PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[Yopo]

Sorry if my grammar is not good, english is not my mother language and I have to learn that by myself. =/

No worries, wasn’t originally referring to you

Iirc they increased infection chance. Sort of a balls out hardcore mode wearing them.

Ah makes sense I reckon. Suppose statue for that would help it more. Like infection rate +10% , seeing as most gear has that sort of thing. I e nerdy glasses, cigar’s etc etc...

 

[Pferdesalami]

I have a question about the 4x4 truck. Is it on purpose, that i can hear a horn or a fanfare in the backround. It is a little anoying, when you noticed it. And that the animal tracker doesn´t show everytime the animals on the map, only sometimes. Didn´t figured it out, when it shows the animals and when not.

 

[Darinth]

If I understand this correctly, the exploit would be to move the LCB a bit after you hit the limit. By always building at the edge of the LCB's range you effectively eliminated the limit.

And no, it isn't a good counter to remove all decos above the limit if the LCB is removed

No it isn't. It causes problems with wanting to move the LCB for legitimate reasons. A better counter is to remove all decos above the old limit when a new one is placed at a different location, but even this causes issues.

4 people can claim 4 adjacent areas and pump a huge number of decoratives into a single chunk by placing all 4 lcbs such that they meet in the middle of a chunk. Depending on the complexity and technical requirements and limitations, it's feasible to pump so many objects into a single chunk that as soon as someone walks into distance to allow the chunk to render... the game crashes due to graphics memory limitations. Not 'has poor performance', just outright crashes. I don't unfortunately know enough about the technical limitations 7 days is on. I've written a simple voxel-based engine, but sadly I never got it to do a lot of the cool stuff 7dtd can do and eventually ended up giving up on it. Hope to pick it up again some day... but it's too much work for a single developer. At least for me.

 

[rubens9311]

True. But I don't think it's like this forever haha.
 Maybe it will come out stable ... 
next week?

error

 

[Xlxfearlessxlx]

I have to say I love the new zombie and items and models for A19. Ok started with a compliment... Now on to the main course. 

With that being said my wife and I play this cooperatively are not happy at all with the new loot progression. Being locked in the stone age removes the excitement from looting. It also heavily effects mining and building. Oh look, more paper, another stone ax, or another blunderbuss... We both have over 1000 hours in this game since we moved over from console to PC. I find we are playing much less than in previous alphas.

I am sure I will catch hell for posting my opinion, but I wanted to say my piece. 

AHEM - "Gamestage gating everything is not fun gameplay." There I said it.

 

[MechanicalLens]

It's fast food! 

View attachment 7_Days_To_Die_2020-08-02_20-38-11.mp4

 

[EggsAisle]

I was doing some quests/looting today, largely in the hopes of obtaining some robotics parts (which are by the way almost impossible to find compared to any other parts, not sure if that's intentional.) In the process, I wondered if the questing system might be fleshed out in such a way to tame the RNG just a touch. Something like:

30% (number is arbitrary) of quests have a more focused reward selection. It's not necessarily visible to the player, but the trader dialogue can append a little hint: "Go and beat up the zeds at house_modular_whatever. Come back when you're done and you can pick an old weapon I've got lying around in the back." Low-level quests might give you a choice between a spear and a pipe shotgun, higher-level quests might let you pick a sniper rifle or a steel sledgehammer. 

You could do this for weapons, tools, seeds, books, electrical stuff, medicine, recipes, construction stuff... you could even align it with the trader's specialty. And this focused reward system wouldn't necessarily apply to all quests, or even most. Maybe there's a cap of 1 per trader per day. But I feel like it could lead to some interesting choices, like "Do I take this quest that's just 300m away and hope for a good reward from the generic table, or do the quest that's 1.4km away but will give me a recipe?" And there's no guarantee that the recipes offered are new/unread, so unlucky is still unlucky. 

Thoughts?

 

[Annihilatorza]

I have to say I love the new zombie and items and models for A19. Ok started with a compliment... Now on to the main course. 

With that being said my wife and I play this cooperatively are not happy at all with the new loot progression. Being locked in the stone age removes the excitement from looting. It also heavily effects mining and building. Oh look, more paper, another stone ax, or another blunderbuss... We both have over 1000 hours in this game since we moved over from console to PC. I find we are playing much less than in previous alphas.

I am sure I will catch hell for posting my opinion, but I wanted to say my piece. 

AHEM - "Gamestage gating everything is not fun gameplay." There I said it.

I understand how you feel, you and your wife, myself and the people on this dev thread are hard core fans when it comes down to this game. I would say less 1% of 7D2D fans comes to the forums and a even smaller % comes to this thread.

You have started hundreds of worlds, killed 1000's of zombies, you have spent over 6.5 weeks real world time in a single game, you are a master at it.

The change the TFP have made is not geared towards us, if it was it would start on:

Hoard night every night

Insane zombies

Only specials

Wasteland only

No animals

Always Run

200% block damage

It is geared toward the new players, who have just started their first world or maybe have 5 to 10 hours in game to give them an overall slower but better experience.

