[chamber]

NECROPOLIS
City of the Dead

Latest Version is 09.06.06
View the Readme
then
Download


Okay, so zombie mods are nothing new. There's been at least one for every iteration of GTA, and I already know of several in varying states of completion for GTA IV.

So far though, for GTA IV, I haven't seen any that particularly fit my taste. Some of them seem like they just retextured a few peds and called it a day. Others draw too heavily from other games in the survival horror genre (if you want Resident Evil - play Resident Evil. I want zombies in the GTA universe). And if there's anything I can't stand, it's fast zombies.

So, shortly after I finished my Anarchy mod, I got to work. Necropolis is my take on a zombie mod.

It's based on the ideas behind Romero-style zombies, and looks to achieve a great old b-movie feel.

Click Here to View the Trailer

Features:

• Enemy peds that move, sound, and act like Romero-style zombies.
• After the initial outbreak, experience Liberty City as an evacuated ghost town. No trains, few cars, almost no living people.
• Basic missions, including gathering supplies and searching for survivors.
• Survivors aren't just random peds - they're secondary characters, with names and personalities - some of them will even help you with their special abilities (for instance, a mechanic can fix your vehicle overnight, and a doctor can restore your health more quickly).
• Rescued survivors act as bodyguards, and will accompany you on your endeavors.

Additional Challenges:

• The gun stores are closed and most of the weapons, armor, and med kits scattered around the city have already been taken by evacuating citizens. And I'll promise you the Burger Shot employees haven't stuck around. You'll have to make do with a limited arsenal, and less options for restoring your health.
• The islands of Liberty City are under quarantine. Anyone caught trying to make it back to the mainland will be executed on sight. Use boats or helicopters at your own risk.

Technical Goals:

• Must be completed entirely in Alice. While I know C++ and .Net, I'd like to show how powerful and flexible Lua actually is. I also feel like Lua mods are a greater contribution to the community, because they're, by their nature, open source. Giving new programmers the opportunity to learn by example can only raise the level of knowledge in the community.
• Must be completely non-destructive. The original game files must remain intact and unmodified - meaning that all uninstallation requires is the deletion of the mod's .lua files.

News:
This is very nearly finished - as you can see from the trailer, most of the base functionality is already there. I've got a few more things to finish up in regards to the survivors (mostly just placing them around the city). Barring any major unforeseen occurrences, I don't see any reason this can't be done before the end of the month. Also, if anybody knows how to get the prison gates in Alderney open, send me a PM. DOES_OBJECT_OF_TYPE_EXIST_AT_COORDS finds the doors, but SET_STATE_OF_CLOSEST_DOOR_OF_TYPE won't unlock them.

Update - 5-08-09: I got the prison doors open. I really appreciate the help from everyone, ZAZ especially. Mod is still coming along, still expect to finish it by the end of the month. My current question - did anyone ever figure out how to load the interior of the church from the McReary funeral mission? Or at least know which .sco file has the data for that mission?

Update - 5-15-09: Good news for those of you that were hoping for abandoned cars in the streets - I've found a way around the problems I was having with positioning them, and the abandoned streets of post-infection Liberty City are now littered with burnt-out abandoned vehicles.

Update - 6-06-09: I've made the decision to move Necropolis into open beta. It works for the most part, and is a lot of fun to play, even if not everything is working exactly like I'd hoped yet. This version is stable enough for players to download and enjoy, but I'm mainly targeting it at other developers.

If you're an Alice developer, feel free to take a look at the code and see if you can make improvements or find mistakes I haven't spotted. Trouble areas and unfinished features are notated in the "For Developers" section of the readme file.

Anything you can contribute, I'll add in, and include in the next official release (with full credit to you for your work, of course!). Any suggested changes not fitting the previously listed Technical Goals, however, will be disregarded.

This post has been edited by chamber on Saturday, Jun 6 2009, 18:36

This mod is hosted at GTAGarage.com

Downloads:
Download v09.06.06 - 0.021MB, uploaded on Jun 06 2009, downloaded 10580 times

Click here to view the mod at GTAGarage

[Satyr22cz]

good
first zombie mod for GTA IV

[z007117]

QUOTE (chamber @ May 5 2009, 19:01)

