PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Total voters
    3
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All it takes is 3-4 dogs to be interesting at any given moment. In a city you could increase the chance or frequency of a random encounter and make it feel pretty busy. A18 POI balance feels great to me. Pacing is important. I'm sure we'll land on a decent setup in another alpha or so.
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Single zombies wandering around is flat out not interesting.

That's what was going on when they were all biome spawns.

Zombie packs wandering around is more interesting than a random distribution because that is something you interact with. You either evade or engage them.

A system of random encounters can also be more varied than "yet more zombies".

The current "wandering hordes" are not even close to what we would want.

 
Why not just make it an option, configurable. So default would be as-is now, for the potatoes out there. But for everyone else who wants more zombies you could have them. I have seen many more Z roaming in some of the mods, especially in the wild, and I had no performance issues. I would like more too, yes, but I also understand why they have it set where it is now.
Friday can't get here quick enough(well Monday for us), we're all just nitpicking while we wait at this point. FFS people I've been getting my fix via Minecraft and I'm bored, even though the RLcraft mod made it fun again(so much death, everywhere), but that is getting old now too. Anyway, for this issue why not just leave it as it is and just add another damn option amongst the many others and put this debate to an end already, seems like a win-win for both sides.
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No performance issues but you could go inside and not get your sleepers because max alive is met from too many zeds outdoors. Trust me everything adds up, and going back to the old way is not good for the game. We're trying to be responsible here. Outdoor zeds are still there, just not as thick. They respawn faster so all in all probably about the same, just not as many alive at once eating cpu.

 
&lt;snip&gt;Zombie packs wandering around is more interesting &lt;snip&gt;
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I hope to god you guys are going to make this a thing!!! this is an amazing idea, much much better than the few stragglers spread out.

PS. I'm not not talking about the regular wondering zombie groups. &lt;--just incase anyone confuses what I meant

 
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Single zombies wandering around is flat out not interesting.That's what was going on when they were all biome spawns.

Zombie packs wandering around is more interesting than a random distribution because that is something you interact with. You either evade or engage them.

A system of random encounters can also be more varied than "yet more zombies".

The current "wandering hordes" are not even close to what we would want.
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that would make things very interesting

 
Wheels are the weirdest thing in the game... There's about a billion of then lying around, that you can't use because they turn to plastic, but you can make one from scratch with plastic, coal and acid? Doesn't make any kind of sense... It's like they forced wheels into a 7day world with no additional items...
A pickup, repair situation would have been much better. Find/craft tire patches, add an air compressor station (be no more useless than a table saw)...
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Its an abstract. Ah yes, lets make a huge mini game just to craft a tire and make vehicles complete inaccessible.

 
I didn’t. I still thrust 90% and throw 10% because that just feels right to me. I don’t care that spamming the throw/retrieval might be more efficient. It seems like casting a magic spell.
It never even occurred to me to use the spear that way until I saw it on Prime’s stream and my reaction was a most definite....WTF.

I tried it and hated it. I love the spear but I use the throw as a finishing move after softening them up with some jabs (which have a nice reach btw). But I’m weird in the sense that it doesn’t bother me that a more efficient way is a way I don’t like to play and I don’t feel compelled to choose efficiency over fun. There are those who will hate it and still play it that way because efficiency is king in their world.

Tldr if you don’t like it don’t do it. I don’t and the game plays great and spears are still one of my favorite additions.
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I don't throw that often because of miss factor. When you miss and your spear flies out a window into the grass in the field outside you regret throwing it.

 
I doubt the saw is in a18 with the new shape menu thingie, but it's not even so much that I expect tires to be functional if found, it's more that the recipe is REALLY weird, and could be better.
...no one finds it odd that the biggest hold up go getting vehicles is acid for wheels?
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Tires are made using acid and polymers IRL though. Do you not do any research and just start posting gibberish? Maybe do some research next time dude, I did mine.

