PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[DaVegaNL]

A fellow brother in hatred for mobile devices... Nice.

Are you at your stage in life yet where you're yelling at kids to get of your lawn?

 

[Hek Harris]

Enjoy!!!!
Check out madmole defend his base on day 84 for some super crazy action, and get a first look at the demolisher zombie!

Love it ! "Oh ♥♥♥♥ Oh my God !!" should be the new name of the game

 

[DaVegaNL]

I don't think this game needs a higher percentage of dungeon-style POI's. They feel quite alike as it, with the same mechanics employed (zombie on planks overhead, zombies in thin-shelled closets, walking into a building and having the floor give way underneath you.. It's all the same. It can grow pretty old pretty fast. So we don't need more of the same, in my opinion.

 

[Zombiepoptard]

I want to do a fortified build because I like to grow food and get health regen but I would like to craft shotguns too as my main weapon. Is it worth it to spec into strength just to get or lvl up my preferred weapon? If not I would change how leveling up a weapon perk works. If it's a perk tied to a weapon make it so that you don't have to lvl an attribute but use more skill points to level up said weapon perk.

If your weapon perks are going to change the way you craft and do combat with that weapon then I suggest having the player have more flexibility for such a huge decision. Locking weapons behind classes is an unnecessary player restriction.

 

[Roland]

You cannot play dungeon POIs like non dungeon POIs or vice versa. Just because you can destroy obstacles doesn't make them similar to regular prefabs. They have significant differences in gameplay. For instance, the dungeons are full of traps and jump scare sleepers. You won't get a similar experience even if you use your imagination to ignore the elephant in the room called obviously intended path. I bet if you have two unknown prefabs, a dungeon and a non-dungeon POI, most players can still easily recognize their 'true' nature, even if they try to treat both prefabs as non-linear.

"Intended path" is only relevant if you are planning to clear the whole POI as in you follow the path through the POI. In earlier alphas there was no path. Just a kitchen connected to a family room with a hall to a couple of bedrooms and then an upstairs which were also rooms off of a hall or main room. Sleepers were all in plain sight in corners and in the middle of the floor and before sleepers they were just walking around in the open.

You would usually go into the house through a door or a window by chopping in (or as you like to put it 'voxel technique'). Then you would loot and kill whatever zombies were right in front of you in the house.

For a dungeon house you could find the opening that starts the "intended path" or you could do as you did in early alphas and chop through a door or window to enter the house at a different point. I'm not sure what you have against this as being able to chop through doors, windows, and walls has been a staple of the game for going on 6 years now. So you chop in and you will see most likely a cluttered living room and a kitchen and maybe a hall and stairway up to the second floor and probably a stairway down to the basement which would have been the roundabout gauntlet-ish way to get to the main level where you are now. Yes, it is different because there will be sleepers hidden behind clutter, in cabinets, and possibly at higher levels that might drop down on you. But you kill these zombies and loot the living room and kitchen and maybe a room off the hall and you get out. Voila, an experience more similar to previous POI's. You did not follow a path, you did not wander through the entire POI clearing everything. True, the zombies weren't all completely in plain sight to be killed while standing in the doorway but we can't have everything I suppose.

Really, it takes little imagination. All it takes, tbh, is a willingness to leave most of the POI unexplored and move on.

Not sure what the essence of this statement is. To me it sound like 'prefabs don't need a believable design because bad design can be ignored due to the voxel technique of the game'.

Here is the essence: We are not playing a Super Mario level that forces you to follow the designed pathway. You can follow the path but you have the freedom to make your own path. Bad design ignored due to voxel technique? Do you really think the level designers had no idea that destructible voxels existed? Do you think they ignored the player ability to make their own path or tried to stop it from happening? Do you think it is an accident or mistake that dungeon POI's aren't landclaimed to force the player to take the pathway? No.

The houses are just cluttered with lots of blind corners and you can choose to follow the path or you can make your own by bashing through a barricade or placing some ladders on a wall and destroying the ceiling to move up to the floor above you on your own terms. You think it the dungeons are poorly designed and I think they are amazing. To each their own.

