PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

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Another piece of feedback, I'm feeling that stamina is not very clearly explained. Or simply doesn't feel right.
It feels like my stamina is never going to be full. I wish that it only got "damaged" when I was under 50% hungry or thirsty.

Also @madmole

I really like your level up skills system. But it feels a bit too hit and miss. There are too many points required and levels are far too high for many of the perks.

I'm not looking at the game to know for sure but I believe there is something like 50 points required to Max out your "special"

And then there are an additional ±50 points to Max out the perks under a specific special attribute.

Along with this you are not going to be able to get any of the unique perk levels until you are level 60+ by that time most of them won't be really that impressive.

The concept of requiring level 100 (max level) for so many perks and stats means that we are going to have to stop spending any points for 20+ levels just to buy what we want at level 100 when they finally unlock.

Long story short, giving us less than 1/2 the points required to Max out our characters AND adding random level gates to skills and perks doesn't make for fun progression.

Either open it up so we can focus on what ever we want, if we end up being a no combat master tool maker by level 20 great. We are very useful yet very weak at the same time.

Or give us enough points to buy everything and keep the level gates in and we will just grind to become masters at survival.

The way it is now there are only a few logical things to put your points in and I'm willing to bet once people learn the game 25%-50% of the perks will never be used simply because there are better options and because of level gates you will need to be level 60+ before some of the perks become interesting.
Currently you get to level 300, so 305 perk points total. I don't even think we have that many perks so you can get them all.

 
GroundNotFlushWithBlocks.jpg

That stuff being worked on to be flush? The gap has caused a few of my vehicles to get caught in it and damage blocks. So I had to do this:

PlateToCoverGap.jpg

It works for now, but still looks odd. At least no more really breaking blocks or getting stuck

 
Question - the Server dashboard is now all servers right? so if I mod my server it will still show up? I want to add making Tin Cans since I can't find them in the list of things I can make.

I will find some existing recipe with a gate.

 
Does anyone know if it's intended (or a bug) for Zombies Never Run to also apply to 7th nights now?
In previous alphas, zombies always ran on the blood moon horde regardless of your choice, but now it's respecting that setting. I don't remember seeing anything about whether it was an intentional change or not.
In alpha 16, I played through with zombies set to never run, and that held true for horde night as well. Not sure about previous alphas, though.

 
How do I insert a storage pocket modification into my armor ?
Click on the armor and open up it's menu. You should see some slots for mods, unless it's really crappy armor.

Drop it into the mod slot and your good. :)

 
Madmole: There needs to be some more 'in game' direction in regards to the perk stat requirements. The ambiguity that currently surrounds it is just confusing, especially for someone who has never played before. ie: Hammer & Forge, Grease Monkey, Advanced Engineering, etc...

 
Madmole: There needs to be some more 'in game' direction in regards to the perk stat requirements. The ambiguity that currently surrounds it is just confusing, especially for someone who has never played before. ie: Hammer & Forge, Grease Monkey, Advanced Engineering, etc...
I agree there. The descriptions in some of them are rather lacking; I, for one, still don't know what Charging Bull does. All it says is "Entity damage:xxx" and the description says I take reduced damage or something of the sort. Do I do entity damage when I run into zombies?

 
Madmole, for some reason i cant play online on a17, yesterday i went back to a16 to try if it was me but the online on previous version was functional. On a17 im shown as "connected" somehow in server but it never loads the map (in dedicated server). And when i try to connect to peer to peer servers, the map loads but never starts the game. Did you have some issues like this with other players?

 
Guns are already the loudest noises in the game. Sleeper volumes are different, since designers do not want every zombie waking up and destroying the place, when you walk in the front door and fire a few rounds. You have to touch a volume before those zombies will react to noise.
More in the sense of spawning a horde nearby, that hears the noise and attacks the player (when firing inside an inhabited POI / nearby sleeper volumes).

With some chance of them being feral. The sleepers dont need to get triggered then.

The player would then get ambushed from "behind" when making too much noise while looting a POI.

 
I agree there. The descriptions in some of them are rather lacking; I, for one, still don't know what Charging Bull does. All it says is "Entity damage:xxx" and the description says I take reduced damage or something of the sort. Do I do entity damage when I run into zombies?
I believe Charging Bull is when you attack while sprinting you do more damage. I've gotten a few 1 shots from it with the sledgehammer. While sprinting, I click RMB, and does more damage when it connects. I think the trick is to NEVER stop sprinting during before, during, and only can stop sprinting after the attack connects.

