tdevine
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Posts posted by tdevine
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Maps are usually 8k or 10k, but the editor can also make 9k maps. Are they playable by other players when downloaded or is there some reason they can't?
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Actually I use both. I can make my own maps with placed canyons, rivers, mountains, coastal areas or islands, and reshape or resize them how I want. I still use MapToolz for this by switching between Alphas as it is outdated. After a year I have the world editing down pretty well. As far as Prefabs, I am getting much better after all the practice, but would like some information on more advanced features so I can improve the quality of them. I am in the process of making an entirely hand crafted map with 100% placed POIs, with some of my own designs, like the mountain bunker I am still working on below. It drives me crazy how much potential the game has for creativity and content past the usual blood moon cycle of game play. Designing an overhaul that would actually have an end game to accomplish while exploring the world and dealing with hordes.
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23 minutes ago, zztong said:
While that would be handy and nice, I can't decide if it is a reasonable expectation to have documentation for something still in development. YES -- because even their own team needs it. NO -- fixing it would require constant rework delaying future releases. MAYBE -- assuming you ever plan to have such documentation, maintaining it is perhaps easier than writing it at the end?
I do recognize that it makes breaking into this space much harder. The reality today is, unless you just want to make a quick POI and then move on, find a mentor. You can be productive reasonably quickly by watching videos, but there are lots and lots of related lessons. I started with Genosis' videos -- they were great for starting ~A19 -- and then got lots of advice from Stallionsden and the CP crew related to optimization and errors, plus Prefab Editor tricks and tools beyond the basics.
I have been learning by trial and error so far as finding specific information is exhausting. I spent 2 days trying to figure out why I could not modify the terrain on my new map because I could not find the information to tell me that it could not be done. The scattered information around all forums and platforms is unreal. So much so that I just want to make my own thread or video that will cover as much as possible in one easy place.
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4 hours ago, stallionsden said:
There is a pinned thread up top called getting started prefabbing - complete (poi creation) no need for another thread tbh
It says it is A16 specific. So how much of the information is outdated or wrong? Is it going to help with A21 enough to even read?
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Trying to put a lot of facts and answers into one thread. Please put the number of the question in the beginning of your response so others can quickly find what they are looking for.
1 How to name a POI so that name shows up in game. The editor name may not be the one you want for the game. Example, TFP "Factory 1" is actually "Shamway". I can't find the file to set the name I actually want. And if you want a name that's more than one word in the editor, you can use a space or it will give you an error. I can use "_" between words, but I would like to do it better than that.
2 What tool do I need to modify a .dll file for this game?
3 When you copy a sleeper volume, why does it copy the size of the volume and number of zombies to spawn, but NOT the trigger of the original volume?
4 What is the purpose of the Load Into button as compared to just using the Load to Clipboard button to bring a copy of an existing POI into your new project or POI?
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8 hours ago, zztong said:
When you say "the Editor", do you mean the World Editor or the Prefab Editor?
For the Prefab Editor, little bits go out of date for each version and the POI-RWG interaction options change too. It kind of takes a community of folks with similar interests to pass along the knowledge. Talking to those folks in Discord keeps me up-to-date. If it relates to the Prefab Editor, feel free to DM me. Otherwise, the CompoPack's #prefabber-hangout has been quite active with POI developers.
It seems to me that the modding community has kept this game alive in a much bigger way than the developers themselves. I would think that TFP would have an official thread that goes over as close to everything that the prefab editor and world editor has to offer, and keep it updated. It would take a little time, but the community deserves it for the 1000's of mods that gave more life to the game. And thank you for the offer to help, I just may use it, thanks again.
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This game has sold about 14m copies or so and around for 10+ years. I have been messing around with modding for about a year or so. Why is it soooo hard to go to one site, one link, one thread that explains everything about the editor? At least what all the options and types of things there are on the right side panel. Most of the info I run across is old and obsolete. Why is the information about the modding of this game so scattered and missing? I use Discord, YT, and other sources, yet can't find 60% of the information I would like to have.
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53 minutes ago, bigstep70 said:
Just copy the relevant poi files to another folder/location and rename it... then move it back so you can access it again in the editor.
I tried that but I think there are other files that look for the original name and it did not work. I will try again. Thanks
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I need about 10 or more additional toolbelt slots when I am in the editor, how can I mod this and what file dictates this?
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I made a custom POI but want to change the name, or even make a backup with a different name. I do not see a "save as" option. How can I do this?
Thank you for the answers and I have confirmed for anyone that also would like to know:
Copy all the files that belong to the custom POI and put into another folder, re-name all of them the new name you would like. Move them into your original prefab folder and now you have two of the same POI with different names.
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Just now, Riamus said:
And is there some reason you feel the need to be rude?
I was kinda joking. This is a hardish game about survival and maybe certain death. If you are getting hit that often you are doing it wrong. This game has 100 ways to loot, fight, and stay safe.
