PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[meilodasreh]

I don't count Bavaria as part of Germany: P Is a separate state within the state

Well that was my point initially.

"They" don't say moin in Germany, only a very small group in that country (should I say somewhere at the outer rim) does so.

And also "they" don't perform Schuhplattler in Germany. Again only a (hopefully) very small group of people does that.

And you don't have to look too closely to find out that in every country there are...well some might call it traditions, but it's just a political correct term for odd habits,

cultivated by -again- small groups.

Just wanted to indicate that "generalized prejudice" included in your statement (what "they" say in Germany)

...but as always in this forum, things quickly turn into something completely different.

Even Roland seems to have given up his attempts to clear this thread from off topic stuff.

So as a conclusion, this is the 7D2D A20 dev thread

madmole's first sentences in the first post:

Welcome to the Alpha 20 Dev Diary. Here we will discuss upcoming features for Alpha 20.

What we made of is:

60% stuff that is officially postponed to A21 or further (bandits, character/armor overhaul, water)

20% boobs

10% are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?............

5-10% other minor off topic stuff (gender discussion, what about console,...)

<5% actual A20 related stuff (consisting of 80% Matt insisting on adding skeletons and newsstands, and again 20% boobs) 

 

[JCrook1028]

I noticed a blue loot bag drop during one of the hordes that gave better loot. Is there two tiers of loot drop from zombies now or potentially more?

They talked about it on stream. Yes zombie loot bags are leveled by toughness of the zombie dropping it. yellow/blue/red iirc, maybe there were 4 levels?

 

[meilodasreh]

They talked about it on stream. Yes zombie loot bags are leveled by toughness of the zombie dropping it. yellow/blue/red iirc, maybe there were 4 levels?

Yep, you forgot level 0 (no bag at all).

Already drops very frequently in A19 and before.

 

[Blake_]

Hi y'all. The latest Dev Stream was in a new seed, rural area, cool places were shown, some old, some new. There were actually 5 players this time, and it was lots of fun as always.

New things shown in the video: 

-More shapes are getting added every day, the current count is 1311 (It is said that there are actually 1312 shapes already in b189)

-Zombies now drop 3 types of bags: Weak ones drop yellow bags, stronger ones blue bags and the nasty ones drop red bags, with better loot each colour. The drop rate is around the same as it always was.

The current version is a20 b187 (b189 is already online though). There are 27 high priority Bugs left, but they are generally tough to fix and each one can result in more bugs once fixed, so it can be a while until EXP release.

They hope to have it before Thanksgiving (December 24-25), but that is unlikely, so let's just go with "before Christmas" and be happy with those beautiful city landscapes in the video.

There were some old well known bugs and issues, like the ugly torch shadow casting when several players are holding lit torches in the same room ; some standing idle dead zds, some clipping... the usual.

Also, Lathan actually tried to make a 5 player horde night while using Twitch with 5 players and V Sync and the TAA on and the occluder on and high settings and his CPU said: "LOL boy, I hope you have a threadrypper" (spoiler: he didn't, the game froze a couple of minutes while he changed Antialiasing to 0% and reduced post processing in video settings). His RTX 3070 held on like it was nothing, but VSync made sure to keep crippling the framerate to 30-60fps no matter his video settings. Good pro-developer video tunning right there.

The stream crashed mid video due to the weather back in Lathan's place (real life weather, not in game), so it's actually split in two videos of a bit more than an hour each.

PART 1:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1202041945

PART 2:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1202103473

This is the last Playthrough Stream before release, so let's just activate the electric Hype train and then turn it off, step down and walk into the sunset until release.

 

[unholyjoe]

Yep, you forgot level 0 (no bag at all).

Already drops very frequently in A19 and before.

then working as intended

but you are actually forgetting something.. the level 0 bag is not a missing bag spawn... it is spawning air.. shirley you can see it right?  <oooops>

 

[dcsobral]

Spoiler

Hi y'all. The latest Dev Stream was in a new seed, rural area, cool places were shown, some old, some new. There were actually 5 players this time, and it was lots of fun as always.

New things shown in the video: 

-More shapes are getting added every day, the current count is 1311 (It is said that there are actually 1312 shapes already in b189)

-Zombies now drop 3 types of bags: Weak ones drop yellow bags, stronger ones blue bags and the nasty ones drop red bags, with better loot each colour. The drop rate is around the same as it always was.

