[SP] Survive Altis - Open world survival

[gianni001 19]

 

Survive Altis

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=697790654

 

Survive Altis is an open world survival sandbox, where players can do whatever they like, there is a general story line that can be followed but the world is an ever changing dynamic sandbox where survival is key. Its a big old world and you and your loyal companion Max will have to use your wits and logical thought to survive..

 

Features:

 

• Dynamic weather with changing ambient temperature
• Character effects - Hunger, Thirst, body temp, sickness, blood level, bleeding..
• Dynamically spawned Zombies and AI , aswell as fixed AI
• A cool story line to follow..
• Civilians that can provide information if spoken too
• Replay-ability
• Unique custom keys for doing actions*
• A "virtual" inventory**
• Many other cool features..

*Rather than include other mods, I decided to approach this a bit different. Instead of having "physical" items, such as wood or matches, these are virtual entities associated with your character.

** Looking at objects will display a dialog informing the character of possible actions, for example looking at a tree would say - "Gather wood (F2)" and by pressing F2, the character will gather some wood.

 

Gameplay:

 

Its an open world, where your struggle to will be prevalent. Not only will there be dynamically spawned zombies and AI, but you will have to battle the harsh elements, find food, find clean water and shelter to keep dry.

 

Max your loyal companion has many abilities that can help you in your journey, he can seek out animals to hunt, warn you of enemy presence, attack nearby enemies and even keep you warm during the cooler hours.

 

I hope you enjoy! 

 

Please leave any feedback / bugs below and ill do my best to get to them!

 

Changelog:

 

09/06/2016 -

 

• Added - Holster weapons
• Added - "Survivors" that roam the map and can be spoke to / convinced to join you
• Added - Dynamically spawned wreckages on roads / repairable vehicles
• Added - Attach chemlight to person
• Added - Lightning storms that during certain weather conditions decimate the map (they look really cool)

 

07/06/2016 -

• You can now pay civilians to fight for you, the currency is zombie teeth. They will join you and can be controlled with the standard arma AI controls.
• Adjusted starting equipment - No longer DLC items
• If the player has a radio on his person he can receive radio chatter from nearby enemies indicating their presence.

[haleks 8212]

I think you forgot the download link mate. ;)

[gianni001 19]

I think you forgot the download link mate. ;)

 

Jeez im a dope, thanks mate. Edited!

[WilliamBUG 14]

A intresting mission. The idea is great. Already played 2 hr and I love the new "dog meat " MAX!! I also think some parts of this "open world" could be improved and make it better.

1. MAX just run around me.. So, "dog meat" get friendly fire sometimes...

2. Don't understand why the military just shooting at me without any disscusion. They did not shot any civilians except me! Please! I am also a poor civilian who want to see my families like others!!! If military want to kill everyone to prevent the virus spreading, please let military kill everyone! We are equal! (I was taking fire and other civilians just stand around me and check me out....)

3. Military, bandits and rebels, they are friends!! They will kill you together... (Surprise, **********) Why...

This is a nice mission, please keeping update. Although the road is tough, I will find my families at the end!!! Thanks a lot!!

[gianni001 19]

A intresting mission. The idea is great. Already played 2 hr and I love the new "dog meat " MAX!! I also think some parts of this "open world" could be improved and make it better.

1. MAX just run around me.. So, "dog meat" get friendly fire sometimes...

2. Don't understand why the military just shooting at me without any disscusion. They did not shot any civilians except me! Please! I am also a poor civilian who want to see my families like others!!! If military want to kill everyone to prevent the virus spreading, please let military kill everyone! We are equal! (I was taking fire and other civilians just stand around me and check me out....)

3. Military, bandits and rebels, they are friends!! They will kill you together... (Surprise, **********) Why...

This is a nice mission, please keeping update. Although the road is tough, I will find my families at the end!!! Thanks a lot!!

 

1. I have an update coming to make Max "stay" when he is close proximity to you. In the mean time, you can manually tell max to stay and he will remain still in any location.

 

2. The intention is for the AI to attack civilians, however as with arma, some times they do not listen. In my player through most of the time they did but ill see what I can do.

 

3. The "bandits" that try and kill you, will actually attack the "army"  -  The Army are Indapendant and the bandits are opfor. So if in close proximity, they should shoot eachother aswell =)

 

I really appreciate the feedback, and it gives me motivation to continue on. Stay tuned =)

[neofit 65]

It's always nice to see a new full map dynamic mission being developed, thank you for spending the time to work on it. Please make sure there are goals like finding something, saving something, escaping, anything really. Just going around looting stuff just we can go around looting mostly empty cans for even longer gets old after a couple of hours.