 
No I meant zombies would do more damage at a higher GS. This is a hypothetical statement.
Not sure how I feel about this - it seems really gamey. I know it's only hypothetical but if you were to consider it, perhaps it would be better to stick to the existing model of introducing progressively more powerful zombies with gamestage rather than artificially buffing the same old zeds we've been seeing since day 1 in a uniform manner. In the tower defense games I've played you typically have a simultaneous development of novel enemies alongside a development of counters to them. Unfortunately I've always felt it takes too long to gather materials and build a base that allows you to adapt to the new changes that come along. If we were to have a significant buff to building and gathering I would be much happier about having new challenges. If day 2 wandering hordes can melt through walls in seconds, it should also take only seconds to put them up.

 
Hi, Madmole. I'm great fun of the game. Can I play A17 without internet? My country not allow me to do that:(

P. S. Sorry for replying like this, I can't open the forum's pc version. Couldn't find how to write a massage to the this thread on phone version

 
I believe Charging Bull is when you attack while sprinting you do more damage. I've gotten a few 1 shots from it with the sledgehammer. While sprinting, I click RMB, and does more damage when it connects. I think the trick is to NEVER stop sprinting during before, during, and only can stop sprinting after the attack connects.
Ahhh I see, thanks! I noticed there seems to be a "power-move" while sprinting and right-clicking.

Hi, Madmole. I'm great fun of the game. Can I play A17 without internet? My country not allow me to do that:(
P. S. Sorry for replying like this, I can't open the forum's pc version. Couldn't find how to write a massage to the this thread on phone version
Yup -- run steam in Offline mode. You have to download it, of course.

 
I can feel their pain. I typically code in PHP, Javascript, C++, and C#. My job then started requiring me to do controls programming. Holy cow that's a whole other ball game once you get physical components into the equation. Sensors, temps, pressure, fluids, and more. It's been much more of a learning curve than I would have expected.
Oh man, I stay away from fluids, hydraulics, pneumatics, etc. Always try to keep things purely electronic, which def helps things on your end as well. I'm in the middle of choosing a LIDAR system, and a few others lesser sensors, but really I'd like to keep it simple and use it's cameras alone for as much as possible, focus on vision recog more than anything. Lot of bots overload themselves with high demand sensors, laser range finders, and the like, poor things. But some LIDAR types can do a neat volumetric point grid kinda thing, adding basic depth info on top of what it's camera sees, trick is getting just enough, but not too much that you need a ♥♥♥♥ing building full of servers to process it. Unlike most endeavors these days I design fully autonomous systems, all self contained, forces me to keep it simpler in many ways, more complex in others(and actually useful in a post-apocalyptic scenario when there is no more "cloud") . Brain I have going currently uses thousands of perceptrons(processor fused with memory) but they only have 256 bytes each, the "memories" are actually just Base Functions, like RBF and KNN, the kind of stuff Assembly is made out of. Can pack them tightly together because in parallel they only run in Mhz not Ghz, so no heat issues as with more typical chips, and they barely consume any power, even with 10's of thousands of them. The actual chips I'm using now are only 1/4" square, have 576 "processors"(perceptrons) each. An FPGA here and there to bridge with more conventional environments, of which I have a few dozen throughout the body(each motor/servo has one for example), and boom, robot brains. Fun stuff.

Actually my current robot(which I am neglecting thanks to A17, worth it, this is my only leisure activity anyway) would be SICK up in 7dtd. Is more of an entirely new species, a lot like the legged robots you see popping up nowadays, like Big Dog, Spot Mini, ANYmal, etc, but with in-hub motor wheels for feet. Basically a dog/wolf + offroad vehicle. It's called a NoRoader, cause it doesn't need them. Imagine the wolf companion TFP did concepts of last year fused with an auto-turret and the motorcycle(well 2 motorcycles). First of all the one I am making irl will NOT have a dang turret, ever, this first specimen is for Search & Rescue, saving lives not taking them, and that's how I will always roll irl, because human extinction would suck and all. HOWEVER, this is a video game, fiction(zombies, etc.), so one could go all out on it. My older designs were actually vehicle sized, but that's a different beast altogether. This one is no bigger than a lion or other big cat at most, can go indoors, up stairs, etc, so def more like the wolf companion. It would be OP as all get out, so making such a thing balanced and fitting into the rest of the game would be it's own special challenge. Realistically no Z would ever be able to get anywhere near you, robots miss in games not irl, but that'd be no fun. However I'm making these incapable of harming people, so if it considered Z human it would not, could not, kill them, but it could do a ton of other things, so maybe something like that would work. Dunno, fun to think about. Of course it could be lethal, technically, in that case, whoah. I would actually make it so IF there were a zombie apocalypse, but that's as likely to happen as is an actual zompocalypse. Maybe in a mod, or a DLC after Gold, Robots & Zombies, oh my. For now I've got to both keep designing the real thing, as well as figure out how to keep Faatals damn super AI z's the F out of my attic while I finish making my roof garden of super corn.

