PC v1.x Developer Diary

[faatal]

What was the thinking behind the small bear?

I assume they'll both have the same skin and it's not a black bear/brown bear scenario as in the art shown the skin is somewhere between the two

Fun.

1 Years ago...make small bear because I can, but ragdoll broken by scaling, so commented out.

2 I fixed ragdoll scaling for 1.0.

3 Allan says "why do we have small bear?". I say "because why not". Allan enables because it now works.

4 You see in game.

 

[MechanicalLens]

I don't work on stats/perks on armor or items. That is mostly Allan. Balance is ongoing as we continue testing.

The order is currently by sorting the biome percents, so if you change the default percents to not be forest low to wasteland high, you will get a different order. The sorting may be removed in the future.

Unsure what you mean here. Were you implying that the biome size sliders will be removed in the future? :noidea:

 

[Riamus]

Unsure what you mean here. Were you implying that the biome size sliders will be removed in the future? :noidea:

I think he means that the sorting may be removed.  The order of biomes around the "circle" is based on percentages used for the biomes, which may be removed.

 

[faatal]

It seems that country towns aren't 100% perfect yet.  There's more than a few places where entire sections of the town are simply cut off from the main body. Good luck getting around everywhere by a vehicle pre-apocalypse times.

Fixing all the bugs in RWG is not simple.

 

[MechanicalLens]

Fixing all the bugs in RWG is not simple.

Fully aware. My post was meant to be entirely light-hearted. I've personally made some lore that the town ran out of funding and couldn't finish the roads.

 

[faatal]

Okay cool, problem I have its the 3 city's are right next to each and filled the whole biome.

Is there a way to change the rwg to have a a city that spans over two different biomes, I know how to make them bigger.

Wasteland is the city biome. It is the nasty end game place where lots of people used to live (for now, unless it gets changed).

RWG mostly does not generate content across biomes. Biomes are each their own place.

 

[faatal]

@faatal , can I ask for a couple of tweaks to make the "nerdy veteran experience" more complete?

LESS loot:  Like a 5% option or so? 25% is still too much for 1, even 2 players. Still, it's a niche option but akin to "nightmare loot setting". 25% is just ok, so it can be less, I wish.

A zd hp percentage would also be nice, I mean like untie the hp from the general difficulty setting and add another option just for that. It could solve some "bullet spongy" problems without actually decreasing the Zd damage tied to the insane difficulty.

And for the RWG:

1- Could you make PLAINS, HILLS and MOUNTAINS sliders  like the biomes`? . Sliders for those 3 are not very easy to handle and you cannot exactly put the percentages that you want. They should work like in the current upgraded biome sliders.

2- A cave option for terrain features? DLC for that at least? pretty please.

@Gazz Why can we still...

Loot % added to todo.

A enemy health slider is not out of the question. Todo.

1 Exact percents would not actually matter as there is limited granularity in how the code/data works.

2 Dynamic caves is something I would like to do someday.

Gazz no longer works on the game. Allan does numbers for loot, items, armor and lots of other stuff.

 

[MechanicalLens]

Interestingly, I'm seeing animalDireWolf showing up under FeralHordeStage under the entitygroups.xml, consistently labelled as .1 percentage chance. Are there dire wolves in blood moons now, under extremely rare (RNG-based) conditions?

 

[faatal]

2. TAA in 7DTD still does not work correctly, namely the developers for some reason lowered all the standard parameters for TAA, as a result it almost did not fulfill its functions,

Yes, TAA sucks and the settings were lowered because of heavy blurring on animated plants. The blurring was considered unacceptable. TAA settings were increased in 1.0 as we now have motion vectors for plants, but TAA is still not great, which is why I use FSR. FSR does have some artifacts of its own, but better than TAA.

 

[Old Crow]

At what point did the zombie game start to turn into a fantasy with mythical creatures?
What's next? A branch of magic? Crafting potions?

He's a tough wolf. But this is not a zombie wolf, this is a wolf from a fantasy game about magic and dragons.
I don't share your enthusiasm. This greatly spoils the atmosphere of the ZOMBIE apocalypse.

...You know dire wolves were actually REAL animals once upon a time, right?