 

** Looking at objects will display a dialog informing the character of possible actions, for example looking at a tree would say - "Gather wood (F2)" and by pressing F2, the character will gather some wood.

Be careful with the keys. F2 is used to select teammate #2, we will have teammates, won't we? I already see myself getting shot at in the woods, I want to give #2 the order to hide or open fire or whatever but start cutting wood instead :).

[gianni001 19]

It's always nice to see a new full map dynamic mission being developed, thank you for spending the time to work on it. Please make sure there are goals like finding something, saving something, escaping, anything really. Just going around looting stuff just we can go around looting mostly empty cans for even longer gets old after a couple of hours.

 

Be careful with the keys. F2 is used to select teammate #2, we will have teammates, won't we? I already see myself getting shot at in the woods, I want to give #2 the order to hide or open fire or whatever but start cutting wood instead :).

 

Thanks for that mate, I come from a MP background, so single player AI controls could potentially have been an over site there. Without giving too much away, there are times where u can have AI team mates. In the interim you may have to rebind that key =(

 

Regarding your other suggestion -

 

Without giving to much away, there is some goals the player can achieve with more coming. The difference is that you wont get a "task" to do a specific objective, but you will find intel, by many different means (speaking with civilians for example) with that intel, the intention is for the player to determine how and if he or she might want to tackle that potential objective.

 

Feedback helps me stay motivated, so thank you. My intention is to keep the scenario update so that there will be new things happening all the time =)  and if anyone has played long enough, I am sure they might have seen the hidden indications of my intentions =)

[gianni001 19]

A few new features including, thanks all for the support so far.

[neofit 65]

• Added - Lightning storms that during certain weather conditions decimate the map (they look really cool)

By "decimate" you mean kill a large portion of people as every 1 in 10 or is this a typo ? :)

 

Also, would you consider distributing your scenario through Dropbox as well? The Steam workshop is nice and all, but not for scenarios that are updated very often. What happens is that people are playing, you update the scenario and upload it, a player closes the game to eat dinner, Steam updates the scenario, player returns and cannot continue with his saves because the version is different and has to restart.

 

Edit:

Have you tested the game with survivor teammates? How do you control them? I've just seen the Steam workshop page for the first time, and was surprised to see that not only the F2 key is taken, but all of the function keys are. This is a no-no afaic. Squad control is a very important part of the Arma SP experience, and precise control is something that has been part of our muscle memory for years. Please rebind them to something else, to Alt-Fn for example, or better yet let people change the binding them themselves. Personally, finding and having human teammate(s) is an important part of a good full map dynamic scenario experience, but I am not willing to work to break good habits I've been honing since OFP to play this, only to work again to switch back to them for every other scenario.

[neofit 65]

Some remarks after an hour of play.

First, I am surprised at how much has already been done. I was expecting more of a pre-alpha / tech demo that people usually start posting, but this scenario has already quite a bit of meat on the bones. So congrats on that.

I only played an hour because there are a few annoyances that I couldn't look past. But hey, that's me, I'd rather be doing something else than be annoyed.

Annoyances:

* The default (first) Context menu option (the menu that is usually on the scroll wheel) is constantly displayed below the aiming cursor, until I open and close it. Quite distracting.

* Holster Weapon. This script (that, as a side note, should have been part of Arma since like 50 years), is the default action all the time. It should be moved to the middle or bottom of this menu. I get to a car door, instead of 'get in as driver' as the default action has been forever, I holster my weapon. I get to a door, instead of opening it I holster the weapon. I holster the weapon and get inside the car, I am again asked to holster the weapon, you get my drift ;). This alone is enough to make me stop and wait for a fix :).

* The F10 menu auto-opens when entering and exiting a vehicle. I closed it because I didn't want to see it, it should not auto-open.

* The autosave feature is nice, but, first, it should not display the distracting message that it will save within the next 60 seconds, and also turning Autosave off should be an option even after I chose on or off at the start. It should be moved to a "0-0-something" radio menu that people usually use for their custom options menu. I am in a close quarter firefight and suddenly the game freezes for a few seconds to save, this is enough to make one lose his bearings. The problem is now that even after I exit the mission then resume, I cannot turn it off any longer.


Questions:

* I got the military base near Piri and liberated it. Suddenly I am drowning in rebels that I didn't see like 10 seconds ago from the top of the tower. I may be mistaken on this, but are you spawning enemy groups within like 100-200m of the player? If this is so I am not sure I like this, I'd rather nothing spawned outside of cities within shooting range, e.g. closer than 400m or more. Otherwise Arma turns into some silly Doom and its monster closets.


