PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[hotpoon]

I wish we could support more than one bedroll for these situations.

Do you mean like Ark, where you can quick travel? Personally I think it would be less OP to have it the way Conan Exiles does it with one bed and one bedroll and you can only choose a spawn spot if you die...not quick spawn on a whim.

 

[madmole]

Maybe some kind of "food variation morale bonus", that is calculated by the game, and indicated in the UI before eating the food, like"Stew: +10 morale", "Bacon & Eggs: +0 morale", "Water: +0morale", "Beer: +20 morale"

If the player repeats eating the same food, the morale bonus drops to zero for that type. A timer will reset the morale bonus over time.

The morale could be acting similar to the old wellness system (boosting a stat), but degrading slowly over time.

Its increase by:

-food

-using luxory items at the players home (you could get a boost once a day by sitting on a sofa + drinking a beer)

-killing 10 zombies within 1 minute

-finding a high-value loot crate

-finishing a trader-quest

I hated that system in state of decay. Oh Bobby is bored and his morale is slipping. Take him with you for some zombie killing to cheer him up. Don't tell me my character is depressed. He's my character. I'll eat 500 corn bread and like it, because I'm full of gratitude I'm still breathing in this nightmare. It turns into this micro maintenance that adds zero value. How about I just make food rare so you are happy to have something to eat? See this problem is about balance, not adding more features.

If we limited stack size to 3 food items per slot, then people wouldn't be taking 50 cornbread and being good to go on a quest. They might actualy make more advanced foods because of limited carry space. I'm not talking about resources like raw corn and potatoes or meat, but cooked prepared foods and bandages need their stack sizes cut dramatically.

 

[meganoth]

Or make seed crafting schematic find only. Its the ability to craft seeds that makes it OP too fast. If you only had corn but not potatoes your stew making ability would be limited and you'd need to find that potato schematic before you had mega farming potential.
Or just make seeds never craftable, and rare loot and high priced at traders. Each one you find is a big deal because you can feed a bit better.

If you ask me, the second one would be wonderful. A slowly growing garden limited by the seeds you find. Garden supply going from useless to supplementary to the only thing needed in a slow progression. Seeds would be valuable like mods.

 

[madmole]

There is probably no way to nerf the output of farming for an experienced player. Any location-based threats can be avoided by smart base design. Forcing a personal time investment (like weeding) would be deemed as no fun by many. Higher stage players will always be able to create more output than can be consumed for that single player.
Hence some other limit, such as a variation bonus (bonus for making and consuming different dishes regularly) or the mentioned spoilage (requiring to cook up dishes on demand).

Or some type of "oft spoilage", such that a food gives more bonuses for 15 minutes after being cooked. (the player can not spam-cook, and live from the stockpile to receive the best bonuses)

Find only seeds and crop trample by zombies/animals but not players would work wonders.

 

[The Gronk]

Or make seed crafting schematic find only. Its the ability to craft seeds that makes it OP too fast. If you only had corn but not potatoes your stew making ability would be limited and you'd need to find that potato schematic before you had mega farming potential.
Or just make seeds never craftable, and rare loot and high priced at traders. Each one you find is a big deal because you can feed a bit better.

Surely the purpose of balance is not to make it OP at all?

This is still just a delay to the stockpiling of food. Is spoilage still an option or have you ruled that out entirely? I still can't think of a good way to reduce food mountains without it.

 

[Haidrgna]

Yeah we'll see. I do want to make generic mud and blood covered walking dead like zombies for the hordes. Special ones you never see, and leave the distinguished ones out of horde night. I always felt it was immersion breaking to see cheerleaders and football players in hordes just for the sake of variety. In the walking dead no one zombie stands out, they are all kind of the same and that is how I want our hordes to be. We could save memory and performance doing this as we could instantiate more of the same model.
Not like this reference, but only in the sense that no one zombie stands out much different than the others:

https://www.marxist.com/images/cache/53f8976f87b65dc011f5deee844b6eb1_w700_h561.jpg

At a minimum maybe we will just cover the existing zeds in more dirt and blood and desaturate their clothing further. But I'd rather make some special blood moon zeds for this, like these are the crazy ones that only come out once a week on blood moons, and that explains their ability to know where players are.

Yeah something like that could work, a similar way to how Left 4 Dead did it where horde zombies where just more grey and hardly stood out, while the special infected did have a specific appearance to stand out, and gaining a performance boost, more zombies on the field as a bonus.