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Hmmm....
19 hours ago, Riamus said:Well, I originally thought I liked the update but the more I am playing, the more I'm finding that I am starting to hate it. I am about to just quit playing because it's annoying me so much. Almost every hit from a zombie causes a negative effect - usually bleeding. At the first levels you just don't have bandages enough to keep up with dealing with all these high numbers of bleeds. Lighting is so messed up that it will go from full brightness to full darkness with a single step inside a building and the fade in/out looks extremely unnatural. Greatly increased damage by zombies, or so it seems, may be fine at high difficulties for those that like that but there wasn't a reason to change difficulty from what it was before. The constant crawling of zombies at broken doors causing them to get their super reach attacks is getting old really fast.
I really hope this gets balanced quickly because it is so frustrating to play right now. I love the look and changes overall but whatever "balancing" that was done is awful.
And WHY would I get spawned on top of a POI roof when I spawn near backpack?! There's no reason for that. It wasn't even a roof you're meant to be on and so no way down besides jumping or building something.
At this point I can't even play anymore. I'm just so fed of with a bleed from practically every hit from a zombie. Waiting for a fix or someone to mod it back to better levels.
No offense, but you sound kinda fragile. Maybe try Mario Kart first?
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I will edit this post as I find or think of more important issues that may make the game better. Hopefully some of you will join in with some great ideas.
1. There has always been a bad balancing factor between playing solo or multiplayer. This game's crafting is completely balanced for a solo player, but are not adjusted for multiplayer. This means that if 3-4 players organize their crafting points, they could be getting and making end game items in less than the first week. It may be worse now, as you can give away your magazines for the right teammate to read. I suggest making it an OPTION so that ONLY the player that looted the magazine can read or use it. This way, the crafting progression can remain balanced for everyone and the team in question, so the game keeps its challenge. And I said OPTION, so players that do not want this don't have to use it.
2. PLEASE, for the love of god, remove the main loot off the roofs, especially tier 4s and 5s. I will use the T5 shotgun factory and hospital as an example. TFP have spent countless hours making these grand buildings with many zombies, rooms, furnishings, atmosphere, etc.... Why would you at TFP think it is reasonable to put the main loot on the roof of these POIs? You can skip 95% of each POI and go right to the main loot. Not "cheesing" is not an excuse for bad choices or design. Put the loot either together, or broken up, IN the POIs, making the player search for and fight for it. A much, much, more interesting visit to the large POIs.
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OMG release the update already!
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Need a much better release date than just saying 2023, since we waited over a year already. I am waiting to finish my mods so I can play with my family and friends. But waiting until the patch. Are you talking 2-4 months or 5-8 months?
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20 hours ago, bdubyah said:
Wait, so you know some things you don't like are being changed in A21, yet you come here and complain about them anyway now? Uh...
Actually, my complaint with these A21 specific changes were that, one, they took way too long, two, the current skill system should have NEVER been put into the game as it is horrible.
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10 hours ago, Ramethzer0 said:
Let's not forget the energy you brought with you. I have this knee-jerk tendency to return that kinda thing back to sender. I mean so far its been formulaic that you have pointed fingers at everyone else, even going so far to do it again when responding to me. Rest assured, if the whole world smells like dookie to you, its prolly time to check your shoes.
But do go on about how the ills of your experiences are totally everyone else's fault.
Bring something to the discussion or don't say anything at all. We don't need a keyboard warrior or a useless troll on the forum. Quit personally attacking me while hiding behind your screen. Also, some of my complaints are being addressed in Alpha 21, so I guess some of my complaints are legit huh? It is good that you don't decide where this game goes, and your opinion of my complaints are also worth ZERO.
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On 3/25/2023 at 1:18 PM, Ramethzer0 said:
Or I dunno maybe you just mad because you like being mad. I mean, this is a lot of leaky eyes for someone who hasn't actually brought anything to the table other than.
Every response you've laid down is just more of how the devs hurt you.
Or i dunno, maybe your toxic spew is empty of any substance to the discussion of improving the game.
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On 3/21/2023 at 7:12 PM, Treb said:
Whether the loot is on the roof, underground or in the middle of the building, you can always dig/pole up/break walls to it and avoid 95%+ of the POI. In a fully destroyable world, it is impossible to prevent cheesing the POI. The problem here is you and your family are deciding to cheese.
No, the problem is bad design. If they were smarter devs they would have made multiple versions of the exact same POI that had the loot in different areas, or even better, random areas each time. Like the shotgun factory that looked exactly the same, but the loot could be in a dozen different areas and you would have to search. Cheeseing is also a term sometimes used when design sucks or the devs are lazy. "Hey, lets put a lot of the main loot all together on the roof of these huge buildings, EVERY TIME". Ya, cheesing is the problem, haahahahahah
On 3/22/2023 at 2:45 PM, Ramethzer0 said:You know.. I understand people can be really passionate about the games they enjoy.
