PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%
  • <img alt=":)" data-src="" src="___base_url___/applications/core/interface/js/spacer.png" />

    Votes: 1 33.3%

  • Total voters
    3
Status
Not open for further replies.
Yeah I liked the old cities with continuous zombie spawns. Made for an interesting time to build a base there. The cities as they are know, even though they are much better in terms of lay-out etc, are pretty tame in comparison.

 
So let me get this straight, zombies outside the POI that hone in on you from hundreds of yards away and then maze their way through several floors of a dungeon to get to you all the while you are stealth enough to not disturb a zombie standing next to you is natural. What!? I'm mean really WTF? No one else has a problem with such a mechanic. Sure if you fire a gun of or make other load noises fine, but you might as well take stealth out of the game if this should be desired in the game.

I find it utterly annoying to clear all zombie spawns outside a POI to then have triggered zombie spawns unleashed upon you from outside with the sole purpose of smashing through the walls to get to my exact location that the zombies inside the POI are unaware of. This is absolute bullocks and should be fixed or designed better not made more obtuse.

I mean I guess the twang of my bow while in stealth should be loud enough to wake the neighbourhood for that total sense of immersion. Why would I ever want to play the game a different way. Silly me, I must enjoy the boredom of it.

 
I agree with RestInPiece. The dynamic aspect of having wandering zombies following you inside was a really cool aspect of 7 days to die. Make the maps less liner if you think you get sandwiched. That would also add to the stealth aspect. Dynamic gameplay = replayability. The superliner dungeon crawl poi's won't give you that excitement alone. I suggest having the dungeon crawls only on big poi's like the skyscrapers. Big poi's will have enough room to not have the identity of the structure lost.

 
It was just some prototype. Maybe the code got deleted. We didn't have proper builds possible back then and it didn't make sense yet. Now we support agility / stealth builds so it makes sense.
Hi Madmole, I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Is it possible to count on a mini-game lockpick in the future? Or is a regular timer hacking an approved hacking method?

 
My issue is 30 zombies from outside come in every time I do a POI. This is a result of me playing solo and the random horde comes for me or near a player (its just me) and they hear me killing stuff and come investigate. At a minimum 5+ guys seem to come from outside and afar when I'm doing a POI. If that didn't happen, I'd love to see lots more zombies outside in cities but when your doing a Tier 3+ and get sandwiched its not cool.
I always go around the area around the quest and kill all the zombies in the area so that they do not come to me at the wrong time and do not interfere with my quest. Just pull yourself together and prepare the territory for the quest :fat:

 
So let me get this straight, zombies outside the POI that hone in on you from hundreds of yards away and then maze their way through several floors of a dungeon to get to you all the while you are stealth enough to not disturb a zombie standing next to you is natural. What!? I'm mean really WTF? No one else has a problem with such a mechanic. Sure if you fire a gun of or make other load noises fine, but you might as well take stealth out of the game if this should be desired in the game.
I find it utterly annoying to clear all zombie spawns outside a POI to then have triggered zombie spawns unleashed upon you from outside with the sole purpose of smashing through the walls to get to my exact location that the zombies inside the POI are unaware of. This is absolute bullocks and should be fixed or designed better not made more obtuse.

I mean I guess the twang of my bow while in stealth should be loud enough to wake the neighbourhood for that total sense of immersion. Why would I ever want to play the game a different way. Silly me, I must enjoy the boredom of it.
I take it you missed the part where I mentioned horde pathing improvements will mitigate the homing instinct to a large extent. As far as I know the random variance has been increased to make _any_ horde less likely stumble across you.

Without that they will only find you inside a house by noise or blind luck.

The cause has been cured, there's no longer a symptom to work around.

 
Yeah see, your frame of reference is different than mine. Books have been in since I can remember, at least as far back as alpha 9.
The information that the books were originally intended as placeholders comes from Roland. He has a deeper insight into the development than one of us does. Madmole has confirmed in a post in this thread that original there were no books or similar planed for A17 and the current books are only a last moment addition.

That the Fun Pimps are working on a feature for a long time is no reason to assume that it will remain. LBD has also accompanied us over a longer period of time but was still replaced by another system. One could regard this as wasted time but according to Roland the Fun Pimps do not only develop a game but at the same time also a construction kit with which they can then also develop other games. LBD may be used later in another game even if it was discarded for 7 Days to die.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
I've yet to use electricity yet. I have done some crazy stuff in Fallout and some basic stuff in MC, so we'll see how it plays out. I might have some polish or changes I want (which happens a lot) once I wrap my mind around something. This is why I feel 18 is so good, I've been playing it for months and tweaking stuff and giving guys improvement tasks.
I see... Well let me tell you that it feels very janky. It is NOT like Redstone. It only has one input and ~4 outputs.

So you can not connect anything to a grid. You can only ever have one generator OR solar panal powering a "grid".