The current version is a20 b187 (b189 is already online though). There are 27 high priority Bugs left, but they are generally tough to fix and each one can result in more bugs once fixed, so it can be a while until EXP release.

They hope to have it before Thanksgiving (December 24-25), but that is unlikely, so let's just go with "before Christmas" and be happy with those beautiful city landscapes in the video.

There were some old well known bugs and issues, like the ugly torch shadow casting when several players are holding lit torches in the same room ; some standing idle dead zds, some clipping... the usual.

Also, Lathan actually tried to make a 6 player horde night while using Twitch with 5 players and V Sync and the TAA on and the occluder on and high settings and his CPU said: "LOL boy, I hope you have a threadrypper" (spoiler: he didn't, the game froze a couple of minutes while he changed Antialiasing to 0% and reduced post processing in video settings). His RTX 3070 held on like it was nothing, but VSync made sure to keep crippling the framerate to 30-60fps no matter his video settings. Good pro-developer video tunning right there.

The stream crashed mid video due to the weather back in Lathan's place (real life weather, not in game), so it's actually split in two videos of a bit more than an hour each.

PART 1:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1202041945

PART 2:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1202103473

This is the last Playthrough Stream before release, so let's just activate the electric Hype train and then turn it off, step down and walk into the sunset until release.

Also, they made a very interesting horde base towards the end. 

 

[kennethklinewv]

Perfection is the enemy of Good.  We do NOT need more cowbell.   Release the fury, already!

 

[unholyjoe]

Perfection is the enemy of Good.  We do NOT need more cowbell.   Release the fury, already!

i expect the cowbells to be tuned  for better melody.

oh and the cowbells dont look right on the snakes.

 

[dcsobral]

Also, they made a very interesting horde base towards the end. 

Also also... Whoever made that blockbuster (or was it the police station?) is an evil genius. It was suggested that Hernan did it, which is interesting... Hernan's work has always been impressive but deviousness isn't an attribute I had associated with him before. He might be spending too much time with laz man.

 

[bachgaman]

Yes, a simple modlet with a few lines will delete that quest line very easily.  And by using a modlet, it should work for later patches unless they change the code around during development.

So, is this comparable to coding drone or bandits?

Another option is just to do it ourselves.  You don't have to remove the traders altogether, just need to tweak them through xml.  I started a revamp of the traders based on how I would like the game about a month or so ago, but paused because Alpha20 is just around the corner.  Will revisit it after I see how that rolls out.

I do. The point of my messages is not that I cannot do something, but that most players cannot do it. Those who did not go to the forum (and their overwhelming majority) and did not find out about xml files, etc.

As Faatal already said, an option to disable or modify the traders is not a simple task and simply not on their list of must haves.  They may visit it down the road prior to final release, but he told you not to get your hopes up if it will be implemented, or even in a manner you wanted.

In the meantime, we have the means to make adjustments ourselves to the traders via modlets.

Then don't let them claim that this is a sandbox and that they care about new players. I THINK there should be more tweaks in the sandbox for new players, not more bells and whistles like drone and twitch integration. It's my opinion. I have already read many times that they have other priorities, but my opinion will not change from this. I can express it and I will. Sorry. And I don't care what nobody cares about

So, all your responses to the problems I  mentioned are kind of like this, if I have it right:

Problem: change loot to remove all challenge quests if playing without traders.

Solution: don't bother, it just becomes useless loot.

That's the kind of thing that kills a game on review. It's unprofessional, incomplete, a hack. If it is to be done, TFP will try to do it right. It means ALL of it so the experience is smooth and pleasant to the players. It means no empty traders, it means challenges you get from loot and then cannot complete because there's no traders, it means all of I said and things I didn't think of and things TFP won't think of until QA starts playing with it and find issues that need to be addressed.

Do traders provide exclusive items? No. There are other settings in the game. A player who turns off traders or minimizes their rewards as much as possible can compensate for this by setting loot by 200% if he does not want to suffer. You are not saying that the player choosing Insane Nightmare should get a grenade launcher with unlimited ammunition at the start due to the fact that it will become difficult for him to play? The more such settings, the thinner each player can make the game for himself. There are a lot of options in the world settings menu now, but most of them are not very significant. For example, setting up airdrop (lol, how useless it is), there are already two of them.

