PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

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Riamus said:
Just having water no longer leave divets if you dig under it or if it isn't filled full enough would need a great improvement.  That's the most noticeable issue, imo.

I also like that it will share space with other blocks and that movement suited in water will be improved.

I don't know that it really needs anything else. Having good looking waterfalls would be nice, but isn't really that important.
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This is what I mean by “good enough”

 
khzmusik said:
That's a pity. I know lots of people are looking forward to NPCs being in the game.

Out of curiosity, is the in-progress bandit code going to be shipped with the alpha, just disabled/unused? Or is all the work in a feature branch that won't even get merged into the A21 branch?

I'm asking on behalf of modders who may or may not be myself. :)  
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Me too.

Disabled. Some data removed.

 
Fanatical_Meat said:
move on to the next project
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It was my understanding from what Roland said many pages back that the next project is currently being worked on. Granted it's still in the planning and concepual phase, but even if 7DTD was done and dusted yesterday the next project would need to complete it's current planning phase to actually be worked on. There's nothing to the next project being lost by them working on water so it works as they intend it to. 

I want the team to work on what they need to & want to so it's the best it can be. That way when it is finished the player outcry of it could have been done better is minimal. 

 
Jinx_DG said:
It was my understanding from what Roland said many pages back that the next project is currently being worked on. Granted it's still in the planning and concepual phase, but even if 7DTD was done and dusted yesterday the next project would need to complete it's current planning phase to actually be worked on. There's nothing to the next project being lost by them working on water so it works as they intend it to. 

I want the team to work on what they need to & want to so it's the best it can be. That way when it is finished the player outcry of it could have been done better is minimal. 
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From the YouTube interview it’s something like 90% working on 7D2D. They have six (I think) doing work on the new titles. Obviously wrapping up 7D2D sooner would allow more staff to work on new stuff.

 
Fanatical_Meat said:
From the YouTube interview it’s something like 90% working on 7D2D. They have six (I think) doing work on the new titles. Obviously wrapping up 7D2D sooner would allow more staff to work on new stuff.
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Depends on the staffs area of expertise. Staff members are specialized and may not be able to do other aspects in game developement. Just because you have them doesn't mean you can use them in the current phase. 

 
meilodasreh said:
that cool "easteregg" POI at the southernmost edge of the navezgane map has some nice outside landscape with cascading water, which does a really good job of "simulating" a flowing river if you ask me.
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What POI is it? I am genuinely curious and would love to go look at it in game!

 
meganoth said:
No, the important use case is to show the blocks you can shoot through, water is just icing on the cake.

Or am I confusing it with the selecting-through-a-block issue? Arrow slits for example should still be shoot-through, but you can not access a dart thrower behind it.
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Quoting myself here as I have some info to add to this:

I made a test with about 12 blocks with holes of various shapes and tried to shoot or melee zombies through it. For most of them that was no problem. But 3 of the 12 were totally blocking bullets and melee through their holes: "Ramp Frame", "Pole Cross Centered", "Pillar 1m Open".

That there were so few problem cases leads me to suspect those 3 might be just oversights. In that case, please disregard my idea about indicating permeability in the UI and someone please just fix those and similar shapes.

 
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Dusting off this old account bc I'm honestly sad to say I think A21 may be what kills 7 Days for me. Been playing for years, and will give the new version a chance but it really sounds like the nail in the coffin.

I will say, new POIs and furnishings sounds really cool, as do the spear improvements and the water improvements.  I'm not a fan of the implication that we won't be able to harvest water from streams and etc anymore but that I think could be adapted to. Most of the other confirmed stuff I'm neutral toward.

What's fully killed my hype for the future of this game is the Learn By Reading system. Honestly, I think it's the biggest mistake TFP have made in this game so far. Locking all crafting recipes and upgrades behind RNG is going to make the game more tedious and boring, which isn't what it needs. We need more stuff to do to keep the game engaging and fun into the long hours of play, not an extended and randomized grind. The game had a grind already of course, but one that felt like it mattered. 

