Crater Creator

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.

I sip water, or occasionally whatever was left over from my most recent meal: tea, fruit juice, soda. I have no problem with eating at my desk, but I typically don’t eat while playing, since both my hands are busy with the game. I might take a swig while holding down the mouse to mine, or when my player character drinks something, for that extra little boost to immersion.

Steam was hogging a ridiculous amount of CPU on my Mac, until I went to the friends list settings and turned on "Don't embed images and other media in-line" and "Disable animated room effects". For some reason Steam does a poor job of handling chat windows with animated GIFs, videos, and similar doodads that've become commonplace, even if the chat window isn't active.

Update, as of b140. The quest rally marker has moved. Path 1 is still viable, but the torch visual cue has been removed. Path 2 has been highlighted with a burning barrel & colored ladder. Path 3 is still viable, but is less direct with the moved rally marker. Path 4 is removed. Path 5 is still viable, with no visual cues. After this latest update, it seems Path 2 is the intended path, while Paths 1, 3, and 4 are either removed or less direct than the intended path. That leaves Path 5 as the one remaining path that's more direct than the intended path. It is my hope that the level designers are either already aware, or else are made aware, of Path 5. It's the path I first noticed and was most concerned about being overlooked.

Understood. Thanks for the additional info!

Okay. I reported because I was unable to find this in the known issues doc.

Alpha 19.5 went stable on May 28th, 2021. That's five weeks ago today. These are all comments made to the announcement on Steam. That's a rate of more than one post a day, where a user needs help because they can't figure out how to play 19.5. There's been confusion on this for a long time. And anecdotally, I think it's gotten worse and worse with every alpha, as more people discover the betas tab and opt in to experimental versions of the game. Each of these actual comments are likely representative of untold others that aren't commenting, but are likewise stuck on a past version and can't figure out how to play 19.5. Would it be possible to change policy to just include the latest stable release in the list of betas? I know it's not a beta. I know from a development standpoint it makes no sense to put it among the betas. But it's just not clicking for a lot of people. Could @The Fun Pimp include a note in every announcement of a stable build, that players need to opt out of all betas in order to get it? I know this is easy to dismiss, that people should know better or know how to search. But it's hard to deny that under the current standard operating procedure, this is a frequent problem among the player base.

@cheebsco I mean, not really. Zoom in and enhance! It's hard to say for sure since the terrain shape doesn't fit into grid spaces like perfect cubes would. But you can imagine how this would only get worse as the ring shrinks more and takes on a tighter curvature, assuming it can't drift outside of its original bounds. Regardless, I think players should intuitively expect the chest to be within the ring, since that's what they're after. Better to err on the side of too centered rather than not centered enough.

I'd also like to report that the swinging metal doors don't close when the trader closes for business. The player is still kept out via teleporting away, but at other traders the doors swing closed.

That’s correct; she’s the only female that speaks in the game currently. Though the trader voice lines are more ‘flavor’ than anything. It would be more important to translate all the written text, so that Czech players can read journal tips, stats on items, etc. Thankfully all of that is in one or two Localization.txt files, so it could be a compact mod to make.

For PvE/coop, the first thing I’d always do is group up, by which I mean physically huff it over to wherever the other players are in addition to allying with them. I’ve never played on a server that big, but I presume a main group would quickly emerge. I don’t see much point in joining a PvE server just to fly solo. Then you’re a member of the community, picking some specialities based on need and what others don’t have covered as well. If others have been on the server already, they may already have some better tools, weapons, etc., and it’d help the group’s success to share that with you. Once the group has a roof over their heads and knows where a trader is, it’s usually off to do shared quests and advance in my own specialties. Frankly it’s like being a good roommate: keep the fridge stocked, try not to be a mooch, respect other’s private property, and ask before reorganizing or redecorating things.

If you post your computer specs and graphics settings, I imagine someone can point out where the bottleneck is and/or what settings to turn down. Don't just give us the highlights - the details matter.

And at a time when the OP is literally asking for silent thunder, no less.

That looks like it affects the UI, but the OP was asking about the storm, e.g. the thunder and lightning effects that also serve as a warning.

Well, what is "the cave issue" exactly? Performance cost at world generation time? Performance cost at runtime? People surprised/mad when POIs built above a cave collapse? People surprised/mad when their base built above a cave collapses? Inconsistent SI results with cavities that span many chunks? Did I miss anything? If we dissect those... The change from infinite worlds to generating the whole world at once bloated generation time way more than caves ever did. One dev mentioned that if they were to do caves again, they'd use a Perlin worm algorithm. It's a method of stringing segments together, and then you'd add decorations and cave POIs. It's a lot like generating the roads, but underground, so I'd expect a similar efficiency. In other words, I'd think optimizations for quick road generation would translate straightforwardly to quick cave generation. I'm least sure about this one but I think the biggest factor for runtime performance was overdraw: rendering too much that you couldn't actually see. Hopefully the occlusion system, added after caves, would mitigate this in caves now. They're big worlds, with enough space to have cities, but also terrain features like mountains where you don't have cities. There could likewise be a rule to not place POIs above caves. As for player bases, I happen to think it's more interesting when the particulars of your build site can have more pros and cons. But setting that aside, the UI could indicate when you're placing a block, if the block supporting it is on a solid column down to bedrock. This would be a good feature anyway, since newer players are always digging under their bases with deleterious results. I don't think this even matters with regard to caves. The only effect is that sometimes you have a cavern that should collapse, but doesn't. I can't recall anyone really lamenting that. Besides which, player made mines have the same issue. In fact, all but item 1 also apply to mines or whatever else players do underground. Which I guess supports my point: caves are such a no-brainer thing to do when you're doing a voxel game anyway. If it's all solid down there, why even have a hundred-block-deep layer of stone? Might as well have higher mountains and let people reach bedrock in 20 blocks. What a waste! Yeah, it's a sandbox and people can use that solid space to make cool things... but there's all this effort to make the surface interesting, when there's nothing special about that. The surface looks interesting in regular, non-voxel games. 7 Days to Die really is, if you'll pardon the expression, just scratching the surface of what it could do with voxels. And when voxels are one of the game's big selling points - the tradeoff for lower graphics fidelity and performance, in fact - that's disappointing.

