, but was kinda subtracting from the general experience.
Sounds like an animation binding problem since the summer event ended, can you give me your killingfloor.log file after a game with that happening? I'll try to get a quick fix out today or tomorrow before I leave if I can pinpoint the cause of this.
I'd always intended to do a crawler reskin for those particular specimens anyway, so the hillbilly model is really just a placeholder, but having it walking around with no animations isn't really acceptable. So I'd like to get on fixing that.
We were playing on normal with friendly-fire on and I must say that 100% is a bit too much for this mod. At least in my opinion. We found ourselves dying in single shot to nearly every ff incident. I was even killed by a single PB headshot on full health and armour, which may not seem that odd, but come on. Also all credit to our least skilled player for pulling that headshot off from the whole length of Bedlam corridor (the one left from spawn) nearly immediately after I crossed the far corner. In the end I switched ff to 50% and it seems more reasonable, especially since we tend to have at least one handyman all the time.
I've always played KF with 100% FF, so I suppose I'm probably just really used to it. It certainly teaches you to check your fire, stand in position that don't obstruct others' movement, fire at angles that don't inhibit anyone's mobility, and really makes you play different all around... but with the higher damage on weapons, I suppose friendly fire is even more of a hazard. I may consider reducing all weapon damage (and zombie hitpoints) by 50% to compensate for this. Very very lethal friendly fire is definitely an intended feature, but you may be right, it may be a bit too much given the higher damage output of weapons. Thanks for the feedback on this.
Megapounds (who despite 1st post description also appear in wave 9) have invalid hitboxes, probably using FP's ones, therefore their head is roughly where their throat is. I took several "headshots" with my sniper rifle and did not hit them at all when aiming at model's head. They did not get enraged, so I assume there are no hitboxes there.
Ah, thanks, I probably wouldn't not have otherwise noticed. I had fixed their head hit"box" (KF code actually doesn't have conventional hitboxes, it just calculates if your hit was on a reasonable trajectory to hit a head) previously but forgot to put those numbers back into a recent revision I did. I'll get this fixed pretty quickly.
Mini Scrakes are f***ing adorable. And have a rocket engine in their asses, they are SO. DAMN. FAST. I fear to imagine how they behave on HoE where everything has speed bonuses.
I've only attempted HoE a few times, they and the snatchers become an unbelievable nuisance. It's rather ridiculous since they start doing some serious damage in HoE as well.
About making Scrakes and FPs more powerful - I'd like to point out that with merely 4 players game likes to spawn even 4 FPs at once in later waves, so sure, make them somewhat more of a threat, but please don't overdo this, hmm? ^^ Or modify spawn mechanics a little or so.
Yeah, I definitely don't want to make them "fake hard" by giving them lots of HP. For the scrakes, I'll probably give them the ability to mitigate damage by deflecting anything that hits their chainsaw, and make their AI a little more interesting. With FPs, if I do wind up making them more beefy, I'll definitely make them less common. More likely I'll make them shake the player's screen when they're rage charging or something, nothing that'll make them artificially "hard" by soaking up more rounds like a sponge.
As to the Heavy Weapons Guy, I have some silly idea, but who knows, maybe that's what you've been looking for. Now bear with me, 'cause I have no idea how KF coding looks like and how hard it would be to implement this, but... how about giving him a suppressive fire ability? Now how would it work:
With only MGs (or maybe even every gun), this particular class either by normal or alternative fire will slow down zeds around the firing cone. Zeds will suffer 2% movement speed loss per each bullet fired in their whereabouts for 5 or so seconds. Effect stacks up to a fixed amount, let's say 40 or 50%. That would help in those situations when there are some heavy zeds (Megapounds?) charging at you and team's damage output is not high enough.
That is not a bad idea at all. I'll definitely test this out, it's certainly doable without too much fuss code-side.
Would be nice to have those MGs firing a bit slower btw (I found myself to be hardly able to see through all the shells flying around my screen when firing SAW), especially if suppressive fire mechanic was to be introduced or else maximum suppression will be achieved in a mere second or so.
Additional feedback about the prepper class: on normal we found it rather unnecessary since there are tons of both guns and ammo packs spawning everywhere.
Yeah, on Normal he's kind of obsolete. The higher up the difficulty goes, the more you need one. That's intended, since Normal mode is more about getting used to the mod's features and not necessarily strangling you with ammo restrictions. I think "Hard" difficulty is certainly doable with a little practice, and Suicidal is... possible, if you're really organized and good at the game. HoE, though, I think might just be out of the ballpark.
I was, however, considering making this mod reduce the spawn chance of pickups on the map... but so far, I haven't really seen a need for it. With no ammo pickups, it makes the last survivor in a wave pretty unlikely to be able to pull through heroically.
I'd also like to point out that so far I've tested quite a few guns and almost all of them are assigned to group 3. Which is super annoying when you're carrying 3 or more pieces with you (which I don't anymore because of that). How about putting the most powerful toys in slot 4 (with the exception of SMG section, they all fit in slot 3 perfectly)? Also pistols order on slot 2 is not really my favorite (I'd prefer Mk23 before Glock - which would make sense since Mk23 deals more dmg), but that's just me.
I'll put this on my todo list: ranking all weapons within their "sleeve" by damage-per-shot.
Small sidenote on behalf or realism. Headless FP I was not even shooting at was able to track me down while navigating through obstacles and in the end killed me. While this is the game mechanic and so on and so forth, it was somewhat silly for a blind and deaf dude to find me with ease. Also I have observed one headless FP that could still rage, which should be impossible.
Headless FPs have always been pretty unique in KF since their AI doesn't get put down all the way to, as it is in the code, Brains_Retarded... so they have slightly better ability to follow people around without a head when they're close. I guess I can just make them dumber, like the other zombies, when they get their head blown off. With their higher volume of spawning, I guess they don't still need that advantage.
Iirc it is possible to actually "heal" Highlanders with syringe. Would be nice if you made it impossible for syringe to activate when attempting to do so. Syringe targeting is clumsy sometimes and wasting a charge is a possibility.
Oh, so you mean you can stab them but it just wastes your charge? Sure, I'll make them invalid targets for the syringe. Just didn't want to confuse people who tried to heal him thinking their syringe is broken or something... but I suppose that's still an issue if he doesn't get healed!
The bug (?) causing zeds to attack specific player is also silly. I found myself being the only person targeted by ghosts and crawlers while I was a sniper standing on the total back of everyone. Also a friend mentioned that he once shot mini Scrake and instead of attacking him, it dashed off *somewhere*, probably towards the rest of our team that was in a completely different section of the map.
Oh, that's not a bug. Ghosts (but not crawlers, maybe you just got unlucky?) try to go after whoever's moving around the least (and thus ostensibly sniping).
I think that's all I can think of for now. The mod is great and provides great alternative from vanilla. Thanks for creating such an awesome piece of software (to You and all the co-authors).
PS: Unless situation is really tight, I find pistols (especially Mk23, but that's probably a personal preference) to be the best tools of zed obliteration. Period.
PS2: In case someone is curious, my most common build: Special Ops, Mk23 (possibly Beretta as emergency backup), Kriss, SCAR. Pistol(s) and SMG for general purposes and assault rifle for heavy duty. The latter greatly benefits from double mag pickups. Round 1 healing and welding also helps.
I think that's a very good loadout. I find most people who play tend to shy away from assault rifles because of the low ammo pool and high weight, but the Special Ops guy is perfectly suited to using them. He's also great with an AA12.
Thanks for all the feedback, I'll try to get those arachnas fixed quickly and put some of these ideas into practice when I do some more feature development.