PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[meilodasreh]

Could someone explain the notations on aaa_poi_sizes?  Like this, for example, what does A37 and B22 mean?

View attachment 21854

It's a hint for us on how the game development will progress further.

there are 37 planned alpha versions, followed by 22 beta versions. adding to whole 60 more years before gold (g-ratio).

 

[dcsobral]

Don't they have the same speed?

Nowadays the 4x4 and motorcycle have almost the same speed, but that wasn't the case when the 4x4 was introduced. If @meilodasreh really has only driven a 4x4 on alpha 17, then he has no idea what a 4x4 feels like since alpha 18.

 

[beerfly]

Did few more seeds and ffs, RWG is gorgeous. 

Proud of you guys, legends. 

 

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, Jost Amman said:
NOOOO! Please NO! The game is already trader-centric enough!  :rolleyes2:



  Reveal hidden contents

This is the one I'm currently playing in: https://imgur.com/2IR1kB4

My base is within 1km of factory 1, factory 3, skyscrapers 1, 2 and 3 and the apartment building. Among a lot of other things. And three traders.

I was on day 10 when someone sent me that seed, and I decided to restart right away.

 

[Weazelsun]

@madmole was the grease gun an inspiration for the model of the pipe machinegun? Because that's what it reminds me of.

 

[beerfly]

This is the one I'm currently playing in: https://imgur.com/2IR1kB4

My base is within 1km of factory 1, factory 3, skyscrapers 1, 2 and 3 and the apartment building. Among a lot of other things. And three traders.

I was on day 10 when someone sent me that seed, and I decided to restart right away.

There is an awesome spot south of the lake in Wasteland, in this seed you gave, for a villa, a horde night villa if you got bored. 

 

[dcsobral]

And on the note of traders, how about adding an option where if you are inside when the trader closes you can choose to slip him 100 dukes to get a couple more minutes? 

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

Backspace should clear it if you are opening the shape menu.

You don't have to select it. Say you opened the shape menu and searched for something, then closed the shape menu. Next time you open the search menu, you type "f" and that will automatically select the text. Then you press backspace and it is cleared.

Same difference honestly. The difference between selecting it and hitting F is neither here or there for me. The issue is that it takes two steps to clear and more importantly I have to take my hand off the mouse to complete the second step.  A single or even double-click functionality would make the menus much more useable. Alternatively if double pressing F cleared the search window, that would work as well.

On a tangent, how do you clear the Red Waypoint from your map in A20? I'm pretty sure this was possible in A19 but can't figure out how to do it in A20.

Is anyone finding .44 ammo very very rare in loot?  I'm level 50 with game stage 130 and I don't think I've seen a single round from loot.  I can craft it, but it seems odd that loot has done.

It's definitely rare, probably too rare. I'm on Day 36 (60min days) and have found about 100 rounds.  About half were found in the forest biome and the others from some trips in the Desert and Wasteland.

 

[hiemfire]

On a tangent, how do you clear the Red Waypoint from your map in A20? I'm pretty sure this was possible in A19 but can't figure out how to do it in A20.

Iirc clicking the flag symbol on the upper section of the map frame should remove the quick waypoint.

 

[meilodasreh]

Nowadays the 4x4 and motorcycle have almost the same speed, but that wasn't the case when the 4x4 was introduced. If @meilodasreh really has only driven a 4x4 on alpha 17, then he has no idea what a 4x4 feels like since alpha 18.

is it still stuck immediately when touching a too steep slope with rubble piles of burned wood or alike?

still slowed much when touching a tree?

much broader than the motorcycle?

has a bigger turning circle?

is generally more sluggish to maneuver/steer around obstacles?

Then my before statement is still valid.

I prefer to shortcut crosscountry. The 4x4 sucked when I tried last time. Did it get some love considering offroad ability?

If you say its worth a try I will give it a shot, but I guess I will teleport me one via creative mode then, not to waste time and mats.

I have the strong feeling that big clumsy thing still doesn't correspond with my driving style.

Last time I got that thing permanently stuck against ore deposits, rocks, trees and so on.

And it really should be like that if you ask me. Driving such a battleship through a forest and everything is just knocked aside would be fun only for a very short time.

 

[Kire]

Suggestion for screamers: 
Make them spawn zombies when taking damage, not just when they see you. right now they seem non existant to me, they spawn and run into a spike and die. would be more fun if they called for help when taking damage

 

[overgoat]

Suggestion for screamers: 
Make them spawn zombies when taking damage, not just when they see you. right now they seem non existant to me, they spawn and run into a spike and die. would be more fun if they called for help when taking damage

Screamers with feral sense turned on are way meaner.  They sometimes scream without 'seeing' you and often spawn additional screamers.  I had a 60-70 zombie screamer horde recently.  Felt like a mini blood moon.

 

[Khalagar]

I didn´t try it myself yet, but there are several people saying that they could avoid that stealth check, wich i guess is still connected with the sleeper volume, by breaking walls and getting sneak kills easier than actually beeing silent using the intended way. That is a huge flaw in the stealth system.

I can confirm this is the case, and it's why I still think stealth is a noob trap perk. I have zero points in stealth and will regularly clear the entire sleeper room by just crouching down outside it and picking them all off with an unsilenced rifle, or in many cases, literally pulling out a shotgun and just blowing their heads off from 30 feet away while their buddies sleep next to them.

You can still break a block to get a better angle into the room for more head shots and they zeds don't care, they only care if you step into the room or if you miss a shot and damage a block in the room, which seems to count as you being in the room with them, but it usually only applies to the floor and not the walls.

