PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[SittingDuck]

Speaking of the hud, i liked the version when the clock was gone... that was realy fun^^

Even better would be if you have to find a watch to check the time ^^

 

[Roland]

lol
I like food and water to on my hud. but not everyone does others do. You know if you press f7 lol your hud disappears and you know squat hey haha

I know, right? The minimalists already have a built in function...

F7 doesn't work for gameplay. It is fine for screenshots. If they can fix it so you can interact with things and pull things off your hotbar then that would be great.

Actually there is.
Sometimes if I have plenty of food, I want to eat even when I am at 99%. So my wellness grows faster.

Sounds pretty meta to me. I don't think the devs should be obligated to design so that people can min/max wellness gain by timing the eating of food at exactly 99%. This is in fact another reason the perfect information should be hidden so that players don't get flipped into meta gaming mode. Personally, I don't think its good game design. Please note that I'm not saying you shouldn't play that way if you don't want to but I believe that the game shouldn't necessarily be designed so that the game is easily played like that. Plus, just eat a little bit after you made it to 100%. If you are still at 100% then you won't be able to eat and if wind up eating at 98% or 97% instead of the ideal 99%....well, if you are THAT keyed into meta play then I think its time to mod in a food bar for yourself so you can enjoy yourself. (Maybe add a hand washing function as well....)

@Roland But with that logic they might as well remove health from the HUD too since there are visual/audio cues and there's no actual penalty until you're at 0%. Get rid of many of the buffs too because irl those would be unnoticed in high stress situations. I know you've said that you would like to get rid of almost everything but that's a really extremist play style, and the logic you use already conflicts with the entire current layout. Considering what's already shown on HUD currently it only makes sense that something as simple as hunger and thirst were added too.

I'd be great with removing the other bars. The game is very playable without all that information right on the play screen. Walking Dad in his minimalist mod put the food, water, health, and stamina bars next to the hotbar in the inventory screen. That worked fine too. As often as you craft and check your inventory it was very simple to check your stats. I'd be fine with that too. It's not so much that I don't want to know (but its partly that); it's more that I don't want those things in front of me while I'm interacting with the world.

Yeah, and stacks with a count >100 only show "lots" because you won't intuitively know if that's 4031 or 4183 wood. =)

Could we also please just have one big rectangle for the inventory instead of a grid and all the stuff is just placed in the big rectangle so that the exact number of slots is ambiguous? Plus, some icons would cover others so that you would have to move icons around to look for items in your pack?

Joking aside, there actually is a big problem with 100% accurate information. It leaves little to no room for error and dealing with the consequences of errors is meat and potatoes for a survival game. What the heck is everyone so scared of losing a few wellness points for? Losing track of how hungry you are and then scrambling to find food before starvation hits or even before you lose more than 1-2 wellness points makes for some good frantic and survival gameplay. Putting an indicator that makes it impossible to make a mistake with eating and drinking is a poor choice in my opinion. The clock and day count always on the screen makes losing track of time and being caught too far away from your base to make it back before sundown something that almost never happens. But remove those and now you have more survival gameplay moments because as a player you made the mistake of losing track of time. Disregarding those who can't divide by 7 anyway, not knowing the day count for the rest of us would make blood moon horde nights a lot more interesting. If you make the mistake of losing track of the days then you will have to pay for that mistake.

Is the game better or worse for not having the minimap with zombie radar blips? (Perfect knowledge of surroundings)

Is the game better or worse for not having aim assist? (Perfect knowledge of weapon sighting)

Is the game better or worse for not having heat map level indicators? (Perfect knowledge of screamer appearance)

Is the game better or worse for not having fast travel back to base? (Perfect travel)

Is the game better or worse for not having enough points to purchase every perk? (Perfect progression)

People will have different preferences about these things but that is beside the point of good design. Just because someone wants to be able to purchase every single perk doesn't make it good game design to let them. By denying them that perfect ability to get everything it creates meaningful choice and could result in a mistake that will impact survival and that will have to be lived with.

