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%

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Hmmm...that's not how Madmole explained it the new horde night death functionality.
He said that if you die on a horde night, gps is turned off until you attack a zombie.

Which is what it is actually supposed to be?
Hmm. Who are you going to believe? I wonder who wrote the code?

 
Yup yup, only unperked turrets.
I actually did think about the combined arms DPS though and I tested this a good number of times. When I ran my tests on this I did not get that result UNLESS I also skilled into the other weapon significantly. Baseline AK + 2 turrets for instance took me longer to kill 25 feral bikers (there with AI turned off just to be a wall of meat) than fully spec'd AK. Same T6 AK with same mods. Weapons get massive damage, headshot, and reload bonuses with their skill ups so when you're using the baseline weapon and then losing half your firing time due to reloading turrets you end up losing alot of DPS.

This DPS loss from the reload placement downtime and turret placement time was so significant that Fully spec'd AK DPS + 2 fully spec'd turrets only ended up killing the grouping about 20% faster. So the "2 turrets + AK" sounds more effective on paper than it is in practice. But without dedicated testing there is so much going on it's really difficult to understand how well you're doing. Especially with all the differing variables in the normal game outside of controlled testing scenarios.

It should be noted that I did not use AP ammo in these tests either, AP ammo would have further benefited specialist AK over baseline AK + turrets.

*Edit: I should note that all ammo found is bonus for horde night but that scrap is not free. Doing my current full int play through for power curve testing purposes I just finished Day 26 horde and I used 3,000 junk turret ammo, 300 shotgun ammo, 500 AK ammo, burnt through my electric fences and finally ended up killing the last 50 with stun baton while tanking the damage via fortbites and healing (to prevent them from breaking through my last block).

Iron is cheaper, but not free and 3,000 junk turret ammo is 9,000 iron. I still spent 500 7.62 and 300 shotgun shells on top of that. Instead of mining for lead I'm mining for iron instead lol. I have more brass than I know what to do with but I can barely keep enough iron on hand by mining at night to keep those turrets fed for normal use + horde night :p . I'm going to have to sacrifice a full day to mining soon to get the shotgun ammo I need to fuel my shotgun turrets because the night mining is all desperately trying to get the 15,000 iron I'm going to need for my next horde night's junk turret ammo even as I spend some of that ammo via POI scavenging.
You might get salvage perks and wrench cars for a healthy amount of scrap iron. Considering it is auto aim and the control against a single zed, watching your back etc I still feel like its ok on paper. I haven't done an INT build yet as finding 100 hours of free time for each build is difficult but I will get to it eventually.

 
on junk turrets

why limit yourself to 2?

I put down about a dozen all fully loaded. when one runs out it goes to sleep and another one wakes up, fully loaded. seems to work that way anyway.

at the end of the horde they were all empty, and we would have been royally screwed without them.

ps perked into them lvl 5 baby!

looking forward to having big rows of them all over the place. I will be invincible!

love that mods work in them too - especially magazine extender!

 
Faatal stated several pages back that nVidia cards are the issue somehow. It's fixed and should be ok when the next patch drops!
I said attempted fixes for AMD GPUs were causing problems on nVidia GPUs.

 
What does a perk have to go with how fast an automated turret shoots, or how powerful it is?
... crafting better ones, sure... But... ??

- - - Updated - - -

Are y'all hopefully considering removing microsplat?
You really need to put your abstract thinking hat on. Just pretend that it overheats running it that fast without knowledge on how to properly operate it.

 
on junk turretswhy limit yourself to 2?

I put down about a dozen all fully loaded. when one runs out it goes to sleep and another one wakes up, fully loaded. seems to work that way anyway.

at the end of the horde they were all empty, and we would have been royally screwed without them.

ps perked into them lvl 5 baby!

looking forward to having big rows of them all over the place. I will be invincible!

love that mods work in them too - especially magazine extender!
We love to reward creativity.

 
someone else with image quality problems? the graphics do not load the textures to 6 frames and I have it all ultra! and only when passing through the area is the load disappointing, the previous experimental was much better! what the hell did they do to this one?

 
I feel it necessary to mention, it used to be way easier to get head blows with melee weapons. Now it feels like more often than not, I'm getting that AoE shaving damage instead of a full-on head shot. It happens often where I hit the enemy in the head with a sledge, but it doesn't knock them over, so I hit them again, and it doesn't knock them over... Then they enter rage mode and hit me. There needs to be a bigger hitbox on their heads for direct hits[...]

I also have trouble with sledgehammer, I suspect headshots with it don't always register, so now I just aim for the body hits.

since a17 all melee power attacks feel like thrusts, not like swings - regarding the hit box. i feel like normal attacks are more forgiving, but that could be only due to the faster "charge". and even with normal attacks i manage 2 "miss" 2-3 in a row from time 2 time.

never missed those sledge headshots pre a17/8

 
Just want to say that I'm loving A18 EXP. The new books really make you think about how to spend points now (Will I? Maybe I'll find a book?) and that's a great tension to have. I'm not finding the pressure to spend skill points like in A17 to crack the next gate. I feel like I can concentrate on just surviving and playing the game at a steady pace. The new RWG is just a pleasure to explore. Loving the new dungeons/POIs, and the "tweaks" to old ones (hey, wait, what, they changed something here, didn't they? ...).

Yes, took a while to find the "best" settings but overall it's been a simply amazing experience. And what a difference a bit of water makes! Simple pleasures in the apocalypse.

Just waiting for reflections to get fixed on Mac and we'll be golden :)

 
@madmole
Are you guys going to patch and fix the pathing regarding the killing corridors and the invisible walls?

alla Jawoodles videos?

Seems like a bug in the zombie AI?
I have an open ticket for that. I've seen the video. It is an issue with how the path grid hit tests the world. There is no quick fix other than some extra checks that will slow down grid updates, so I'm not going to band aid fix an exploit that is easy avoided by not doing it. It may get fixed when further path optimzations are done that allow for better block checking.

 
I have an open ticket for that. I've seen the video. It is an issue with how the path grid hit tests the world. There is no quick fix other than some extra checks that will slow down grid updates, so I'm not going to band aid fix an exploit that is easy avoided by not doing it. It may get fixed when further path optimzations are done that allow for better block checking.
For sure, totally.

Here's one more to put a ticket in too.

I'm sure you're aware, but just in case. Makes it so zombies don't path correctly when hatches are placed.

(Hatch)
But yeah, those first two videos are definitely just exploiting.

 
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