PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

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TFP will add as much zombies as the system they built allow for, without making it unstable. We have no idea how they coded the world. Perhaps it IS possible to built a world where a billion torches and 2 billion zombies on the same screen is possible, but then what do you have to sacrifice to have that ?
Stop focusing on one single aspect of the game, and consider that everything in the game has to work nice together, share the same backbone, and use the same resources.
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I remember playing Alpha 14 i think, or something like that.... Massive 50+ zombies (maybe more at once lol) horde attacked my base on random day during daylight. That was awesome 10/10. Hope it happens again, things like huge bees, undead vultures or zombie bears is just not zombie world i grew up in. I think it should be either full zombie game with minor changes or full leftforarcadegame game.

 
This is why almost all of my programming is done on a potato while my gaming PC sits idle, unless it's something like a neural net which requires vast amounts of system resources with relatively little code.
If I can get it working reasonably well on a potato it should run very well on anything else. It's much harder to retroactively make a large body of code faster.
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On the other hand I do all my coding on my gaming rig. Why? Because I want the fastest, smoothest and most comfortable experience while I'm working.

 
I understand TFP want to have as much zombie as possible, but how it is decided? What base hardware level they are thinking. In their System requirement they recommend
OS: Windows 7 or Higher

Processor: 3.0 Ghz Quad Core CPU or faster

Memory: 12 GB RAM

Graphics: 2 GB Dedicated Memory

Direct X: Version 10

Network: Broadband internet connection

Hard Drive: 4 GB available space

Sound Card: Direct X compatible

I meet all these, yet I cannot run game with more than fourth size Texture, and everything off, shadow and everything. I think they need to update their System requirement from Recommendation to minimum, there is no point run a game with everything off and running on lowest texture. at least give something to play on.
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You are forgetting something here. Game is in Alpha stage. At this point they focus on adding content. Once that is done, in Beta, they will focus on optimization...well, that's the general stages of progression.

 
On the other hand I do all my coding on my gaming rig. Why? Because I want the fastest, smoothest and most comfortable experience while I'm working.
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You can't get much more comfortable than laying on a bed, programming on a laptop with a dog between your legs :-)

As for smoothness, if it's not running reasonably smooth on a potato then your code is too slow. That's been my experience and why I gave up programming on anything better.

 
You can't get much more comfortable than laying on a bed, programming on a laptop with a dog between your legs :-)
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This :)

Except I don't know anything about programming, but I do know the feeling of having a dog between my legs.

And watching her breathe and being at peace is something quite beautiful :)

 
This :) Except I don't know anything about programming, but I do know the feeling of having a dog between my legs.

And watching her breathe and being at peace is something quite beautiful :)
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Yeah, it's all fun and games until one of you farts :-)

 
Hey Roland, question for ya, do you know if the fun pimps have something like a wind turbine on the table for electricity? it wouldnt be that hard to make one outta scrap stuff for a different way of gaining electricity, would be fun, or maybe down the road a water generator that you simply place in water and it generates a small amount of electricity? it would lead people to make hydro electric dams and have them alter the terrain to make them since waterfalls are not a thing yet
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I have an SDX mod that adds a power generating windmill to the game. Most of the features folks ask about here are already available. TFP will probably add them later in development, but if you want things sooner, load in a few mods.

 
That's one way to enter a party.
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Your neighbors party has been so much better, now, where's the booze? :-)

I'd say the state of the update is the same as the OP's social skills, not ready for use by the public.

 
You are forgetting something here. Game is in Alpha stage. At this point they focus on adding content. Once that is done, in Beta, they will focus on optimization...well, that's the general stages of progression.
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I am not sure of alpha, beta defination in books, but for me Alpha is trying different features like TFP doing, playing with motion capture, and changing Rendering etc. And Beta is bug fixing making them work on cases where it doesn't work or produce error. I never see Optimization is part of Beta testing. If something is nothing working on desire hardware/platform in alpha stage, Beta is too late to change it.

What if they find out that 5th Gen CPU have to left because a Zombie mustache is not compatible with it and crash system. If it is not optimize for release in Alpha, it will never be. Though they surely have their reason and priority, but no way 30 FPS optimization can be part of Beta and not Alpha itself.

 
TFP is still working on developing and optimizing the core engine and mechanics in this Alpha phase. Heck, simply moving from Unity 5 in A16 to Unity 2017 in A17 is a huge step forward in terms of performance and capability. I'm sure they are optimizing what they can as they port the codebase to Unity 2017.

 
You can't get much more comfortable than laying on a bed, programming on a laptop with a dog between your legs :-)
As for smoothness, if it's not running reasonably smooth on a potato then your code is too slow. That's been my experience and why I gave up programming on anything better.
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Not smoothness of my creation.. rather smoothness of the development environment and any other software I am using.

Plus I have 2 27 inch monitors connected to my gaming computer ;)

 
As for smoothness, if it's not running reasonably smooth on a potato then your code is too slow. That's been my experience and why I gave up programming on anything better.
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In my experience, you start your project on a gaming rig, and by the time you've finished it technology has moved on and yesterday's gaming rig is today's potato.

 
Special zombie types IMO only work in a Left 4 dead scenario, and those special zombies that 7d2d does have, I don't fancy that much to be honest (spider and the cop I mean, the screamer is ok).
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The irradiated are even worse. It just feels wrong having zeds regenerating within seconds, the concept of radiation as regeneration alone is absurd to me, the zeds even worse. Spider is okay ... not my preferred solution,. but a climbing zombie definitely makes sense. Oh, and I dig a digger zed.

 
Was just thinking about wandering hordes. Are they still all crazy where if you don't kill them all they spawn like 2 to 3 times a day? I would be really cool to have one just wandering around all the time instead of spawning and taking a direct b-line toward a player. The idea of a wandering horde should be something ominous in the distance that you want to avoid unless you have a badass plan to deal with them. The way it is now they basically just ninja spawn and run a train on your backside without even an audible warning. You're gonna hear that coming, you're gonna see it, and you're gonna smell it. It just feels really rude to me to have 20 or so zombies taking advantage of me.

I get that you can't have all that ai walking around all the time, but you could just represent the horde in code as simply a single vector that moves about, taking only wide open paths while represented as a vector so they don't just move through buildings and such. Do some kind of lod graphics that look like a horde kicking up dust or something.

Instant horde destroying me from behind only really gives me a "wtf?" response, rather than a sense that there is an actual horde wandering around.

 
Not smoothness of my creation.. rather smoothness of the development environment and any other software I am using.
Plus I have 2 27 inch monitors connected to my gaming computer ;)
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Yeah, I was bummed when unity starting using visual studio instead of monodevelop as the default ide. Monodevelop crashes more often but it always recovered itself well when restarted, the last time visual studio crashed I ended up having a hell of a time getting it working again. If gedit had a decent code completion feature I'd use it for everything, not just python. I might have to go back to monodevelop or find something else, visual studio is klunky, slow and leaky in comparison.

Update: Wow, you've got to build monodevelop from source on windows? That sucks :-/

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TFP is still working on developing and optimizing the core engine and mechanics in this Alpha phase. Heck, simply moving from Unity 5 in A16 to Unity 2017 in A17 is a huge step forward in terms of performance and capability. I'm sure they are optimizing what they can as they port the codebase to Unity 2017.
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Hopefully they'll go up to 2018 next, I can see them having a lot of use for the c# job system.

 
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+1 in the wandering hordes, perhaps they could be a randomly generated event in which a random chunk is chosen for them to spawn in and a random direction is set, I see the current wandering horde as just another box I need to check on my everyday survival regimen vs it being an unexpected threat that totally sidelines me

 
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