You can ever only have one activator (cam, pressure plate, tripwire) activate a trap, since they only have one input.

It is still great! But far from perfect.

That would be immersion breaking to see a border of every house or even one house you are questing in. Its easy enough to NOT store things in POIs you aren't living at. I put my storage chests in the middle of the road in SP and mark it on my map and collect them later after I get a vehicle.
If you need to store things at a POI, put a bedroll down.
He was also asking about a circle WHILE the quest is active. I quit about 10 quests because i was backpeddling (especially before the radius was increased) Could we have an indicator for that? Like a maxamount from a specific point in the top right corner or something?

 
Somewhat offtopic. Any news on networking? Are there reasonable estimates you can give on max. playercount/server for the final release?

 
I see... Well let me tell you that it feels very janky. It is NOT like Redstone. It only has one input and ~4 outputs. So you can not connect anything to a grid. You can only ever have one generator OR solar panal powering a "grid".

You can ever only have one activator (cam, pressure plate, tripwire) activate a trap, since they only have one input.

It is still great! But far from perfect.
Electricity in 7dtd needs logic gates, pistons and machines that react to electricity. Think about hopper, dropper, dispenser, door in Minecraft.

Also I would make the generators hold more engines and more solar cells and more fuel..

 
I always go around the area around the quest and kill all the zombies in the area so that they do not come to me at the wrong time and do not interfere with my quest. Just pull yourself together and prepare the territory for the quest :fat:
I believe the term you are looking for is "get off your ass".
 
Electricity in 7dtd needs logic gates, pistons and machines that react to electricity. Think about hopper, dropper, dispenser, door in Minecraft.
Also I would make the generators hold more engines and more solar cells and more fuel..
Nah! Nothing major like that.

Just a gridsystem is enough. This isnt minecraft where its about creativity. Its about effectiveness.

And not beeing able to connect two powersources or to make an electic fence go in a circle is unintuitive.

 
I thought MM would like that, he probably worries about lag. (Dump Unity?)Personally, I'm hoping for up to 100 active "non-player" entities visible at one time (slider for potatoes and difficulty).

You could then have some serious late game POI's.

An example have a key POI (nuclear power plant) surrounded by 100's of radiated zombies inside and out (can only wear a full rad suit or die).

Step 2 two after clearing is to fix the radiation leaks then try to figure out how to get it going without an explosive meltdown. Then players can power anything from a standing telephone poll (or something like that).

Players could chose not to fix the power plant and radiated zombie will continue to spawn making building a lasting settlement almost impossible.

Not quite an end game, but it would change the game to more of a city builder (think Banished but first person). Would still have non-radiated zeds of course. :)
Starvation mod for A16 had that. A nuclear power plant with radiation and the entire outer edge of the map was an explorable radiation zone (requiring hazmat suit and radiation medication). This added another 'endgame' to the vanilla that we have today. You couldnt get the gear to explore these areas without getting to a gamestage high enough to spawn special zeds that dropped the gear.

 
Starvation mod for A16 had that. A nuclear power plant with radiation and the entire outer edge of the map was an explorable radiation zone (requiring hazmat suit and radiation medication). This added another 'endgame' to the vanilla that we have today. You couldnt get the gear to explore these areas without getting to a gamestage high enough to spawn special zeds that dropped the gear.
Sounds amazing! I hope they work on A18 when its released as they seem to think as I do.

 
Really? It made cities dangerous. Now they're just... Loot boxes closer together.
Honestly surprised you don't feel the same.
We must be playing different games. Or you games broken. I got lots of zombies in my cities. They are definitely not just "loot boxes"

Maybe not a ton of zombies out on the roads but there are in the buildings. And that's where the real loot is. I would argue that on higher gamestage some of those buildings aren't even worth it. The amount of ammo you use doesn't justify the buildings loot.

 
What part of it is annoying? The part where it breaks the enter-kill-loot-repeat monotony? O.o
For me personally it's too much of one gameplay mechanic. I have been playing borderlands mod. 100% all zombies all the time. Balance. I'm just speaking for myself mind you but too much zombie slaying makes the game feel put of balance.

Some may like it, and that's cool. But it would annoy alot of people.

- - - Updated - - -

For A17 we got new options that were awesome for customizing the game. It would be cool to get a 2x 3x 4x 5x multiplier option for biome spawning zombies for day and night. Then people could choose how much sandwiching they could take and/or their rig could handle.
I played A17 with 4x biome spawns and it was pretty crazy and you did really notice that all surrounding zombies home in on you as soon as you enter a POI.
This is the solution. Roland strikes again!

 
So excited for Alpha 18. Good thing it dident get released before summer or i would not have gotten any color on my skin hehe. When I read threw 100s of pages here and i am wondering about a simple thing that I cant find info about:

Q: Will flowers and mushrooms be able too be looted by the simple "E" command again in A18?

Keep up the awesome work, hoping for more pictures again soon ^^

 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top