PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[Guppycur]

The reason I don't drink coffee, throw down barb wire on enemies chasing me, use the other gimmicky things that cheapen my experience is because I like the feeling of accomplishment.  If eating a candy bar just to get better loot works, then why have crap loot in the first place.

But to each their own. 

 

[madmole]

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.

They cannot pyramid under a 4 meter iron bar from what I've seen.

 

[madmole]

Yucca Juice I can get behind.   A magic mint that that gives you 500 crit bonus for 10 minutes.. not so much.

Because its grounded in reality? Do you not hear of "tainted supplements" in UFC? Supplement makers pump drugs into stuff all the time to get people to actually take it. Plus its in the future. Look at 5 hour energy. Its quite possible/plausible for candy/supplements to get added benefits in the future as a marketing ploy just like 5 hour energy. Why do you get more resources when you mine with rock crushers? Placebo? Maybe, but they jam a cocktail of stimulants in there and you go hit that @%$*#! harder than normal because the suggested effect and stimulant made you want to get a better result than normal.

 

[Laz Man]

The reason I don't drink coffee, throw down barb wire on enemies chasing me, use the other gimmicky things that cheapen my experience is because I like the feeling of accomplishment.  If eating a candy bar just to get better loot works, then why have crap loot in the first place.

But to each their own. 

Variety is the spice of life?  Not one way to rule them all?  Candy takes up bag space, and costs dukes to purchase.  They also have a short duration.  More things that come with trade offs and causes players to make decisions is a good thing for gameplay imo.

Versus just adding more of something that already exists for ooh and ahh factor.

Editing: Candy may seem out of place to some but its not much different then then items that give temporary buffs in other games (e.g. Fallout).  If it hurts people's immersion too much they always mod the items to something more realistic (e.g. Ginko Baloba Pills (perception)).  It is clear to me though that the devs want a certain level of humor in their game so the candies feel fine to me.

 

[SittingDuck]

They cannot pyramid under a 4 meter iron bar from what I've seen.

In A18 when you use a 2 block ramp as a steep wall 4 blocks high you are untouchable. Zombies don´t hit the wall, jump against it and slide down slowly... forever...  did you fix that in A19?

 

[Alpacko]

so.

what did i miss

proper education, purpose in life & a haircut are my best guess.

 

[Khalagar]

For example, any vehicles beyond bikes have become a complete waste of time for us in A18 because the fuel consumption was ramped up so high that if we don't mine oil shale we can't run them. I'm not talking about constant driving around either - without mining you don't even find enough gas to support a single drive to the traders and back each week.

. . .Wrench cars my dude.

Gas is so ridiculously trivial I didn't know people even ran out. Less than 5 minutes of mining would get you a lifetime supply of it for 5 people, but if you absolutely refuse to even touch mining, you should already be wrenching cars you see fairly often and each one will get you hundreds of gas.

Even my "run and gun only" friend always carries a wrench with him on road trips so he can stop and wrench down a car and top off his bike if he gets low. Literally, 45 seconds of wrenching will run your bike for 10+ minutes

 

[Ranzera]

I'm probably going to end up ignoring candy as much as the current buffs. I heard "addiction" once and decided every last buff item is just another thing to sell to traders. TFP are going to be extremely disappointed by candy's usage rate (assuming that player activity monitoring stuff they mentioned works). With buffs that aren't that common to come by it's extremely easy to fall into "Too Awesome to Use" territory (warning TV Tropes link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TooAwesomeToUse) or be so underwhelming nobody cares. SquareEnix still can't get players to use consumables much in their games, I have little faith TFP are gonna nail it.

Ergo candy is almost certainly going to have very little impact on game play. That said, I'll keep an eye out for the Trader Prices candy. It's the only temporary buff that actually matters in this game imo. Gotta make those first few solar panels affordable!

 

[MajorMunchy]

I'm probably going to end up ignoring candy as much as the current buffs. I heard "addiction" once and decided every last buff item is just another thing to sell to traders. TFP are going to be extremely disappointed by candy's usage rate (assuming that player activity monitoring stuff they mentioned works). With buffs that aren't that common to come by it's extremely easy to fall into "Too Awesome to Use" territory (warning TV Tropes link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TooAwesomeToUse) or be so underwhelming nobody cares. SquareEnix still can't get players to use consumables much in their games, I have little faith TFP are gonna nail it.

