PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

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Laz Man said:
Speaking of gameplay, I have a question about POI design limits for Level designers:

Tier 1 POI Clear quests have around 9 zds, Infestation around 15-18 zds, sooo

How many Zds is your design limit for Tier 5 Infestation quests?

You answered... "Alot" 😅
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Your answer to a question about how many zombies in a POI makes me feel like I have been abusing players on my server when I can pack almost 400 zombies in a partially collapsed Shopping mall that measures 60x100 that I created.

 
Naz said:
There are more believable with minimal dev time ways to communicate to the player the bike has broken. You could use sound effects like a tire popping or gears jamming, you could make the wheel animations hitch to make it look like somthing has broken/bent/warped preventing them spinning smoothly. 

Simply copy pasting the fx for the other vehicles on to a bicycle is a very "it's 16:59 on Friday" solution 🤣
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Sure. The system was set up to use particles. Anything else would be additional work and I have other things to work on now.

 
Riamus said:
If that is the case, then this has changed from maybe something to mod out to something that must be modded out for me.  It will be the only thing that I feel the need to change.  I don't feel there is any value to destroying something that is expensive to make and potentially has a ton of loot in it.  It is nothing more than an annoyance that will generate anger when it happens and that isn't why I play games.
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A20 vehicles explode the same way. I don't think zombie damage to vehicles has changed either.

You damaging your vehicle by hitting things is what has been increased.

 
Blake_ said:
One of the things I wanted to ask.... now that you have AI throttling, will you increase the blood moon entity limit for a21? 64 is nice, I don't know if you guys talked about it. I believe CPUs can handle a bit more in the very close future though. Current top of the line rigs are doing 200+ screamer battles without much of a slideshow.
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Possibly, but there is other enemy related optimizations that need to be looked at as the throttling is pretty specific with what it is doing currently.

 
vergilsparda said:
  1. With the new vehicle damage system, has anything been changed or put into place to prevent vehicles from taking damage when going up and over overpasses in towns and cities (or in general). I find that often when going up that ramp bit, because it's not smooth, the vehicle hit noise plays—mostly everything but the 4x4 (as in the stream the 4x4 went over the bridge/small overpass very easily) does this. And judging by the fact that any hit seems to cause vehicle damage, doing that would cause damage; unless it doesn't anymore. I've explained that poorly but I hope I explained it somewhat well enough that I made sense here lol
  2. It was a little unclear in the stream as Lathan was still somewhat driving, but when vehicles are completely broken, will they be unable to be driven? Steve's explanation of certain visual items disappearing (the bike chain on the bike) and others creating sparks (the crank shaft) made it seem like when a vehicle hits 0% it will just stop working entirely.
  3. And third, will armor plating mods, or perhaps a new type of plating mod, be added to vehicle mods in order to lower the amount of damage any given vehicle takes (perhaps a new mod, a vehicle armor plating mod of some kind, or some sort of actual plow mod that will take no damage from zombies lol)?
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1 Hit damage is scaled by angle of impact, so glancing blows do much less. There is also a minimum impact amount, below which there is no damage.

2 I, not Steve talked about that. Chain on bike is the only disappearing part. Moving very slow without gas or at 0 health is the same as A20. No one seems to know that as they never got their vehicles to 0 health!

3 Probably, but I don't know when that will get added.

RipClaw said:
I generally try to avoid hitting objects, but when driving through the desert or wasteland you will inevitably hit objects. I have no problem repairing my vehicle.

My question was whether the damage values you see in the stream are the final balancing for the Experimental or if they were raised to show what a badly damaged vehicle looks like in the stream without having to drive against walls for 5 minutes.
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Damage numbers were not changed. That is how they currently are. The damage scaling is easy change by us and like many things, we will adjust it as necessary to achieve the balance we want.

 
faatal said:
2 I, not Steve talked about that. Chain on bike is the only disappearing part. Moving very slow without gas or at 0 health is the same as A20. No one seems to know that as they never got their vehicles to 0 health!
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I think most people know how it feels when the vehicle runs out of gas. But hardly anyone will let their health drop to 0. Personally, I repair my vehicle when it is down to 80%. Most of the time even much earlier.