NECROPOLIS City of the Dead Okay, so zombie mods are nothing new. There's been at least one for every iteration of GTA, and I already know of several in varying states of completion for GTA IV. So far though, for GTA IV, I haven't seen any that particularly fit my taste. Some of them seem like they just retextured a few peds and called it a day. Others draw too heavily from other games in the survival horror genre (if you want Resident Evil - play Resident Evil. I want zombies in the GTA universe). And if there's anything I can't stand, it's fast zombies. So, shortly after I finished my Anarchy mod, I got to work. Necropolis is my take on a zombie mod. It's based on the ideas behind Romero-style zombies, and looks to achieve a great old b-movie feel. Click Here to View the Trailer Features: Enemy peds that move, sound, and act like Romero-style zombies. After the initial outbreak, experience Liberty City as an evacuated ghost town. No trains, few cars, almost no living people. Basic missions, including gathering supplies and searching for survivors. Survivors aren't just random peds - they're secondary characters, with names and personalities - some of them will even help you with their special abilities (for instance, a mechanic can fix your vehicle overnight, and a doctor can restore your health more quickly). Rescued survivors act as bodyguards, and will accompany you on your endeavors. Additional Challenges: The gun stores are closed and most of the weapons, armor, and med kits scattered around the city have already been taken by evacuating citizens. And I'll promise you the Burger Shot employees haven't stuck around. You'll have to make do with a limited arsenal, and less options for restoring your health. The islands of Liberty City are under quarantine. Anyone caught trying to make it back to the mainland will be executed on sight. Use boats or helicopters at your own risk. Technical Goals: Must be completed entirely in Alice. While I know C++ and .Net, I'd like to show how powerful and flexible Lua actually is. I also feel like Lua mods are a greater contribution to the community, because they're, by their nature, open source. Giving new programmers the opportunity to learn by example can only raise the level of knowledge in the community. Must be completely non-destructive. The original game files must remain intact and unmodified - meaning that all uninstallation requires is the deletion of the mod's .lua files. News: This is very nearly finished - as you can see from the trailer, most of the base functionality is already there. I've got a few more things to finish up in regards to the survivors (mostly just placing them around the city). Barring any major unforeseen occurrences, I don't see any reason this can't be done before the end of the month. Also, if anybody knows how to get the prison gates in Alderney open, send me a PM. DOES_OBJECT_OF_TYPE_EXIST_AT_COORDS finds the doors, but SET_STATE_OF_CLOSEST_DOOR_OF_TYPE won't unlock them.

it looks very good¡£¡£¡£¡£thanks¡£¡£harry up

[Paper-Cut]

Looking good, keep up the good work.

[goin-god]

QUOTE (Satyr22cz @ May 5 2009, 16:35)

good first zombie mod for GTA IV

its not.

Looks promising. Good luck with it.

[Maciel]

Damn, great work, but, can you put them like in "Dawn of the dead" 2004, you know, they run instead of the retard walking.

Awesome mod dude.

[-Bone-]

Very good idea!

Can u make the game spawn blown-up, flipped and badly damaged vehicles and dead bodies? So instead of the typical spawn-peds-and-moving-cars-in-the-distance-and-around-you, you could make a real post-apocalyptic feeling. Blown-up cop cars, ambulance and fire trucks, damaged cars, zombies everywhere.

Be genetically different baby!

This post has been edited by -Bone- on Wednesday, May 6 2009, 22:22

[chamber]

QUOTE (-Bone- @ May 6 2009, 17:19)

Can u make the game spawn blown-up, flipped and badly damaged vehicles and dead bodies? So instead of the typical spawn-peds-and-moving-cars-in-the-distance-and-around-you, you could make a real post-apocalyptic feeling. Blown-up cop cars, ambulance and fire trucks, damaged cars, zombies everywhere.

I originally planned to do something like this, but unfortunately, it's not as easy to spawn a visibly damaged car as you'd think. You can set the 'car health' to some low number, but other than black smoke if you try to drive it, it doesn't have any visual effect.

Now that I think about it though, there may be a way to get it to spawn those totally burned out cars - you know, the husks that are left when a car explodes.

I think it'd be a nice touch. I also like the ability to impede movement by vehicle - with wrecked cars littering the street, you couldn't just grab a sports car from an abandoned dealership and zip around town at top speed. But the problem would be in positioning them. The way the game itself spawns vehicles is hard-coded, meaning we can't just modify it to make empty destroyed cars instead of normal cars with drivers. If I wrote a car spawning procedure that worked like I spawn peds - randomly in a radius around you - the cars would end up in weird places (on top of buildings, inside of interiors, etc). If I wanted to try placing them manually around the city, that would be a huge task, and could easily add months of development time - not to mention having all those cars spawned at once would make for huge memory usage.

I could turn traffic back on, then search for cars in the area around the player, then convert those to burnt out cars - but I'd have to test and see if it could do that fast enough to be effective. My guess is no - you'd see a normal car with a person in it for 2-3 seconds, then suddenly the person would disappear and the car would turn into a burnt-out version of itself.

