PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

Here's the latest book video for all you junk collectors in the wasteland!

#7daystodie

 

[KingSlayerGM]

1000 times? You need a 3x3 tower to survive, and a 7x7 tower to thrive. If you dislike placing 1000 blocks you need to nerf your base designs a bit.

Actually, MM, I think he made a fair point.

Sometimes building a base to survive the horde is a tedious job, and I would argue that repairing and upgrading it are even more so. Place a thousand blocks, upgrade a thousand blocks, repair a thousand blocks.. This is very true if you think that the zombies will just shred through your defenses and you have to repeat this every week. Usually when you play a tower defense game, you don't need to rebuild everything for every horde. But yes, I know this is a core mechanic of 7dtd.

So what do some players do? Skip the horde nights, stay in an empty poi, drive around, log off, take advantage of the faulty AI. Because they don't want their base damaged.

He just proposed 1 solution, which was to make building easier, which I would argue in favor. It would make it easier to play the game as a tower defense.

 

[madmole]

I don't use mods at all in Skyrim or Fallout. Not yet anyway. Many people don't mod at all. I do have a select few mods that I play with from time to time, but I also mostly play vanilla 7DTD. The game changes so much each release that provides enough replayability for me to not need mods currently.
I know you guys are eventually going to want to shelve the project and move onto other things, but a few things COULD help extend the life of 7 Days To Die.

Regular releases of paid content updates would be a big one. I know Cities Skylines does a ton of this, and I've gotten suckered somehow into buying quite a few of them (I think I may have picked up some of them on the Humble Monthly Bundle or maybe a Humble Bundle). An example of this would be a modern texture pack that adds new paint textures with untainted paint (as opposed to the old, worn paint in houses int the game right now) for players to decorate their base with.

I also think you guys could make some dough by rewriting the network code to be more client/server based (to prevent cheating and allow for certain optimizations not possible with the current net code) and renting out servers similar to Minecraft Realms. Allow users to buy 'day packs' of 30 days, and let them shut the server down when it's not in use to save days. This actually could generate more revenue than a monthly fee because it's easy to tempt someone to buy something one-off vs coaxing them to pay a monthly fee. For example, I have a group of friends I game with on Friday night. If I could have the 7DTD server up Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I know it will last 10 weekends. However, what actually ends up happening is that during the week sometimes I may hop on, so I may start it up for that day and hop on to do some base work before horde night. It's a player friendly approach to renting monthly game servers. Best of all you can rent it for a different price based on player count. Minecraft Realms charges $3.99 for 2 players or $7.99 for 2-10 players I believe. One obvious problem that would need to be solved are the mods, but a simple web interface to upload them would be easy to make. Doing this does not necessarily mean you have to take the server away either. You can still let people host their own server, but your servers would be specifically set up and optimized for the best gameplay. In addition, your servers would have a dedicated interface in game that makes purchasing, creating, and controlling the server dead simple.

Overall, if 7DTD development eventually comes to an end, I'll understand, but I will be deeply saddened. I have so many hours in the game it is ridiculous. Who knew that 7 Days To Die was going to be this great? When this game started years ago, I bought it day one, and I think that I've gotten WAY more than my money's worth compared to any other game I own. It really is fantastic and I personally thank you guys for sticking to it for as long as you have.

Every end is the beginning of a new journey

 

[madmole]

Yeah, it's going to suck not being able to play on a nice long weekend. Luckily I'm not working currently (medical issues), but for those who are, no nice long labor day weekends to play.


Just report it to Amazon. No need to hire an attorney.

I believe we did but nothing happened. Maybe it takes them a few months to look at something lol.

 

[Ti2xGr]

Thanks for the new book set. I can definitely see those coming in handy.

 

[Thecolours]

Here's the latest book video for all you junk collectors in the wasteland!

What else can you tell us about this new efficient digestion stat and how it works?

 

[khzmusik]

Here's the latest book video for all you junk collectors in the wasteland!

These look pretty good. I will predict that people will be scouring the land for the brass one, especially mid/late game.

A suggestion, though. Perhaps the first book, about harvesting honey from wood, should only apply to gathering wood using an axe of some type. That is, not a chainsaw.

Those things harvest an ungodly amount of wood at a time, so you'd pretty much be guaranteed honey when you use them. This makes them even more OP than they are now. And besides, honey is kind of an early/mid-game item. By the time you get a chainsaw, you probably have ways to get antibiotics through other sources. So it shouldn't create any adverse balancing issues.

This also isn't unrealistic, since presumably you have to be precise when chopping a tree to get it, and a chainsaw is not precise.

EDIT: Also, yes, please talk about the whole digestion thing.

 

[sinkler]

Rick likes the cheese because nobody is wondering how to start the quest. It might break immersion but it does a great job of people knowing where the rally marker is.
I've mentioned a faction flag you activate, that would be more immersive and waving in the wind would be easy enough to spot. So trader quest is trader Joel flag, duke is a duke flag, etc.

I like the idea, sounds much better.

We talked about that too, then you don't see the whole thing flicker/rebuild and cannot double mine the resources.

