PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary
- Thread starter madmole
- Start date
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faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
Low. I just read a Unity is getting DLSS article and it seems to just be the hi def render pipeline getting it, which we are not planning on updating to, since it would be months of rewriting gfx code and shaders.
From what I've seen. A lot different. Much less human.
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bachgaman
New member
Hi @madmole
First of all many thanks to you and your team for this game, 7DTD is really awesome! Me and my friends got a lot of pleasant emotions and memories associated with this game, thank you
I read the list of changes in alpha 20 and was pleasantly surprised how much these changes corresponded to my expectations, I literally voiced many of these points during the game, but I would like you to know what features could improve the game in my opinion (sorry for maybe not perfect english)
this is just my subjective opinion, of course I do not demand, but I convey my opinion and I understand that my vision of the game most likely does not coincide with yours
1. Hardcore mode - yes, I mean that game mode with one life as a checkmark in the settings before creating the world. Someone will say that I can decide for myself whether to continue playing after the first death or not, but you must agree that it is very difficult to abandon the progress achieved wanting to play perfectly, but at the same time there are players who, for this very reason, do not try to survive. Many people generally abuse the ability to die (replenishment of food and water, zeroing of negative statuses, and so on) and honest players do not use this just in order not to lose interest in the game. I am not asking to make such a mode mandatory, but possible without mods
I have seen videos on YouTube where people are proud to withstand very dangerous waves directly using their death as a survival tool, this is absurd
In addition, an intermediate option is possible, along with this, you can add the ability to preserve peace and progress. Suppose players play a hardcore mode with 1 life, they can save before the bloody moon or a dangerous mission and in case of failure, death, roll back the world to the time of saving and try again. This will save you from annoyance after accidental death, but it will leave joy from a flawless victory
2. Increase penalties for hunger and thirst up to the death of a character - I don't really understand why you can't die of exhaustion in a survival game, again, to be honest, you don't really care about food in this game , maybe it's even beneficial not to waste time looking for and creating food (again, you can die to replenish satiety) Even if you can't die from it, the penalties for hunger and thirst should be significantly more substantial than a slight decrease in stamina.
3. Death Penalties - based on the first two points, it is quite obvious that players do not consider death losses, especially if they do it on purpose (items can be put in a chest) Did you think that the 10% experience penalty from the current level is prohibitively small? Perhaps an eternal (or very long) decrease in maximum health/stamina or an increase, instead of decrease in difficulty, to make it harder and harder to play if the player dies too often, and not vice versa
4. Zombie intelligence - literally in the first days of the game, it so happened that without any guides I calculated the optimal (in my opinion imbalanced) defense system in bloody moons. The thing is that during bloody moon zombies, obviously, calculate the shortest path to the player and follow only it (maybe they still trigger on the doors because instead of breaking a concrete block with a strength of 2500 they hit a reinforced door with a strength of more than 7000).
Therefore, as soon as the player digs a moat around the base and makes an exit from it leading to the door behind which the player is hiding, the player becomes almost invulnerable with a proper supply of ammunition to destroy them behind the door through the holes (I played at all difficulty levels and only demolishers can oppose something to this, and then by mistake of the player who shot the bomb)
I think all experienced players follow this tactic and it's very boring. Dont you think it is necessary to lay some randomization in the choice of path for zombies? For example, with some small probability, some zombie would choose not most optimal path. For example, they would not run out of the moat, but start digging under the shelter or attack not the door, but the walls. This change would not affect the physics of the game, I'm not talking about they have to act smart, but sometimes they have to act unpredictably
It is about this point that zombies act too predictably. This makes it easy and boring to defend.
5. Nerf of electric fence and explosives. This is incredibly helpful in defending the base during the blood moon. The electric fence slows down the zombies very strongly and it will not break even if 500 or 1000 zombies pass through this thread per night (because parts of the electric fence can stand very far from the combat zone) I understand that it may not be possible to make some kind of victim counter on the fence, but maybe you just need to weaken its effect?
