PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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So on bloodmoon nights is it still a thing that zombies can spawn inside your base behind your defenses, essentially making said defenses pointless?

 
So Junk drone, that thing sounds cool, I got a few questions though if a dev is willing to spill the beans.

1: Is it lootable/buyable off trader?

2: Can you use it as a non-intel build? or do you need the skill to even control it? I am going to guess it'll be like junk turrets, can be used by anyone just int build can use it better.

3: Do you need it give it ammo like a junk turret? Does it require Gas to fly? What *does* it use for ammo if anything?

4: Since it follows you I am supposing you devs are going to allow it to teleport to the player to catch up to you if you go on a vehicle? Since it has storage it'd be a pain to have to keep emptying it to pick it up each time you hop in a vehicle. Most games with companions do this. Then again its fly speed could be as fast as any vehicle or a bit faster so it can just keep up.

5: How good is the heal? Oh who cares, as long as its decently reliable, could be 1 hp every 2-4s and that'd be pretty good imo.

6: Is it going to be OP as crap just like junk turrets still are even for a non-int build? So many people use it to cheese the game pretty hard.

7: I hope its AI is going to be decent so it doesn't get stuck on things on the cieling all the time.

Now a non-drone question... Will we get a book line for sledgehammers? If we do, I'd like it to focus on the useage of using the sledgehammer to break into things or destroy blocks better.

 
Not to mention that Padded Armor, as far as I know, is typically identical to leather armor, base stats wise.
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Leather armor can have up to 9-10 armor rating I think, Padded caps out at 7. Honestly though if your on nomad or below difficulty all you probably need for defense is padded armor, as they hit like flies on those difficulties. More is better of course, but you can make due with padded for a while even on warrior difficulty. The zombies deal 50% more damage on warrior difficulty compared to nomad.

 
Please!!! ADD A DYNAMIC CLIMATE IN ALL BIOMES! :wave: SUNNY, RAINY, STORMY, FOG, SNOW, SEASONS OF THE YEAR..
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I'd like to see the day 5 fog bug thats reared its ugly head again fixed. Day 5 hits its always foggy, and the fog will not go away until you completly exit the game and reload it. It was fixed for a while in a17 but its back again for revenge.

 
Junk Drones are the tier 3 version of junk sledges and junk turrets. They will be rare and there will be a schematic and parts you’ll have to find in order to craft them. This begs the question as to whether the promised nerf to loot will be in for a19. Awesome gear at high quality is still too easily found too early. Everything we find should be brown or orange and mostly tier one, uncommonly tier two, and rarely tier three. Anything higher quality than orange should be very rare.
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I'd just make it take MUCH higher gamestage before you see the higher stuff. I dislike that change, as it'd kill my reason to loot partly if you could never find the stuff. Then again, there always is trader.

 
Junk Drones are the tier 3 version of junk sledges and junk turrets. They will be rare and there will be a schematic and parts you’ll have to find in order to craft them. This begs the question as to whether the promised nerf to loot will be in for a19. Awesome gear at high quality is still too easily found too early. Everything we find should be brown or orange and mostly tier one, uncommonly tier two, and rarely tier three. Anything higher quality than orange should be very rare.
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In A18 this was ll kinds of wonky because some perks / weapon classes had 1, some 2, some 3 weapons to them.

It was simply impossible to get any tiered distribution going that would be fair to every weapon class.

 
Madmole, this is just a question and I apologize if it is out of line, but I wanted to know what happened to the domesticated wolf that came out a sketch, with the drone AI could this be feasible? for some next alpha? or it would be a surprise for A19 (dreaming)

Z


Z


 
Junk drone revealed!https://twitter.com/7DaystoDie/statu...096267264?s=20

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Alright, sweet. Is along the lines of what I was expecting when you said you were going with a flying drone design. I am seriously glad that you put blade-guards on it.

As a roboticist who is also a gamer I've had decades to grow my window of acceptability with this stuff, this fits within that window just fine, better than most actually. Robots in video games make my eyes roll 90%+ of the time. I'm used to it but at least this is far better than most. My eyes stayed put, win.

Would it fly? Ha, no, end of story. How different would a flying one look from this? Mostly needs more fans, at least one, and with larger blades for adequate lift. 3 fan minimum for decent control too, this would be a mess to fly irl. You honestly could take those 2 now move them forward and inward a bit, then add a third in the back in the middle. That would make me happy, er. But I'll concede this is a rather minor detail.

Your lore could actually near remedy the existing drawbacks tbh. If it is near-future then there is a strong possibility that better motors and better batteries exist, since those are the bane of drone anatomy irl, or at least they did before the apocalypse hit. Yes that could honestly be enough to make this heavy-ass double bladed(4 actually, 2 in each) drone fly. That's saying a lot right there.

So ok, good enough for gaming work. You could consider the practical drawbacks to this design mere minor details in this respect, and that is saying a lot by comparison to most robots in games. Even as someone with a strong bias for it to make actual sense, since making such things real and practical is what I do irl, I will gladly play along with this in-game with a smile on me face. Kudos.

 
Is the drone using the normal ai procedures (hovering low to the ground, using pathfinding), or a freemoving ai like the vultures (without fancy pathfinding) ?

