PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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hiemfire said:
That actually sounds good as an occasional treat. :D  

Which style?

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clint eastwood, outlaw josie wales

 
RhinoW said:
The main problem I have with mods is the fact that they depend on the core of the game. And it's obvious when they try something that doesn't work (like adding new weapons or zombies), since the base of the game doesn't support those new weapons (some weapons simply don't work with the current viewmodels or skeleton rigs). I'm not saying they did a bad work, the problem is that they can't do more simply because there's no tools for it.
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Agreed, there is a limitation to modding based on the tools available currently.  Especially XML modding versus DMT.  But as Roland has pointed out, its a place where new game design ideas (especially complete reworks) can become reality.  Whereas you may get little or no response at all from the game Devs.

 
Not every game needs to be 100% moddable from start to finish. A lot of games aren't. Personally, I'd rather see a sequel that is built with mods and multiplayer in mind.

 
betam4x said:
When Madmole said they were gearing up for gold, I doubted. After playing Alpha 19 for some time, I've become a believer. This game feels something like 90% done. Outside of bug fixes, the only areas I see that need improvement are Random Gen, the music system, and (maybe) storyline related lore.. It's both scary and sad that one day we won't have another Alpha to look forward to. I've been with this game since it came out of Kickstarter (I don't back things on Kickstarter). I've watched it evolve from a quirky fun early access game 

I'm sure some other people have other metrics they measure the game by. However, this game feels pretty close to complete to me. I personally hope Alpha 20 can wrap things up or get us almost all the way there. I also hope to see other games from The Pimps in the future....maybe another genre of game (like a Diablo style action RPG?) set in the 7DTD universe? Who knows.

Side Note: The music has definite Ultima vibes to it in some areas.
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It's finally on the right track since A17, but I wouldn't say it's close to the finish line. As much as I love the game, I can say that the most hours I (and probably more players) put into it, were because of the promise of a new update and changes, otherwise I wouldn't reach 50hrs if it stayed in A12 (when i started).

There's still lots of polishing and concrete mix to add into the house.

I'm the guy that "whines" about the gun play because it still feels very wrong and stiff (artificial recoil and bad shooting anims, awful animation timings, desynced sounds, bad particles, bad viewmodels, bad aiming down sights models, bad animations for some weapons). The only weapon that escapes this is the DB shotgun.

Melees also suffer from this.

Lack of zombie variety and repetition is still an issue.

The whole Hive Mind AI still has some issues (like focusing on 1 block out of the sudden).

Modifications are still under-explored (and still need visual upgrades for most of them).

Vehicles still need some form of modification/customization.

We still need more home defense blocks / block redesign (like the barbed wire) / turret upgrades (durability, like the blocks).

Some PoI's are in dire need of specific doors (like the new stores, they need the metal frame glass doors instead of those metal glass frames around them).

Players still need double doors and more doors in general.

More craftable lights that they removed in A17.

Things that are completely finished?

- The core loop of the game is the most solid i've seen in any survival game. (and that's not something you can say for most games)

- The whole freaking concept of it (a survival game with a purpose, when was that invented?)

- The quantity of the different additions and concepts (they're still a bit hollow, bit the whole modification, vehicle, electricity additions fits very well into the game).

So yeah, it's mostly polishing and finishing up the frameworks they've added, the game is getting insanely solid and I love it.

 
RhinoW said:
It's finally on the right track since A17, but I wouldn't say it's close to the finish line. As much as I love the game, I can say that the most hours I (and probably more players) put into it, were because of the promise of a new update and changes, otherwise I wouldn't reach 50hrs if it stayed in A12 (when i started).

There's still lots of polishing and concrete mix to add into the house.

I'm the guy that "whines" about the gun play because it still feels very wrong and stiff (artificial recoil and bad shooting anims, awful animation timings, desynced sounds, bad particles, bad viewmodels, bad aiming down sights models, bad animations for some weapons). The only weapon that escapes this is the DB shotgun.

Melees also suffer from this.

Lack of zombie variety and repetition is still an issue.

The whole Hive Mind AI still has some issues (like focusing on 1 block out of the sudden).

Modifications are still under-explored (and still need visual upgrades for most of them).

Vehicles still need some form of modification/customization.

We still need more home defense blocks / block redesign (like the barbed wire) / turret upgrades (durability, like the blocks).

Some PoI's are in dire need of specific doors (like the new stores, they need the metal frame glass doors instead of those metal glass frames around them).