But what does explosives do? It's not even about too strong a grenade launcher, but pipe bombs are incredibly powerful, even at the highest level of difficulty hordes of zombies are ground to powder from some small pipes with gunpowder. It's imbalanced
6. Nerf repairing blocks and doors in battle. Another reason it is very easy to defend is repairing doors during a siege. Is it okay that with a nail gun you can repair thousands of durability on a door in a matter of seconds? With the proper supply of steel, you don't even have to kill them, you can just stand and repair the door (I haven't tested it, but it looks like this)
You can simply add the condition that if the block is attacked, then it takes more time to repair it or repair is not available at all
7. Rework some perks, especially on weapons and armors - you yourself should know that there are completely useless perks in the game, it's sad to see them realizing that they could be better and then the player would have a choice. I'm talking about completely dead branches of weapons (in fact, all melee weapons are almost dead and make no sense, all these spears, bows, crossbows, electric batons and brass knuckles are just too weak and unnecessary weapons partly due to weak perks) The creation of armor is simply useless because it is not difficult to find or buy. Now, if the perk for creating armor would give bonuses when wearing it, it would be a completely different story.
In general, many perks look boring. Most often, when improving them, you do not receive any special bonus, you just receive, conditionally, 20/40/60/80/100% damage and that's it. There is no motivation to upgrade many of them, even for the sake of fun. It seems to me that the developer's task is to make any kind of weapon playable, but now in the game, in fact, there is only a grenade launcher, an automatic shotgun and, possibly, a machine gun (for which you will get tired of creating bullets). The rest of the weapon is a deliberate loss.
8. First aid bandages - what do you think player should be doing during the first days of survival? I don't think he should be looking for the desert on foot to collect the aloever. Otherwise, he will not have the simplest way to heal himself. Either he must abuse death or seek out the desert with a stone axe and a grassy tunic. It might be worth adding a new type of grass for the green biome from which you could make at least some medicine, say, a mini-bandage that replenishes 5 or 10 health points. In addition, you write that the desert will become a more harder biome. In this case, why do you need bandages in the game if you can only craft them when you get a truck and a supply of first-aid kits? (I'm exaggerating)
9. Loot from regular zombies - It would be nice to be able to find a few dollars after killing a wandering zombie. Why not? True, it is difficult to think of what they can find useful besides money
10. Useless dropped loot from an airplane - is a fact. Most likely there are a couple of cans of food and a few cartridges. Almost always not worth the time. It seems that it does not depend on the gamestage. Then why is it in the game?
11. Challenge Quests - you spent time developing note assignments, but I don't understand what they are for? For completing them, you get about the same experience as for killing one zombie, 350 dukes are not worth this time absolutely. Perhaps it is worth at least making the reward dependent on the gamestage, this would be enough for the motivation to chase rabbits with a nail gun.
Perhaps it is worth using the mechanics of the quest chain and then the reward will depend not on the stage of the game, but on the number of completed challenges, thus some players can diversify the routine cleaning of factories and hospitals
12. Vehicle - why is the truck so slow? why is a motorcycle as slow as a truck? why is there only two places in the truck? (I saw about modifications, that's great, thanks)
By the way, in addition to the modifications you specified, I would add a modification for the damage when knocking down zombies (so that you can destroy them as in carmageddon but it may affect the balance in the bloody moon)
13. Infection - you need to do something with it, I actually did not notice its influence for 300 hours in the game. Yes, after zombie hits, I got an infection many times, but I have never experienced problems with curing it, so I never knew what would happen if it rises above a few percent
14. Zombie "tank" - Since there are "special" zombies in the game, why is there not one among them who would break down walls and smash doors? After all, this is obvious. Let it be large and slow so that it can be destroyed from afar, but this would greatly diversify the defense process during the bloody moon and, by the way, would make sniper rifles necessary. I understand that at this stage of development the game, this most likely will not happen. Just a question
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
This is all the main things that I could remember at the moment, please note that I have not written anything that requires work on game physics or models and textures (almost), basically just change some numbers.
