PC v1.x Developer Diary

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seven said:
So those magazines magically refill themselves when we hit reload, but we need to see 1 round at a time on a lever action?
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Although I don't care at all about the reload animations and, for me, they are fine, I'd point on that if you're using a gun with magazines, you aren't generally refilling magazines in the middle of a fight.  If you're doing that, you've really miscalculated and are not likely to survive.  You'd refill magazines at home/base and then go out with a bunch of them ready-to-go and just drop the empty magazine and insert the already filled magazine.  You *might* refill empty magazines between fights, but not during fights.  So your comment isn't really relevant other than to suggest that refilling magazines be something you need to do at your base or between battles and that you can't use ammo found until you put it into a magazine.  Some people might actually like all that "realism".  I'd personally hate it.  And yes, I'd also not enjoy having to reload one shell at a time for lever action and shotgun.  I already don't use shotguns because of the limited ammo capacity and it breaking blocks so easily, though the latter has improved in A21.

I think if TFP wants to just sweep this topic under the rug and not add these animations based on number of shots used, they might just change the reload for shotguns and lever action to a single shell and just say that is an abstract of reloading all shells, regardless of number.  With it being 2 shells for shotgun (I don't know what lever action animation is), it gives the suggestion that it's based on shots fired when it isn't.  That might at least reduce the complaints... probably not, though.  :)

In the end, I don't really care.  I'm not a gun nut and I aim with crosshairs and not the sights and I don't care if the animation is the right number of shells.  I'm not watching the animation and if someone didn't tell me how many the animation reloads, I wouldn't have any idea.  Obviously many people care about this realism, but I think that far more people are like me and just don't care or even notice.  I wouldn't be against it as long as crosshairs remain and reload speeds aren't worse because of the animation change.  I just don't care if it's left alone either.

 
meganoth said:
Actually I wouldn't mind. In most games I notice the graphics for a few minutes, after that the only things going through my mind are gameplay-related.

Thankfully you posted a picture of the revolver and how you want the revolver to look like, otherwise I still would not know what people here are talking about. I never noticed and chances are that I have already forgotten the issue when I see a revolver in the game again.

Your version of the revolver looks better by the way, but mostly because it is a smaller revolver and doesn't take up as much screen space. I would suggest to TFP to make the weapons smaller or put them lower so they don't hinder the view so much. Especially melee weapons modded with the fire mod simply burn in my eyes because they fill up the screen
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Thank you for being honest that you don’t really have these kinds of preferences. You might notice you are a niche case in the general survival audience. Probably 7 days to die coagulated a lot of fans that don’t care as much about this issue. It doesn’t change that the gun play is subpar and needs to be improved a little if revamping isn’t in the cards.

The revolver picture is how most games do handguns. A lot of the issues with the gun play stems from them building off of bad bones. So i don’t know how much they can improve and what would be a tall order.
 

In gunplay department I’ve seen a ton of indie teams do better than this games doing not nearly as much resources as the fun pimps have. I’m not trying to compare this game to the leaders of the industry I just want any and many improvement to gun play. 

 
seven said:
So those magazines magically refill themselves when we hit reload, but we need to see 1 round at a time on a lever action?
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Yes, because there's no animation for loading magazines. Or, for that matter, magazines. If there were magazines in the game that you had to load with bullets and watch an animation of it, it would drive me crazy if the animation showed two bullets being loaded however many bullets there were in the magazine.

I'm talking about animation. If it's not animation, it's not related. How much concrete you carry, how the bullets magically appear in magazines, etc. None of that counts, because I don't get to watch it. Feel free to come up with examples of other animations that I might be giving a pass, but stuff that doesn't have animation are not relevant.

 
FramFramson said:
Complaints about gunplay aside, comparing this game to a regular FPS seems absurd considering it's a fully-destructible voxel survival-crafting world as well as a zombie shooter when no other FPS has the first and few have the second?

Devs have a hell of a lot more to do than just gun stuff, or even weapon stuff.
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Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work on it and doesn’t mean the gunplay is good. They have the team and they should improve their weakest aspect of the game. 

When the animation team gets freed up from whatever they’re doing they should focus straight to implementing the basics on gunplay. Go to my other post to get the details. 