Players still need double doors and more doors in general.

More craftable lights that they removed in A17.

Things that are completely finished?

- The core loop of the game is the most solid i've seen in any survival game. (and that's not something you can say for most games)

- The whole freaking concept of it (a survival game with a purpose, when was that invented?)

- The quantity of the different additions and concepts (they're still a bit hollow, bit the whole modification, vehicle, electricity additions fits very well into the game).

So yeah, it's mostly polishing and finishing up the frameworks they've added, the game is getting insanely solid and I love it.
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The game will never be perfect for most people. I've over 2,500 hours in at this point (at least), I've gotten my money's worth, and I still play.

A thought I had the other day was that Zombies could use the dye system for their clothing. That would add some variation to the clothes. I'm sure TFP is already on that. :)

The rest of the stuff you mentioned seems like bug fix material except perhaps vehicle mods, which would be a good target for A20.

EDIT: One thing I'd love for TFP to do is get one of the first Alphas working again so that we can see how far things have progressed. Maybe call it 7DTD Classic or something.

 
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Roland said:
At best you are simply naive in actually believing that most everyone is just like you and you just cannot imagine that anyone could have fun playing in a different manner than you find fun.
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Uh no, it's based on browsing the various forums, and I've already said you can play in a million different ways lol. You can play the entire game without killing a single zombie, it's 100% possible to do, so of course you can pick the absolute worst possible perks and build and never go to a trader and never build a base and never use a tool etc, and reach end game. You just have to ignore that kind of extreme niche play style when talking about what's common. Would you prefer, me to name out and list and link to 48 separate comments between here, the Steam forum, and Reddit, on every opinion? It's a lot easier to just say "Nobody picks charismatic nature, because it's bad" and explain why it's bad, rather than spend 2 days on the "nobody" part.

I work in a mix of marketing, working with customers directly, and working with our devs at my current company. Customers call me saying they want X, I then decide if that feedback needs to go to the trashcan because it's stupid / unreasonable, or pass it on to the devs as potential suggestions. With market research and customer complaints, you have to multiply every single complaint you see by a sizable number based on your total player base. Like with a game like this, for every single person you see say "Charismatic Nature kinda sucks" there are going to be dozens if not hundreds who said that to themselves and not on a forum and didn't pick it.

I'm a nerd and one my main hobbies is researching stuff and reading reviews, so I spend a LOT of time on forums reading other people's opinions. You have to take each with a grain of salt and evaluate it. Like I and a couple of other people said the Gardening perks are really good, and others said they don't ever pick them. You combine those together, and can tell that the perk is likely well balanced and is good for some builds and not others.

If everyone agrees that Miner 69 is almost always a must have, then you know it's probably a *really* good perk. If one turbo nerd has an excel sheet break down of stats and numbers showing objectively *why* one perk is better than another mathematically, it's worth ten times more than people saying "I like it but I don't know if it really works" etc

When dealing with devs / the money men in a company, the ONLY thing that matters is potential revenue gain numbers. That's it. So if something doesn't impact enough people to matter, there's no point in even talking about it. Like with the Junk Sledge, I know I'm in a minority with caring about that, so I try to frame my arguments as "people who play Int builds could benefit from it not being bad".

Even then though, when dealing with coding, many things seem WAY simpler to fix than they really are, and sheer numbers of people minorly annoyed don't really matter. I doubt you will find a single person, Madmole or Faatal or any dev included, that doesn't think it's a bit annoying / silly that two people can't talk to the trader at once or two people can't access a stash at once. The reason that kind of thing isn't fixed is because it's low priority and would almost certainly open a giant festering can of worms (ten thousand new bugs) so it's easier to just shrug and put it on the back burner

Sorry, not trying to make my opinions seem more important than anyone elses. Opinions be opinions yo. It's just pretty easy to get a group consensus when you spend a few hours on each of the main forums. The people on the forums are only a small sample, but you have to account for that with marketing. So if your playerbase is 1K people daily and on the forums you  see 4 turbo nerds and 12 regular nerds complaining about something, you can pretty easily extrapolate it to know there is at least a pretty sizeable chunk of the player base unhappy about it. 

Whether that makes it worth changing depends on what it is and what's involved, and end of all, "It's Madmoles world, we just play in it"

 
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Adam the Waster said:
are burnt trees suppose to be lootable?

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Looking at your debuffs pains me. that` s a rough start.