Anyway thank you very much for your attention and the time spent if you had the strength to read everything. Many thanks to you and your entire team for the game. And please add ability to build a railway in the game, I'm tired of driving transport on the way to the merchant (just kidding)
First of all many thanks to you and your team for this game, 7DTD is really awesome! Me and my friends got a lot of pleasant emotions and memories associated with this game, thank you
I read the list of changes in alpha 20 and was pleasantly surprised how much these changes corresponded to my expectations, I literally voiced many of these points during the game, but I would like you to know what features could improve the game in my opinion (sorry for maybe not perfect english)
this is just my subjective opinion, of course I do not demand, but I convey my opinion and I understand that my vision of the game most likely does not coincide with yours
1. Hardcore mode - yes, I mean that game mode with one life as a checkmark in the settings before creating the world. Someone will say that I can decide for myself whether to continue playing after the first death or not, but you must agree that it is very difficult to abandon the progress achieved wanting to play perfectly, but at the same time there are players who, for this very reason, do not try to survive. Many people generally abuse the ability to die (replenishment of food and water, zeroing of negative statuses, and so on) and honest players do not use this just in order not to lose interest in the game. I am not asking to make such a mode mandatory, but possible without mods
I have seen videos on YouTube where people are proud to withstand very dangerous waves directly using their death as a survival tool, this is absurd
In addition, an intermediate option is possible, along with this, you can add the ability to preserve peace and progress. Suppose players play a hardcore mode with 1 life, they can save before the bloody moon or a dangerous mission and in case of failure, death, roll back the world to the time of saving and try again. This will save you from annoyance after accidental death, but it will leave joy from a flawless victory
2. Increase penalties for hunger and thirst up to the death of a character - I don't really understand why you can't die of exhaustion in a survival game, again, to be honest, you don't really care about food in this game , maybe it's even beneficial not to waste time looking for and creating food (again, you can die to replenish satiety) Even if you can't die from it, the penalties for hunger and thirst should be significantly more substantial than a slight decrease in stamina.
3. Death Penalties - based on the first two points, it is quite obvious that players do not consider death losses, especially if they do it on purpose (items can be put in a chest) Did you think that the 10% experience penalty from the current level is prohibitively small? Perhaps an eternal (or very long) decrease in maximum health/stamina or an increase, instead of decrease in difficulty, to make it harder and harder to play if the player dies too often, and not vice versa
4. Zombie intelligence - literally in the first days of the game, it so happened that without any guides I calculated the optimal (in my opinion imbalanced) defense system in bloody moons. The thing is that during bloody moon zombies, obviously, calculate the shortest path to the player and follow only it (maybe they still trigger on the doors because instead of breaking a concrete block with a strength of 2500 they hit a reinforced door with a strength of more than 7000).
Therefore, as soon as the player digs a moat around the base and makes an exit from it leading to the door behind which the player is hiding, the player becomes almost invulnerable with a proper supply of ammunition to destroy them behind the door through the holes (I played at all difficulty levels and only demolishers can oppose something to this, and then by mistake of the player who shot the bomb)
I think all experienced players follow this tactic and it's very boring. Dont you think it is necessary to lay some randomization in the choice of path for zombies? For example, with some small probability, some zombie would choose not most optimal path. For example, they would not run out of the moat, but start digging under the shelter or attack not the door, but the walls. This change would not affect the physics of the game, I'm not talking about they have to act smart, but sometimes they have to act unpredictably
It is about this point that zombies act too predictably. This makes it easy and boring to defend.
5. Nerf of electric fence and explosives. This is incredibly helpful in defending the base during the blood moon. The electric fence slows down the zombies very strongly and it will not break even if 500 or 1000 zombies pass through this thread per night (because parts of the electric fence can stand very far from the combat zone) I understand that it may not be possible to make some kind of victim counter on the fence, but maybe you just need to weaken its effect?
But what does explosives do? It's not even about too strong a grenade launcher, but pipe bombs are incredibly powerful, even at the highest level of difficulty hordes of zombies are ground to powder from some small pipes with gunpowder. It's imbalanced
6. Nerf repairing blocks and doors in battle. Another reason it is very easy to defend is repairing doors during a siege. Is it okay that with a nail gun you can repair thousands of durability on a door in a matter of seconds? With the proper supply of steel, you don't even have to kill them, you can just stand and repair the door (I haven't tested it, but it looks like this)
You can simply add the condition that if the block is attacked, then it takes more time to repair it or repair is not available at all
7. Rework some perks, especially on weapons and armors - you yourself should know that there are completely useless perks in the game, it's sad to see them realizing that they could be better and then the player would have a choice. I'm talking about completely dead branches of weapons (in fact, all melee weapons are almost dead and make no sense, all these spears, bows, crossbows, electric batons and brass knuckles are just too weak and unnecessary weapons partly due to weak perks) The creation of armor is simply useless because it is not difficult to find or buy. Now, if the perk for creating armor would give bonuses when wearing it, it would be a completely different story.
