PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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dcsobral said:
I don't know, man... Maybe so, but I'm a hell of a mini-maxer and Strength will only get the odd point for quite a while. Combat skills are unnecessary, unless you are playing at higher difficulty levels -- in which case the argument should be "strength is optimal at higher difficulty levels", which is not, of course, the default. Until you put a lot of points into it the combat skills pale in comparison to the actual gun, and Intellect means better guns faster. And experience??? Upgrade. I usually do one point in Sex T and one in Miner 69er and then wait until get the cigar. One point in Sex T so I don't get tired all the time, one in Miner to unlock iron tools, dig buried supplies and break crates faster.

Do you think a 5% increase in combat effectiveness translates into faster zombie killing? How many hits does it take to kill a zombie? Two, three? How likely it is that 5% will push it to one or two? Not very.
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Yeah, I do usually play at maxed settings now, but that was not what I am basing it on.  At those settings though the sledge is probably be best melee, because it gets a lot of 1 shots and can quickly kill even the hardest zeds on insane. 

The main reason I say most optimal builds will get strength is actually for power leveling by mining and building.  If you really go for it you can hit level 20 pretty quick. 

You can just dig a bunch and spam your base much faster than normal while also using less food.  The stone axe is also not a bad weapon early on, so you can just use that, even on insane. 

As I said though, they did a pretty good job balancing exp, and if you just do a lot of questing and buy or loot materials from quest locations, you can still get a good boost to exp.  Depending on your luck and how fast you kill, it could probably be debatable if going strength first would be optimal. 

Just saying generally if you are going for optimal speed leveling, you are likely going to invest in some strength for mining early on.  The points wasted usually pay for themselves in faster levels. 

 
Is there and I, miss A16 as zombies? I only was a blood moon, zombies only know all the hard to rush, but not smarter than people also pathfinding.
 

 
 Hi guys, for those who didn't watch the stream playthrough of tonight (October 27/28 2021) Here's a summary:

The stream featured Lathan (Fubar_Prime) , Robert (kinyajuu) and Ryan.

They played the same seed as the first gameplay stream, but they started over and showed more and different exploration, the improved city exploration with MORE zombies (yeah, now there's quite a lot of them pouring from every corner in cities)

.... and a bunch of other things, like the improved buried supply quests (Now they use an exclamation mark and have the range of the quest displayed on the top right so you know where to stay). They confirmed the corner-chest bug fix and now (a20) they also spawn more Zds (6+ entities on a tier 1).

They showed a bit of the shape menu and its use, and they confirmed that a20 will come out whenever it's ready AND that they will tell us at least  the week before . There are still some bugs to flesh out until release, but the gameplay looked amazing.

Bugs showed in the stream:

. Blue Fuse Box says "Press E to Use", due to Prime making a test prop and the POI designers using it by mistake. That issue is even in some POI in a19.6 b8

. Flying arrows shot by a team mate can show pink while flying in multiplayer (see stream when kinyajuu sometimes shoots with the bow ).

. Some animals like chickens don't ragdoll on death, sometimes resulting in them floating after death animation finishes playing.

. Multiplayer: Team mate's head can clip through Jen's interior shop light when you watch a team mate buy something in her shop.


Spoiler
5s3l5w.jpg
. Zds clip a lot through  doors and go through them way more often than they should. Doors are a WIP. They also seem to clip through blocks way more often.




And the last one (for @faatal), and this one can be fun to screenshot , is that Zds can get locked in the "jumping" state when jumping/getting thrown on top of half blocks (?):

5s3kse.jpg


She is right there and is completely alive and locked in place (except that she looks at you, lol).

 
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A couple of things I noticed watching the stream so far:

  • Some pretty bad pop-in during exploration, like POIs shifting from impostor to full model very close the player, hope this isn't related to the new Dynamic Impostor change. Maybe it's related to Lathan's settings rather than a bug?
  • The new Primitive Bow model could do with having it's positioning adjusted. It's a minor thing but when the bow is drawn the arrow isn't pointing towards where the crosshair is


I ended up turning it off once they started using Twitch integrations which I'm just not interested in. Which is a shame

 
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Streamer's view distance could be set low... would account for popping in. 

I'm excited for twitch integration because of what it will do for modding.

Also, idgaf about twitch but Halloween is coming up and I wanna see what zombie lathan will dress up as this year. :)

 
Guppycur said:
Streamer's view distance could be set low... would account for popping in. 

I'm excited for twitch integration because of what it will do for modding.

Also, idgaf about twitch but Halloween is coming up and I wanna see what zombie lathan will dress up as this year. :)
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Yeah I was hoping the pop in was just a settings thing. I've been holding off playing 7 Days for a while now in anticipation of A20 dropping so maybe it's that bad that in A19 and I just don't remember it. Just seemed really over the top in this stream. My other concern with it is that it's some side effect of the Dynamic Imposter feature which is honestly one of the features I'm looking forward to most, would had for it to have some massive trade off

From my perspective the Twitch stuff is just something that I wont experience myself when playing so I think should be kept to Lathan's other streams.

Give me the vanilla experience that I'm going to get when A20 drops (minus the bugs of course)

 
Was probably my fault. I asked if the dancing zombies I had seen in an earlier stream were part of TI and he said yes and did a demo of it.

 
Roland said:
It's the trick and not the treat this  Halloween!
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the correct formula for all this stuff is:

a = o + (u - l) + d

a = actual release date

o = optimistic guess by dev to please audience

u = unforseen bugs 

l =  lucky flukes considering optimizations and "working from first try" things (mostly that number is negative)

d = two months

 
Gamida said:
Was probably my fault. I asked if the dancing zombies I had seen in an earlier stream were part of TI and he said yes and did a demo of it.
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How long did that portion go on for? Might go back and watch the rest assuming it got turned off at some point

 
I don't use Twitch integration, but I don't have any issues with them showcasing it in the Development streams.  Not sure why it is such a big deal that they are including it.

 
In my opinion Twitch integration is an ok marketing feature. It's also fun to make from a dev's point of view. That doesn't make it any less lame, useless or offensive. The offense is that It's SO low priority compared to anything that needs to be done, that it's just the winner for poor dev's choice award of 2021. 

But it got done. And it's well done. Please keep developing the game, not a 3rd party whatsapp emoji integration thank you very much. Nobody is going to care about that feature in 30 years,  but they WILL remember the game.

 
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SnowDog1942 said:
probably less,  gotta streamline!!!
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Oh joy... That is basically the only complaint I have with the game right now. I don't play online but with my wife, so we build a lot, and that is the biggest thing that is lacking in our opinion. I know there are plenty of weird things and bugs that need to addressed, but for the most part it's really great other than the actual base aesthetics.

 
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