PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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Yukkie said:
Wasn't this place the Dev Diary for the Alpha 20?
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Welcome to the forums! That's a beautiful first post. Come, have a drink with us ! This is indeed the official thread for the a20 Diary. At this point (so close to a20 release), things get a bit crazy. We have a Math teacher, a Rooster a Pervert and the chads, no way you will get bored while the hype train keeps going.

 
I have a couple of A20 questions:

Hypothetically, if the release date to the GP (general public)  is December 5th, when could we expect the Patch Notes? 

Jut confirming, there are no major changes to the skill tree, correct?

We play on "friendly fire hurts" mode,  can my drone hurt my allies if they jump in its line of fire? 

Sidebar:

To the guy that mentioned the C64, I call your C64 and raise you a Vic20.  haha

 
Caution, there are a lot lot lot of letters.
 

Everything that is written below is just my view of the game after 450 hours in A18 and 460 hours in A19. I do not impose my point of view on anyone.

At the moment, we have 19 world settings that affect the game in one way or another. Together with all the sub-items, these are several hundred if not thousands of world options.
It is not possible to balance it out for everyone.
The game needs presets with a ready-made set of settings:
1. Zombie free creativity mode
2. For beginners. Not beginners 7D2D. For those who have never encountered games with crafting, building and leveling a character before. I was such a beginner. I have never played games of this kind and it took me about 50 hours and about 7 attempts to learn how to survive in this game. I know quite a few people who quit the game at this stage.
3. Normal mode for those with basic survival skills.
4. Difficult mode for experienced players.
5. Survival with minimal loot and heavy penalties, etc.
Only within these presets will it be possible to balance the game as much as possible.

Of course, add the ability to create your own presets and leave the ability to play with free settings.

Of course, there should be no talk of any hardcore and one-life mode in vanilla, these tasks are solved in overhaul mods.

Regarding the endgame. At the moment, my endgame is the third horde after the arrival of the demolishers in the warrior. If my base withstood it any longer in this session, I have nothing to do. This is about 85 or 92 days of survival with a standard setting of 1 hour = game day.

I would also like to express my opinion on the effectiveness.
I myself fell into this trap. At some point I realized that I always play only according to the most effective scenario in order to achieve maximum development and combat power as early as possible. Once it got boring and I abandoned the game for half a year. Then I saw on YouTube, a Japanese channel, the author of which has lived 650+ gaming days in half a year, starting in May of this year.
I was delighted with the lines he does in a regular game, how he just enjoys the game without any fuss.
Later I met a few more channels where people just enjoyed their favorite game.
I realized that I created a comfort zone for myself in a survival game! Survival doesn't have to be comfortable damn it!
In a new survival, I got out of my comfort zone and finally started enjoying the game again.

I use the bow and crossbow all the time on an equal footing with a firearm, not because it is effective, but then that I just can, because I like to go through part of the location using stealth, and then take out my m16 and insert it into the mouth of every zombie I meet and click on trigger.

I also agree that traders make survival a lot easier.

About perks and pumping.
Firstly, you can get a very interesting gaming experience if you number all the available perks and pump them depending on the result of the randomizer.
In a regular game, I would give the opportunity at the beginning to select only two branches of development, and I would forbid combining strength and intelligence, since when pumping them, other branches are not particularly needed. This is the same trap I wrote about above.
If you're only playing through strength + intelligence, it's time to follow the stairs and get out of this pit, there is still a lot of interesting content in the game that you are missing out on.

Another thing I noticed is that most of the solo players I have met are ditching survival in the world before they get to the T3 weapons / tools, demolishers.
I have met a few players with 2000+ hours of gameplay who were not aware of battery charging and solar panels. For them, the generator was the ultimate state of the art.

I would also like to discuss starting points, I want to be able to start in any biome without having to edit spawnpoints

There is too much gas in the game, it doesn't even need to be crafted.
If there is a desert on the map, you are the king of the roads. In my survivors, after the days of mining, I have about 2 days of dismantling the machines. I get enough gasoline, which is enough for 75+ days.