But, yeah...
Excuses for bad design..........
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How do POI spawns change when solo or in 3 man multiplayer?
Can you load a POI in the editor, and then "save as" so you can make some tweeks and place it? When I load it into a new POI area the spawn zones go away.
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EDIT: I had posted my earlier content while frustrated and angry after trying to experience multiplayer with my friends and family. I wanted to articulate my thoughts without those feelings, so I will try again.
After getting to know the game, I started checking out mods, and thinking about things in the game that made no sense to me. I could not enjoy the game at this point knowing what I had concluded to be major problems or missing features. I stopped all of us from playing until I could mod it, including making my own mods. And since I had no experience modding this game, I had to reverse engineer established mods first before making my own, which took about 2-3 weeks before I could start making multiple mods and changes with no errors, and were balanced within the game. This also included making my own custom map and using the world editor, along with third party software to make it more realistic. The offered default maps are a horrible example of what this game could actually be.
This all took me about 2 1/2 months of research, time, trial and error, and hunting down mistakes. And what got me the most frustrated and angry was the fact that after 10 years, this game has very little info or help to make mods or use the editors that is easy to find or access. On YouTube, most of the vids cover the same crap, and none of them are very detailed. Those creators could not even answer some of the more basic world editor questions. Now there are sources for info, do not get me wrong, but when you are looking for detailed or advanced info, it is very hard to find. I have had some luck on a Discord I was pointed to, but the process of gaining a lot of knowledge to modify this game is a long frustrating road. And some of the changes I needed to make before enjoying the game again, I think should have been addressed long ago, so I would not have to use my own time working on it instead of playing it with my friends and family.
Another thing that was really frustrating was trying to add finished community mods to the game. Almost all of them had to be customized as they were completely unbalanced, included features that made vanilla features useless, mixed quality content with crap content, had errors, were not really finished, were not thought out, ruined the survival aspect, etc... One vehicle mod was missing sounds, some vehicles drove like crap, some had the avatar in the wrong place etc... More work for me again.
1. Nothing is more frustrating than watching your nephew just climb up to a tier 5 POI roof, grab all the best loot and come back down. But wait, I thought this was a semi hard core survival game? Food is scarce, you start on foot, what is this? "Don't Cheeze", is a poor excuse for bad design. I know TFP have purposely patched out exploits in the past, so why not this? They could have easily just taken the 50 or so tier 4s and 5s, removed the main loot from the roof, broken it up, and scattered it in 3-5 areas of each POI depending on size. This would at the least make players search or fight through the POI to grab all the loot. Even better if possible, make the loot respawn randomly around a POI. Something similar to this or better should have been a priority. I had to do this myself, and it works great.
2. The skill system. Who at FTP thought is was good to have only 5 crafting levels and immediately be able to craft stone, iron, steel, etc, at the same level that you have reached once the item was unlocked? This takes a "semi hard core survival game" and turns it into a basic, easy mode crafting game. You are telling me that once I am at level 5, get lucky and find the right schematic, I can now craft end game items at tier 5 within 30-60 days or even sooner? You also can skip an entire crafting element like iron tools if you get lucky enough for example. The real problem here is single player vs. multiplayer. Since skill costs do not change from SP to MP, now all your team has to do is min-max diff skills your team needs, making the skill system a joke. My job was to build vehicles. Needless to say I was making the 4x4 in a few weeks of game time. Not very fun, not challenging at all. In single player, your skill choices matter much more as you advance much slower as you have to cover the entire skill system yourself, but multiplayer completely destroys this.
The next patch will address this, but after 10 years, and the latest horrible system that should have never been part of the game in the first place. You should never be able to make iron tools if you can't at least make tier 3-5 stone tools.
3. The game feels kind of empty and lonely. Not many zombies around outside of POI's. No civilians or survivors running from zombies. One type of car to litter the world. No roaming zombies in a POI that you have entered, you need to wake them all up, but can shoot most of them first. Where is everyone? Screamers and hordes are not much of a challenge. And I was told that the POI spawns do not change with MP? This can not be correct. I get the same amount of spawns in a POI no matter SP or MP? Please tell me this is not the case. I had to combine and customize mods to make an occasional civilian/survivor either running from or fighting zombies to liven up the world. I did the same to add a half dozen different vehicles that could spawn along with the default cars, giving more variety and life to the world. I changed the skill system and spread it out to make more sense, while adding more content to fill it out better.
Why has FTP not put more effort into optimizing this game? They said because it is not finished, but 10 years and probably 5+ to go, this game and its players need more effort to optimize this as we go, not 5 more years from now, or even longer?
Why can't we zoom out to see more of the world map?
Why can't we share our explored parts of the map with the team in MP?