 
I'm going to disagree. The old way was a little more "zombie movie lore correct" but bad for performance and game play. Clear the city and have free reign with all the loot in every house? Bad for game play. Ideally we get a few more guys wandering the streets in addition to sleepers. I have to kill 500 zombies now to clear a town, the old way was 20. How was that any good? You guys literally are clinging to probably "first time memories" when you were a noob and those 20 guys felt like 200 and you were scared. Now you are a veteran and nothing short of 200 actual zombies outside will bring back that "feeling". I emplore you to load up alpha 12 or so, and tell me how great it really IS, not how great it WAS. Memories and feelings are deceptive.

Pois were shells of boring repetiveness, once you cleared the 20 zeds in the streets the entire town was yours, for 4 days until they respawned. Zero danger inside a house unless you missed someone outdoors who wandered in.
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At the time the OP was describing, the central city had zero respawn time. The zeds couldn't be cleared - ever - and it was purely an exercise in getting in, getting as much as you could before you attracted too much attention, and getting out again without getting overwhelmed. Gunfire was guaranteed to bring every Z in a three block radius toward you. It was difficult. It was scary. And it was fabulous. Only Tier 5 quests come close to recapturing that feeling in the current game, but there are only a few of those. They get old after a while. The central city could be anything RNG gave you.

 
I don't throw that often because of miss factor. When you miss and your spear flies out a window into the grass in the field outside you regret throwing it.
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i have idea maybe for later alphas

maybe when you throw the spear (like say that poor window) when it lands there is a bright color cloth (Like purple , bright yellow) on the back of the spear so if you look for it i would stick out like a sore thumb.

 
Aaaand a second answer probably: A city roaming with zombies would be "clashing" with the quest system, at least for beginners playing vanilla early game.
So I think the solution (for vanilla without encounter system) should be that lots of zombies in the streets should be confined to wasteland cities

And the encounter system is really a solution to performance problems, think about it:

2) You might enter a wasteland city without a hitch three times in a row but on the fourth time you round a corner and all hell breaks loose with a momentary zombie horde surrounding you. Like many of you have been saying (about the inside of POIs), a constant density of zombies is boring in the long run, spikes of danger when you least expect it is soo much better.

2) The server can create big groups of zombies for each player and still keep the workload constant at all times. Because the server can just refrain from starting more encounters until previous running encounters are finished. Load-balancing by focusing on a small subset of players and switching focus randomly around.
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About time someone gets it. Everyone else is in 3 year old tantrum mode and not realizing the whole thing is a fake simulation anyway. There is a performant responsible way to do it and a bad way to do it. We can have 64 zombies in the world and 3 in your face, and the rest hiding/hunting/roaming... or we can have none in the world and dynamically add stuff near players so joe has 10 guys chasing him, bob has a mini horde of 20, and fred has a wandering trader, and Snowdog has a hooker horde.

What is out there waiting/lurking like A1 is irrelevant. What threatens you right here and now is all that matters. It will feel like there are more zombies than there ever where. We plan options so you can add more or less dynamic encounters. They can be game staged etc so its actually a challenge.

 
Tires are made using acid and polymers IRL though. Do you not do any research and just start posting gibberish? Maybe do some research next time dude, I did mine.
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i thought they were made with rubber and air ( i learn more form this man then i do at school lol)

 
About time someone gets it. Everyone else is in 3 year old tantrum mode and not realizing the whole thing is a fake simulation anyway. There is a performant responsible way to do it and a bad way to do it. We can have 64 zombies in the world and 3 in your face, and the rest hiding/hunting/roaming... or we can have none in the world and dynamically add stuff near players so joe has 10 guys chasing him, bob has a mini horde of 20, and fred has a wandering trader, and Snowdog has a hooker horde.
What is out there waiting/lurking like A1 is irrelevant. What threatens you right here and now is all that matters. It will feel like there are more zombies than there ever where. We plan options so you can add more or less dynamic encounters. They can be game staged etc so its actually a challenge.
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This sounds amazing, especially the hooker part :)

Seriously tho, it does sound great, when would we expect this? Gold? Next alpha?

 
5K SUBS? Do you mean followers?
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He means SUBS as in subscribers not followers. Unless refering to twitch..not sure if they are a part of the group allowed. I'm pretty sure its only Youtubers, I could be wrong.

 
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