Crater Creator

If we do ever get friendly NPCs, that's certainly the kind of stuff I picture them doing. Even the non-friendly bandits, which are expected to make it into the game, will probably need some things to do other than walking patrol routes 100% of the time. I could see a homebody kind of trader that wanders around but stays within a trader compound. But if the compound is made destructible, that could get weird, with them trying to do AI tasks they can no longer complete. So I think I'd still prefer an itinerant style trader, that stays in one spot at a time but changes among many different spots from one day to the next. I get what you're saying. Vehicles are a feature, but not a core feature like survival, hordes, and crafting. If they're successful in optimizing the game, it could help out here in a couple of ways. One, they could turn up the maximum vehicle speed, which is kept annoyingly low for the sake of not driving out of the world before it can load. And two, with enough optimization they could increase the population density, meaning there would be more towns/cities with more POIs, and thus the trader would have more POIs to choose from and the average round trip distance could be lower.

That could work. From what I can tell, they originally intended to have a trader reputation system. They wrote good reputation and bad reputation VO lines. Then they gave all the bad lines to Rekt, as a way to utilize more of the lines they had (or maybe just for the lulz) before they could implement a system to use all the lines more conditionally.

Actually I think it represents a magnificent improvement. Yes, the intersection can be a pseudo-POI that's placed where roads intersect. We've seen the beginnings of that already, with the occasional procedural bridge over gaps. But note the lane markers going all the way down the road, and the cars that are distributed at random spots but positioned and rotated to align with the lanes. That's huge. It means that when RWG is fleshing out the roads now, it's no longer just painting asphalt blocks and haphazardly sprinkling individual decoration blocks on top. If you can do those lane markers and aligned cars, it means you have the tech to do procedural guard rails along the road, shoulders along the road, ditches, culverts, fences, sidewalks, curbs, median strips, road signs, telephone poles, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc. etc. They've had the art for many of these things for ages - now we could see them in RWG. Fully leveraged, it'd make the RWG roads we have now look like childish doodles. As someone who loves the potential of procedural generation, it's very exciting to see. P.S. It's worth mentioning that not all roads should have all this stuff. It should be thoughtfully distributed on a spectrum from downtown/urban to rural/country, with the former having a lot of these procedural additions and the latter having very few.

Already planned? Could you elaborate and/or hook me up with a source? Interesting idea. However they'd be implemented, the idea of different traders being affiliated with different factions is very appealing. I mean if all traders worked for a Traitor Joel faction, every player would want to maintain a good reputation with Joel, since as discussed the traders present advantages that are hard to ignore. So I concur that splitting them among factions would be more interesting.

I do like the idea of having expensive items that are out of reach now, but that the player can aspire to obtain later. It gives the player a goal - something to work towards - beyond an explicit quest to go here and do this. And to be fair, the game has this to a fair degree now. It's somewhat dampened by the 3-day loot refresh, though. Still, I think the sheer number of items for sale is worth addressing in its own right. A trader shouldn't have more than a dozen melee weapons to choose from (keeping in mind it's rolled separately for each player). As I've said before in other contexts, too much luxury of choice tends to work against the sense of it being a survival game.

Sure, here they are. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CV4QcxCpi9qkSU0IEbhl0GPq0HE8nGsl/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JhH2gklV3ZSMlEDEcdaMwASLckCEUyQj/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UOuTBH2CWPXAapc6He377IFA9DCrygZi/view?usp=sharing

There can be a blanket disabling of achievements, but I think trying to police the gameplay effects of using console commands to cheat is going down a rabbit hole. If you’ll forgive the hypothetical, it isn’t hard to imagine if the game had ‘quest_succeed’ and ‘quest_fail’ commands added explicitly to automatically resolve the active quest. What then? Either the command works or it doesn’t. killall is just a slightly more roundabout way of doing the same thing. I’m afraid your idea is at odds with why the cheats exist in the first place.

Hey, I know how to read between the lines... child zombies confirmed in Alpha 20!

