PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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11 hours ago, Laz Man said:

Sounds like working as intended. 😂

Higher Difficulty is Difficult...check

More then 1 option to survive...check

But seriously, cheese is a moving target. They could change to fix one cheese but introduce a new cheese in the process.  Not sure if your just venting or if you actually have a suggestion in mind because before A17/A18, you just built super thick walls and the zeds just bee lined it at you and the game was over. Roll the credits.

Vedui did a recent video comparing A16 AI to A18 AI, and I cant believe people miss the old way which was even cheesier (dig a hole and place dirt over your head or build an elevated arch and watch the zeds spin in circles below you lol)

Reference Video:

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Very cool experiment, though I think he was a bit quick to call some of those scenarios 'game breaking'.  In a real game, there would have been cops (who have a ranged attack), spiders (who can climb), and hornets/vultures (who will be attacking you from the air).

I think this video illustrates one of the best things about A16 - that the z's didn't know the hit points of each material. 

 
Damocles said:
At least the cheerleaders are (to be politically correct) not blonde anymore.
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I was surprised at how well the cheerleaders and wights climbed over each other in the video - they almost got over the top that way.  The most I see when I play is just one standing on another's shoulders here and there, although I play single player and they don't spawn in clumps of 25 at a time.

As someone was saying a few pages back, it's more interesting to have each type of zombie have its own gameplay role (the spitter, the flier, the jumper, the digger, etc.)  And seeing that video, I can totally see the cheerleader taking the acrobat role.  That is, being the specialist in climbing on top of other zombies.  I find this idea compelling, because waves of different zombie types require arranging and then juggling more layers of defense, rewarding elegant designs in addition to brute force or cheesy ones.

 
Gazz said:
Somewhat realistic but impossible to get a definite count. A good while back I compared forum accounts/visits and game sales.

So while the forumites sometimes think they represent anything, the truth is that the entire forum together is a tiny minority. It definitely is something we keep in mind when evaluating feedback. 😃
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Still better than nothing, and might even be enough for a representative sampling, although there's no way to know. 

 
hotpoon said:
Very cool experiment, though I think he was a bit quick to call some of those scenarios 'game breaking'.  In a real game, there would have been cops (who have a ranged attack), spiders (who can climb), and hornets/vultures (who will be attacking you from the air).

I think this video illustrates one of the best things about A16 - that the z's didn't know the hit points of each material. 
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The hitpoint sensing is actually not a bad idea.  If another zombie sees another breaking in through a door, it makes sense the others will follow.  Where my immersion breaks is when they can sense this 10 blocks away behind a building.

If they can reduce the hp sensing down to maybe to a 4 block radius it would feel more immersive...😅

 
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Laz Man said:
The hitpoint sensing is actually not a bad idea.  If another zombie sees another breaking in through a door, it makes sense the others will follow.  Where my immersion breaks is when they can sense this 10 blocks away behind a building.

If they can reduce the hp sensing down to maybe to a 4 block radius it would feel more immersive...😅
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I tend to agree with you, but additionally I think it shouldn't be a 'sense' thing, but a 'line of sight' thing.  I've had 2 situations that felt really b.s. to me:

  1. Zombies outside bashing on one block.  That block starts to crack, so I put a barb wire on it so that when it does crack, they first get cut up by that before getting to me, but instead they collectively start bashing on another block. They couldn't see me place the barb wire, so they shouldn't have known about it.
  2. Zombie dobermans seeing me on a roof and then performing a very complex path through a bunch of closed doors and multiple floors to get to me.
 To me that is broken.

I also really like @Khalagar's idea:

Ideally, the solution would be to have different special zombies that can make paths for the other zombies. Like a Zombie Miner or something that specifically makes tunnels to different areas in an underground base and the other zombies could follow those tunnels, or spider zombies leaving a web ladder so others can follow them onto roofs or something
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If a construction zombie had hit point knowledge, he could lead the way for the other zombies, and you would need to prioritise taking him out. I think that could be fun. 

