dcsobral

That used to be possible. I believe it's still possible in a19, though harder because you'll usually kill a zombie before you can chop off all limbs.

I know from the streams that it would be possible to create these things are parts and set them to always spawn but, on the other hand, you could also just make the whole thing in the tile itself. A tile is, essentially, a 150x150 (iirc) POI which is guaranteed to be placed adjacent to other POIs (tiles) according to certain rules, and which can have randomly selected sub-POIs chosen according to tags and semi-random sub-POIs (parts) selected from a pre-defined list. So say you create a rural (I think) dead-end tile. That sort of tile spawns on city borders, and being a dead-end means there's a single road connecting to it. You could put ditch and fence on all edges, make a check post on the road connection, then fill the interior with "military"-tagged POIs and assorted parts such as explosion craters or barricades, and the end result would be a 150x150 military base POI with a lot of randomness. I think that goes more or less along the lines you are thinking of.

There's the odd troll every now and then, of course, and probably quite a few people who haven't grown out of the phase where people react to being denied by kicking and screaming. But there's also many, many instances where the "hate" comes out of love. People who feel so strongly about 7 Days to Die that they feel deeply frustrated by what would otherwise be a minor issue. And the amount of time people have spent playing this game is truly no joke. I have 8,219.5 hours logged on Steam as of this moment, though a good chunk of it is probably due to the thousands of random gen seeds I've generated through an automated process without actually being present, and I've talked to people who have logged even more hours without that excuse. I agree with all you have said, but I think it's good to recognize a lot of it has more to do with a lover's quarrel than with hate.

Well said. To anyone bemoaning the delay, consider this: would you be upset if you had to restart the game after every update on experimental? How about if there was one update every day?

Was it said that scripts will be loaded from mods automatically? Do you know what's the folder/file structure? And I'm also rather curious about UI changes. I think it was said that some stuff that was hard coded is now XML, which will make it easier to make alternate UIs.

They said so, yeah. They went on to say, though I paraphrase, "find things where you expect to find them". Well, Half Life 2 was 2004 and Half Life 3 was, uh, is not out yet. So they have about 9 years from the launch of Half Life 3 to go gold.

@Roland Please add a Prime "I see what you did there" emoji.

Honestly, they weren't even trying to deal with the food. Didn't invest in Living off the Land or Master Chef, didn't loot the crops we saw over and over, didn't make much of an effort to buy food from the vending machine, rarely went for Buried Supplies. To me, they looked pretty much like a new player would when it comes to food. And though they struggled, it did not make gameplay impossible. I think their level of struggle is fine for players who do not make any sort of effort to acquire food. I see that more as a nice-to-have for gold than as a feature for alpha 20, let alone a bug.

Yes. Solar panels and banks are provided exclusively by the trader. Once again, no one world options affect anything other than what is written in them That reply doesn't even make sense. I explained my experience is how I came to that answer based on that experience. So, "no one world options affect anything other than what is written in th em" and you know this because your experience is what, exactly?

Also also... Whoever made that blockbuster (or was it the police station?) is an evil genius. It was suggested that Hernan did it, which is interesting... Hernan's work has always been impressive but deviousness isn't an attribute I had associated with him before. He might be spending too much time with laz man.

Also, they made a very interesting horde base towards the end.

