PC V2.0 Storms Brewing Dev Diary

Old Crow said:
Am I correct in guessing that the aimed-for April 15th window for Experimental will be pushed back some to allow implementation?
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April 15 is a Tuesday, so that was an approximate date as we would not initially release a major new experimental on a Tuesday. An actual public release date would be a Monday, so maybe the 21st. I probably need 3 more days of work on it code/xml wise. I also have new zombie work to be finished, so it will be tight. On the other hand, we don't have to get everything perfect to start experimental, so some changes can happen during exp.

Jugom said:
I understand that harder biomes need to be... harder, but personally, I'd rather have a global timing with not so frequent storms but that can last for a whole day (hour?) than having storms start and stop 5 times in a single day.

Either way, yay for weather survival.
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My general target is once a day with some days being skipped, but that is just a guess until the team plays it a while. They will not last anywhere near an hour of realtime.
No Man's Sky and Stalker both have similar concepts which I refer to as examples of how it could work.

 
faatal said:
April 15 is a Tuesday, so that was an approximate date as we would not initially release a major new experimental on a Tuesday. An actual public release date would be a Monday, so maybe the 21st. I probably need 3 more days of work on it code/xml wise. I also have new zombie work to be finished, so it will be tight. On the other hand, we don't have to get everything perfect to start experimental, so some changes can happen during exp.

My general target is once a day with some days being skipped, but that is just a guess until the team plays it a while. They will not last anywhere near an hour of realtime.
No Man's Sky and Stalker both have similar concepts which I refer to as examples of how it could work.
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I didn't think I could get any more excited about Update 2.0, but @faatal proved me wrong. Thanks you!!!

 
faatal said:
My general target is once a day with some days being skipped, but that is just a guess until the team plays it a while. They will not last anywhere near an hour of realtime.
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Hopefully things like frequency, duration, and the damage (or rate of damage) are configurable, perhaps even on a per-biome basis.

Grandpa Minion said:
allowing players to combine items removed alot of unnecssary items off the server (thousands of items) 
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I wouldn't have expected that. I'd have thought people sold those items.

 
faatal said:
I was not going to say anything until it was more done, but yes I started prototyping our existing storm weather being more dangerous looking and harmful to the player. That was approved yesterday and our particle artist has started doing better effects as I just did a cranked up version of snow for the snow biome. The timing was global, but is now per biome as harder biomes will probably have more frequent storms. There will be some new UI messaging telling you to take cover or get out of the biome if it is also hazardous to you as the hazard system runs in parallel with the storms, so both could be happening to you.
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HELL YEAH LETS GO

 
faatal said:
I was not going to say anything until it was more done, but yes I started prototyping our existing storm weather being more dangerous looking and harmful to the player. That was approved yesterday and our particle artist has started doing better effects as I just did a cranked up version of snow for the snow biome. The timing was global, but is now per biome as harder biomes will probably have more frequent storms. There will be some new UI messaging telling you to take cover or get out of the biome if it is also hazardous to you as the hazard system runs in parallel with the storms, so both could be happening to you.
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faatal you are a magnificent beast, thank you very much for spilling some beans for us to eat and its great to know that weather survival isn't scrapped.

 
faatal said:
I was not going to say anything until it was more done, but yes I started prototyping our existing storm weather being more dangerous looking and harmful to the player. That was approved yesterday and our particle artist has started doing better effects as I just did a cranked up version of snow for the snow biome. The timing was global, but is now per biome as harder biomes will probably have more frequent storms. There will be some new UI messaging telling you to take cover or get out of the biome if it is also hazardous to you as the hazard system runs in parallel with the storms, so both could be happening to you.
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Good to hear this, really. Do you know if current 1.3 armor temp resistances will be rebalanced so the lining and mesh mods will have more impact? Will all armors still have the same resistance as they do or will they be unique?

 
Oh man, now I'm wondering if, in the wasteland, the storm system will work at all like the storms from the Mad Max game, where visibility drops to nothing, debris flies around like crazy, and you'll get pummeled and ragdolled if one of those debris chunks hits you (you can also get struck by lightning).

It was a great system because it wasn't just a blanket DOT damage or something as boring as that, it was a legitimate obstacle course you could risk if you wanted to (to keep playing instead of sheltering, but they also put a bit of loot in the storm as bait).

 
FramFramson said:
Oh man, now I'm wondering if, in the wasteland, the storm system will work at all like the storms from the Mad Max game, where visibility drops to nothing, debris flies around like crazy, and you'll get pummeled and ragdolled if one of those debris chunks hits you (you can also get struck by lightning).

It was a great system because it wasn't just a blanket DOT damage or something as boring as that, it was a legitimate obstacle course you could risk if you wanted to (to keep playing instead of sheltering, but they also put a bit of loot in the storm as bait).
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Lighting storms in the desert and wasteland would be cool

 
HB_H4wk said:
With some fallen burnt and broken up trees.
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trogs said:
…I know it would probably be too taxing on performance to have fully grown forests, but I think a few details here and there could be added, like fallen trees, ferns, wall vines, hanging vines and trees and plants spawning with a random rotation and angle to break up the pattern a bit
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Whenever I walk through a real life forest, I can’t help but consider what 7DtD is lacking that makes its “forests” not feel like real ones. I think the recent addition of a mix of shorter grasses was a significant step in the right direction, though patches of tall (>1 meter) grass is needed too. I think V2.0’s new feature of leveraging sub-biomes more, so there are groves of greater tree density, will help even more.

