PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[HerrKingsley]

What about boss zombies that appear at the end of the horde night? Only available to those choosing to deal with blood moon hordes defending their base.. and as for their loot, I honestly have no idea what could be considered balanced. Legendary items, a percentage of resources spent to successfully defend, or even Roland's idea to halt heat generation for a couple of days are some things that come to mind. I don't know how that sounds, it's just brainstorming.

I wouldn't mind seeing Horde specific loot. I know Gazz said that they don't want horde nights to be a loot delivery system. But i hope that they could reconsider it.

The game is based on surviving the 7 day horde, now if you do that and put up a fight there should be a reward.

I like the sound of a special boss sending out its minions first to damage your defense and then doing the final blow. It's a bit like he boss in "I am legend". He is much smarter than the other "zombies" and gives them commands on what to do.

That's maybe how they know where you are during horde night.

 

[JamsCB]

Well, regarding the silly idea of electromagnetic storms screwing up electronics, you'd just build your vehicle or generators with magnetos and shield your spark plug cables. Or even better, build a compression ignition engine (simple diesel engine) without all the electronics. Once it's running, it doesn't stop unless you cut the fuel source. If you have the mechanical knowledge to build the stuff you already are in game, that would be pretty easy.

Balance by making fuel harder to acquire is by far the better option.

 

[Ayrton]

And why can't we all fly and have no heatvision ?

we are the version without special effects

 

[meganoth]

Well, regarding the silly idea of electromagnetic storms screwing up electronics, you'd just build your vehicle or generators with magnetos and shield your spark plug cables.

The survivor doesn't do this for the same reason he doesn't put a shotgun turret on his 4x4 backseat or a blade trap on his engine hood. He is a technical noob who gets all knowledge from recipes he finds and slavishly copies.

 

[Roland]

gets all knowledge from recipes he finds and slavishly copies.

so....typical High School mentality.

 

[Dimpy]

Well, regarding the silly idea of electromagnetic storms screwing up electronics, you'd just build your vehicle or generators with magnetos and shield your spark plug cables. Or even better, build a compression ignition engine (simple diesel engine) without all the electronics. Once it's running, it doesn't stop unless you cut the fuel source. If you have the mechanical knowledge to build the stuff you already are in game, that would be pretty easy.

I agree. If the problem with vechicles is technical, then the immediate reaction is to find a technical solution.

If you want to change the way players approach the horde night, there need to be a fundemental logistical problems.

The survivor doesn't do this for the same reason he doesn't put a shotgun turret on his 4x4 backseat or a blade trap on his engine hood. He is a technical noob who gets all knowledge from recipes he finds and slavishly copies.

I thought that was just because the game engine doesn't support block placement on non-world entities. ☺

 

[Dimpy]

In general, not just for horde nights, vehicles would be more balanced if they were more at the whims of map design. In my experience, the route I have to take on a bike is never more than 20% longer than the distance I would need if I went in a straight line, because driving on roads vs off-road does not have a noticeable speed difference.

If I had to sometimes take a route that's, say, four times longer than walking in a straight line in order to get to a particular POI, taking a 4x4 might still be the better option, but at least it's a meaningful choice with definite pros and cons.

 

[SnowDog1942]

so....typical High School mentality.

Yea dude.

 

[RipClaw]

If you want to change the way players approach the horde night, there need to be a fundemental logistical problems.

Logistics problems do not only affect the horde night but also the gameplay in general. But the nice thing about logistics problems is that they can be overcome with work. The reduction in the amount of gasoline that can be found will definitely require oil shale mining.

 

[konrax]

Here is a simple and elegant way in my opinion to deal with horde night and people just driving around to avoid it.

Give land claim blocks a bonus damage resistance for all blocks protected by it against zombies as well as players. It doesn't need to be much, and you can even built a trait around it to help boost it for fun.

LCB's mimic the stats of the player who placed it for horde night generating purposes.

If the player is online, zombies that spawn for horde night will spawn and attack the LCB as if it was the player.

Zombies need to also try and attack player made containers as a priority. Attacking player loot is a sure fire way to get players to want to fight the zombies instead of running away. You could even try to just have blood moon hordes just attack high concentrations of player loot.

The only thing that will get people to not run away, is if they feel their stash is actually being threatened.

Cheers

 

[madmole]

Me too. But some consistency would be nice. If I can craft fine mechanic for guns and vehicle I should be able to craft a bar stool.

A wooden one sure. Round chrome 50's style, with shiny red plastic seat? Na, loot it.

 

[madmole]

I've heard about many performance gains for a18, any specific for weather conditions? Very big performance hit when it starts to rain even with beefy GPU, maybe you can tone down the quality of some shader

Rain is just a simple particle effect now, the whole world doesn't get wet anymore, (not sure if 17 still does), so in theory it should be faster than before, and base fps faster with occlusion so, rain shouldn't break the camels back.

