PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

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A17 meme - Calling All Streamers months ahead for.... When It's Done. :smile-new:
June 2018

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for

August 2018
it´s done?

 
No, but you can paint them.Paint them red, make them go faster!

Paint them pink for more family-friendly massacre.

Paint them black for a true Fortress of Doom. (black spikes really are critical here)

Or build steel spikes and then paint them in simple wood. =P

On a more serious note: What new and interesting functionality would other types of spikes have?
usualy they didnt do damage upside down. is that fixed?

 
On a more serious note: What new and interesting functionality would other types of spikes have?
Immobilization. The current "wood spikes" type, if used IRL, would actually be better at trapping zombies to be manually dispatched (preferably with some type of pole arm) than for killing them- especially if brain damage is required. They might dismember themselves and/or damage the spikes in their struggles eventually, and a few might be unlucky enough to impale their heads- but most would just get "stuck"

Until the number stuck grew great enough to counter the spikes by sheer weight or "bridging", anyway...

 
An idea that is probably not entirely my own:

I'm sure a lot of issues concerning the zombies have been addressed by the new AI, but some things that still bugged me in the last build:

(wall of text follows)

One of the ways the devs addressed zombie difficulty was to make them bullet sponges. I think this is an ok idea but not with the current limitations on weapons damage. Even with maxed out stats on the AK a radiated zombie cop was still too beefy to justify wasting the ammo on, especially when the item drop on it was pretty weak.

Game stage has a few flaws in my opinion. It was pretty easy to get to a higher game stage using just melee weapons and solid base design. Looting even normal POIs became nearly impossible at 20-30 day mark as I could not get better guns or the ammunition to combat the ferals and cops would spawn in every POI, including the shacks. I spent most of my time farming crops and selling stuff to traders to generate enough cash to buy enough ammo to loot a couple buildings and even then I was getting diminishing returns-a broken AK and 150 spent rounds of 7.62mm for clothes or items I could easily craft at a higher level. Either slow down the game stage progression OR...

Another way (not a programmer, so not sure how hard this would be to implement) could be to limit the the spawn of beefy zombies to certain POIs that have really good loot (not talking about a boss fight) while leaving the normal POIs at the basic spawn level. For me I ended up halving the health of all zombies and increasing the damage given, stun chance, infection chance (I made being infected brutal by shortening the time between stages, increasing stamina loss and health loss, and included a fever buff that really hurts movement), and I turn zombies always run to counter the weaker health.

All of this is probably moot being so close to a new build, but I like the discussion part of this forum.
 
When I saw your name Skippy, I had to look up 0330 MOS. Thought I found another Devil in here but alas, there's no such MOS lol

 
I'm a little bit surprised how many people seem to think "it's done when it's done" means anything other than "it's not done yet but we're still hard at work and as soon as it is ready to show the public we will release it." Now with the smilie added it apparently means we've gotten closer to imminent release, too! I guess the only good answer to "when will it be done?" is to just say "...."

Oh well, I guess we just all want to try the new shiny build and know that every day is one less day until it's released. For my part I'll happily just wait until it's done... and then wait another month or so until it's released stable anyway. In the meantime I have approximately 1 billion other games I haven't finished with yet, and I can occasionally play my a16 game and enjoy the last few weeks of running around on my cool map with a couple pretty lakes near my home and lots of lovely wide open spaces to run around in and feel like I'm alone in the wilderness instead of having POIs packed in everywhere(which is my only tentative fear about a17).

 
I just want to get A17 out of the way tbh

That might sound weird as hell but I have work to do that I'm not getting done because I can't stop thinking about A17

I just need to get it in and out of my system

 
lol! seriously. my father used to say "it's done when it's done", when he had no idea how to make dinner. Kinda makes you feel like you're being talked down to right. Would be kinda nice to pass along to all the people I hyped up for "it's done when it's done" the actual reason for the delay. I'm not upset about the delay, I'm upset about being treated like a child, than looking like a complete idiot to my viewers.
Faatal was very clear about that. They are squashing bugs. Dozens of em. And new ones still pop up from testing or finding them themselves.

Did you read that? Or are you just going on the "A17-E is done when its done :) " on top of this page? I think if Roland would replace that with "A17-E is done when all bugs are squashed :) " it wouldnt change one thing. Still there would be grave for more info and there still would be passive aggressive stings because no exact date is given. Imo there is no need to feel treated like a child. Its a clear message. We can trust on it. There is no room for error in it. No "broken promises".

Cheers

 
Faatal was very clear about that. They are squashing bugs. Dozens of em. And new ones still pop up from testing or finding them themselves.Did you read that? Or are you just going on the "A17-E is done when its done :) " on top of this page? I think if Roland would replace that with "A17-E is done when all bugs are squashed :) " it wouldnt change one thing. Still there would be grave for more info and there still would be passive aggressive stings because no exact date is given. Imo there is no need to feel treated like a child. Its a clear message. We can trust on it. There is no room for error in it. No "broken promises".

Cheers
the only thing that could change would be the question to --- "what percent of bugs remain? or how many bugs are left?" :)

 
I do game development and I can't tell you how many times I'm like "yeah this is great, it's almost ready!" and then something just materializes out of the woodwork that suddenly demands 2-3 weeks of my time

I get it

 
Still waiting and checking here occasionally. noticed the previous late July / Aug estimate has gone and been replaced with the no estimates will be made its done when its done. I resent this statement especially when you already had an estimate... It almost comes across as aggressive towards the consumers. Poor. Just be honest.

