PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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Roland said:
I needed this a couple days ago when Mr. Program Manager of office software was trying to analyze TFP workflow according to the way things work in his background...
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Yeah, that's what made me think of it. Mr. Program Manager was entirely correct for the vast majority of large software corporations.

But, it seems like game development is more like working in a startup (which I've also done, briefly, while still in college). Basically, everyone is a cowboy, unit tests are considered a waste of time, "requirements" are just what developers believe customers will think is "cool," nothing is documented, everyone works 70+ hours/week, etc. (I do not speak from experience in the gaming industry, so I could easily be wrong.)

At the place where I currently work, they hired a boss who worked at (and sometimes founded) companies like this, and tried to bring that work ethic into our team. It was absolutely horrible. I started looking for another job not long after he took over, and do not ever want to work that way again. Fortunately, like a lot of cowboy bosses, he left the team for greener pastures, and the current boss is much better.

 
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Gazz said:
If you clear the entire map of super corn then you need to accept a quest to reset one of the Bob's Boars POIs.

If you are already farming it you only need 1 level in the farming perk to make a profit.
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What happened to the percentage chance of no seeds? Is that negated by investing in Living off the Land?

I hope so 🙄

 
Will no one think of the seeds!

We farmers are yet again under attack after all this time thinking that the protections of the seminal "Hoe V Spade" ruling of many alphas ago would prevail.  They have not!

Many thought they could relax under the visionary TFP ruling but here we are yet again at each others throats and blockading the local seed merchants and their poor employees as they try to go about their daily lives.

How many seed will be left to rot or be planted in the wrong soil.

Sad times indeed.  We should all come together in the spirit of the season (New Alpha) and speak harmoniously of seeds and their crucial role in our lives.

Bless the seeds and all you are touched by them.

Well that's the stupid out for the day.  Have fun and stay safe everyone

 
I have checked the release notes via searching for "map" and noticed on a a few streams something that I assume to be a bug OR an undocumented feature in the release notes:

Specifically, on the in game player map, the icons assigned show up, but the labels no longer do in A20(as they used to do in A19).    Is this a feature(got I hope not!) that is not documented(or perhaps not well) in the release notes?  Or is this something to be considered a bug for fixing?

 
Eromivus said:
I'm sorry if these have already been pointed out or this is the wrong spot for it, but a few things I've noticed watching Jawoodle's two videos:

1. Zombies on his horde night wouldn't climb ladders to get to him, so they just milled about and randomly swatted at stuff below him

2. Raining indoors again

3. This could be pre-existing behavior and I'm only noticing it because there's more stuff in the world, but zombies seems to be getting distracted and caught by objects that pose no threat. They just seem to be ignoring the player more to do inane things, but again I can't swear to this.
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#1 and #2 existed in A19 too.

You can see #1 in action of you watch Glock9's Farmer Glock series. In his horde base, he had to add an open hatch to the ceiling above his ladder, even though it was maybe 5 blocks above the end of the ladder, or the zombies wouldn't climb.

#2 appears to only happen with POI blocks. Player-crafted blocks seem to block the rain. At least that's how it works for me in A19.

#3 seems to be an A20 bug, I've heard more than one streamer comment about it.

 
khzmusik said:
#1 and #2 existed in A19 too.

You can see #1 in action of you watch Glock9's Farmer Glock series. In his horde base, he had to add an open hatch to the ceiling above his ladder, even though it was maybe 5 blocks above the end of the ladder, or the zombies wouldn't climb.

#2 appears to only happen with POI blocks. Player-crafted blocks seem to block the rain. At least that's how it works for me in A19.

#3 seems to be an A20 bug, I've heard more than one streamer comment about it.
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Thanks for the info. I haven't had rain inside of any POI's for A19, but I will say it doesn't rain much in general, so I guess it's possible the two just haven't happened concurrently so I was just assuming it was fixed.

 
Eromivus said:
Thanks for the info. I haven't had rain inside of any POI's for A19, but I will say it doesn't rain much in general, so I guess it's possible the two just haven't happened concurrently so I was just assuming it was fixed.
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I had rain inside pois in a19  a18 a17 etc been around a while.

 
khzmusik said:
This is categorically not true. It's actually how development works in most major companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc). I speak from some experience.

The gaming industry works very, very differently than other programming industries. I'm glad I don't work in it. :)
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Well, my post was specifically about the game industry. I don't care how long it takes to do other types of programming. We do tons of experimentation and deal with lots of unknown problems. You know how many times I have to fix a bug that can take 5 minutes or 5 days? A lot. How do you schedule how long it will take to fix an unknown amount of bugs that take unknown amounts of time to fix? You guess and guesses are often wrong.

 
khzmusik said:
Yeah, that's what made me think of it. Mr. Program Manager was entirely correct for the vast majority of large software corporations.

But, it seems like game development is more like working in a startup (which I've also done, briefly, while still in college). Basically, everyone is a cowboy, unit tests are considered a waste of time, "requirements" are just what developers believe customers will think is "cool," nothing is documented, everyone works 70+ hours/week, etc. (I do not speak from experience in the gaming industry, so I could easily be wrong.)