 
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Not sure how I feel about this - it seems really gamey. I know it's only hypothetical but if you were to consider it, perhaps it would be better to stick to the existing model of introducing progressively more powerful zombies with gamestage rather than artificially buffing the same old zeds we've been seeing since day 1 in a uniform manner. In the tower defense games I've played you typically have a simultaneous development of novel enemies alongside a development of counters to them. Unfortunately I've always felt it takes too long to gather materials and build a base that allows you to adapt to the new changes that come along. If we were to have a significant buff to building and gathering I would be much happier about having new challenges. If day 2 wandering hordes can melt through walls in seconds, it should also take only seconds to put them up.
I guess it's along the lines of, it takes years to put up a skyscraper, but destroy one support in a day, and it'll all come tumbling down. Now I know it's not the same for houses as much, but it shouldn't be able to be put up in the same amount of time it took to destroy it. Granted, it should be sped up a little bit, but I think that's due to some perks not working with tools atm. Or can add in a perk to increase tool speed to make it go faster, etc.

 
Not sure if this is a bug or there are rare super powered guns, but I found this.
View attachment 25619

and this is the normal ones I get

View attachment 25620
Hi dizzy, I think I can answer this (though not explain it!)

The dmg 7 shotgun is loaded, the dmg 100 one is unloaded. I had two shotguns myself, unloaded one before selling it then thought why am I selling this it’s much better than the other one :)

Yeah, it’s daft... feel free to raise a bug report!

 
A17e Good and Bad

Well, I finally downloaded the latest A17e, and have some first impressions.

There are a lot of things I really like:

  • The graphics look much better (minus some occasional glitches which I'm sure will be worked out)
  • New POIs are very good
  • UI in general is better
  • Generally speaking, the new perk system is a big improvement (but see below)
  • I actually like the fact that the zombies don't drop loot, and are now purely a threat rather than a resource to be mined
  • The fact that zombies get up quicker now leads to better combat (no more "shoot them until they go down then go in and club them" all the time)
  • "Mining" gives fewer resources now, so no more 10x stacks of wood by night 7
  • Haven't tried it yet, but the move to XPath for modding looks like it will be much easier to work with


But there are also some things I don't like (mainly stuff with perks):

  • Mining motions (hitting grass/using stone axe) are way too slow, and it's not clear which perk improves that (or even if one does)
  • Many perks are gated but don't say why (level requirement? Need to put skill point into general attribute?)
  • Not clear what "Miner 69er" actually does now (the text refers to the "power attack" but you can't do that with mining tools? If not that, how is it different than "Mother Lode?")
  • Seems to be no way to craft higher-quality tools (I put a point into Intellect but it did nothing - bug maybe?)


And, there is one thing that is really bad now, and it's making the game far less enjoyable.

That is the "difficulty" of the game. I know there were lots of criticisms about the game being "easy" but this goes too far in the other direction. Now it's not so much "challenging" as "frustrating."

An example: Around day 5, a wandering horde of wolves spawned in. One ran up to me and pretty much killed me without warning.

This started off a tedious round of deaths. The wolves didn't wander from my backpack, so if I tried to get my stuff before the backpack disappeared, I immediately died again. The only solution was to re-spawn, making sure not to collect anything for a new backpack, then run to where the backpack was. Get wolves to chase you, and try to get far enough away from the backpack before they kill you again.

Re-spawn, rinse, repeat. Not fun in the least.

It was definitely not helped by the fact that there is now a de-buff where repeatedly dying will lower your stats. By the time I got my backpack, I think the timer on that de-buff was up to two hours real time.

Here's the problem: This new difficulty only affects you in the early game, and 7D2D was never too bad with the early game. It was the late game that was uninteresting. This new difficulty level doesn't help that, in fact it actually hurts.

By the time you're not subject to insta-death, you're at the point where you have nothing to do but turn 7D2D into Minecraft. It seems like the Pimps' solution is just to grind longer to get to the late game - but that's not a good solution. Until you reach the late game and get bored, you'll just be going through constant die-spawn-die-again cycles which are no fun at all.

It would be far better if 7D2D focused on making the late game different, rather than ramping up the difficulty or increasing the grind. The inclusion of things like seasonal weather (where farms die off in the winter), or enemy NPCs that only show up after day 120, or things like that - those would make the late game more interesting.

That is all IMHO, of course. And, luckily, I think most of this can be done with mods (or "modlets"), so there's certainly hope for folks like me, even if TFP don't agree with my opinions.

 
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