Btw. how often do we look for cooking pots? Once per game? Your play-style reminds me of an old thread where you suggested to fake LBD by distributing perk points according to the exercised activities. Isn't that a similar situation or at least related to it? Trying to invent your own fantasy rules to make the game fun.

Whatever. That was one example. You can also find a functioning workstation in many POIs without venturing too far in. You can also find other useful materials and books by going into commercial and manufacturing type pois and simply hitting the main front rooms without going deep into the storerooms or up into the rafters etc. I said cooking pot for the start of the game because that is when most people would have a hard time with the dungeon POIs and would want to get in and out quickly for those beginning game items. But you knew that and are just trolling me at this point I think or at least I can't believe that you actually think I go looking for cooking pots over and over again...

Going into a POI and looting 1-3 easy rooms without trying to follow and clear the whole thing by following the gauntlet pathway is actually a viable and smart tactic especially during the early game. Roleplaying spending points by first doing activities in the area that the points you want to spend as a way to get that LBD feeling was a way of showing that people would SAY they liked LBD for the feeling of learning by doing but were really just interested in speed leveling through repetitive actions. And it bore out as most replies were that it would slow leveling up immensely if they had to do some repetitive action that held no other game benefit every time they wanted to spend points. It showed the hypocrisy of the LBD argument that chopping down 20 trees making their chopping skill better was fun. If it was so fun why not still chop down 20 trees and then spend one of your points in Miner69er for that oh so fun feeling? See? Nobody wants to do it if it doesn't add to the speed of leveling.

This idea of chopping through a ground floor doorway and looting just a few rooms rather than clearing the entire POI is not the same thing at all. But if you can't see the difference I don't think I can explain it to you any clearer.

Thank for adding this at the end. I was wondering what this tedious egg and spoon race you described was for until I read that sentence.

I could tell you needed the extra hint. But I also can see now that anything more than barren empty rooms and hallways in a simple cardboard boxish configuration with zombies in plain sight and well lit to boot is going to enter the tedious egg and spoon race zone for you. Luckily for your fun, as Madmole has stated there are more super basic remnants and ruins. And luckily for my fun, the level designers continue to work and we WILL see more of their fun creativity in the future with more new POI's and more conversions of older POI's

 

[RyanX]

Any two story house is going to eat half your day with all the winding blocked off pathways, especially early game with stone axe and a crude melee weapon and limited ammo bare bones perks.
Any stealth player will spend much longer creeping through a POI.

We have no solution in A18 for nerdpolling loot grabs, we're talking about some solutions for 19.

On the contrary for the stealth player. You can stealth past every zombie and open up every loot container without waking a single zombie sometimes, or at most stay crouched and kill a couple. If you stay in stealth and use a sledge...easy peasy. A medium sized house...10 minutes. A bookstore, 5. Albeit it takes some perks, but quickly doable.

 

[Roland]

I don't think this game needs a higher percentage of dungeon-style POI's. They feel quite alike as it, with the same mechanics employed (zombie on planks overhead, zombies in thin-shelled closets, walking into a building and having the floor give way underneath you.. It's all the same. It can grow pretty old pretty fast. So we don't need more of the same, in my opinion.

I'm all for new mechanics but you know what felt really samey? All the non-dungeon POI's with their repeated mechanics (zombie on the floor in middle of the room, zombie in the corner unobstructed by anything and killable from the doorway, walking into a building and seeing everything there is to see from the door, a room with a couch, a dresser, a tv on the wall, chairs, and drapes, maybe a duffel bag in the corner, go up stairs --> end of hall --> bedroom --> ladder --> attic) It grew old and new was made. In the future new new will be made and hopefully with new mechanics.

But why more of old?

