meganoth

[I moved this thread to an appropriate section] It may be better to ask the author of the mod launcher directly. But in any case, without a much better description what is happening you won't have much luck getting a meaningful answer.

[Moved the thread to the correct section.]

I practically put that mod on ignore because I only had relatively weak CPU and GPU in my PC. Now that I upgraded the CPU (and maybe the GPU will follow suit) this mod looks like we will become close friends soon.

That was at a time where occlusion of hidden blocks wasn't built into the game. Theoretically caves should not matter anymore to terrain rendering or at least not much. There was a mod though I assume it cost a lot of FPS. As I am an enthusiastic POI-destroyer at times I would love to have burning blocks. Think of the wooden trap buildings you could build solely to burn them when lots of zombies are inside.

5800h is a mobile CPU. Even if it is geared towards high-performance there are still physical limits your laptop can't ignore. Heat dissipation just does not allow your laptop to reach the same performance as a full PC and you have to tune your settings accordingly. There is one bug with window blocks costing too much performance in cities that has been fixed in A21. So those drops in cities will likely not happen or not be as strong as in A20. But in my experience even in A20 those drops can easily be avoided if you turn off shadows completely.

Not necessarily. I think his idea was that the game creates new blocks with their own ids on the fly from the basic blocks whenever such a block is created. Afterwards the block would be indistinguishable from a block that had been defined from the start. It would require code to geometrically add together the shapes that define a block (i.e. shape itself and hit boxes), obviously a feature that would require intricate knowledge of how unity defines blocks and I assume a lot of development time. But once there it would cost practically no overhead using the created blocks or complexity in how blocks are represented.

At least for A20 early crops can be very useful. Since you find recipes randomly there is always a chance for you being able to cook advanced recipes. And if you spec into STRENGTH and put points into Master Chef early then you also have advanced recipes relatively early in your game. Note I am just speaking generally. The game offers different solutions for some problems and food is no exception. You can get food from multiple sources and if other sources are sufficient then obviously there is no need for points into LotL. And usually veteran players have much less problems with food than novice players in early game.

I am not saying it isn't a grind. I am just saying there is **also** an element of chance with Lotl1 where you can be surprised by an especially bad harvest. And then you may have to make a small decision whether to just keep waiting for that food type to be available again or maybe switch to a new dish for some time that does not depend on that food type. It might make you check out recipes again, which ones you can do and which ones are wasteful with the food type you have only a few of. All this isn't much but at least it is there, on top of the grind. (And TFP could increase the meaningful decisions if they changed some of the recipes, i.e. so it isn't always 2 corn and 2 potatos for all the higher tier foods. For example have some potato recipe better than grilled potato that uses 1 less corn or even no corn) If you are always playing Fortitude then that is a valid approach as you reach LotL3 relatively soon. I tend to spec into different attributes and at the time I would get LotL3 the game would have been in its last legs already and I definitely don't need a farm anymore. Most if not all potato and corn fields are in quest POIs and every town has them. I don't see any reason saving them up. If you are using LotL1 just to farm wild crops nobody is forcing you to make seeds out of them. That was the point of my remark, you can get lots of food just by gathering crops and then Lotl1 is a cheap way to double your result.

Since I am one of the mods that said something similar you might refer to me in this paragraph. In that case you should know that I was paraphrasing what I heard TFP devs say and may have either be misunderstood by you, or using the wrong words or were even wrong myself interpreting their words (it was a long time ago, I don't know what exact words I used, just like you don't remember who said it). Whatever it was, to my knowledge they never said in any way that they ignore veterans. The only thing they said was that the vanilla game(!) with default settings(!) is always the game with which new players start and therefore has to be balanced around novice players. They never said they don't listen to veteran players and I got the impression they do react to novice and veteran players both, but naturally only as far as it doesn't interfere with their own plans. Yeah and surprise, crafting was just overhauled to be much more relevant. We just will never know how much of that is the result of player input or their own observation.

Whenever you change major alphas you should clean your settings. If you are on steam you need to start the game launcher (steam asks you whether you want to start it or not). Then change to the "tools" tab in the launcher and select the last option there, "Clean ...". You might not need to clean everything to get your games to start, but your configuration at a minimum. For example you can often keep older worlds and savegames, but sometimes you need to remove them as well. Backup any savegames and worlds you like to keep IF you delete them as well.