In general, many perks look boring. Most often, when improving them, you do not receive any special bonus, you just receive, conditionally, 20/40/60/80/100% damage and that's it. There is no motivation to upgrade many of them, even for the sake of fun. It seems to me that the developer's task is to make any kind of weapon playable, but now in the game, in fact, there is only a grenade launcher, an automatic shotgun and, possibly, a machine gun (for which you will get tired of creating bullets). The rest of the weapon is a deliberate loss.
8. First aid bandages - what do you think player should be doing during the first days of survival? I don't think he should be looking for the desert on foot to collect the aloever. Otherwise, he will not have the simplest way to heal himself. Either he must abuse death or seek out the desert with a stone axe and a grassy tunic. It might be worth adding a new type of grass for the green biome from which you could make at least some medicine, say, a mini-bandage that replenishes 5 or 10 health points. In addition, you write that the desert will become a more harder biome. In this case, why do you need bandages in the game if you can only craft them when you get a truck and a supply of first-aid kits? (I'm exaggerating)
9. Loot from regular zombies - It would be nice to be able to find a few dollars after killing a wandering zombie. Why not? True, it is difficult to think of what they can find useful besides money
10. Useless dropped loot from an airplane - is a fact. Most likely there are a couple of cans of food and a few cartridges. Almost always not worth the time. It seems that it does not depend on the gamestage. Then why is it in the game?
11. Challenge Quests - you spent time developing note assignments, but I don't understand what they are for? For completing them, you get about the same experience as for killing one zombie, 350 dukes are not worth this time absolutely. Perhaps it is worth at least making the reward dependent on the gamestage, this would be enough for the motivation to chase rabbits with a nail gun.
Perhaps it is worth using the mechanics of the quest chain and then the reward will depend not on the stage of the game, but on the number of completed challenges, thus some players can diversify the routine cleaning of factories and hospitals
12. Vehicle - why is the truck so slow? why is a motorcycle as slow as a truck? why is there only two places in the truck? (I saw about modifications, that's great, thanks)
By the way, in addition to the modifications you specified, I would add a modification for the damage when knocking down zombies (so that you can destroy them as in carmageddon but it may affect the balance in the bloody moon)
13. Infection - you need to do something with it, I actually did not notice its influence for 300 hours in the game. Yes, after zombie hits, I got an infection many times, but I have never experienced problems with curing it, so I never knew what would happen if it rises above a few percent
14. Zombie "tank" - Since there are "special" zombies in the game, why is there not one among them who would break down walls and smash doors? After all, this is obvious. Let it be large and slow so that it can be destroyed from afar, but this would greatly diversify the defense process during the bloody moon and, by the way, would make sniper rifles necessary. I understand that at this stage of development the game, this most likely will not happen. Just a question
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
This is all the main things that I could remember at the moment, please note that I have not written anything that requires work on game physics or models and textures (almost), basically just change some numbers.
Anyway thank you very much for your attention and the time spent if you had the strength to read everything. Many thanks to you and your entire team for the game. And please add ability to build a railway in the game, I'm tired of driving transport on the way to the merchant (just kidding)
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Matt115
New member
Anywho know what software TfP to make characters models? i was thinking how much time it takes to create one zombie and maybe try to make some zombie modelsI am Dummy thicc and the clap of my Butt cheeks are destroying your base walls
https://twitter.com/7DaystoDie/status/1382359396924071939
Looking pretty cool but... why does he have a Western revolver? idc It looks great. i want to see what the feral and the spider zombie look like
faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
Stealth still works. Feral sense is basically zombie hearing and seeing x2.5, which is mod-able in xml and may be tweaked before release.
Blake_
Captain Obvious
Good afternoon (?) @faatal. I have a bunch of déjà vu questions for you.
1- Is a20 playable to some extent and/or did you have time to test/play it a bit these past few days for your own purposes ? Any highlight will be appreciated .
