Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Lonestarcanuck]

No, that is a huge feature to pull off and adds literally zero value to average customers. I'd rather just have a rwg mixer you can say its all winter and play that for hardcore survival.

 

so I like that so I can have a winter world but I need to be able to have crops fail if they are not in green houses and heated.

 

How hard would it be to add temperature/failure to crops based on biome/temp?

[khzmusik]

How hard would it be to add temperature/failure to crops based on biome/temp?

 

+1 for this. If the global temperature could be modded via XML, and timers are also available to be used in XML, then there's your seasonal weather right there.

[SrslyGTFO]

Any chance we'll see a slightly more robust bleeding mechanic? I saw a suggestion over in Reddit regarding three tiers of bleeding debuffs. It would add white and orange tier bleeding debuffs, with different levels of health loss, of course.

 

With proper armor, perks or whatever, you could mitigate the bleed debuff somewhat. It should be extremely rare or impossible to get a critical (red) bleed debuff in full modded steel armor against a vulture. Maybe just a mild bleed.

 

So when are you starting an A19 Dev Diary??

[Odetta]

How about letting us name our gear?

 

 

 

Would be funny if the game gave call outs too;

 

"Roland was crushed by "The Peoples Hammer"

"Roland was cut to ribbons by "McStabby"

"Roland had his melon popped by "Rusty Trombone"

[Dimpy]

Tier 6 is never craftable, period. You can craft say a blunderbuss with no perks because it is a tier 1 shotgun. Once you buy rank 1 of shotgun messiah you can craft faulty shotguns, and get a permanent recipe for double barrel shotguns. If you happen to find a pump shotgun schematic, you can craft a faulty one. Buy more perk ranks to craft up to blue T5. Pink T6 is find and buy only and never craftable.

 

Right, like stone axe is T1, iron is T2, Steel is T3.

 

So then there's going to be six tiers of tiers of item type as well as quality level? I had thought before it was only three tiers. Well the more the merrier I guess .

[madmole]

Is it still possible to have that many intersecting biomes? I think it was 17.1 where the RWG made it where only certain biomes would be next to certain biomes... so I assumed that was the general goal.

 

Regardless, a global precipitation system makes sense IMO.

[madmole]

wouldn't it clearly say what season it was? or maybe give newbs an immunity to seasonal tempratures for 2 hours. easy fixins for a good challenge rating

 

You are not finding a parka, flannel, jeans, boots gloves etc in 2 hours. And if its storming I plan on making even that hard to survive in good gear if you are in the snow biome. So just how is a noob going to deal with something everyone else had months to prepare for?

 

No matter the answer we're not doing seasons.

[Crater Creator]

Hate the idea of random stats on guns. This is, so far, NOT a dungeon crawler where my the point is to repeat the same looting sequence until I get that one piece of gear. Please do not make it so.

 

Look at the POIs and quests we have now. The party enters a self-contained interior space and traverses a maze-like layout full of enemies, traps, and puzzles until they reach a 'treasure room' and/or complete a predefined, action or exploration based objective. Like it or not, that IS a dungeon crawler! It seems to me more variable stats on the guns or other loot would just spice things up, making it less repetitive if anything.

[madmole]

LOL. I live on 86 acres MM. I've watched rain roll across the front 40acres while it never touched the back 46 while i was bushhogging in sunny weather.

 

I've seen this hundreds of times, but we don't let rare moments or reality drive our game designs and production choices.

[madmole]

Plus some DPS...

 

Amiright?

 

My poor quality pink dyed diamond tipped stone axe is going to be boss. How about letting us name our gear?

 

You'll get the same DPS as that pink dye gave you, its a mod not a new pickaxe. I'm all for naming gear but I don't know what it entails. Certainly a post gold thing.

[madmole]

How about a moving low resolution perlin noise layer to simulate cloud density? The denser the simulated cloud, the more it rains on that particular area.

 

That would give you weather fronts moving across the map and, if you use 3d perlin, you can have the rain get thinner and denser more naturally as it traverses the map.

 

Add in a cloud texture to visually display this and you could have people on one side of the map warning people on the other side about harsh weather fronts moving in.

 

Sounds over engineered. How about it has an increased chance to rain every day that it doesn't? Lets keep it simple so weather doesn't get cut completely.

[madmole]

so I like that so I can have a winter world but I need to be able to have crops fail if they are not in green houses and heated.

 

How hard would it be to add temperature/failure to crops based on biome/temp?

 

Probably not that hard but lets leave some work for the modders to do. Thats kind of a hardcore personal tastes mod, that I would install myself, but average guys need simple farming.

[madmole]

Any chance we'll see a slightly more robust bleeding mechanic? I saw a suggestion over in Reddit regarding three tiers of bleeding debuffs. It would add white and orange tier bleeding debuffs, with different levels of health loss, of course.