An accountant would point out that food is a lot more worth to you at the start of the game (as it is harder to come by). As soon as you are more mobile (minibike or motorcycle) the food value (for you) drops strongly as you can scavenge and buy a lot more food. Sort of the built-in inflation because of supply and demand. So 0.5 food at LOTL0 or 1.5 food at LOT1 on average could be more worth to you at the start of the game as 3.5 food from a seed at day 30. By the way, if anyone thinks LOTL1 is useless at the start of the game because he doesn't start a farm early should also take into account that even without a farm you get double the food from wild plants as well. I usually invest one of the 4 points I get from the initial quest into LOTL1. Each potato or corn farm is simply giving you twice as much, that seems worth it alone.

Then let me explain that stupidity. All games except walking sims and cookie clickers give the player challenges to overcome. The only other sources of pleasure the player can derive from a game are graphics/sound, story and what is commonly called Instant Cratification. Those first two can be provided by movies as well, but unique to games are the challenges that directly involve the player by forcing him to react in meaningful ways. When a game developer makes something more difficult or not automatic or trivial to attain for the player may looks like he his working **against** the player. But in general players need those challenges to have prolonged fun with the game. A change to make something more difficult or dangerous for the player is in that way never a player-hostile change. Now it depends how you meant that "player-hostile". If you meant it as "this change works against the player and is therefore hostile to the player" and this is how I read it, then my comment is spot on. If you instead meant "player-hostile change" as a simple alias for "unfun change" and would have called something that makes say higher-tier weapons easier to get or animals easier to shoot as "player-hostile" too then yes, my reply does not fit. But then you invited this by using language that is easy to misinterpret. The return of farming is seed+food. Since food can be and usually some of it has to be converted back into seeds it is two sides of the same coin. Seed chance and food return was carefully balanced so that you get a surplus on average starting at LotL1, but there is still a random chance for some food types to have a bad harvest and getting scarce making you react. For example through cooking of different and maybe even lesser foods you still have the ingredients for, or searching for the missing seeds or searching for ingredients or seeds that help you make different foods for a while. This is also why I don't understand players who keep seeds until they are at LotL3. They practically wait until farming is at its most boring and reduced to a grind. 😉 PS: IMHO realism had a very small part in deciding how to change farming and driving for TFP. They naturally will take any change that makes the game more realistic as a nice bonus on top, but as they said multiple times their main reason for any change is "is it more fun?". ..

When they added zombies to the game, did some forum users complain about player-hostile changes too ? 😎 I had multiple games with farms and I never speced above LotL1 in SP. And all those "worthless" farms were giving me back lots of food. Did I do something wrong? Or is your need for safety and security just a bit too much for a **survival** game?

Recognize that your discussion whether this topic is futlie or not is quite as useful or useless as the topic itself. But I agree that the opinion of 1000+ players is not necessarily worth more than that of a newbie. As the game has to work for veterans and newbies alike if it wants to stay relevant for a long time, newbies can point to problems just like veterans. Me, I want 1) legendary weapons (those look like they are a sure bet eventually) and weapon degradation. 2) An upgrade to the tile system so you can specify exactly which tiles can attach to other tiles. 3) The extensive lakes of earlier alphas.

Because the biggest feature they were working on didn't make it into A21, bandit NPCs, bandit AI, new armor and new player avatars

I'm not sure what you are experiencing is the norm. Do you have your trigger finger pressed the whole night through? Then change how you build, use traps (barbed wire for example) to slow down the horde. Give the horde a long-winded pathway they have to follow before reaching you. Push them into pits where they have to walk out again and then follow that same long-winded pathway to you again. Only shoot at zombies that attack critical blocks.

... and then there is the big guy at the drum providing the work rhythm.