Thoughts:

* I liked the breadcrumbs that you left to the first piece of intel, I didn't expect any story to be implemented already. I liked the radio chatter as well. One criticism though: like in many games and movies, it all seem to take place in a weird world where nobody read a book nor saw a film about this thing called "zombies". Like in the first episodes of The Walking Dead guys go like "woah what is that, are they dead or alive, let's call them walkers". The "what is it, is it alive?" fall into the same category. How about something new, as I imagine I or any other human on Earth would react: "Guys, wtf, zombies? Like in the movies? Is this real?" ;)

* Menus: the F1-F10 keys could imho go into the Context Menu, under an option called like "Perform action" or something

* The dog commands take the whole of the Context menu. It may be better to place them into a submenu of the Context menu, called like "Dog". Giving these Context menu options that open submenus different colours may also help finding them.

* Congrats on coding a whole system to manage the dog as a separate entity, it is working quite well from what I saw. But personally I would prefer if it were normal Arma teammate #2, controllable through the normal Arma teammate actions, the ones that make sense of course. F2-1-6 to make it Stay, F2-1-1 to follow, F2-3-2 to, ahem, "hold fire", F2-3-1 to attack, etc. At least "regular" Arma teammates, when told to Stop, do stop and don't run around in the line of fire when the commanding officer is trying to snipe :).

* I you haven't played Pilgrimage, then stop everything and do it :). It has quite a bit of good features. For example, placing grey "+" signs on corpses that you kill to help you remember where the loot is. Or have the last 1-2 guys in an enemy group potentially surrender, not only because it makes sense, but allows one to interrogated them for extra intel.

* Does the mission support mods with extra weapons like RHS?


Anyway, great job and I'm looking forward to playing more when the annoyances are dealt with.
 

[gianni001 19]

@neofit

 

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

 

1. I have fixed all action display priorities so they dont interfere with standard arma stuff, particularly the holster weapon. So opening doors should be the norm now =)

 

2. I Think you ment the F1 menu opened when getting into vehicle, this shouldnt be the case. I force this menu open shortly after the intro scene as the scenario uses alot of "different" unique systems that I need the user to read about. Is it possible you were getting into the vehicle at the time the menu opened? I can't replicate this problem at all. If it was indeed the F10 menu you are talking about, this has changed significantly but still, it was never tied to entering a vehicle?

 

3. I am yet to adjust the auto save, however. I plan to give players the option to enable / disable auto saving at their tent. This way it can be toggled beyond mission start.

 

4. Regarding my custom user keys F1 - F10.. I am going to change these so they do not interfere with the standard AI controls. 

 

5. Animal AI is a fickle bitch, I spent countless hours trying different methods to get the dog to work efficiently and this method is seemingly the best, however I am happy to explore other options.

 

6. My AI spawn mechanics are a bit in depth but essentially I "kind of" spawn AI in the vicinity of the player (within 1000 meters) , however there is a few circumstances, checks and balances that occur as the intention is to make them a dynamic threat. If your character has a radio on him, he will intercept radio chatter from the AI which is intended to be a warning, Max on "Kill" will also bark if AI are in the vicinity. This is a balancing act for me, I want there to be a constant threat but at the same time I dont want it to feel scripted. I wouldnt mind your thoughts after you have another player thru given that - I have fixed the annoyances =)

 

7. No support for RHS or any mods (yet)

 

8. Have played pilgrimage, it is alot of fun. The idea of an open world, SP survival / un scripted mission was spawned after I played Pilgrimage. Though I wish I had hes coding skills!

 

I hope that address most of your questions, specifically those annoyances as, they were blood annoying and fixed now =)

[neofit 65]

Good job on the menu, it became much more playable now.

I've encountered another roadblock. Again, purely personal, if others like it then more power to them. I don't like the current health/injury system. If I understood F1 correctly, when we are hit we start bleeding which makes us lose HP. We use a bandage to stop the bleeding and HP loss. Then, if our thirst and hunger levels are above 80, we first regenerate blood, then when it's back to full we regenerate HP.