 

[Roland]

I want to do a fortified build because I like to grow food and get health regen but I would like to craft shotguns too as my main weapon. Is it worth it to spec into strength just to get or lvl up my preferred weapon? If not I would change how leveling up a weapon perk works. If it's a perk tied to a weapon make it so that you don't have to lvl an attribute but use more skill points to level up said weapon perk.
If your weapon perks are going to change the way you craft and do combat with that weapon then I suggest having the player have more flexibility for such a huge decision. Locking weapons behind classes is an unnecessary player restriction.

It isn't that bad leveling up 2 attributes. Besides leveling up Strength isn't just to be able to unlock higher tiers of the shotgun perk. It also gives benefits for that shotgun so if you like the shotgun you are spending points on it every time you put points into Strength. Those points are not being wasted just to activate a gate.

Now leveling up 3 attributes is going to keep you a bit more mediocre in all three instead of badass in one or two. Plus, even without a single point in strength if you find a purple shotgun and load it with mods and find a book or two that helps you will still have a ton of fun with that shotgun and be very effective.

 

[xfejiou5]

A lot of last week was spent on getting the new Physics Master system working, so thrown item physics will run on the client. I have several bugs with laggy throwing/colliding and throwing through players, which that will fix. SP does not have those problems, since the physics were already running on your computer.

Cool! I like hearing about stuff like this. Keep up the good work!

 

[Zombiepoptard]

I don't think this game needs a higher percentage of dungeon-style POI's. They feel quite alike as it, with the same mechanics employed (zombie on planks overhead, zombies in thin-shelled closets, walking into a building and having the floor give way underneath you.. It's all the same. It can grow pretty old pretty fast. So we don't need more of the same, in my opinion.

There limited beaten up textures add to this problem of everything look the same. The resource pallets are a cool addition but they are overused in pretty much every poi. The way they path players is to liner and doesn't give you enough viewing space to take in the poi's identity of being a specific structure. When working with visually limiting voxel game like 7 days to die there main focus should be making recognizable places. Now it has shifted to making everything look like crap because that's their theme. Some buildings just look like rubble and have a lot of unneeded visual noise that's irritating to look at.

It's not always a good thing to have so many visuals crammed into one object or texture especially if you don't have full control on how things look (voxels limitations). Joel Respond to me with "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" dismissive response. All though they might be masterful game artiest doesn't make this game's visual quality void of criticism.

Adding deco will always be a good thing.

The structure on the outside and inside is better than alpha 16

The textures are overly detailed to overcompensate for a grimmy theme. Instead, I would make them look old and subtly spooky/Haunting.

Dungeon poi's need to be opened up and resource pallets need to be used less to path players.

Wall textures look unrecognizable from what they are attended to be. example Drywall is sometimes replaced with concrete textures.

I guess I just want some acknowledgement over these sort of things.

Do you see the clutter?

Are you getting more texture space?

Can you make the really trashed places specifically for the burnt or wasteland biome and have subtler decay on others?

 

[Haidrgna]

Thanks yeah it could have been worse I was just like please don't blow up my crates/workstations...

It should deal more damage to wood and workstation blocks tho, letting one pop in your store room might be forgiven, but multiple, should wreck your containers up for letting that happen in my opinion.

This was a good horde certainly puts you in place and will make you prepare ahead better next time. It probably is time to not just defend in your main storage base anymore but have a solid tower nearby with more spikes and other traps to take the load of needing to use ammo.

I also noticed that the unarmed melee was not suitable at all for horde night, you got punished hard for trying and missing a few punches. The radiated and armor zombies did not even notice getting hit. Any thoughts on giving the strength guy some extra knockdown/ragdoll chance on hit vs the tougher zombies. Like he will not kill em one hit but he can knock them away from him to get a breather.

 

[Zombie_Jam]

I'm all for new mechanics but you know what felt really samey? All the non-dungeon POI's with their repeated mechanics (zombie on the floor in middle of the room, zombie in the corner unobstructed by anything and killable from the doorway, walking into a building and seeing everything there is to see from the door, a room with a couch, a dresser, a tv on the wall, chairs, and drapes, maybe a duffel bag in the corner, go up stairs --> end of hall --> bedroom --> ladder --> attic) It grew old and new was made. In the future new new will be made and hopefully with new mechanics.
But why more of old?