 
What uh, do you think he's kidding about? Just curious.

To me the most important aspect of what he's asking is that the localization be pushed from servers. Is that a thing now?
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He asked if there was any changes to localization.txt, we always edit that file.

 
The Plains biome was probably one of the weakest biomes, but as far as I am concerned it is not about any specific biomes, it is about the fact that we had: 13 biomes we could use and add to any given world, modified to our liking, now we have 5 and any others just look like a purple alien landscape no matter what you do. We had a lot of different terrain textures to choose from to build the biomes from.

In A17 we even got the ability to add completely new biomes, build from scratch up and would work flawlessly in the RWG mixer. Now any such biome hopelessly crashes the mixer because it only accepts the hardcoded biome names of the original ones, of which only 5 are actually looking the part.

It is all about variety, we had 2 different forest and the plains, they were all mashed together. We had different wastelands and a radiated wasteland, only one remains. It is all about variety and the ability for anyone to add in even more variety. The current biomes are but a shell of the variety we had and all we seem to get is that they may have plans to maybe add sub-biomes. Sub-biomes as they exist now are just sub-par to the ability to add in new biomes.
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No offense but you should wait until gold to mod it so that you aren't disappointed by changes/removed stuff. Mod support is planned, but the problem is people are modding it before we're done then they act like we shafted them. We shaft ourselves constantly. Probably every piece of art I made is getting replaced. I redid the trees 5 times, then Justin redid them. He's better then me, and I can focus on game design and game play.

Having more than 5 biomes doesn't offer anything. I'd rather have 5 unique ones that look amazing, than 10 watered down ones. Currently the burnt forest and wasteland are still pretty ugly and don't offer enough game play or incentive to be there. We need to add better loot to the radiated biome and add unique resources to all biomes.

 
This is response to the flying Drone that is now being shared as a feature. I'd like to say first, that I appreciate the hard work that went into it. It's really neat how it appears to the sum of other bits and bobs re-purposed by some survivor with a lot of genius. That aside is just seems a little strange in this game, and I'm not sure of the fit. If I read correctly it seems like it has different modifications that can affect storage size, and so forth? I wonder if this signals the potential to see modifications finally come to existing things such as vehicles. Really, being able to differentiate vehicles in a server is a long needed change. Being able to color them differently, and have different modifications would be really nice. Hell, even being able to apply paint to these new drones to help differentiate them when in a group would also be neat. I'm going to wait and see how this is implemented and how it acts in game before making too much judgement. I would like to suggest that unlike Junk Turrets this should not be something you can find in the wild. This is something you should have to spec into, in order to create.
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It should have some hefty requirements to build.

 
Madmole, this is just a question and I apologize if it is out of line, but I wanted to know what happened to the domesticated wolf that came out a sketch, with the drone AI could this be feasible? for some next alpha? or it would be a surprise for A19 (dreaming)

Z


Z
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No because wolves would require a ton of features to look acceptable, foot ik, head and eye tracking, turning their head and body to make corners, tilting their body when turning, and good pathing etc. The junk drone just flies and may clip through walls if he can't reach you, its being coded and we haven't even seen it in action yet.

 
I do agree that the high quality gear at times is too easily found, at earlier stages. Although that doesn't bother me as much as the strange stats that come along with finding high quality items, even at later days and higher game stages. When and if they nerf the loot, it would be useful to see the stats balanced out. It is one of the more irritating things right now to me, in 18. I found about mid-game level 6 leather leg armor. Time to time in later game I've found level 6 military leg armor, and without fail the leather armor beats the military armor in stats. It's only recent as in the last day or so that I finally found one with decent enough stats to warrant the switch. Top tier leather armor shouldn't outclass top tier military armor stat wise. Same goes for iron gear shouldn't when found at level 6 have stats higher than the average found in steel armor and that has been a thing too. If they nuke the loot, they should consider balancing the max stats of different stages of armor if possible so when you do find the higher level stuff it isn't a let down.
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The problem is that the damage reduction stat range is super tight across the full spectrum and the fact that adding mods to armor doesnt increase damage reduction (e.g. whereas weapons get a dmg bonus with every mod added to it).

I think in general most players value their armor solely on its damage reduction stat...

Edit: what might be a nice addition to the game is if damage resistance was also affected by an items durability stat. That might encourage players to keep their armor repaired AND spread out the value of armor into more stats.

 
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or a freemoving ai like the vultures (without fancy pathfinding) ?
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Oh great I can see it now:

*Our hero riding his war-harley across the desert*


*every time he stops his companion drone catches up and starts slamming him in the back of the head*

"sigh"

*and off to the next adventure he rides!*

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I'd just make it take MUCH higher gamestage before you see the higher stuff. I dislike that change, as it'd kill my reason to loot partly if you could never find the stuff. Then again, there always is trader.
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Making it not appear at all until higher gamestage is pure leveled loot. No thanks. TFP has done leveled probabilities of loot which is fine but there should always be even a slim chance of getting a steel pickaxe on day one.

It is the chance of getting something amazing that keeps the loot game going but getting mostly junk quality gives us parts we can use to craft our own before we find the same thing of better quality than we can craft.

if I can find 4 brown pistols and then use those to craft a yellow one then both looting and crafting are supported.

 
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