PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Rassilon]

17.1, 17.2, 17.3 and 17.4 were updates to the game. It is not like we spent 10 minutes on each of those. A lot of work went into them.
We could of called 17.2 18 and now we would be on 19, but we didn't. These are just made up numbers based on a general feel for where the game is at.

you can call an Onion "Potato" but that wont be right either.

Bringing in 17.1/2/3/4 as argument is invalid as those were to 90% fixes for the initial 17.0 Update.

Dont get me wrong here, im just playing devils advocate.

While im happily waiting and playing Skyrim (for the 9th or 10th time) i can understand those who want to make a point saying they did not wait 3 months for new Content, but indeed 10 months.

At the other way i can understand you: Beeing on attack here every Day sucks.

PS: Im happily eating Popcorn while reading all the Posts of People who think 7 Days will go static with next Update. (No its not^^)

 

[madmole]

Madmole, any chance we can get another video on an a18 book series?

A slim chance. I kind of thing you guys might like to uncover the rest for yourself. If we don't make the 20th I will to kill time. Should be a new horde video today/tonight. What would be better that covering all the books is to cover the art of mining and show mining, that book series is nice and the new mining is great.

 

[Khulkhuum]

Right. Hunt creatures to enslave them for life, put them in tiny cages in solitary confinement with no chance of escape or parole.Sounds like a perfect game for children.

I once saw a video commenting on one of the newest pokemon games (many islands you travel between, don't remember name). The gist was that the people from one island wanted to eradicate some "pokemon pests", so they brought some aggresive pokemon from elsewhere. The conclusion was that these new, more aggresive ones would greatly destabilize the ecosystem on the island, practically eradicating many pokemon species there, not only the pests.

So yeah, creature enslavement, forcing to fight for money and being exterminated because of stupid decisions. Not to mention some pokemon have the power to kill, torture and enslave humans and other pokemon quite easily.

 

[Rassilon]

Yep, I announced the desire to "pick up" stuff with a timer a while ago, then we don't need to slow the crafting menus crafting clutter. The new helper blocks help some, but ultimately I'd like players to scavenge stuff on site. Like there is this new aquarium I want for my base!

oh god yes. Please bring this in sooner or later.

On our Server we helped ourselfes with an Ingame Shop but that just dont feel right / Immersive.

 

[madmole]

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.

500 was probably a huge exaggeration, but imagine double, like 128. Even that would make a big difference in atmosphere and game play, and it was more of a "what if we had spent that time on this instead of that" kind of statement.

 

[Rassilon]

A slim chance. I kind of thing you guys might like to uncover the rest for yourself. If we don't make the 20th I will to kill time. Should be a new horde video today/tonight. What would be better that covering all the books is to cover the art of mining and show mining, that book series is nice and the new mining is great.

I think we would also welcome Videos about daylie Tasks that feature a new/enhanced Mechanic.

Like :

looting a new POI

making use of new Perks/Book-Mechanics

Go mining / show how the Node System works and leads to a vein.

Such stuff

 

[madmole]

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.

Mining and deformable terrain is going gold. I was talking about releasing an option that would disable digging terrain to see what kind of performance gains could happen, and theorizing on potential higher zombie and player counts on servers or fps improvements. The future is unknown what we would do, we would need some time to play around with various tech.

 

[MajorMunchy]

Yep, I announced the desire to "pick up" stuff with a timer a while ago, then we don't need to slow the crafting menus crafting clutter. The new helper blocks help some, but ultimately I'd like players to scavenge stuff on site. Like there is this new aquarium I want for my base!

wait, AQUARIUM!?!?!? please say thats a legit thing in A18

 

[madmole]

The shortest amount of time in getting a 4x4 in my 7D2D "career".

Don't you have to be level 80 or something in A17 to make a 4x4?

EDIT: In A18 you'll be walking and have brown and orange stuff for sure on day 3, and be level 3.

 

[Aurelius]

500 was probably a huge exaggeration, but imagine double, like 128. Even that would make a big difference in atmosphere and game play, and it was more of a "what if we had spent that time on this instead of that" kind of statement.

