PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[khzmusik]

There has been more than enough simplification over the years. They are new players, things are supposed to be confusing. Hell, we already have glowing symbols floating over rocks and nests. Why not just have the game autocraft what it thinks you need at that time as soon as you have the resources in your inventory. Why even have different resources? Just have everything scrap to "scrap material" and you can craft everything from frames to vehicles with this same resource. The game already progresses too fast as it is. If you don't even have to wait for things to smelt anymore, it just gets that much faster. I do not think that is a good thing.

I agree that TFP should leave in the mechanic where you have to smelt items into the forge to get materials.

I disagree that it's supposed to be confusing.

Complex game mechanics can, and should, be presented so that novice players can understand them.  For example, hover tooltips - when you hover over an area in the forge window, something pops up that says "add fuel here" or "add items to smelt here," and the output window could say "here are the raw materials smelted into the forge, use these to craft items" or similar. The game mechanics would be exactly the same, but new players would be less likely to look at the forge window and not know what the hell they're supposed to do.

That's what 7D2D should be doing IMHO - not making things simpler, but making things easier to understand.

 

[Juank]

Regarding the new sounds: it's a hit & miss. Some are improvements, some feel like they are about the same but unfamiliar, but some are absolutely awful, unsatisfying and unsuited to the action. I think the importance of being "satisfying" cannot be understated. Repetitive actions such as mining are satisfying in 7 Days to Die in no small part because the sound effect is satisfying, and it would be a terrible shame to lose that.

Indeed. The metal sound was fine, now, it seems like we are hiting some kind of rubber-plastic-metal or something different that a metal sourface.

 

[Callum123456789]

this is my ultra safe base area with like a wall of steel then another layer of it to ensure safety its costly but really good also the light casting on metal seems noticeably better than a19 am i crazy or has that been improved? 

 

[retrogamingdev]

Never seen. Does it happen again on game restart?

It happened on restart and after I started a new RWG game. I exited cleaned my game files (in the launcher) and now it seems good. 

 

[JoeDaFrogman]

i have 2 questions. 1st when will alpha20 be out of experimental? 2nd) how come it seems like me (and a couple others i talked to) have broken rwg no matter what names we put in the 6k, 8k, and 10k maps stay the same (6k is juvupe valley, 8k is west Xuyofu territory) 

I have generated well over 600+ worlds in the past 2 weeks.  You are doing something wrong.  Open a dedicated thread with you exact steps(leave nothing out) and we can get you sorted.  

 

[retrogamingdev]

That's what 7D2D should be doing IMHO - not making things simpler, but making things easier to understand.

This 100%. At this point it is UX/UI type stuff vs actually changing the systems greatly. 

 

[Star69]

Just my own, basic XML edits. When your rig takes 2 seconds does that feel good to you? Would more regular calls of that "unload unused resources" be better maybe? I don't know but it doesn't seem good to me how it is performing right now. The game is otherwise smooth and over 100fps in most cases and then you push E and get lagged out. Or talk to a shop owner and get lagged out.

I've noticed in other Unity games due to my 64GB ram it has higher RAM usage than most people. Do you have 64GB of RAM?

I'll also add that I did add 4 other traders to the same trader just so I have some variety at the one trader I typically visit (f6 -> static spawn). Maybe that is causing an issue not sure. My base is somewhat close to them. Also most of the hitches are like .5 to 1 second like you mention. It is just every 30-60 minutes I get one of the long ones like the game is about to crash.

I have the same setup as you except I have 32gigs of ram and I’m not experiencing what you are, the hitches are so slight that I don’t even notice them anymore.

 

[Forgotten Memes]

Is there a way to disable weather effects? They nuke my framerate into the ground and I have to restart the game to fix.

 

[Gazz]

Complex game mechanics can, and should, be presented so that novice players can understand them.

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

 

[dcsobral]

View attachment 22163this is my ultra safe base area with like a wall of steel then another layer of it to ensure safety its costly but really good also the light casting on metal seems noticeably better than a19 am i crazy or has that been improved? 

There were improvements to a bunch of sources of light -- the campfire included, I believe -- very recently (b231 to be precise). 

 

[POCKET951]

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

it may be bloat...but it adds friction and makes deciding to craft require a bit more investment and patience. idk this sounds silly but I like the nuance of having to smelt things in the forge before I can use it, as annoying and pointless as it is, it feels good to do, and it also frees up some storage space

 

[dcsobral]

Were the PREGEN maps updated?

 

[gpcstargate]

Is there a way to disable weather effects? They nuke my framerate into the ground and I have to restart the game to fix.

