PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Jedo]

The wolf killed the deer,

The player killed the wolf,

Hi-ho, the derry-o,

Hunting sure is fun!

 

[madmole]

Could you add maybe a Trader Quest leading to a garage (or a factory) where the Trader knows there's a working vehicle?That could be a new (sort of gated) way to get vehicles without just dropping them on the player from loot.

Maybe the level of the POI you're sent to can be related to the vehicle tier.

E.g.: a Garage could be for the Bicycle and the other tiers would be found in a Factory maybe.

Why? Its perfect as is. If you want a guaranteed thing, spend 1 point on it.

 

[madmole]

Well that's all good and well but if I'm gonna use my shells for looting to keep my 7.62 for horde nights (which I honestly should right now) there's really no point speccing into shotguns in the first place. The other huge issue with the double barrel is the constant reload that slows you down. When you're surrounded it's a death sentence while this should exactly be the situation in which the shotguns excels.
To be honest the whole concept of a 2 magazine gun should be rethinked because it doesn't fit a game play of killing masses. Or the mechanics need to be revisited so that it does massive splash damage so that a bullet equals several casualties. Right now it has no niche at all and is very unforgiving.

The other issue with the STR build is more global : he has absolutely no ranged specialization. Every other character has both melee and range power, the strength guy is a close quarter dude with no survivability. The more I think about it the more I think machine guns should be a STR specialization while shotguns should be for the tanky FORT build.

While I don't think shotguns are perfect I think you are wrong, shotguns can craft slugs which are like 762 on steroids.

 

[madmole]

What if you die again?

They recapture you sometimes, other times you die a true death and have to reload a save if you didn't save while captured.

 

[Gazz]

I'm a real grammar nazi as well; I want to go through all the game's text with a fine-toothed comb and fix it all for you guys :cocksure:

We're not holding you back. =P

Data\Config\Localization.txt and Data\Config\Localization - Quest.txt are csv files with all the game text.

 

[madmole]

A temporary delay on looting (i.e. the loot-timer takes 20% more time, sort of inverse Lucky Looter effect) would still get the "kicked while down" reaction but not weaken the player against dangers or make getting your gear back more difficult. No death loop.
XP loss could also be 60% of a level below lvl 10, 50% of a level below lvl 20... to address the non-nastyness early game.

We're going with 25%, keeping it simple. Early game isn't hard, you have no gear is all. So losing xp early game means nothing IMO you keep looting and your fine. Kill a few zeds and XP is back. Or choose to build a base you can get some good xp no risk.

 

[madmole]

Madmole, I am sorry but I have a feeling, that you did not really play AGI build from the beginning.
First off, killing at night is tricky, because night vision goggles are ridiculously rare. From what I saw in XML files, they only drop from loot bags and in several of my games, I simply did not see them drop. You talk about maxed out pistol, but now its pretty hard to get and you need suppresor to not wake up other zeds. In regards to ammo, with my str build I use next to none, because I melee 90% of zeds and in tight spot I use my shotgun. Sure I get hit a bit every now and then, but that is easy to heal and with heavy armor you take little damage. Also taken into account, AGI does not have any gathering perks, which quite hurts.

About AGI weapons being more rare... I get that there are more weapons but making them less prevalent increases cost of entry into the spec. I feel it should be balanced differently.

Side note, I get a loot of explosive arrows/bolts from trader (up to 75). Feels a bit too much.

I urge you to try and play stealth build in your next playthrough and test it. Is it fun?

Who uses night vision goggles? Those are a dumb gimmick, and I haven't seen a pair in 500 hours. I can see fine at night once the moon rises. Once you spec up you can one shot with the sneak bonus. If not you will drop them easily before they get to you, or you simply move a bit and they only run close to where you were and have no clue where you are, repeat and they are dead for sure. Use a bow until you a silencer. To be clear I'm talking about hunting zeds outside at night, not clearing POIs at night.

Gathering perks? You can grab 3 ranks of whatever for dirt cheap, noone says you can't spend points elsewhere. I typically only get 3 or 4 perks out of one attribute and perk into others because a lot of them just don't matter to me right now. I might grab them later when I have all the essentials (3 ranks miner 69r and mother lode, some scavenging, at least one lucky looter, 3 ranks of adv engineering because I never get all the schematics to do traps and electricity.)

