Dev Suggestions

[Princess Chi]

The main feature of the game that enticed me to buy it in the first place and which led to me falling head over heels in love with it is the whole sandbox open world building aspect. I put tons of time into both building and designing my bases. My goal is for them to look like a house people dream to live in yet also a bad ass and defensible compound.

One of the issues I've run into while building my dream base (home base not horde base) is the limited paint options... All of the paint options are "dirty" which make the houses I built appear to have been bombed or appear to have been built pre-apocalypse. Which is awesome and immersive for POIs. But NOT for a brand new house that I spent hundreds of real life hours in game collecting resources for, designing, and building. It should look like the brand new base/house/compound it is. Also we need all of the paint options used for POIs accessible through the paint brush. We shouldn't have to physically go to a poi and use a paint brush to copy the paint off of the POI. If its a matter of finding/making textures feel free to reach out to me. I can either create some of my own or enlist the help of others to do so. I'm sure tons of people would be happy to volunteer.

My second grievance is animals. Even in The Walking Dead they realize gasoline is hard to come by and eventually expires. Making horses a very practical means of transportation. This can add a hole new aspect of gameplay. You could have to go catch your own wild horses, buy them from traders/ranchers, or even breed them to sell to other players. You'd also need to feed them, water them, provide medical treatment, craft bridals, saddles, and armor for them. And finally build enclosures for them as well as keep them safe from the zombies. 

Finally that brings me to livestock. We already have gardening/farming and mods which have attempted to implement this and oh boy is it fun but buggy. In a real apocalypses we'd be farming animals for food. Like cows for milk and meat. Pigs for meat. Chicken for eggs.  We can build our own chicken coop or cow pen with defenses from the zombies and nests for the chickens like the ones in game. It'd add a whole new level to the game. 

A lot of the models are already there like the chickens and wild boars. The vehicles can easily be repurposed for the horses for transportation.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

More colours and textures. Yes please. Or at least make them so that you can easily mod in new colours and textures.

 

[doughphunghus]

I’m partially making this up and I am too lazy to try to search for the posts I think I read this in but my guess for “painting” is this (someone please debunk this if I’ll wrong. I’m reading between the lines of what I’ve heard):

the paint textures are limited on purpose. In fact, I would guess a lot of the games limitations (as we see them) are on purpose due to the “low end” pc specs the TFP wants to keep or “keeping it simple” aspect of a game still in development.

for painting, specifically:

-  I think there is a performance hit if there are too many paint textures in a chunk. I’m basing this on the compbopack poi creation instructions. 

- I think I read that there is a very small vanilla  “paint texture” mapping in place Meaning like “there is only space for 125 unique paint textures” or something. The number isn’t important, other than it’s very small (it’s not 1024+), hard coded somewhere , cannot be expanded by mods, and is mostly already full of textures. I’m guessing this is to keep the memory footprint of textures down.

- I think I read that there are no plans for expanding the current paint texture mapping(s) for modders or anything, so we could easily add lots of textures “as paintable textures”. It doesn’t mean “no” it just means “no plans that are being shared openly from TFP”

- the workaround so far (some examples here: https://7daystodiemods.com/?s=Blocks , and just nicer blocks in general: https://7daystodiemods.com/?s=Deco ) has been to add custom blocks that have their own hard coded textures. This isn’t great as these blocks are only decorative and don’t have the materials/hit points /health of the vanilla blocks when you just paint them (meaning a decor block is fixed health/material and unless the modder (or you) go through and do all the work to make the custom block act like a vanilla block all the way through the upgrade cycle. Right now it’s just a single block that looks nice if you plan ahead and integrate it into your build. 

anyway: I too wish the painting options were more varied with cleaner (and dirtier!) looks, and you could easily mod in your own paint options but it seems it’s not going to be in the cards as far as I can tell. Also: I would love to be able to “double paint” textures so you could put a second coat with transparent paint and graffiti or bloody hands/blood splatters/kid scribbles/dirt/wear and tear  /nuts and bolts/outlines/stripes/patterns/ etc on top of existing paint. But I doubt this is going to happen

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

@doughphunghus I can understand why they do it, but then at least make it so it is easily modable to get more colours for all blocks. None of TFP´s bussines if i wanna stress my hardware to the max with mods or not.

 

[doughphunghus]

@doughphunghus I can understand why they do it, but then at least make it so it is easily modable to get more colours for all blocks. None of TFP´s bussines if i wanna stress my hardware to the max with mods or not.

Yeah, I agree.  I don’t know why there’s not a moddable way to add new textures. It may be just a “not a priority” vs a technical issue and they just hard coded some useable number (for their needs).

 

[khzmusik]

Yeah, I agree.  I don’t know why there’s not a moddable way to add new textures. It may be just a “not a priority” vs a technical issue and they just hard coded some useable number (for their needs).

I'm pretty sure the limited textures are due to the lack of binary storage space for a block.

Basically a block is represented by a binary number, and that number has to hold all of the data for a block - its 3D rotation, reference to its entry in blocks.xml, etc. Consider that all six sides of a block can be painted, and it's no wonder that single number can only hold so many block textures.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure fataal said something like that in the dev diary, possibly of a previous alpha.

FWIW, there are textures that are not "turned on" for painting, not even in the editor. There is a modlet somewhere which fixes that, but I can't remember what it is.

 

[doughphunghus]

Basically a block is represented by a binary number

Interesting. If that’s literally true, then I would imagine that there is a routine to “read the binary” to decode the entire block, and given the number of block textures (guessing, not looking)  it’s probably like 5-6 bits reserved for the texture. So adding a bit to double the texture count could mean redoing the bits (and the parser) for the entire block, which may all already be allocated or reserved for all the other block data…. But, just imagining a scenario….

suppose there’s extra bits that are unused/reserved. I could imagine TFP not wanting to “use them up” until they know they will not need them for something else. If true, *maybe* once the game goes near gold and they know there are “free, unused bits” just lying around in the block data…maybe … just maybe… they’ll allocate one to painting expansion   but I’m not holding my breath.

 

[zztong]

I'm speculating here as I have no direct knowledge of how textures work, how their runtime environment works, etc. ...

I suspect it is desirable to load up all textures into memory (perhaps a "texture cache") on the video card. There would be a finite amount of space for that which depends on the video card in question. If that cache were exhausted I'm not sure what would happen, perhaps the runtime environment would have to juggle textures in/out of the cache. and perhaps affect performance. Paint textures would be some of the game's textures. Mods adding more paint textures would compete for space at some point.

... And again, that's speculation. Certainly we would all enjoy more paintable textures.