Nope, sorry. "Placeholder" is well defined as something that is never intented to survive into gold. What is surely true is that we have no sure way to know which of their features and mechanisms were meant as placeholders or were experiments that might have turned up in the final version. One heuristic you could employ is that anything that was in the first few alphas was mostly placeholder while anything after that was experiment. Some stuff was labeled clearly as placeholder stuff **by developers** and is also very likely placeholder stuff, for example all the graphics bought in the unity-store. Some people on the forum said that LBD was a placeholder. I have my doubts about that, I think that was an experiment.

I think Laz Man mentioned multiple improvements. I think simply increasing max range by ~3% after each quest (together with excluding already used POIs) would solve the problem. Eventually I would get quests far away but at that time I would also have a selection of 5*5= 25 quests to choose from and a gyro.

That is an interesting point you are making here: That due to district settings the same POIs could be placed near the trader. I am not sure about it though: Farm, Pass N Gas and the L shaped house would probably belong to rural, commercial and residential zones, all the zones you would find in a small starting town.

There are a few reasons IMHO: 1) Actually not enough time to create a more expansive game. But thats ok since this game is supposed to be 7 Days to Die Part 1. Expansion is for part 2 and for modders, that's why the game is designed to be easily moddable. They thought of a lot more features they would have wanted to include but the time and size of their company didn't allow for more if you also include the following points 2 to 6. 2) Since the game is EA they needed a fully playable game from day 1 of EA. Hence the game was filled with placeholder graphics and mechanisms that had to be replaced eventually 3) If you design a game that hasn't really been done before you need a lot of experimentation on mechanisms of the game. In "older times" this experimentation was hidden in closed development and many games were light on new mechanisms anyway so we players are not accustomed to see experimentation being done. Even now many EA games start to enter EA only after their main experimentation phase which means you don't see that a lot. 4) There are surely developers who don't experiment much and developers who like to experiment. I am quite confident to place TFP in the latter category 😉 5) There are surely developers who just look at established games and take mechanisms from there and developers who like to use something new. I am quite confident to place TFP in the latter category 😉 . And actually I think a part of the appeal of 7D2D is that it is chock full of new mechanisms. Now the problem is: If you use a lot of new mechanisms then some of them turn out to be not working as good as the designer had envisioned, i.e. some disadvantages only show up after extensive playtesting. So a lot of tweaking or even replacement of such mechanisms has to happen. 6) TFP seems also very keen on having a fluff-free game, in other words they don't want to have lots of identical stuff in the game. For example each vehicle you can drive is quite distinct from the others, there are no two variants of the jeep for example. So expansion of the game is always hard as new features don't come cheap. If we take the vehicle example: What could be a new vehicle with new features? I can think of one immediately, a boat or raft. But unlike adding just another vehicle that acts like a jeep (say 2 days development, testing, bug fixing and balancing all in all) a boat or raft would need surely weeks now to be added (including testing, balancing and bug fixing)

After about 10 quests you will be promoted to T2 quests. The problem is if you get the same POIs after 5 quests already. How many (questable) POIs does a typical town have? If we say that it needs 10 each of tier 1 and 2 and at least 5 tier3 (at that point you should easily be able to travel to adjacent towns for quests) then a town would need to have at least 25 buildings, which seems a lot. One solution would be to place a lot more wilderness POIs that act as viable quest buildings in reach of multiple towns. Since wilderness seemed too empty in previous alphas that solution would kill two birds with one stone. Laz Man, how many wilderness POIs did you add this alpha ? 😉

This is not happening because of the game, this would probably happen with many games and applications that really stress your CPU. Most games though tend to stress the GPU more than the CPU. If you notice this only happening with 7D2D then the other games you tested probably are GPU-bound and because of that still run well at the 3600 setting even though you have a potentially unstable configuration.

I am pretty sure that Roland gave us all the info he was allowed to share when he was super mod. So a community manager could only change frequency of posting the same stuff again and again or style. Is it frequency or style that should be improved in your opinion? Or is it a cleaner presentation of the facts you are after?

Yes, you can buy them. But the question is whether you can progress at an acceptable speed with traders alone. It isn't workbenches alone, trap, weapon and tool crafting depends on magazines. And the trader often has parts instead of complete weapons or tools. I'm not saying it is impossible. It is just not known yet if it will still be a viable way to play the game. We won't know until someone tries it out.