In the game, brass is too accessible because of this, the value of the cartridges is lost.
After a day of disassembling cars, I have several dozen brass radiators. I could take out up to 7 radiators from one private house for a crappy building!
Why does the trader have no money limit?
Why do I loot buildings for a couple of days, fix all the loot, put on modifications and sell it all, I get 20,000-50,000 dukes.
I start to marinate the ducks at about 50-55 days of the game from 85-92. At some point, I melt 200,000 dukes at one time and get enough shells to fill the pool and drown all the zombies there.

At the moment, the tasks of the traders do not make any sense to me. Instead of taking the task and running 1 km to it, looting the building, going back 1 km and turning in the task, I will loot several buildings and get a lot more loot and ducks, which will sell it.
Level 1-2 quests should not be further than 500m, 3 - 1km
At the beginning of the game, if I don’t swing into int, I won’t be able to get a bike and I have to run from the merchant to the quest and back for half a game day, so I don’t complete quests at all.

 
mstdv inc said:
Caution, there are a lot lot lot of letters.
 

Everything that is written below is just my view of the game after 450 hours in A18 and 460 hours in A19. I do not impose my point of view on anyone.

At the moment, we have 19 world settings that affect the game in one way or another. Together with all the sub-items, these are several hundred if not thousands of world options.
It is not possible to balance it out for everyone.
The game needs presets with a ready-made set of settings:
1. Zombie free creativity mode
2. For beginners. Not beginners 7D2D. For those who have never encountered games with crafting, building and leveling a character before. I was such a beginner. I have never played games of this kind and it took me about 50 hours and about 7 attempts to learn how to survive in this game. I know quite a few people who quit the game at this stage.
3. Normal mode for those with basic survival skills.
4. Difficult mode for experienced players.
5. Survival with minimal loot and heavy penalties, etc.
Only within these presets will it be possible to balance the game as much as possible.

Of course, add the ability to create your own presets and leave the ability to play with free settings.

Of course, there should be no talk of any hardcore and one-life mode in vanilla, these tasks are solved in overhaul mods.

Regarding the endgame. At the moment, my endgame is the third horde after the arrival of the demolishers in the warrior. If my base withstood it any longer in this session, I have nothing to do. This is about 85 or 92 days of survival with a standard setting of 1 hour = game day.

I would also like to express my opinion on the effectiveness.
I myself fell into this trap. At some point I realized that I always play only according to the most effective scenario in order to achieve maximum development and combat power as early as possible. Once it got boring and I abandoned the game for half a year. Then I saw on YouTube, a Japanese channel, the author of which has lived 650+ gaming days in half a year, starting in May of this year.
I was delighted with the lines he does in a regular game, how he just enjoys the game without any fuss.
Later I met a few more channels where people just enjoyed their favorite game.
I realized that I created a comfort zone for myself in a survival game! Survival doesn't have to be comfortable damn it!
In a new survival, I got out of my comfort zone and finally started enjoying the game again.

I use the bow and crossbow all the time on an equal footing with a firearm, not because it is effective, but then that I just can, because I like to go through part of the location using stealth, and then take out my m16 and insert it into the mouth of every zombie I meet and click on trigger.

I also agree that traders make survival a lot easier.

About perks and pumping.
Firstly, you can get a very interesting gaming experience if you number all the available perks and pump them depending on the result of the randomizer.
In a regular game, I would give the opportunity at the beginning to select only two branches of development, and I would forbid combining strength and intelligence, since when pumping them, other branches are not particularly needed. This is the same trap I wrote about above.
If you're only playing through strength + intelligence, it's time to follow the stairs and get out of this pit, there is still a lot of interesting content in the game that you are missing out on.

Another thing I noticed is that most of the solo players I have met are ditching survival in the world before they get to the T3 weapons / tools, demolishers.
I have met a few players with 2000+ hours of gameplay who were not aware of battery charging and solar panels. For them, the generator was the ultimate state of the art.

I would also like to discuss starting points, I want to be able to start in any biome without having to edit spawnpoints

There is too much gas in the game, it doesn't even need to be crafted.
If there is a desert on the map, you are the king of the roads. In my survivors, after the days of mining, I have about 2 days of dismantling the machines. I get enough gasoline, which is enough for 75+ days.