I had a lot of fun with agility but I understand exactly how to play that build because I designed it all. Maybe you are doing a few things differently that are costing you?

 

[Hek Harris]

Not a big deal but it would be more practical if, when we scrap clothes with tint, the dye was ejected (for example : ammos are retrieved when we scrap guns). Currently, it's modify > take the dye > close > scrap if you want to get back the tint. This hurts my laziness.

 

[madmole]

My friends and I have decided to play version 17.4 again. Since in 18.0 the creative menue was partially destroyed. No structure has been assigned to the soil types so that they look the same except for 2 exceptions.After 6 years = ♥♥♥♥, worst update

Let me get this straight, the most important game function for you is to plant grass or play in creative menu? What the hell are you talking about?

 

[madmole]

That you see the old house from far away is simply the result of how distant terrain is shown. You would get much less than 1 FPS if the game had to draw every block of every house when you look at a town from afar. So the game engine pre-generates static pictures of how pois look from afar and shows them instead of generating the real scene in real time.

I think that with the right optimizations we could build real blocks in the distance, or update the static meshes every so often so changes are seen at a distance.

 

[madmole]

Switching to 17.4 because of soil issues? Wow...

I soiled myself when I read that lol.

 

[Wulf]

I like the night vision goggles. They add some roleplaying sense and it just feels like the icing on the cake for a stealth build.

In a18 the nightlighting is different so they are less usefull, but still.

I would like to use them, so don't get rid of them please.

 

[madmole]

Not really liking the new 'Topsoil' block system. It's steamlined and cool in theory, but it kills a lot of biome-ignoring building opportunities, and it REALLY sucks in the desert biome; the Topsoil block you place doesn't actually behave like the sand around it (it acts exactly like the soil from other biomes, with its more HP and digging up into clay), and it also costs way more clay than you'll actually get from digging up the native sand.
The current system means the desert is self-depleting, and you can only patch things up with these weird doppelganger blocks. Could we get Sand blocks and something like the old system back? Topsoil could be a helper block pointing to the traditional interchangeable soil types (Forest, Burnt, etc.), and Sand could just be Sand again. It just sucks having this weird compromise system for the GROUND, of all things.

E: apparently a guy up-thread agrees with me, VERY much so to switch back to 17.4, lol

We chose to go with splat maps because hey the world looks amazing now. Along with that comes some limits to how many unique player made terrain blocks can be placed and render correctly. It may be possible to swap your block to have the proper ingredients, but who is placing adaptive terrain, then digging that same block up? You can't have sand back unless we delete gravel or dirt and nobody wants to lose those to sand. What is the use case where you need more than dirt/grass/gravel?

 

[madmole]

Don't forget plural possessive apostrophes!The truck's wheels = the wheels of one truck

The trucks' wheels = the wheels of several trucks

I'm a real grammar nazi as well; I want to go through all the game's text with a fine-toothed comb and fix it all for you guys :cocksure:

Another small grammar lesson for those interested: semicolons are used in place of periods, when you want to elaborate on a previous sentence, but a comma would create a run-on. It's a joinder for two grammatically complete sentences. See five lines ago for an example!

Gosh its been 35 years since English class and I didn't use any of it until I was about 28 and started modding a bit, you don't need good grammar to write auto body estimates. I'm trying to re-remember all that stuff; hopefully between you and google I can improve

 

[madmole]

@MM, did you see this meme from Roland in the 7d2d meme thread? I lol'ed....
https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?62913-7-Days-to-Meme&p=1012371&viewfull=1#post1012371

Hahaha no nice thread lol. Glad I can be the blunt of some jokes

 

[wolfbain5]

mm, on NV goggles.

I finally found one in all the hours I have played, and I play about 6-8 hours a day since drop. I do poi raiding at night several times, with all the night prowler perk books, that's where an agil build excels;but, for that to work, NV is important since lights kinda kills stealth. agility stealth build and night stalker books are very synergistic.

would you be willing to tweak the drop rate or sale availability of NV goggles at traders?

side note, can we get radio detonated explosives? would be a great asset for the demolitionist build

 

[Gareee]

I wonder if new players would not even know about the alternate weapon types were because the tutorial only has them make the club.