Look at it this way - it wasn't time wasted, because you learned some valuable information from it. Now you know for future iterations and game releases.

When you're doing rapid prototyping to identify your feature set, you end up with quite a number of these moments. It's just the cost of doing business.

-A

 

[madmole]

You know, if Steam overlay is working you can press a key to take a screenshot, instead of having to take an actual photo of your display.

F9 takes one too with the software and puts it in your screenshots folder.

 

[Guppycur]

Unfortunately pc's are not progressing at a rate to smash these problems in a timely fashion so design constraints are a thing yet.

Yeh it's all about number of core's now not ghz, and game engines do not seem to take advantage of multiple cores enough.

 

[mr.devolver]

A slim chance. I kind of thing you guys might like to uncover the rest for yourself. If we don't make the 20th I will to kill time. Should be a new horde video today/tonight. What would be better that covering all the books is to cover the art of mining and show mining, that book series is nice and the new mining is great.

I never watched any of the book series videos for this reason. I wanted to learn everything new while playing it, because my plan is to play for long hours each game session, plus I like to discover stuff myself, so I'm trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible. For mining I might make an exception because I usually don't mine, that task is for my niece and I do everything else.

 

[madmole]

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.

You should go train in Dagestan and learn the first thing about MMA that Khabib teaches: Respect.

 

[madmole]

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

That's what I said. Its not much of an accomplishment if you turn on cm lol.

 

[Blake_]

Where in the hell do you get that assumption? I love voxels, just hate the limitations and hell they have put us through. In a perfect world we have diggable destroyable everything with micro voxels and flowing water and endless fps, ray traced rendering, 10000s of zeds etc.
Unfortunately pc's are not progressing at a rate to smash these problems in a timely fashion so design constraints are a thing yet.

I understand that point of view. I don't share it in full. More entities would be cool. But period right there. Micro voxels are not fun and will not be until a few decades into the future because they are like robots: halfway there just doesn't cut it for fun.

I reiterate the childhood feeling and control of building/digging what you want with 1 meter blocks. They always snap perfectly, Fallout 4 sucks in the snapping part and requires the same amount of time to create each model and tile than to figure out a good multiblock model/ texture with the 1 meter technique.

My perfect game of all time is THIS GAME exactly how it is now with the missing content to come ( that was hinted here on the forums) and just the 200 entities on screen stretch that might be possible if you keep making these huge cake toppings called alphas.

Honestly its gameplay is THAT good not just because of horde night and quests and loot and campaign and bandits. A huge part of this game is having the certainty that you can build block castles simply block by block and then take them down or modify them at pleasure. It is so fun a reasuring that Minecraft rocks JUST because that design. The Lego part of the brain.

Battlefield has destroyable everything(ish) and static terrain. Empyrion has a moving static terrain that feels exactly how digging with microvoxels would feel in the future. Bethesda has nice story. I finish it several times and throw it away.

This game though, I keep coming back. 40% because of voxels. Take them out for a sequel and I could use 7dtd 2 as toilet paper when my 300 hours of fun are over. This is a 6000 hour game because of LEGO blocks.

 

[madmole]

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.

I can just leave and you guys can have all the fun you want. I think with all the angry "I can't have 18 now" vibe and I've already told you guys everything there is to know about A18, there isn't much purpose for me to be here any more.

 

[madmole]

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?

Maybe a touch of the 18 code slipped through the last patch?

 

[madmole]

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

Exploding arrows and SMG, grenades if needed. Yeah maybe on the stealth, for now it works ok, but you can't get your sneak bonuses and that bothers me. It would be nice if you could move to a new window and got a new sneak shot.

 

[madmole]

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.

I hated Fallouts lock perk. No chance, none? Screw you guys. Basically forcing everyone to buy lock picking or find an npc to do it kind of sucks. Give me options, but nope, they pretty much make everyone buy a few ranks of that or deal with wondering whats in the safe the rest of their game.

Right now lock picking is probably too easy but since you can mash through stuff it needs to be easier than breaking in. It needs some balancing yet.