PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

He says the vomit vulture looks like crap a modder would do, so is this the finished version.

No discussion of mods allowed here

 

[Genosis]

Eventually I'd like to do dead is dead, and a version with lives. Maybe lives are bought with perks. So you waste perk points buying a spare life but its costing you valuable progression to have a spare life or two sitting there. Dead is Dead is pretty hardcore, I'd like some way to keep going but pay a steep price for it. 50k dukes, or lose 10 levels, etc.
Maybe at some point, we are tying hit points to your level now, so the death penalty might need some work.

+1 for Dead is Dead/Permadeath option

We played with a Permadeath mod (Which has since broken after updates) for a period of time, and people really liked it. We even had friendly fire/kill everyone on to add to the tension. We had a clip saved of one of our streams where I accidentally put an arrow in the back of my wife's head. The reaction of both of us was priceless lol. I felt so bad.

Though, an XML "opt out" option or individual "unlimited lives" setup would be nice too, for those who want to play on that particular server, but don't want to be permadeath with their friends.

 

[Weazelsun]

Hobo stew is the only thing you can use rotten meat in a recipe. At least from what the 17.3 recipe xml say atm, and that can't be opened up till you use points to get it.
I still think they should change that anyways..just use regular meat and fixed. or use cat/dog food as an ingredient. Give a reason for people to hold on to those.

edit: nope you are right, it's also used in fortbites.

same, change them or use infected meat lol.

I searched the wrong thing..oops!

A fix for it, could just simply have the infected animal not drop any meat and just drop leather or bone, or heck even nothing at all. Hm... perhaps infected meat could be used for new recipes as well.

After reading through the pages. Having zombies trample crops is an interesting thing. Though, I don't know if it would be something that the general player base would like. It does give a memory though, back in A16, one the players of the group I was playing with had created a greenhouse for the crops. Funny thing is that anytime a screamer spawned, that screamer would head directly for the greenhouse! lol

- - - Updated - - -

Chickens and rabbits are useless entities anyway, might as well give them SOMETHING to do.
Starvation Mod had rats, and it was a nice additional challenge to keep them away from your plants...

Meh, I'd say chickens are useless only because of the biome they spawn in. Considering that they spawn usually in the desert biome, anytime I head down there. I'm more likely to see a boar or rabbit.

 

[madmole]

@madmole:with all the talk about death penalty, there is ONE thing you need to fix first before the deathpenalty can be harder/playing with lives:

hordenight. If you die in your defenses, because they breached within an hour, the only thing you can do is spawn randomly and run.

You cant get into your house bc zombies are there/would be a deathtrap, so no backpack.

So all you can do is run. Its not fun. Its frustrating.

Especially if you implement one of the great ideas of the community (toxic rain on hordenight) this becomes even more of an issue.

Once you die (or all of your party) the horde should end/pause.

Because otherwise its just a running/dying simulator.

Your bedroll room should be deep in the bowels of your fortress, not easily accessible where the zombies first killed you. Running for your life is pretty easy. On horde night I try to keep coffee on my belt and in case things go bad I can outrun them until morning.

If we made them stop attacking when you have died, what if you wanted to get back out there and fight? How is one death fair ? You can just exploit this by getting naked, and going out at 10pm and letting them kill you. You would spawn safely in your base, and the death debuff would probably be gone by the time the horde is over or early next day. You avoid all base damage, all risk. It might be frustrating, but we have given you tools to deal with this and you need to use them, not ask for features that remove the main reason to play the game. Set to not drop your belt, then you have coffee on spawn and can easily outrun them.

 

[madmole]

I have to say I disagree with this.
I always build a "oh crap I died" outpost somewhere. Not too close to my base, but not too far away from it either. In this little outpost I keep a small supply of basic "re-stocking" materials, that I add to as my game progresses. At first, it might only be a few cans of food, bandages and a club/axe etc, but as I progress, it's stocked with an increasingly good supply or "rebuild materials".

Players should, I think, have to think about dying during the horde, and plan for that contingency accordingly.

Exactly! Hope for the best, prepare for the worst! This game rewards you for being smart and preparation, and punishes you for the opposite behavior, but we give you tools to deal with nearly every situation.

 

[madmole]

Honestly, I feel players should only be able to craft up to tier 3 (of 6) items max, this way there is always a reason to go out looting at least till you got a full set of tier 6 everything, which when you cannot craft it, will take a while. It'll be even more important as didn't I hear that higher tier items will finally have higher base stats as well?

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.

 

[madmole]

Me too, and infection in A17 seemed exactly the same way. By (primarily) slowly weakening the player instead of just directly depleting their health, the best way to deal with infection seemed to be to stand still (even going AFK) and wait it out. Realistic or not, I didn't think this was fun gameplay, because it took the player out of the game in the same way you're describing the sandstorms in Conan.

I just switched to my ranged weapon when infected and conserved my stamina, it was gone before I cleared the POI. Regardless I like the old setup better where you slowly get worse and you have to change your plans and find antibiotics.

 

[madmole]

Regarding average consumers, remember that even the 10 hour player is going to see lots and lots of zombies, whereas they may not even see bandits at all. But, fair enough. You have to worry about rework, the art pipeline that's already in place, and other production concerns.
I really do hope you'll at least try it with some zombies, though, because I think you'll find it's a more efficient approach than what you've done so far. If it works out, then maybe your next game can take full advantage of this from the start.

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.

 

[madmole]

Would that include, for instance, disabling screen space reflections when "reflection quality" is set to "off"? I was surprised recently to learn the only way to actually turn off reflections is through the new console command (gfx pp ssr 0), and it resulted in a major performance boost.

