Crater Creator

The mod launcher is an unofficial third party product. I'll merge this in with the existing thread for this tool.

Aw, thanks guys! I truly appreciate the support. My advice if you want to play ComSenMod in the near term would be to play it with an Alpha 18 game: preferably a new one so e.g. adjustments to biomes can apply. I have no expectations that it would work in A19 - it modifies xml that changed drastically from A18 to A19. Big picture, I also feel that slowly but surely a lot of the things I've griped about in vanilla and 'fixed' in ComSenMod are getting addressed in vanilla, either directly or through other changes that make the point moot. There are fewer "well duh, of course it should be like this" examples to point to as time has gone on, which is a credit to Gazz et al. So instead, I've been pouring all my time into prefab modding for some time now. But, knowing there's still interest certainly encourages me to revisit ComSenMod or something like it.

If you haven’t yet, you may want to take advantage of our Multiplayer section.

I feel like the Twitch integration is kinda sorta approaching this, with temporary effects to unpredictably help or hinder the player, like increasing their speed, or making only melee weapons work. And your Twitch watchers make great gremlins.

First thing's first: nice house. I like that you gave the house a proper apocalypse treatment, with broken walls and trash strewn everywhere. In the shed, you seem to use cupboards up high instead of cabinets. The cupboard's textures look best on the ground. Maybe your brightness is just set high, but the POI seemed very bright. I like to only turn on a light if it will A) guide the player along the one true path, or B) when they're particularly effective to set the mood for a space. Speaking of the one true path, it looks like the house is reversible: it can be navigated front-to-back or back-to-front. If you want this to be a questable dungeon crawl, I encourage you to pick which end is the start and which is the finish, and lock the doors accordingly. The house seemed very dense on loot. It's tempting to overuse the newest decorative art, like the clothing racks and piles, everywhere they make sense, but I feel the rewards in this house are heavy relative to the risks.

Version 0.9.5 is now released! As teased earlier this month, it adds DTTunnel, a Tier 4 POI. DTTunnel is a largely underground journey through Death Toll's first two rounds, including the road tunnel, sewers/waterworks, and Hersch Shipping Company. Familiar set pieces from L4D, including 2 safe rooms, are strung together in the same order you see them in L4D. Because it's mostly underground, making DTTunnel was more like subtractive modeling than past POIs. You can have paths that just end, without having to do something with the empty space beyond. Vital stats: 0.97M vertices 100 sleeper spawns ~35 minutes to complete Enjoy! Update 10/29/21: Re-uploaded after fixing a sleeper bug in DTDowntown

Some boulders are good for variety. I find they're overused, though. At least where I've lived, you don't get that many boulders sticking out of the ground like you see in Navezgane or RWG, even in the wilderness. As for making more organic rock outcrops out of stone blocks... well it theoretically works, but I for one hate messing with terrain density to achieve smooth results. We need a smooth terrain function.

Interesting. I'm currently working on a mostly-underground POI, and I've been grappling with how the surface should look. This example reminds me just how much difference the trees can make.

Since this is Pimp Dreams and I’m totally not salty about losing building materials, I propose the new system have scrap iron gloves, reinforced wood helmet, rebar frame chest armor, brick boots, flagstone pants…

Thanks, Matt! I'm now building out the underground parts from Death Toll: Riverside Tunnel and the sewers from rounds 1 & 2. It'll be another deal like DT_Downtown, where it's deliberately not sprawling, but the memorable parts are condensed together to fit into one large POI. So that'll be a Tier 4 I'm estimating, and then I plan to do some standalone buildings (Tier 1 or non-questable) from the finale. At that point I believe one could almost, if they wanted to, string together all these POIs on a custom map and have a reasonably representative facsimile of the whole campaign. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but you could. The roof of No Mercy hospital may be Left 4 Dead's most iconic setting. The roof itself wouldn't be too bad to make (I've looked), but it's on top of a skyscraper, where you never see the inside of most of the floors in L4D. It's definitely not the lowest hanging fruit, but I'll keep thinking about how it could be feasible.

I'm working on it.