 

[faatal]

Speaking of which, are there plans to increase the amount of water on the map (vast winding rivers cutting across the wilderness leading to lakes, for example)? Most are located on the very border of the map nowadays, and the rivers are pretty illogical in nature. They don't flow from or to anywhere. (Not asking for flowing water btw.)

There are ideas. Stamps are meh and need replacing/editing/adding. We have talked a bit about running water like roads, but would be problems with roads and having to do bridges, so may never happen.

 

[Old Crow]

1. I don't know. Books is Allan.

2. Correct. I did not add it as the model was done in 2 separate pieces, which code does not support and I think bicycles with armor is weird.

3. Punted to the future as no time for coding that.

Well, it looks like that book's text was corrected in today's patch and now references the Enforcer outfit! A shame about the bike armor and vehicle storage mods. Kinda makes me wonder why they were modeled if the bicycle armor isn't being added after all. Hoping to see the vehicle storage mods added soon.

 

[faatal]

I think he means that the sorting may be removed.  The order of biomes around the "circle" is based on percentages used for the biomes, which may be removed.

Yes. The circle order will probably be changed to always be the same regardless of biome size. It may also need to seed each biome near the center, so they are near each other and would grow outwards to their percents.

Well, it looks like that book's text was corrected in today's patch and now references the Enforcer outfit! A shame about the bike armor and vehicle storage mods. Kinda makes me wonder why they were modeled if the bicycle armor isn't being added after all. Hoping to see the vehicle storage mods added soon.

When you have a big team, there are always a lot of moving parts and differences of opinion or available time.

 

[Old Crow]

When you have a big team, there are always a lot of moving parts and differences of opinion or available time.

That's understandable. I appreciate the answers!

 

[MechanicalLens]

The new Dire Wolf model looks sick! Props to the art team once again!

 

[Uncle Al]

Loot % added to todo.
 

If loot % is getting worked on at some point, can we get the way it's applied changed?

Specifically if a loot item has a 'number found' of 1-x, and a 1 is rolled, any loot percentage less than 100% will reduce that to 0 found.  That makes lower loot %ages (which I'd otherwise love to use) completely mess up things like eggs. Because eggs are found in numbers of 'usually 1, occasionally 2', even 75% loot changes that to 'usually 0, occasionally 1'.

As I understand it, loot percentage (for stackable items/items found in multiples) works by:

Rolling how many items would have been found at default loot level, then multiplying that number by the loot percentage and then rounding down.

At the very least it should round up, but ideally it should work by:

Rolling how many items would have been found at default loot level, then roll the loot percentage that many times and award one item for each loot percentage roll that succeeded.

Using that model would give results far closer to what I think people expect from a given loot setting.

 

[Riamus]

@faatal 1.0 introduced some processed half splat files.  I would assume these are designed to speed things up?  They seem to have a drawback if someone is making a custom map.  It seems that a road (and likely also a river) that is 1m wide on the full size splat will not show up in the game because of the half splat.  I know you aren't really supporting alternate ways people use to make maps beyond RWG, but this might be something to look into and see if there's a way to avoid such a problem.  If someone edits the splat for roads (and presumably water) and draws a 1px wide road (or river), it should still show up in the game.  Such thin roads/rivers might be unusual and not commonly done but it seems like an oversight to completely lose that in the game with the half splat even if they aren't normal.  A 1m wide path through the forest or leading to a hidden cottage or something like that could make for an interesting location on a map.

 

[Robbing Zombie]

Have these keys been made the same for every item? I find it annoying, when some stuff has modify under W etc. Mistakes have happened... 

 

[Kalex]

...You know dire wolves were actually REAL animals once upon a time, right?

And looked nothing like popular media portrays them. They weren't much taller than modern wolves but were bulkier and had a shorter broader muzzle, not the pony-sized versions of modern wolves that popular media portrays.

 

[Doomofman]

Fun.

1 Years ago...make small bear because I can, but ragdoll broken by scaling, so commented out.

2 I fixed ragdoll scaling for 1.0.

3 Allan says "why do we have small bear?". I say "because why not". Allan enables because it now works.

4 You see in game.

Thanks for the response. Would be nice if they could be shaded/colored slightly differently to make it seem like they're a different species or something but I'm sure not many people would notice