Don't you think that the words "unprofessional, incomplete, a hack" work in the opposite direction? Can you customize the amount of loot you get from chests, but can't customize the amount of loot the trader gives you? Isn't that "unprofessional, incomplete, a hack"? Any player who wants to test himself and turn on "25% loot" will be shocked at how the trader spoils his game.

According to your logic, if everything should be either perfect or not at all, they should remove most of the existing world settings. Because their presence without other settings is an inferiority.

It would be much easier if it they removed it for everyone. Being an option means they have to support both paths.

Ok, then they should delete everything that can be disabled in the settings. And they won't have to support anything

And it will take longer if they take time to add another option to the game, and even longer if that option makes the factions/bandits/storyline development harder.

So far, we have no bandits, no factions, no storyline. You idealize by saying that they will be forced to work out an alternative mode in which all of this is not. We already have this mode. We're playing it now.

The blood moon wasn't even a thing for many alphas. And there were multiple "modes" to play the game that were removed. Disabling blood moon did not require changes on anything else. There's no mention of blood moons anywhere in the game, there's nothing that depends on blood moons happening.

Just like a trader. Exactly the same

By the way, the game has quite a few settings related to the blood moon. And there are no settings for the trader at all.

If you think that, you are plain wrong. TFP spends a lot of time balancing things, and the existing balance problems are just a testament to how difficulty and time consuming it is to do it. I was part of the Ravenhearst mod team for a while so I can speak from experience on how hard it is to do it. As for TFP "not doing it"... Alpha 18 was basically a balancing alpha. They talked on dev streams about changing loot balance, they are talking in this very thread right now about changing balance on trader prices. And the new gamestage per biome thing, do you think there's no effort being done to balance it? They spend a ton of time on game balance and you just need to go back and play older alphas to see how much it changed. Just because you don't like the current balance doesn't mean they don't care.

If they add a no-trader option and people start complaining you can't get crucibles, you can't get ammo, etc, etc, they have to pay attention to it. They might decide not to do anything about it, but just meeting and discussing and deciding takes time. And if they decide that yes, they need to do something, it's more time. Adding an option that is so badly supported people will only complain about it does more harm than good.

How many years in the game can you upgrade Treasure Hunter to level 3? This question is enough to cross out all your words about balancing the game.

200 ammo for a tier 1 quest. Pipe Bombs. Barter and Adventurer. Items of the highest grade in quest rewards. Zombies that die with 50 blows with a club on the maximum "difficulty" level. A grenade launcher that destroys millions of zombies in one shot, but does not damage even wooden blocks. Airdrops. Quest notes. Etc. There is no balance in the game.

I have a fair amount of experience with modding 7 Days to Die. I have mods available on the mod launcher, I was part of the Ravenhearst overhaul mod modding team. I have open source tools I've created to support it.

In replying to you I thought of all things I'd have to change if I were to make a mod to remove traders entirely. I thought of the things I would not be able to do with a modlet and how much code support would be needed for it (I'm a software developer myself). And it isn't the first time I thought about it either: Jax wanted to remove traders from Ravenhearst around the time I was in the project -- as did I --, so I thought about what would be needed at that time.

Every single thing I mentioned as being needed comes from actual experience. 

That said, I'm not trying to convince you of it. You asked a question, and I answered to the best of my ability. I can't help it that you don't like the answer.

Once again, no one world options affect anything other than what is written in them

 

[LTKarhel]

Well that was my point initially.

"They" don't say moin in Germany, only a very small group in that country (should I say somewhere at the outer rim) does so.

And also "they" don't perform Schuhplattler in Germany. Again only a (hopefully) very small group of people does that.

And you don't have to look too closely to find out that in every country there are...well some might call it traditions, but it's just a political correct term for odd habits,

cultivated by -again- small groups.

Just wanted to indicate that "generalized prejudice" included in your statement (what "they" say in Germany)

...but as always in this forum, things quickly turn into something completely different.

Even Roland seems to have given up his attempts to clear this thread from off topic stuff.

So as a conclusion, this is the 7D2D A20 dev thread

madmole's first sentences in the first post:

Welcome to the Alpha 20 Dev Diary. Here we will discuss upcoming features for Alpha 20.

What we made of is:

60% stuff that is officially postponed to A21 or further (bandits, character/armor overhaul, water)

20% boobs

10% are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?............

5-10% other minor off topic stuff (gender discussion, what about console,...)

