Blake_
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Posts posted by Blake_
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8 hours ago, faatal said:
The number of bandits that are spawned at any one time. Say a bandit takes x2 the performance of a zombie, then I would not want more that half of them in the world compared to the number of zombies a computer can manage and still have a reasonable FPS. Now that does not mean the world will have bandits everywhere. That depends on game play goals. I would like bandits to be rare, because this is a zombie game and 99% of the population is dead or a zombie.
For reference, Fallout 3, which is a weird and unfair comparison to 7dtd, had usually around 16 bandits/entities tops on a POI. They were enough to give the player a good sense of thrill and "emotional romantic moments" with 'them guts flying around'. Skyrim POIs and some quest scenes spawned around 30 entities, but that was unusual, as lesser numbers were more common.
In reality , you can give a single player thrill enough with just 3 bandits. Now, the AI has to be good, like good good. Good to the level of full-on smooth pathing for MANY more meters than the sexiest zd, extra comments, cover, heal, help, grenades, fluff, etc.
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1 hour ago, faatal said:
There were some issues with platform changes and then there was a bad merge of some of my changes that they backed out and may end up having to hand merge.
That right there and other issues born from simple overlooks are the biggest downsides to having patches as opposed to just bringing on the beefy alpha . That being said, I like the patches. It keeps the player engaged while waiting for a21. Bandits. Finally. More than 4 years since those swearing lines were recorded, lol.
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29 minutes ago, Kalex said:
Will we be able to loot the gear off the bandits?
Lots of work to visually swap body parts to dressed/undressed ones, significantly more so if the new dismemberement becomes a thing for npcs. But I would also love to have that in the game. Sooo satisfying to loot with visual feedback. Bethesda main franchises have the feature and it makes gameplay significantly more immersive than not having it.
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I do recall devs stating that there will be not only bandit "minihordes", but also bandits covering POI and Air drop locations. In fact those will very likely be their first 3 situational appearances until we get more beefy events (npc road encounters, robberies, random battles, etc) in the form of a proper encounter/event system. The event system is a maybe, so it will happen 100%. That's TFP's motto for good stuff, lol.
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6 hours ago, faatal said:
There should be melee and ranged bandits. Some may do both. Melee are the first ones I'm working on.
They will be hostile. Possibly later there could be neutral or friendly ones belonging to a faction. They will not loot stuff or destroy things unless they are in their way just like the AI currently does.
They are zombies with weapons, but with different behavior. Like they will hide in cover and wait to ambush you.
I wishfully wonder : Will you unleash the full gps pathing code to make them follow the player to the depths of hell... ish?
Also, do you guys plan.to make animations with some basic faatal-made integrated AI tasks like using chairs or sofas, or even eating food standing or otherwise? Sneaking behind an unaware bandit sitting and eating a diabetes-inducing jar of honey would be loads of fun I gather.
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@Roland do you know from the mouth of that straight horse if a21 is getting a thread soon after 20.4 releases? Or are there just cavities? :D
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11 hours ago, Roland said:
Blake has the interpretation he wants and he isn't letting go...
True that. Tough crowd, lol.
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11 hours ago, Roland said:
No. He didn't.
It never did. Bad translation?
"I can feel the change like an itch in the back of my skull ". That's... roughly his neck? Scalp? Who cares about a little paraphrasing? It all depends on the Duke's size I guess. Also, Jared says he can sense something stirring inside of him. I consider myself a polite gentleman and won't comment any further on the subject. I am loving this deep, profound lore.
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3 hours ago, Guppycur said:
So what I'm hearing is if you're infected zombies won't hurt you.
Only if you have The Duke's STD will they stop coming after you. Pure raw lore...err...Content?
Think about it : Jared said that he was welcomed, that going inside was easy. And then, he stated that he could feel it in his neck. A dirty mind I have not. It's just there. Word for word.
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16 hours ago, Roland said:
I like LBD okay. I enjoy the freedom of using a central pool of xp for whatever I want to improve a bit better. I like playing how I like and focusing on what I think is fun but still being able to improve in the areas that I'd rather not grind up. The LBD in A16 was pretty good because you could grind or spend skill points as you chose.
My first choice would be to award xp based solely on time survived and not tie xp to any specific action at all. Simply have it be a reward for not dying. If you do die, the timer starts over for when you will earn your next xp payout. The problem with xp based on actions is that it incentivizes those actions in unnatural ways and instead of the focus being to live and survive in the world, the focus becomes doing specific highly effective actions to slurp up xp. The game becomes all about leveling up instead of living and surviving in the world. Remove the xp carrot and suddenly the only actions a player needs to do are the actions they want to do in order to survive. Without zombie kill xp you would only kill zombies when needed instead of hunting them down and farming them for precious progress currency.