So, all your responses to the problems I mentioned are kind of like this, if I have it right: Problem: change loot to remove all challenge quests if playing without traders. Solution: don't bother, it just becomes useless loot. That's the kind of thing that kills a game on review. It's unprofessional, incomplete, a hack. If it is to be done, TFP will try to do it right. It means ALL of it so the experience is smooth and pleasant to the players. It means no empty traders, it means challenges you get from loot and then cannot complete because there's no traders, it means all of I said and things I didn't think of and things TFP won't think of until QA starts playing with it and find issues that need to be addressed. It would be much easier if it they removed it for everyone. Being an option means they have to support both paths. And it will take longer if they take time to add another option to the game, and even longer if that option makes the factions/bandits/storyline development harder. The blood moon wasn't even a thing for many alphas. And there were multiple "modes" to play the game that were removed. Disabling blood moon did not require changes on anything else. There's no mention of blood moons anywhere in the game, there's nothing that depends on blood moons happening. If you think that, you are plain wrong. TFP spends a lot of time balancing things, and the existing balance problems are just a testament to how difficulty and time consuming it is to do it. I was part of the Ravenhearst mod team for a while so I can speak from experience on how hard it is to do it. As for TFP "not doing it"... Alpha 18 was basically a balancing alpha. They talked on dev streams about changing loot balance, they are talking in this very thread right now about changing balance on trader prices. And the new gamestage per biome thing, do you think there's no effort being done to balance it? They spend a ton of time on game balance and you just need to go back and play older alphas to see how much it changed. Just because you don't like the current balance doesn't mean they don't care. If they add a no-trader option and people start complaining you can't get crucibles, you can't get ammo, etc, etc, they have to pay attention to it. They might decide not to do anything about it, but just meeting and discussing and deciding takes time. And if they decide that yes, they need to do something, it's more time. Adding an option that is so badly supported people will only complain about it does more harm than good. I have a fair amount of experience with modding 7 Days to Die. I have mods available on the mod launcher, I was part of the Ravenhearst overhaul mod modding team. I have open source tools I've created to support it. In replying to you I thought of all things I'd have to change if I were to make a mod to remove traders entirely. I thought of the things I would not be able to do with a modlet and how much code support would be needed for it (I'm a software developer myself). And it isn't the first time I thought about it either: Jax wanted to remove traders from Ravenhearst around the time I was in the project -- as did I --, so I thought about what would be needed at that time. Every single thing I mentioned as being needed comes from actual experience. That said, I'm not trying to convince you of it. You asked a question, and I answered to the best of my ability. I can't help it that you don't like the answer. Yes, it is very easy for a modlet to completely change the quests. Alas, if you change a quest line that is in progress you can easily completely break the quest progression -- that's something that happened a few times while I was on the Ravenhearst team, forcing people to start a new game when updating. I had not considered this in my original reply, but it's something else that would have to be considered if this option was to be set on game load like the other options. But the point is that the modlet completely changes the quest. It doesn't make it an option. There's no way in the present system for a quest to go different ways depending on a game option.

I have similar feelings. Traders are so immersion breaking for me... And, yet, I can't get myself to not rely heavily on them. I'm not sure exactly why. A significant part is vehicles, books, auger and crucible. Also, no solar power without traders. I think if the traders had no books I would not be so keen on them -- books on the traders are significantly easier than looting, and completing book series can give significant rewards that are very important to my play style. I did have a playthrough this year where I set myself to play the locust plague challenge: disable loot respawn; you may travel to find a city and location you like, but you cannot loot anything but wilderness POIs until then; once you start looting a city, you have to loot all the city; you cannot loot any building that is not the neighbor of a building you have already looted (except for the first building in a city). On alpha 19 it meant no trader because there was no trader nearby, but alpha 20 has a trader per city. If there's a trader I'd say you can do buried supplies but doing a quest on a building follows the same rules as looting the building, plus no double looting. Anyway, it was a really good playthrough, though some of the stuff I couldn't find on loot until day 40-50 was a bit crazy.

Didn't they say each trader has their own tier progression now? That would mean being able to get the tier 1 completion multiple times, particularly if you end up in a world with two traders close by your spawn point.

