PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[Aldranon]

...

If you just build a tower that has solid r concrete and stand on it, they literally cannot get to you for a long @%$*#! time. I'm talking a solid 7x7 or 9x9 r concrete 4 high base to stand on. I start with a hollowed out one, then when I get spare resources I fill in another layer until I'm out of space then tear out the ladder hole and fill it. You don't need to get to the inside once its done any repairs would occur from the outside where it was damaged.

I like going at least twice that high and eventually growing the fortress to the claim block's range. 

Also putting a slope up on the outer walls appears to deflect some of the damage done.  Sometimes a lot of damage is deflected, if you don't move from the center, the AI can get "Stuck" and the "zombios" will be running against the wall and not be attacking.  

 

[Roland]

Whatever breadcrumb system was in before a17 is not in the game. The one I added in a17 or a18, can't remember, is used for AI seeking noises. The breadcrumb makes seeking noises less accurate, so it is helpful to the player.

I don't think there ever was a breadcrumb system before you joined the team. It was often talked about for the future. I said "still" in but I just meant that no breadcrumb system that I know of has been removed. In A16 zombies were blind and deaf at night to the point where you could chop down a tree four blocks away from one and as long as you were crouched you were invisible. Definitely no functioning system of breadcrumb sounds operating in A16...

 

[MechanicalLens]

deleted

 

[Aldranon]

Exactly this. Dig a block down and place a spike. They most certainly damage when walked on and most zombies get stuck on them and so continue to take damage until they die or the spike is destroyed. Also, when a spike is destroyed other zombies will choose to walk across existing spikes rather than go down a block and then to hit the next spike. So a ring of spike placed one block down in the ground will actually get much more fully utilized. They won't tend to make a path through and then all the rest follow that bath. They will keep moving around stepping on the next spike so they can maintain their cheapest pathway.

...

If I bother with spikes, I first place blocks in a checkerboard pattern around my base.

Then place barbed wire flat on each block and iron spikes between each block.

For slowing them down more, I still put barbed wired on the tops of each block, but cover all sides of every other block with barbed wire too!  No spikes, of course.

Just to add flavor to BM when I have more resources than I need.  

 

[madmole]

I like going at least twice that high and eventually growing the fortress to the claim block's range. 

Also putting a slope up on the outer walls appears to deflect some of the damage done.  Sometimes a lot of damage is deflected, if you don't move from the center, the AI can get "Stuck" and the "zombios" will be running against the wall and not be attacking.  

Twice as high? Makes them further away to shoot and if you fall you risk breaking a leg. My tower as a whole is very tall, but my bars are 4 meters up so I can shotgun their brains out.

 

[Alpacko]

Less than could be .0001%. It doesn't imply that that it is 4% something. Take the total forum member count and divide into 12-25 million (copies sold I haven't checked for a while but that should be in the ballpark) and that is the % of users that visit the forum.

one could ask how many of those 12-25m people played 4 more than 0-10 hours and how much they care 4 the progress of this game, let alone the very existence of this forum.

since 7days isnt a "game as a service" or full of MTXs (yet) one could ofc dont give a firetruck about how much people care(or even install the game), after they ve paid.

if they are not interested in word-of-mouth advertising - that is.

 

[Aldranon]

Twice as high? Makes them further away to shoot and if you fall you risk breaking a leg. My tower as a whole is very tall, but my bars are 4 meters up so I can shotgun their brains out.

They can pyramid up pretty high.

If I shoot the BM, I feel I'm robbing myself of quality POI time! 

Its a good feeling when going into Tier 3/4 POI's (best looting POI's) with a crap ton of ammo!

Tier 5 POI's need rework IMHO.  Random "loot room" location mostly.

 

[madmole]

one could ask how many of those 12-25m people played 4 more than 0-10 hours and how much they care 4 the progress of this game, let alone the very existence of this forum.

since 7days isnt a "game as a service" or full of MTXs (yet) one could ofc dont give a firetruck about how much people care(or even install the game), after they ve paid.

if they are not interested in word-of-mouth advertising - that is.