EDIT:

@MM what about ideas on how to avoid/hide resetting the POI in front of the player? do u have a preferred direction u consider regarding immersion breaking POI reset ?

 

[madmole]

These look pretty good. I will predict that people will be scouring the land for the brass one, especially mid/late game.
A suggestion, though. Perhaps the first book, about harvesting honey from wood, should only apply to gathering wood using an axe of some type. That is, not a chainsaw.

Those things harvest an ungodly amount of wood at a time, so you'd pretty much be guaranteed honey when you use them. This makes them even more OP than they are now. And besides, honey is kind of an early/mid-game item. By the time you get a chainsaw, you probably have ways to get antibiotics through other sources. So it shouldn't create any adverse balancing issues.

This also isn't unrealistic, since presumably you have to be precise when chopping a tree to get it, and a chainsaw is not precise.

EDIT: Also, yes, please talk about the whole digestion thing.

Chainsaws appear to harvest wood 20% faster than my pickaxe, so they aren't OP considering noise and gas use.

What digestion thing?

 

[khzmusik]

What digestion thing?

The "efficient digestion" buff that comes with the mineral water. It implies there's some new "digestion" mechanic, and if so I missed it. If so, maybe the subject for the next video?

 

[Blake_]

Amen to that. A few mods have nice ideas, but always coupled with ten things you wouldn't want. Oh well, this will all make sense once workshop drops and installing and maintaining a mod is easier. Can't ask your playerbase to install 45 tiny mods... So you make one big one to not lose too many players.

Oh yes. Workshop is the promised land.

 

[betam4x]

Sorry guys, was gone for a couple days.

To be fair, a spoilage timer doesn't necessarily need to know the creation time of an object, only the decay rate of a stack.
Not a perfect system, two stacks of 50 will decay twice as fast as a single stack of 100, but sufficient to act as a food sink.

You don't even need to go that far. The timer has nothing to do with stacking except one specific corner case of having a full inventory, and that is solvable, but I guess they already made a decision on that, so it's a moot point.

1) Stability is the issue. Caves systems that run under buildings have an adverse effect on the prefabs above them and the stuff you build over them.2) They already do have a bridge system, for water areas, it's just not fully implemented yet (but works for the most part).

Look in the mod section.

I have a terrain gen modlet that is capable of making bridges over rivers and lakes. *thanks to Haidr'Gna for getting me those altered prefabs*

It just depends on the 'seed' you use, and if the main road 'needs' to make a bridge or not, instead of just going around it.

Roads don't go through buildings, and neither would caves. It's pretty easy to write an algorithm to avoid entire cities if you wanted to.

Performance, why is this simple scene laggy? (there is a complex sewer/cave network you can't even see rendering, adding to chunk building time, etc.)

Madmole, do you guys not implement culling of any kind? If not, you should. An aggressive culling algorithm can vastly improve performance (which also allows for higher levels of detail if desired).To be clear though, I wasn't necessarily asking for the cave system to change, I was just asking it we could get a hook into the cave system so that caves can be procedurally or manually generated.

EDIT: To be clear I was referring to occlusion culling.

 

[Aurelius]

Says the guy who's seen us redo everything at least twice.

Not everything.

Still waiting for the smell mechanic to be redone

-A

 

[Gmad03]

Is workshop support still planned?

 

[Psymbifish]

The Smell mechanic was indeed a great part about previous Alphas.

I was thinking that since consumables, weapons, and other items had a frame/depth/weight to them since A13, A14, or A15 (can't 'member exactly when that became a thing), it would be neat to be able to decorate the base with various crafted and found items (place-able items in the world).

I imagine that would take up a lot of memory that would be better served elsewhere, especially since there would then be so many item tags if that were the case, the engine would have to keep track of each item and its XYZ/ attributes instead of expiring. Cool to think about, though.

 

[sillls]

Just try it yourself.

No! Don't say that, SnowDog might just do it.

 

[sillls]

No thanks, there are too many tough to navigate situations where they will look bad IMO. Its worth a try, but if it looks bad, well forget it. At a minimum we'll have survivor camps you can repair the wall before the next horde shows up, and once you do you have a small horde show up you protect them from kind of thing.

I'm looking forward to seeing that.

 

[sillls]

I sincerely apologize from the bottom of my fart.

lol. You tell'em stinky!

 

[Gnomaana]

Ahhhhh immersion.
This is a game where u believe u are really smashing zombies in the face by pressing your mouse button, while carrying 20 tons of stone in your backpack, having created a mega castle in a weeks time, But that yellow ! ---- Totally unrealistic

It makes me suddenly realize im playing a game, wth man!

Good God I'm sick of this argument against immersion. If immersion means nothing why aren't you just still playing text adventures. The only purpose of graphics is to make the game more immersive..

 

[Dunkurtin]

If you don't have some silly reservation against mods you could play Darkness Falls. A very good mod even though I don't like LBD and sticks. I'm quite sure vanilla will stay a salt mine for you.

That's the plan once(if) the game goes gold. Either play it with mods, or depending how many years it is, I may even enjoy the action oriented gameplay of the vanilla without the expectations I got used to playing during previous versions.