PC A20 Developer Diary Discussions

Ranzera said:
ETA: Also, 10 (I think that's the right number) equipment slots down to 4 is a travesty. What a loss. I used to argue with the guys in the older alphas who said that removing complexity was becoming a problem.

I was wrong.
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Not necessarily. It all depends on how they put down things in the game.

Removing stuff may be even better if you achieve the same goals. Think about when they invented the dishwasher as an example: before that, in restaurants, you had 1) the pile of dirty plates 2) The washing basin with soaped water 3) the washing basin with clean water to wash away the soap 4) the pile for clean (but wet) plates 5) the clean and dry plates. All that was put together inside the magical box we call the "dishwasher"!  :hail:  🍽️🍽️🍽️🍽️

 
Thank god this was moved out of dev diary, was afraid someone would actually read my post.

We moving all the "omg it looks amazing cant wait" posts too? since those definitely fall under discussions, albeit more positive ones.

Roland said:
Getting to play with all the inevitably cut content is truly one of the Early Access perks.
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One of the reasons i will never say i wasted money on it, or regret buying it. It gave me over 4000 hours of amazing enjoyment. But even the strongest most classic of cars run out of mileage and cant be amazing forever.  Stronger shinier faster models are always an inevitability. 

 
JaxTeller718 said:
We moving all the "omg it looks amazing cant wait" posts too? since those definitely fall under discussions, albeit more positive ones.
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We are moving all the posts that are not directly responding to or asking a question of Madmole be they positive or negative. Your rant was in reaction to someone else’s comment to Madmole. His was definitely not positive but it stayed because he was talking to the developer. Everyone who started discussing whether in agreement or not with him came here. 
 

Hope that jives with your sense of fairness. 

 
Hmm, I got that backwards. All the responses were moved here. Splitting discussions is confusing.

 
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Ranzera said:
Hmm, I got that backwards. All the responses were moved here. Splitting discussions is confusing.
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It's about keeping things tidy. Every so often a new member (whether they revisit the forums or not is another question) would complain about how they would have to sift through dozens of pages to maybe get one useful post from a developer. A lot of people simply do not have time on their hands.

I'm sure something could be done to "tie conversations together", such as providing links to the original message in every post in which someone responds to it, but that would be an unnecessary amount of work on Roland's part when it doesn't matter at the end of the day. In about a week few, if any, people will revisit these specific posts.

 
Ranzera said:
Hmm, I got that backwards. All the responses were moved here. Splitting discussions is confusing.
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Its not that difficult. If people respond to you quoting your content it will show in your notifications and then you can go straight to their response if you want to respond to them. As to your first concern that you edited away, nobody was protecting the devs. Your original criticism is there for Madmole to view and respond to if he wishes. What was split off was all the discussion by others. Sorry, but it has nothing to do with a conspiracy to keep the devs' egos intact and everything to do with the the 3-4 legitimate questions that were getting overwhelmed by you starting the next #gate.

There is nothing wrong with voicing displeasure and having a robust debate over the simplification of the clothing/armor for A20 but that place is here in the discussion forum. You brought up your point and Madmole will answer it and that will be the end of it. Pages and pages and pages of salty ranting just isn't going to happen there any longer. And you are mistaken about Madmole never reading this thread. He knows about it and he does read it and if he feels like he wants to get involved in the spectacle he will respond.

The A20 Developer Discussion thread is for asking questions, giving feedback directly to the developers, and getting information from them. It is not for 15-page long raging debates. Hope that clears things up. It may not be ideal for the sake of conversation but it is ideal for keeping the Diary thread focused.

 
Yoghira said:
Hi,

may i ask your audio guy in your developer team if you plan to insert spatialized audio / sound to Alpha 20 or a later version?

Ok it is only a thing when you play with headphones but it should be an option to activate. It will create much better immersion because

you know exactly where to look if you hear a noise. Above / under , left or right, behind or in front of you - you can say where they are (zombies, animals), ... with closed eyes.

I installed Unity just to play with that and it is very easy. I tried:

Unity´s spatializer,

Resonance Audio,

Oculus Spatializer Plugin

Steam Audio Spatializer.

You don´t need soundreflections or ambisonics or things like that, just the spatializer.

And then to make it "perfekt" bind the footsteps to the foots, the "Grrrrrrrr" to the head, the "swooshes and "swings" to the arm or hand

and the "gibs" or hits to the collision coordinates - done. 😀

And a second thing i recognized is that u use "Linear Rolloff" instead of "Logarithmic Rolloff" in most of

your "3D Sound Settings" for the creature sounds.

That cause the unnatural sense of distance to the sound source.

Please use "Logarithmic Rolloff" wether you go spatialized or not.

How do you as community and as developer think about these?

Regards

Yoghira
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There is more amiss with the sound system than just linear fall-off.  It seems that only the horizontal element of distance is considered.  Vertical distance doesn't matter - so sounds 200m above you while in a mine at bedrock is just as loud as sound right next to you at the surface.

But yes.  +100 to this from me.

 
Danidas said:
For future versions of the game would you consider the possibility of re-adding cosmetic mods. Like the current hat mods for helmets to make them look like a cowboy hat, baseball hat, etc but for all 4 gear slots. In order to allow us to swap out the look of our gear to further diversify our characters appearance beyond the dye system. As one of the main complaints about the new gear perk system is that everyone will end up looking identical when doing a specific role.
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i have a feeling thats what its "Kinda" like!


