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%
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You lose the freedom that you specifically cited as one of the reasons for the rework of the perk system though. And you are not gaining 'easy to understand.' The system is easy to understand wherever you put the perk. Absolutely no one would be confused if the perk categories were different unless they are made in a nonsensical manner. A perk category that covered most non-combat perks is not nonsensical at all.
Those 999% (10 times the players apparently ;D ) will also not think about a million other small details that make the gaming experience truly great.
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Well I'd like for everyone to play what we have first before jumping to conclusions that it doesn't work because one guy on the forum disagrees. A generic perk tree isn't needed, all it would do is water down the attributes and some people would still female dog that you need to invest points into a generic tree that doesn't have any combat to unlock the ones you want. This would make mining even less accessible than it is under strength. At least under strength there are some great other perks you can get while your there for mining.

Its clear you haven't thought it through. We're here to protect the 999% and make a great game, your idea would make it less accessible. The more attributes, the less perks you can get because of scaling attribute costs. Then it waters down the loot too, now we need to make some eyewear that boosts your generic abilities so we're not favoring attributes?

BTW, no means, no, this is a courtesy so at least you understand why your idea won't work.

The only thing I would do, if somehow nobody likes this design is just nuke the mining perks, and mining would be 100% item driven. A generic attribute would be a lot of wasted effort that thematically doesn't fit with the new setup that is more class driven and would require a lot of content to properly support. Why does this disease affect my generic attribute? Make no sense either.

 
We could diminish effectiveness probably pretty easy, but why should food be complicated. Its just food, people have better things to do like build forts, gather mats, mine, do quests, loot, trade, etc.
Balance will solve the problem, as discussed ad infinitum a month ago.
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I know food spoilage is a dead topic. But, this has become the go to answer on a depressingly high number of questions if they have to do with the survival aspect of the game. Farming? can't be too complicated because what fun is that. Food spoilage? Nope, why should food be complicated what fun is that. Heat vs Cold? All clothing helps with both because what fun is having to adjust to the environment. I can't think of a single "survival" aspect that has gotten harder or more complex.

I know you have a vision and you have to make the game sell as much as possible but some of us started playing BECAUSE of the survival aspect not in spite of it.

Edited to fix typo.

 
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Holy crap he is good. That is insane. I would not want to face him angry even if I was armed with whatever gun I want.
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Yeah that was crazy cool. One thing I've learned over the years is that if you strive to get better and put the time in, its crazy what you can accomplish. I am genetically a skinny fat guy, the guy with 9" arms and a gut. I was able to work out and get pretty strong by grinding for years and years. I'm still getting stronger at 52. Started playing guitar again, I'm no Rick (he is god tier) but I'm a lot better than I was a year ago just jamming 10-30 minutes a day, trying a new song every few weeks or days, depending on the mood. I'm a pro at 7 days again, but still probably lack a few of the tips the best guys do. Practice with intent makes you awesome.

 
The game does not promote that path. You are if you insist that you must be awesome at harvesting.
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You kind of made his point for him. His WHOLE argument is that to be good at mining/harvesting forces, or at least pushes you, to choose melee. It is two entirely separate parts of the game, combat style and building/harvesting, that in a perfect system wouldn't be tied together at all. I don't build more than I have to so I got no skin in this argument. It will never affect me but his point isn't exactly invalid.

 
I think you underestimate how much material you need for a decent base.
I've already used 1000-1500 rebar frames and about 10000-15000 cement to build my current working base. And I'm not finished with the construction yet. These are completely different quantities than the little bit you can get from the trader and the pallets in the POIs. And the base is not even very big. It is only 20 x 20 blocks with a height of 17 blocks and surrounded by a 4 block high concrete wall and a 4 block deep and 2 block wide trench with concrete walls.
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So you need this on day 7? My point is you can build an ample base with no perks if you are patient, and that is only building at night, just go gather stuff, buy a couple perks if you don't find good gear but generally none of our team are saying you need strength to be good at building. Only if you are an OCD min maxer would you need it.

 
Yes, and some moss covered ones too. I remember the Medieval Mod had some awesome textures in this regard.
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I'm not familiar with that mod, I only play vanilla (since alpha 4), but it would be cool with moss too, or with little green vines.

 
if you pull a 10 lb bow to only half draw. thats not archery its trick shooting. rapid shooting on low draw weight and only drawing 10 to 12 inches.
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Drawing 10 to 12 inches? If you draw it to scale, yes.

