PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[PandaTea]

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?

I dont see the Fun Pimps adopting ECS for this game.

I think they are very much getting content in, bug fixes and get the game to gold status.

Anything else I think would be pie in the sky to Quote Joel

 you guys must be professional!!!

 

[Khalagar]

The 4x4 sucks quite a bit of gas, you can't harvest enough gas IMO, you have to mine shale. Maybe with scavenger perk maxed you could get enough fuel. I built one this game but I can't craft gas yet so I'm still driving my motorcycle.

Yeah I have noticed the 4x4 uses a crazy amount of gas. TBH I don't really use the 4x4 very often, I just don't see much reason to even in coop. 2 motorcycles > 1 jeep as they seem to use about the same amount of gas for 2 cycles, and with 2 vehicles you can split up and do different stuff on the way back like stop at different PoI and stuff if people want.

I don't get the person's aversion to just mining shale though. It's so ridiculously over the top, once you find a single shale mine you have no gas problems ever again. I bet 10 -15 minutes max of mining on shale a single time would cover the entire parties gas needs for the rest of the time you played until the next alpha came out lol.

 

[MechanicalLens]

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[Laz Man]

Yeah I have noticed the 4x4 uses a crazy amount of gas. TBH I don't really use the 4x4 very often, I just don't see much reason to even in coop. 2 motorcycles > 1 jeep as they seem to use about the same amount of gas for 2 cycles, and with 2 vehicles you can split up and do different stuff on the way back like stop at different PoI and stuff if people want.

I don't get the person's aversion to just mining shale though. It's so ridiculously over the top, once you find a single shale mine you have no gas problems ever again. I bet 10 -15 minutes max of mining on shale a single time would cover the entire parties gas needs for the rest of the time you played until the next alpha came out lol.

You could also just mine all the surface shale and a few layers below it if you absolutely can't live without the sun....lol

 

[Laz Man]

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!

Great question, do any of the candies come with negative side effects?  If not, even more reason to use them...

 

[faatal]

Maybe they get displaced when the origin shifts somehow.

I analyzed and tested that, but never could get anything bad to happen.

 

[MechanicalLens]

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[faatal]

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.

If that happened, the entity would still be loaded, could be seen with le console command and nav icon would be on it. In recent reported cases the entity was just gone. It may have failed to reload when the chunk was loaded.

 

[Aldranon]

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!

I will mostly ignore candy, I think.  Early game sounds tough, so I cant be sure.

However, there are some POI's and I'm looking at YOU military base with the 5 gun safes...

It will be then when I know if I pasted the test or not. 

Will I pass the test?

 

[Laz Man]

Do you know of the possible side effects of the current drugs in A18? I never looked into that personally, nor do I know of their percentage chance of occurring.

Apart from beer making your vision go blurry momentarily, I dont think there are any side effects.

 

[MechanicalLens]

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[Laz Man]

Very good. I heard some rather unnerving rumors of steroids fully encumbering you or recog ruining your vision for many, many minutes if you happened to unfortunately suffer from the side effects... Glad to hear these were just that, rumors.

I'm not 100% sure, I'm on my mobile.  However, every time I've used recog (During blood moons) I have never had any side effects.

Edit: I think I'm confusing recog with the consumable that boosts XP gain.  Will check later when I get on.

 

[MechanicalLens]

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[faatal]

but if you want to improve the performance of this game,i do think the ECS will be the important and necessary part in your plan.and the earlier you change to the ECS,the less of rewriting you guys will do.

by the way,how about the pathfinding algorithm?will you change the astar to the bstar?

The game will be fine going gold without ECS. Now if Unity improves their tech, we might find some use for it if time permits.

Our A* algorithm works fine it is our usage rules that will get tweaked over time.

 

[MechanicalLens]

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[faatal]

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?

Fixed

 

[faatal]

Also @faatal Unsure if this is a part of your profession, but have the "blinking trees" been fixed for the next update? (Trees, usually ones that the player planted themselves, that become invisible or at least mostly transparent suddenly from almost all angles once you approach them, but their hitboxes still remain and can still be harvested.) It's quite common in A18.

Sounds like occlusion. Trees are in groups with a bounding box around them. If box is too tight, it can lead to edge trees being hidden. I have increased the padding before. Might need more.

 

[MechanicalLens]

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[Blake_]

Sounds like occlusion. Trees are in groups with a bounding box around them. If box is too tight, it can lead to edge trees being hidden. I have increased the padding before. Might need more.

The hidden tree issue happens quite a bit sometimes, at least once over the course of a complete gameplay (30- 150 hours). I plant clusters of trees (100+) and it eventually happens.  On occasion it gets so glitchy that they don' t just disappear at the edge of the screen, but also in my very face, and I can still hit those ghost @%$*#!s .

 

[madmole]

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.

Candy is still getting balanced, but its more of an intentional choice. You save something you find for maybe later, but when you buy it (candy is buy only, not looted) you tend to use it for a specific idea you have in mind. Some of them give +2 to an attribute so you could unlock some perks, craft some things at a higher quality, etc. If you are a miner for 100 dukes you can get some rock crushers and get +1 to both mining perks for 5 minutes giving you a substantial boost to mining. Worth 100? I'd think so with the extra payload. If you are looking to build a base and needs resources ASAP, craft better tools, etc it could be worth it IMO. Is it some huge game changer feature? Probably not huge, but sometimes the little stuff makes the game cool.

Like the cooking change I love. Since food poisoning is gone cooked foods give a nice bonus to max stamina. Eat some shepards pie and get +40 max stamina and combine that with +35% stamina regen from black strap coffee and mining with a 2 handed pickaxe is so much better, or go nuts with fists or your favorite weapon power attacking. I'm saving so much ammo using melee now using this technique clearing POIs that the hordes aren't eating all my time mining for gunpowder. I stilld do, but I'm level 50 something and its not consuming my soul yet like it used to so I'm happy about that new mechanic.

Another fun one is eating pumpkin cheesecake before a transaction and sticking to them for an extra 5%. So who knows, candy might provide some nice little mechanics people might enjoy. I'm using them and looking at the ones I don't use and thinking about why. Mostly its a player choice. Like the ones that help lockpicking if I didn't have breaching rounds for my shotty I'd be using them probably to get into those 10k lock boxes that are a @%$*#! to get into otherwise.

 

I believe that's been changed, yes. Also, remember that you can stack these temporary buffs three times, so if you want to chug 3 recogs, go right ahead.

Recog is insane, if you are short on ammo on a horde take some and do crazy damage and save your ammo and rack up the xp.