<5% actual A20 related stuff (consisting of 80% Matt insisting on adding skeletons and newsstands, and again 20% boobs) 

OK, now I'll be speaking one-to-one in German with a translation so that nobody can say that we both don't understand each other.

" So Dicker (slang), natürlich redet ein teil im Norddeutschraum mit moin moin. Genauso wie es bei Euch unten der Fall ist, das ihr alle mit Grüß Gott oder Servus sagt" Aber geal, wir sind alles Deutsche im Herzen. Oder anders gesagt Wir sind alles Patrioten. Wir sind zu 50 % Deutsch und zu 50 % Zombies

english"So thick (slang), of course a part of northern Germany speaks with moin moin. Just as it is the case with you below that you all say hello or hello" But alright, we are all Germans at heart. In other words, we are all patriots. We are 50% German and 50% zombies :israel:

 

[dcsobral]

Do traders provide exclusive items? No.

Yes. Solar panels and banks are provided exclusively by the trader.

I have a fair amount of experience with modding 7 Days to Die. I have mods available on the mod launcher, I was part of the Ravenhearst overhaul mod modding team. I have open source tools I've created to support it.

In replying to you I thought of all things I'd have to change if I were to make a mod to remove traders entirely. I thought of the things I would not be able to do with a modlet and how much code support would be needed for it (I'm a software developer myself). And it isn't the first time I thought about it either: Jax wanted to remove traders from Ravenhearst around the time I was in the project -- as did I --, so I thought about what would be needed at that time.

Every single thing I mentioned as being needed comes from actual experience. 

That said, I'm not trying to convince you of it. You asked a question, and I answered to the best of my ability. I can't help it that you don't like the answer.

Once again, no one world options affect anything other than what is written in them

That reply doesn't even make sense. I explained my experience is how I came to that answer based on that experience. So, "no one world options affect anything other than what is written in th em" and you know this because your experience is what, exactly?

 

[bachgaman]

Yes. Solar panels and banks are provided exclusively by the trader.

Oh @%$# you're right, it changes everything. It's impossible to play without solar panels. People will complain and TFP doesn't like it. So we are canceling all my posts.

That reply doesn't even make sense. I explained my experience is how I came to that answer based on that experience. So, "no one world options affect anything other than what is written in th em" and you know this because your experience is what, exactly?

Do you want to argue with that? I am ready to view to your arguments. What world options affect something other than what is written in them?

 

[SKINK]

.

 

[Doomofman]

They hope to have it before Thanksgiving (December 24-25), but that is unlikely, so let's just go with "before Christmas" and be happy with those beautiful city landscapes in the video.

You mean November 24-25. But essentially what they were talking about is they would like to have streamer weekend next weekend Nov 20-21 which is the last weekend before turkey day for folks in the US (with Exp release on the 22nd if they followed the usual pattern) but I don't really expect that myself, but I think it's looking better for it to come out in November

Though aside from one weird issue where Lathan's FPS dropped to like 0 at one point, I thought overall the game looked in much better a state than previously

 

[Khalagar]

MFW people won't stop posting wall of texts talking about traders despite  it already being said several times traders are in the process of being reworked in A20 and with future changes coming

 

[bachgaman]

MFW people won't stop posting wall of texts talking about traders despite  it already being said several times traders are in the process of being reworked in A20 and with future changes coming

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What aspect of the game will not change in the future? So that we know what we can argue about.

In addition, I do not see the trader sliders among the announcement of changes. They will "rebalance" it for the "adventurer" difficulty level and 100% loot / experience, but when u playing with harder settings, the trader will still spoil everything

 

[Xtrakicking]

So I got a question prompted from seeing the new RWG. Will the spawning.xml file have entries for cities in Alpha 20? It would be pretty dope to be able to control zombie spawning inside cities and separate from biome spawning like in previous alphas.

 

[jorbascrumps]

So I got a question prompted from seeing the new RWG. Will the spawning.xml file have entries for cities in Alpha 20? It would be pretty dope to be able to control zombie spawning inside cities and separate from biome spawning like in previous alphas.

It is possible to adjust spawns inside cities. They have already increased city spawns in A20.

 

[Xtrakicking]

It is possible to adjust spawns inside cities. They have already increased city spawns in A20.

How so? Last time I asked people told me one could only adjust biome spawning in A19, since cities weren't entries anymore; or is this actually a change coming to A20?