 

[Thecolours]

We're trying letting players craft blue. Damage is increased with each quality color. You still need parts to craft guns and more with better quality, so it will not be a blue gun factory I assure you. If you lose the one you have, it will take significant work to acquire 25 new parts to craft another blue gun. You get 4 parts for scrapping a gun, no matter its quality. So you'll need to scrap at least 6 shotguns to craft a blue shotgun. This is just a placeholder, we need to test and balance it yet. Guns might be too abundant.

finding guns is not that hard at all. You can find 6 guns the same type in one day, no problem. If you want to make crafting guns more of a challenge I would suggest adding another layer of complexity.

 

[Trankitas]

Or make seed crafting schematic find only. Its the ability to craft seeds that makes it OP too fast. If you only had corn but not potatoes your stew making ability would be limited and you'd need to find that potato schematic before you had mega farming potential.
Or just make seeds never craftable, and rare loot and high priced at traders. Each one you find is a big deal because you can feed a bit better.

I mean, IRL you have to care differently of every different species of plants that you have, so it would be realistic to have to learn how to successfully take care of every species. (don't know if it would suit well for the game tho)

 

[Thecolours]

Yeah we'll see. I do want to make generic mud and blood covered walking dead like zombies for the hordes. Special ones you never see, and leave the distinguished ones out of horde night. I always felt it was immersion breaking to see cheerleaders and football players in hordes just for the sake of variety. In the walking dead no one zombie stands out, they are all kind of the same and that is how I want our hordes to be. We could save memory and performance doing this as we could instantiate more of the same model.
Not like this reference, but only in the sense that no one zombie stands out much different than the others:

https://www.marxist.com/images/cache/53f8976f87b65dc011f5deee844b6eb1_w700_h561.jpg

At a minimum maybe we will just cover the existing zeds in more dirt and blood and desaturate their clothing further. But I'd rather make some special blood moon zeds for this, like these are the crazy ones that only come out once a week on blood moons, and that explains their ability to know where players are.

A special blood moon zed that only comes out on horde night sounds awesome. Have them replace all the normal zombies. But, I wouldn't want to see crawlers and cops go away. They make horde night defenses more important because of the added threat they bring.

 

[madmole]

Until they fix zombie speed it really is simple if you die during horde night.
We. Are. Significantly. Faster. Than. The. Zombies.

Oh, in case you are playing Nightmare speed.... Run 40 meters instead but same routine.

For now, in A18 nightmare mode should be fixed.

 

[Survager]

Some idea for death )

We're trying letting players craft blue. Damage is increased with each quality color. You still need parts to craft guns and more with better quality, so it will not be a blue gun factory I assure you. If you lose the one you have, it will take significant work to acquire 25 new parts to craft another blue gun. You get 4 parts for scrapping a gun, no matter its quality. So you'll need to scrap at least 6 shotguns to craft a blue shotgun. This is just a placeholder, we need to test and balance it yet. Guns might be too abundant.

Joel, how can we lose our weapons? )

I suggest this:

If a player dies outside the base, he can lose the most expensive weapon what he has in his inventory or on his belt. This weapon along with the all mods must be moved to the nearest traider. In the inventory of the character or in the backpack, which he will deliver after respawning, there will be a note with the text: "We found your weapon and delivered it to this merchant [coordinates]. If you want to pick it up, you need to go to this traider within 3 days and buy it at a price of 30% of its real value. If you do not have time for 3 days, you can also buy your weapon, but for 100% of its cost. Hurry up, surviver, everything is in your hands!"

 

[RipClaw]

Joel, how can we lose our weapons?

There's plenty of opportunities. You die and the backpack is destroyed or disappears due to a bug. You can also accidentally drop the weapon if you press G and don't find it quickly enough.

Or you are in the mine, the ceiling collapses, you are killed and the backpack is destroyed by falling debris. Has happened to a friend of mine before.

It is also possible that the weapon is in a box and the whole chunk resets. I've seen it before. That's why I always build a spare bases in case of a bug that destroys my whole base.

 

[Survager]

Interesting. +1 to INT for this post.

There is one problem: so we will get a huge amount of meat for 100,500 hours of play before, and just forget about the garden)

 

[Survager]

AFAIK scrapping can only yield one resource.