At the place where I currently work, they hired a boss who worked at (and sometimes founded) companies like this, and tried to bring that work ethic into our team. It was absolutely horrible. I started looking for another job not long after he took over, and do not ever want to work that way again. Fortunately, like a lot of cowboy bosses, he left the team for greener pastures, and the current boss is much better.
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I do not believe in working 70+ hour weeks or even 60 hours, except in rare occasions. Several studies over the years and my own experience tell me you get diminishing returns until you reach a point you are so burned out, you make extra bugs and bad decisions, subtracting from what you actually fix or improve. Meaning you could of just stopped at 50 hours and got the same net amount of work done.

 
faatal said:
Well, my post was specifically about the game industry. I don't care how long it takes to do other types of programming. We do tons of experimentation and deal with lots of unknown problems. You know how many times I have to fix a bug that can take 5 minutes or 5 days? A lot. How do you schedule how long it will take to fix an unknown amount of bugs that take unknown amounts of time to fix? You guess and guesses are often wrong.
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Not in the game industry, but I am a developer by trade.     I can't tell you just how many times I estimated a problem to take 2 hours to fix and it took 8 days, or how many times I estimated a problem to take 5 days and it took 20 minutes.      When dealing with pretty much more than a singular programmer(and sometimes not even then depending on the size/age of the code base), you can't really estimate something you are not intimately familiar with.

Then, on the other side, there are times where I want to spend an hour in the code to create edit code to make it more flexible and easier to deal with in the long run, but would cause a massive set of regression cases that would take QA weeks we can't afford to spend.

 
faatal said:
I do not believe in working 70+ hour weeks or even 60 hours, except in rare occasions. Several studies over the years and my own experience tell me you get diminishing returns until you reach a point you are so burned out, you make extra bugs and bad decisions, subtracting from what you actually fix or improve. Meaning you could of just stopped at 50 hours and got the same net amount of work done.
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That's exactly right IMHO.

Incidentally, I was not trying to diss you personally, nor The Fun Pimps. But it seems like everyone who works there had already worked as some kind of developer in the gaming industry, and that tends to skew your perspective, because the gaming industry is very exploitive of its developers and its workers in general.

My reaction was against the notion that doing things like "planning something on paper" - meaning, having written product requirements before starting development - simply can't work for anything more than a quick bug fix. That's not true at all, and in every place that isn't a game development company, they do it that way because developers work better that way. ("Better" meaning faster, with less overtime, producing fewer bugs, etc.)

If that's not how you work best, and it's not how you want to work, then that's fine. But thinking that it simply can't work any other way concerns me. To my outsider ears, it sounds like you're so used to working in an unhealthy environment, you believe you can't get the job done when working in a healthy environment. I hope I'm wrong.

 
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khzmusik said:
That's exactly right IMHO.

Incidentally, I was not trying to diss you personally, nor The Fun Pimps. But it seems like everyone who works there had already worked as some kind of developer in the gaming industry, and that tends to skew your perspective, because the gaming industry is very exploitive of its developers and its workers in general.

My reaction was against the notion that doing things like "planning something on paper" - meaning, having written product requirements before starting development - simply can't work for anything more than a quick bug fix. That's not true at all, and in every place that isn't a game development company, they do it that way because developers work better that way. ("Better" meaning faster, with less overtime, producing fewer bugs, etc.)

If that's not how you work best, and it's not how you want to work, then that's fine. But thinking that it simply can't work any other way concerns me. To my outsider ears, it sounds like you're so used to working in an unhealthy environment, you believe you can't get the job done when working in a healthy environment. I hope I'm wrong.
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I understand your point. There is value in planning and many people work better with a strong structure. I'm self motivated and just tend to like to jump around and work on multiple things. Brainstorm stuff and just do it. I actually get bored working on the same thing for more that a few days. Documentation also bores me, so I prefer to do the minimum to get a task moving along.

 
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I'm pretty sure I responded to Gazz with a question regarding his statement about the Living off the Land perk, but it seems to have been deleted.

I will ask again.

Does the perk at level 1 negate the percentage based chance of getting seeds back and instead guarantee it?

 
Beelzebubs Ghost said:
What happened to the percentage chance of no seeds? Is that negated by investing in Living off the Land?

I hope so 🙄
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Beelzebubs Ghost said:
I'm pretty sure I responded to Gazz with a question regarding his statement about the Living off the Land perk, but it seems to have been deleted.

I will ask again.

Does the perk at level 1 negate the percentage based chance of getting seeds back and instead guarantee it?
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Both still there. Maybe Gazz will answer twice. :)

 
Beelzebubs Ghost said:
Does the perk at level 1 negate the percentage based chance of getting seeds back and instead guarantee it?
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No, but it should. I don't see any streamer that likes the RNG seed type, and they have a point that it basically just makes you not want to even touch farming until late game (if even then)

 
@Laz Man Are there plans to add the switches/triggers to most existing POI’s?

Also roughly how many POI’s are questable with the restore power quest type? I noticed in a stream there were some from the trader, but were 3+ kilometers away… I’m assuming this will improve the more POI’s get this quest type?

P.S. love all the work you and team have put into the new POI’s. Can’t wait till Monday!!!

 
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