PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[archergod]

I think you are confused as to what I was saying.
I'm saying if we just made the terrain static and still had fully buildable destroyable voxel houses/pois it would have saved us 3-4 years of headaches. 2 minimum, and the game would be more successful because it would look great, run great, and do 95% of the things you can do now in 1/3 the development time, then think about what we could add without the time wasted on water and voxel terrain. IMO we would have had a better game. How does 500 zombies on screen sound compared to mining, at 200 fps?

I was on my server yesterday alone, and it render 100s of zombie thanks to screamer... I fought for first time with 100 ...yes exact number 100 zombie in one screen. It works fine for me fps drop from 80 to 30/40 but it was playable.

I love this game for it's ability to dig anywhere, so don't talk about static terrian even in your thoughts please . If I really want 500s of zombie in my game, I would rather play game like age of empires ... one of strength of this game is Open world. and I love it for what it is.

 

[Crater Creator]

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.

I can relate to that. Things like the barbecue grill and swing set just look so new and shiny, how could I not put them in the backyard of every prefab I make?

I'm looking forward to, for instance, the coffee makers in A18. Now how about that computer? Or more stuff to put on table & desk tops (framed picture, alarm clock, bowl...) Or a couch corner with a separately-paintable throw pillow on it? Or a...

 

[n2n1]

Burning shaft mod particle effects!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1171189555082354688

Good job Joel. Made it yourself?

I have nothing against - good effect.

But does this have to boast game developer? Leave this level for modders.

 

[Crater Creator]

And that finite selection of poi's? With the new dynamic block system, it doesn't have to be that way. They could literally have the interior of every building different, if they designed it from a different point of view. Why does a desk have to be limited to open vs closed? Why can't it be a nightstand, a bookcase, a trap, or even a wall?

Ever since I learned of the dynamic helper blocks, that's exactly what I'd hoped they would mean for the game. But you can't use them like that in reality, because they're still individual blocks. If a hallway is blocked off with debris, the level designer's not going to use a block that's sometimes a desk and sometimes a wall, because the latter would be this single out-of-place wall block.

To really get dynamic paths out of it, instead of just dynamic decorations, we need a system that does groups of blocks. Nested prefabs, if you will. Either that, or do it the old fashioned way by making copies of a dungeon POI and manually changing the intended path in each variation. EDIT: ...as FA_Q2 pretty much suggests.

 

[Gamida]

Do you know of any POI's that have workbenches in them? (Dungeons. Think of Butcher Petes, but don't, because that one does not have a workbench in it, I'm sure.)
Nevermind, found one. Day 3 4x4

Don't you have to be level 85 to make a 4x4? On day 3?

 

[Crater Creator]

Players want to feel rewarded and find a substantial loot cache. Piece mealing it would be like when we removed the payload harvest at the end, it wasn't good.

Glad you remember that...

I'm not saying you need a poll, but we'd sure have more fun outside the Dev Diary if we could make polls again. I drafted one on this very subject, but my request for poll approval was never answered.

 

[MechanicalLens]

Don't you have to be level 85 to make a 4x4? On day 3?

If you find all the parts to the 4x4 (or any vehicle) in Pass-N-Gas boxes, you can assemble the vehicle at the workbench with no perks/levels required. An oversight perhaps?

 

[Crater Creator]

We're going to address death with some changes. If you die on blood moon, the zombies will no longer GPS to you unless you engage them in combat. This will prevent death loop. SO if you get rekt, you can spawn in the wild or if your bed roll is in a secure room you can just crouch and it will basically not know where you are and normal stealth rules will apply, until you engage, then its on again. So if you die you can hide and not get in a death loop. If you want to keep fighting you can. It will be up to the player.
This will help reduce xp loss and aggravating death loops. Of course you can do this already by not pressing the spawn button until sunrise, but this will be a bit better IMO. You could sneak off to a mine and do something and not stare at a button. If your team mate is alive the zeds will keep gps to him.

