PC V2.0 Storms Brewing Dev Diary

User said:
On my second horde in 2.0, game stage 90, day 14, vanilla settings. I'm getting tons of ferals, cops, mutated zombies, even on the normal difficulty, this is pretty crazy, especially given how I'm having a pretty easy time with clearing poi's, and unlocking biomes, I hadn't even seen a mutated zombie yet. The day 7 horde was extremely easy in comparison, not even a single cop. I'm not metagaming or minmaxing. Even in heavy armor, I got hit twice? Infection, weakness, concussion. During a horde night, these feel way too punishing. The difficulty seems insane considering it's the second horde. I killed tons of zombies with my steel spear and other weapons, but the horde lasted until morning. Given the crawling changes, normal fighting positions or simply holding a poi don't work as well, and they have an easier time breaking in. Is there any limiting factor on horde contents given the day? Or is it all just game stage? Because I killed what felt like hundreds upon hundreds of ferals, and the horde still lasted until 4, and I nearly died. On day 14. Just seemed like a completely random difficulty spike way too early. Anyone else having this experience? I used a fortified poi as a horde base. I must be doing something wrong, I've never had such a hard time with a day 14 horde.
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I don't know why you're getting the ferals, but if I recall correctly in v1.0 they changed the first few horde nights to have unlimited zombies. Hordes used to have a set number of zombies per night, so you could just kill X number of them and be done with it. I can't find it in the patch notes, but they did talk about it during one of the developer streams.

My current take on early horde is to just not kill them, unless you have a glut of ammo you want to convert to XP (HA! Yeah right, a glut of ammo on day 7!). Get to the top of a big, solid building, make sure they can't path to you and just wait until dawn. Then you have a set amount of zombies to kill again since they stop respawning after dawn. It helps a bit if you spend the night only crippling the zombie's legs, because then they're substantially easier to kill in the morning and seem to do less damage to the POI you're in since they're so slow to move around.
 
ProlificPoultry said:
I was thinking about the perks and how people are saying that they’re real busted but now a thought just came to mind about them. What if they’re not busted? What if they implemented these new damage mitigation perks to prepare us for the addition of bandits, particularly ranged ones? Suddenly they don’t seem so busted anymore when you’re taking ranged hit scan damage.

The new perks reminded me of some items from Risk of Rain, namely the rose buckler’s shield which reduces damage while sprinting, safer spaces which allows you to block the full damage of a single attack every 15 seconds, tougher times which gives a random chance to block a hit and the topaz broach which gives a temporary shield after a kill in the form of extra health.

Now these are two different games but given the large number of sources for getting chipped or chunked in Risk of Rain these items are generally seen to be busted but not unbalanced.

So herein, despite the addition of the new zombies I don’t think this is a good test of how balanced these perks are… yet. Like I don’t want them to be nerfed before we see what they can actually do against bigger threats. I feel like they probably make pvp a lot more enjoyable because fights can last longer instead of getting one shotted by a sniper rifle or mowed down by an m60
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It is quite evident in this alpha that the damage mitigation appears to be either a miscalculation or a significant oversight regarding the mitigation of damage in perks.
7d2d already includes a tag designed to decrease damage to players.
name="DamageModifier" operation="perc_add" value="+or-" tags="player"/>
One would assume that if the intention was to lessen player damage, adjusting the value here would have been considerably simpler than creating an entirely new perk system to achieve reduced damage against players.
Nonetheless, as I mentioned in a previous post, this alpha is poised to be the best PvP update alpha they have implemented thus far; the reason for that is not due to the damage mitigation in perks.
 
faatal said:
I retested and one of my tests was wrong. Math.Abs is a bit faster than the FastAbs, but if I put "in" on the parameter, FastAbs speeds up quite a bit and beats Math.Abs due to less float>double>float nonsense. I am hesitant to do even that being close to stable release.
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I see, however there are plenty integer operations and the "Fast" ones don't do so well here compared to the standard stuff. Also just pointing out what I observed, not asking to rush anything. Also would you mind sharing those tests?
 
Mr. Perfect said:
I don't know why you're getting the ferals, but if I recall correctly in v1.0 they changed the first few horde nights to have unlimited zombies. Hordes used to have a set number of zombies per night, so you could just kill X number of them and be done with it. I can't find it in the patch notes, but they did talk about it during one of the developer streams.

My current take on early horde is to just not kill them, unless you have a glut of ammo you want to convert to XP (HA! Yeah right, a glut of ammo on day 7!). Get to the top of a big, solid building, make sure they can't path to you and just wait until dawn. Then you have a set amount of zombies to kill again since they stop respawning after dawn. It helps a bit if you spend the night only crippling the zombie's legs, because then they're substantially easier to kill in the morning and seem to do less damage to the POI you're in since they're so slow to move around.
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You can still complete early game hordes before dawn. I finished the Day 7 and Day 14 hordes in my first playthrough by about 2-3am. The ease of this will depend on your gamestage, difficulty setting, and base design. I finished Day 14 faster than Day 7 because I was better geared and had more perk points increasing my damage.
 
