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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You asked for a quote and then try to dismiss it. Im not against the event system and Im clear on what it means and what it can bring.
But you asked, and that quote is most likely why people are misunderstanding what it is. Sometimes people can take days to catch up on the forum so that quote was the impression people had of it. Yes MM has cleared it up but he also said part of that system was already there as wandering hordes.

September was two months ago. Not 2014.
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He has talked about it in terms of today’s discussion before today. The idea has been evolving. So even if people are a day or two behind, that September quote shouldn’t have been a factor. Two days behind isn’t two months.

But sure, you found a quote that could account for some unknown persons being confused if they weren’t caught up by two months. I was talking to Doc who was reacting to the things Madmole was saying today. He was caught up and I knew it and I was referring to the current description of the proposed concept.

Just to clarify my original statement then: There is nothing in the current description of the concept or madmole’s most recent posts on the subject to suggest that the new encounter system is going to work just like wandering hordes.

 
I didn't mean 'fake' in that way. It's all fake, of course - just like cinema. It's the immersion.You can watch a film and get immersed in it and for awhile you are tricked into being entertained as if it's really happening. Other times, the movie is so predictable, you already know what's about to happen and you're just like 'oh, brother'..
I was talking about how it can be immersion breaking and I tried to explain the difference between how the old spawn system and this new spawn system was different in that regard.

The houses with the sleepers in the closets are the same way to me. You know and expect them to be there. It feels 'fake' and forced - and I just think that the encounter system would likely be similar and after a while you can just almost predict that something will happen each time here and there.

Where as before in the spawn system that you don't like - they were all around you in the wasteland especially - it was completely unpredictable - you'd get immersed in the tension - anything could happen - could they be behind you? Could there be a bunch of dogs over that hill? Could there be some cops on the other side of that building? It was different and unpredictable and tense - and while you're fighting one zed another could be coming right up from behind you.

The spawn system in the POIs especially are more linear...you clear areas at a time and most of the time so long as you know what you're doing - all of the zombies are ahead of you and you've got a pretty good idea of where most of them are going to be in each room. It's like when hollywood overdoes the CGI and you can see threw it and it throws you out of the movie..
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The old system was completely unpredictable? Quite the opposite in my opinion.

1) run into hub city 0,0

2) trigger all spawners until max alive zombie limit is reached.

3) run a few laps around city

4) loot POIs unmolested as spawning is no longer triggering.

5) rinse and repeat.

Just as immersion breaking plus a resource hog. I'd rather have the random encounter system that better manages the limited resources of the system.

 
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I think we can handle it in a way that feels natural, and reproduce what you liked about Alpha 10 without the cpu and lag issues in a more elegant way. There is a huge wasteland, but all we are concerned with is what you see right now. If you are shooting stuff, making noise, and realistically EVEN IF YOU NUKED the entire thing an hour ago, zombies from miles way (off screen) could be attracted and come investigate. That wouldn't be immersion breaking, but not possible with the old setup, but certainly doable with what we're planning. The key is a lot of events, and a wide range of random intervals and criteria we collect. I'm hoping to write 50+ events and have them game staged. We can't have a group of high level bandits in a helicopter spawn in the forest to gun down the roaming day 1 survivor, but we could if a level 100 guy was blowing up a bandit camp... they called in the backup. I can't think of a single negative to it if we do it right.
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It sounds great on paper. I hope you guys can pull it off! I’ll be optimistic until then. Thanks for explaining the vision more clearly. I wouldn’t get hung up on how we pictured everything to work. We know only what we know so you providing more context has shed some light.

Loc

 
The old system was completely unpredictable? Quite the opposite in my opinion.
1) run into hub city 0,0

2) trigger all spawners until max alive zombie limit is reached.

3) run a few laps around city

4) loot POIs unmolested as spawning is no longer triggering.

5) rinse and repeat.
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Or trigger a heat spawn just outside the hub city and run in without any spawns to worry about.

 
What I hope is part of the random encounters is some variation in the same encounter. For instance, the damsel in distress....one time you help her & she gives you a map to a treasure. Another time, same damsel but when go to help you get surprised by some bandits(she was bait). I can think of many variations. If the damsel was only associated with one outcome, players wouldn’t think ‘oh it’s the damsel & I don’t feel like dealing with bandits’. Multiple scenarios for each random encounter would really keep them from being predictable and boring. It’s all about RNG which would be awesome.
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I like how you think. It’s like having affixes and prefixes. Scenario part A can be randomized with a plethora of scenario part Bs. This would make each instance have a potentially unique outcome. Nice!

Loc

 
The old system was completely unpredictable? Quite the opposite in my opinion.
1) run into hub city 0,0

2) trigger all spawners until max alive zombie limit is reached.

3) run a few laps around city

4) loot POIs unmolested as spawning is no longer triggering.

5) rinse and repeat.

Just as immersion breaking plus a resource hog. I'd rather have the random encounter system that better manages the limited resources of the system.
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Cool trick..I never did that, but it sounds like you purposely created a situation that made it predictable. The game didn't do that..you did. I am just saying that for me the game was more fun when there were loads of zombies in cities, and yes it was more unpredictable because there were more variables involved. At that time, before the HD Mocap zeds, we could have well over 80 on our screen at a time without much lag at all. It only made sense in certain areas like the wasteland cities, but those areas had never-ending zombies that continually spawned - you could never clear it.

While the POIs were vacant of zombies, I remember many times them breaching through the building from outside. Back then, you even so much as open a dresser drawer in the classic apartment building and you would have zombies flooding the entire building. It could get very intense and 'unpredictable' - compared to very few zombies outside and the ones already in the POI are sleeping and in the same spots. That's all I mean.

