PC A19 Diary Discussions

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I'm not worried about the pigs. I've also yet to find a single beaker, or the workstation schematic.

Normally, I have a bunch by now. RNG is just sucky this time.

For meat, I get wolves wandering to my base and easily shoot them while they rub up against the pointy things

attached to the support pillars.  :D

(love the highways from nitrogen. base up top, bars 2 blocks below the roadway for a cage, floor is 3 blocks above ground)

(spikes on the poles and ... meat and xp delivery system)     :D

I'll have to do a screenshot of it.

 
MechanicalLens said:
Speaking of which, today I got 5 beakers on day 3. XD I looted a mid-sized gas station and each medical pile I found had a beaker in it.
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Hm, do we have a hidden meth lab POI ingame already ?  :)  

Kidding aside, having only 2 and on day 24, looted 2 big towns in RWG with lucky goggles for comparison. You are lucky, buddy. 

This is what makes this game so cool, we never know. 

 
beerfly said:
Hm, do we have a hidden meth lab POI ingame already ?  :)  

Kidding aside, having only 2 and on day 24, looted 2 big towns in RWG with lucky goggles for comparison. You are lucky, buddy. 

This is what makes this game so cool, we never know. 
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Yep. There's been times where I never found a wrench until day 10+, other times I found over a dozen wrenches in the first few days. RNG at its finest, gotta love and hate it. :)

 
Is there a new experimental or update in the works soon? I wanna start a new game but don't want to have it instantly invalidated by a new patch. Making a new map takes a very long time...

 
AlabasterW said:
Is there a new experimental or update in the works soon? I wanna start a new game but don't want to have it instantly invalidated by a new patch. Making a new map takes a very long time...
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Since the A20 dev diary isn't even up yet, I think you are good to go for several months ;)  

 
MechanicalLens said:
@bloodmoth13 That wouldn't work. Imagine having to scrounge up tens of thousands of feathers. Not gonna happen.
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TBH i dont ever use dart traps, i might need to give them a shot, but i wind up with thousands of feathers end game that i have no use for since early game has brainwashed me into thinking they have value.

Vultures are plenty late game so harvesting feathers shouldnt be that big a deal, and there are other options for base defense too.

I might not be qualified to comment on this though since i dont really know what role dart traps fill since i never use them, but i think consolidating a few niche items where it makes sense is more fun (like mouldy bread and sham sandwiches)

 
New game, new map, and trader has a beaker and cigar AND chemstation for sale on day 1.

(working forge, mixer, workbench too)

Mind you, first night, zombie shows up, I'm  plinking at it, wolf shows up, kill wolf and zed.

another zed shows up, as does a bear.  Bear decapitates the zed. (that was hilarious to watch)

Took forever to kill bear.

Scamper down, harvest the meat.

Day 1.

You just never know what RNG is gonna give you, or do to you.

😛

 
Spectral Force said:
@Fatal  Will this water update pave the way for boats and how does this affect the game, as in what is the benefit of doing it as a mesh vs block?  Will the CM menu still have water as placeable?
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burh what about barrels that can be used to have a floating sea base....

Too bad the zombies will just swim up to it and eat it!

 
Roland said:
Since blocks and water can share space, I wonder whether the POI design guys are cooking up  any submerged dungeons for us.

A submerged ship off the coast of Arizona would be so immersive. ;)
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coast of Arizona... i remember that beach now... i sold to some unfortunate victim. :) next thing you will want scuba equipment and sharks and submarines... oooops :)

 
@bloodmoth13 The fact you've never used dart traps shows your... ignorance in terms of their ammo consumption. Realistically, you'd need thousands of darts per week. Try gathering that many feathers between each horde. Not only would it not be realistically possible, but if it was, who would want to spend that amount of time doing so? Dart traps would quickly fall in popularity, with few, if any, people choosing to use them. It's a good idea on paper, but an atrocious idea in practice.

Dart trap ammo requires the ingredients to be able to be mass collected and mass produced. They don't use feathers, or polymers, or mechanical parts, or springs, or steel. They use some iron and a little bit of clay. Those thousands of feathers we all have by the end of a world? They'd be good for one, maybe two horde nights if you're lucky.

Honestly the better idea is probably nails. Problem is they are dirt cheap, so you would need to increase the resource cost to produce them as well. (I don't think many people will shed a tear about that though. How many uses for nails are there anyway other than wood furniture, a couple deco recipes, and for shooting chickens with?)

 
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Jost Amman said:
@madmole

For the sake of "simplification", we should get rid of the dart trap ammo and just make it shoot nails.

Dart ammo is only used there. Whatd'ya think?
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I swear I can g back over your posts and se multiple requests for simplification and removal of items. Like whats up?

"Hey MM since frames are made of wood how about we just make wood turn into frames on harvest."

I get yall are over actual complex gameplay but can we not remove crafting from everything. 

 
Water sounds kike it will be really tricky.  I think there should be infinite source blocks, but they should not be abailable to players in a normal game.  They should only be created during the RWG process or in creative mode.

It would probably be relatively easy to bake rivers into Navezgane.  But getting rivers functioning in RWG wlild probably be a nightmare and would add to the RWG generation time.

I think lakes should count as infinite sources.  But in terms of water fill, there should be a limit.  Ideally water would flow until it reaches sea level, and sea level would be fixed so that it can never rise.  I.e. water that makes it to sea level would automatically cancel out at that level.