 
Survager said:
When something is created in the workbench and at this time the light of the lamp burns brighter, this is clearly visible and logical. 👍

In regards to the forge, wouldn't it make more sense for the bellows to be animated to compress and decompress when something is being created there? 😇

I understand that this is more difficult to do than changing the intensity of the glow, but if you guys decide to do this, do not forget about the concrete mixer, it would also like to spin when they mix the concrete 😉

And the campfire could just sound a little different when something is being cooked there. For example, it could be the sounds of frying or gurgling 🙂

View attachment 27839

View attachment 27838
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Sure, it could be better, but most of us have like 5 things we are working on and we have little time left for when we would like to release. Different methods take different amounts of time to do and often require different combinations of people to work on them.

New cement mixer model is not done. Bellows were not made to animate.

The new campfire with the 3 parts turning off/on is in, but art is being adjusted. It does glow brighter during crafting and looks fine.

Survager said:
On the last stream, we were shown that zombies will eat the corpses of animals. Do you have plan's that zombie-vulture/bears/wolves/coyotes also make it with deer's/rabbit's/chicken's corpse?
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Sure, I can dream about a thousand features, but we shall see what we have time for.

Gamida said:
Wait. I never even noticed that. Do you mean we can kill zoms again by hitting with vehicle if we don't mind the trade off of it doing damage?

Don't mind that at all.
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Yes. Vehicles do a lot more damage to zombies and you take it as well.

 
zztong said:
I'm cool with seeing how the vehicles play, but I do hope:

(1) Running into a shopping cart does not continue to be like running into a block of granite, and

(2) That if the vehicle has spikes and a ram plate that running into a fleshy zombie doesn't hurt [the vehicle] too much. Otherwise, could I please take off the spikes and ram plate so that getting around in the wilderness was easier?
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1 Is the same. Shopping carts are blocks. Blocks don't move. Would need to be a prop and with lower health or special hit rules....

2 At some point vehicles are supposed to get separate parts to represent mods, so they can be turned on/off, but we did not have the time in A21.

 
MichaelL. said:
It's my understanding that there has been a lot of optimization of the lighting in-game - which helps a lot with FPS.  I'm curious if we will still be able to light obects/blocks "internally " (from the inside-out) by turning off the light's shadow setting in order to create special effects? 
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There have been some changes to lighting. I would not use the word "lot". FPS is better somewhat. PC hardware, your settings and what the game is doing and rendering vary greatly, so it all comes down to what your current bottleneck is.

Changing a Unity light's settings is exactly the same.

mstdv inc said:
@faatal please confirm or deny that the game uses hitscan for firearms and projectile for bow and crossbow?
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Yes.

 
Alpha 21 is looking like a better update than a20 so far, just sad that you guys removed materials and rebar frames and aren't gonna add them back this update. I think it would be cool to ask your playerbase for a vote about this, maybe via Steam, 'cause I THINK that the majority liked the more materials we had back before alpha 20 more. Otherwise I'm just gonna play alpha 16 or 17. Btw no hate, just caring. Ps thnx 4 reading

 
HB_H4wk said:
Your answer to a question about how many zombies in a POI makes me feel like I have been abusing players on my server when I can pack almost 400 zombies in a partially collapsed Shopping mall that measures 60x100 that I created.
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I wouldn't worry too much about it unless you play with alot of people on your server.

Certainly infestation numbers are alot but I know I have seen much higher numbers in user created POIs such as the CompoPack.

Keep in the mind there are several reasons we use lower zombie counts.

One reason is we have to make sure 8 players can be questing the most populated POIs at the same time as that is the official maximum number of players we support.

 
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One thing I'm really curious about, especially since it wasn't shown during the dev streams - how much vehicle damage does a single repair kit repair at 0 points in Grease Monkey in A21? They were happy to show us the amount of damage taken, but neglected to show us the other side of it.

 
THIS IS NOT PERSONAL nor meant as an attack on anybody... but... some things just need to be left for the players to experience themselves.. :) we cant (or shouldnt expose everything or the player doesnt need to get into the game and or wont be surprised).

so here is just a very small hint

A21.0_2023-05-06_16-14-11.jpg

 
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