Ergo candy is almost certainly going to have very little impact on game play. That said, I'll keep an eye out for the Trader Prices candy. It's the only temporary buff that actually matters in this game imo. Gotta make those first few solar panels affordable!

so you think no one will use them on a day 50+ horde night? i mean, bases can self defend only so much and what it the fun on not slamming zombies with your own 2 hands? everything needs consiquences in this type of game, otherwise you might as well call this minecraft zombie edition and have all your 10 year old friends play. 7d2d with its drawbacks on taking things is good and somehwat realistic and nice. its like people who want that infinite zombie loop base so that they can always win horde nights. whats the point of playing the game then? its pointless and you are going no where in the game if you want "zombie loops". might as well go creative mode at that point IMO

 

[Ranzera]

so you think no one will use them on a day 50+ horde night? i mean, bases can self defend only so much and what it the fun on not slamming zombies with your own 2 hands? everything needs consiquences in this type of game, otherwise you might as well call this minecraft zombie edition and have all your 10 year old friends play. 7d2d with its drawbacks on taking things is good and somehwat realistic and nice. its like people who want that infinite zombie loop base so that they can always win horde nights. whats the point of playing the game then? its pointless and you are going no where in the game if you want "zombie loops". might as well go creative mode at that point IMO

25 HP and a little more explosion damage isn't going to change anything.

 

[Guppycur]

Editing: Candy may seem out of place to some but its not much different then then items that give temporary buffs in other games (e.g. Fallout).  If it hurts people's immersion too much they always mod the items to something more realistic (e.g. Ginko Baloba Pills (perception)).  It is clear to me though that the devs want a certain level of humor in their game so the candies feel fine to me.

This actually touches on my main problem with the current direction of the game. It's trying to be too many other games. 7 days to die, despite its similarities to Minecraft, never felt like Minecraft (granted I played very little), and I never considered a Minecraft clone. It was its own unique game with its own unique features, but now it is filled with gimmicky items I can find in several other games.  When it comes to candy, I see no value add.  It brings nothing to the game except for a short term solution to a "problem" that also wasn't necessary to bring into the game in the first place (insert problems that candy solves here).

I get that this stuff sells and it's used in other successful games and I actually wholeheartedly back the pimps business decision to implement these "features", but I still like what I like, and dgaf whether or not fallout has them.

With candies specifically, I don't care... It'll just be another item to not pick up or use, as long as it doesn't become *necessary* to use.  But overall, introducing irritating problems (a merchant who doesn't want money and is only willing to sell you junk even though he has, somewhere, an entirely different store for the guy in line behind me) just so you can introduce gimmicky solutions (a candy that freshens my breath so much the merchant falls in love with me and wants to show me his wares) is not a value add.  It's why I *rarely* visit them.

/Giving guppy's two cents since 1971 

 

[Khalagar]

I have no problem with the addition of the buff candy, it will probably just end up like buff potions in essentially every game where most players "save them for a tough fight" and then end up basically never using them or just sell them.

Doesn't hurt to have in the game, there's already several buff items that are nifty and definitely useful, just not used because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

Me and my friend have been playing since before like A14, and neither of us actively carry or use buffs like steroids or basically any of them besides the craftable drinks. I'll use megacrush early game if I find it, and I do usually carry coffee instead of water because in A18 at least, Coffee is like, objectively the best drink. In A16 and A17 I always used Goldenrod Tea as my main drink, but I don't really see a reason in A18 to drink anything besides coffee or occasionally Yucca Juice for the extra hydration

I have no strong opinion either way on the candy honestly, not sure why people are being hung up on them. Just "use it if you want, ignore it and sell them if you don't want them" items to me. Probably took a ridiculously minimal amount of dev time as a side passion project, so it's not like it was stealing time from major features. Basically like the added food items. I don't care either way, so my stance is just "Why not?", more options and content is almost always a good thing

 

[Laz Man]

All good points about temporary buff items.  Thinking of other games where they are used (ARPGs, MMORPGs, etc.) they are probably best used in systems where "Boss" type encounters are especially difficult without their use.  Alot of RPG games are like that (e.g. cast magic spell or use buff item to give them a higher chance of success over  a specific encounter).  Without encounter set pieces like that, they will probably be under utilized which might not always a bad thing for open world type games.  At the very least, they will provide an alternative option for some player builds which is a value add in my opinion.