I think the game is better for not having perfect knowledge of food and water. I think the game would be better without perfect knowledge of location, time, date, stamina, health, and XP as well (But I'm not pushing for those things other than using a mod for myself). As long as there are indicators that can be noticed if you are watchful then that is what makes for a good survival game in my opinion. The ability to make mistakes due to imperfect knowledge and then having to scramble to survive the consequences of those mistakes is part of what makes this game so re-playable and fresh every time you play.

 

[Roland]

I agree. In real life, I always know to what degree I am hungry or thirsty. I hate having to flip to the character page all the time to check something my character should always be aware of.

This is quite inaccurate when you are in shock, full of adrenaline, at high anxiety, and chronically stressed and worried which are all conditions I believe we can agree would be present in a zombie apocalypse. Plus, you are not actually hungry or thirsty in the game until you reach 0% at which point you do know in a big way and you still have plenty of time until "starved to death" hits you.

If you hate flipping to the character screen all the time then stop doing it and try paying attention the many many indicators provided in the game that give you plenty of warning long before you become hungry. There is zero reason to check the character screen. Worst case scenario is to just eat or drink something. If you are at 100% then it won't work. If you are less than 100% then as soon as you eat or drink a notification will tell you briefly what your new level is so you can decide whether or not you want to take the action again. You don't even miss out when you eat at 98% because even though the game doesn't show you past 100% you actually do go past that and remain at 100% longer than you would if you simply hit 100% exactly. So nothing is wasted.

 

[Aldranon]

I was playing around with a Proof of Concept mod Doombringer101 was making... basically, each thing you crafted had components, like pistols do, and I distinctively remember that the string on my stone axe would break after like 2 hits...
...now, some might thing that was frustrating, and it was, but it was also a blast! I had a zombie in the area and it took me about 45 minutes to actually kill it. And it was awesome. Nothing could be crafted while running either, so you were sitting there tying a string around a rock and stick just so you could ineptly bash it against a zombies head.

Shame fortnite took Doom from us, but he'll be back one day, and I hope to see that PoC come to life.

Oh I remember the untold numbers of stone axes surrounding my character at night because there was nothing to do the first day or two at night. Boredom is the reason I now play underground the first few days. The above ground invincible tree house is boring at night too and POI's are not balanced early game, close combat against 6-8 zombies is not my vison of trying to survive.

So, boredom was the only reason I "liked" spamming - something to do. Now I'm too busy digging holes in the ground the first few days.

 

[Roland]

I cannot for the life of me understand why the developers opposition to giving paying customers the food and water bars that we keep asking for.

Paying customers also wept for the minimap, the suicide button, spawn points for fast travel, rectangular terrain voxels, spamcrafting, and 1-block movement and TFP said no. Its because you are a paying customer to play the game and not a paying customer to develop the game. You paid to have access to what the Pimps deliver and that is exactly what you will get.

Saying that people can just mod them in is a bit silly because as soon as they do that you will not accept their bug reports as the game is not vanilla anymore. Plus it's a hassle. For something so simple and so popular just enable it via either -1. A game setting option (so all players on a server have to this for fairness) or

2. An option in the options menu so that any player on any server can switch them on or off as and when they wish.

Don't try to think up tenuous excuses to avoid this - just do it. Anyone working in a tertiary industry needs to accept that "The customer is always right." It doesn't matter how you personally feel about this - you need to accept that expecting a modern first person game to have no hud info is an extreme, niche position.

I agree with the options for HUD visibility. I disagree that this game must conform to what any other game on the market does or doesn't do. I also disagree that "Customer is always right" is anything but an extremely weak way to carry out game development. There are all kinds of ways to wreck a game with that mentality...

The idea for A17 onwards is that food will smell again and become hazardous to be carrying about on loot runs. All we want is to glance at the bars before leaving base for said loot run to make sure we have enough sustenance to complete the task without needlessly endangering health/wellness.

No need. Just eat something and drink something and you will have perfect knowledge of how much to take. If you are at 100% you won't be able to and if you are less then there is zero drawback to eating it anyway.