As you can see, it's definitely an idea I've rolled around, but I haven't come to a satisfying conclusion yet. If I do, I can assure you I'll implement it.

The peds and cars in the distance around you, however, are mostly removed. There's still parked cars here and there (otherwise you'd have to ALWAYS be on foot, and that gets old quick), but the traffic is gone, and after the first 'mission', you'll almost never see random people around that aren't zombies.

[kimr120]

funny that you use hurt walk mod on the zombies

[nerner]

Really nice mod, first zombie style one for IV to be completed maybe?

Could you please give an approximate date for it to be finished by?

[goin-god]

Looking awesome with thouse anims. Love how this looks in IV.

[chamber]

QUOTE (nerner @ May 8 2009, 12:59)

Could you please give an approximate date for it to be finished by?

I'm looking to have a fully-functional beta released by the end of the month.

It'll be a complete version as far as I know, but due to the complexity I won't be surprised if people come across a bug or two.

QUOTE

funny that you use hurt walk mod on the zombies

I was actually really surprised at how well that worked.

I've enjoyed finding clever ways to utilize built-in resources (a necessary challenge, since making this mod non-destructive means I can't add my own artwork or sounds). One of the things you don't really notice in the trailer is the noises the zombies make. Everybody knows about that zombie player skin that you can unlock for multiplayer - to be used with that, there's actually a collection of "zombie groan" noises already in the game files. I assigned that to the peds - and they actually shuffle around groaning like zombies. It's pretty unnerving, actually, to be standing around in some dark tunnel, and suddenly hear a zombie growl right behind you.

[nerner]

QUOTE (chamber @ May 8 2009, 20:42)

I'm looking to have a fully-functional beta released by the end of the month.

Cool, but you can take as long as you want to, no rush mate.

[drytaffin]

Awesome, I watched the video and I should say: Thank you, it's great !

I have some suggestion for you: Make the game always dark or make somethink different between day and night, for instance: During Night: Zombies, and during day: some "simple" mission which would help you to kill zombies [Find a car, buy you gun, repair a car etc...] and this with very few zombies during the day.
And smething else: A flashlight would be awesome.

It may be really hard but really fun to play with

Again, great work

This post has been edited by drytaffin on Saturday, May 9 2009, 20:12

[kimr120]

here some ideas!
1. try to make running zombies to
2. make them follow you everywhere.

[HippieCommunist]

a tip would be to make the running zombies and the gimped walking ones to have different moving multipliers... or even a CHANGING one for creepyness @_@

cant wait to try!

[RichyZ]

QUOTE (kimr120 @ May 9 2009, 17:38)

here some ideas! 1. try to make running zombies to 2. make them follow you everywhere.

Read the first post, he said he despises fast zombies.

[RichyZ]

QUOTE (drytaffin @ May 9 2009, 14:27)

Awesome, I watched the video and I should say: Thank you, it's great ! I have some suggestion for you: Make the game always dark or make somethink different between day and night, for instance: During Night: Zombies, and during day: some "simple" mission which would help you to kill zombies [Find a car, buy you gun, repair a car etc...] and this with very few zombies during the day. And smething else: A flashlight would be awesome. It may be really hard but really fun to play with Again, great work

Buy you a gun? Who to buy from? And if there WAS anyone to buy from, why would the dollar be useful?

[JJJ8]

QUOTE (RichyZ @ May 9 2009, 23:16)

QUOTE (kimr120 @ May 9 2009, 17:38) here some ideas! 1. try to make running zombies to 2. make them follow you everywhere. Read the first post, he said he despises fast zombies.

Indeed. I hate running zombies too.
Glad that chamber is supporting Romero-style zombies.
(People who demands running zombies should go to other zombie mods threads, or use chambers Anarchy mod. In anarchy, the peds will come running torwards you trying to kill you like you wish...with weapons in hands and driving cars. Hehe )

Oh, and I am looking forward to this great mod.
How excitng it would be, to able to fight your way thorugh zombies by only using lua script!

P.S.
I was a bit wondering about... I don't know how to say that...back ground traffic?
(The flow of cars that you see on roads when your high above the air, or a lot of head lights and tail lights at a straigt road even there aren't real traffic)
Are you going to disable that stuff cause it is totally useless for a ghost town. Or is it hardcoded?
Just a small question...

This post has been edited by JJJ8 on Sunday, May 10 2009, 17:06

[olddawid]

from the movie it lookd like they got zombies after the peds dead/shot it rises to zombie and start chasing?

u could make em randomly accelerating and randomly spawn faster/slower. And an idea is to ,know when the heli chases whit spotlight on night kinda effect or flashlight effect when dark .... like a cirkle light around u that stops for like 4 seconds randomly ...