PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[faatal]

Lighting depends on your settings. If you turn shadows off, then you will get sun or moonlight shining into interiors, since nothing is blocking their light. With shadows on, caves are pretty dark, but it depends on the ambient light value, which changes based on time of day and biome.

There is always a moon at night in the game, but when the moon is low in the sky, the ambient light also gets dark, so outside it is quite dark or in this cave I'm in.

 

[DaVegaNL]

There are _no_ natural light sources inside a computer.
The main ones are directional, point and spot. The directional light is representing the sun and is the one that leaks through the ground to illuminate caves. Candles are a point light and spotlights... well, you might guess that one.

Fataal has already taken steps to improve the point lights which was what the OP was about.

Calculating closed rooms is ridiculously expensive on system resources, it's best to avoid that if possible.

Yeah we should start a club for forum-goers with a unique title!

 

[DaVegaNL]

For Madmole…

My dad used to have one.. Then again; he started to go bald after I was born. Pure coincidence, of course..

 

[KingSlayerGM]

Hey madmole,

so quality now determines damage, but a brown pistol could do more damage than a yellow one? Maybe I am not understanding this correctly. However it seems very odd to me. Whats the point of having colors at all then? They don't give any useful information, you still need to check the stats.

 

[DaVegaNL]

Hey madmole,so quality now determines damage, but a brown pistol could do more damage than a yellow one? Maybe I am not understanding this correctly. However it seems very odd to me. Whats the point of having colors at all then? They don't give any useful information, you still need to check the stats.

So you know at a first glance what the general quality of the tool/weapon is. Sure, you can still check the details, but the colors are useful as a first-glance indication.

 

[Shineblossom]

Hey madmole,so quality now determines damage, but a brown pistol could do more damage than a yellow one? Maybe I am not understanding this correctly. However it seems very odd to me. Whats the point of having colors at all then? They don't give any useful information, you still need to check the stats.

Well even with range, the quality is important. As made up example - If you have brown item damage range 10-25 and yellow one with damage range 20-35, then it is possible, if you get really good rool on brown one and really bad roll on yellow one. How ever, if you would get good rolls on both, yellow will be better.

 

[RipClaw]

Well even with range, the quality is important. As made up example - If you have brown item damage range 10-25 and yellow one with damage range 20-35, then it is possible, if you get really good rool on brown one and really bad roll on yellow one. How ever, if you would get good rolls on both, yellow will be better.

What would interest me here is whether there are limitations here so that a brown weapon might be better at damage than a yellow one but never better than an orange one, for example.

 

[Shineblossom]

What would interest me here is whether there are limitations here so that a brown weapon might be better than a yellow one but never better than an orange one, for example.

Well, orange is between yellow and brown. So orange, in this fake scenario, would have lets say 15-30 range of damage. So, if you had:

BROWN pistol with range of 10-25 and rolled 25

ORANGE pistol with range of 15-30 and rolled 27

YELLOW pistol with range of 20-35 and rolled 20

You have a brown pistol that is better than yellow one but still worse than orange one.

That or i might understand it completely wrong, in which case Madmole needs explain himself

 

[RipClaw]

Well, orange is between yellow and brown. So orange, in this fake scenario, would have lets say 15-30 range of damage. So, if you had:BROWN pistol with range of 10-25 and rolled 25

ORANGE pistol with range of 15-30 and rolled 27

YELLOW pistol with range of 20-35 and rolled 20

You have a brown pistol that is better than yellow one but still worse than orange one.

That or i might understand it completely wrong, in which case Madmole needs explain himself

I guess I remembered the order wrong. I thought first comes brown, then yellow and then orange.

My point is that due to the random status values a weapon might be better than a weapon that is one level higher, but never better than one that is two or more levels higher. For example, it would be ridiculous if a Q1 weapon was better than a Q5 weapon.

 

[Crater Creator]

The same applies to the intake of antibiotics. You never know if they will work or not. So it would be good to get more information about whether the infection is getting worse or better. I know of players who panicked and swallowed all the medications they had because they didn't get any information.

+1. I totally did this when A17 came out. In fact the more I think about it, it would be super to simply disallow the player from taking more antibiotics if they've already taken some. That may sound like hand-holding fluff, but it would give the player feedback that the antibiotics are already working to the maximum extent possible. Plus, we already have this feature elsewhere (ex. you can't splint a leg that's not broken).