 

With proper armor, perks or whatever, you could mitigate the bleed debuff somewhat. It should be extremely rare or impossible to get a critical (red) bleed debuff in full modded steel armor against a vulture. Maybe just a mild bleed.

 

So when are you starting an A19 Dev Diary??

 

That sounds alright. Maybe 2 would be fine tbh. Why ask for 19 when 18 isn't done?

[madmole]

Would be funny if the game gave call outs too;

 

"Roland was crushed by "The Peoples Hammer"

"Roland was cut to ribbons by "McStabby"

"Roland had his melon popped by "Rusty Trombone"

 

Stabby McStabbins is a favorite of mine lol. That would be funny.

[madmole]

So then there's going to be six tiers of tiers of item type as well as quality level? I had thought before it was only three tiers. Well the more the merrier I guess .

 

Three tiers of items, 6 tiers of quality.

[betam4x]

You are not finding a parka, flannel, jeans, boots gloves etc in 2 hours. And if its storming I plan on making even that hard to survive in good gear if you are in the snow biome. So just how is a noob going to deal with something everyone else had months to prepare for?

 

No matter the answer we're not doing seasons.

 

That makes me a bit sad. Ever play Don't Starve (Together)? Seasons can add quite an interesting dynamic to a game. It wouldn't be harsh on noobs either. Spring and Fall feature mild days and slightly chilly nights, summer features hot days and in the winter, it snows. Hell if done right you could eliminate the snow biome and just have forest, wasteland, and desert biomes. Desert would be hot all the time. Wasteland? Anything you want, extreme thunderstorms? Acid Rain? Who knows. The forest would be the only biome to undergo seasonal changes.

 

I personally find the latest changes to temperature/climate/weather a bit boring. I preferred Alpha 16's weather. However, I'm one of those that enjoys the current alpha.

[Dimpy]

Stabby McStabbins is a favorite of mine lol. That would be funny.

Stabby McStabbins sounds like the kind of character you'd hear mentioned in the game's flavor text.

 

I'd be amused if there was one of those "found note" quests with the late Stabby McStabbins telling you where you can find his secret scroll of stabby skills.

[faatal]

@faatal

 

Old buddy, old pal... Vehicles... Maybe add a few blank keyboard binds that turn children on and off like headlight does when you hit f?

 

...so we can mod in some more interesting animations?

 

Pretty please?

 

I added to my todo list, but no promises.

[faatal]

Okay, I'm glad to get a better idea of your intentions on this. While in theory you only need one room, in the experience of many, no part of a POI is safe until all parts of a POI are safe. And it's not because of paranoia or ignoring stealth.

 

From what I've gathered, this is because as soon as you walk away, the game doesn't remember which sleepers were where: only how many are left. So when you return, the remaining sleepers are re-rolled and by random chance show up in your already cleared room. I believe a lot of users have misinterpreted this, to believe that sleepers repopulate almost instantly.

 

Sleeper volumes do remember what sleeper types were spawned in addition to the count, but not their positions.

 

That leads to animals being respawned outside of their cages, so for A18 on March 25 I did:

Fixed SDTD-9335 Restored sleepers roll on animal/zombie spots (sleepers remember their spawn point and restore at that point).

[faatal]

Faatal has been spending most of his time on optimizations, code cleanup, and bug fixing. It’s also why he hasn’t been showing up reporting here as often as he did in the past. What he’s doing now is hugely important but time consuming and it doesn’t make for sexy posts.

 

Yes and some refinement as I see things that could be better. Here are my interesting changes for the last 2 weeks:

 

Fixed SDTD-8497 Vehicles are a base wrecking machine (vehicles do half damage to land claimed blocks and make the sound, use driver's block damage scale).

Fixed SDTD-8480 request for having bikes (2 wheelers) not do damage to blocks when they fall over after dismounting (increased minimum velocity required to damage and reduced damage amount).

Fixed vehicle doing more damage on collision separation, block check could fail and block hits tended to undo the motion and repeat the damage.

Added vehicle hopForce forward offset, so front tire lifts more on 2 wheelers and motorcycle does wheelies.

Adjusted mass of 2 wheelers.

Increased vehicle self damage.

Optimized HUD target/crosshair update and reduced garbage gen.

Fixed SDTD-8839 smoking minibike when placed/spawned.

Added Block VehicleHitScale for vehicle collisions, removed heavy hit based on mesh tag and setup blocks (road debris and small cactus x999, signs x8, shopping cart x4).

Fixed SDTD-9349 mushrooms can be damaged when run over by minibike (set crops to VehicleHitScale .1).

Fixed SDTD-8948 Wandering horde has too many duplicates side by side (GetRandomFromGroup takes a last spawned id and tries 3 times for a different id. Applies to all spawners except biome).