 
Yeah that was crazy cool. One thing I've learned over the years is that if you strive to get better and put the time in, its crazy what you can accomplish. I am genetically a skinny fat guy, the guy with 9" arms and a gut. I was able to work out and get pretty strong by grinding for years and years. I'm still getting stronger at 52. Started playing guitar again, I'm no Rick (he is god tier) but I'm a lot better than I was a year ago just jamming 10-30 minutes a day, trying a new song every few weeks or days, depending on the mood. I'm a pro at 7 days again, but still probably lack a few of the tips the best guys do. Practice with intent makes you awesome.
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In before the LBD crowd think The Second Coming has started and Madmole just announced the Rapture....

 
I think you underestimate how much material you need for a decent base.
I've already used 1000-1500 rebar frames and about 10000-15000 cement to build my current working base. And I'm not finished with the construction yet. These are completely different quantities than the little bit you can get from the trader and the pallets in the POIs. And the base is not even very big. It is only 20 x 20 blocks with a height of 17 blocks and surrounded by a 4 block high concrete wall and a 4 block deep and 2 block wide trench with concrete walls.
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BRO.

First, that's awesome.

Second, there's a huge difference between "I have to perk strength to build!" and "I have to perk strength to build 17 block high fortresses with high walls and deep trenches all made entirely of reinforced concrete!"

It's like the difference between "I have to perk intelligence to travel the map!" and "I have to perk intelligence to have an MTV Cribs garage full of half a dozen motorcycles, jeeps, and a pair of gyrocopters."

What you call a "decent base" most would consider an epic fortress. I mean it's a 4 story building if you do three blocks of height per floor.

Even still, remember I said I'm playing with no base, so I've made little effort to collect materials. What I've gathered is mostly to create a large flat battle ground to fight the horde on and the rest is for later when I'll probably switch to mining/crafting/base-building at level 150+. Or maybe not.

I haven't found an auger yet, but if I had one and spent a couple hours or more mining ore and stone then your 1500 rebar frames and 15000 cement would become totally doable. If you're perked into 69er & motherlode, you could do it faster.

I don't even need INT to get the forges going, I could just ready my materials, read a magazine, and build 6 forges so I'm not waiting for cement and rebar forever. My trader has a cement mixer and I've found two construction sites within a couple km with mixers so I could take a trip on my bike, get them all cranking out tons of concrete, go do some quests for a while, and come back later to.... enough concrete and rebar to make your towering concrete fortress if I wanted to.

Even though I'm an agility/perception focused character.

I honestly think people are underestimating just how capable a char is of building without STR or INT. I created my char specifically to test that exact hypothesis.

I read a lot of people saying "You're so limited and forced into perks in A17!" so I said "F*** it, I'll play without STR or INT" and it's working just fine. In fact it's a lot of fun because it's so different than how I typically play.

A18 is supposed to be even MORE friendly to specialization while giving you options of vehicles, building, mining, crafting. So if I think A17 is just fine, I honestly can't understand why anyone would cry "muh freedom!" about A18.

Seriously though your concrete fortress sounds awesome, but you've got a high bar and taste for size. That's way beyond "decent base", especially considering it's not even your horde night base! WTF. 4 meter high walls and deep trenches made of concrete for... wandering hordes and screamers? BRO.

 
So you need this on day 7? My point is you can build an ample base with no perks if you are patient, and that is only building at night, just go gather stuff, buy a couple perks if you don't find good gear but generally none of our team are saying you need strength to be good at building. Only if you are an OCD min maxer would you need it.
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Of course I don't need that on day 7 but he wrote that he could build a concrete fortress with a few thousand concrete and cobblestone. A fortress for me is much bigger than what you could build with that amount of concrete and cobblestone.

I build my character on strength in the early game because I love mining and also fight a lot in close combat. In the later course of the game I go more on stealth and perception because I also like to do that. I don't limit myself to one build but I also don't max out all skills. For example, I don't put a single point in Gunslinger because I never use the pistol or the magnum.

But as far as the OCD topic is concerned, it drives me crazy that the drawbridge is 4 blocks wide and the garage door 3 blocks.

 
It is not really a documentation issue (that just slows the work down), but that it adds additional work to the render process. The depth buffer gets copied to a low res version, then thousands of blockers get checked (rendered to it) using a depth camera and the results have to get read back from the GPU (takes time) and then applied to each occludee's renderers (enable/disable or switching shadow modes). We are basically using CPU time to try to get back Unity renderer culling and processing time and save some overdraw.
Static world games don't need to do that because they can process their worlds offline and build up data to define what can be seen from each general location.
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Hi Faatal. Interesting stuff.

You said the depth camera converts things to low res, but can/does it also 'see' every voxel? My point is maybe only seeing every second or third voxel (over distance) would halve the work? Maybe even more so than lowering the res (even though higher res would be pointless).

 
But as far as the OCD topic is concerned, it drives me crazy that the drawbridge is 4 blocks wide and the garage door 3 blocks.
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It’s how we maintain the horror tag on Steam

 
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