 

[AlabasterW]

+1. I totally did this when A17 came out. In fact the more I think about it, it would be super to simply disallow the player from taking more antibiotics if they've already taken some. That may sound like hand-holding fluff, but it would give the player feedback that the antibiotics are already working to the maximum extent possible. Plus, we already have this feature elsewhere (ex. you can't splint a leg that's not broken).

To add to this, if you take painkillers again before the damage resist buff has expired, it'll use them up without giving you the +40 HP. It's irritating!

 

[Shineblossom]

To add to this, if you take painkillers again before the damage resist buff has expired, it'll use them up without giving you the +40 HP. It's irritating!

Don't overdose on drugs, kids! But yeah, when you need a quick fix, as in health-wise, it brings you down.

 

[Weazelsun]

@madmole, adding on to what the others are on about quality. I'm assuming that main difference regardless of the item damage, is that the higher quality weapon will have more mod slots? That is if, I'm actually reading right what you mean by quality.

 

[Crater Creator]

There is audio and visual feedback when you score a hit. So if you see that you often miss the headshot a sensible person normally would change to body hits as the more reliable hit location. I often do this when I can't afford to get hit myself because of low HP. And hitting the body is easy, except for the reach. And with that an arc-based mechanism doesn't help at all.

That would be a strategy for how the player can deal with a counter-intuitive melee combat system, but it's not a strategy to make the system intuitive. No thanks. Aiming for the head should feel good in a zombie killing game, not like something you merely tolerate and work around.

 

[Crater Creator]

With the new dynamic music system, can't you make a little dramatic music for when you're bleeding? or a human pain noise or bleeding sound effect (this is already in the game I think).

Players won't notice sound effects alone and need an obvious visual indicator. Proof: you’re not even sure if there’s a bleeding sound effect in the game now.

 

[The Gronk]

I guess I remembered the order wrong. I thought first comes brown, then yellow and then orange.
My point is that due to the random status values a weapon might be better than a weapon that is one level higher, but never better than one that is two or more levels higher. For example, it would be ridiculous if a Q1 weapon was better than a Q5 weapon.

Madmole has said that although it's possible for a weapon to be better than one from the next tier up it's also very unlikely. That would put the chances of a weapon being better than something two tiers above as ■■■■ near impossible.

I think the statistical trick they're using is a "bell curve" which is a standard way of providing a distribution of numbers that gravitate towards a middle value. The most common example of this is rolling three six-sided dice (3d6) to generate basic stats for a dungeons and dragons character. You can roll "1" on all of the dice or "6" on all of the dice, this gives you a range of 3-18. The chances of getting either 3 or 18 is significantly lower than getting something around 10-12. This tends to put the stats for whatever you're generating around the middle but still leaves open the possibility of a high or low score.

Spoiler

I've got a little custom class of code that will roll any amount of (x)-sided dice just for this reason. It can even roll dice that cannot exist such as a floating point.

Math rocks make the click-clack.

 

[kamer1337]

Hey madmole,so quality now determines damage, but a brown pistol could do more damage than a yellow one? Maybe I am not understanding this correctly. However it seems very odd to me. Whats the point of having colors at all then? They don't give any useful information, you still need to check the stats.

whats the point of colors in A17? mods. (all colors have same stats in A17)

 

[RipClaw]

whats the point of colors in A17? mods. (all colors have same stats in A17)

In A17 the color shows the durability of the weapon and how many mod slots it has.

 

[Crater Creator]

Weapons and armor now have scaling recipe costs, so the higher the quality the more materials are needed to craft the item.

Please take this as a "consider the following" comment, and not an "oh no, this is the whole picture so the sky must be falling" comment.

Players really don't like feeling penalized for making progress. They hated when upgrading to steel tools wiped out their stamina. They hated when improving block damage meant fewer resources per block. They're not going to like discovering that they can't craft a gun because they bought a perk and now the same materials they had aren't good enough.

It would be nice, then, if you could still make lower quality items if you needed to.

- - - Updated - - -

...very probably... A19... next week...

Woohoo!

 

[Gazz]

I think the statistical trick they're using is a "bell curve" which is a standard way of providing a distribution of numbers that gravitate towards a middle value. The most common example of this is rolling three six-sided dice (3d6) to generate basic stats for a dungeons and dragons character.

If I remember this right, 3d6 is the first bell curve you get. (2d6 won't do)

However - in a game with so many angles of freedom it makes no difference at all. A linear random range with an offset and you're good.

It's not like entity damage is the only stat on an item and the end result that the player notices is "a random number". Sources say that 99.7% of players will never know nor care about how the number became the number that it is.