PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[RyanX]

@Pille: My point pure and simple is that you never have to fully clear and explore a POI nor do you have to follow the path of least resistance. For those who struggle to find the fun or even the ability to stay alive during the early game because they are spending so much time going through entire POIs there is an alternative to that and it has nothing to do with how a building has been designed and everything to do with player choice.
@Meganoth: I agree that randomizing best loot location or spreading it around more would be awesome. I’m also in favor of mazes instead of one path gauntlets. That would only enhance the experience more. Removing the lights that hint toward “a proper path” is would go miles all by itself in my opinion.

@Davega & Poptard: I agree additional decorations and textures would be grand if they can do it for variety’s sake.

@everyone: the level designers did their job with full knowledge of voxel destruction technology. There is nothing wrong with going to the roof first or going through a door or a window or building your own stairs in a stairwell shaft that only has remnants of the old stairs. No level designer is lying awake at night shaking with fury that players somehow managed to bypass their lighted pathway.

They would’ve landclaimed their POIs to force platforming and staying on their path if that was the case.

All good stuff...and yeah, I never pay attention to the lights anyway because the path is usually self-evident.

But, as far as the "player choice" thing: the rub is, you don't know if that loot pinata at the end has already been looted or not on a MP server, so that steers you towards bypassing the rest of the POI too. I don't agree that it's meta if you have other people on your server bypassing it. It's in-game knowledge at that point. Someone that knows all the honey holes can spoil a very large area. I'm living by a very large town, and I hear people complaining about not being able to find good loot...and it will get worse when towns get smaller. The "loot bug" getting fixed would go a long way. You know the bug where if you pass within a few blocks of an empty container it resets the timer on loot respawn? Was that addressed for A18?

 

[Sappystreetbum]

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.

Just a thought: the weak point could be hit stopping the demolisher, he's distracted by the noise, and nearby zombies are attracted. Monkey bomb zed...

 

[madmole]

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.

Strong disagree, perk choices have weight to them now, before you leveled so fast you could have everything. You can still grab a few ranks pretty easy in any one other tree, but mastering two trees would be difficult. Sorry guys but the game is great now, the old single class of survivor had no difficulties to overcome other than waiting for everything to unlock.

I just lost my gyro and there so now I have to look for another one at traders. The old game I'd just say oh meh, I'll just max out int in an hour and buy the perk, no big deal. Now I have real loss I cannot replace. I have no guarantee one will spawn again, and I'm grounded driving my gas hog 4x4 now, searching every trader for the schematics, parts or a full gyro. And I don't even have enough money for one again, so there is that issue.

Overall its a much better design. If you want to be a shotty guy go into strength and partially into fort for heavy armor if that is your thing. I'm spread out over 3 perks right now because this save game didn't have everything I needed in schematics yet when I started or in loot. So I bought some int perks I wouldn't if I could do a new game.

 

[madmole]

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.

Maybe, if your questing though and you include travel time, a half or sizable chunk of a day is gone no matter how you slice it.

 

[madmole]

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.

Yes I wasted points on electricity and getting to int 5 or so and that cost me being rank 5 of fortitude, and I could really use that right now. I will have it for the next horde night and hopefully all my relevant perks maxed out and with that new minigun and some fort changes, hopefully fair better Not that I did bad, I was happy to survive and be challenged, that is always the best outcome to me. Its boring if its a breeze.

 

[madmole]

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?

There is a trend where the level designers over use new stuff every time. Then they back it off or when new assets come online they delete some old new to make room for the new new. We've added a boat load of new models to A18, spaces look better than ever. The big stuff is yet to come but I really don't think anything you complain about is a big issue, you are seeing a WIP. I still think you need your head examined, why keep harping on a WIP? No we're not cleaning it up, we want a gritty filthy urban decay look to the game.

 

[andrough]

Crazy night 84. RIP gyro. Your didn't seem to use the door choke point as much, but I only caught one zombie clipping through the whole time anyway. Great progress on that, if someone has been working on it. The demolisher was really something. I take it you hit the green target to start the explosion countdown and it looked like they don't explode if they just take enough damage to die, right? Think I saw a couple killed by other demolishers exploding. If you all do add block damage to that, then damn am I worried for my cages suspended over a pit. Hope you plan to include something to allow us to prevent some of the damage. I thought the point was: see them and instantly adjust to targeting them to prevent the fists as much as possible. If they end up with the damage potential of cop explosions on top of the work they can do while alive, then RIP me.

 

[Morloc]

There was no good reason for the nail gun to have quality ranges as it was never intended to be a weapon.

Tell that to the chickens....

-Morloc

 

[madmole]

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.

