PC A20 Developer Diary Discussions

Man I hope the behemoth is reconsidered at some point.

I was driving back to my base after 2200 & thought how bada$$ would it be to run into one of them in the pitch dark, having one of them sprinting towards you. 

 
Second edition, text!

Reading this thread of the forum, you can see that the requirements for developers are increased regarding small details!
Look at the pixel games, the graphics are terrible (Minecraft), but there is an interesting gameplay.
No game has become popular just because of the good graphics!
We need to add new features to the game!
In the old mods for this game, a lot has already been implemented!
For instance.
-Changing seasons
Once every few days, it snows and it gets cold, then everything comes back!
- Radioactive zones where you can find unique resources and loot!
-Ability to build modern objects as well as objects from the future! The year is 2036, if I'm not mistaken!
 And when you walk on the map, there are carts, hoes, sledgehammers all around!
-Ability to build a railway, (I understand that it's hard for Unity, but I really want to! :))
- And the most difficult thing in the game is the balance!
There are many inconsistencies in the existing skills in the recipes!
It is impossible to make a pipe yourself without a machine!
And now we are making them, for the production of a forge in which you can melt metal, it is illogical!
- The use of electricity in the game has practically stopped!
 If the game had modern machines powered by electricity, then it would be in demand!
-And now on a wooden table with a vice and a file you can build a spaceship. :)

We apologize in advance for the Google translator!

 
I'm not sure how I feel about the new 4 slot clothing/armor direction.

The new concepts look cool and the set bonus sounds interesting. But having less outfit slots means less mods - means less choice. It makes the whole clothing system simpler. Players are directed toward most-will-play-like-this prototypes. Less in-between characters.

At the moment you are ghathering armor/clothing parts as incremental upgrades and moving your mods between them to best suit yout character. The set bonus might make finding most outfit items boring, as you now are looking for ONE specific set. (...as there are less mod slots and some important mods are already hardcoded into a specific set)

To me, this is the first time it feels like something meaningful is being dumbed down. It sure will look better but I've never liked "graphics over gameplay" so to speak.

Feel free to convince me I'm wrong! :)

 
toores said:
I'm not sure how I feel about the new 4 slot clothing/armor direction. *SNIPED FOR SPACE*
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For me im all for it, A Lot of clothing has gotten the Shaft, many people would rather wear their armor shoes then wear Worn boots or Goth boots, or Wear there helmets and not wear a hat (until they get mods)

Plus it would make everyone look much cooler! and Plus you can mix match armors, So if you want to wear mining gear but want to wear a Farmers hat, you can! Now i do think there could be more (like hunter, Army, EXO, Athlete, Football gear, ETC) but who knows, maybe there will be more in the next stream.  

 
One thing I just realized is that after the first couple of days in a new game, looting piles of clothes, dressers, hangers, clothing racks, etc. will provide the joy that book cases do, where instead of getting some garbage t-shirt i have a chance at an armor set piece.

 
Eromivus said:
One thing I just realized is that after the first couple of days in a new game, looting piles of clothes, dressers, hangers, clothing racks, etc. will provide the joy that book cases do, where instead of getting some garbage t-shirt i have a chance at an armor set piece.
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Free cloth and paint you mean?

 
Adam the Waster said:
Free cloth and paint you mean?
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Getting cloth is legit, though by my first horde night i usually have more than i ever use. Having to find bits of stripped down cloth here and there might be a nice change. As for paint, using chrysanthemum and oil on the chemistry station is generous enough that i don't bother with that fussy game of pulling dye out of clothes before that point.

 
toores said:
I saw the indoors darkening effect in the stream. Any chance this gets taken out?

It really feel more like a bug than a feature. You can see clearly what's inside a store and after 2 steps your screen dims to complete black. And if the POI has some areas where you go in and out a lot or there's a hole in the roof, your bightness keeps waving up and down.

I don't believe it adds much to the game, rather takes away and feels like something is broken in the lighting tech.
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Eyes adjust the light that goes through the cornea in real life tho. In my case, it feels realistic, not broken lighting tech.

 
Sidney said:
...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.   
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Pipe rifles are incoming.  Tiers are tiers... you can be better/worse with all rifles, but each +tier rifle is better in general, but there are some trade-offs (mag capacity, fire modes/rate).  How else are tiers supposed to work?

Sidney said:
  • 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.
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You're saying bugs are holding this game back from achieving success?  First of all, many Bethesda titles (the entire Elder Scrolls, Fallout series for starters) shipped full of bugs of all sizes, and managed to still dominate because they were fun anyway (which does not excuse Bethesda, but is true nonetheless).  Secondly, telling the devs that bugs are bad is redundant.  They have massive lists... and stuff's being fixed all the time.

