PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Weazelsun]

I can empathise with this.
But generally speaking, IMO, a general "Difficulty" setting as it currently exists really is ill suited for 7 Days To Die. My hope is they bring in more game settings, like, for example, turning off digging, and make the Difficulty settings a template style of game settings. Where, for example, on Easy, Zombie game stage is elongated, Digging is turned off, block damage is boosted, zombie damage is nerfed, zombie health is nerfed, etc. But each of these are independent settings when starting a game.

I think that most of us have acknowledged that 7 Days To Die has a wide variety of ways it can be played and approached. I think that the game appeals to a huge range of players and with that a huge range of play styles.

Really, at least IMO, purely for the sake of the game, this to me seems like the best approach. The more you can allow players to define their game experience when starting a game, the better off I think the game will be.

I genuinely do not see a reason to have 7 Days To Die be a rigidly designed game out of the box. Or why anyone would want to aim this game towards a rigid design. To me, no way of playing should be off the table.

Someone wants zombies to always run and 1 hit concrete blocks on Game Stage 1? Go for it!

Someone wants zombies to always walk and struggle to knock down cotton plants? Have at it!

Want a base that zombies can never reach and is essentially invulnerable? Go you!

Want food to have 20% the normal effect so that your survival skills are better tested? Done!

Whatever the game play style, having a wide array of settings only expands accessibility and the range of players who would could enjoy the game dramatically... if only for that one setting...

Case in point, I don't think I'd play this game if there wasn't a drop setting for Toolbelt, Backpack, All, etc. If I were to guess, that one setting kept a lot of people interested in the game as opposed to turned off. Why TFP wouldn't take this approach in every situation is beyond me.

I mean... They're not building 7D2D as a hobby. If you can engage more people with more ways to play the game... How... is that not a win for everyone?

But I'm of the opinion that 7 Days To Die could nearly replace Minecraft and a host of other games out there. That what TFP has started shouldn't be viewed as "Get'er done and move to the next", but as something TFP can build off of over time. Or... Sell 7D2D to a company that would treat it as such.

The potential of this game is ridiculous. Just... absolutely... Insane.

Indeed, I originally made the post out of frustration in going to a tier 3 quest, and yes could I have just abandoned it upon seeing those ferals and radiated? Yeah, I could have. In the end I tried it and died. I just sometimes feel like as a farmer/ builder-type, I'm going to lag behind the others in terms of how to deal with the current gamestage zombies becuase the other players will have spent their time looting and preparing. Whilest I would only have a few arrows and a simple iron club. My only gripe is with the gamestage and how sometimes it feels unfair.

 

[Ayrton]

MM o Ronald

Is it too much to ask?

* composite crossbow?

* Revolver homemade (with homemade ammunition)

* winchester rifle

 

[madmole]

Sounds good. I always thought it had something to do with lighting, but that makes sense. Other than those, graphically speaking, the other things that drive me crazy are the LOD models for those branchy shrubs / dead tree things. Not the tiny ones, but the taller ones you see everywhere in the forest. Once I start seeing it, I can't stop.

I thought I deleted that one L shaped one that was kind of repetitive/obnoxious. Can you screenshot?

 

[madmole]

What if...the first quest you got from the trader was to give you a tutorial on how the crafting system works?

We already have a start tutorial for that. Speaking of, I deleted a lot of redundancies in so its faster to get through it now. less stones needed, only 1 craft needed not 2, 3, etc.

 

[madmole]

I was just bothered at how uneven the roads were in A17. Earlier RWG builds had some weird roads too but A17s have been pretty unrealistic and for the Alpha you introduce all the new vehicles it made it even more painful.


What do you mean by "nice and clean"? I hear that and think how it is now where I see a straight clean lines dividing the snow biome from the desert? Will the biomes blend more? Ideally I would like to see different grades of snow, grass, burnt stuff, etc. fading into the next ground texture but I realize that would mean there would have to be a different texture for each. Is there another way to do that?

Also why aren't the biomes at different elevations? Snow on top, desert at the bottom, green in between.

Me too. Keep it up!

I'm talking about the actual biome borders are no longer dithered which caused the sky/fog to spam back and forth between one biome and the next. Now the border is clean with no "noise" just like Navezgane. The ground can be blended better when we get splat maps in A18, as the texture doesn't HAVE to represent the biome 100%. so erosion on cliff faces can be textured differently than the block it actually is made of.

 

[madmole]

So the desert biome is definitely starting to look more like the Adrar Plateau then a typical desert, which is awesome btw! I completely understand that the biome is named desert for simplicity, but I think it would be a fantastic idea to incorporate a little more for the said biome.
The main suggestion would be to change the under layer terrain from the "hard sand", that has little to no structural integrity, to something a bit harder. Maybe not as hard and strong as regular stone, but something that can hold up when you spend time digging below the surface. Heck, even sand stone would work .

