PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[faatal]

I was under the impression there was a variable for all blocks that was multiplied times the durability to determine how easily the AI thinks it can go through it, and that doors were set to 0.5.
I get that in order for the AI to seem intelligent and to prevent horde cheesing, the Cost of a block needs to be roughly similar to how hard it actually is to break through it. However, I don't see why a strict 1:1 correspondence is necessary. Maybe the time it would take to edit the XMLs, test and balance wouldn't be worth it, but I feel like making blocks slightly asymmetric with regard to how much they get targeted by zombies could have a positive effect on game feel.

That is how it works. Been like that since A17. You asked if any of that was new or tweaked. The answer is no. A18 is same as A17.

Doors are 25%, but they are typically 2 blocks in size, so 50% of 2 blocks. I don't see a need to tweak one block to be x% of another. They already use the block health. AI already uses variation in block health vs distance based on AI intelligence level. I see no benefit in slapping arbitrary variations on blocks.

 

[DaVegaNL]

Sorry about that

No worries, I took those stamina-enhancing pills!

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Im glad someone wants a challenging game. I feel alone with this thought sometimes, then I cry.

.. And after crying?

 

[NukemDed]

so,

not console as in xbox/ps which is what i assume gup was poking fun at,

dm is pressing f1 in the pc version to bring up the console

simple really i suppose...

 

[archergod]

Can we have Arrow goes through broken Door, I mean we can visibly view against the broken door, but arrows cannot go through, seems little out. Or change the graphics of door to now show what is on other side of door until it is completely broken ?

 

[Gilthanaz]

Easy there Ouch, we’re not scheduled for a forum fire for at least another two weeks!

What do you mean, in two weeks? If we can't play A18 after the coming weekend, there'll be riots! We'll even bring the console crowd and write many forum posts expressing how angry we are, right after the letter we sent to the United Nations Council due to the crimes against humanity committed by the pimps because they let us wait so long, which is psychological torture as defined by the Geneva Convention. They might even consider a "military option" to end our suffering and drop supply crates with "liberated" copies of A18.

Viva la instalaciَn!

 

[hotpoon]

The lack of block knowledge you describe and then acquired by seeing would be expensive. Each zombie would have to be raycasting all over the place to check visibility and store that block visibility for themselves and path calcing would have to use that zombie's visibility data as it checked each block. Animals make assumptions about 3d space and randomly run around to look for access, so zombies could too.
You could also look at it this way. Zombies do have xray vision in the form of heat and air current sensing, so they do see more heat leaking through weaker blocks and a hyper sense of smell, so every crack entices them.

Zombies might have better senses in terms of smelling where brains are and being able to see heat maps, but in the example, they had knowledge about the structure that they hadn't seen. Nothing to do with me as a player.

In my mind I don't think they really need to acquire the block knowledge at any point. The only knowledge they should have is that BRAAAAAINS are in that skull of the person they are looking at, and then they go for it. Like they did in previous alphas.

When A17 first hit, I saw a lot of angry posts about the 'structural engineer' zombies, but then they mostly quietened down when Roland said the new AI was just a baseline for the bandits, and would be be adjusted down for the zombies. It does not sound like that is your intention. It sounds like you are happy with how they behave. Am I correct in thinking that?

 

[The Gronk]

hell he has even replied to himself just to get more points... he had to be banned for a week because he got in a serious cussing fight with himself... it was rough... everybody was walking on egg shells around here.
if you believe that, i will cook up another one.

That's not too far from the truth anyway.

If memory serves Guppy has replied to his own posts with counter-arguments quite recently. That's either a sign of someone who can see, and propose, multiple viewpoints at the same time or a symptom of severe cognitive dissonance.

 

[Zombiepoptard]

Dude our art team made Rage and various Doom games. Let our art team do their job. It looks better than it ever has and if you think otherwise you need your head or eyes examined, as id games are always praised for their art. I'm sure 7 days will look amazing when its finished we're in the best hands money can buy. As I said its a WIP and until the new renderer comes online and every texture is redone its not going to look right.

Not to go back to this but I've been thinking about those wall textures a lot lol. I hope you're right Joel and I hope the art team makes the textures less grim not the other way around. Alpha 17 was great on deco and poi building as far as level design goes. So yes it does look better but I don't think it was the textures that did it. I'm sure the guys from id are doing an amazing job but can the pois feel relatively hospitable so that touring around them is slightly pleasant. What is the new rendering going to improve?

 

[meganoth]

No worries, I took those stamina-enhancing pills!
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.. And after crying?

We don't want to know!!!!!!

I'm sure Snowdog is like a benevolent father figure to many young forum users here. We have to protect their innocent souls.

