Hey ditoLoco, thanks for the great feedback, keep it coming. :)
1. The skill system is made in such a way that you always choose from the next level skill of your profession when you level up, and 2 skills randomly selected from other professions (or skills used by NPC characters for your new level).
Some abilities will always be better than others, and many will depend on your playstyle. Vampire touch, for example, is one of a very few ways that you can heal during combat, it scales with your damage, and it can be difficult to balance because too much health gain can make the character immortal. It might need some tweaking, but it was already too strong once, so I have to be cautious.
Right now, there are a decent amount of abilities up to level 13 and a few on level 14. About 125 abilities in total to use, and there are editors available if someone would like to mod in new ones. Growing the choice to 5 abilities I think will be too wide, as it will provide most abilities of professions. I think it's better to have more replayability and the possibility of making different characters in every playthrough.
The next big patch will be about AI improvements, which will include the behavior of summons.
2. Sleeping
- It might be a good idea to speed it up like that. I'll have to think how doable it would be without freezing the world (so enemies can still ambush you if you sleep in the wild).
- You regain health by waiting mostly, so both sleeping and waiting for health will regenerate it. Only sleeping regenerates fatigue, and it can have some consequences, like reduced hearing of enemies. You can sleep only if you have fatigue, while in some cases, you are hurt, but not tired and might want to wait it out a bit.
- The sleeping speed depends on enemies around. If there is someone nearby, sleeping will be slower. The reason for this is to give you time to react if you get in danger.
3. Crafting & 4 Salvaging
These are excellent suggestions, I'll add them to the list of things to do. :)
One of the ideas I had was to create a godlike power to teleport anywhere in the world for your whole stamina bar, which would help with setting up base. This will likely come with other powers in one of the later big patches. Building (which includes creating anvils and other workstations) was moved for a further patch to focus on AI right now, but it will come eventually.
5. Enemies
I'll try to make the zombie situation more convenient.
- Humans don't see at night unless you have a source of light (torch, candle, light spell, etc.). I haven't gotten the situation where humans shot at me at night (elves do, though), but I'll check it out.
- Casters use weapons to scale their abilities, and these weapons deteriorate as they cast them. Mechanically speaking, every attack or ability that does damage will reduce the durability of your weapon. Shield deteriorates from getting hit. The hitting walls situation I'll get in control in one of the future patches. :)
6. Aiming
I think I understand. I'll see what I can do about it.
As for the shooting through obstacles, right now when you input a movement for example, all "attacking" is processed before any moves for AI. After your movement, the world moves forward by a set of time it takes for you to make your action. So let's say it can look like this:
- You move, the world moves by 1 unit of time, and all AI can make actions depending on how long they didn't act.
- AI that decided to make an attack go first. So, for example, a hunter might have shot you at your new position, where the line of sight was good.
- AI that decided to make a move go second. A zombie could have moved at this point and block the line of sight, giving the perception of blocking an enemy shot.
I'm not sure if something can be done without slowing down combat by a lot, given the technical choices I've made when building the game. Maybe rotating some systems to process movement before an attack could help, but I'll have to think about possible consequences.
Bonus 7. Movement
I think we had the rotation that was processed while being held, but it didn't work too well. Moving forward is done in such a way to speed up walking as much as possible, even at the cost of moving a little further than intended. Rotating requires a bit more precision.
The going over the available weight limit, I have a task somewhere to debuff the character under heavy load. ;)