And in before responses saying go do something else which i'm obviously already doing so you can keep your snarky comments and shove em up your ass.

 
It's only been 14 months since A16, why is everyone so impatient? Sure it's more time than two infinty wars being released, longer than it takes to get pregnant and have a baby, longer than it takes a newborn to learn to walk, longer than the release of new graphics cards. But this is a game, it takes time! So be patient, it will be done when it's done.

I remember when they said they would release bigger alphas further apart than all the hotfixes that caused everyone to have to start over and everyone was happy about it.

 
Still waiting and checking here occasionally. noticed the previous late July / Aug estimate has gone and been replaced with the no estimates will be made its done when its done. I resent this statement especially when you already had an estimate... It almost comes across as aggressive towards the consumers. Poor. Just be honest.
And in before responses saying go do something else which i'm obviously already doing so you can keep your snarky comments and shove em up your ass.
nice, preemptive snarkiness to combat imagined potentially upcoming snarkiness

 
Tried out the new 8k RWG today and it took over an hour running in the editor. I think Kinyajuu said it was 5 or 10 mins in a build. I will hopefully get to help him with some optimizations.
So a client user starting a new map would have to wait about 5-10 minutes.

I imagine this also goes for a server operator starting a new RWG map.

How about someone joining the game? Do they experience any delay when joining a new server/map for the first time?

 
Shovel spear update

Just tested out a steel shovel as a spear on hoard night and it's great.

Hey! If you want a challenge, You really should max out the number of zombies on hoard night, and get on with it in hand to hand combat.

I recommend setting zombies to walking when doing this because it can be very overwhelming as the zombies will quickly surround you. I almost died several times, lol.

Nothing like getting off your fort having at them in close combat with a shovel, it's pretty challenging and fun.

The best part was when dawn came and I charged one of the last bigger ones, killing it with once shot, I was both surprised and excited at the same time! :)

Have fun.
This is surprisingly good, never thought to use to shovel as a weapon. Took down Big Momma with four or five hits, didn't have any other melee weapon laying around lmao.

 
Still waiting and checking here occasionally. noticed the previous late July / Aug estimate has gone and been replaced with the no estimates will be made its done when its done. I resent this statement especially when you already had an estimate... It almost comes across as aggressive towards the consumers. Poor. Just be honest.
I know, right? Imagine those scientists running a year-long experiment, and as they near the end of it they find out that their experiment has been contaminated. Imagine the pregnant woman who goes two weeks past her "due date." Imagine the construction workers who pour the concrete for a bridge, only for it not to set up properly; then they have to tear it up and do it again.

It's amazing how things can pop up which delay the previous estimates.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm not a complainer... I'm a goof-off! You must not be reading my posts. :)
I know you are. It was a meta comment for those who don't understand how the dev process on games like this work.

 
lol! seriously. my father used to say "it's done when it's done", when he had no idea how to make dinner. Kinda makes you feel like you're being talked down to right. Would be kinda nice to pass along to all the people I hyped up for "it's done when it's done" the actual reason for the delay. I'm not upset about the delay, I'm upset about being treated like a child, than looking like a complete idiot to my viewers.
Hey Skippy,

No disrespect meant. I know not everyone reads every single post as they try to catch up on all the posts so I will break it down for you and everyone else who are wondering what happened.

In June Madmole said in a video that he was hopeful that they would be done with A17 by the end of July. He admitted that it was a guess but that it was his estimate on what he felt would be possible.

In early July the team made the choice to upgrade to Unity 2018.2 because at first glance it appeared that it would have some solid performance benefits and no major inconsistencies from the previous version. It was a risk but one they felt was worth it for the benefits. They were right about the benefits but they were wrong about inconsistencies. It turned out their shaders became incompatible and needed to be redone. This caused a delay much longer than they anticipated.

Towards the end of July, as people were submitting bug fixes and uploading new art assets from their local builds to the shared build the magnitude of new art assets overwhelmed the atlases that they use. This has caused another unforeseen delay as they have had to find an alternative solution to be able to include all the new art in the game. They have found a solution and are doing that conversion. The bad news is the delay it caused but the good news is that all the new content that will be included in A17 is awesome and will be able to be supported.

At the end of July when I knew that Madmole's guess was going to be wrong I changed the date to August which caused an eruption from a segment of the community who thought that "hope" and "guess" and "estimate" really meant "promise" and "vow" and "set in stone". Then when August 1st came and all the "It's August where is it?" posts started appearing I changed it to "August or....." so that people would know that even August was just an estimate. But people went ballistic and the dev diary went off the rails. I had to move over 150 posts out of this thread all because some people couldn't understand the difference between "Maybe" and "Definitely".

That is how "It's done when its done" came about. I realized that the immature segment would never understand the concept of "estimate" and if they were going to be mad no matter what then I didn't want to have to deal with constantly updating the date. I added the smilie because someone thought the phrase sounded petulant and passive aggressive and smilies always make forum posts better. Right?

But now....lol....we have people trying to assign special meaning to the smilie...

It will be done just as soon as the unforeseen issues are handled and the known bugs that are considered show-stoppers are squished. There aren't going to be any more Unity updates before A17 and they know the full extent of the massive amount of new content and have a framework that can support it all. They are not holding out on us and stringing us along. They will get it into our hands at the soonest possible moment they can.

 
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