But yeah, there are probably server crashing possibilities out there.  Perhaps there could be a server option to limit or turn off flow for larger servers.  Internal testing would probably yield interesting results.

However, good water has been done... I believe several years ago it was Roland who posted a video of a game where water would drain and fill other areas if the player created a situation where it could happen.

Like spice, the water must flow.

 
Roland said:
A submerged ship off the coast of Arizona would be so immersive. ;)
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just convince Mexico to dig a moat and make them pay 4 it.

MAKE ARIZONA GREAT AGAIN

 
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Boidster said:
We can always hope, but I think that would be difficult, computationally, unless we want the infinite water trick that Minecraft has. Minecraft only has two water types, source block and flowing block (with a 'direction' tag on the flowing blocks). It doesn't really redistribute the remaining water when you remove a block (from a pond let's say), it just calculates whether there ought to be a flowing block where you took the water or whether it should create a new source block (the infinite water trick). A single source block will power a waterfall forever; it never drains out. And you can't take water from a flowing block (to fill a bucket).

Trying to calculate 120 glass jars' worth of water out of a lake and then redistributing the water in the entire lake would be...a challenge, even if the entire lake was contained in loaded chunks. If they greatly simplify it by having, say, only 10 possible water levels in a block, the visual of seeing the pond drop down visibly after X jars/buckets have been removed would result in much wailing and gnashing of teeth in these forums.

I'm no expert so grain of salt and all that, but I think of how computationally expensive it is to calculate SI (i.e. lag you see when a medium or large building is collapsing) and then think about a 4,000 block lake of water and needing to compute new water levels when the player takes a stack of murky water jars from it. Or builds a trench leading out of it in an attempt to drain it into a moat around his base. Maybe they'll find a neat shortcut for all of that which works well.
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All true. But remember how in previous alphas the SI calculations of collapsing buildings brought your FPS down to single digits and nowadays got much much better? My theory is that it was eventually put into its own thread because it is a task that can run perfectly parallel to everything else. The same (imagined?) treatment could help with water:

Have a low-priority thread running that distributes all water that has an air block below or more than the level of water in the surrounding blocks. If the difference of one block is less than would be needed to increment the surrounding blocks each by the minimum step it simply is removed (it evaporates) and not distributed anymore.

That way a lake will always level itself out. Drop a few bottles of murky water into it and it will make a small ripple and everything is level again after 3 seconds.

Drop one block full of water into it and it will make lots of ripples outward until it eventually vanishes and the water level will return to its previous height everywhere. Drop enough water to increase the water level by one step and it will actually increase water level a step (in practice you'll need to be careful about the order of updates to the blocks to achieve this)

On a powerful server that low-priority thread would have a core for itself. And on small and slow CPUs it would only get the leftover CPU cycles.

 
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DanLW said:
Water sounds kike it will be really tricky.  I think there should be infinite source blocks, but they should not be abailable to players in a normal game.  They should only be created during the RWG process or in creative mode.

It would probably be relatively easy to bake rivers into Navezgane.  But getting rivers functioning in RWG wlild probably be a nightmare and would add to the RWG generation time.

I think lakes should count as infinite sources.  But in terms of water fill, there should be a limit.  Ideally water would flow until it reaches sea level, and sea level would be fixed so that it can never rise.  I.e. water that makes it to sea level would automatically cancel out at that level.

But yeah, there are probably server crashing possibilities out there.  Perhaps there could be a server option to limit or turn off flow for larger servers.  Internal testing would probably yield interesting results.

However, good water has been done... I believe several years ago it was Roland who posted a video of a game where water would drain and fill other areas if the player created a situation where it could happen.

Like spice, the water must flow.
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Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy with "infinite" water that didn't decrease when you e.g. dipped a glass jar in it. As long as it looks at least somewhat realistic.

Also, I'd be absolutely ecstatic if it were possible to have waterfalls in the game (POI placed would be good, but even better would be random gen waterfalls). That's probably asking too much though.

 
khzmusik said:
Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy with "infinite" water that didn't decrease when you e.g. dipped a glass jar in it. As long as it looks at least somewhat realistic.

Also, I'd be absolutely ecstatic if it were possible to have waterfalls in the game (POI placed would be good, but even better would be random gen waterfalls). That's probably asking too much though.
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I dream of the following scenario:

The map is split by a mountain range. On one side is a big lake on a higher elevation, you start on the other half. Through some event or quest in mid game a dam breaks and slowly (over say 2 weeks) the half you are in is flooded with water.

In the 2 weeks you have to find a place on the other side emerging out of the water to build your new base in and transfer your most precious stuff to it. While all the usual stuff like horde nights happens in between and your old base slowly sinks.

 
Well, same game, day 39. Still no boars, but FINALLY found a beaker. Got 4 in one day. (live on stream, so no cheatin to get'em)

Got the steel tool schematic too.

STILL need the workbench schematic. Started dropping pts into INT, so I figure RNG will wait until I can make it via that route, then drop

a bunch of the books.

(trader has a working bench, so made my tools, 3 pcs steel armor all I had parts for, and 2 chem stations)

Oh, one trader had a motorcycle chassis for sale and the full motorcycle. Bought the chassis as I could make the handlebars.

I has motorized wheels now. Sold the 4 minibike chassis and 2 handlebars. (I hate the sound of it)

Other test game, trader had a beaker on day 1. Go figure.

:D

 
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