 
Vaeliorin said:
No, I mean smart.  Because it always knows the weakest point in your base, it's very easy to control where it goes, and thus simple to defeat.
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 That's more understandable of a problem and more complicated to solve than not having the basics in gun animations. Got a little of topic but when in pois I love smart zombies that are challenging. Maybe they could have different pathing systems for each zombies assigned randomly. idk

 
Vaeliorin said:
No, I mean smart.  Because it always knows the weakest point in your base, it's very easy to control where it goes, and thus simple to defeat.
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The problem here is that this is also a game that's supposed to be with "tower defense" elements in it. The AI was programmed like that so that on horde night you can do exactly what you don't like.

A possible solution would be to have Blood Moon AI to be turned back to "dumb" and all other AI (during week-days) would be the current one.

I would support this kind of change only if it was togglable in the options though.

 
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Jost Amman said:
The problem here is that this is also a game that's supposed to be with "tower defense" elements in it. The AI was programmed like that so that on horde night you can do exactly what you don't like.

A possible solution would be to have Blood Moon AI to be turned back to "dumb" and all other AI (during week-days) would be the current one.

I would support this kind of change only if it was togglable in the options though.
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Honestly, I'd like the A16 AI back, just fix the spinning, make the zombies aware of elevation, and add in rage mode.  It was possible to control zombie pathing back then (without exploiting them not understanding if you were above/below them) but it was hard.

For example, this base only kinda controlled their movement, because a decent portion of them would just throw themselves off the edge and start destroying everything down below.

View attachment 2440

And I say this as someone who's primary interest in the game was because of the Tower Defense part.  I watched the game for years, and thought "If they ever add mechanical traps, I'll definitely buy this."  They did, and I did.

 
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Laran Mithras said:
Carrying around 11 tons of concrete, eating a meal in 1 second, cutting a tree into lumber in 3 seconds... none of that matters, but BY GAWD there better be hyper realistic aiming and loading animations in this game, OR ELSE.

Some people just cannot let go.

Happy with my zombie survival sandbox game. When's 2.0?
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“Hyper realistic” You mean the thing that they put in most games. Wanting the reload animations to be on point with every other game isn’t as far of a reach as you think. 

 
zztong said:
I could appreciate an effort to improve iron sites, animations, more realism reloading, and so forth. And, if nothing changed I'd be completely fine with that too because the game plays really well.
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Riamus said:
I think if TFP wants to just sweep this topic under the rug.
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Joel responded to me with gunplay is fine  3 years ago. The thing is it’s not fine in any stretch of the imagination it’s subpar trash. The only thing that has seen big improvements was the reload animations. But the gunplay generally is still awful. I know they have the resources give the word to the animation team to go fix that stain on the game. 

 
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Zombiepoptard said:
Joel responded to me with gunplay is fine  3 years ago. The thing is it’s not fine in any stretch of the imagination it’s subpar trash. The only thing that has seen big improvements was the reload animations. But the gunplay generally is still awful. I know they have the resources give the word to the animation team to go fix that stain on the game. 
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They will remain in denial, unfortunately we will have to wait for the modders to work on this after the game goes gold

 
Vaeliorin said:
Honestly, I'd like the A16 AI back, just fix the spinning, make the zombies aware of elevation, and add in rage mode.  It was possible to control zombie pathing back then (without exploiting them not understanding if you were above/below them) but it was hard.

For example, this base only kinda controlled their movement, because a decent portion of them would just throw themselves off the edge and start destroying everything down below.

View attachment 2440

And I say this as someone who's primary interest in the game was because of the Tower Defense part.  I watched the game for years, and thought "If they ever add mechanical traps, I'll definitely buy this."  They did, and I did.
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But this type of thing is the only example that is ever posted when A16-AI proponents claim that A16 has tower defense. And it needs advanced knowledge and a massive effort , something only veterans might do from day 30 on. And it is still tricky as you have to be sure the zombies don't collapse your base from below. Its an expert thing. I started with A15 and after a few tries to utilize traps in a tower defense way I gave up.

The current AI gives tower defense to everyone. Novice players can use it after the first horde night seeing how zombies react or even with an assumption that narrow passages work as expected, veterans can use it from day 1.

 
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