The battery can be installed on the ground and disassembled with wrench, as we do now with office chairs :smile-new: )

 

[Roland]

There is one problem: so we will get a huge amount of meat for 100,500 hours of play before, and just forget about the garden)

Not if the animals that attack the crops are rabbits and if the meat from them is further reduced. If you made rabbit hordes that spawned from the "garden heat map" but each rabbit only yielded 1 meat resource then it would take killing 5 rabbits to get even one charred meat meal. Plus rabbits are harder to kill than deer.

 

[bluepharoh]

I did another test and didn't notice any problems. 3 solar panels, 3 pressure plates, 10 dart traps and a lot of lights.
View attachment 28402

If I may interject here. I find that when you have solar panels hooked up to battery banks and 22:00 rolls around, the solar panels will show the same electrical draw as the battery banks they are connected to. Most of the time the solar panels are not actually powered on when it shows that they are, but it does seem like the odd time they may be creating a double circuit or something which leads to major performance issues like micro stutter and slow motion delay in-game. Like even though I may see a drop from 60 fps down to 30 fps, it feels like the game is running at 5 to 10 fps.

I have hundreds of electrical connections and devices around my base without any performance issues until this anomaly happens. I have experienced it the last couple of alphas but thought it was a known issue. The short term fix has been to immediately cycle the solar panels off and back on to clear the problem. Not sure if there may be more to it or not though. If there is a way to ensure solar panels power cycle automatically that may help.

In about 100 hrs of play in my current 17.2 game I have experienced this issue maybe 4 times so replicating it will not be easy. Works out to be about 7% of game nights for me. Hoping maybe this will help narrow it down for you or at least one issue related to electricity.

 

[Cernwn]

What's critical is that there be some mechanism whereby the more plants on your farm, the more challenge you're given. This could take many forms. I would favor a system directly analogous to the above, where rabbits and deer attack your crops, and their number and frequency is related to the number of plants making 'heat' in a chunk.

The only issue with this, is that attracting large numbers of grazing wild animals would exponentially increase the available food source even more.... Unless they were "infected" (not zombified, but live plagued) versions which only dropped bones and rotten flesh when harvested. Locusts/vermin, fires from thunderstrikes, drought and crop/livestock blight also work as random events for advanced game stages of farming. On the flip side - rare quality ingredients, mutated hybrids or crop surpluses are easy ways to add positive events to a randomized (more exciting) farming system. I completely agree that more rewards should = more challenge, and vice versa.

 

[Aerial]

We're trying letting players craft blue. Damage is increased with each quality color. You still need parts to craft guns and more with better quality, so it will not be a blue gun factory I assure you. If you lose the one you have, it will take significant work to acquire 25 new parts to craft another blue gun. You get 4 parts for scrapping a gun, no matter its quality. So you'll need to scrap at least 6 shotguns to craft a blue shotgun. This is just a placeholder, we need to test and balance it yet. Guns might be too abundant.

I tend toward thinking craftable up to 3 or 4 would be better, just to be certain that there's a significant difference between what can be crafted and what can only be found. If it's a lot of risk to look for a purple gun that's only marginally better than the blue I crafted, I probably won't do it. If that purple weapon is vastly superior, then the cost in time, risk and ammunition to search for it becomes less daunting.

I really like the idea of gun parts for both repair and crafting (at least that's how I've interpreted what madmole has said). It provides a weapons sink with a pretty simple and flexible mechanic. I hope there will be something similar for clothing and armor as well.

 

[Gazz]

+1 for Dead is Dead/Permadeath option

The big problem there are player containers/bases.

Even if your character gets deleted you still have all your cool stuff and you're getting bored with the cheese zombies that your low gamestage gets you. =)

Even if the game would now view you as "another guy" you could still break into your old base easily enough, especially if you knew any door codes.

It's just not a quick and simple feature.

 

[Arma Rex]

Not if the animals that attack the crops are rabbits and if the meat from them is further reduced. If you made rabbit hordes that spawned from the "garden heat map" but each rabbit only yielded 1 meat resource then it would take killing 5 rabbits to get even one charred meat meal. Plus rabbits are harder to kill than deer.

Perhaps Rabbits that eat crops yield more meat, and breed more? I'm really hoping for us to get animal trapping and collecting soon, as it was mentioned in the kickstarter video.