Adding to what’s been said, shifts in emphasis have been somewhat unavoidable while the game has and continues to be in development. You drop in a Minecraft-style crafting module one alpha, and suddenly 7 Days to Die is a game with a well developed crafting system. You add random world generation the next alpha, and suddenly 7 Days to Die is a game with robust exploration and replayability. It would be easy to construct a false narrative around these developments. “The devs first thought this would just be a crafting game, but then they changed their minds and pivoted towards it being an exploration game. Then they got bored with that, and hoped it could be a role playing game instead. Then…” etc. I see this feedback quite often on the Steam forum: that the devs must have no direction and can’t make up their minds. But this ignores that the game is still being made. A bake shop’s cookie dough might be tasty in its own right, but the bakers were never there to make cookie dough. The fact that cookie dough was available first doesn’t mean that their plan A was to make cookie dough for everyone. They were always there to make cookies.

Version 0.9 is now released! It adds DT_Downtown, a Tier 5 POI and without a doubt the largest prefab I've built to date. I've been putting as much time as I can into it these last few weeks, and now you can enjoy this newly finished centerpiece of the pack. Over 1 million vertices/triangles Over 100 sleeper spawn locations 40-45 minutes to complete (your mileage may vary) DT_Downtown is an extra large conglomerate of Riverside's downtown buildings, reassembled into a creative yet familiar dungeon crawl. Players should recognize many of the locations, encountering them in a fresh way. Many areas are more detailed in shape, texture, and lighting than they were originally in Left 4 Dead. And the variety to the combat encounters, only possible in 7DtD, should keep you on your toes. Some areas are wholly original, like this stock room connecting several of the shops and offices. Inspired by the original Death Toll, it all builds up to an energetic conclusion in the back alleys. Can you reach the safe room in time, or will you be left for dead?

Given these grievances, maybe console players could boycott the game. If enough people do it, Telltale Games might even go out of business! /s Okay, fine. That's being terribly glib and sarcastic, but here's my point. Telltale Games is a dead horse, and when you ask for updates to the existing console release, you're beating that dead horse. Actually in this analogy, when you come here to do it, you're beating the jockey that was on the horse before it died.

I think that would throw the baby out with the bathwater, since the context of that idea was to "improve the experience with disappearing or stuck vehicles." If players get mad about losing their vehicle, they sure as heck will get mad about losing the stuff in the vehicle.

Ah, right. On a totally unrelated note, I wonder if A20 will have a vehicle mod where you could, say, safely stow your bow on horde night.

But even if your vehicle always occupied its full space in the world, you'd still be playing pretend: pretending that your vehicle is vulnerable and needs to be protected in a garage, when we all know your vehicles don't require any building at all (and this is unlikely to change at least until bandits are added). You would still only really be building a garage for aesthetics rather than a functional purpose. Meanwhile, I think quality of life overall would suffer from not being able to reset a vehicle that gets badly stuck in difficult terrain. What if we take this parking space idea, and use it to improve the experience with disappearing or stuck vehicles? What if a parking spot were like a bedroll for vehicles? If your vehicle disappears or is stuck in the middle of nowhere, you can interact with your parking spot and it will respawn there. If I recall correctly, other open world games with an emphasis on vehicles (e.g. Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row) have this feature. There would be an exploit opportunity in respawning your vehicle to bring home loot instantly. But this would be tempered by the fact that you have to get back to your parking spot to use it in the first place. So abandoning your vehicle instead of just driving back is unlikely to gain you anything. There'd be exploits with making your character suicide, too, but what else is new.

The next place I want to represent in this project is downtown Riverside. But I'm running into a familiar problem. The player's path in Left 4 Dead weaves in and out of many buildings. You may only go inside a room or two of a given building, while left to guess about the rest of its interior. That won't do for an open world voxel game, where a player can explore every nook and cranny. My solution is twofold. First, select the interesting, well defined spaces and smush them together to absorb the gaps of undefined or uninspired space. This keeps the whole POI to a reasonable size (I hope). And secondly, when there's a space that's undefined in L4D that's unavoidable, I'm borrowing and inserting rooms piecemeal from other parts of the map. I'm still having to make a wholly original shop interior here and there. But the point is to bring L4D locations to 7DtD, so I'm trying to keep the highest possible proportion of places you can actually see in Riverside. And while the path is condensed, players should at times recognize that they're going through the same places, in the same order, that they're used to from playing Death Toll. The gist is that this POI has snowballed and snowballed, and now it's a Tier 5 POI. It'll be my first Tier 5 in fact. I haven't added sleepers yet, but I truly think the Tier 5 classification will be justified. Hopefully players will be pleased at this news. For those more interested in content than my musings on level design, here is a teaser. An office on Riverside's main street in Left 4 Dead: [/img] The same office in CC_Left4Dead, which I'd say is 90% done (not the whole POI, but this office):

I especially like the lighting/atmosphere of this pic.