Welp. I'm sure no one is interested in my two cents (especially based on the handful of pages of this thread I've read), but I wanted to voice them anyway because this is very disappointing. This was a favorite game of mine to play with loved ones, and it sounds like we're at the end of the line. (Unless modders bring us back an old system or make a better one.)

I probably won't be logging back in here again, as I'm not looking to debate. I wish TFP well in their future projects, and hope this won't be as bad as it sounds.

 
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So all these people that hate the idea of learn by looting...did you hate back when finding the minibike book and forge books and stuff were total RNG? There were a lot of people that didn't like when that was changed back then, and this new system sounds like a full blown version of that. I don't see why there's so much hate for it, it's not like it's totally new to the game. Also, people have long cried for removing weapon crafting from being perk-gated, which it sounds like this will do.

I remember loving the hunt for those books, so I'm hopeful this system will bring some of that feeling back.

 
bdubyah said:
So all these people that hate the idea of learn by looting...did you hate back when finding the minibike book and forge books and stuff were total RNG? There were a lot of people that didn't like when that was changed back then, and this new system sounds like a full blown version of that. I don't see why there's so much hate for it, it's not like it's totally new to the game. Also, people have long cried for removing weapon crafting from being perk-gated, which it sounds like this will do.

I remember loving the hunt for those books, so I'm hopeful this system will bring some of that feeling back.
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I miss those days too.

In defense of the new "learn by looting" system - it's not a new concept and is a wonderful part of the zombie survival game, Project Zomboid.  Learning by reading books just makes sense and finding said books is exciting. Personally, this is my favorite change for A21. I really hope this makes loot more relevant to the place its looted thus making POI's more relevant too. My big gripe with loot is the ability to find most of it in most places. I hope magazines make finding certain POI's exciting again making each POI more special in its own right by way of localized loot.  

 
Cr0wst0rm said:
While im not dissapointed by LbL system, (i think it is better than LbC system), i am more dissapointed by lack of features. The water system is a great addition but when looking at confirmed feature list, it feels kind of short to be fair.... Some graphic changes are the most of things i can make out of this list. No bandits is a def. killer for me. I work for some other game studio, and i was able to implement 3 subsystems for that game, being animal skinning system, ambient music system (combat, suspense etc crossfades) and fall damage system. While it may sound like something easy and absolutely unnoticeable in details, i feel it is almost the same as this list of features offers. (water logic excluded). Mostly visuals, that could be solved in just few seconds by purchasing some decent assets and then puting them in substance painter for sec, that should be it. And not putting it in "feature list", because people dont care that much about graphics, you can do placeholders for time being and do graphics when gameplay elements are done....
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All those systems you mentioned you've worked on, however, don't seem to need any kind of balancing (maybe only the skinning system regarding how much stuff you get from skinning?). In the case of TFP's systems that they're working on, there's A LOT of rebalancing going on. I can only imagine the huge amount of work they're doing just on the loot tables alone. After that, they need the QA staff to test and give feedback, and then if something needs rebalancing, they need to do it all over again.

Most people see only one small slice of the cake and think that those changes are (pun intended) "a piece of cake" to do.

I don't think that's the case here.

 
bdubyah said:
So all these people that hate the idea of learn by looting...did you hate back when finding the minibike book and forge books and stuff were total RNG?
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You can't compare that directly because there were significant differences in the game. Back then, when you raided a crack a book, there was something to be found in almost every bookshelf. In addition, nearly all zombies dropped loot. Mostly it was garbage but sometimes there was something good. I had a horde base in A16 that was designed to get as many of the zombie corpses as possible. After the horde night I had chests full of loot. I didn't have to loot non-stop instead the loot came to me.

An important difference is also that you only have to find schematics once. However, you have to find up to 100 of the magazines to build a Q5 auger, for example.
 

 
А почему нет не единого слово про оптимизацию игры ? или это вообще не входит в планы разрабов ?


And why is not a single word about the optimization of the game? Or it is not in the plans of developers? 

 
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