In the game, brass is too accessible because of this, the value of the cartridges is lost.
After a day of disassembling cars, I have several dozen brass radiators. I could take out up to 7 radiators from one private house for a crappy building!
Why does the trader have no money limit?
Why do I loot buildings for a couple of days, fix all the loot, put on modifications and sell it all, I get 20,000-50,000 dukes.
I start to marinate the ducks at about 50-55 days of the game from 85-92. At some point, I melt 200,000 dukes at one time and get enough shells to fill the pool and drown all the zombies there.

At the moment, the tasks of the traders do not make any sense to me. Instead of taking the task and running 1 km to it, looting the building, going back 1 km and turning in the task, I will loot several buildings and get a lot more loot and ducks, which will sell it.
Level 1-2 quests should not be further than 500m, 3 - 1km
At the beginning of the game, if I don’t swing into int, I won’t be able to get a bike and I have to run from the merchant to the quest and back for half a game day, so I don’t complete quests at all.
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Here : https://community.7daystodie.com/forum/22-game-modification/ 

Steam Workshop for 7dtd is on its way, so no worries about these in the future. 

 
mstdv inc said:
Why did you throw it off to me? Did I write that I want to do modifications or am looking for information about them?No
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Nah, no reason to, but before every latest release we all want some changes in some way. And this is the best part of this game. We are given so much types of gameplay that at some point people want more.

No matter if it comes from the guys we play with, the streams we watch some stuff from, or the talks we have here. There is always something that can be added. 

The thing is the devs are kicking ass for the release, among their plans, not Ours. Which we have to respect. 

P.S. Welcome to the forums 🤠

 
beerfly said:
Nah, no reason to, but before every latest release we all want some changes in some way. And this is the best part of this game. We are given so much types of gameplay that at some point people want more.

No matter if it comes from the guys we play with, the streams we watch some stuff from, or the talks we have here. There is always something that can be added.

The thing is the devs are kicking ass for the release, among their plans, not Ours. Which we have to respect.

P.S. Welcome to the forums 🤠
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Please tell me which part of the sentence

Everything that is written below is just my view of the game after 450 hours in A18 and 460 hours in A19. I do not impose my point of view on anyone.
Click to expand...
you did not understand

 
Blake_ said:
Regarding the current a20 state of RWG: (selectively quoted)

If you see the same 1-10 POIs in the first 2 cities you explore, you know the randomness has failed.

You will also have repetition, but it will be so low that nobody will really notice (needs lots of POIs to work though)
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I agree that while A20 RWG promises significant and exciting advancements, that players are still going to eventually find it repetitive. The human brain is pretty good at finding patterns. I suspect even the randomness introduced by Parts will feel the same after a while.

Several months back I did some analysis. Using a variety of map generators, I was seeing 8k maps with 2,500 to 3,500 POIs being placed depending on the number and size of cities desired. A19 (vanilla) has around 500 POIs. A20 is adding how many new vanilla POIs... around 200... so 700 total? If the map needs 2,500 POIs, then you're looking at roughly 2,500 / 700 = 3 to 4 copies of each POI to perhaps 3,500 / 700 = 5 copies of each POI.

Let's throw in the CompoPack. Yes, this is going to assume that all the CP POIs are placeable. Many are quite large and do not place well and/or are very thematic/unique and may get excluded for matters of taste.

For A19 vanilla (~500 POIs) and CP 47 (~500 POIs) we get around 2,500 / 1,000 to 3,500 / 1,000 = 2.5 to 3.5 copies of each POI. For A20, let say for the sake of discussion CompoPack 48 is approaching 700. Now we're talking maybe 1,400 POIs total. 2,500 / 1,600 to 3,500 / 1,400 = 1.7 to 2.5 copies of each POI. (Better!)

So, take a step back here. Even with hundreds more POIs, we're still probably going to struggle to have more than two semi-unique cities per map. Trying to reduce repetition by increasing the number of POIs make sense, but numerically speaking it seems to me we need to add more POIs than TFP and the community has created to-date.