Version 0.8 is now released, which adds the Quik Buy convenience store, again from Death Toll. This one has a lot of detail & lighting work: more than the original had in Left 4 Dead. It's the first commercial POI in the pack, and it's also my first time using grouped sleeper volumes. There are a couple spots that look crude for now, e.g. the fallen light pole... I've made them the best I can for A19, but I'm already looking forward to some new shapes and decoration options in A20, which this POI can use as soon as A20 becomes publicly available. Enjoy!

Thanks for the feedback, all! It's been an interesting challenge to make some decorations, like a piano or a big old TV, out of the limited set of block shapes and textures. Some people talk about constraints spurring creativity, and I think that applies here. It's long been interesting to me how every world builder has their own take on how to make a fireplace in this game, for instance. My next POI for this collection is the "Quik Buy" convenience store, which is opposite the church in Death Toll. I can safely say it's most of the way done, but I do want to make more passes on it before it's ready for release.

I probably thought twice about it at first. As it stands now, eating canned food provides only advantages, other than the opportunity cost of not doing something better with it. So... down the hatch. As for the gross out factor, you have to remember that long time players saw a time when they were pulling “human turds” out of toilets and turning them into fertilizer (or worse, for the less practical and more childish/trollish among us). For me, I’ve about decided that water is so ridiculously plentiful (e.g. you can live off of one water block forever), that toilet water is a waste of time. Heck, at 100% loot you don’t even have to boil murky water - you find enough of the fresh stuff. If I ever seriously pursue a more extensive mod, I plan to represent mental/emotional/social health factors as well as physical survival. This would include qualities like ‘humanity’ or ‘comfort’ that would definitely go down if you eat pet food. Then it wouldn’t be a no brainer, from a game theory point of view, to just eat it. The player would actually have to weigh an upside and downside. I’d also have an iffy version of each canned food (not just the pet food), where there’s a risk of food poisoning.

Left 4 Dead in The Walking Dead? Sounds fanciful! But if it works, it works. I've switched the primary link to a Google Drive url. Please let me know if anyone still has issues downloading the file.

Thanks! We chatted about it earlier, but to not leave your question unanswered publicly... sure! I'd be happy to contribute this to the compopack. Thanks for asking first. And thanks for bringing the download issue on Chrome to my attention. I will investigate alternative places to host the mod.

>>> Click Here to Download <<< >>> Alternative download link <<< CC_Left4Dead version 1.0 A collection of locales from Left 4 Dead, remade as 7DtD POIs. by 'Crater Creator' Last tested in A19.6 b8 There are two zombie games that, by a wide margin, I've played more than others. One is 7 Days to Die, and the other is Left 4 Dead 2. Like The Walking Dead and other series, Left 4 Dead has become a beloved classic of modern zombie fiction in its own right. This made it an easy choice to use as a source of locations to adapt to 7 Days to Die. For the 1.0 release, I've focused on locations from Death Toll, my favorite Left 4 Dead 2 campaign. The pack currently includes 10 POIs: Tier 5 DTDowntown: an extra large conglomerate of Riverside's downtown buildings, reassembled into a creative yet familiar dungeon crawl Tier 4 DTTunnel: a largely underground journey through Death Toll's first two rounds, including the road tunnel, sewers/waterworks, and Hersch Shipping Company Tier 2 DTChurch: Riverside's local church and adjacent cemetery. The L4D Survivors used it as a safe room after defeating 'church guy' and the horde he called with the church's bell. Tier 1 DTCabin: a creepy forest cabin on the outskirts of Riverside DTQuikBuy: a convenience store, just across the street from the church in Riverside DTBoatHouse: a small riverfront building, where the survivors held out before John and Amanda Slater rescued them by boat Non-Questable DTTower DTBungalow DTPavilion DTRiverCabin All POIs are configured to work in RWG. They use all vanilla game assets and should work with other mods. They're meant to closely match the originals in terms of aesthetics, with changes to pathing, loot balance, and other gameplay as needed, especially to create entertaining 'dungeon crawls' in the questable POIs. This collection may expand as time allows. Not all memorable/distinctive locations would work well as standalone 7DtD POIs, but others are viable. To install, simply move the CC_Left4Dead folder into your 7 Days to Die installation's Mods folder. Lastly, I love feedback! Put it right here.