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
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I wish I had a special a18 dead is dead key I could give you, and when you died you lost the code or access. You would be super stoked but super stressed knowing your A18 would be gone until release if you died lol.
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Wow, that is a really great idea (if you guys can hypothetically pull it off for the next alpha).

If a bug kills me in my dead is dead Pre-alpha 19 access I will cry blood.

 
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean, but I'll give a go at an layman's explanation. BTW, I'm the layman doing my best to explain what little I know. So, in an ideal situation, occlusion and pathfinding would be tied together to compliment one another, however, two issues that come to mind:
1. they are both extremely complicated systems that mixing them would probably cause more bugs than what it's worth.

2. I believe they are both worked out completely different to each other. Whereas pathfinding is like a mathematical grid, occlusion is based on geometrically how far away something is perceived to be and does it block the item behind it? Honestly, I have very little idea how GPU processes are handled, so can't comment much further.

But one is for certain, if occlusion was handled like pathfinding (based on a grid), you could never get remotely close to 60FPS. The calculations just couldn't be done in time.

I'd love for grid based and vantage point to be combined at least on flat and narrow spans between you and the zombie. I hate that zombies zig-zag over the grid and don't walk directly to you. I did ask Faatal whether it was a programming possibility to rotate the grid, but his answer was basically a no; again, too complicated for only a slight benefit.

In regards to zombies following your trail, hasn't that been implemented a few Alphas ago?
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I think he is complaining about the part where you can build an elaborate maze and stand at the end of it, the Zombie will (nonsensically) navigate through with flawless precognition from start to finish and kill you.

If you stood on the other side of a glass pane, or on top of a wall, the Zombie should start bashing the wall, not look for the stairs to 'path' to you.. at least, that's what's EXPECTED for a Zombie.

I too find it stupid, but a necessary evil. The game would not be as fun, especially if Zombies couldn't flail their meaty arms though wood, let alone cement blocks to fulfil their purpose.

 
Question - Animals
any plans to add other animals to the game?

also maybe the ability to trap chickens/rabbits to produce constant food source
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They're redoing current animal skins, and they'd prefer you to run around, not have a cage to catch them for you. But we already have farming, so..

 
That is where you go: "You take the poi on the left, I'll take the one on the right".
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yeah but his method usually ends up with a lot of deaths and me helping with bag recovery :)

I like to play dead is dead so my method works well for that - I always liked the dead is dead in Minecraft.

 
We're closed until we get these walls fixed...Can you help?
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Something like that :)

Quest 1: Clear Zombies

Quest 2: Collect 15000 Wood, 15000 Cobblestones, 15000 Iron

Quest 3: Craft Spikes, BarbWire Fence, Landmines, Flagstone blocks

Quest 4: Craft WorkBench, Forge, Cement Mixer

Quest 5: Craft Iron Club

Quest 6: Find Survivor and force him with ur iron reinforced club to become trader

Quest 7: Deliver Crafted Items

Questline complete: 5% discount at trader and 5000 dukes :p

 
I think he is complaining about the part where you can build an elaborate maze and stand at the end of it, the Zombie will (nonsensically) navigate through with flawless precognition from start to finish and kill you.
If you stood on the other side of a glass pane, or on top of a wall, the Zombie should start bashing the wall, not look for the stairs to 'path' to you.. at least, that's what's EXPECTED for a Zombie.

I too find it stupid, but a necessary evil. The game would not be as fun, especially if Zombies couldn't flail their meaty arms though wood, let alone cement blocks to fulfil their purpose.
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Okay, so it's not so realistic that they can path directly to you in a maze without double-backing or going into dead ends. But only in rare circumstances would the player ever really see that 'magical ability', anyway.

Maybe TFP's could make the zombie designs more Jedi-like so then we have an explanation as to how they can do this? Lol

 
You should like ours then since it doesn't touch on the things you dislike.
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That is cool. Just thinking alot of people will see it as an end and move on. I guess that's what some people want. Ah well.

 
Question - Animals
any plans to add other animals to the game?

also maybe the ability to trap chickens/rabbits to produce constant food source
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I believe Madmole's reply to that one was that adding animals is just like adding zombies. The more animals, the less zombies you can realistically have. So having the ability to have an entire farm of animals isn't the idea of the game when you need to have enough zombies to be a threat.

But I remember countering with a suggestion. The game allows you to have up to maybe 5 low AI animals, but these are extreme 'heat' sources for zombies. Any more than that and it draws crowds of zombies that just make it impractical to maintain.