Median play time is 14 hours which is insane. Most games have less than 2 hour median play time. And I must have typo'd I meant 12-15m. We would like to get as many people addicted to the game as possible obviously, its good to have happy customers, most happy customers will repeat buy the next game we make without question. We like making games that become a hobby for people. I just hope a lot of people who didn't like it 7 years ago give it another shot when we're gold.

 

[Khalagar]

Holy crap, I can see why loot is getting nerfed a bit early game. On my current A18.4 character on Warrior with some run happy zombies,  by the end of day 1 I already had an AK, Shotgun with 120+ shells, 70 9mm bullets, an iron spear (which promptly flew into the void never to be found), some iron armor etc.

This is from the morning of day 5, and is after I lost an entire day on day 4 due to a broken leg and 18 over encumbrance requiring me to limp back to camp ridiculously slowly so I could splint it. By Day 2 or 3 I was already getting steel tools and chainsaws, all I need now is an auger or steel pick to have the full set by the end of day 5.  Not pictured - An almost complete motorcycle in the box, waiting for the last couple of parts I'm about to buy, and tons of brass and iron tools and weapons I need to sell

Honestly, I think a lot of current loot issues on A18 isn't even (just) the spawning, it's the vendors. I always think the Lucky Looter perk is over rated and go for the Quest Reward perk instead. So my first 4 points go to raising the Quest Reward thing to level 2 so I get way more dukes and better reward options, then just spam buried supplies quests because they are fast and give food and plans.

I know madmole has mentioned that in A19 the traders are still a bit out of line with the rest of the loot drops, so I'll probably have to self limit by not going for my usual Quest Reward perk. I just thought of what Mad Mole was saying about the carrot and stick when I went from the initial "AW YEAH! A Steel fire-axe!!!" to just auto scrapping all the iron ones I proceeded to find. I've basically already skipped completely past the primitive age within a single day, and hit the end levels of mid tier already within about 4 days of actual play time and nearly 20 hours in game spent limping home with an unsplinted broken leg while over encumbered

So the logic for A19 seems to be, you might have level 1 military leg armor, but a level 4+ scrap armor and use it instead because it's higher level, but that's never really been a thing for me early game because mods are so rare in the early levels. I rarely ever have enough mods to even fill all my level 1-2 gear for the first few days / week. Are mods going to be more common? Or will the loot have more differences between levels now besides just mod slots?

 

[MechanicalLens]

deleted

 

[Laz Man]

If I bother with spikes, I first place blocks in a checkerboard pattern around my base.

Then place barbed wire flat on each block and iron spikes between each block.

For slowing them down more, I still put barbed wired on the tops of each block, but cover all sides of every other block with barbed wire too!  No spikes, of course.

Just to add flavor to BM when I have more resources than I need.  

Barb wire flat?  Did you mod those back in?  Only barb wire in game now is the one held up by wooden posts.

 

[FranticDan]

Not a fan of the candy thing either.  I won't be using them so its not too big a deal to me besides wasted Dev time that could have been put towards something nice.   I've never used a vending machine anyway.. no change for me.  I know they said they are putting in candy to reduce food in vending machines.   A simpler and more believable way of reducing food in vending machines would have been to... you know.. reduce the food in vending machines ---- without adding magic candy.

I think there should be a separate vending machine at the traders that are different to the ones in POIs.
The ones at traders restock everyday, while the others never restock (but have more in them to begin with?)

 

[Crater Creator]

...the health bars are amazing...

The hunger and thirst bars are now, too!

Well, I've looked at backpacks several times now. They never want to disappear for me. That is why it now logs every step of backpack creation, destruction and teleportation. It may require some type of death, respawn, teleport loop automation to track down.

Then I'll redouble my efforts to tell people to repro and report the issue in detail.