Now numbers. At the very spawn spot, while I was still checking the new interface, I got under fire. Before I could properly take cover I got hit 2 or 3 times. After I valiantly killed the 4 dudes, I bandaged myself and found out that I had about 5800 blood left (out of 12000, btw it would be nice to have this info in the F1 window or F10, so we don't have to restart or load a previous save to find the max after we got shot) and 21 HP (out of 100). My toon was all bloody, could barely limp around, and was constantly making these annoying sigh noises. Nice effects, but it lasts too long. No way to play this way, I had to regen. So I sat down. And waited. And waited. 5 minutes later I was at around 7200 blood. Which means, if I use the full power of my calculator, a total of about 22 minutes sitting down by the fire, hearing sigh noises. Only to reach full blood, after which god knows how long to recover HP, I didn't wait till the full 12K blood. It felt like year 2000 Everquest 1 all over again. Even at x4 time acceleration that's 5 minutes of sitting down, probably reloading a few times because the "constant threat" won't let you react at timex4.

Besides, if either hunger or thirst is below at 79 and we have nothing to raise them with and bad guys shot up our wheels, then what? Spend 3 hours limping to the next vehicle? Reload? Not a very entertaining feature IMHO. I will then simply reload to even before I got shot and bypass this whole health system every time it happens. If these mechanics are forced upon the player by replacing the save-anywhere system with save locations or something, then I simply won't play because I never play scenarios that do that.

I wouldn't call it "realistic" either. I got 3 bullets in me, at least one of which was a 12.5mm if I'm not mistaken. One bandage and sitting it off for half a game day won't bring me back on my feet by any stretch of the imagination ;).

So, to sum things up, it's IMHO too intricate, too punishing, too time-consuming. I didn't feel that it brought anything interesting to manage. Sorry, I'd much rather abstract this whole health system and pop a couple of stock Arma health kits and be on my way. Failing that, I'll just reload.

---

BTW, among the 4 the rebels that jumped me at the spawn spot, 3 had a different DLC weapon each (2x sniper rifles + 1 MG). Two guys didn't have a single bullet. That's probably why the last two kept running around instead of finishing me off, but maybe they are not meant to be without bullets?

[gianni001 19]

@Neofit -

 

Regarding all the health regen stuff. 

 

Essentially, due to the damage handler I have, the concept is you "blood level" is key, so maintaining it is very important. As, you have noticed you can get shot a few times more than would be typical. The scenario has a  little RPG elements to it. One thing to note, and ill be sure to put this in the hints and dialogs is by sleeping you regain 30% hp and 1000 blood. So this is a good way to regen, if you are totally wrecked!

 

As an fyi to you - Once 12000 blood is regained, you will regain health quite fast, around 1% hp per 10 seconds. 

 

As with anything, its always a balancing act.

 

After all, it is a survival sandbox. Ill take these things into consideration =) appreciate the input

[neofit 65]

One thing to note, and ill be sure to put this in the hints and dialogs is by sleeping you regain 30% hp and 1000 blood. So this is a good way to regen, if you are totally wrecked!

 

So in my case, I would have had to sleep 5 times to get my blood back, whatever that means in terms of game time and real time, or sit around for about 25 minutes of real time. This is too long imho. Maybe you can add an option at the beginning to choose either your blood+HP health system or the stock 1-shot-kills+health packs?

 

I would also like to reiterate the request to add a dropbox download for the mission. I tend to not want to play for more than an hour a new mission from the Workshop, because there is a high chance that any interruption may may allow it to download a new version and invalidate all my saves. With a new scenario it is important to be able to control what version you are playing.

[gianni001 19]

Ill get a link today some time, but new versions dont break your current saved scenario. You continue with that one until you restart,which will start the new version.

 

Also tweaking the blood system a fair bit. Changelog soon

[neofit 65]

Ill get a link today some time, but new versions dont break your current saved scenario. You continue with that one until you restart,which will start the new version.

Really? Is this new? I remember every time there was a new version on the workshop, Arma3 wouldn't Resume saying that there was a version mismatch or something to that effect.

[haleks 8212]

Really? Is this new? I remember every time there was a new version on the workshop, Arma3 wouldn't Resume saying that there was a version mismatch or something to that effect.

 

Depends how it's done : if the mission you play at only compiles its functions once (at mission start), then it's safe to keep using the same save until you start a new game.

If you're playing an addon or the base game, then it's probably safer to let go of your save after an update : functions in this case are compiled each time you launch your game, obsoleting your saves in the process.

[palatine 24]

Armaholic / dropbox? :D

[palatine 24]

Hi, I like this mission. But when I save a game (for continuing later) then reload a saved game, the AI gone.

After reload a saved game then arrive in the "home" (where there supposed to be 2 AI family waiting) - but there are no one, just empty.

Any idea?
 

[neofit 65]

Don't bother, this mission seems to have been abandoned a year ago.