So this wouldn't work with harvesting animals because they don't re-produce, however it could work for things like chickens and collecting their eggs, sheep and collecting their wool or cows for milk.

Fish reproduce pretty quickly I think, so maybe it could work with them?

 
I believe Madmole's reply to that one was that adding animals is just like adding zombies. The more animals, the less zombies you can realistically have. So having the ability to have an entire farm of animals isn't the idea of the game when you need to have enough zombies to be a threat.
But I remember countering with a suggestion. The game allows you to have up to maybe 5 low AI animals, but these are extreme 'heat' sources for zombies. Any more than that and it draws crowds of zombies that just make it impractical to maintain.

So this wouldn't work with harvesting animals because they don't re-produce, however it could work for things like chickens and collecting their eggs, sheep and collecting their wool or cows for milk.

Fish reproduce pretty quickly I think, so maybe it could work with them?
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is unity that bad to where you cannot have 20 zombies and 20 animals? that's a lot i know but just for examples sakes

I always wondered too, why unity..?

 
is unity that bad to where you cannot have 20 zombies and 20 animals? that's a lot i know but just for examples sakes
I always wondered too, why unity..?
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Not only Unity, devs have a system requirements goal. They can`t just add more and more, because at some point our ovens will need help. Or a hammer.

 
 
I haven't got it yet. I'm saving up the perk points for rank three of advanced engineering which is Electrician. We didn't have electrical schematics when this character started but I'm starting to see them spawn, but yet to find a generator schematic. I have found some things at traders, so we'll see if I buy the perk, depends on what I can find between now and when I have the points to spend. The good thing is the electrician gets xp for trap kills so it won't feel useless if I buy it and find schematics later.
For me horde night is all about ammo. I stand on my walls and shoot everything, perferably before they reach my spikes because I want the XP. Its costing about 100 rounds per 10 levels or so, so I need about 500 rounds to get through a horde night right now. I love grenades I just drop them onto a big cluster of zombies and watch bodies fly. Molotovs still blow up in my face or the radius is too much and light me on fire so I don't like them for fort defense where you throw straight down.
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Very cool, thanks! Really looking forward to the Grenades. And faatal recently mentioned he had done some work on the molotovs, so keeping fingers crossed on their 'look out below!' usability :)

Electricity Tip.

I just had a horde night after taking a couple rl weeks away. Something weird happened within the first couple minutes. There was an explosion, inside my bird cage! And a wierd boomy at that. I lost half of the switches I had mounted on the floor (concrete blocks), and a couple of e-fence posts that were 5 blocks away, while -not- losing a couple of e-fence posts that were in between the lost switches and the far fence posts. &lt;definately a one-off, and running a few modlets so no bug report&gt;

Anyway. The 'tip' is to protect your switches better than I did (though I've never had anything like this happen before, heh).

Due to the switches demise I lost -all- of my traps, eep!

Which led to quite a bit of advanced sailor speak while trying to suddenly fight all the zeds strolling right in to my small 7x7 birdcage.

Hell, I hadn't even bothered to put an e-tool in my backpack, though I did, thankfully, have one in a flush mounted floor chest in the cage. Which allowed me to make a couple frantic connections to get the e-fencing back up.

Fun, though -wildly- unexpected!

--meilodasreh, funny stuff! :) and just in case it wasn't clear; the shower comment was meant as, 'MMs working so damn hard to get A18 out he doesn't have time to shower!' ... since MM & I are of an age I'm 99% certain he got the intent (and obviously meilodasreh got it and expanded on the joke), but just in case any of you young whipper snappers were wondering :)

 
Not only Unity, devs have a system requirements goal. They can`t just add more and more, because at some point our ovens will need help. Or a hammer.
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i run AMD so unity is not my friend.

But I WILL say the new ryzen 3000's double my fps and not i can play on max 60fps and 45fps horde night &lt;3

 
i run AMD so unity is not my friend. But I WILL say the new ryzen 3000's double my fps and not i can play on max 60fps and 45fps horde night &lt;3
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no probs on my ryzen 2700x system with rtx 2080 on a18. my average fps is 75-80

but what people keep neglecting is the fact that voxel world has a very large factor to game limits.. unity can be used in non voxel games and be very competitive with other games... but a voxel world is a different experience and does have limits currently. future is always changing tho. :)

 
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