Roland

They were told the same as I've said here that this weekend is looking good and hasn't been ruled out and we will know for sure as soon as Rick makes the official announcement. They've decided to hedge their bets and possibly get first scoop. If it turns out to be true then they win and if it turns out to be next weekend then...oopsie!!

lol...those streamers are risking egg on the face just to be first to announce. It's not official until Rick announces.

lol...we'll see how you feel about the pipe pistol. The animation for that shows you emptying the six chambers onto the ground and then loading six new rounds. So if you shoot once and then reload it feels like you are dumping 5 perfectly good rounds and then putting 6 new rounds in. The visual is so compelling that I sometimes check my ammo to make sure I didn't waste anything even though I know it is only a visual and not actually what's happening..haha

Does anyone get excited when they find the diamond edge mod that adds significant durability to your item? Why would you when repairing back to full utility is so simple? Having permanent degradation would make mods that improve durability truly worthwhile Well the exact timetable hasn't be revealed and there are plenty of inconsistencies to be found but for sure our day 1 is not THE DAY ONE. In my imagination I think there were two falls. The initial fall when the bombs fell and then some initial return of civilization followed by the Duke's takeover. I think businesses like Poopy Pants Daycare were probably post apocalypse businesses that sprang up but then the Duke's takeover plunged the area into a second downfall. None of that is cannon but it helps me explain the mockery of pre-apocalypse businesses and the hand crafted items in crates if there was a short period of re-emergence and then a second fall.

knowing that it’s a definite no is much easier to call than a definite yes. Given how much flack we get for under estimating we definitely don’t want to give an official release date and then have to delay. I’m optimistic since there was no definite no after the meeting.

Things seem promising for either this weekend or next but until an official announcement is made by The Fun Pimp it is just hopes and crossed fingers.

You are reading way too much into these actions. The replacing of the old date with the new date is completely on me and me alone and in no way meant to be some devious method of re-writing history or pretending the old estimate never existed...lol. I'm happy to take your feedback on that account and in the future will use strikeouts instead of deletion on outdated timelines so that the historical documentation can be preserved for those who care to know all the dates we missed. I also am the main one who updates and maintains the first post of the dev diary, adding whenever a developer reveals something so that a summary is available. Again, there was no intention on my part to try and hide or rewrite the historical evidence of changes made or to try and pretend that what we have now is exactly what was always planned to be. As for the removal of the first video-- I assume you mean from steam. It was simply because the gameplay footage no longer represented the game people were buying. That video was there forever and we received a ton of feedback over the years to please replace it with a more relevent video. We did that and then also added the live action trailer for the game as well. Lately, the requests for a new updated video have been coming in again. As for that first video explaining the game's outline from kickstarter it is still available and hasn't been suppressed: https://v.kickstarter.com/1638406456_482cd0aabaa6fff949c191ec621142b7e293d126/projects/582117/video-267274-h264_high.mp4

It is exactly the size it is meant to be. TFP has tried in the past doing smaller updates and it didn't work for them. What they have been doing works great for them and is obviously sustainable financially. No method is perfect and people will be critical of these large updates. But it isn't going to change. Only threat of bankruptcy would force a change and like I said...we are at the other end of the spectrum on that account. So thanks everyone for the professional and lay advice but just stick to playing the game and giving feedback about gameplay and leave the business decisions to the guys that are observably doing a fantastic job at it. If it helps ease your minds, Joel and Rick were successful millionaire businessmen before they ever started TFP and they have brought their experience running a successful business to bear and we can see the fruits of their practices. I get that you might want a smaller update and more often, and someone else is happy to restart every month for monthly updates, and someone else wants TFP to hit an estimated release date on time. Thanks for your input. TFP is constantly looking at ways to improve what they do in a way that works for them so that they can continue to deliver content as awesome as 7 Days to Die for years and years to come.