The problem I have with LBD is that it exacerbates that distraction from natural play even more by encouraging players to grind unnaturally or even finding ways to set up an automatic process to level up while AFK. For a great look at the power of LBD to overwhelm the game and plunge players into an xp centric mindset just look at the current state of the trader quests. Trader quest progression is currently an LBD model. By doing quests you go up in quest tiers and progress. Look at how much questing now dominates the game and how players often feel compelled to spam multiple quests a day so they can grind up their "quest skill" with the trader and move from T1 to T5 as quickly as possible. Can anyone really point at grinding multiple quests a day to the exclusion of most other activities and call that natural and normal?
People used to explore POI's just because it was fun to clear them and explore. Since questing for the traders became LBD-like there seems to be a lot less exploring and clearing a city like there used to be and a lot more ignoring all POI's except the ones the traders send you to. People complain that they keep getting sent to the same POIs as if they couldn't go and explore a new POI without a quest. But the power of the LBD model for progressing up the quest tiers is so strong it wouldn't occur to most people to "waste their time" on non-quest POI's.
Do I have fun questing and rising in the ranks? Yes. So I don't hate LBD. I just recognize how XP-centric models change the player focus from living and surviving in a virtual world into a focus of simply acquiring xp and leveling up and I think it is too bad. I hear that @Boidster is possibly working on a cool time-based xp alternative. I wonder how that is coming along....?
Summary.... enjoy the game for what it offers or switch games you say? Does reading your scroll counts as enjoying the game? I'm roleplaying a reader at the moment.
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@faatal,sorry to bother you at this time of intense a21 developing, though I would love if you could answer, to the best of your knowledge, the following questions:
1. How are things? Meaning What are your plans for basic bandit AI?
2. Do you know if water is getting some love and if so, do you believe the raft will get a meaningful spot in the game at some point?
3.Are " zds going through 1 meter holes" and "wandering sleepers " something that you personally want to do in the future/at some point? .
4. While not exactly your department, do you know if the RWG team is planning to introduce new RWG features and/or stamps in the future? Meaning not only more size options, but also more than one kind of crater, river, etc. Right now, they are few in variety, regardless of the coolness of the feature.
5. Do you think 7dtd will be able to increase its entity limit in the future by any amount, or do you deem it far fetched for Unity and/or this game at this point in time? The reason for this question is none other than "where in the world will npcs fit above this already tight cap".
Thank you for your time.
Hugs.
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6 hours ago, Roland said:
Lol. Ancient, very ancient reference. Respect though.
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A20.3 Release Notes:
Added:
.A pixel to the Sunset.
.Zds now move before thinking of attacking, before they just attacked while thinking about it.
Fixed:
.Madmole trimmed his beard.
.Roland writes too much to appease the masses. It might not be fully fixed.
.TheFunPimp became a pessimistic human being. It's now completely fixed.
Known bugs:
.Lazman is actually really hardworking. Known bug. Needs more testing.
IMPORTANT:
To report a bug, send a email to Uganda's Foreign Affairs Department so it can relay the issue to the ISS and beam the answer to the rover Opportunity. From there, and with a "no more than 6 mins-delay", you might get a reply in the form of a paper-written note in your doorstep on the exact date of the Jupiter's Winter's Solstice. Buy Himalayan Pink salt, It's healthy.
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15 minutes ago, meganoth said:
A pre-release DLC is a bad idea.
Tell that to some eastern titles and their crossover oufits and pikachu faceswaps. Also, nobody would resist to buy the soundtrack. Or a silver skin for customizing your soundtrack. Sweet.
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Throwing good and proved rpg formulas into the gameplay to enrich it is always a definitely for me. I thought the team was edgy about wrapping up the tent, but it seems the player will keep enjoying unbelievable beefy alphas for some time yet. Yes, please. No sarcasm. This is the top 1 on many a steam library. And if cash ever runs low, as Matt would say, shut up and take my monkey [in the form of pre-release dlcs (new quests,special zds, POIs, rwg stamps, etc)].
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22 hours ago, Roland said:
Additional Possibilities
Madmole's new crafting system
Bandits
Random Event Manager
The Duke, himself
The Duke's Casino POI
Raft
Reputation System
These are what I can think of that have been talked about but not yet implemented. Probably not all of these as they have said they want to keep A21 on a shorter leash.
What is the reputation system? Is it among players with simple stuff like records or is it like a ranking similar to the gamestage which includes npcs that you have to surpass to be the bestest, like in STALKER?
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1 hour ago, faatal said:
I said I expected to succeed again 10 bandits and not 10 players, meaning bandits are easier. So you seem to agree with me, which is not backwards.
I was talking about a consultant working on water. I'm the one working on bandits.
