PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[Kage848]

Don't mean to speak for Gup, but I don't think he was implying (in any way) that you should abandon building super awesome bases and just play nomad forever. Just that it might take longer to get to that point now. Every time a new build comes out, a certain percentage of people insist that their play style is being inhibited, but in my experience those concerns are usually pretty short lived. Time will tell, though.

I dont want to play a week or 2 in game to make a base. Going from poi to poi sounds awful. 2 weeks ingame is 14 hours on default. I dont want to play 14 hours before I can do what I love. We shall see when I get home from vacation. I'll be base building then.

 

[rhud1979]

Or not, after 15 Hours the game keep punching me in the face, and after i am soo angry that my real life suffers i consider to deinstall the game

Have you tried starting at a lower difficulty? Not being snarky, just legit asking.

Also, again not being snarky, if weird game issues are causing you real life stress, then I would stop participating in EXPERIMENTAL branches. Part of the deal is that things are going to be broken and unbalanced.

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I dont want to play a week or 2 in game to make a base. Going from poi to poi sounds awful. 2 weeks ingame is 14 hours on default. I dont want to play 14 hours before I can do what I love. We shall see when I get home from vacation. I'll be base building then.

My guess is that after we start learning how the mechanics work in this version a little better, you'll be back to base building in the first few days again. But again, time will tell. Either way, good luck and happy streaming.

 

[Royal Deluxe]

Have you tried starting at a lower difficulty? Not being snarky, just legit asking.
Also, again not being snarky, if weird game issues are causing you real life stress, then I would stop participating in EXPERIMENTAL branches. Part of the deal is that things are going to be broken and unbalanced.

Its not about beeing broken or unbalanced, you know these glue Fly traps, thats exactly how this game feels, as if you stick in glue.

 

[Nugetti]

It varies from pc to pc. I'm just saying that the biggest win for a lot of people was lowering the resolution. We are working on optimizations and have a pretty nice one coming.

This is good news. Performance in POIs (read: me failing in combat indoors from laggy controls due to lower FPS) is the thing that is keeping me from fully diving in and properly testing the experimental atm.

Has it been noted by the dev crew that Tree Quality is bugged atm? It controls other things as well (like car / object LOD), and LOD distance slider doesn't seem to do anything.

 

[madmole]

Im fine with abundance och weapons after the Apocalypse. But they should do some heavy damage. A head shot is a head shot and should be a instant kill.Now if TFP wants to balance it, Make ammo super rare.

That is probably what would happen! Every one emptying their guns on bullet sponge zombies so now the world is out of ammo

Now that perks are done Gazz can properly balance the firearms. I'm shooting for 2 pistol shots to the head with no perks to kill a weak zombie, so by the time you get a couple perks or mods you'll be one shot killing easy zombies to the head. But yes they are pathetic in current form it took 5 shots to kill a weak zed to the head and 5 point blank shotgun headshots to kill a biker. That is just wrong.

 

[wolfbain5]

Not sure if it was intentional or not (could have been for aesthetic reasons in the short term) but the hubs aren't making downtown zones. You can twix the prefabs and add them to the commercial or industrial zones. Then adjust your prefab list in the rwgmixer so skyscrapers can spawn in those zones.

wont do that during experimental, but when the modders do there things, I will borrow some of their stuff.

 

[madmole]

Ive created 5 maps in random gen and flew around most of all 5 of them. There are some issues.
1) They are tiny!, any update on enabling us to generate a larger one. I DONT CARE how long it takes to generate, as long as it plays ok

2) As others mentioned... Same biome to the north/middles/south every time. How is this better for randomness?

3) I havent seen ANY skycrapers.. Do large cities still exist in random gen or is it bugged?

A16 was a vast improvement in random gen over A15. Now its going backwards

8k is huge. North pole is north. There are good sized towns for sure, not sure about cities. The big accomplishment is RWG now uses a height map like Nav, so no special snowflake code once the map is generated its identical to playing NAV which is good for performance. We can make it prettier and improve it.

 

[Lonestarcanuck]

If you run into those there is some pretty good loot they are protecting. You don't have to kill every zombie, there is no shame in running away, putting a marker on your map as a reminder to come back later when you are more powerful. We are doing some balancing because some of the loot rooms are too difficult. Barbed wire traps can slow them down long enough to take them out if you have the firepower.

ok that makes sense. I came upon a bakery and when I broke the door there where two feral cops in side - makes sense being a bakery.

 

[icehot]

I dont want to play a week or 2 in game to make a base. Going from poi to poi sounds awful. 2 weeks ingame is 14 hours on default. I dont want to play 14 hours before I can do what I love. We shall see when I get home from vacation. I'll be base building then.

I'm on day 5 of my 2nd playthrough, I'm in a base, not one I've built, but a prefab I've taken over - there's definitely not enough resources to build a base unless it's a basic wooden hut at the point I'm at right now. Stamina degridation has only just started to become less of an issue, but still need better tools as I'm still in the stone age, and need better mining perks before I can even hope to build anything of my own.