There's something I don't understand in 2.0.
I crafted a Q6 Pipe Baton without using any legendary parts... aren't they required anymore? 🤨

i thought they removed them, but then I found one in loot.
What's going on? Can anyone explain? 🤔
 
faatal said:
Now that you mention it, I have dreams for my next play through of doing a 4x12 km map using line that goes from forest on south to wasteland in the north. That would require me to travel through each biome to get to the next instead of just staying in the forest and dipping into each biome to unlock one at a time. I am curious to see what breaks when the map is not square.
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Sounds interesting :)
Is there a standard ingame option to generate rectangular maps?
 
SylenThunder said:
And all without putting any focus at all on PvP gameplay. Imagine that. PvP wins from PvE content.
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yes, I genuinely feel sympathy for you as in the upcoming months, you will begin to encounter numerous x-millions of "legacy" and "modern" console accounts eager to engage in PvP as console continues its path towards dedicated.
It is now your responsibility to review all the post, reports, requests, and various matters that these PvP players will soon be submitting on this forum.
With the work you have to do on this forum and steam forum- oh my, how will you ever have time to eat?:)
 
Mr. Perfect said:
I don't know why you're getting the ferals, but if I recall correctly in v1.0 they changed the first few horde nights to have unlimited zombies. Hordes used to have a set number of zombies per night, so you could just kill X number of them and be done with it. I can't find it in the patch notes, but they did talk about it during one of the developer streams.

My current take on early horde is to just not kill them, unless you have a glut of ammo you want to convert to XP (HA! Yeah right, a glut of ammo on day 7!). Get to the top of a big, solid building, make sure they can't path to you and just wait until dawn. Then you have a set amount of zombies to kill again since they stop respawning after dawn. It helps a bit if you spend the night only crippling the zombie's legs, because then they're substantially easier to kill in the morning and seem to do less damage to the POI you're in since they're so slow to move around.
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The change to horde night does not create unlimited zombies. There is still a limit. It just makes the last wave "trickle" so it lasts longer. You can still easily complete the first horde nights before dawn. I'm often don't with them by 1am or even earlier. Later ones can also be completed early, but it is harder because of the number you have to kill.
 
@faatal I noticed the performance in 2.0 is in a good place. Is there any chance that you guys talked about increasing the overall biome spawn quantity of zds by a bit, or set it as and option or even decrease the respawn delay for undead entities?

I ask because I don't even know if the game has margin/leeway for more entities or if with 3.0 and bandits that would be a stretch.

I did notice with mods that more than 64 zds was doable and stable on PC back in 1.0. Not sure if consoles could handle it. I am not talking total entities though, just increased spawns below that limit.
 
bdubyah said:
@Laz Man Who is the one working on Area 7? Hats off to them, even seeing it in its current state, it is impressive. Watching G9 go through it losing his mind since he is expecting to get ambushed as he doesn't realize it isn't finished yet. Haha. Worth a watch to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

Worth nothing just how much anxiety it gave him not seeing zombies. Maybe some designed like that? Big abandoned spaces add to that creepy vibe.
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That one is by Eric. It should be coming online very soon. It was checked in intentionally, so people wouldn't have to reroll a new map to quest it.
 
Riamus said:
The change to horde night does not create unlimited zombies. There is still a limit. It just makes the last wave "trickle" so it lasts longer. You can still easily complete the first horde nights before dawn. I'm often don't with them by 1am or even earlier. Later ones can also be completed early, but it is harder because of the number you have to kill.
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Oh! Well that's not so bad then, I was under the impression it was a never ending stream and just stopped trying. Sisyphean tasks and what not.
 
Mr. Perfect said:
Oh! Well that's not so bad then, I was under the impression it was a never ending stream and just stopped trying. Sisyphean tasks and what not.
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Sisyphus should have just blown up the boulder with explosives, and that's usually how you finish a horde early.

Putting the horde night zombie count higher also helps, as the total number for the night is the same but you can kill faster. Well, so long as you have an AOE killing method...
 
ZehMatt said:
I actually measured that just today with Unity 6.1, the built-ins are better and codegen wise at least the integer versions are just 4 instructions with no branching which the "Fast" ones never achieve, ever, no matter how hard I pressure the code path. With those "Fast" functions you play against the little optimizations it can do, mono will replace Math.Min/Max and so on with intrinsics.

See code here for the intrinsics:
github.com

mono/mono/mini/intrinsics.c at 0f53e9e151d92944cacab3e24ac359410c606df6 · mono/mono

Mono open source ECMA CLI, C# and .NET implementation. - mono/mono
github.com github.com
github.com

mono/mono/mini/mini-ops.h at 0f53e9e151d92944cacab3e24ac359410c606df6 · mono/mono

Mono open source ECMA CLI, C# and .NET implementation. - mono/mono
github.com github.com

So I don't see how a hand rolled version can possibly be faster, also my own tests show the opposite effect which I measured in Unity (Mono), .NET Framework 4.7 and .NET Core 3, in every runtime the custom version is at least 10% slower, sometimes there is a gain of 40% which is not nothing.
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