Sidney said:
  • 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.
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* Autosort:  Inventory management is vastly superior now.  If you want, you can even grab a super-tiny and easy-to-use "lockable slots" mod (Khaine's is the one I recall at the moment).  'Smart' autosort doesn't matter; you arrange your necessary stuff however you like, lock that # of slots, and mass-shunt everything else to/from containers / vehicles as you like.  You'll likely no longer need to use autosort at that point.

* I like the exit-vehicle camera angle suggestion.  Would be nice if your camera angle was auto-corrected to facing forward (the direction your vehicle is facing) when switching back to first-person.

* Spears are much easier to use, now.  The problem with retrieving them (as I see it) has nothing to do with how spears currently work; it's the grass that's typically blocking your line-of-sight to the spear (or whatever else).  If grass no longer blocked LOS for interactions, it would be a significant improvement.

* I never use "near your bed", merely "on your bed", and haven't had any issues with respawning.  In SP the things that killed you despawn anyway, so you don't need the "near" option, especially if you placed your bedroll somewhere wise.

* Don't try to drive through the wasteland if you don't like dodging debris / landmines in a vehicle... just stick to the roads to travel through the zone.  It's always faster, unless there simply *is* no road to get where you want, which presents an interesting challenge anyway, and makes a lot of sense in a carpet-bombed environment.

* XP from crafting has already been thoroughly addressed.  You get tons from doing everything else, and it discourages the safe, boring, and grindy 'spam-crafting in my base(ment)' scenario. It also gets weird in MP with multiple people using crafting stations and sharing XP via proximity, etc.
* If you want trap-kill XP, spec into the INT tree to get it.  I received XP for Z's that bled out from wounds I gave them (last build was heavily blades-oriented, with constant auto-bleed).

Sidney said:
  • 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.
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If your definition of "special zombies" simply means "presents a threat", as you seem to be saying, then I will refer you to your game settings (which have been improved / added to multiple times in recent alphas: BM controls, new difficulty levels, run speed controls, etc)... and to silent-killer Z-dogs, Dire Wolves, and Z-Bears in wandering hordes (I've had two Z-Bears & three Z-Dogs jump me without warning... tell me that's not a challenge).  You can't simply take a single example (even a zombie bear) in a 1-on-1 situation, in daylight, when you know they're there, and say they're not a threat because you can beat them in that fight; one of those you *didn't* see/hear coming while you were busy dispatching a normal zombie can easily ruin your day.  Ruined day = sufficient challenge = special enough for that definition, as I see it. 

Add to that the ever-increasing likelihood of suffering max-HP-lowering & often nasty debuffs for being hit by even the most common zombie, and you have all sorts of potential trouble to deal with.

Sidney said:
  • 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.
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All of that has been promised and is incoming.

Sidney said:
  • Low worth/Worthless game content like stealth, gillie suits, knives, spears, batons, buried treasure perks, etc.
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Calling gameplay elements which contribute to - or even define - other playstyles which you obviously haven't experimented with "worthless" is simply a disservice to both the game, the devs, other players, and yourself.  It's also lazy.  Any of those listed things can be quite fun & useful, if you actually tried them out.  They don't have to be the absolute 'best' way to play (as if there could be a 'best' way).  They work, add variety (something you complain about the lack of in the same post), and are fun if you let them be.  Time to find a bigger box to think in!  Try something different.
This point is one of the biggest reasons I even went to the effort of addressing your rather rant-y list of 'problems with the game'.  

Sidney said:
  • 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.
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Experiment with your BM settings.  TFP have mentioned how high numbers of AI entities are a heavy load on the CPU.  It may have very little to do with your graphic settings (though certain things like shadows are performance-expensive; it's worth trying each setting @ min/max to see if it helps).  Try lowering your BM 'max alive per player' numbers, etc.  I find a lower number does not necessarily result in under-populated BM hordes; the total kill count after a horde night is mostly affected by how fast I can kill them, not how many were incoming at once.  If fewer Z's active at once noticeably improves performance, and smoother play leads to more kills, then that might be the way to go.

Sidney said:
  • 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.
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All of this is what I'd call polish... and more appropriate / logical to address once the core elements / features of the game are done, which they're not.

Sidney said:
  • 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.
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I agree that Random Gen customization controls would be very cool. 

You can already disable 'drop on death' entirely... and if you meant the debuff when respawning, I'd agree that it might be nice to be able to adjust it's severity/duration in game... but you can do it manually if you need to.  This game is very easy to mod, as most things are easily changed in Notepad++ (free) via XML files.  At one point, I found and changed the death penalty debuff duration to 1 in a few minutes, for example.  I imagine the low-level thermal buff would be even easier to alter.

 
 
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I wish there was a drop All on death-your dead body is now reanimated with all your stuff option

Hunt that thing down and kill it for your loot

 
Demonoid74 said:
I wish there was a drop All on death-your dead body is now reanimated with all your stuff option

Hunt that thing down and kill it for your loot
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I remember that was a thing in Zombi, and if you died on the way to the corpse with all the weapons they got scattered and lost all over again

 
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