I just love it how it sounds like devs are hard at work adding new MFB! 😂

Traders are intended to be a significant part of the game. To disable traders in alpha 19 you'd have to change the tutorial quest line, and remove all quests since the award is given by traders. Removing all quests also requires changing loot. As far as I can tell, you'd also have to change world generation on alpha 20 since cities are connected by trader tiles. From the stuff I heard on the forums over the years, traders will also be essential to moving the storyline and will tie in all the factions. That's pure speculation and even if not it is subject to change -- if they try something and it just doesn't work, they'll drop it. So here's what disabling the trader with one button requires: Tying a setting to the world generation as opposed to the game creation (no other setting does that). The UI changes to add the setting. Some mechanism to selectively remove loot items depending on settings. Some mechanism to change the quest line based on settings. Adding an alternative to trader tiles to be used on world generation. Supporting "no trader" option all through future developments, some of which are expected to be heavily reliant on traders. After that they might have to consider balancing the game for no trader games, if people choose to play no traders and get frustrated because of the things they are missing on due to the lack of traders. Even if you think all these missing things are exactly right, there will be people who want "no trader" to be exactly like "trader", except without traders. Even if no balance is done, they have to spend time taking these complains into consideration. All of this is doable, but it is definitely not trivial. The next step is answering this question: is it worth spending the time and resources in this instead of the other features on their list? Should they spend time on that instead of fixing water? Should they have spent time on that instead of fixing rwg? Should they spend time on that instead of doing bandits, since doing this will have consequences to what they do with bandits? Now let's compare to the setting changing the amount of experience. First, it works like all other settings: you choose it when loading the game and it can change at any time afterwards. Second, it doesn't add any new systems to the game, just limited changes on the code. Third, it does not need to be balanced since the whole purpose of the setting is changing balance. Fourth, it has no impact whatsoever on future developments. So amount of loot, amount of experience are one-time investments with limited impact and (relatively) cheap development, and disabling traders is expensive with wide ranging impact and will make development of planned features more expensive as well as have it's own maintenance cost. That's why. Yeah, they have hopes. Or at least Richard has hopes. But then Allan had to go and break the game by turning someone into a ghost.... ah, well. 😄 (tongue in cheek, but kind of true)

I meant the other way around. When they take damage from an unknown source (that is, not a player) they can go into destruction mode. AFAIK, not guaranteeing it. As for immediately vs after a few seconds, that may be a matter of performance but it also helps avoiding the case where moving towards one goal makes another goal more attractive and vice verse, in a loop. It may be clear to you that the zombie can go attack you but the AI never knows for sure, and this delay helps prevent gross exploits. Also, they are in rage mode. Enraged people tend to ignore their surroundings except for whatever they are focusing their rage on. Well, ok, not "rage mode" because that's a different thing (though I think any zombie in destruction mode should also be in rage mode), but the idea is that they are bashing things around in a fit of rage.

I'm usually frustrated at people who complain about their cheese bases not working anymore. Like people who want to make an underground base where zombies just won't reach them during horde night -- that one is a pet peeve of mine because on alpha 15, before I knew zombies would not dig, I used pillar 50s on the roof of tunnels so I could defend them. But you have to be careful about these things because what constitutes "cheesing" depends very much on how you think horde nights should be handled. To people who liked underground bunkers, making underground bunkers was their goal. For them, they weren't cheesing it, they were dealing with it. The same goes for loop bases. Just consider this: if there was a real zombie apocalypse then a loop base would be ideal. But even leaving these more extreme cases, there are people who think the players should be directly engaging zombies during horde night with weapons and there are others that want to work between horde nights so that their bases will take care of zombies during horde night. One is focusing on the FPS element, the other is focusing on the tower defense strategy element. Making something impossible doesn't necessarily mean the game got better for one group, but it does mean the game got worse for another group. The bunker builders are right to be upset: there's no point in building underground bunkers anymore. As a tower defense person I happen to enjoy this particular change because it gives me a reason to make underground bases (which, incidentally, I stopped doing since alpha 17 because digging became so much slower). On my own last YouTube playthrough I made an AFK base. It isn't a loop base, just a base that is very effective in killing zombies without my intervention. During horde nights I use the free fly camera to see what's happening. The challenge comes in designing the base, seeing it fail and figuring out how to fix it, then keeping it repaired and the dart traps ammoed. Many people might find that bases like that shouldn't be possible at all, that the players must be actively engaged in base defense on horde night, but here's the thing: if a base like this is made impossible, it won't change anything about the way these people play. It will just remove that possibility for me and people who enjoy this sort of thing. Never ask for a playstyle to be made impossible because you don't want other people to do those things. And when it comes to something like this, where you have "people X might not like it" and "many would like an increase in challenge", one has to consider whether that increase in challenge would have any effect whatsoever for the people who would like it, and I don't think so. I hate loop bases, so I just don't use them. I'd appreciate the increase in challenge but, fact is, it wouldn't change anything for me. I believe it can happen whenever a zombie takes damage, though maybe it's just fall damage.