 

[Demonoid74]

I also NEVER used any drugs , chems , alcohol in any of the Fallout or Elder Scrolls games...plenty of people did...I never wasted my time , was to busy punching everything to death...never needed any buffs the provided and did not want the side effects...Kind of like in real life!

 

[JCrook1028]

Eye candy gives +50 to loot stage which is very significant. I take one to the top of the teir 5's to the loot room get a big loot bonus on every chest I open, then pop an oh @%$*#!z and jump down 200 meters and I'm out of there. Not to mention the health bars are amazing and boost max HP 25 plus give you faster crit healing,etc. They might not be everyone's cup of tea but for 100 dukes its a no brainer to me. Oh and one helps you get a nice barter boost too.

Meh, Seeing as how I barely bother with the Tier 5's at all that part really doesn't entice me. As for taking a candy to jump down 200m? No thx, that pushes me way too far out of reality. I stay away from the top end parkour for the very same reason. So, once again, I'd say your "guarantee" that I'll use it is false. Others will I'm sure tho so all's cool. Temp buffs just don't interest me, at all.

 

[MajorMunchy]

Meh, Seeing as how I barely bother with the Tier 5's at all that part really doesn't entice me. As for taking a candy to jump down 200m? No thx, that pushes me way too far out of reality. I stay away from the top end parkour for the very same reason. So, once again, I'd say your "guarantee" that I'll use it is false. Others will I'm sure tho so all's cool. Temp buffs just don't interest me, at all.

one good way for candy use would be a single player game when your super far in and you have all rad zomibes. that crit boost or a recog would come in handy!

 

[Ranzera]

I don't know if it's changed but the first time I popped a recog, the blur vision was so severe that it both negated any benefit the recog gave and made me never want to use it again.

 

[MechanicalLens]

deleted

 

[unlike them]

I recently decided that traders currently bring more bad than good to the game, so I started playing without them. When we have more fleshed out NPC, White River clan, bandits, better quests, then traders would be justified. Currently they bring weird problems/mechanics:

- the concept of invulnerable blocks/POIs

- the magic POI restoration/loot respawn and gimmicky double looting of a POI, which became a new standard

- the magic teleporting after 22:00

- the 'problem' of too many foods in store, 'solved' by introducing magic 'candies'

- exploits of 'secret stash' (putting on/removing nerdy glasses)

- the current quests we have are beyond primitive, even by sandbox standards

- traders/quests make the game easier, so people often see no point to build a base anywhere but next to a trader

- the opportunity to buy the things you need, instead of looting it, results in a scheduled routine of visiting every trader after the restock cooldown.

We can argue about the last point, as having more than one way to gain things enriches the game. Maybe yes, but I decided that I prefer the old way of looting/crafting. So when I found that Nitrogen has an option to build maps without traders, I did it. But you also need to use a modlet to remove the 'find a trader' quest with this opiton.

 

[MeatShield]

The place ECS would be most useful for this game is in terrain generation.  Since, if memory serves, the code for that is a c++ library there would be little point in doing it.

What on earth does calculating the drag coefficient of a satellite have to do with pathfinding?  What is the "B*" algorithm in relation to pathfinding?

B* is a search algorithm, it's just not very common, and not really suited for 3D path finding.

It's a really cool algorithm and I'd highly recommend reading it. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a059391.pdf

It's best used for optimizing decision making, and it works equally well for an optimality search as well as an adversarial search. It 'could' be used for 2D/3D path finding, however the special sauce that B* brings is a pair of values for each node. One is an optimistic search cost and the other a pessimistic cost. These values represent the bounds for how expensive a path that traversing through this node is. As the graph is explored, these values are updated when more accurate data is found. This can be beneficial if a nodes optimistic search cost is higher than the pessimistic cost of another, it can be excluded entirely because there is clearly a better path through the second node. This is really cool, but I cannot think of a good way to weight these values initially. Since the player can arbitrarily build structures, the pessimistic value would have to default to infinity, or some arbitrarily large value like 4 blocks of steel blocks. The optimistic value would be the difficulty of traversing the block contained in the node. So none of the special sauce B* has does anything except add overhead.

Further, I can't figure out a way to integrate the X,Y,Z heuristics like we can with A*, or similar greedy algorithms.

I'd love to see how B* could be adapted to 3D path finding, but I really don't think it's possible.