Hopefully we get this into A18, but no promises.

Long story short this should reduce the whining IMO. Dying once on horde night is tolerable, but dying 5-10 times or whatever sucks.

Pardon my catchup, but... omigosh! The reason I joined this forum originally was to whine about the death loop. Thumbs up on this solution. It should work across SP/MP and the potential exploits seem limited. Thank you!

 

[Crater Creator]

I didn't go that long with my agility guy his save game got rekt, but his magnum was brutal, the last shot did double damage and with AP rounds he could do some nice damage. He gets the SMG which is now a tier 3 weapon and not a piece of crap. So when things get nasty he can do pretty well with it. Also he has access to exploding arrows/bolts so I think he would do ok. Obviously horde night is not his strength, but the rest of the week he's a ghost silently wrecking everything.

I have to wonder how you would've played that Day 84 or Day 93 horde night with an agility/stealth build - perhaps an open killing field supplemented with some traps that don't get in the way, where you mostly run around dodging their attacks while squeezing in your own. I like a stealthy build myself, but I don't naturally associate that with an agility-based horde night where it's all about small arms, dodging and reloading fast. It does seem like for A18 at least, it'll be a true handicap that all your stealth perks are useless during the BM.

You hinted at a top-level perk where the BM horde couldn't sense you, but that'd be too powerful. So maybe the way to 'stealth' the horde is with a perk that promotes a rhythm to combat. E.g., when you kill a zombie, all zombies lose track of you for 5 or 10 seconds: long enough for you to try to take advantage of your agile/stealthy character's strengths, sneak up and take down another one before the effect wears off. This would be no more 'gamey' than perks you've already added, like getting back stamina after a kill.

Just don't make the mistake Deus Ex: Human Revolution did, which Penny Arcade illustrated so well:

Spoiler

 

[Crater Creator]

...I want to reiterate that getting to the third rank in most perk trees makes you quite powerful and is plenty bonus to thrive in the game. So for example if I decided to do Perception as my primary and Agility as my secondary but then decided I also want Miner 69er which is in strength I only need to get 3 ranks in that perk to feel the difference and excel at destroying blocks quickly.

In my humble opinion, it shouldn't take 3 ranks. You should feel the difference with every rank you buy (assuming of course that you’re doing the thing that the perk affects). I felt that 5 ranks was too watery for a lot of perks in A17, and A18 is looking that way too. If I were to overhaul the perk system (I have a spreadsheet and everything!), I'd consolidate the effects into 3 ranks per perk, while scaling up the points per rank for a chunkier, but not necessarily easier, experience.

 

[KingSlayerGM]

Here's a guy playing with the mod. At the end here he cranked up the zombie numbers (not sure what the max is) enough to scare most people! IF his computer was strong enough that is LOL.

200 is very cool it would be amazing to have that in 7dtd.

But I can see a lot of lag there and we are still 300 short..

 

[The Gronk]

200 is very cool it would be amazing to have that in 7dtd.
But I can see a lot of lag there and we are still 300 short..

The lag is not only due to the terrain. A large part of that is AI calculations.

I still don't understand why TFP are persisting with an antiquated AI system just because it appears to work easier in a cubic world. The moment you add a half-block you've completely ruined about the only saving grace raw A* has.

 

[Crater Creator]

It reminds me of when the developer put gun safes in the game thinking they would be something players would break into once they had better quality tools but lots of players tried to break them open on Day 1 with a brown stone axe and it took forever (of course). Instead of marking the location on their map and vowing to come back later with an iron pickaxe, they instead came straight to the forums to complain about how grindy the new gunsafes were and that breaking them down was zero fun....

Fallout has great looting and we have that now, so that pursuit is nearly over.

Madmole has mentioned Fallout three or four times since Roland's post, so I think this is worth pointing out... In Fallout, if a lock is level 3, and your lock picking skill is level 2, you can't pick that lock. It's not that it will take a long time so few players bother. It's actually impossible, and I think that's an important difference.