I would like to believe it shouldn't be to difficult to incorporate the change either, changing the already hard sand layer that is generated and replacing it with sandstone or something else. Maybe even a slight re-texture? But I cannot say this as I wouldn't know the repercussions of the change.

Take this suggestion with a grain of sand, heh I used sand instead of salt , and either ignore it or not

I would like to hear everyone else's thought on this as well!

Excited to see what else TFP bring out to for World gen ;P

Right now we have to make sand several meters thick otherwise hills have dirt or whatever showing. With splat maps we can make sand 1 meter thick with no visual anomalies.

 

[madmole]

I'll bring it up again, seeing as I've never read a real response. will there be a way for us to turn off digging zombies? Either by setting or mod?

No plans for this. You can turn off blood moons completely now in 17.2.

 

[madmole]

On a side note since we were covering textures - why are the storage limits for containers you produce so varied. I really like to use the bookcases, gun safes etc when setting up my base. It has a good final look to it. However, it seems that you are discouraging this because the storage space on cosmetic items is abysmal. Most of the cool containers that I can get are simply untenable because simple locked containers offer so much more (and very much needed) capacity.
Can the storage capacity for the cool decor be opened up to match the capacity of the locked chest or storage box?

No. You can easily mod that in though.

 

[madmole]

I've been playing with Gaia a lot making custom worlds so am familiar with the stamp process; are y'all going to be generating the stamps or pulling from a folder like Gaia does?
Super excited about this methodology... Even with pre determined stamps, the sliders in Gaia produce some very random cool stuff.

I think Justin is us creating stamps in world machine and then we have a unity node editor that controls blending, rotation and a million other things with those stamps. The results have been amazing.

 

[madmole]

@madmole, would it possible to do a re-think on what gamestage encountering ferals and radiated occur? Right now for me as a "casual" and "inefficient" player, it's not fun anymore going into a POI at a player level of 50 or so and only having a compound bow and a few arrows and having to deal with several ferals and at least one radiated at a gamestage of around 100 isn't fun. I understand that dying is always solely going to be on me, but it feels like the game rewards a person for being more efficient and having better knowledge in tactics.

Maybe you aren't optimizing your build for combat? Have you considered adjusting the speeds of the zombies with those options? I'd need more data to know if the game is too hard at level 50 or 100.

 

[madmole]

Agreed. I hope he can get it worked on and pushed into an update.

It would break save games and probably require some new menus, etc so it will have to go into a major update.

 

[madmole]

So what's the plan with tinted colors on zombies you mentioned a while back. Its added to body parts but not clothes if I remember correctly.

Are we going to see randomized hair and clothes colors soon?

I think that would give some nice flavour and diversity to the zombies.

If it's to resource demanding for vanilla please make it atleast modable.

No plans as its not needed to go gold. We're not making the game to extend 4000 hours to 5000 hours of fun, but targeting 20-30 hour customers who the hair looks just fine to. You guys are crazy with the stuff you ask for. Its fabulous you play this long but old is old. Changing the hair isn't going to add any value to the average consumer and you could care less 10 minutes after its in and its the new "old".

 

[Ayrton]

@madmole




Is it too much to ask?

* composite crossbow?

* Revolver homemade (with homemade ammunition)

* winchester rifle

 

[Hek Harris]

I disagree. A game can have a reputation for being a tough game at its default level and do just fine. There is nothing disheartening at all about playing the game on its easiest settings if those settings make the game playable and fun.
Consider that if TFP simply changed the wording on the menu so that the currently easiest setting was presented as default and people could increase the difficulty up to Nomad then there probably wouldn’t be anything disheartening to talk about. Casuals would happily play the default level and super cracks would shift the slider up.

That can happen right now with the only difference being that the easiest setting is known to be a (-2) instead of a (0).

I’m not saying that the devs shouldn’t tune gamestages or try to improve the pacing but there is nothing wrong with playing the game on Scavenger (-2) or Adventurer (-1) if those settings end up being more fun for someone. Especially when the main difference between the modes is exactly the answer to the player’s issue.

Yep. And playing on scavenger with all zombies in nightmare speed, loot 25%, blood moon every night and a crapy map is way harder than playing in survivalist with walking z and 200% loot. That's why I thing those levels should be removed : players would choose the damages done by player and Z, + the gamestage and so everybody would be happy.

 

[madmole]

also...for A18 I would like to see a way to have materials that Zombies can't break.
think about it, in any Zombie movie/show/etc. they can't break everything. yes Zs are not real (yet) and so keeping with the Zombie Universe, you should have items that are zombie proof.