Yeah, there are very weird cases when a zombie is coming in your direction -- or pathing to you -- and suddenly reverse direction and go attack some block. There was a striking example of it on Kage848's current playthrough, on the first horde night with demolishers. One of the demolishers walking down the path to him just turned 180 at one point and started going back (link at the bottom). Zombies doing weird things when the player is within reach isn't uncommon in my experience. On SP in my computer the AI task takes one or two seconds to change, so if they are approaching when I suddenly go past them they won't attack me because their current task does not include attacking. Same things go for block destruction: if they are engaged on it before I make myself "available" for attacks they'll keep at it for a couple of seconds before switching to approach and attack me. But that weird behavior of just deciding to stop pathing to you with no apparent reason, that I find rather frustrating. In some circumstances I can see them going to a block and attacking it, so I suspect it is all related to destroy mode, but I just can't figure out why they are doing it. It is not a case of not having a path. In kage's case I think the demolisher's path was blocked by the zombie in front of it, but I have seen it happen with zombies that were not in contact with any other zombie.

Night of the Dead does that? I have never observed it. In fact, aside from jerk infected which intentionally attack base structures, their destruction mode seems pretty similar to 7d2d: if they attack base structures if they take damage that wasn't inflicted by the player.

It's always immediately available on Twitch. Just search for "Past Broadcasts" instead of the default "Featured". It was being done like that for the first two or three, and then it changed to two days (?) because of Twitch terms of service.

So, faatal did not have an AI toggle to set zombies upon prime and whoever else was playing (ork?). Or, at least, he didn't use it. Of the three playthrough dev streams so far this is the one I enjoyed the most by far. And we got shutters! Hopefully. No idea whether they are player-craftable. They would be very useful in a lot of different places where I'm presently using hatches, particularly since they come both in "inside" and "outside" orientations, whereas hatches are always "outside". We also got to see most pipe weapons in action -- the only one still not shown (that I can recall) is the pipe pistol. Oh, and Lathan put an 8x scope on the pipe rifle and the model was just awesome. The sound effects and animations on these pipe weapons has been solid and I hope the other guns got an overhaul otherwise some of them will feel rather lacking. And the drone! Honestly, we didn't see much more of the drone than on the show-and-tell dev stream, and it mostly served as a flying storage box but, hey, I'll take a flying storage box any time of the day, any day of the week. Oh, and prime completed the tier 1 of the trader and the rewards looked... interesting. You gotta watch and see it! Plus it was fun and informative. I'm in awe of Shawn's ability to play, read chat and answer questions from it all at the same time. I'm just watching the stream and I couldn't keep up with the chat as well as him! Poll time: what was the highlight of the night? A) Shawn ragdolling a bear with the 4x4 while the others shot at it. B) Bobblehead Jen. C) Shutters. D) Pickable ladders. E) Other: ____ One negative for me: I wish there was some tweaking done to the progression. I'm not talking about this third playthrough stream in particular, but the three of them taken together and there just seems to be something missing. It's not even that I feel something needs changing, it's just that it feels a bit stale with everything exactly as in alpha 19. (that said, I do feel Agility lacks non-combat related perks) Oh, and one thing on the wishlist for next week, @Prime : show us what the shape categories are. So the second one is square blocks, the third one looks to be round blocks by comparison, but what are the rest?

Oh, cool. Is that part of today's stream? 😃

It's not a script. Some sleeper areas are configured to wake up the sleepers as soon as someone enters it.

The distinction was before a19 stable (MF) and a19 experimental (HH/H).