On a plus note I've not died yet in this 2nd playthrough, my first one I was dying all the time, but it didn't take too long to figure out the tactics and to play it safer, and only take POI's that are more applicable to my current level.

 

[SnowDog1942]

8k is huge. North pole is north. There are good sized towns for sure, not sure about cities. The big accomplishment is RWG now uses a height map like Nav, so no special snowflake code once the map is generated its identical to playing NAV which is good for performance. We can make it prettier and improve it.

Yes I have seen good sized towns, but not one city with skyscrapers. Have any of you guys seen one?

 

[madmole]

My dearest madmole, gazz, and Faatal...
As I write this post, I am reminded that we don't always see eye to eye, but on this one point I'd like to show my solidarity in one particular vision...

...and that's difficulty.

The General threads are filled with cries of "it's too hard", and "waa, my hoo hoo hurts, it's not a cakewalk anymore", and yet a large number of these people also REFUSE to lower their difficulty level, citing "new users will die, the game will fail!".

And I'd simply like to help bolster your morale by pointing out that these same folks will be compaining that the game lacks challenges in 5 months, and that what makes this game great in the first place IS it's toughness...

So please, although you can feel free to revert the perk system, and I'm grateful levelled loot is no longer an issue, please don't cave to the loud few and nerf sleeper counts, irradiated zeds at GS 27, the New AI, vulture "death from above", or any other factor that makes zeds deadly.

Thank you.

Yes I was saying the same thing, in a month the same people will be "its too easy", so we're not changing the difficulty. We are looking at boss rooms, those seem to be too difficult. However once firearms are fixed it might not be so bad.

You might come around on the perk system. The perks are way better/more interesting but some people are fixed on skill grinding. I like playing how I want, crafting ONLY what I need and not jumping through hoops to build my character. People complain about level gates but skill gates are worse... who wants to fall 5000 times to level up your agility? Or run on foot 200k miles when you have a perfectly good motor vehicle sitting there?

The caveats of skill grinding are not as great as you think. Now you just play and focus on survival and the rest comes together. I'd rather focus on real NEEDs like food/water/shelter/scavenging/fighting than be forced through artificial mechanics like falling to get better at parkour, taking damage to get better at light/heavy armor etc. Those systems are impossible to balance and more frustrating to most players IMO.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

Absolutely not. I'm not super worried about the difficulty yet but this play nomad and forget building a base stuff is where I draw the line. Building a base is my #1 thing in this game. Screw nomad. I get you probably like that but I'm 100% against it. This game for me is at it's best with cool base building.
I want base building from day 1. Next you will be suggesting some kind of blight to spread through destroying everything we built. Oh wait lol

I don't think a day 7 horde base is likely to be in the cards. I've tried several different starter base designs in a "creative" game and they all get wrecked pretty quickly. I'm sure part of the problem is that I'm trying a bunch of designs that worked well in A16 and no longer work. Over time, people may find ways to exploit the AI which allows for the creation of Day 7 bases. The other problem is that you are unlikely to be able to gather the resources you need to build a base for the first horde (assuming 60 min days of course).

 

[Guppycur]

I dont want to play a week or 2 in game to make a base. Going from poi to poi sounds awful. 2 weeks ingame is 14 hours on default. I dont want to play 14 hours before I can do what I love. We shall see when I get home from vacation. I'll be base building then.

I think it's doable, but that you just have to approach it differently.

 

[Tin]

Yes I have seen good sized towns, but not one city with skyscrapers. Have any of you guys seen one?

Could be wrong and they could just be very very rare, but pretty sure they won't...yet!

The new RWG, still seems very much like a WIP, from what I'm seeing.

I'm liking what I see though and it looks very promising for the future (imo).

 

[SxR]

Still havin' FUN!!

.. Well, not the way they intended. ;x

 

[Guppycur]

Still havin' FUN!!
.. Well, not the way they intended. ;x

Evil... =)

 

[Royal Deluxe]

Yes I was saying the same thing, in a month the same people will be "its too easy",

Because thats exactly how the game is designed

A hard start you have nearly no chance if RNG dont like you

A good middle

And a easy tralalala wonderland as soon as you have your perks up

Remove the lower 25% of the Difficult scale

Remove the upper 25%

and stretch the middle over the 100%

Besides that as sidemark, when i say Glue17 feels like you play in glue i dont speak about difficulty.

and 8x8 km is maybe large from some points of view

but

64km² are still only 64² of 314² we had in a16

 

[akram22]

did you guys catch up with the newest cappo video , it shows pretty exciting results, @fataal

also , MM what will you say if you (from the past ) saw A17 right now, lets say during A8 development ? out of imagination question

 

[Brian9824]

@madmole is it intended to be having ferals and radiated zombies spawning in hordes at low gamestage?

Many people are getting hordes with them before they are even level 15 and they completely overpower any defense you can do

 

[Jacoviz]

Mutated seeds? Where are them?!?