Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[MechanicalLens]

Deckard Cain? Is that you?

 

Yes it is, my good fellow. No mere butterfly lady could kill me.

[Jugginator]

Yes it is, my good fellow. No mere butterfly lady could kill me.

 

Good good. Can you identify these items I found?

[rdunham3]

Well with a level 5 lucky looter I found a modded auger (iirc it came with the 50% gas mod), a level 2 m60, an ak47 , 2 junk turrets and maybe a beaker . Next couple days I found a steel pickaxe and two(!) irradiation removal mods.

Put 1 part on lucky looter, looted 4 houses and could barely found an anvil schematic and an ak47. I'm also on a single player save with lucky looter 2 and I barely found 3 junk turrets on day 30.

I can't run looting tests but there's clearly a huge gap between level 1, 3 and 5 without accounting goggles. Maxed perk + goggles must give free beakers and engines methinks.

 

RNG is RNG. I've found great stuff before putting any points in lucky looter and crap stuff for days after putting points in.

 

The lucky looter bonuses, and goggle bonus, are a minor alteration of your chances. Game stage is a much bigger factor. I'm not a TFP dev but I'm sure of that.

[madmole]

MM, since you said that you are brainstorming a19. Consider this.

 

Most people arent in the forest or away from cities. so them being rather empty is understandable, but cities and town, that's where most people are and where'd we'd expect them to have died. it shouldnt feel so empty. I waited, did as you asked and played to see the feel. and it still feels empty. Can you beef up city and town areas? tie it into max alive, so many zeds in a town or city, kill them until the number say 100 for a small town, 300 for a city. reaches zero, have em respawn every couple of days. make the city feel like a threat again.

 

There is nothing I can do but you can mod it easily. We need to ensure enough zombies for the POIs, decent FPS etc. We're planning a random encounter system to keep things interesting and with more optimizations we can get more zombies alive. We have no way to know where a city is, so we can't add more zombies to cities than is in the wild, we need some kind of procedural mask.

[MechanicalLens]

Good good. Can you identify these items I found?

 

I cannot. I forgot my glasses at home...

 

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Good thing I tested the area before I started building. 3 invisible trees. 3!

[Jugginator]

I cannot. I forgot my glasses at home...

 

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Good thing I tested the area before I started building. 3 invisible trees. 3!

 

D: But Mr. Cain, how can I know if this armor I found is a normal trash piece or it's the Godly Plate of the Whales or a Demonspike Coat?

 

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I cannot. I forgot my glasses at home...

 

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Good thing I tested the area before I started building. 3 invisible trees. 3!

 

Omg you have the worst luck with those guys Perhaps remove them from your biome xml before a new world? If you don't have it, grab Notepad++ and search/delete all of them

[MechanicalLens]

D: But Mr. Cain, how can I know if this armor I found is a normal trash piece or it's the Godly Plate of the Whales or a Demonspike Coat?

 

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Omg you have the worst luck with those guys Perhaps remove them from your biome xml before a new world?

 

I don't want to get into XML's. Lol I'd probably do more harm than good.

 

Yeah, they were all within 5 blocks of each other. I'm really glad I checked before I laid down any sort of solid foundation.

[Jugginator]

I don't want to get into XML's. Lol I'd probably do more harm than good.

 

Yeah, they were all within 5 blocks of each other. I'm really glad I checked before I laid down any sort of solid foundation.

 

Right lol, well, if it makes you feel better you can just copy and place it on your desktop incase you do, but shouldn't cause issues. I saw Faatal say he found an error in one of the XMLs and has a fix for it tho.

[madmole]

Getting Red Dead Redemption vibes over here. I remember the encounter system in the Undead Nightmare expansion. You'd stumble across people mourning over their dead loved ones, just for their dead loved ones to become undead loved ones and chomp their mourning victims's faces off.

 

This is a wonderful idea. Please, proceed.

 

New books and legendary items will be first. I'm pretty stoked legendary items will be really cool and we're working on usability improvements at the same time.

[Jugginator]

New books and legendary items will be first. I'm pretty stoked legendary items will be really cool and we're working on usability improvements at the same time.

 

Consider me stoked too

 

Can we get a tip jar for Rekt? That's all he says when I leave him, maybe if I tip him he'll shut up about it and tell me to just get the F out of here, which is fine.

[MechanicalLens]

Right lol, well, if it makes you feel better you can just copy and place it on your desktop incase you do, but shouldn't cause issues. I saw Faatal say he found an error in one of the XMLs and has a fix for it tho.

 

The invisible trees seem to show up most often around where player-planted trees used to be. So never plant trees down where you plan to build.

[MechanicalLens]

New books and legendary items will be first. I'm pretty stoked legendary items will be really cool and we're working on usability improvements at the same time.

 

That sounds awesome! I cannot wait to see what you all create!

[beHypE]

There is nothing I can do but you can mod it easily. We need to ensure enough zombies for the POIs, decent FPS etc. We're planning a random encounter system to keep things interesting and with more optimizations we can get more zombies alive. We have no way to know where a city is, so we can't add more zombies to cities than is in the wild, we need some kind of procedural mask.

 

From what I understand there's no "city marker" somewhere in your data. That being said, I suppose there is a POI marker. What you could probably do is create a new "heatmap" metric that only goes up when there is a POI close by. This heat would obviously spawn zombies in its vicinity, but the toughness of those zombies would be decided by how much the heatmap indicator is : in other terms, how many buildings are close enough to raise the marker. Basically, more zombies around POIs, and cities will automatically be a bit more swarmed overall. No need to actually spawn 20 of them to give us a challenge, if they get harder the more buildings are around.