Bandits easier than humans? You jest. I remember a17 with moderate shivers. Nevertheless, you already have a very nice path-targeting code that can be made into a crazy good AI, like making landscape npc bandits "store" viable attack paths within the same gameplay session. Allowing them to create a tiny NPC "POI"/tent/workstation thingy on the outskirts of your base/ airdrop site, etc is also a viable behaviour and a very cool and emergent one at that . It might sound like a Pimp Dream? Difficult to tell nowadays with all our dreams coming true. Money, Love and Bandits, the three most important things in life.
Will you make settings for "esoteric" things like bandit AI (accuracy?) and/or bandit amount in the menu?
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1 minute ago, faatal said:
Any amount would be better...
As long as it fulfills the roadmap, we can wait those 3 years. Each alpha is like a new game, but it's very clear that you need hands in some aspects. 3d modeling doesn't need much training if the modeler has some background. Nor does animation.
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9 hours ago, faatal said:
Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I am planning on doing bandits in two phases that will span two alphas as we are hoping for shorter alphas in the future by moving away from giant monolithic changes.
Reading between the lines here: I'm glad we get 2 more years of development. It is very much needed for quests, npcs, and RWG and systems' depth and polish.
50 guys shouldn't do shorter, because patches, backports, alternative builds and backport overlooks/issues can be detrimental vs a big monolithic alpha. And you guys are semi-long distance with a buch of time zones.
The people argument goes like this in broad strokes:
SpoilerSome changes needn't people but time, like AI.
Some systems, like quests, wouldn't need that much time if there was a good dev tool to allow designers to fill the world with them, both scripted and non-scripted (trigger system is a step in the right direction). Same with npc/player models: a UMA replacement for character creation is needed, and can be used for both character creation and all npcs, a face-swapping system is the minimum amount of work required. Face features and a few body types would be the ideal (plus 3d models should be designed in a modular way to avoid clipping from the get go, which the art team doesn't like vs a full-body model) . Just 10 months of dev time tops with your resources , no biggie because it's worth it. Or you guys can just use UMA 2, but it will be less performant and has loads of redundancy and 3rd party stuff.
Art and Design (including system design) do need people, and that's 66% of any game. 80-100 trained devs should allow TFP to do noticeably shorter cycles, and we are not there yet.
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42 minutes ago, Tmodloader said:
Yes this is why I worry on the bandits. In a voxel game like this, it would be a feat of achievement to programming to get the ai done. Not that I doubt it could happen but with the desire to release 1.0 eventually, it may be extremely difficult to get bandits working without just using similar ai to zombies.
Make no mistake. faatal can do it. Yes, it will take a while, but another fun fact, when faatal starts a feature, he finishes for the same alpha. The only bottleneck here is 3d models and animations, really. Now, I hope for healing, covering, surrounding, retreating, swearing, grenade throwing and miscellaneous loitering/eating, but we might not get the last 2. It depends on how many keyboards per finger he gets.
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Fun fact: There's no video game out there with a vanilla non-scripted general-purpose bandit AI that seeks cover, surrounds, throws grenades, heals/retreats when damaged, communicates between each other, targets and follows the player through a Multiplayer voxel world in a believable manner.
Most advanced ones just move to the player and target him/her while following him/her with significant glitches, like Empyrion. There are also scripted ones , that have a bit of brain but within a very limited area. Some non-voxel games do achieve some of those features, like Rust, with scripted and area-limited NPC AI working in Multiplayer.
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21 hours ago, faatal said:
Maybe a few weeks.
Bandits in vehicles is near the bottom of my list of what they need to do. You know what happens to the bottom of game dev lists? They generally get cut, but it could happen.
Well, you did the vehicle code an will do the bandit behaviour. I think you are the right person to buttlick in order to get to that bottom-list feature. And bandits on rafts and helicopters for second from the bottom !! . Make sure to snatch some animators to work with for those features, lol.
Trader Rekt eating a big earn of corn while sitting on a pink chair musn't be at the bottom list either. That feature should be up top right below bandits IMHO.
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2 hours ago, Jay_ombie said:
Using Experimental 20.1
Is there a alternative way to get around broken Quest's when a player crashes during a shared quest ? Its happened twice now and its like the quest doesn't know what to do next when a player crashers out. i.e. Last night friend crashed (again) it showed a marker to the last zombie for instance but there isn't one at the marker..
Happened to me too ! the marker shows but the Zd is nowhere to be seen, I thought it was because a big horde came and filled the entity cap before it spawned or because it did spawn and run off and fell off the world, but it could very well be because a crash or network issue. There's no work around either. Current console commands can give you the same quest by pure chance, but there's a big chance that it's a NO TRADER one. It's a very annoying issue. Gazz's fault for sure.
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8 minutes ago, jorbascrumps said:
Obviously it's way too early to start getting hyped but this is great news. Thanks for sharing.
Too late. Forum already be like:
2
Alpha 21 Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted
I see. Thanks !