I believe so, Faatal will or maybe has responded already on this.

 

[madmole]

I think this is a good idea. It's a better way to accomplish the interesting decision making with the old fertilizer system without the waiting game that came with crafting it.

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.

 

[madmole]

100% agree.. I call these locations my "Bug Out" bases.. I toss a spare lv 1 or 2 Pistol and some ammo.. some bandages and some bottles of water and canned food from an airdrop for those "Just incase" I need to bug out moments. The 50 some odd Dukes i'd get for selling them are not worth the security of having even the basics after a collapse.

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

 

[madmole]

Regarding farming, I believe it can’t be balanced by just changing some numbers. The math doesn’t work out.
Under the current system, crops grow exponentially. That’s in opposition to a progressive learning curve, where things start easier and get harder over time. No matter how you adjust that exponential curve, it’s going to be too hard for players at the low end of the curve or too easy for players at the high end of the curve. You'll never find values for vegetables per stew or yield per plant that accommodate both ends of the spectrum.

Now, you can dismiss the problem by concluding that you shouldn't bother fixing it because food isn't a big part of the game, or that experienced players are just too good to be worth balancing the game for them. But I would point out that other parts of the game do have a balanced progression curve, namely the game stage and heat systems. These systems already accommodate all kinds of players well, from the 10 hour player to the 1,000 hour player, by scaling the zombie threat based on how successful you’ve been.

Farming could draw inspiration from these systems to have its own progression curve. 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.

Most of the pieces for that, both art and code, you already have. And that's good in part because it means there's gameplay there you already have, too. I.e. there would already be different ways to counter animals attacking your crops. Whereas if crops randomly die for no reason, what does the player do about these random failures? Buy a perk? Engage in some new farm-specific gameplay you have to code? Nah. Just lean on the tower defense, traps, gunplay etc. you already have.

But again, I'm not attached to animals eating crops in particular. I'm just looking for some way that a bigger farm is harder than a smaller farm.

Interesting. +1 to INT for this post.

 

[Arma Rex]

@madmole

Do we have any double barreled shotgun models you can tease us now? I remember asking this a couple months ago and you said something like they were done, but you had to work on animations. Can you now show us the model?

 

[Damocles]

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.

If they dont stand out, how do you make the player understand their difference in strenght (without resorting to fantasy solutions).

Currently a little girl is clearly weaker than a biker. A cheerleader weaker than a lumberjack. A big mama has more resistance than a thin business-man.

If they all blend in, it would feel random them having different stenghts and behaviors.

 

[Tin]

If they dont stand out, how do you make the player understand their difference in strenght (without resorting to fantasy solutions).
Currently a little girl is clearly weaker than a biker. A cheerleader weaker than a lumberjack. A big mama has more resistance than a thin business-man.

If they all blend in, it would feel random them having different stenghts and behaviors.

I actually think that's great. Would make me a bit more leery on how I approach them, if they can react differently, or some are stronger/weaker.

 

[madmole]

@Madmole
Thinking of interesting decisions, what about recieving a large amount of acid, say 4 or 5, for scrapping a battery, along with the current lead of course.

Batteries are very valuable but it's possible to be in a situation where the player is lucky enough to find a battery or two and no acid.

AFAIK scrapping can only yield one resource.

 

[faatal]

This has been experienced by a ton of players tbh so it rather surprises me that this seems to not be on the radar.
It has been noted that it is rather extreme with solar panels - where I notice this the most - and also seems to be noted with trigger plates. Lights seem to exacerbate this as you put more of them on the circuit. Solar panels are by far the worst culprit - last base I put together had 4 lights, 3 electrical fences, 4 dart traps and a blade trap all hooked up. Some stuttering with gas. Brought me down to a slide show - likely around 5 fps - the instant that I hooked up the solar panels. Of course, horde night IMPROVED performance because the solar panels switched back to battery power at that time. When I tore my 200K solar setup out and went back to gas - everything was fine again.

I purposely keep lighting rather low - less than 6 sources - because if I start to light what I want to performance takes a really steep hit as well. Interestingly, spotlights seem to have a much lower effect than lights.

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

 

[KingSlayerGM]

snip

Animals that destroy your farm just for balance?

Hell no man.

We can't have pets because of performance issues, we can't have companions because of performance issues, we can't have more zombies because of performance issue. Sure let's have useless rabbits and stags that ruin your farm, very interesting gameplay.

 

[Arma Rex]

Animals that destroy your farm just for balance?Hell no man.

We can't have pets because of performance issues, we can't have companions because of performance issues, we can't have more zombies because of performance issue. Sure let's have useless rabbits and stags that ruin your farm, very interesting gameplay.

Pretty sure they meant we can't have them right now because of performance issues. I'm sure later they'll be able to add companions/pets, as they already mentioned taming wolves in the Alpha 17 concept art video.

 

[madmole]

I've said it before, but I find that planning for what I should do after my own character dies, at least in a first person survival game, creates a disconnect. It takes me out of the game.
This game is... weird about what happens after the player character dies on horde night. You don't see other games where, under default rules, you respawn empty handed while a long battle continues. Other games handle death in the usual ways, which for illustration I categorize as Half-Life style (rewind time to when the PC was still alive), Team Fortress style (respawn immediately with stuff), or Counter-Strike style (spectate until the 'round' has finished).

In a purely single player game I'd probably agree, and advance the clock many hours later and have you wake up somewhere, but in a MP game there are situations like you want to respawn and get back to get your team to help fight.