Tilda Key ~ If you must ...... " 7 Days to Die Console Commands " ....... "Edit _ use .. F1"

• weather = Control weather settings
  
• weathersurvival = Enables/disables weather survival
  

 

[faatal]

Just my own, basic XML edits. When your rig takes 2 seconds does that feel good to you? Would more regular calls of that "unload unused resources" be better maybe? I don't know but it doesn't seem good to me how it is performing right now. The game is otherwise smooth and over 100fps in most cases and then you push E and get lagged out. Or talk to a shop owner and get lagged out.

I've noticed in other Unity games due to my 64GB ram it has higher RAM usage than most people. Do you have 64GB of RAM?

I'll also add that I did add 4 other traders to the same trader just so I have some variety at the one trader I typically visit (f6 -> static spawn). Maybe that is causing an issue not sure. My base is somewhat close to them. Also most of the hitches are like .5 to 1 second like you mention. It is just every 30-60 minutes I get one of the long ones like the game is about to crash.

Many things don't feel good but are not fixable in practical terms. Sometimes things can be changed, but they are not worth the investment. Redoing resource management would be nice, but would take months of time and then may only get little to no gain.

There is a fixed cost, since it has to scan all loaded resources, so doing it say every minute would be more annoying to only save .1 secs. Games typically hide this stuff with loading screens between levels/stages/whatever, which we don't have. Maybe someday Unity will have an incremental way of doing that.

Being Unity (or really any engine), there are often uncontrollable things we have to live with. Code can only be improved so much before you hit a performance wall.

I have 32GB, so maybe, but I've never heard of Unity doing anything different with 64GB.

Tilda Key ~ If you must.

• weather = Control weather settings
  
• weathersurvival = Enables/disables weather survival
  

F1 key opens the console.

 

[Forgotten Memes]

So... what is everyone's thoughts on the super scarcity of acid? I'm on day 36 and I've only found 6 acid so far.5 of it went to a Chem bench and I have hardly seen any. Has anyone had any luck with acid? Also what type of medical containers yield acid when wrenched?

I havn't had any trouble, I find around 1 per day.  Focus tool stores, auto stores and gas stations.  Check janitor carts and sinks.

A nice solution to keeping them rare, but not too rare would be if  you got 1 from wrenching a chem station.

 

[meganoth]

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

Weeell, did you developers think of that when you changed farming in A20 so you need to replant even the harvested seeds ?

One positive about the smelting is that it is a unique mechanic (someone correct me if I'm wrong here and other survival games do something similar). 

Another positive, you actually need to plan ahead what you want to smelt. I often have the situation that I smelt X but then really needed a lot of Y smelted and have to wait longer for my mistake. I don't see how this can be simulated with longer crafting times.

 

[dcsobral]

One positive about the smelting is that it is a unique mechanic (someone correct me if I'm wrong here and other survival games do something similar). 

Journey of Life also has smelting. And, separately, forging. Or at least that was the case last time I played it, but they literally rewrote the game since.

Another positive, you actually need to plan ahead what you want to smelt. I often have the situation that I smelt X but then really needed a lot of Y smelted and have to wait longer for my mistake. I don't see how this can be simulated with longer crafting times.

Clay: you need it for crops and cobblestone.

Iron: repair material and hatches.

Brass: no use outside forges.

Lead: no use outside forges.

Stone: various uses.

Sand: cement.

For the most part if something can go in the forge there's little incentive to not doing so. The only exceptions are ingredients used exclusively for glass. Yeah, sure, it's perfectly possible to screw it up, but it's not really a "I might need this" matter, particularly since you can take the material out of the forge as needed rather quickly.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

Having to smelt does, to a limited extent, factor into time management. If you haven't smelted anything, you can't craft anything. And so you do need to make sure you have items smelted before you can craft something.  It also allows some time shifting since you can smelt resources as you get them to be ready for the final crafted product. If you made the forges work like the workbenches, this would further reduce the need to mine since your crafting would always be perfectly efficient. There would be no resources idling in the forge. 

 

[dcsobral]

Alpha 20 Stable is out? Come on, guys, it's still months until April 1st!

 

[meganoth]

Journey of Life also has smelting. And, separately, forging. Or at least that was the case last time I played it, but they literally rewrote the game since.

Clay: you need it for crops and cobblestone.

Iron: repair material and hatches.

Brass: no use outside forges.

Lead: no use outside forges.

Stone: various uses.

Sand: cement.

For the most part if something can go in the forge there's little incentive to not doing so. The only exceptions are ingredients used exclusively for glass. Yeah, sure, it's perfectly possible to screw it up, but it's not really a "I might need this" matter, particularly since you can take the material out of the forge as needed rather quickly.

The situation I was describing was that you have some time available and you use it to smelt 10000 scrap iron (which you could have used to smelt 10000 brass instead) and suddenly need lots of bullets. Too bad, only 200 brass in the forge, now do some smelting.