The fist build is impressive in the right conditions, but the sledge club guy are probably better for horde night because of greater knockdown. Fists have a high chance to gib heads but it doesn't work that well in a crowd, you need choke points to feed them knuckle sandwiches one at a time then its pretty awesome.

 

[Survager]

MM, please return the context menu!

MM, once in our game it was possible to call the context menu on items and there was a choice of actions:

- separate a certain amount

- scrap and so on.

Can you return this context menu? This menu could have the same menu items as to the left of the item description.

Splitting stacks in half, and then again in half and again in half to get 25% is very tedious and illogical.

Also, on boxes with cartridges or other materials, you could add an additional “unpack” item to such a menu, and “repair” for weapons, which would be very convenient and would not have to look for a recipe in the list of recipes.

Even if the recipe comes first, we still need to make a lot of movements:

1. choose a box with cartridges

2. click on “recipes” to the right of the description (by the way, the menu items move, and the activation button for the same action changes depending on the subject)

3. select a rep in the recipe list

4. apply the recipe!

Please return the context menu.

 

[RestInPieces]

@Madmole care to reply to this post? Don't have to read the whole thing just the initial question.

Anyway, since we agree on the big point (distribute thte loot), who cares if it's a myth. :cocksure:

Indeed.

 

[Noctoras]

Which points to the real fault: The big loot-bonanza end room. And the solution: Distribute or randomize the loot in POIs

This would:

- fix the nerdpoling to loot issue

- randomize and revitalise gaming experience

- remove the "one way street" feeling of dungeon POIs to some extent.

Very good idea. Spread out the loot, no need for it to be all in the final mega bonanza room

 

[MajorMunchy]

This would:- fix the nerdpoling to loot issue

- randomize and revitalise gaming experience

- remove the "one way street" feeling of dungeon POIs to some extent.

Very good idea. Spread out the loot, no need for it to be all in the final mega bonanza room

or be a ♥♥♥♥ and atleast when a quest is activated, no placing of blocks can happen?

 

[Kattla]

Will A18 be playable without POI's, or are there essential skills/perks that needs books to be unlocked?

 

[Kattla]

I love the demolisher zombies! The design is rad as hell; I like how it looks like a biker realized he was turning and just strapped some C4 to himself to go out with a bang :smile-new: The beeping is terrifying!

It looks to useful to be true.

 

[Kattla]

This is exactly Rolands point: It is you who thinks he needs to follow the path and not break through walls and not nerpole. Neither the game nor the developers (as far as I know) have ever stated that you should not do that. Maybe this is a myth the users of this forum created for themselves because getting at the best loot was always too predictable and easy.
Which points to the real fault: The big loot-bonanza end room. And the solution: Distribute or randomize the loot in POIs

My solution was to remove the POI's. But that was A17, not sure if that is still playable in A18.

Cons: Few wild zombies.

Which makes progress dead slow.

Which is a little bit boring in the long run.

Makes playing regular 7d2d feel like survival in a supermarket.

Pros: Feels more like survival.

Far better immersion.

Gives back some of the "good old 7 days to die" feel.

Makes the wasteland biome attractive, for once. (for the cars to loot).

Thanks to those here on the forum that made me do that experiment. It was worth it.

 

[madmole]

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.

Mining is fixed in A18. There are huge signs that say COAL HERE DUMMY with an arrow all over the world now. I made them for me, because I am a dummy and coudln't find coal, or any ore tbh.

 

[madmole]

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

I really liked the panic moments too.

Thanks yes you know the game is getting good when you can just crank out 2 great videos in a row with zero editing.

 

[Dimpy]

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?

The impression I got was the design you mentioned was more of a design unique to Diersville than one unique to all POIs lacking a dungeon crawl. Surely you understand that its possible to make a building interesting without adding the horde of zombies, linear path, and loot room that has come to define the dungeon crawl...

 

[Guppycur]

This is exactly Rolands point: It is you who thinks he needs to follow the path and not break through walls and not nerpole. Neither the game nor the developers (as far as I know) have ever stated that you should not do that. Maybe this is a myth the users of this forum created for themselves because getting at the best loot was always too predictable and easy.
Which points to the real fault: The big loot-bonanza end room. And the solution: Distribute or randomize the loot in POIs

Let's be real on this point. They may not have said those words, but they sure as hell have used harder blocks than the textures give the impression of to prevent people from doing just that. Cement painted like wood, basically says "we want you to go this way."

Chopping straight through "voxel loot style" is not as feasible as it sounds on paper.

These things are designed in every way to make you go down a specific path.

Except nerd polling, which thankfully MM said they would be addressing.