Won't somebody please think of the children?

And yes, Unicorns.

 

[Gazz]

As a former QA Lead in the gaming industry, it's refreshing for me to hear this sentiment from a dev. A lot of devs paid lip-service to it, but would shut you down with prejudice the second the philosophy became inconvenient for them. You say it like you actually mean it.

You QA people can be an annoying bunch but unfortunately... this just doesn't work without you.

It's extremely rare that a report will be ignored and even then the design gets looked at because even if something works as designed - if it looks like a bug then the design was not very good.

You do need considerable self-confidence to go ahead and design anything but once you start ignoring everything that disagrees with your vision you have a problem.

 

[TSRViper]

What do you mean, in two weeks? If we can't play A18 after the coming weekend, there'll be riots! We'll even bring the console crowd and write many forum posts expressing how angry we are, right after the letter we sent to the United Nations Council due to the crimes against humanity committed by the pimps because they let us wait so long, which is psychological torture as defined by the Geneva Convention. They might even consider a "military option" to end our suffering and drop supply crates with "liberated" copies of A18.
Viva la instalaciَn!

Yeah...or that

 

[canadianbluebeer]

QA: "if someone does this, it crashes the install"

Dev: "why would anyone do that?"

QA: "let me show you..."

Dev: "oh! I guess I better fix that"

yes, actually happened. Mind you, it was a reasonable question from them, and the response funny. Even other testers said the same 'why would anyone do that?'.

(issue was, if you held the enter key down during install, it would barf. stupid right? why would you do that?

installing from FLOPPIES took time, so you get out of your chair, shove it in towards the desk, and the

right arm of the chair happens to push down on the enter key of the number pad on the keyboard...

"Oh! guess I better fix that" indeed.

One of those found totally by accident bugs.

 

[Gazz]

One of those found totally by accident bugs.

The best bug I found (different game) was that you put a medic into a shuttle, flew him down to the surface and disembarked. Then used the shuttle's tractor beam to tow the poor sap to space. Then you used the battlecruiser's emergency vehicle recovery tractor beam to try and recover the medic.

That would crash the game.

That wasn't accidental, though, but me actively trying to break the game.

 

[seryie8a7]

when will the a 18 stream start ?

 

[madmole]

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

More like gather resources (Not as much as you have lol), repair the highlighted blocks, he's open for business, no discounts.

 

[madmole]

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.

In Skyrim/Fallout you can keep going, but I tend to save that for last and then roll a new character and start over.

 

[madmole]

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?

If we go there (no discussions of it at all for years tbh) we'd do some kind of animal forge (chicken coop block) where you put a chicken in and the 3d model and ai disappear, you then add feed and it produces eggs and feathers.

 

[Roland]

Zombies might have better senses in terms of smelling where brains are and being able to see heat maps, but in the example, they had knowledge about the structure that they hadn't seen. Nothing to do with me as a player.
In my mind I don't think they really need to acquire the block knowledge at any point. The only knowledge they should have is that BRAAAAAINS are in that skull of the person they are looking at, and then they go for it. Like they did in previous alphas.

When A17 first hit, I saw a lot of angry posts about the 'structural engineer' zombies, but then they mostly quietened down when Roland said the new AI was just a baseline for the bandits, and would be be adjusted down for the zombies. It does not sound like that is your intention. It sounds like you are happy with how they behave. Am I correct in thinking that?

Are you still arguing from a 17.2 perspective or have you tried 17.4 yet? There were a lot of adjustments to randomize behavior and make it so that zombies would abandon long pathways.

You’re right that I made the statement at 17e that the perfect knowledge AI without variations were just a first pass and that zombies would be dumbed down and bandits would be the smarter enemies. Since that time zombies have been dumbed down and variations of behavior have been coded in.

It does sound to me as well that for the sake of challenge and thrills there will always be some zombies that will take a long path so that you get them coming at you from everywhere— even across a plank connected to an adjacent building. Personally I love that and have fun trying to block all access points to where I am. I think that 17.4 is close to the right amount of variation

 

[madmole]

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..?

Its pretty bad. Our lead programmer had a minecraft like engine when my brother and I were looking to do this game so we partnered with him and he was using Unity.

 

[madmole]

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. <definately a one-off, and running a few modlets so no bug report>

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

LOL on "advance sailor speak". Yes the game produces a wide variety of things you don't always expect, that is one of the most amazing things about 7 Days IMO.

Its a bug,but I was at some old mine POI and the thing literally started collapsing and I was dodging falling blocks and zombies while trying to spam med kits and survive. Most games need months and months of work to achieve a bug that fantastic.