Damocles said:
Well, you have taken them out of the game since A17 for some reason. That is a politically correct move in the current times.
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I played with a mod recently where, in addition to the default, they had business women as well as male strippers.  I have to admit, I really liked that.  I'm not one to champion political correctness. It's not that important to me, but seeing that in the mod me smile. 

 
hotpoon said:
I tend to agree with you, but additionally I think it shouldn't be a 'sense' thing, but a 'line of sight' thing.  I've had 2 situations that felt really b.s. to me:

  1. Zombies outside bashing on one block.  That block starts to crack, so I put a barb wire on it so that when it does crack, they first get cut up by that before getting to me, but instead they collectively start bashing on another block. They couldn't see me place the barb wire, so they shouldn't have known about it.
  2. Zombie dobermans seeing me on a roof and then performing a very complex path through a bunch of closed doors and multiple floors to get to me.
 To me that is broken.

I also really like @Khalagar's idea:

If a construction zombie had hit point knowledge, he could lead the way for the other zombies, and you would need to prioritise taking him out. I think that could be fun. 

I played with a mod recently where, in addition to the default, they had business women as well as male strippers.  I have to admit, I really liked that.  I'm not one to champion political correctness. It's not that important to me, but seeing that in the mod me smile. 
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Yeah if they can program line of sight easily (no clue).  I figured the quick fix is just limiting their "sensing" radius. :)  (no clue if that is easy/hard either lol)

 
Khalagar said:
Isn't that just the heat map system? I thought breadcrumb was where zombies would follow the path you took so they would know where your doors were and where to jump or avoid traps etc
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No. The heat map controls spawning—in particular the spawning of screamers. It has nothing to do with zombies who are already spawned drawing closer to players because of noise. 
 

Yes. The zombies indirectly follow the player following “breadcrumbs” by going to the last position they heard the player and then the next one and so forth.  This draws them closer to the player they have not seen. Once they see the player they stop following  indirectly and start following directly. 
 

No. Breadcrumbs have nothing to do with them finding doors or avoiding traps. The pathing system calculates the cheapest route to you and the zombies take that route. They don’t avoid spikes because you did. They go around spikes because that is less expensive movement-wise than it is to go through. If you make your spikes flush with the ground they will barrel into them without thought regardless of the path you took. 

 
Khalagar said:
Isn't that just the heat map system? I thought breadcrumb was where zombies would follow the path you took so they would know where your doors were and where to jump or avoid traps etc

Yeah, Grenades are near mandatory even for my "on the road" fight. I've made a few decent "kill chimney" that rely on explosives with low block damage, but maybe it's just on the higher difficulties, it seems like when I've tried grenades with a "Castle gates" style build it starts getting hectic way too fast, especially with Demos. But I guess those are late enough where you just expect noobs to account for them with their base design or die

Do you guys ever monitor the Subreddit? As with basically all games, the subreddit is like 10 times bigger than the actual forums or the steam forums and seems to be the main place people discuss the game. Like me for instance, I've played for like 3 or 4 years but never even really thought about posting on the official forums until the A19 signup stuff was here. The subreddit is quite active, especially after big updates
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With the telemetry software, hopefully they will be able to better gather objective data moving forward. 😁

Roland said:
No. The heat map controls spawning—in particular the spawning of screamers. It has nothing to do with zombies who are already spawned drawing closer to players because of noise. 
 

Yes. The zombies indirectly follow the player following “breadcrumbs” by going to the last position they heard the player and then the next one and so forth.  This draws them closer to the player they have not seen. Once they see the player they stop following  indirectly and start following directly. 
 

No. Breadcrumbs have nothing to do with them finding doors or avoiding traps. The pathing system calculates the cheapest route to you and the zombies take that route. They don’t avoid spikes because you did. They go around spikes because that is less expensive movement-wise than it is to go through. If you make your spikes flush with the ground they will barrel into them without thought regardless of the path you took. 
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Thanks for the reminder about spikes.  A great tip when using them for horde bases.