R-Con and Steel should not be breakable for example. in World War Z for example, with the fast aggrisive zombies they could not break most items.

maybe increase the AI for pathing and jumping and stacking, in WWZ the zombies formed a human pyramid

data/config/blocks.xml

What fun is it if you have invunerable blocks? Mod it in and see for yourself. You will be bored and go WTF was I thinking.

 

[madmole]

It makes no sense to change the difficulty of the game when there is a difficulty level that suits your needs.
If your reason is you are "disheartened" to play on "easy", how are you going to feel if they shift the difficulty down across the board so you can play "normal", THEN get good and find that even "insane" isn't hard?

"Bored". The answer is "bored".

...you're asking for a major change in the game that not only affects others, but eventually yourself, for the singular purpose of not feeling "disheartened" at playing at easy level.

Plus now there are so many other options to make it easier like zombie speeds, how/when horde nights occur, zombie block damage, etc. If your doing all of that, and its still hard... turn down the difficulty, noone is judging except yourself.

 

[madmole]

I can empathise with this.
But generally speaking, IMO, a general "Difficulty" setting as it currently exists really is ill suited for 7 Days To Die. My hope is they bring in more game settings, like, for example, turning off digging, and make the Difficulty settings a template style of game settings. Where, for example, on Easy, Zombie game stage is elongated, Digging is turned off, block damage is boosted, zombie damage is nerfed, zombie health is nerfed, etc. But each of these are independent settings when starting a game.

I think that most of us have acknowledged that 7 Days To Die has a wide variety of ways it can be played and approached. I think that the game appeals to a huge range of players and with that a huge range of play styles.

Really, at least IMO, purely for the sake of the game, this to me seems like the best approach. The more you can allow players to define their game experience when starting a game, the better off I think the game will be.

I genuinely do not see a reason to have 7 Days To Die be a rigidly designed game out of the box. Or why anyone would want to aim this game towards a rigid design. To me, no way of playing should be off the table.

Someone wants zombies to always run and 1 hit concrete blocks on Game Stage 1? Go for it!

Someone wants zombies to always walk and struggle to knock down cotton plants? Have at it!

Want a base that zombies can never reach and is essentially invulnerable? Go you!

Want food to have 20% the normal effect so that your survival skills are better tested? Done!

Whatever the game play style, having a wide array of settings only expands accessibility and the range of players who would could enjoy the game dramatically... if only for that one setting...

Case in point, I don't think I'd play this game if there wasn't a drop setting for Toolbelt, Backpack, All, etc. If I were to guess, that one setting kept a lot of people interested in the game as opposed to turned off. Why TFP wouldn't take this approach in every situation is beyond me.

I mean... They're not building 7D2D as a hobby. If you can engage more people with more ways to play the game... How... is that not a win for everyone?

But I'm of the opinion that 7 Days To Die could nearly replace Minecraft and a host of other games out there. That what TFP has started shouldn't be viewed as "Get'er done and move to the next", but as something TFP can build off of over time. Or... Sell 7D2D to a company that would treat it as such.

The potential of this game is ridiculous. Just... absolutely... Insane.

I really have to ask though, are the people currently complaining about A17's difficulty playing 17.2? We fixed a bug that was causing harder zombies to spawn WAY too early.
We add options that make sense and provide replay value. But we're not fond of having so many settings its totally overwhelming to new players and think the defaults should be good, and non defaults would be for players who have logged some hours and know what they are doing.

 

[madmole]

MM o Ronald
Is it too much to ask?

* composite crossbow?

* Revolver homemade (with homemade ammunition)

* winchester rifle

We're aiming for 3 versions of each weapon archtype unless a weapon doesn't make sense to start with, like a a rocket launcher. That said, 3 pistols, a blunderbuss, a double barrel and a pump shotgun for end game, probably the 9mm, then the magnum and maybe a 50 cal desert eagle. maybe a musket rifle, then hunting, and sniper, etc. smg, ak, heavy machine gun.

 

[Roland]

I really have to ask though, are the people currently complaining about A17's difficulty playing 17.2? We fixed a bug that was causing harder zombies to spawn WAY too early.

This. Many people will not have restarted with the A17.2 release and are continuing their A17.1 games. I wonder whether the fix would work on a save game from A17.1. It may be that even though there is no game breaking reason that people should restart with A17.2 if they want this issue to work they may need to restart.

 

[sillls]

Right now we have to make sand several meters thick otherwise hills have dirt or whatever showing. With splat maps we can make sand 1 meter thick with no visual anomalies.

How is it that you can do this with splat maps and not before?