Optimized EntityAlive updateCurrentBlockPosAndValue.

Fixed UI ItemStack dirty flags (always updating) and optimized UI array access.

 

Fixed fleeing animals will get stuck in corners or run into walls (Bigger random angle. Shorter paths. A large AIPathCostScale now makes paths that don't go through blocks. Run away short paths switch to random escape direction).

Refactored AI run away logic and added timeout.

Fixed CalcPositionInDirection not height testing correct position.

Improved AI run away values.

Adjusted animal move/panic/turn speeds.

Merged deer mesh and prefab and centered near front feet.

Increased timid animal vision angle.

Added path start position motion estimation.

Increased path point reached distance when side stepping.

Added AI slows down near end of path and won't turn when close.

Improved AI blocked distance, side stepping and direct movement.

Changed AI returning home to use aggro speed (at 80%).

Fixed entity RotateToGround jittering on flat terrain, rewrote math and added springiness.

Fixed SDTD-9255 gyrocopter floats in air if the pilot gets disconnected/logs out (vehicles will fall once their chunk loads).

[Guppycur]

THAT'S what hopforce is... or maybe I'm thinking upforce... I dunno, unity definitions are vague, like:

 

Wheel Damping Rate: This is a value of damping applied to a wheel.

 

Gee, thanks unity. THAT clears it up...

[Crater Creator]

Sounds over engineered. How about it has an increased chance to rain every day that it doesn't? Lets keep it simple so weather doesn't get cut completely.

 

This was suggested before, but here it is again... one simpler idea would be for precipitation to raise the water table, and it takes time to come back down. Then weather would have both a short-term and longer-term effect, without having to implement seasons. Flooding and droughts would impact survival more than clothing/temperature alone, and it would specifically introduce a dynamic hazard to underground living.

[JaxTeller718]

What suboptimal choice is being made? If every mod adds to the damage of the gun in addition to adding a special effect then every mod is useful even if you don't particularly care about the special effect because DPS is of interest to everyone. The only problem right now is that guns are being found and/or crafted that have more slots than the mods we have available to put into them-- but that will change.

 

In A18 you will only be able to craft up to a certain level of quality and you will only be able to craft lower class weapons. So being able to craft an SMG up to poor quality will make finding a good quality SMG a happy event since you can't craft one and there will be more mods so you'll be able to fill those slots and have an SMG that is more powerful damage-wise than the one you crafted could ever be. In addition, finding an AK-47 will be a more powerful base weapon than the SMG and since you won't be able to craft an AK-47 at all that will be a really exciting find.

 

Making the quality level add damage and the mods add damage would be too OP. taking the damage off the mods and keeping it with the base weapon would make the mods less exciting and many would be seen as completely useless by those who don't particularly care about the effect they give. Keeping the damage increase on the mods means every mod is useful in a way that is important to the player and with the re-organization of weapons and changing which are craftable and which are not and at which quality-- that will return the fun of scavenging for weapons. And once we have more mods in our storage chests when we do find that gun with 6 mod slots we will be very excited to run back to base and plug all those slots in and watch that damage value go up and up and up and up and up and up.

 

If anything, I think there should be a weighted random damage range applied to the mods instead of the base weapons. I like what Madmole said about possibly making the base weapons more of a rare loot find and making the mods more common.

 

If I may, i think the disconnect between the company and the community is the assumption we wanted mods in the form we received them.

 

People were asking for mods but things like silencers/scopes/magazines/nails etc. NOT mods in PLACE of quality stats. It seems like one part of the community feedback was received but the other part ignored. Mods are nice, as an addition TO quality crafting stats etc. NOT in place of them.

 

Think of how many more combinations we could have had if we had both quality and mods. You reduce the silly mods like paint adding damage to everything, add back the quality stats and have mods give small bonuses or functionality. Hell the first time MM showed off the mods EVERYONE was wondering what the heck was up with Quality 1-6. And most expressed concern over it.

[faatal]

THAT'S what hopforce is... or maybe I'm thinking upforce... I dunno, unity definitions are vague, like:

 

Wheel Damping Rate: This is a value of damping applied to a wheel.

 

Gee, thanks unity. THAT clears it up...

 

Hop force is not a Unity value. That is a up force I apply to the vehicle when you make it hop. The force is just more to the front of the 2 wheelers and can be shifted in XML.

[Crater Creator]

Sleeper volumes do remember what sleeper types were spawned in addition to the count, but not their positions.

 

That leads to animals being respawned outside of their cages, so for A18 on March 25 I did:

Fixed SDTD-9335 Restored sleepers roll on animal/zombie spots (sleepers remember their spawn point and restore at that point).

 

That's great news! Even if you were targeting a different problem, now the intended gameplay of clearing out parts of a POI at a time will be viable.