Why can't we craft a lower tier of an item if we don't have the parts to make a higher tier, or just don't need the higher tier item?
Why is it taking 12-24 months to get an update that should only take half as long?
Why can't I change the terrain in world editor mode and save it?
Why are most POI zombies set to active instead of attack, making them too vulnerable?
Why has it taken so long to fix water in the world?
Many other questions I forgot.
I actually like the idea of the game, and I see it has come a long ways from where it started. But I still get frustrated at how far it is from the potential it has.
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On 2/19/2023 at 7:19 PM, zztong said:
I realize your conversation is likely moving elsewhere, but I wanted to try to answer one of your questions here where I happened to see it for fear of not seeing where it picked up.
I recall asking about this in the "Discussion and Requests" part of these forums and got an answer. There's a flag that has to be set. As I'm not very conversant in Unity, I don't recall what that flag is, but you're welcome to review that conversation...
Feel free to necro that thread if it would help.
Thank you for your help.
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I find it insanely infuriating that this game has been out for 10 years and almost NO information is available to modders. When I say no information, I mean that I have been trying to mod this game in a multitude of ways and could only find about 20%-30% of the info or help I needed after scouring the internet and forums for days and sometimes weeks, only to find no answer at all to a should be easy question. I have watched vids on YT for 50 hours plus, and they all cover the same thing, just annoying. So I wanted to start a general thread to include things that modders have either been taught or learned on their own through trial and error like myself. Loading, unloading, testing, re-testing, loading and then unloading again just to find an answer that should have been covered by TFP or the community long ago is just rage inducing to me. So I will start with some questions that maybe someone can answer, them list some facts I learned on my own.
I like the game, it has great potential. But one sad feature is that you can beat about 90% of the game just by using an elevated position like a roof to get away from zombies and kill them.
??? How do you give zombies the ability to jump up more than one block? I have used jump strength, jump distance, AI leap, and nothing works. My spider zombie can "leap" up higher now, but it is not consistent. When the spider zombie gets under my elevated position it just attacks blocks like all the others. If I take the AI block out, it just stands there anyway.
FACT: If you give a zombie an AI LEAP command like the spider zombie in the config files, then increase its "jump distance", the zombie will try to jump or leap onto the player and attack. If you set the jump distance high enough like I did with my spiders, sometimes they can jump or leap onto a roof.
??? Why can some models or meshes of driveable vehicles be turned into undriveable blocks that will work like vanilla ones (sedans), while some models or meshes can not? You can't interact with them like other blocks no matter what settings you use. I tried to turn the Apache Helicopter model from a mod I found into just a block that you can search and harvest, but never could interact with it no matter what settings in the config I used.
??? In the world editor, why can't I adjust the terrain with a shovel or whatever, add terrain or even water, and save it to the map? The only thing I can do in the world editor it seems is place or remove/replace prefabs.
FACT: If you are interested in having more control over your custom maps, try Maptoolz. You can place water, roads, mountains, etc... It works in 2023.
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1 hour ago, khzmusik said:
There are other forums that should be used for this. The Mods forum should only be used to announce published mods and modlets, and so users can post questions about those mods and modlets in their respective threads. (Click on the big red "Posting in the Mod Forum" banner at the top of the forums.)
If you want to share your knowledge with other modders, the appropriate place is in the Tutorials & Guides forum:
https://community.7daystodie.com/forum/39-tutorials-guides/If you need knowledge from other modders, the appropriate place is in the Discussion and Requests forum:
https://community.7daystodie.com/forum/40-discussion-and-requests/
There are also non-forum places to ask about this. The most active one is Guppy's Unofficial Modding Discord server:
And, there is a reason that not a lot of information is given by TFP themselves. The game is still in development, so any information they give you could be outdated by the time the next alpha rolls around.
Just look in XML.txt in the game's Config directory. It gives you a whole lot of info about what is contained in those files, but there are entire sections that are obsolete or that needed to be added in A17 or above.
There is a similar issue with third-party tools. You recommended Maptoolz but there's no guarantee that will be around in future alphas. For example, we used to have Nitrogen and King Gen for generating RWG maps, but those tools don't deal with the A20 RWG system (tiles and parts, etc.) and AFAIK there are no plans from the authors to update them. So, any references to those tools will simply confuse people who are starting to play now.
According to TFP, the long-term plan is to offer Steam Workshop support, and once they start working on that, I'm sure there will be a lot more information coming from TFP themselves. Until then, you have to accept shifting requirements as part of the cost of modding an unfinished game.
Thanks, I will resume posting in the correct areas.
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We can upload 9k maps, can all players use and play with this size?
in Discussion and Requests
Posted · Edited by tdevine (see edit history)
I know 8k to 10k are normal, but the editor also lets us make 9k, can all players still use it if I share it or is there something I am missing and they can't?