PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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madmole said:
No because sales continue to improve and review ratings are higher than ever. The process of going gold requires us to look at every system and decide if it's the best we can do or what we really wanted then change it to something shippable. If you don't like change don't play EA games. We haven't removed any materials, we removed the endless tapping of upgrading to reach a decent block. Wet concrete is just a dumb simulation thing and never added any value to the game and eats CPU to calculate when it dries so it really wasn't worth the sim factor for the CPU it ate. Wood to reinforced wood? We want meaty upgrades you can feel, not oh another block that is only 200 hit points more than the last one.

New quest type restore power will be cool. When you flip the switch zombies are attracted to the noise/light. There is more to it than that but I'll save that for a stream.

Pretty much this. It's too tedious and confusing to upgrade your base with the insane current block upgrade path. It's just over designed. Simple is better.

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Not gonna lie, I don't like it. That being said, I understand the change, I just hope concrete blocks are faster to craft than current wet blocks.

 
Blake_ said:
So that's what all the testing branch updates were all about. As much as I understand the commercial value of a20 being optimized and having a big impact, optimizations on that scale released sooner rather than later will always have a positive impact on the game as a whole in every marketing aspect, both for new players and "old" ones. 

That is, as long as you think it's easy to port and doesn't introduce too much "paperwork" then go ahead. I won't mind the map restart if the game behaves 15% smoother in every instance. Last patch 2-3 months before a20 exp is indeed a sweet spot and keeps the crowd interested.
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Recent a19 changes have to do with Twitch.

Map restart should not be required for the optimizations I'm doing. Data formats are not changing.

 
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Oh crap MM was on, maybe I can get him to talk about more of the armor sets. 

Any news you guys can give us on the new armor sets that are coming? 

 
MechanicalLens said:
Not until A21. :)  It says so on the first page.
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Ya I know... I was hoping for A20, heh. 

They can tell us more of the sets though, if they have them mostly figured out. 

He teased that the plant fiber set was actually viable when maxed out.  More information would be dandy. 

 
pregnable said:
Ya I know... I was hoping for A20, heh. 

They can tell us more of the sets though, if they have them mostly figured out. 

He teased that the plant fiber set was actually viable when maxed out.  More information would be dandy. 
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Plant fiber set bonus: Upon taking damage you summon plant fiber minions to fight for you for 10 seconds. 60 second cooldown

                                      Summons a protective plant fiber spirit above your character that increases armor rating by 3

                                      You can now eat plant fibers. Graze for days!

 
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Blake_ said:
Lol, damn. I thought you were just gonna scratch your head against the wall with the main thread optimizations, how wrong I was ! Also It's a good thing they pointed that out, because the version release notes are too big to handle every single time. 

While DX12 is nice, relieving the main thread of mesh baking calculations is HUGE. So that's why you won't exist for a while. Thanks.
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Got the baking thread working today and with full baking quality instead of simple/fast. Full was required with how Unity implemented it. Hopefully I won't find any issues in final testing tomorrow and that will get committed.

 
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faatal said:
Got the baking thread working today and with full baking quality instead of simple/fast. Full was required with how Unity implemented it. Hopefully I won't find any issues in final testing tomorrow and that will get committed.
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This is very good news. I'm itching to test those gains on my system. It's difficult to predict to what degree the gains are without testing, but I'll say the improvements will be instantly noticed by everyone as every system is currently bottlenecked on that front. A20 will be the first truly "stable stable build".

 
@madmole since 7D2D is getting "simplified" 

i would like to know if the idea that would make it so players can repair their whole bace from some menu or station was in the works or even passed through?

 
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@madmole

One word: repair .... NO, two words: repair drone !!!!

How about a late game mod to the drone so it automatically repairs any damaged block in your vicinity with the speed of a nail gun if you have the mats. While you can repair destroyed blocks or help the drone. IMHO not overpowered, you still need to visit every corner of your base and repair substantial damage made by demos etc.

 
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meganoth said:
@madmole

One word: repair .... NO, two words: repair drone !!!!

How about a late game mod to the drone so it automatically repairs any damaged block in your vicinity with the speed of a nail gun if you have the mats. While you can repair destroyed blocks or help the drone. IMHO not overpowered, you still need to visit every corner of your base and repair substantial damage made by demos etc.
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That depends. What is more costly, 1 entity with pathing and AI  or incremental hp calculations/ full heal for many blocks at once (workbench task) ? My experience tells me the drone is more costly than many blocks, but if the base is huge then we might just need a CPU with two cores per faatal to handle the situation.

 
madmole said:
Pay the price of upgrading from frames to wood to stone to concrete if you aren't confident in what you are building. You can always build it in frames then remove the frame and place the concrete block where it was.
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That's very unintuitive for endgame. Wasn't the whole point of having those frames to setup the layout, upgrade it while skipping early game steps without manually switching a placeholder block? Rebar frames could stay, I really can't see how their existence is a problem, just have them upgrade into the (new) concrete or cobblestone. 

And I still feel like concrete should be a thing on it's own (cobblestone path), those old metal upgrades from wood always felt gritty and satisfying.

While I agree about the no downgrade to a certain extent, that has always been the logic behind the "reinforced" block types, you're just adding more layers, (wood to metal mostly, and their extra upgrade within their tier) which makes sense and feels rewarding watching them get broken down into what they were (means they served the purpose).

 
madmole said:
Pay the price of upgrading from frames to wood to stone to concrete if you aren't confident in what you are building. You can always build it in frames then remove the frame and place the concrete block where it was.
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or give us the option 2 pick up misplaced blocks for the first 3 seconds.

 
@madmole

i cant recall discussion about 'things' lying about in the world.

currently some items are represented by a graphic that looks like the item for example an ak 47 when ypu drop it on the ground, and others are that brown bag thing.

these things all despawn after a while.

any reason against them persisting? i think it would be nice to have them on a shelf or table rather than have to put them in a storage container.

of course more graphics for the ones currently with bags would be nice

watched the latter part of the stream yesterday. is there a link anywhere here about this twitch mode? id like to learn more...

 
madmole said:
Yes, but I think we're buffing the basic concrete to be as strong as the old r concrete.

Probably cobblestone so it has good amount of health and looks better IMO.
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I miss scarp Upgrade tier and the window upgrades

now its over simplified

Scrap makes sense in Building in the wasteland and sense metal notes no longer drop raw Iron its easier to get scrap metal. Plus it looks so good (not the first tier that looks like bricks but tier 2 looks SO GOOD)

Same with the windows back in A17 you had to repair windows one board at a time to reinforce it. i used to love using windows as a Barrier and fixing them to the max wood and leaving the scarp. it was cheap and easy and made sense. now its goes from window, Wood all, stone etc

i miss some of the small stuff

 

 
"Oh i am Lumberjack and im not ok"


Ah thats hot. That hot!
ExvgSb3WQAMwS41

 

https://twitter.com/7DaystoDie/status/1376940854628151302

 
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