 
Gazz said:
So while the forumites sometimes think they represent anything, the truth is that the entire forum together is a tiny minority. It definitely is something we keep in mind when evaluating feedback. 😃

 
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and the authorities surely never get bored telling us our opinions are meaningless 

Roland said:
But they're all painters apparently (and their friends and family).
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they re called people of color these days...

 
I agree that the new pathing is not ideal for horde night base defense. Hotpoon's example of placing a barb wire fence behind a block where the zombies are about to break through only to have them switch to a new place because of the block HP change is absolutely frustrating and immersion breaking. Vedui makes a strong point that in a zombie game you would expect zombies to want to travel the shortest distance rather than the cheapest distance.

However, the new AI is absolutely the best for POI exploration. Zombies being able to path to wherever you are deep within a POI makes it thrilling as you have zombies entering from outside and actually working their way to where you are. It feels very survival horror-- much better than A16 and previous. Now when I compare the amount of gameplay time spent inside POI's compared to defending from the blood moon horde, I have to say that the new pathing is a net win. 6-7 days a week exploring POIs vs 1 night a week defending makes the new pathing very worth it in my eyes.

Hopefully they can obfuscate the jarring behavior better for horde night but I don't want them to change a thing about the pathing if that means we lose what we have now for POI exploration. It already seems a bit less intense in A18 than it was in A17. In A17 the zombies were like relentless terminators never stopping in finding pathways to where you were in whatever building you were exploring. In A18 they seem a bit psychotic or A.D.D. at times-- but it still is way better than it ever was previous to A17.

I disagree with Vedui when he said that the cost was too high and zombies should be reverted back to shortest direct distance to the player. I suppose if you feel that horde night is the whole reason for playing then I can understand that feeling. But I don't. It is a big part of the game to be sure but I spend way more time and enjoyment exploring POI's than I do playing horde night base defense and the new pathing is fantastic for that experience.

 
I would say zombie lives matter! But another developer was already attacked by Kool-aid dyed hair people...and they moronically bent the knee and removed the joke to appease a miniscule percentage of the population who will never play their game anyways...sigh , nothing new as almost every caves these days...

 
Roland said:
If you make your spikes flush with the ground they will barrel into them without thought regardless of the path you took
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What do you mean by flush with the ground? With the old spikes you could dig a block down and place them in the ground quite well, do you still do that with the current ones? Like make the floor itself made out of spikes? ? I didn't think the current ones even damaged on the top part tbh

Laz Man said:
No one ever said meaningless, but I can understand why it feels that way.
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I'm still curious if they check the subreddit much. It's basically the "real official forum" for a lot of games where the devs monitor it and engage the crowd, but it's also common for devs to just basically ignore the 70K+ (in 7 days to die's case) subreddit and only monitor their own smaller forums.

74K people on the subreddit might be small by total game sales wise, but total sales is a pretty bad metric anyway because a GIGANTIC percent of people never even launch a game or make it past the first 15 minutes. Like in 7 days to die, over 35% of players have never even crafted a bedroll, and almost 50% of players have never even killed 10 zombies. Over 70% of players have never hit bedrock etc.

In marketing, you basically have to assume that for every person who's actually actively communicating, there's a ton more who are lurking. I don't remember the exact numbers, but for a lot of places, it's something like "for every one person calls and complains, there are 10,000 who are unhappy but didn't call"

Roland said:
. Zombies being able to path to wherever you are deep within a POI makes it thrilling as you have zombies entering from outside and actually working their way to where you are
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Is it just me, or is it ONLY Lumberjacks and screamers that do this? Freaking Lumberjacks will aggro from 98.9 miles away and then dig through a solid steel bunker to find you because they heard you were talking smack 9,000 levels deep in a PoI you are raiding. I rarely ever get any other zombie that decides it wants in on the fun and comes into a PoI after you

Lumberjacks are literally the minibosses of the game, they aggro from so far away and feel like they have as much health as an irradiated feral wight. Frozen rage and hate, barely even condensed into a big burly man

 
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