But I agree that the absence of fallen trees is conspicuous. Long indivisible segments aren’t ideal for an RWG voxel game, but I could see more chunky rotting tree and branch segments that are no longer than a car or debris pile. Notably, forests also have creeks and game trails winding through them. Creeks would probably be too hard, but I would experiment with implementing game trails as tiny RWG ‘roads’, just 1 meter wide. They’d be distinguishable only because they’re dirt, with no grass growing on top. Just due to visibility, it would feel like bunnies congregate on these paths when you’re hunting.

 
Crater Creator said:
Whenever I walk through a real life forest, I can’t help but consider what 7DtD is lacking that makes its “forests” not feel like real ones. I think the recent addition of a mix of shorter grasses was a significant step in the right direction, though patches of tall (>1 meter) grass is needed too. I think V2.0’s new feature of leveraging sub-biomes more, so there are groves of greater tree density, will help even more.

But I agree that the absence of fallen trees is conspicuous. Long indivisible segments aren’t ideal for an RWG voxel game, but I could see more chunky rotting tree and branch segments that are no longer than a car or debris pile. Notably, forests also have creeks and game trails winding through them. Creeks would probably be too hard, but I would experiment with implementing game trails as tiny RWG ‘roads’, just 1 meter wide. They’d be distinguishable only because they’re dirt, with no grass growing on top. Just due to visibility, it would feel like bunnies congregate on these paths when you’re hunting.
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There are some really nice mods for this (of course it costs some performance but who cares on PC):

Just take a look at MPLogue's Better biomes mod:

https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/5366

image.png

Also worth a try for city improvements: MPLogue's Urban decay mod

https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/6867

image.png

 
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Thaledwyn said:
There are some really nice mods for this (of course it costs some performance but who cares on PC):

Just take a look at MPLogue's Better biomes mod:

https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/5366

View attachment 33851

Also worth a try for city improvements: MPLogue's Urban decay mod

https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/6867

View attachment 33847
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I just want the decor I don't care about how dense it is. Cuz that causes performance hits 

But all the tree types, plants, corpes, junk on the road, logs, that's imo what the game needs 

 
Thaledwyn said:
There are some really nice mods for this (of course it costs some performance but who cares on PC):

Just take a look at MPLogue's Better biomes mod:

View attachment 33851

Also worth a try for city improvements: MPLogue's Urban decay mod

View attachment 33847
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The better biomes is definitely nice, and I've tried the trees mod by Dashu, which also looks great, but at least with that mod, I started to get certain vanilla textures showing in the low resolution mode, making the game look bad.  I could use the gfx command to make them high resolution again, but I'd have to keep doing that as I moved around because they'd eventually be low resolution again.  Things like vanilla trees and grass and vehicles would all look that way when the mod was installed.  I would happily take a performance hit in order to have a way to force everything to use the high resolution textures, but when I can't force it to always use those, it just wasn't worth using in my game.  I'm guessing that better biomes one would have the same effect.  It seems that anything that adds enough extra textures causes the problem as I've seen the same situation with certain other mods.

As far as the second image, the ivy isn't bad, but I wouldn't want the graffiti.  For one, it doesn't show the texture under it (no brick shapes under that), which makes it look odd.  And second, there are only going to be a relatively small number of graffiti images and seeing the same ones hundreds of times around a large city would look bad, imo.  If the game could automatically generate random graffiti that looked good and matched the underlying textures, I would be interested.  Otherwise, that's one that I'll avoid.

 
Riamus said:
The better biomes is definitely nice, and I've tried the trees mod by Dashu, which also looks great, but at least with that mod, I started to get certain vanilla textures showing in the low resolution mode, making the game look bad.  I could use the gfx command to make them high resolution again, but I'd have to keep doing that as I moved around because they'd eventually be low resolution again.  Things like vanilla trees and grass and vehicles would all look that way when the mod was installed.  I would happily take a performance hit in order to have a way to force everything to use the high resolution textures, but when I can't force it to always use those, it just wasn't worth using in my game.  I'm guessing that better biomes one would have the same effect.  It seems that anything that adds enough extra textures causes the problem as I've seen the same situation with certain other mods.

As far as the second image, the ivy isn't bad, but I wouldn't want the graffiti.  For one, it doesn't show the texture under it (no brick shapes under that), which makes it look odd.  And second, there are only going to be a relatively small number of graffiti images and seeing the same ones hundreds of times around a large city would look bad, imo.  If the game could automatically generate random graffiti that looked good and matched the underlying textures, I would be interested.  Otherwise, that's one that I'll avoid.
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However the other props like the

subway 

Billboards even tho imo they lack personality 

The corpes and skeletons 

Junk on the ground 

And from the GNS video. Rats!!!! And pigeons is really cool. More animals the better 

All of those are pretty good and other stuff doesn't make sense like like the random fires and water hydrants still going off 

But the base game has this issue too. Like the fact electricity is still up. Even tho it's been who knows how long sense the apocalypse.  The burnt forest still burning.  Etc

 
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