2-What are you working on at the moment ?
3- Do you know what the target/intended features for 19.5 ( that were ported from a20) are ?
4- Something you can share about interesting stuff from other departments/teams ? Anything will do ( things like new art team stuff info, RWG info, new features, a new wig for Prime, Roland's last Pi number findings...etc).
5- Can you name a feature that you really want to do (for 7dtd) and you wish you had the time for it , either current alpha or future ones ?
1- Is a20 playable to some extent and/or did you have time to test/play it a bit these past few days for your own purposes ? Any highlight will be appreciated .
2-What are you working on at the moment ?
3- Do you know what the target/intended features for 19.5 ( that were ported from a20) are ?
4- Something you can share about interesting stuff from other departments/teams ? Anything will do ( things like new art team stuff info, RWG info, new features, a new wig for Prime, Roland's last Pi number findings...etc).
5- Can you name a feature that you really want to do (for 7dtd) and you wish you had the time for it , either current alpha or future ones ?
MechanicalLens
New member
faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
Very playable. I played it briefly last week to test feral sense. All the normal stuff works fine, just some features like the block shape UI update are in flux.
faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
GoldsharkROU
New member
Sounds beautiful!!!, Is something going to change about the sound? I say because today I´m three meters from a sleeper and he doesn´t know that I am disarming a car with a lot of noise, or breaking a bed etc. It is quite shocking that we feel it very high and the Z doesn´t even know.
faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
By design, sleepers are passive and won't hear sounds until you enter their sleeper volume, because we don't want large sections of a POI being awake and bashing through stuff before you get there. POI designers can group sleeper volumes to help with what you describe, so a debug screenshot using shift+f11 of where you are at would let us see what POI(s) has the issue. We have a ton of POIs, many made before we could group volumes, so there are probably many places where it could be improved.Sounds beautiful!!!, Is something going to change about the sound? I say because today I´m three meters from a sleeper and he doesn´t know that I am disarming a car with a lot of noise, or breaking a bed etc. It is quite shocking that we feel it very high and the Z doesn´t even know.
Morloc
Arch Necromancer
SarkMCPFan
New member
i just hope that option for city selector does mean bigger and more cities.. sometimes i make a new world and hardly find anything good.. (mostly the small ones)
Khalagar
Active member
Yessss
I really hope there's some more features to bring back that "new to the game" horror. I still vividly remember the first time I played the game and was holed up in a PoI absolutely TERRIFIED at the sounds of the zombies outside the walls trying to find me as I cooked my meat and light was shining through the windows because I didn't cover them up well enough etc. They of course ripped through the walls while I was crapping my pants and trying to hide on the stairs and break the stairs so they couldn't chase me up. Literally spent every night in that crappy half ripped down PoI crouch walking and hiding in absolute terror
Now days I just go do quests at night even with running zombies since they just don't seem to aggro or group up in enough numbers to be a major threat even early game. They just don't seem to have anywhere near the aggro radius they used to even when I've got forges and campfires going in what should be open sight
Honestly, I would really like if there was just a feature to make the zombie senses SUPER sharp at night. It would be great if nights were absolutely horrifying and dangerous to go out in.
Gimme dem roaming hordes that spawn in massively increased frequency at night and can sense noise / heatmap / cooking meat from hundreds of blocks away. Mini horde night every night!
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Diragor
New member
The last weekend I started a new world with a friend and used the Nitrogen World Generator and created a only Wasteland Map with a small Snow and Desert Biome. And damn was it horrifying to play. I LOVE IT!!! The wasteland feels like real survival and finally the world isn't epty there. You always need to expect the worst. Walk into a mine or a dog follows you or the damn bears
We had so much fun and Now I got a question for the RWG.
Will it be a bit more complex like the nitrogen generator? Like create bigger cities and towns. Cause Vanilla RWG always feels too empty. Also I wish there would be an only Wasteland option cause the forests are too boring for players with 1000+ hours
We had so much fun and Now I got a question for the RWG.
Will it be a bit more complex like the nitrogen generator? Like create bigger cities and towns. Cause Vanilla RWG always feels too empty. Also I wish there would be an only Wasteland option cause the forests are too boring for players with 1000+ hours
meilodasreh
New member
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