Also, saying that once you are fully hungry you might only lose a couple of wellness points as if that is something trivial... Once your wellness is over 150 you will need to consume about 3 entire deer to get that couple of points back.

You already won the game if you are at 150 wellness, Hoss. It may not be a trivial amount of meat to gain back a lost wellness point or two but the difference in your ability to survive with 148 vs 150 wellness is trivial. In both cases you are already a god and pretty much invulnerable if you are also wearing armor and have good weapons. Its another discussion but even going from 150 down to 140 is a ridiculously trivial death penalty because having 140 wellness isn't a penalty....

Plus the stupidly loud character cues regards food, water, temperature and exhaustion are something that many of us will try to avoid. Not just for our own sanity but because it can give your position away in PVP.

Stupidly loud? You mean....noticeable? But I thought people were saying that there are barely any indicators to warn you on your way down to 0% fullness? Which is it? Not enough or too much? Too much AND you need a bar?

Can we get some NPC hand-holders added to the game too?

 

[Royal Deluxe]

My simple wish

No Clutter at all

 

[Olaf Severson]

Stag look so beauty. In a17 i cannot hunt this pretty animal =)

 

[AllekseyAll]

map parts

there are a lot of military bases in the world, how are they fight with zombies without a territory maps?

sure it may be nice idea to add map parts which wil reveal to you some territory, may be show "points of interest":

banks, another military base/bunkers, may be shops or traders far away from you base in remote cities.

 

[Ouch Quit It]

Stag look so beauty. In a17 i cannot hunt this pretty animal =)

Reminds of the Deer Hunter,,,,,can I borrow someones boots...I forgot mine again!!

 

[Guppycur]

Could you explain how?

For them, not us.

 

[Roland]

You're a troll and your presence on this forum is toxic.
A. You are unaware of this, and generally not self aware.

B. You are aware of this and are trolling for fun.

From one undead amphibian to another? lol

 

[Aldranon]

Stag look so beauty. In a17 i cannot hunt this pretty animal =)

There is an average of a dozen potentially Lyme disease carrying female ticks on a deer. Your not killing a deer, your killing a walking disease factory!

Feel better?

 

[Maharin]

While I'm in 100% agreement that perfect knowledge takes more away from the game than it gives back, that has little to do with what information one should have available to them at any given moment in a game like this. And preference has a huge role to play in what makes "good design". Immersion has everything to do with you feeling like you are really there so you do things like ducking in the real world when something comes flying at your character's head. That sort of thing.

A stat bar doesn't have to have a number with it to be useful. But because my physical body is not tied directly to my virtual body, I NEED feedback from the game to know what is going on. In the real world I know where I'm hurt on my body and pretty much how bad, too. Sure there are exceptions like getting hit in the abdomen by a 2x4 and getting cracked ribs and bruised organs. I feel the cracked ribs and know that is bad but I won't necessarily feel the bruised organs or realize 2/3 of one of my kidney's is now dysfunctional... but I know I am hurt "bad". What I need the game to tell me about health is the stuff I would know without thinking about it.

As for food and drink I look at the bars in this way. At the low end that's when I'm so hungry that I start considering eating things I would not normally think of as food or drink things that I wouldn't normally consider drinkable. On the high side for hunger that's when food stops tasting good and I no longer have a desire for food at all. Similarly for water the high end means that I no longer feel thirsty and drinking more becomes an unpleasant thought.

The game needs more than bars, though, to give proper feedback. Being very ill, for instance, should have a major impact on gameplay. But it should also be VERY noticeable to the person controlling the character on screen. More visual visuals, please. Flashing the screen borders with different colors or patterns would be a great help, for instance. If I'm super drunk or dying of thirst or something else like that then maybe my actions become a lot slower so changing weapons takes several seconds and might even fail. That sort of thing. That brings me into my character's plight and makes their needs become way more noticeable to me.

So my short version? Bring back all the bars that make sense (health, stamina, food, water), or give us something equivalent, but remove the numbers and add more visual feedback to bring us into the game instead of feeling like a medical student analyzing the medical chart of a patient.

