These are a few effects I thought that they would look good in 4.0. I am writing about two kinds of effects: visual effects/graphical effects and physical effects (e.g. gun recoil and ballistics)
Graphical effects:
- Dust
It would look like a small piece of fog around your feet while you walk. (It is a pretty bad discription, I hope you know what I mean). I would also appear when you drive a vehicle. There would be much more dust behind vehicles.
Dust will just appear on some ground materials while walking on e.g. dirt, gravel and sand while vehicles would make dust everwhere but with a different intensity depending on the speed, ground material (Sand and dirt would make more dust than on roads on grass) and wetness (does this word even exist?). Wet roads and grass like after/during rain or next to water like rivers and lakes make less dust than dry sand. Sounds logic?
Same is with walking: prone and sneak would not make any dust on all materials, walking just on dry dirt and sand, running would make a bit dust on dry grass, much more on sand and dirt. Roads and stone would make no dust at all. More about dry and wet ground materials under the physical topic.
2.Waves
Volumentric objekts that appear when an object moves through water, smaller and slower objects cause smaller waves than big and fast objects. - Fire
Is not just graphical. If we get an official flamethrower and molotovs/incendiaries it would be cool if we can set wooden structures and barricades on fire (maybe op, what you think? ). We could extinguish it with extinguishers (a new item that Nelson could add, rare and could be found at fire stations) or buckets of water (also an new item, empty buckets could be found at farms and camps and filled up at rivers). - Vehicle traces
Something similar to the footprints Nelson showed us in his devlog but for vehicles. - Bullet holes
Also something ballistic: when a bullet breaks through e.g. a window, it will left a hole with some cracks around it. If the bullet doesn’t go through e.g. metal or stone, it would left a more 3D hole or dent, not just a decal.
Physical effects
- Weapon behaviour
1.1 Weapons and statima
It would be like that: after running or jumping (low statima) it would be much harder to aim and the recoil would be stronger -> it would be harder to make a clear shot.
1.2 Weapons and their interaction with the surrounding
We saw in the first devlog that guns will get up when you get close to a wall. So maybe Nelson could make it like that: when you stand in front of a little wall or fence and your gun is on the same height as the top of the fence, it will be a bit stabilised when you aim because it would kind of laying down on the object. It would also decrease the recoil of the gun. The effect would dissappear when you start walking and start again when you stand in frong of a object for about 1 second.
1.3 Ballistics
There are lots of other posts about ballistics so I won’t write much about it. Just a few things I would like to see:
- things like ricochet and breakthrough of armour (already on trello)
- different types of ammo for large calibers like explosive, incendiary and anti- armour/ anti tank bullets.
- Ground materials
I thought it might be interesting if ground materials would have effects on the character an on vehicle:
- wet materials make you slide further and make your vehicle harder to control/ you may get stuck in mud (wet dirt)
- different materials make you walk louder than on others, e.g. it would be louder to walk on crunching gravel than on sand or grass. Walking louder would alert more zombies (already implemented for different types of walking, but my idea is to make it depending on the ground material, too
- mud and sand could make you move slower because you sink in a bit (everyone who already walked in real sand knows what I mean)
This are my ideas for this time, maybe something will follow in the future.