Only if you assume that I think creating office software is contemptable somehow. I don't and I wasn't trying to set you up for a personal attack based on your industry. As I said, I think that the way you create projects and set workflow is probably different for office software and game software and your experience might not jive exactly with what needs to happen or does happen in a video game studio. You are the one who has set yourself up as knowing what is good or bad based upon your experience so exactly what your experience entails is definitely part of the discussion and not simply an ad hominem fallacy to be ignored. My son is a programmer in the event planning industry and from what he has shown me, his project cycles and workflow are quite a bit different than what I observe at TFP as well and it isn't a straight across comparable thing to say that what works and can be designated successful and right in one sphere is the same for the other. If the update happens in a time frame that TFP is completely happy with is it still failure? If internally they were hopeful for October 31st because a Halloween release for a horror game would be cool but actually anytime before the end of the year was still acceptable for their goals did they really fail? If they would have seen missing the October 31st date as a failure they most certainly would have released on that date and dealt with any blowback for needing to force restarts. But they are still within their internal timeline for when A20 must get pushed out so really they haven't missed anything. I'm not claiming that their project management is perfect. Of course, there can always be improvement and they do have those kinds of meetings as well where they look at their workflow and look at the management of the development cycle and look for ways to be better and improve. No I haven't. You drew the analogy that an employee who misses a deadline too often gets fired. I pointed out that TFP is not an employee. You then clarified that a company that misses deadlines too often could go bankrupt because their clients are angry at not being well provided for. I then answered that the result of TFP's development practices is that they are about as far away from bankruptcy as you can get. They aren't just lucky. The game isn't good and people's favorite source of entertainment in spite of them. I'm saying that the results they have created both in terms of art (their game) and solvency (their business) speak loudly to a successful (albeit not perfect) model for development-- or at least a model of development which works for them. It may be counterintuitive to your experience in your field but results don't lie and they have results in Spades. If they have one failing in the philosophy of release dates it is that they get excited thinking about their fans playing the new update and then when they start interacting with them on the forum or during a stream they say something that they hope they can do because they know how excited and happy that would make everyone but it isn't necessarily reflective of their internal timeline window. Could Rick have come down hard on the entire team and said, "I know that we have more time that we can spend on this update but I said October 31st so lets crunch and get something out by that date no matter what."? Yes, he could have done so but he didn't. He said that we are still well within our acceptable release window so lets get it done right and not worry about an informal estimate I said during the stream.

Trust me. You love it because of them.

Because they felt it needed more work. There are many examples in the industry of studios who release incomplete updates simply because they were directed to release on the date that was given ready or not. In this case there was no official date given-- only an estimate and when that date came they decided to keep working on it internally rather than release it to experimental as it was.

Of what? What product are you producing? Is it a video game? I'd like to know exactly how similar your job and our project manager's job is and whether your deliverables are at least on the same scale or even relatable to the deliverables our project manager is overseeing. Your general description of what you do is very similar to what I witness as I "see" TFP work. They have a very similar structure in place that you describe. I also am privy to the reports that are posted for completed deliverables and workflow appears to me to be in a good place and not bogged down at all. There is quite a lot of instant collaboration that comes up as artists or level designers need a programmer to make something happen that has them snagged and I'm actually quite impressed with how fluid the team is across different departments. Your assumption is that there is little to no project management simply because in a forum one of the owners will say that they are certain things should get done by [Date] and then that date happens. I'm actually surprised that as a professional in the industry you would take such musings as official dates. If they are stated then I post them as estimates but TFP doesn't create official deadlines on the internet. They keep those deadlines and any adjustments to them internally. What about you? Do you post your official target dates anywhere online for anyone to view? Again, we would need to know the industry you are coming from. There are differences in complexity and while the individual parts that each of the programmers are easily accounted for in terms of time at the start, A20 as a whole is immensely complex. You would probably want to do a smaller update as your answer. TFP doesn't want to do that but that by itself doesn't mean they are just haphazardly throwing together whatever because it sounds cool. They are at the opposite end of the spectrum from bankruptcy which, by the way, is an excellent sign that they are managing things well. And I let you know that you are wrong based on my insider view of their operations which despite your professional experience you don't have and are just guessing at because they they decided to release in December instead of October 31. (They could have released on October 31 but chose not to.)

There are no official release dates. Just estimates to give people a ballpark. But even if it was official it is still acceptable because TFP is not an employee that has been given a deadline. That is just a poor analogy that keeps getting used over and over by folks who are employees and probably resent the fact that THEY have to keep their dealines...

yes. But not A20

There is a fundamental difference between being an employee and an employer. There are many things employees cannot do that employers can do. You just need to stop seeing TFP the development studio as an employee of some job because they are not. They are an independent entity that can make an estimated target and then choose to go past that estimate because they deem it necessary to deliver a product that is in good form rather than meet the target and deliver something poor and not have to worry about getting fired. You are probably an employee and can only view situations from your own experience/point of view. TFP is not an employee. They are also committed to quality over meeting target estimates.