Other things that will make a map more repetitive will be:

  • increasing the number of cities
  • increasing the size of cities
  • increasing the size of the map
The first two bullets often have me trying to think of ways to make the Wilderness more of an attraction for play, but the city is so appealing to players. Cities have dense-packed POIs, so there's a high concentration of loot and zombies, plus that's where you find the traders. The high tier POIs are usually in cities too. Players don't really leave the cities, except maybe to mine, but then they don't usually go far.

The last bullet I think is worthy of some discussion too. If you go to a 16k map, you've quadrupled the map area. The need to place 2,500 POIs turned into a need to place 10,000 POIs. Assuming the goal would be to make unique cities on 16k maps then... well... maybe AI needs to be making POIs. :)

Blake_ said:
I gather POI devs should have to keep making even more POIs for that to happen consistently, I mean AMIGONE funerals everywhere points to a lack of funeral home variety for example.
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Certainly, and this will lead to some interesting placement issues. Finding two Fire Departments next to each other is undesirable. How does RWG know that two different Fire House POIs should not go next to each other? Finding a bunch of fast-food restaurants next to each other is normal. Finding a bunch of McDonalds next to each other would be silly. How does the RWG know which POIs are in the same chain? It can know not to use the same POI, but functional equivalents are a challenge.

 
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zztong said:
Certainly, and this will lead to some interesting placement issues. Finding two Fire Departments next to each other is undesirable. How does RWG know that two different Fire House POIs should not go next to each other? Finding a bunch of fast-food restaurants next to each other is normal. Finding a bunch of McDonalds next to each other would be silly. How does the RWG know which POIs are in the same chain? It can know not to use the same POI, but functional equivalents are a challenge.
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That is fixed. There's no more Poopy days next to another Poopy days since a looong time ago, heck there isn't a club next to it either due to the new rwg tile district code. And districts also work excellent within the same city.  I'm talking from city to city. You can find two cities that have the exact same POI variety. That's repetition too. It doesn't take much to go from city A to city B .

It's less than a19, but it's still there.

 
Lord Morphleyes said:
I have a couple of A20 questions:

Hypothetically, if the release date to the GP (general public)  is December 5th, when could we expect the Patch Notes? 

Jut confirming, there are no major changes to the skill tree, correct?

We play on "friendly fire hurts" mode,  can my drone hurt my allies if they jump in its line of fire? 

Sidebar:

To the guy that mentioned the C64, I call your C64 and raise you a Vic20.  haha
Click to expand...


The patch notes will  be released on the day the Streamer weekend begins which would be December 3rd in your scenario. You'll have all weekend to peruse them before the update hits on whatever Monday it hits.

There have been no major changes to the skill trees. 

Drones don't fire anything that could hurt anyone or anything.

 
Blake_ said:
That is fixed. There's no more Poopy days next to another Poopy days since a looong time ago, heck there isn't a club next to it either due to the new rwg tile district code. And districts also work excellent within the same city.  I'm talking from city to city. You can find two cities that have the exact same POI variety. That's repetition too. It doesn't take much to go from city A to city B .

It's less than a19, but it's still there.
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Oh yes, with vanilla RWG you're probably right. My mind is still anchored in the RWG, Nitrogen, KingGen A19 competition and I've probably not seen a vanilla RWG map in a great many months. I think we were still seeing different Pump-n-Gas POIs across the street from one another. I think there's only one Poopy Days POI.

 
Uncle Al said:
I'm fairly certain that's not how sneak damage works:

All weapons get a +50% damage bonus for a sneak attack, with no points in hidden strike, bows get +200%, so a 31 point steel arrow is 93 damage with no hidden strike and a 50 point 7.62 round is 75.  Hidden Strike adds an extra 50% per rank, so 250% at max rank.  That means bows do +450% damage at max hidden strike (171 for a steel arrow) and guns do +300% (200 damage for 7.62).  Note that bows are, relatively, a much clearer sneak attack choice when you don't have Hidden Strike ranks than when you do.  The upcoming improvements to archery damage will probably mean bows become the best sneak damage dealers irrespective of skill, though.  Bows are also totally silent which is not true for silenced guns - in fact silenced high caliber guns are only as quiet as an unsilenced 9mm.

