PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%
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    Votes: 1 33.3%

  • Total voters
    3
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Clothing can only accept one mod, and that is pockets. Your confusing clothing with armor.
Has any thought been put into making a dye slot? I like coloring my armor but the minute I need that slot for another mod I yank the color out. Having a dedicated slot just for dye would be awesome. I missed the rest of this conversation so I'm assuming one of the books will allow you to put pockets on clothes and that will use up its slot so no color there either... Not sure how much work it'll be but something to consider.

 
Has any thought been put into making a dye slot? I like coloring my armor but the minute I need that slot for another mod I yank the color out. Having a dedicated slot just for dye would be awesome. I missed the rest of this conversation so I'm assuming one of the books will allow you to put pockets on clothes and that will use up its slot so no color there either... Not sure how much work it'll be but something to consider.
Like, 2 and a half pages back...

Ah but dye is no longer a mod. I mean it is, but its not adding damage/stats or eating a mod slot. We're adding a dye slot below the mod list for dyes. So clothes have one mod slot and one dye slot.
 
Its a discount in crafting. Nothing more, nothing less. If you craft 100 bullets at once with this new special recipe you save 20% of mats.
Madmole, will we be able to create boxes of bullets using bullets? This may be necessary to make room in the inventory, as it is now happening with gas.

 
Ah but dye is no longer a mod. I mean it is, but its not adding damage/stats or eating a mod slot. We're adding a dye slot below the mod list for dyes. So clothes have one mod slot and one dye slot.
Madmole, will armor have a special cell for the dye mod, or will only clothes have such a feature?

 
We have random agro speeds now, so this effectively does the random/walk/run speed request. ZOmbies no longer walk at you in sync, you'll see the one you hit take the lead.
If my zombies in the game have sprint speed during the day, can their agro speed change to the speed of a nightmare during an attack? )

 
Madmole, will we be able to create boxes of bullets using bullets? This may be necessary to make room in the inventory, as it is now happening with gas.
Not without mods, we're not planning it. Its bulk crafting not hack inventory to carry more, but it could be used for that. We're a lot more interested in losing hundreds of recipes not adding hundreds. Before anyone panics I mean the block menu system.

 
Madmole, will armor have a special cell for the dye mod, or will only clothes have such a feature?
Yes, anything that can be dyed will have a new slot. We gained to slots with the max mods nerf so there is plenty of space there.

 
Glancing blows will be another feature that, depending on the details, could radically change combat. I will argue melee combat is enough of a core component to this game that you really do need something like Orsey showed: an arc-based mechanic instead of the current point-and-shoot crosshairs mechanic.

I guess what I’m saying is, I don't view these glancing blows as a mere nicety. They'll be a critical part of having a fully realized melee combat system. I wouldn't be surprised if, in practice, most melee swings for most players result in "glancing blows."

 
Remember when zombies corpses not being lootable was the literal end of all mankind as we know it? Now everyone just accepts the new change and gets outraged about something else. I was not sure about the change, but I absolutely don't miss the zombie corpses now. Plenty of other containers to loot.
Just something to keep in mind if you think TFP have "ruined" your favorite version of the game with some new feature or gameplay change.
Nah. I still don’t like most zombies being lootless, and have modded the game to restore that while implementing my own solution to the problems that change was designed to fix. :)

 
I don't think this is necessarily bad to be able to max everything out eventually. I don't know what is planned exactly, but I don't think a sandbox game as this benefits from artificial classes. In my professional career I have learnt two academic professions and I am sure, other people have learnt more. There is no reason that a doctor shouldn't also be a good plumber or gardener, given time and experience.
Maybe master of everything is not needed, but channeling people into an artificial class system is - just in my opinion - not necessary either.

It might well be a matter of balancing, though. It will no doubt be a tough task, best of luck on that.

Very much looking forward to A18
I don't mind being able to max everything out either, just make it take a very long time, say level 100 is the softcap, you can go to whatever level you want, but it gets harder to level due to the exp needed. I'll be honest I hate hitting max level in a rpg, because then I feel like I am wasting my time killing things as by that point I got way better stuff than they can drop, but they don't give exp anymore, so even less of a desire to bother fighting them.

 
If my zombies in the game have sprint speed during the day, can their agro speed change to the speed of a nightmare during an attack? )
A18 zombies can boost up their move speed randomly (chance based on game difficulty) when taking damage. The lower the tier the higher the boost is percentage wise. Sprint can boost 10% higher, which is lower than nightmare, which is a 20% increase over sprint.

 
Not really, its game staged and loot is set up accordingly. Changing it would be a bunch of work that only benefits 5000 hour guys who have memorized how many zombies spawn at particular houses. There are loads of new remnants going into the game that have zero to a few guys that spawn, but the dungeons are what they are and the loot is good.
I would’ve game staged the number of sleepers in POIs (in fact I did for ComSenMod). But be that as it may, I just hope there are enough of these remnants that the Day 1 player isn’t stuck trying to take on a Day 10/Day 100/Day 1000 number of sleepers, when all they want is to find shelter before night comes. That was a problem in A17.

 
And I thank you for doing so. Alpha 18 is shaping up very well. I can't play with occlusion enabled for the time being so I have that turned off. Here are my thoughts if the forum doesn't mind eavesdropping...
Occlusion is coming along. Today I think I finally have it to the point of it being visually clean (little to no object popping, no shadow popping) and mostly performance neutral when tracking low amounts of objects (occludees).

The problem with occlusion is it adds some CPU and a little GPU overhead, so it can actually reduce performance in the worse case. If you are outside and can see most of the world, then not much is hidden, so the overhead will be higher than the gains from not drawing a few things. If you go inside or have a wall in your face and 95% of the occludees are hidden, the you get some FPS gains. The more objects that are tracked, the more lopsided the best and worst cases become, so a careful balance has to be reached for what it worth occluding.

 
Occlusion is coming along. Today I think I finally have it to the point of it being visually clean (little to no object popping, no shadow popping) and mostly performance neutral when tracking low amounts of objects (occludees).
The problem with occlusion is it adds some CPU and a little GPU overhead, so it can actually reduce performance in the worse case. If you are outside and can see most of the world, then not much is hidden, so the overhead will be higher than the gains from not drawing a few things. If you go inside or have a wall in your face and 95% of the occludees are hidden, the you get some FPS gains. The more objects that are tracked, the more lopsided the best and worst cases become, so a careful balance has to be reached for what it worth occluding.
Does light still penetrate surfaces? This person posted a screenshot:

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?111778-Alpha-18-Dev-Diary!!/page541&p=984748#post984748

 
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