PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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faatal said:
Finished a wish list item today. Early tester feedback seems good. More zeds in towns. ;)

Added biome spawning supports disabling spawn types using POI tags in an area.

Added commercial, industrial and downtown biome spawning types (more and faster respawning zombies).
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You really can't disappoint huh? That's so amazing, can't wait for those city wanderers.

 
TheGutterKIng said:
Got two questions for the devs, I apologize if they have been asked but I could not find any information on it.

-Will screamers be able to detect the player at bedrock now? I can run 10 forges, multiple campfires and chem stations with no screamers spawning, or mine at bedrock with the auger without them spawning, even with block damage turned up to x3. Mining 10-20 blocks above bedrock still spawns them as normal it seems, but just not right at bedrock.

-Will demolishers ever be added into POIs late game or just late game blood moon hordes?
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Screamers work the same.

No changes for demos planned.

Spuder said:
@faatal Is there going to be something displayed on the HUD when going into the different Biomes that show the modifier, Or will this be all hidden and behind the scenes so to speak?
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It was talked about, but not yet.

 
Blake_ said:
So December 23 it is for us give it or take 1 week.
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Don't forget the holidays tend to act as a limiter to worker availability and productivity. The gap between (US) Thanksgiving and New Years is a cruddy time for projects in certain industries. Among knowledge workers, coordination with co-workers who are on vacation, family demands, seasonal depression, and more are all factors. Conversely, the holidays can be a great time to turn a pack of self-motivated (and vacationing) players loose on testing, assuming there's no major issue that makes a game unplayable.

 
faatal said:
Finished a wish list item today. Early tester feedback seems good. More zeds in towns. ;)

Added biome spawning supports disabling spawn types using POI tags in an area.

Added commercial, industrial and downtown biome spawning types (more and faster respawning zombies).
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NICEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!  MORE ZOMBIES MORE FUN UwU. Another good news!

 
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unholyjoe said:
the bad news is... there is a cost... a zombie now spawns where  the newsstand used to be. well there is your chance to make a skeleton... go kill him :)

joking of course
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Damn you have me idea- make system similar to the forest- you can take body of zombie use acid and create skeletons! and you can put skeleton on pike , hang skeleton on tree put skeleton on chair in newsstand!! this ssssoundsssssssoo goood uwu ! Well it would be perfect as part of hallowen updated! 

 
Dares said:
I have a question, saw on the stream that the dog had the old look. Will the new model be included in the experimental/public at the start?
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The dog and some of the other zombie overhauls will arrive as they are completed in the 20.x updates. 

 
zztong said:
Don't forget the holidays tend to act as a limiter to worker availability and productivity. The gap between (US) Thanksgiving and New Years is a cruddy time for projects in certain industries. Among knowledge workers, coordination with co-workers who are on vacation, family demands, seasonal depression, and more are all factors. Conversely, the holidays can be a great time to turn a pack of self-motivated (and vacationing) players loose on testing, assuming there's no major issue that makes a game unplayable.
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Lol, that is actually true, but they won't let it get past Christmas, even if it means that we get a few MF bugs for early experimental.

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@faatal , what does "Added biome spawning supports disabling spawn types using POI tags in an area." mean? 

I understand it like: You added code for allowing POI designers to place a POI and disable spawns in that particular POI area using the colored box system if they so choose ?

 
Blake_ said:
@faatal , what does "Added biome spawning supports disabling spawn types using POI tags in an area." mean? 

I understand it like: You added code for allowing POI designers to place a POI and disable spawns in that particular POI area using the colored box system if they so choose ?
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Nope. It allows biome entries in spawning.xml to be disabled based on the POI tags in each biome spawning area (80m x 80m) of the world. The designers are already using these tags for RWG.

Now I can do things like this in a biome where this spawn type is only enabled if commercial or industrial, but not downtown.

<spawn maxcount="4" respawndelay="0.3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" tags="commercial,industrial" notags="downtown" />

Blake_ said:
Lol, that is actually true, but they won't let it get past Christmas, even if it means that we get a few MF bugs for early experimental.
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Every experimental has some MF bugs left. Lower priority MFs can be done throughout the experimental period. There are usually still some MFs when we go stable.

 
faatal said:
Now I can do things like this in a biome where this spawn type is only enabled if commercial or industrial, but not downtown.

<spawn maxcount="4" respawndelay="0.3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" tags="commercial,industrial" notags="downtown" />
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So a use case would be, say I only wanted dogs in a wasteland city, I could set them up as a biome spawner using the tags so they don't spawn in the wilds, but do in cities?

That's kinda cool.

 
At the least it means that cities can become hub-city like  without affecting the overall spawn levels of the rest of the map or even biome that the city is in.

 
@faatal a few days ago we got the hype train sidetracked by a hype raft.

Will it make it? I think it could fit 1 seat mod on Sundays at the very least.

A reinforced sail mod? Skeletons with notes? 

 
Roland said:
At the least it means that cities can become hub-city like  without affecting the overall spawn levels of the rest of the map or even biome that the city is in.
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Well the max alive will still come into play.  Some sleepers are loaded.  So either it will balance between low biome spawns or low sleeper spawns.

I hope they split the max alives between the two types. 

 
Guppycur said:
Well the max alive will still come into play.  Some sleepers are loaded.  So either it will balance between low biome spawns or low sleeper spawns.

I hope they split the max alives between the two types. 
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I feel your feels... but there are no benefits in cluttering that into 2 variables. POI are extremely fine tunned and balanced for each tiered quest and they have a fixed number of entities. Why would you need a variable that allows for a higher cap to constant spawning in those cases of hard-coded design in which entities are supposed  to be in specific hand picked numbers?

Yes, you can say it might be more organic and useful even allowing to create an ARENA-like quest in which you fight different sets of Zds in an encased place for a reward, but even in that case it would be better to script it, period.

Why would it be a bad idea?

1- Less performance as it would be a new big parameter that can run independently to the previous fine-tunned MaxAlive cap, and can result in useless sleepers spawning for no reason inside and bloating a house while you get more Zds outside too. 

2- MaxAlive already gives us the illusion of more Zds by  constantly spawning those 4 Zds in the vicinity (in faatal's example), and Zds outside can eventually path to the inside too.

You can already manually position a sleeper volume and I believe you can also tune its respawn rate. I wouldn't ask for more than that .

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What I would ask @faatal though, is the ability to change map icons via xml with parameters like fading options and size (both compass and map ones, like all the white ones the player can place and the ones from animal tracker and vehicles and drone, the trader icon, quest makers, plane supply location...etc) and place them all preferably in a new folder ("MapMarkers" maybe? or the already existing ItemIcon folder, who cares as long as it is accessible, right? )

Edit: That way it would help us both modders and quasimodders alike to have a way to tweak the map icons easily without using Unity himself.

 
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Guppycur said:
...so we could have both.  Full sleeper AND full biome spawns. 
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Filling all the sleeper volumes with the variable in every hidding spot would be the only use case. Sounds meh to me for performance reasons and will unbalance tiered POIs and should only be used when not questing. I don't disagree to that intention and like you I would like more control over sleeper volumes in the future, but it might be HARD on the system to have lots of sleepers that you can't even see spawn simultaneously.  MaxAlive and your "MaxSleepersAlive" can only do 1 thing, and that would be to check and limit the spawn cap, but contrary to MaxAlive, you can't set whatever limit you like to MaxSleepersAlive or it would overflow the POI if you set it high enough, so I find it even more useless in that case.

 
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