Oh base damage for 9mm is 32 not 8.
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I don't mind relooking at my numbers.  Though this time I also did a quick test with a biker zombie on Adventure difficulty

32 is correct, I grabbed the block damage by mistake instead of entity damage.  I noticed I forgot 9mm at the end, and went back to add it quickly.  Went a bit too quickly actually.  It looked low when I put it in, I should have trusted my gut and rechecked the number at that point.  Thanks for pointing that out.

On the stealth damage, I was looking at what the code does and it looks like I didn't understand fully what it did (plus what I was seeing in game).  At fully perked hidden strike, when I hit the body of the biker while stealth, I got the pop up of 6x Stealth Damage - that made me think of 6 Times or 600% of base damage.  So when I was looking through the code, I had that in my mind in determining how the game calculates the value.  I grabbed the bow sneak damage bonus (which was 2) and then the hidden strike (which in the code, it says level 5 is at 3).  So in my head, 2x3 = 6 which matched the popup I saw in game.

But then I looked closer and the popup doesn't seem right at all.  With no perks bought at all, the popup for the bow should have been 2X or 200%, but was at 3.5X.  The actual damage as calculated by the game tracks with what you mention (4.5X).  So it goes back to where the stealth damage is being calculated first by adding and then by multiplying (so 2 from bows plus 2.5 from hidden strike).  That must mean that the game treats the first value in the hidden strike for level 1 (0.5) even though the code associates it with level 0 (which I thought was a baseline that everyone got).

Thank you for pointing that out, it helps me understand more about what the code is doing in the background.  Which makes me wonder if the popup message was correct at one time, then the damage was adjusted downward, but the popup message was not fixed.

 
image.png

One thing I will miss in A20 RWG will be the random resource nodes in cities since it will all be tiled over

shouldn't be a problem though because I am sure resources will be littered all over the wilderness and in rural/suburban areas

I assume resources will still be under the city, but just alot harder to find because you would be digging totally blind

 
Blake_ said:
I gather POI devs should have to keep making even more POIs for that to happen consistently, I mean AMIGONE funerals everywhere points to a lack of funeral home variety for example. 
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I just assumed that AMIGONE funerals was a franchise funeral home  🙂

But the main point about the number of POIS needing to be increase to for avoidance in nearby towns is a good one, though I think a lot of that is going to fall on the community to build ones.

 
I gather POI devs should have to keep making even more POIs for that to happen consistently,
Click to expand...


I would suspect TFP will need to either a) be continuously creating POIs throughout Alpha, Beta, Gold, forever... or b) come up with a random POI creator that can combine rooms, floors, and other structure elements to produce new POIs on the fly. That would actually be pretty cool, imagine 1 Amigone Funeral Home where the end loot is in the tower, one where it's in a basement, and 1 where it's in the attic as usual.

 
PBRstreetgang said:
I would suspect TFP will need to either a) be continuously creating POIs throughout Alpha, Beta, Gold, forever... or b) come up with a random POI creator that can combine rooms, floors, and other structure elements to produce new POIs on the fly. That would actually be pretty cool, imagine 1 Amigone Funeral Home where the end loot is in the tower, one where it's in a basement, and 1 where it's in the attic as usual.
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you forgot one.

C) TFP could finish up what is already planned and move on to greener pastures and let the community add custom POIs as have always been doing (many people out there would love to share their customs).

 
I hope with workshop support we can add individual POI's that are rated by the community. The POI packs we have now are mostly great but there are few stinkers in the mix.

 
Roland said:
I hope with workshop support we can add individual POI's that are rated by the community. The POI packs we have now are mostly great but there are few stinkers in the mix.
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you know how it goes... the world is full of artists (and yet cant draw or paint) and professionals and experts (but have never studied the field they claim to be in) and.... :)

but agreed i hope for a rating system as well.

 
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