Why not scroll back a few pages and read my discussion with some other posters regarding this issue.

Perhaps you can perform some forum magic so that other users can see it, we covered this.

 

[Zombiepoptard]

- - - Updated - - -

It isn't that bad leveling up 2 attributes. Besides leveling up Strength isn't just to be able to unlock higher tiers of the shotgun perk. It also gives benefits for that shotgun so if you like the shotgun you are spending points on it every time you put points into Strength. Those points are not being wasted just to activate a gate.
Now leveling up 3 attributes is going to keep you a bit more mediocre in all three instead of badass in one or two. Plus, even without a single point in strength if you find a purple shotgun and load it with mods and find a book or two that helps you will still have a ton of fun with that shotgun and be very effective.

That's good to hear. Thank you Roland.

 

[Vik220]

Hey Madmole,

Could you nerf the Molotov cocktails? Those things are wayyyy overpowered in A17.

Thanks!

 

[Pille]

"Intended path" is only relevant if you are planning to clear the whole POI as in you follow the path through the POI. In earlier alphas there was no path. Just a kitchen connected to a family room with a hall to a couple of bedrooms and then an upstairs which were also rooms off of a hall or main room. Sleepers were all in plain sight in corners and in the middle of the floor and before sleepers they were just walking around in the open.
Really, it takes little imagination. All it takes, tbh, is a willingness to leave most of the POI unexplored and move on.

Why would you do that? If you're not looking for an essential item, why would waste time switching POIs all the time for no reason? It seems inefficient and unnatural unless you know where the pinata rooms of dungeon are. It's like an artificial disadvantages that has to be taken to prevent the dungeons from harming the game.

Here is the essence: We are not playing a Super Mario level that forces you to follow the designed pathway. You can follow the path but you have the freedom to make your own path. Bad design ignored due to voxel technique? Do you really think the level designers had no idea that destructible voxels existed? Do you think they ignored the player ability to make their own path or tried to stop it from happening? Do you think it is an accident or mistake that dungeon POI's aren't landclaimed to force the player to take the pathway? No.

Do you really think that something that's done on purpose makes it somehow better? The implemented design pattern makes zero to no sense in a destructible world scenario. Others have given good reasons why it doesn't work, no time to repeat what was already said.

Whatever. That was one example. You can also find a functioning workstation in many POIs without venturing too far in. You can also find other useful materials and books by going into commercial and manufacturing type pois and simply hitting the main front rooms without going deep into the storerooms or up into the rafters etc. I said cooking pot for the start of the game because that is when most people would have a hard time with the dungeon POIs and would want to get in and out quickly for those beginning game items. But you knew that and are just trolling me at this point I think or at least I can't believe that you actually think I go looking for cooking pots over and over again...

You basically say meta-knowledge about the game is required to have a reason to ignore large parts of a prefab. Imo that's not a good argument. I mean the workstation and other important stuff could be as well deep inside the building why would stop looking for it on the ground floor?

Well your play-style is really weird so looking for cooking pots over and over again doesn't seem far-fetched... First it looked like the dungeons were indirectly dictating your way of playing by subconsciously motivating you to make odd decisions when looting prefabs. But now it's more like you expect us to have the same play-style and meta-knowledge as you. To me your argument sounds like that: 'You can play in such a way that the dungeons don't feel artificial and linear'. Yes, maybe you can. And? That's not a good enough reason to have them in rough quantities.

Going into a POI and looting 1-3 easy rooms without trying to follow and clear the whole thing by following the gauntlet pathway is actually a viable and smart tactic especially during the early game. Roleplaying spending points by first doing activities in the area that the points you want to spend as a way to get that LBD feeling was a way of showing that people would SAY they liked LBD for the feeling of learning by doing but were really just interested in speed leveling through repetitive actions. And it bore out as most replies were that it would slow leveling up immensely if they had to do some repetitive action that held no other game benefit every time they wanted to spend points. It showed the hypocrisy of the LBD argument that chopping down 20 trees making their chopping skill better was fun. If it was so fun why not still chop down 20 trees and then spend one of your points in Miner69er for that oh so fun feeling? See? Nobody wants to do it if it doesn't add to the speed of leveling.