I wonder if the club should just be dropped completely, and the stone spear should become the new starter quest hand weapon. The wood club always feels pretty worthless, imho.

 

[SickPuppy]

NVG are total badass! They're my fav item in the whole game, please don't remove!

 

[Gareee]

Two things I've noticed but not sure if anyone else has...

I've had my motorcycle hit by zombies once or twice and completely broken...and repair kits won't repair it at all. I've only seen this with the motorcycle though. (Saw it last night, and saw it two xp's back as we.)

I've not seen one screamer at all in the latest patch. That IS a breath of fresh air after the Halloween screamer assault. (That should be a yearly event, imho.) But has anyone seen a screamer at all since the fix release?

I'm also in favor of a stiffer death penalty. We also have two server players who just suicide on infection and ignore the cure because death is too insignificant now.

A17s first release was brutal, but maybe we need something between it and what we have now.

 

[Onarr]

Who uses night vision goggles? Those are a dumb gimmick, and I haven't seen a pair in 500 hours. I can see fine at night once the moon rises. Once you spec up you can one shot with the sneak bonus. If not you will drop them easily before they get to you, or you simply move a bit and they only run close to where you were and have no clue where you are, repeat and they are dead for sure. Use a bow until you a silencer. To be clear I'm talking about hunting zeds outside at night, not clearing POIs at night.
Gathering perks? You can grab 3 ranks of whatever for dirt cheap, noone says you can't spend points elsewhere. I typically only get 3 or 4 perks out of one attribute and perk into others because a lot of them just don't matter to me right now. I might grab them later when I have all the essentials (3 ranks miner 69r and mother lode, some scavenging, at least one lucky looter, 3 ranks of adv engineering because I never get all the schematics to do traps and electricity.)

I had a lot of fun with agility but I understand exactly how to play that build because I designed it all. Maybe you are doing a few things differently that are costing you?

Yes you would not, because as I said, they are not in loot tables except for loot bags so chance to get them is one in a milion. Thats what I was pointing out. I suppose that is a bug? I would like to use them and I think I am not the only one:

I like the night vision goggles. They add some roleplaying sense and it just feels like the icing on the cake for a stealth build.In a18 the nightlighting is different so they are less usefull, but still.

I would like to use them, so don't get rid of them please.

mm, on NV goggles.
I finally found one in all the hours I have played, and I play about 6-8 hours a day since drop. I do poi raiding at night several times, with all the night prowler perk books, that's where an agil build excels;but, for that to work, NV is important since lights kinda kills stealth. agility stealth build and night stalker books are very synergistic.

would you be willing to tweak the drop rate or sale availability of NV goggles at traders?

side note, can we get radio detonated explosives? would be a great asset for the demolitionist build

NVG are total badass! They're my fav item in the whole game, please don't remove!

You are right that visibility outside once moon comes out is more then sufficient to aim at zombies. I was however thinking more in terms of clearing PoIs.

My idea of stealth build was to get muffled military armor, silenced weapon and night vision goggles and go clearing PoIs at night (which I presumed was what night stalker perks are for). I always counted this as one of the benefits of AGI build - ability to clear PoIs at night. I thought that is pretty cool, but I guess that was never the intention from your statements "Who uses night vision goggles? Those are dumb gimmick" and "I'm talking about hunting zeds outside at night, not clearing POIs at night."

Sneak bonus is awesome, but as you mentioned, you need silenced weapon to be effective. Not long ago I argued that they are hard to come by, on which you replied that is by design, because AGI has more weapons. AGI indeed has more weapons, however only fraction can be used early to mid game for clearing PoIs. Therefore, if you want to spec into AGI from the get go, you are rolling dice, where odds are largely stacked against you. This is issue n. 1. Large barrier for entry compared to other specs




Yes, you can get perks from other trees, but with other trees you need only one combat perk to use them, whereas in AGI for stealth you need 3 - bows/crosbows or pistols provided you found silencer, stealth dmg and stealth effectiveness. This means less perks to put into other trees if you wanted to be effective in combat. This combined with the fact that AGI has no gathering perk is issue number 2. AGI build is weaker compared to other trees.

Inability to get NVG is 3rd issue