IMO

Anni 

 

[MechanicalLens]

You have started hundreds of worlds, killed 1000's of zombies, you have spent over 6.5 weeks real world time in a single game, you are a master at it.

This gives me confidence. You'll only need to spend several weeks in an actual apocalypse to master the world around you. 

 

[Annihilatorza]

This gives me confidence. You'll only need to spend several weeks in an actual apocalypse to master the world around you. 

Well you had better, or you going to be bandit toast really quick

 

[MechanicalLens]

Well you had better, or you going to be bandit toast really quick

One month I'm wearing a tinfoil hat, the next I have a crown above my head.

 

[Annihilatorza]

One month I'm wearing a tinfoil hat, the next I have a crown above my head.

and a shotgun in your right hand

 

[MechanicalLens]

and a shotgun in your right hand

I'm left-handed.

 

[bloodmoth13]

If I understand this correctly, the exploit would be to move the LCB a bit after you hit the limit. By always building at the edge of the LCB's range you effectively eliminated the limit.

And no, it isn't a good counter to remove all decos above the limit if the LCB is removed

The rule would be that player placed complex items can only exist within your land claim block area, if you remove it those items are replaced with trash. Its not a bad tradeoff considering the alternative is that you never get to see them at all. None of them are mandatory, they are just finishing touches.

There will always be trade offs and thats fine, it would be better to be able to place six hi res book shelves than none at all

 

[Gazz]

and a shotgun in your right hand

I'm left-handed.

Correct. The right hand has a chainsaw attached.

The rule would be that player placed complex items can only exist within your land claim block area, if you remove it those items are replaced with trash. Its not a bad tradeoff considering the alternative is that you never get to see them at all. None of them are mandatory, they are just finishing touches.

There will always be trade offs and thats fine, it would be better to be able to place six hi res book shelves than none at all

You guys do realise that this is getting into the territory of weird and hard to enforce rules, right?

There is no need for a solution because there is no problem.

 

[Noctoras]

The argument isn't if it is realistic or not. The questions are:
Will most players use this? No.

Will it cause performance issues? Yes.

Would it delay going gold, and already promised features? Yes.
Can it be easily modded? Yes.

So unless the answers are Yes, No, No (4th question doesn't matter to me) then the answer is probably always going to be no to x feature request.

I understand your point, but it is a bit of a stretch, espacially point one. 

If "most players" ust it is a criteria, you could just as well get rid of 75% of the weapons or more :=)

 

[Jost Amman]

and a shotgun in your right hand

I'm left-handed.

Correct. The right hand has a chainsaw attached.

Yeah! 


Spoiler

 

[Roby94]

Someoane nows when they gona update for the next build ? i have wrn hollow blocks on b173...maybe the next build i can play

 

[lord_ahriman]

Someoane nows when they gona update for the next build ? i have wrn hollow blocks on b173...maybe the next build i can play

Yeah, no new build past week, maybe they are going stable this week.

 

[meganoth]

I was doing some quests/looting today, largely in the hopes of obtaining some robotics parts (which are by the way almost impossible to find compared to any other parts, not sure if that's intentional.) In the process, I wondered if the questing system might be fleshed out in such a way to tame the RNG just a touch. Something like:

30% (number is arbitrary) of quests have a more focused reward selection. It's not necessarily visible to the player, but the trader dialogue can append a little hint: "Go and beat up the zeds at house_modular_whatever. Come back when you're done and you can pick an old weapon I've got lying around in the back." Low-level quests might give you a choice between a spear and a pipe shotgun, higher-level quests might let you pick a sniper rifle or a steel sledgehammer. 

You could do this for weapons, tools, seeds, books, electrical stuff, medicine, recipes, construction stuff... you could even align it with the trader's specialty. And this focused reward system wouldn't necessarily apply to all quests, or even most. Maybe there's a cap of 1 per trader per day. But I feel like it could lead to some interesting choices, like "Do I take this quest that's just 300m away and hope for a good reward from the generic table, or do the quest that's 1.4km away but will give me a recipe?" And there's no guarantee that the recipes offered are new/unread, so unlucky is still unlucky. 

Thoughts?

It needs repeating: One big reason for the change of the loot tables is that normal zombies in the early game are outclassed by tier1 weapons. While stone age tier0 weapons are or should be a good match for normal zombies.

Many survival games start with the hero so weak he has to avoid fights and is only slowly getting more powerful. First of all in 7D2D the weak phase isn't so weak, at no time in the game do you need to walk away from a fight with a single zombie. And in earlier alphas and especially A18 your weak phase had a duration of half an hour (until you raided your first POI). That is obviously rushed for a game that is usually played for 35-50 hours per world. You can't just give a level 1 player a steel sledgehammer and expect him to still have a healthy respect for normal zombies.

The second consideration is that A19 has no variable difficulty for biomes, areas or POIs. A20 seems to get some of that and that would allow offering quests of varying difficulty. Without higher difficulty you can't just give higher rewards, who would be so dumb to select a low-tier quest when the high-tier quest isn't more difficult or dangerous. Even if it was 1.4km farther out.