Does anyone else feel like the traders are an overly dominant presence in the game? By and large, if I need something, the trader is the most lucrative place to get it. Weapons, armor, vehicles, defenses, decor, books, consumables, raw materials: the trader will have it. They’ll have more variety on any given day than I’m likely to find in a week of looting POIs. They’ll have higher quality items than I can craft, except for maybe a few things I really specialize in. This has been the case for different builds, including ones that don't specialize in Intellect/Influence perks. I feel like my character’s life revolves around the traders. Literally, since their location outweighs any other consideration on where to build a base. Does anyone not build really close to a trader, other than those going out of their way to add challenge? And it’s the only place you’re completely safe, outside of PvP or erratic zombie behavior. And they have free stations to use. And as the quest givers, they have the exclusive power to reset all the loot containers and harvestable blocks in a POI. I can anticipate some responses to this thread. If you don’t like the traders, you don’t have to use them. You can mod them out of the world pretty easily or just pretend they’re not there. That’s true, but as with other balance concerns, such sentiments dismiss the possibility that the game could be better. __________ How would I do traders? Like food trucks. In fact, they could use the box truck that was recently added to the game and already has several variants. In the morning, the truck appears at a semi-random place along one of the roads, with a map marker if you’ve seen that trader before or are close enough. The trader character can stand inside, ready to interact with you, or it can just be a talking truck to save art budget. The traders are presented as itinerants, that make a post-apocalyptic living by roaming the countryside to meet other survivors and swap goods. The truck is just a truck. You can’t hide inside, and it can be destroyed like any other vehicle. Another truck can take its place tomorrow or however often the trucks change locations, not necessarily in the same spot. The existing trader POIs are kept around, sans trader, for whenever the developers add bandit defense quests, or whatever their plans are for these locations. The working stations and vending machines can stay there, but the POI is destructible like any other. Quests can still be given by traders for now (they're the only choice until other NPCs are added). Trader loot is more specialized per trader, as is already planned. But they also have less inventory overall - say, a quarter of what they have now. And it’s more closely aligned with your loot stage - not in lock step, but how much better a trader's stock is over what you can loot is at least controlled. This is important for not overshadowing scavenging gameplay, and making it feel less like going to Costco and more like picking over a booth at the flea market. A few items are randomly rolled to be ‘on sale’ for a limited time discounted price. The trader perk (or your reputation with that trader, if the devs get around to that old idea) affects the number of items on sale and the amount of discount. And when viewing all, the trader inventory UI is still sorted by category, e.g. all the clothing inventory first, followed by all the ammo/weapons inventory, etc., instead of whatever it's doing now. The impact: No more weird, exploitable sections of land that can’t take any damage in this purportedly 100% destructible world. No need for the other immersion-breaking bits we have now, i.e. teleporting you away at night and making the trader invulnerable. Trader location no longer dictates a handful of best places to build a base. More incentive to explore more of the world, since the traders move around to unpredictable locations like air drops (the “get off your ass” philosophy). Traders are more of a bonus, and less of a reliable safety net to soften your survival concerns. The intended loot progression the devs have worked hard to implement is not so easily bypassed by buying your way to stuff that’s otherwise ‘too good’ for your current character. (I know some people don't like leveled loot in the first place, but if that's the direction the game's going, it should be consistent). More and different POIs in a world can be in range for a trader quest over time. Expanded opportunities in PvP to reach a trader before others and/or set up an ambush.

I think it would help to put a mass of blocks at surface level, two blocks high, directly above where you’ll be standing. It doesn’t have to be that strong - just something to deflect the zombies from getting directly above you, because that’s when they’ll start to dig. I haven’t tested this design personally though.

I think asking if people enjoy being encumbered is misleading. People don't enjoy being hungry, bleeding out, running out of stamina, etc. It's not the right question to judge a mechanic. The first principle here is, the player's inventory is limited. Given that, what's the best way to limit it? I see encumbrance as a way to impose a soft limit instead of a hard limit on the inventory. Remember, the inventory is considerably larger than it was before. Back then it was a hard limit: carry up to x and then you hit a wall; you can't carry any more. I like this soft limit better, where you have a period where you're of running out of space and paying more for it with every item, instead of boom, I have to deal with my inventory now. I'm 100% in favor of Roland's idea of having multiple containers, backpacks or otherwise, of different sizes which you can find and/or craft. Finding useful stuff like that is what makes looting worthwhile. Another idea you might like, since you're after a greater sense of progression... just spitballing here... is if all backpack slots caused encumbrance, and instead of a Pack Mule perk, the encumbered slots and/or the amount of penalty per slot decreased slightly every time you level up. This would parallel the change where your max health and stamina increase by one every time you level up.