Okay, fine, 1 minute per linear kilometer. I was remembering wrong how the map sizes are listed. But here you can hear it straight from the programmer. 14:30 Kinyajuu: The speed of world gen right now, the idea is to keep it at, at most, 1 minute per kilometer. So like an 8K, we don't want to go over 8 minutes. 10K... speaking of, the three new sizes for the new maps. We're gonna start with 6,144 (m) since that's the Navezgane size. We're not gonna do the 4K. They felt real small, and 6K kinda feels about right, and then we have 8K still, and then we're also going to have 10K size maps. So you get an extra, bigger size map. But, like, a 10K shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to generate, and that's, like, my hard goal. If there's problems, like, going over that number, it's something I have to look into and, like, not accept. So we're gonna try to keep it to where it doesn't feel like it takes forever to get into the game the first time. How will @Kinyajuu's generation algorithm run in better than O(n^2) time, you ask? Above my pay grade. 😛

The devs have said they're aiming for 1 minute of generation time per square kilometer, e.g. ~6 minutes for a 6K map if they meet their goal.

I understand your concern, but you’re basing that assessment on an A19 standard. You don’t know how A20, with its optimizations and other changes, would perform on your hardware (nor do I). My recollection was that an opt out was added, not an opt in. It was enabled by default, thus getting data from everyone who doesn’t care or doesn’t notice the option. If so, your sample size should be more than sufficient to eke out trends.

I suppose now that the game reports analytics, TFP can see whether 4K or 8K maps are more popular now, and use that as one guide for whether to go bigger or smaller.

Even better, it needn't double the file size. They've already pulled off a tinting system for weapons/tools/clothing, and in A20 that will expand to include vehicles. It should be possible to tint zombie clothes/hair/skin if they're willing to produce the character art assets in the right way. The other way to add variety without blowing up the resource budget is with swappable parts. That is, each soldier zombie has on a few pieces pulled at random from a library of different boots, hats, belts, armor pieces, etc. Their previous attempt at this sort of thing, UMA, didn't perform well, but I'd sure like to still see some kind of individual variation.

Yup, you nailed it. And that's why when they added trader protection, I hoped it would at least be a temporary, first pass feature until they could do traders 2.0. It defeats the design goal that, if a player has the Blood Moon enabled, the zombies present them with a scaleable challenge. And it defeats the design goal/game's own convention, that the world is 100% destructible down to bedrock. I've talked at length about a better way to do traders, so that indestructible blocks aren't needed. I still hold out a small hope that bandit NPCs can be done in a way such that traders don't need the absolute protection with its design-breaking consequences.

I don't know... the game is more CPU bound than anything, and I'd assume it was always that way. Years ago, Crysis had such high system requirements for its time that it sparked its own "Can it run Crysis?" meme. I think a lot of people thought that bringing systems to their knees was a good thing. And part of me can see that angle, in the sense that it gives a game longevity. The game you bought gets even better years later, as you upgrade your hardware. I guess if you want to drive innovation as a software developer, you push the envelope in how much your software demands of the hardware. But if your goal is the most successful game, you match your software with what's on the market when the game's scheduled for release. To expand on your point, the pairing of voxels, full destruction, and procedural generation can be thought of in at least two different ways. On the one hand, it's an albatross around TFP's neck. It's far too ingrained in the code even if they wanted to axe the features for better performance. I believe Joel once said if he had to do it all again, it might not be a voxel game, or they'd at least curtail the 100% destructible world to avoid the performance hit it creates. And I can see why. There's a sizable portion of the gaming community that just doesn't get what the big deal is with voxels. We see it on a perhaps weekly basis. 'I can run Conan or Valheim or whatever the flavor of the month is smooth as butter, and I have an expensive graphics card. Why is this game so bad?' TFP is a victim of its own success on this. If 7 Days still looked like Minecraft, then more people would take their cue from that and compare it to Minecraft and other voxel games. On the other hand, the voxel/fully destructible/procedurally generated worlds are a unique selling point. A killer feature. If you can get a gamer to look critically, you can say "look what I can do!" and dig an epic, multi-layered, one-of-a-kind mountain fortress that they've never seen anything like in 1000 hours of playing Fallout or what have you. It's just a shame that, while TFP have invested so much in disguising the voxels - with terrain smoothing, an ever-increasing selection of block shapes, and POI overhauls to have thinner, fancier, less blocky walls and decor - they've also shied away from what really makes voxels and procedural generation shine. Namely, caves. Sure, 7 Days has mining, and that both works well with voxels and is a well developed system now. But complex, unpredictable paths through the terrain, that scratches a different itch: a more exploratory itch, that I've enjoyed since the days of ASCII-based rogue-likes. I didn't start writing this meaning to swing the conversation towards caves, but you got me thinking about the pros and cons of voxels and I couldn't help but arrive there.

Can confirm. I didn't think my aim with a bow was THAT bad. It occurs when entities aren't frozen, too. This issue appears to be new in b128. It might be related to this change: Changed: Optimized Entity to not need Graphics/Model objects (Shawn)