Talking about rough start, i Just had the fastest permadeath game session ever, didn`t even last half a day. Generated 4k rwg map, had a nice spawning point (in a car lol), and my first buried supply quest led me to mountain lion.. I though hostile animals spawned at night or was that change only for forest biome?

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Joining in on Perks, I play with purist builds/roleplay, I never spend a single point outside my specific tree until it`s maxed out. Now I`m playing agility, maxed it out fully before I got anything else and I`m doing fine. I`m on day 60 (40min day, no loot respawn, bm every 2-4days, max alive 64, survivalist, nightmare) and don`t even have a bicycle and honestly don`t see a need for one as there is still plenty to do in my town near trader. After maxing out agility just now started investing in intellect (engineering, physician) for faster crafting times, not the items they unlock.

Reading people say one or other perk is a "must have" really baffles me. What were you guys doing before perks were introduced? Some of them are better than others, sure, that`s the beauty of it, but saying one is a mandatory perk is just wrong as it all depends from person to person.

 
Khalagar said:
Uh no, it's based on browsing the various forums, and I've already said you can play in a million different ways lol. You can play the entire game without killing a single zombie, it's 100% possible to do, so of course you can pick the absolute worst possible perks and build and never go to a trader and never build a base and never use a tool etc, and reach end game. You just have to ignore that kind of extreme niche play style when talking about what's common

I work in a mix of marketing, with customers directly, and with our devs at my current company. Customers call me saying they want X, I then decide if that feedback needs to go to the trashcan because it's stupid / unreasonable, or pass it on to the devs as potential suggestions. With market research and customer complaints, you have to multiply every single complaint you see by a sizable number based on your total player base. Like with a game like this, for every single person you see say "Charismatic Nature kinda sucks" there are going to be dozens if not hundreds who said that to themselves and not on a forum and didn't pick it.

I'm a nerd and one my main hobbies is researching stuff and reading reviews, so I spend a LOT of time on forums reading other people's opinions. You have to take each with a grain of salt and evaluate it. Like I and a couple of other people said the Gardening perks are really good, and others said they don't ever pick them. You combine those together, and can tell that the perk is likely well balanced and is good for some builds and not others.

If everyone agrees that Miner 69 is almost always a must have, then you know it's probably a *really* good perk. If one turbo nerd has an excel sheet break down of stats and numbers showing objectively *why* one perk is better than another mathematically, it's worth ten times more than people saying "I like it but I don't know if it really works" etc

What would you prefer, me to name out and list and link to 48 separate comments between here, the Steam forum, and Reddit, on every opinion? It's a lot easier to just say "Nobody picks charismatic nature, because it's bad" and explain why it's bad, rather than spend 2 days on the "nobody" part.

When dealing with devs / the money men in a company, the ONLY thing that matters is potential revenue gain numbers. That's it. So if something doesn't impact enough people to matter, there's no point in even talking about it. Like with the Junk Sledge, I know I'm in a minority with caring about that, so I try to frame my arguments as "people who play Int builds could benefit from it not being bad".

Even then though, when dealing with coding, many things seem WAY simpler to fix than they really are, and sheer numbers of people minorly annoyed don't really matter. I doubt you will find a single person, Madmole or Faatal or any dev included, that doesn't think it's a bit annoying / silly that two people can't talk to the trader at once or two people can't access a stash at once. The reason that kind of thing isn't fixed is because it's low priority and would almost certainly open a giant festering can of worms (ten thousand new bugs) so it's easier to just shrug and put it on the back burner

Sorry, not trying to make my opinions seem more important than anyone elses. Opinions be opinions yo. It's just pretty easy to get a group consensus when you spend a few hours on each of the main forums. The people on the forums are only a small sample, but you have to account for that with marketing. So if your playerbase is 1K people daily and on the forums you  see 4 turbo nerds and 12 regular nerds complaining about something, you can pretty easily extrapolate it to know there is at least a pretty sizeable chunk of the player base unhappy about it. 

Whether that makes it worth changing depends on what it is and what's involved, and end of all, "It's Madmoles world, we just play in it"
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From my experience, Charismatic Nature has always been a late game perk and incredibly useful in Insane difficulty (where everything insta f*cking bleeds you) and I can see where most of the players come from with it's criticism. 

But I believe the main problem isn't with the perk, it is the fact that all the "Influence Perks" are obviously suited to a Charisma specific skill tree, since the new perk system is heavily inspired in fallout. And in the intellect tree, all the other perks take priority (otherwise why would you even go for intellect?).

 
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