I remember in the stream, Madmole said that we can wear whatever piece we want, You want to wear a farmers hat with you're nomad gear? You can! but it will come with more perks if you wear the set!
 

im drawing up some ideas for some :S

 
Any normal player stats?

Does player be stronger while hard working instead of "press button to carry 50 TONNs while you can not pass 100 meters without coffee break"? I mean player actions should train basic stats, book can help this be more effective but nothing more.

Really, 100 level you can do a lot but still running like flying brick.

 
MechanicalLens said:
I haven't been doing too many quests this alpha. Have any people received quests for the non-remnant versions of the new stores, other than the T4 shotgun messiah? (Ex. Crack-A-Books, Pop-N-Pills, etc.?) I'm just curious if TFP allowed these POI's to be potential quest locations.
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I just got a tier 2 one for the new Working Stiffs store.

 
khzmusik said:
Playing Devil's advocate here... The one thing that those lights don't do, is go out. Flares do. If they're commonplace (like, cheaper to make or loot than torches) it would add light management mechanics, which could be cool.

Also things look spookier in a red flickering lights, so it would add to the fear factor.

...Having said all that, I'm not married to the idea, and I'm sure you guys have a lot more to work on.

EDIT: Sorry for the two posts, I thought the forum software would "auto-edit" my previous post.
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imo i feel like the flashlight gets overshadowed!

The torch is not as bright but can be used a A emergency weapon, (helped me a hell of alot early game)

Weapon/Helmet lights have no real downside aside from making you less stealthy and taking a mod slot

The flashlight is brighter then both but not really handy, I much rather uses a Torch, Maybe make it into one of the cop lights so you can to Beat the Crap out of someone (thoses things are HEAVY)

 
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Yeah the old 6 D battery Mag Lights...I still have a few and back on the job ,had hit people with them...they work well ;)  

 
Sidney said:
I'm curious why you believe that.  Do you guys want to be like EA?  Release games that are visually pretty, but fundamentally garbage?  If so please reconsider because almost nothing that AAA publishers @%$# out is worth the time, let alone money, to play.

This is just like, my opinion man, but the things that are holding you back are:

  • The lack of variety as well as the hard tiering of weapons and armor.  For example the sniper rifle is strictly better than the marksman rifle, and there are only 3 rifles total.
  • Bugs, especially the gamebreaking ones like vehicle duping, item loss in vehicles, vehicle loss, crippling FPS hitching during weapon fire, zombies' attacks clipping through walls, jerky zombie movement (the micro rubberbanding not the pathing that attempts to juke the player, that's cool), the game deciding that you don't have a bedroll or that your bedroll is actually someone else's, etc.
  • Things that perhaps aren't bugs, but are super irritating like the almost random autosort order, inconsistent reload and draw with bows, camera position not staying the same when exiting a vehicle so you are always disoriented, inability to consistently pick up a thrown spear, respawning "near your bed" can place you on the roof of a nearby POI (like a Shamway), the cancerous amount of I-beam debris in the wasteland making the 4x4 unusable there, gaining zero exp from cooking food or from zombies dying to traps/bleeding/fire.
  • Lack of special zombies.  Only the demo, and to a lesser extent the vultures, present a threat.  Everything else is a bullet sponge to one degree or another.
  • Game progression, especially loot not being better in harder POIs and harder biomes.  I understand you're working on this one, so this may not be valid for long.
  • Low worth/Worthless game content like stealth, gillie suits, knives, spears, batons, buried treasure perks, etc.
  • Terrible FPS, especially during BMs, even with the graphics turned way down.  My PC isn't a potato, but I never saw my frames break 30 on a BM after night 14.
  • Lack of features common in other FPS games such as different mouse sensitivity settings for different zoom levels, autorun, configs stored in a universal and portable .ini/.cfg file instead of the damn windows registry (really guys?), and changeable crosshairs.
  • Not enough "knobs and dials" to customize the game without mods.  For example you can't turn off the death penalty, nor can you remove the noobie weather protection.  There are a LOT of settings that should be configurable when creating a new world that aren't there.
These are the things keeping you from greatness, not how pretty your models are.
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I mostly disagree with point #1 above.  I assume you mean lack of variety in weapons, not lack of variety in this game.

Ignoring that I really agree with the above as a general "the game is not finished and needs a lot of polish".

If I know anything about software development (and I do) I would bet that many of the performance issues relates to just how broad this games is in terms of features.  Sure it can be optimised but the number of concepts here is actually mind boggling.  You have distributed state management in a game with RPG and Tower of defence and FPS rolled into one.  Then you have concepts like time management, resource management, and S.I.  Those things are each worth a book and people just take them for granted.  Fully destructable world.  Check.  Zombie AI and pathing through a fully destructable world.... NOW things get serious.  Just for fun we also have 3d spacial stuff - lighting, reflections, weather.  But wait, there's more.  Because everything is moddable and controlled via XML config.  Enough?  Nope.  We have buffs and status effects and bonusses.  Lets not forget about effect types - explosions affect blocks differently to say a melee attack.  And then we still need to get to entities, vehicles, and other things that are not part of the environment.

There is nothing else even remotely as ambitious as this.

Oh and that little "distributed state management" thing I glossed over... Whoever coded that needs a medal.

 
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