 

[Damocles]

Backpacks teleport randomly above where they started and will retry it thousands of times. I've thrown many through the ground and they always recover, so that is probably not what is happening to them.

Maybe they get displaced when the origin shifts somehow.

 

[Khalagar]

Backpacks teleport randomly above where they started and will retry it thousands of times. I've thrown many through the ground and they always recover, so that is probably not what is happening to them.

One thing I've had a problem with is Junk turrets falling through the floor to lower floors. They will sometimes just take off no clipping through floors and fall to the bottom floor and stop, but not go into the ground itself. They don't always even make it to the bottom floor, they sometimes just go through 1 floor before deciding they are good.

I wonder if that's similar to what happens to lost backpacks. You die a couple of floors up, your backpack falls a floor or two down and then the player returns and can't find it.

The only thing I've had flat out no clip through the ground itself in A18 is my expensive jeep, and my own character. Jeep may have just been an "outrun the map generation" thing, and my character falling was my friend acting a PoI quest as I was walking into the radius and it respawned the PoI and I fell into the ground. He was able to dig me out, so luckily I didn't even go all the way down, it was kind of like you described though where I was bobbing up and down in the ground like something was stopping me from going into the free fall even though I could look around and see there was nothing below me (because I was in the ground)

 

[hotpoon]

What makes you think a zombie couldn't figure that out? Dogs can. They will scratch at, claw, dig etc and figure out a weak spot in a fence or room, etc. As far as I'm concerned its a realistic and good mechanic.

@madmoleto be fair, the zombies aren't figuring anything out by trial and error - they immediately know the hp of every block to start with, even ones they can't see, let alone scratch at. 

Please do yourself a little experiment - during horde night, when all the zombies are outside banging on one block, place another block in front of it on the inside of the base (which they can't see from outside) and then watch them all switch to a different block because they immediately know the previous path is now more difficult. I'm sure you won't find it to be a realistic and good mechanic after that because it just doesn't feel good. It feels like b.s. 

It feels like...Fortnight - building during battle <-- joke, lol. Please don't ban me.

 

[The Gronk]

Unfortunately, the problem of zombies with an engineering degree was known before anyone even started playing with the new AI.  It's an easily deducable consequence of using A* pathfinding.  Following a path like that only leads to easy exploits, many of which have been listed recenly.

There should be a limit on the smartness of a zombie.  Sure, maybe the construction workers would instinctively attack weak points but the stripper?  If she knew about structural integrity and materials science before she died she wouldn't have been a damn stripper.

It takes a great deal of skill to look dumb, not everybody can play "Mr Bean" without looking like an idiot instead of a fool.

Spoiler

 

[Aldranon]

Barb wire flat?  Did you mod those back in?  Only barb wire in game now is the one held up by wooden posts.

Well, that shows the last time I used that. lol.

I mostly just wait out the BM now as wasting a lot of ammo/resources for only a little loot is not appealing to me.

 

[Ranzera]

Hell, the first thing I did in A17 was make a spiral maze horde base chock full of passive traps in the walkway, with a bars above that I'd stand on and shoot down below. Horde was never so trivial as that. They eventually put path finding costs in which made that stop working. But man, what a few .#s that was.

 

[Barra]

Less than could be .0001%. It doesn't imply that that it is 4% something. Take the total forum member count and divide into 12-25 million (copies sold I haven't checked for a while but that should be in the ballpark) and that is the % of users that visit the forum.

 

While Im in no doubt, that these numbers are correct, I want to point out, that even if its "just" 5% of buyers visting the forum, the one that do visit the forum, are the ones most obligated to the game with the most experience, so their feedback IS valuable to improve the gameplay for the whole playerbase.

As mentioned before the most buyers that are not visiting the forums are propably the ones that not got "addicted" enough to the game, maybe because of some feedback provided by the forum users was not taken care off by the devs 

Im really fine with how the game is developing, dont get me wrong, Im a huge fan but please dont be temted to use this low numbers of forum visitors as a kind of excuse!