Sorry, for digging out the LBD discussion. Pretending to have something is not the same as actually having something. To answer the question - because it's not 'so fun feeling' just to pretend LBD exists as if it actually exists. Just because others don't share your point of view/feelings doesn't mean they are hypocrites. Btw. personally, I don't mind that LBD was removed.

I could tell you needed the extra hint. But I also can see now that anything more than barren empty rooms and hallways in a simple cardboard boxish configuration with zombies in plain sight and well lit to boot is going to enter the tedious egg and spoon race zone for you. Luckily for your fun, as Madmole has stated there are more super basic remnants and ruins. And luckily for my fun, the level designers continue to work and we WILL see more of their fun creativity in the future with more new POI's and more conversions of older POI's

I don't want to repeat myself (AFAIK already said that): I am fine with dungeon POIs if they are not too frequent. Atm. it's way too much.

Bottom line: The major fallacy is to look for the problem only with the players. Yes, they can adapt to new gameplay elements but that doesn't mean they still have as much fun as before.

Who? TFP with some code or the player having more control of sleeper behavior in some game setting? -How "deep" are the zombies sleeping.

-Do "Reinforcement" zombies come from outside the POI. What are the chances of reinforcements and is/are there various triggers (gunshot, zombie scream, ect)

Something like that? I think TFP have the skills to do that easy enough.

I don't get the purpose of all these questions. Perhaps I can answer later but don't have much time atm. because discussing with Roland was fairly time-consuming. Really sorry.

 

[SnowDog1942]

Yes for now, but I think we might change that.

Please change it. Pretty please

 

[OP LORD]

Hi.

In A16 was no problem with finding coal but in A17 is hard to mining and find some coal.

It is possible to craft some coal from wood? It an real thing process in real life. I guess it can be more good mining coal then made from wood.

 

[agrastiOs]

The video was amazing!

The gyrocopter getting blown up was hilarious, sorry

I really liked the panic moments too.

 

[Gamida]

The initial idea was you shoot his flashing light and it blows him up doing massive damage to entities near him, but after playing it I think block damage will be a better design. The issue is, is there no way to minimize massive destruction? So maybe shooting it can half the damage or 1/4 it or something, but if it goes off on his own it does a lot. I'll have to chat with the team to come up with a plan. This was my very first look.

I thought that was the whole idea of him having that light you had to shoot. If you could shoot it before he exploded then he would take out some of his zed brothers for you. If he got past and exploded on his own then he would also damage surrounding blocks. You were pretty overwhelmed by them on horde night so it looked like most if not all get to you or your doorway. What difference would shooting them do if they exploded either way.

I couldn't tell if they did not explode if you did kill them. That would not make sense for the light then as if I had to kill him instead of shooting the light to stop him from exploding what is point of the light? I may be seeing it all wrong and may have to watch the video over a few times. Or someone in the know could explain a bit more about how he works.

 

[Genosis]

The video was amazing!
The gyrocopter getting blown up was hilarious, sorry

I really liked the panic moments too.

I continue to get more and more excited for A18; will make for a renewed excitement and wonder for the game, not to mention some great material for vids/streams which we are looking forward to. The demolisher zombie really gives you the impending dread, watching as your finely laid plans crumble to the ground and the horde swarms in.

This will affect conventional base design, which was sorely needs as "go to" bases were sorely formulaic. A17 has been the alpha when many people picked the same "AI path" driven bases, favoring exp farming over survival. Something tells me that when the "drop path" base is used now and a demolisher goes into full "destroy" mode, it will turn some people on their heels and we will finally see some creativity go back into builds.

I know I will be working on plans B through E when plan A is smushed by "Mr. Blinky". There, I already picked a nick name for the zombie and he hasn't even been released yet.