Thanks! You do great prefabs, so I especially appreciate that coming from you. It was interesting how that part of the attic developed organically. I was already planning to do the old, cluttered part of the attic from early on. But what I learned that's unique about level design in 7DtD is that you have to model the whole thing. You can't just model the few rooms you want to do and leave the rest inaccessible. It would look too weird if you left it empty, or if you filled it in as solid wood. So I looked at a bunch of reference photos of attics, as I'd done for the rest of the house, to get ideas and to bring in more realistic elements. And I stumbled on the phenomenon that people don't take a lot of pictures of their attic, unless they're remodeling or otherwise doing work on it. So I rolled with it, and it became the 'new' part of the attic, with the contractor zombies there that were actively in the process of remodeling it. If I do a bunch of houses with attics, then I'll have to come up with something else up there. But for a single house, I think it becomes a thematic element that makes the house more unique and memorable.

You know, I've spent a lot of time in loot.xml over the years, and this thread makes me think... even if we accept the premise of leveled loot, maybe they should abandon sorting all the loot into tiered groups. Maybe they should go back to simple loot lists, but put a gamestage number/modifier directly on each item. Then you could just have a loot list of all the armor, and add it to all the containers where it makes sense to find armor, and the game would look at the individual item to see whether you're 'ready' for it at your gamestage. It may not affect the end result that players see, but it would make the files easier to read and maintain, and you could go beyond tiers if you wanted. For instance, you could start finding chest armor a little bit before you start finding helmets, without waiting for this big rollover where all sorts of loot changes all at once.

To be fair, from the perspective of making the game look better it does make sense to work on non-player characters first, since you don't see the player character(s) except in the character screen and in multiplayer. Meanwhile, you might see Joel every day if your base is next to him. If they want to put lots of time into specific, named characters like Joel, I can see the logic in that. The problem to me is that they treat the zombies as specific, named characters. Literally! They have names like Steve and Darlene. In a way, Left 4 Dead has better looking common infected - not when you examine a screenshot, but while you're playing it - because the developers handled them as nonspecific background characters that you'd see a ton of at once. If you look at them side by side, of course 7DtD wins - the Left 4 Dead character was made over ten years ago. But to this day (I still play Left 4 Dead 2), I never think, "Oh, here comes another female_casual_02, this art has gotten so repetitive and stale." Because of the individual variation, I just see that it's a zombie: one nondescript, random individual out of a crowd which, as far as I can tell, I've never recognized before. And that's how I think zombies - at least the non-special or 'hero' ones - should be.

I feel like the traders are at least that good if not better now. The traders really are the great equalizers, providing critical items like that first iron tool to shore up your vulnerabilities. I'd like to see more of those 'lottery ticket' moments from looting, too, and for the traders to be less reliable, more transient in what they offer and when.

I don't think I ever thought of it as predominantly a scavenging game. And horror is somewhat predicated on provoking a certain fear response, which is difficult to sustain after the first few hundred hours, for any game. That is to say, it may still be horrific, but only to new players. But I have always considered it a survival game, and unfortunately I do think that's diminished over time. Thinking about it, what seriously threatens your survival in the current game? Is it the zombies? Well, yes, they can threaten your character's life, but most games have bad guys to fight. So entities trying to kill the player directly isn't really survival in the strict sense, or else most games would be considered survival games. Is it food and water? Not nearly as much as it used to be. At the start of the game, edible wildlife is very abundant. Water doesn't require a cooking pot anymore, nor worrying about metal cans and their stack sizes. A single water block solves your entire water problem forever. You can make a fire for cooking any time you want from just a handful of rocks, which has always bugged me. Exponential crop growth has been tamped down, but crops still grow perfectly every three days, with no threats to the yield. Is it exposure to the elements? Not at all. You get free protection from the elements at the start, and by the time that peters out you'll certainly have plenty of clothes from normal day-to-day looting. You start in a biome that's room temperature year-round, and there are very few reasons to ever leave. The worst thing that can happen from being outside without shelter is getting a little hot or cold. I feel like you almost have to be going out of your way for your character to suffer from lack of food, water, clothing, or shelter. These are more like annoyances than essential elements you spend significant time securing. The injuries are more developed now, in terms of creating medium-to-long term problems you have to deal with to survive. That may be the one area where there's more survival than there once was. ---------- The dungeon crawls provide more gameplay with more structure than the mostly empty buildings we had before. It's a value-adding thing. It's also a powerful allure for anyone wondering what they're supposed to do in this sandbox. Even when I know I should be focusing on resources or building, I find myself unable to resist those sweet rewards for doing quests. I suppose it's not so much the dungeon crawls themselves, but the traders that dominate the game for me. Theoretically I can pull myself up by my bootstraps with enough perk points and craft 90% of things, but it seems easier to just get some Dukes and buy what I need. In that way, it's not as post-apocalyptic as one might expect.