On a side note, I'm all for not having any firm concept of "time of day" before we find a watch. I'm all for manually counting the days between hordes (and randomizing that number somewhat, too). I'm all for needing a compass to know the direction I'm facing with any accuracy (the main compass points are easy enough if you know how the sun behaves where you are at). I'm perfectly fine with hiding the actual count of large stacks of items (seriously, how quickly can anyone count more than 50 items or so?).

And I think it would be interesting to have a map that is just a blank surface we can draw on (as an option to what we have now), so we trace out the roads and points of interest along the way. We note the landmarks and do our best to remember where things are relative to each other. Maybe finding a map just gives us another sheet of paper to draw on with some stuff filled in for us.

 

[Cyber Shadow]

I agree with Roland. The fact that you even have bars that show your hunger and thirst, and a clock up top that always shows you what time it is ect. Makes the game pretty meta. However even if the in game clock were to be removed people can just start creating timers for themselves.

 

[Kalex]

This is quite inaccurate when you are in shock, full of adrenaline, at high anxiety, and chronically stressed and worried which are all conditions I believe we can agree would be present in a zombie apocalypse. Plus, you are not actually hungry or thirsty in the game until you reach 0% at which point you do know in a big way and you still have plenty of time until "starved to death" hits you.
If you hate flipping to the character screen all the time then stop doing it and try paying attention the many many indicators provided in the game that give you plenty of warning long before you become hungry. There is zero reason to check the character screen. Worst case scenario is to just eat or drink something. If you are at 100% then it won't work. If you are less than 100% then as soon as you eat or drink a notification will tell you briefly what your new level is so you can decide whether or not you want to take the action again. You don't even miss out when you eat at 98% because even though the game doesn't show you past 100% you actually do go past that and remain at 100% longer than you would if you simply hit 100% exactly. So nothing is wasted.

1. If you are concentrating on something else, saying not dying to a zed about to eat your face, it is very easy to miss the pop-up.

2. Our characters whine about everything necessitating opening the character sheet to see what they are whining about this time.

3. I try to keep hunger and thirst above 0% because the audio cues are so damn loud and obnoxious. If you have the volume up enough to hear the ever-so-stealthy zed footprints, then the hunger/thirst audio cues blow your eardrums out.

 

[ZedBullfrog]

From one undead amphibian to another? lol

ba-dum, tssssss....

 

[xlittlekuribohx]

i was thinking air powered traps like dart box and or blade traps variants or make traps specifically for pneumatic system. have a generator or battery bank power an air compressor and use short pipes to connect to the traps, the traps would have high consumption of air but have high damage. when the air tank or tanks are full the power to them turns off until it gets low. this could also be used with the new vehicle system. an impact tool connected to an air compressor could repair faster and with less resources used then standard repair kits. i was thinking it would be cool to have a paintball gun in the game that could shoot rocks or darts or even use gas to make it a flamethrower. the same air tanks used for the compressor could be used to power the paintball gun.

 

[The-Walking-Dad]

For them, not us.

Should have realised. D'oh!

 

[CptLaserPants]

@Roland Where you and I differ is in what we consider good game design and the implications of certain HUD information on the game play experience. I can somewhat agree on some things such as time, date, and compass, and I definitely agree that a mini-map is totally unnecessary and immersion breaking. But for basic body information pertaining to the character such as health, stamina, thirst, hunger, and even temperature I think you are simply incorrect.

Having this information on HUD only serves as a QoL convenience. It doesn't make for bad game design and the lack thereof certainly doesn't make for better. The only reasonable argument here that I can see is convenience vs clutter, and even then I think it's unwarranted to call it clutter given the design of the HUD as it is currently.

 

[JaxTeller718]

Well it wouldnt be a #gate without my value-less opinion so I say all info should be on the hud by default. No harm in it being there. Modding can take over the removal of it all. All survival games come with hud info, so it would follow the norm. Id love an in game hand held compass though instead of GPS on the top screen.

Everyone is so obsessed with numbers. How about just a color coded body sim where blue means full and red means hungry. No numbers. Why is it always about NUMBERS. Maybe something like Ark.