I'd rather have a little bit of 'both' - I don't know why it has to be only one or the other. Let's not have the encounter or sleeper system be so over-used and let's not have the outdoor zombies be too underused - I don't think we should champion one way or the other - but try to find something in the middle. I don't think any of these systems by themselves can take the place of another one. This encounter system does not seem like it would be a solution to lack of zeds.

Besides the lag most people are very likely getting is not due to zombies unless they are actively destroying blocks -depending on your computer, you can spawn a bunch of zombies in and it won't affect your FPS much at all. You can kill all the zombies currently alive via the console and it won't have much of an effect on a lot of people's computers - the FPS issues are graphic-related. That's where the biggest slowdown is for most people. Granted, when there are a lot of zombies beating on blocks - the FPS does start to become affected on the CPU side. But, that's going to happen whether they are spawned via an encounter system or some other way. The graphical effects are primarily what make most people's game run slower though. You still can't run as many zombies as you could back in A10. And while I think the game looks prettier, I'd honestly go back to earlier Alpha graphics in a heartbeat if it meant the game ran better with more zombies. I personally was satisfied with how the game looked. For me - the number of zeds in a zombie game would almost always takes priority over graphics.

 
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Well to me it sounds like a great system. Whether or not it will solve some things, who knows? I'm sure it won't solve everything and maybe some other ideas will fill those gaps. The encounters idea can open up a crap-ton of modding possibilities too, which is awesome.

 
What would be cool is giving server admin control over the encounter system so they can act as dungeon masters...
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How about like how DOOM Eternal is doing their "Invasions" mode?

If you opt into it in your single player game, random people join your campaign as a zombie and try to mess you up.

That would be interesting and would open up multiplayer a bit without having to worry about balance issues.

EDIT: (in Arnold's voice) Do it! Do it noooowww!

Beat them to the punch. Got like 5 or 6 months probably.

Call it R.I.P. Random Infected Players

 
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Idea for burning zombies behavior

You have to listen for their pains right now. It needs some polish for sure, like spraying blood.
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@MM, while you are talking about bleeding here, I want to offer my idea, which may seem interesting to you.

The essence of the idea is short: what do you think about burning zombies losing their target during burning. It would be interesting if during burning the zombies ran randomly, waved their hands and shouted loudly from pain =)

And only when the zombie goes out, he could again find his target ...

 
Encounters sound really cool. Love the idea. But honestly, that will be one hell of a challenge to handle, because there is one major problem.

-How do you predict, where is player headed, so you can prepare an encounter? In open world, especially in random world generation, this is going to be a nightmare.

You have taken up quite a challenge, but I wish you best of luck. If you can make it its going to be pretty awesome

 
Cool trick..I never did that, but it sounds like you purposely created a situation that made it predictable. The game didn't do that..you did. I am just saying that for me the game was more fun when there were loads of zombies in cities, and yes it was more unpredictable because there were more variables involved. At that time, before the HD Mocap zeds, we could have well over 80 on our screen at a time without much lag at all. It only made sense in certain areas like the wasteland cities, but those areas had never-ending zombies that continually spawned - you could never clear it.
While the POIs were vacant of zombies, I remember many times them breaching through the building from outside. Back then, you even so much as open a dresser drawer in the classic apartment building and you would have zombies flooding the entire building. It could get very intense and 'unpredictable' - compared to very few zombies outside and the ones already in the POI are sleeping and in the same spots. That's all I mean.

I'd rather have a little bit of 'both' - I don't know why it has to be only one or the other. Let's not have the encounter or sleeper system be so over-used and let's not have the outdoor zombies be too underused - I don't think we should champion one way or the other - but try to find something in the middle. I don't think any of these systems by themselves can take the place of another one. This encounter system does not seem like it would be a solution to lack of zeds.
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Nope, I stumbled on the limitation through regular play and was wondering why the zombies stopped coming at me. It was 100% the game not me. 😎

Side note....you probably would enjoy this. Here's a screenshot I have from one of the old alphas....

594 zombies...I think my fps was at ~5 ...lol

fuYd17o.jpg


 
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No you are just knee jerking. You could always do whatever you wanted with raw iron, scrap it on the spot and build whatever metal stuff you wanted to. It was two items with a different icon and an inconsistency. Get over it.
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The next thing you remove from the game are brass items?

Well, after all, the truth is, why are they needed if you can just find ready-made brass scrap, extract brass scrap from doors, cars, batteries and other objects?

Why do these intermediate objects if we scrap them or melt them in the forge anyway?

Simplify so simplify! =)

NO! DO NOT DO THIS!!! PLEASEEEEEeeeeeeeee....

 
Nope, I stumbled on the limitation through regular play and was wondering why the zombies stopped coming at me. It was 100% the game not me. 😎
Side note....you probably would enjoy this. Here's a screenshot I have from one of the old alphas....

594 zombies...I think my fps was at ~5 ...lol

fuYd17o.jpg
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Wow, haha yeah that's crazy. I think the most i've ever set the maxalive value was 255. It would be curious now that most of us have faster machines than when the game first came out to go back and play some of the really old alphas and see how many we could push on the screen now. Could make for a crazy, fun little side-game to play on....

 
Wow, haha yeah that's crazy. I think the most i've ever set the maxalive value was 255. It would be curious now that most of us have faster machines than when the game first came out to go back and play some of the really old alphas and see how many we could push on the screen now. Could make for a crazy, fun little side-game to play on....
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I had older hardware back then too.... I probably could spawn more than that with what I have now.😂

 
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