Stealth as a whole is always going to be a fairly awful skill because horde nights exist, which means your entire build is useless on the hardest night of the week. Especially in coop it's hard to compete with a dude who just holds Shift + W + M1 with a shotgun and clears the entire PoI before you have even crouch walked past the first floor

So I just accepted the traps bundle for T1 quest completion in a creative test world and they are... really quite very horrible? 5 wooden spikes, 5 barbed wire fences, and 15 landmines? That almost feels like a trap, pun not intended. I was expecting a dart trap and/or a blade trap and/or electric fences but...

Constructive feedback time: Please TFP, please make this bundle type worth its weight, because currently... it's very bad. haha

Yep, my friend picked a level 2 or 3 trap one for some unknowable reason, and got like 5 metal spike traps and a couple of land mines. Meanwhile I was like . . .  but the farm plots / mods / vehicle parts dude wtf

 

[Gazz]

I have tried shotgun and machine gun when testing balance and yes, it's kinda true.

I just enjoy the stealth gameplay and there is no one I need to impress with x zombies killed per day. =P

 

[Frankencow]

I'm personally all for harsher death penalties. I had an awesome experience yesterday while infected and hungry. Wandering horde was on top of me trying to get to me at night. When I died I was fine and it took all the fun and excitement away from the experience knowing that i can just die to fix it all. The XP penalty isn't large enough to really care as with a few zombie kills I was right back where I needed to be.

I did make a modlet for anyone who wants to test out what harsher death penalties would be like. It halves the food and water on respawn to 50 percent of your max, it  keeps infection and broken arms and legs on respawn but will clear infection when it reaches 100 percent and you die, and it raises the limit on XP deficit from 50 percent max deficit to 100 percent max so if you die 4 times it will no longer accumulate deficit.

I find this is harsher but not too harsh like it used to be in A17.

You can find it here  Jax Death Modlets Among Others

That said A20 has been amazing in my opinion. The sense of fear is back and I am not looking to mod things as fast as in other Alphas. This is a home run imo and the pois and danger present are amazing. Great work Mad Mole and the team! This is a huge step in the right direction!

PS - I love the farming now. It means something and it is not easy mode. You have to WORK to get a farm up and it feels like an accomplishment so put me in the camo of being a fan of the changes.

PPS - Yuck on the image with the link can we make it so theres no image?

I also would be OK with harsher death penalties, but I also tend to just start new games on death in SP. (I also enjoy TLD on Interloper.)

One idea for multiplayer that would cause a greater sting of death without changing gameplay would simply be to add some kind of social/badge element to zero-death play. On a fresh seed, as long as you have remained death-free (or configurable: "under X deaths" total; or perhaps average less-than 1 death per 200 game days; etc) the player screen and chat gives you some kind of trophy or hero/survivor indicator next to your name.

For a lot of people in multiplayer settings, the sting of losing the reputation and bragging rights is greater than anything the game mechanics themselves could impose.

If you then wanted to take it further, game mechanics could be tied to that status. Trading Lobbies  that can only be entered by "Survivors", speed, health, crafting bonuses, or whatever. But even just reputation alone would be a big incentive.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

I have tried shotgun and machine gun when testing balance and yes, it's kinda true.

I just enjoy the stealth gameplay and there is no one I need to impress with x zombies killed per day. =P

So what´s the take on beeing able to break walls to be better at sneak killing than when you are actually beeing silent? That´s utterly stupid tbh. Is there a fix planned?

 

[Doomofman]

Is there more work being done on performance in cities and even performance in general?

 

[Khalagar]

there is no one I need to impress with x zombies killed per day. =P

Devs confirmed to be filthy casuals

SMH I bet Madmole has least a 40 to 1 KD ratio, get on his level

 

[Mechanimal]

Not sure how well the stealth is working, but right now I am typing this as I wait out the night... underground... in a city... in the wasteland. I shall not as much as scratch my nose until I hear that morning jingle. I have not perked into stealth at all except for one level of Hidden Strike, but that's just a damage bonus, gives me no extra stealthiness.

This is only my second time in the wasteland this playthrough, the first was an amazingly fun super scary night of WHAT THE F EVEN IS THAAAAT... NOPE... I am shocked I survived(albeit barely). I had not even yet been to the desert, nor the snow, and THOUGHT I was just taking another "Restore Power" quest in the forest biome, but Jen sent me to the wasteland... restore power is a night thing... it was on a farm, a big open farm where every high level Z could see and join in. And they did, I ended up cornered in a little shack with hatches on the doors, my trusty turret, and a dream of seeing daylight once again.

Was one hell of an intro to how much biomes stage things up. Haven't been that challenged in a long time... except for right now as I listen to all the footsteps above me, just waiting for me to make the slightest sound before I go up and clear that Level 5 skyscraper... in the morning of course.

This really is a substantial alpha TFP, I only started in A16 but have over 3k hrs already. Heard many stories about how cities used to be scary AF, had to imagine that, but not anymore. Too many awesome things to congrats you on this time around, wish me luck(I'm in danger). 

 

[Khalagar]

For added fun, I highly recommend this mod to make the roaming hordes bigger. With feral senses on you can get some legit zombie movie moments when suddenly 20-50+ zombies come tearing their way into a PoI / your base. I spent several hours trapped in a trader's PoI as it was sieged by a horde, and early game I pretty much was always crouched all night with my lights off trying to stealthily open chests etc. 

Def added a lot of scary moments to the early game, and after using it I feel like vanilla roaming hordes should be at least 2x size