If 7DtD adopted this design for gun safes and other locked containers, where tools/lockpicks below a threshold have zero effect, I'm sure some players would bemoan losing the choice to bang on it with their terrible stone axes. But I don't think any reasonable person attacked Fallout's cred as an open world sandbox game because they couldn't lock pick above their level. It's actually liberating, to not have to agonize over when something crosses the threshold from a waste of time to being worthwhile.

 

[Lonestarcanuck]

I'll take fewer zombies with voxel terrain. There are dozens of games that have lots of content but static terrain.
If that's where the game needs to go... so be it. /shrug

The reason I don't play rust anymore is the terrain in 7DTD. the fact that I can reshape the land around me is amazing.

yes I would love to see a 10K map with 100 players - some day that will happen, right now I can get online with 8-20 players on an 8K map and it is a lot of fun. not many games allow this level of flexible building.

yeah there are cons depending on a framework or engine. I deal with it daily with Angular or Django ("the 'd' is silent" ).

 

[Crater Creator]

Tower defense, crafting, looting and questing are the bread and butter to this game. Digging is not a core pillar and mining could easily be done without it as well.

Survival horde crafting game. Don’t forget survival! I feel like I’ve said that before .

It's the combination of shorter-term, day-to-day survival with the longer-term, regularly scheduled big horde o' tower defense zombies that gives this game its identity. I know the game didn't start with a Blood Moon, but you can't put that genie back in the bottle, and it's how this game creates climactic rounds of victory and defeat, that other survival games don't manage.

 

[Lonestarcanuck]

Good job Joel. Made it yourself?I have nothing against - good effect.

But does this have to boast game developer? Leave this level for modders.

With burning Shaft you will need a "Penicillin Mod"

 

[Lonestarcanuck]

MM/TFP - if you change the height map and reduce it by maybe 50-100 blocks, would that not improve performance?

Instead of mining down 30-100 blocks I would mine 10-30 blocks or something like that?

 

[meganoth]

If you find all the parts to the 4x4 (or any vehicle) in Pass-N-Gas boxes, you can assemble the vehicle at the workbench with no perks/levels required. An oversight perhaps?

No, TFP changed this on purpose in one of the 17.x alphas.

 

[meganoth]

You hinted at a top-level perk where the BM horde couldn't sense you, but that'd be too powerful. So maybe the way to 'stealth' the horde is with a perk that promotes a rhythm to combat. E.g., when you kill a zombie, all zombies lose track of you for 5 or 10 seconds: long enough for you to try to take advantage of your agile/stealthy character's strengths, sneak up and take down another one before the effect wears off. This would be no more 'gamey' than perks you've already added, like getting back stamina after a kill.

Excellent idea. As a stealth player I can say this would really be a game changer as a lvl5 perk.

But 5 seconds would be definitely too long. I imagine the time should be about long enough to either make another headshot with the magnum/bow or 2 shots with the pistol. A kill streak with headshots would be quite doable but not just trivial.

 

[Roland]

Oddly enough even without the threats it seems underground is extremely popular with the current player base.
We had a discussion on this after Joels post in my Discord and it was pretty much unanimous. If underground is removed in some form, people will quit the game and no longer recommend it. Even modded those same people just wont care, they would refuse to play.

Hopefully this is all just talk for a sequel. We need to hope we get to gold with as much intact as possible of the game we fell in love with. Save experimentation for the next game. This one already has established itself as a revolutionary voxel game.

Actually this is all just talk for a possible option after the game goes gold. A better discussion would have been to ask everyone on your discord, “If there was an additional game mode where the terrain was static but zombie counts were dramatically increased would you ever play that mode?”

Madmole was musing about how much of an obstacle voxel a have been from a dev viewpoint but he never said they would be removing voxel terrain from 7 Days to Die as anything more than an option.

I love the voxel terrain and wish TFP could/would invest more into solving the issues and making it even more amazing but even I would also play a static terrain mode as an option every once in awhile.