Prime said the easiest way would be to have it just fall out of the player after 20 seconds and he will consider that for A21.

Well the QOL issue of the tracker on the spear is a bit more than simply loving it for the sake of convenience. It also constitutes a fix for the limitations of the game itself. Spears can land and fall into the mesh of the ground terrain so that it is completely invisible to the player. If the player can get close to where it is it will be automatically vacuumed up when pressing E but you have to know right where it went. The same is true for zombie bodies. The spear can sometimes completely enter a body and not be visible at all. Now on a 1 to 1 fight this isn't necessarily a problem. But when you have multiple enemies and you have three spears on your belt that you are throwing and then backing away to avoid another enemy it is easy to lose track of them and the tracking system becomes a must for regaining your spears. I just don't see it as a plausible option given the current state of how terrain voxels fit together to make the player go without that feature for however long it takes for them to be able to make or find a tracker mod. Especially since such a mod would necessarily involve electronic parts and not be a primitive glue/wood/leather product. Sure, I'm for complete removal of HUD displays as a challenging cinematic way to play the game. But, in for a penny in for a pound. If I'm playing vanilla and already accepting the HUD displays in the game I'm not going to say no to something that really helps spears be a viable weapon. Finally, I'm sure that if such a technique became widely known its attempted use would increase. I still have doubts about the numbers for actual successful attempts there would be even if all PvPers started adopting the technique. But I already mentioned it to the devs so it is up to them now how they want to proceed.

If they would put out updates every 3 sec. then I would 100% support them using child labor.

yeah but....99.9% of usecases involves throwing a spear at an NPC for which the GPS tracker works perfectly to help you retrieve your spear if you missed or if the spear goes inside the zombie or animal. Because the spear is a primitive weapon, you kind of need the tracker function on it from the very beginning and not as a mod that you may not find or be able to craft until much later. I say "must" in the sense that it is a QOL addition that you don't want to play without once having had it. I do realize that we had spears for a long time before having the tracker function for them. But there really is no going back in my opinion. The problem described in this thread is going to be an extremely rare usecase in which a player doing PVP unequips his gun and loads his spear and is able to get close enough to throw it and hit the opposing player without the player realizing they've been hit so that they go back to their base unaware of being tracked. Even if the player knows they've been hit but can't remove it from their own body they can (and would) eat glass before going back to their base and reveal its location. So we are talking about a slim chance of being able to stick a person in the first place and then an even slimmer chance that the person stuck doesn't know they're stuck and then the even slimmer chance that even if they do know, instead of committing suicide and respawning clear of the spear the player is going to choose to go back to their base while wearing their new body piercing. I mean, I'll mention it for sure because its funny and we should be able to remove stuff that is currently impaling us but nothing can convince me that changes need to be made for this rarest of rare usecases that would hurt the QOL of those of us who use spears in their most common usecases.

When Shirley gets here she can tell you.

Is it really that easy to tag someone with a spear in a way that makes them unaware that they have a homing beacon stuck on them so they go running to their Yavin 4 base and give away their location?

My take is two-fold. First, we are not waking up on the first morning of the apocalypse. Years have definitely passed since the virus struck and the bombs came down. So the inversion principle could have already occurred as backstory to the day we call Day One. All the easily found high quality stuff has already been looted and we aren’t able to find the rare good stuff until our skill as scavengers progresses. There is no mini-game of us actually rooting around through cupboards filled with junk to find something worthwhile that others might have missed. That is all abstracted and generalized by the current system. It’s not that the cupboard only had can of Sham that didn’t go bad. It had a bunch of stuff and buried under it all in the back was that good can of food that is presented in the user interface. Secondly, for gameplay purposes it would be really stupid to have end game gear appear so early on. I know it would be stupid from first-hand experience during previous alpha versions where that was indeed the case. If you really want to try playing the game where any weapon could be found at the beginning just try some of the previous versions where that was possible. Maybe you’ll find it fun as everyone is different, but in my opinion, it significantly shortens the desire to play in that world and makes future looting less exciting. Granted, Alpha 19 turned out to be extremely linear but A20 fixes that with the pipe weapons and the new Lootstage that is modified by biome.

Have a cookie AndrewT....

*Crosses Khalagar off the list of potential babysitters...