 

[madmole]

Noooooo, that was my favorite God Father reference

I'm ok with what Gazz said he did.

 

[madmole]

I've been watching this discussion about using vs gimping vehicles to escape horde night, and it got me thinking that some things about riding/driving vehicles are a bit funny and unintuitive the way they are now.
For instance, motorcycling is way more dangerous compared to driving a car in real life. Basically hitting anything on a motorcycle tends to be fatal, and just one slip on a wet road can be your last. But in 7d2d you can ram a brick wall at full speed and you won't even fall off your hog!

Sure, the motorbike has that wicked zombie maiming spiked plough in the front, but still I think there should be some chance to fall over and get hurt real bad whenever you ram a zombie (maybe diminished by some riding skill, idk). That shoud bring some healthy sense of excitement into dodging zombies coming at you along the road (and it shoud go without saying that riding off-road is extremely perilous since any collision to a stationary object could be insta-gib or at least broken legs + arms + ribcage + skull fracture). Wasn't there a time when getting hit by a zombie would knock you off the minibike? I think I remember reading something like that.

Falling off a bike should not be that lethal because the speeds are slower, but then again it's easier for faster zombies to catch you and drop you off your ride with a well placed swing. Same mechanics, different challenge.

For cars it makes sense to have better protection from the angry undead mob, but I suppose running into a sufficient amount of midless zombies could at least severely damage the vehicle, and temporarily slow it down a bit.

Now if there was a truly durable getaway vehicle like a van or truck, that could only be found in a specific POI, and only during horde night... Anyone remember that one mission in L4D, where the final objective was to fight your way to that armored truck in the hall and drive it out the depot? Man, that excrement was tight! (pardon my "french")

We wanted to get stable vehicles out in 17, they aren't gold ready IMO, and later would like to add accidents where players are thrown from the vehicle and the vehicle can crash and burn etc.

 

[madmole]

Nah Joel, archery can't compete with guns end game. The reload for crossbow is worse than the shotgun. The compound bow draw is slow as well. I personally hate the crossbow and use the compound bow (actually for some reason prefer the wood bow over the compound, only use compound for the extra damage). I only mentioned the Van Helsing gun-bow (crossbow) because I had just watched that movie lol. Even with points put into archery for faster reload and fully modded, it can't keep up late game. For late game (rpg-game wise, not realistic) I'm thinking like Lord of the Rings -- draw, fire, draw, fire, etc. Or Green Arrow -- 3 arrow draw, fire. Right now it feels like: drawwwwwwwww, fire, drawwwwwwwww, fire, etc. Overall, I would say the bow is on par with the pistol maybe a tad better. The best ammo that a bow has is flaming arrow. Also, I could see bleed damage being associated with arrow types for damage-over-time as well. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it should be on par with the AK-47, just trying to portrait with words that I can see that it does still need a little bit of love to be viable late game. A suggestion to try to help you "see" what I'm saying is use a bow-type on high game staged (fully irradiated) horde nite.
On the topic with the vehicle gimping, it would be fruitless unless you could gimp the bicycle as well otherwise people will still "ride" the horde nite out. So there's that

In 18 you are encouraged to specialize, and bows are under agility, so really its a stealth weapon. So you aren't attracting wandering hordes, zombie neighbors or screamers when using a bow, so I think it balances out if used as a stealth player. Considering you buy all the agility perks and use them together, its a great way to use it. But side by side against an AK guy both level 1 with no perks? Probably not, but then again the ak guy isn't as effective in stealth and his ammo costs are much steeper.

 

[madmole]

GTA motorcycle mechanics would be nice.

I doubt we'll get them that nice, but somewhere between now and them with some way to wipe out/wreck would be nice. Right now its the training wheels version.

 

[madmole]

Why don't we just increase the archery perk into a Legolas-like speed shooting at about 150% reload speed. Then henceforth bows would have a place in the endgame. Lets say, combined with purple quality and some equipables you'd get about 450% starting speed. Which would be pretty cool just imagining it.

And make firearms feel inadequate?? This is a mod you seek.

 

[madmole]

Friends I played with only expected guns & ammo from Cops if you killed him before they blew up that is, & Magnums from Cowboys, % chance that is...

That game is so 2015. We're not catering weapons to anyone now, its an equal chance to drop insert weapon name here, so that each archtype can get his type of weapon he wants to use. Dropping one specific gun by a specific enemy would skew the balance in favor of those archtypes.

 

[madmole]

Oh right, my bad. Practically TFP can invent or postulate any strange rays, gases, effects and have different devices react differently to it.

This is correct. The blood moon fog might be speculated to what causes it, or the strange lightning storms. Fact is nobody knows but don't get caught out in a blood moon.

 

[madmole]

In A18 is there an indicator for shale locations? In recent alphas it has been a bit of guessing game where to find it; maybe that's the intention, but it's not consistent with other ores which have surface indicators.

Mining is completely changed, but the new tells we made are semi broken for some reason so I'll show it when its ready.