I can't help but point out that, in the time it would take to concept/model/texture/rig a new zombie type so that the snowy biome isn't all the same lumberjack, one could make dozens of complementary beanie colors, beard colors, shirt colors, pants colors, suspender colors, skin colors, etc.

I want to upvote this post a hundred times. Procedural variation is already used to great effect to generate the worlds. An artist can spend a long time crafting the perfect looking nurse zombie or lumberjack zombie or what have you, but no matter how good one looks by itself, it's not going to look good when every nurse is an exact clone of every other nurse. Every player, new and old, gets a whole passel of zombies every horde night. Plus, they only see a limited subset of zombie types at any given gamestage. So it's practically unavoidable that the game will spawn more than one zombie of the same type. And when there's only one model per type, there's no diversity. All cops are fat, all nurses are female, all businessmen have pale complexions, etc. It's not a good look, even in the literal sense. And since, obviously, an artist's job is to give you a good look, it means much of their work goes to waste. This is the way.

I'm disappointed, but only because that's not quite what I imagined when you said 7DtD coaster...

So I did; I guess it slipped my mind. I definitely treat the other robots as weapons. In that case I agree - whatever the drone still does do, it should scale up with the Robotics Inventor perk. Thanks! I imagine this is how we'll all sound when we tell stories about A19 years from now.

Okay then, scratch AI & animation. For the easiest way to get this feature, I would propose this design: Blocks within your land claim with less than full HP are tracked in a list, which is updated any time a block within your land claim is damaged or repaired. If this is not performant, then exclude terrain blocks. If your land claim block itself is at full HP, then every time you hit it with a repair tool, repair material is deducted from your inventory and 'converted' to a proportional amount of added HP, distributed among all blocks in the list that take that repair material. The conversion rate is the same as if blocks were repaired directly. So that new UI isn't needed, there's just one repair algorithm. The list of blocks is sorted by descending order of max HP, and within those categories sorted by descending order of missing HP. For example, that means for a heavily damaged base, the first hits of your repair tool will deduct 10 wood per hit and go to repairing damaged wooden frames (50 HP), then the next hits will deduct 10 wood per hit and go to repairing damaged wood blocks (200 HP), then the next hits will deduct 10 iron per hit and go to repairing damaged scrap iron sheets (300 HP), and so on. Importantly, the converted repair value can overflow from one block to the next block in the list of the same material, so that you get the full value of your repair material. This may not be performant though, even if optimized, so I still think a paintbrush-style repair tool that can touch multiple blocks per click has potential.

It seems to me that the drone can already fall neatly into the established system. If you perk into Robotics Inventor, your drone(s) would gain the advantages of: being able to be crafted in the first place better craft quality better damage better fire rate better clip size better active range better active robots at once And as you level up Intellect itself, your headshot damage and dismember chance with drones increases. This is all stuff that would happen just from extending the existing design. If you have all that, while someone not perked into Intellect doesn't, is that not appealing to Intellect builds? Is that somehow putting Intellect builds at a disadvantage, when it's all the same kinds of stats that other attributes/perks affect? On the carrying capacity... well it may offer something cool to everyone on that front. But on the other hand I'll happily use, say, explosives without perking into Perception, because explosives do some uniquely cool things that no other weapon class does.

Seems like a lot of programming/UI/AI/animation work. Plus, non-intellect builds want to repair their bases, too. They’ve already said they don’t want the drone to be so handy that everyone uses one. If a less tedious way to repair is desired, my solution would be to port the paintbrush’s ability to touch multiple blocks per click to the repair tools.

Last I noticed several Alphas ago, this depended on the shape and ignored rotation. So half blocks would always let the rain in, even if they covered an area with no gaps. Rain would also come through hatches, because the game wouldn't bother to take into account whether the hatch is open or closed.