 

I understand that you have to actually account for MP, because this could create deadends in your maxAlive pool. I guess I don't have a perfect solution, but you have some options :

- have a limited number of zombies a player can spawn at once, the first to spawn is the first to die of old age when the max is hit

- reduce sleepers in POIs if there is a lot of spawning around it

- make it an option, because for SP the maxAlive would actually never be an issue unless you cheese it, and it would just work great

[madmole]

madmole:

 

How is the state of the encounter system you mentioned ? Is it in the works or is bug squeezing currently more important ?

 

 

Link to the post of madmole

 

 

I hope for something like Left 4 Dead did with their AI Director:

 

Its wandering hordes on steroids and properly game staged. Might be a quest giver, wandering trader, group of bandits, a horde, herd of bears I mean deer, etc. The engine will see you are bored and make things interesting.

 

 

Its still just a concept, I'm working on books and legendary item design right now and hopefully we can go into production in a week or two on those things. Its probably a ways out yet its not even on the roadmap yet I don't think.

[madmole]

You literally need the lucky looter to find schematics to make the steel tools and even find the steel tools. You need schematics to craft most things as you can no longer learn them from perks.

You probably can find those items without the perk but my guess from playing the game is the chances of finding rare loot without lucky looter is astronomically small . As of A18 it's the most forced perk in the game. It makes A16 looting look good.

 

Edit:By forced perk I mean the fact I have to find both schematics and the tool parts to craft steel tools,weapons ,completely skip farming because I find canned food , skip armor crafting and clothes because I can now find everything from looting with maxed lucky looter. Without lucky looter I think it's impossible to find those items at all.

And to make things worse it breaks the game completely by giving day one augers , machine guns and maxed out junk turrets.

 

Nonsense you don't need it at all. Its completely possible to find everything in the game. I rarely buy it. All it does is pretend you are a few levels higher than you are so you might get an orange instead of a brown, but wait a few days and you'll be getting oranges anyway. You'll get the same stuff eventually so its a waste of points aside from reducing the radius of treasure if your in it for a long game. If you want end game by day 75 instead of 100 then go for it I guess, to each his own.

 

You need to not spread misinformation it just makes you look stupid and makes us have to put out these fake fires. You should ask, or say "Im not sure but I heard it ____", rather than creating all this bogus information.

[madmole]

What Female Survivor Cover Art?

 

One of the artists shared a link but now I can't find it. Maybe its not live yet but I thought it was.

[Star69]

After playing experimental for many hours now I’m seeing 2 bugs on dedicated servers that are random and I cannot replicate so can’t put in official bug report.

 

1) zombies are standing after they die again. A guess would be 20%. Had a biker die in a doorway, standing and we couldn’t get through the doorway until the corpse disappeared.

 

2) turrets falling through the ground. I placed one on a cobblestone block to guard my mine entrance while mining. No zombies came but it was gone when I went to grab it to return to base. Second time, we were doing tier 5 quest in Shamway factory. We were on the roof & I placed it to deal with birds & big group of zombies. While it was shooting, we saw it disappear through a solid block right in front of our eyes though we could still hear it. I found it on the floor below the roof. So it seems they can drop through solid blocks, no idea how to replicate.

 

Otherwise, game plays wonderfully. Glad to hear the bug where you can’t place a block randomly was discovered...who’d a thought an invisible juniper tree?

[madmole]

Consider me stoked too

 

Can we get a tip jar for Rekt? That's all he says when I leave him, maybe if I tip him he'll shut up about it and tell me to just get the F out of here, which is fine.

 

That would be funny just to see what people leave behind. Time to bring back turds.

[Gareee]

You literally need the lucky looter to find schematics to make the steel tools and even find the steel tools. You need schematics to craft most things as you can no longer learn them from perks.

 

Actually, in both my recent playthroughs the steel tool schematics have shown up in the traders stash. (Thats how I got it last game, and IF I hadn't gotten lucky being able to buy a cheap minibike, I've have bought it in my new play through I started with the latest patch.

[Quantum Blue]

Quantum can you add to the faq that we're planning a localization update to the four supported languages this winter, and after that will will look at the challenges to Chinese, Portugese, Japanese and Russian?

 

Done. (In the Coming to 7D2D section.)

 

You could have also pointed HollowPrime to the FAQ for Dev Diary Madmole favored response recommendations as well. (It's in the first post.)

 

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?129219-Alpha-18-General-play-answers-ideas-and-or-concepts

[Gareee]

We're planning a random encounter system to keep things interesting and with more optimizations we can get more zombies alive.

 

@Madmole:

 

If I had a Christmas list here, it would be for the first pass of the random encounter system, and improved cities with elevation changes and reincorporating the old hub city idea.

 

And of course more books...

 

Course I haven't been good this year, and I'l probably get coal, but I'm hoping it comes with some nitrate.

[meganoth]

Oh but I don't agree at all. It was a very important decision. That's why I very rarely broke my decision and scrapped ore, thereby losing material in the process. If it were not important than I would have had no reason not to scrap ore. You completely missed my point. It was an easy decision for me to make because it was important not to waste a valuable resource.

 

Exactly. And a decision that is easy is never a hard one. Do I take the 1000 gold or the apple? Well, the decision is easy. Do I take this stack of 200 iron ore to my forge and make forged iron out of it or do lose one fourth of it to make scrap iron that I have lots and lots from looting already? Well, the decision is easy as well.

 

Now that non-decision is gone. You will still put the iron you mine into your forge because you need lots of forged iron. And lots of darts for your dart traps.

 

The second question I want to ask: How often have you smelted scrap iron out of your forge because you needed scrap iron for crafting? That probably small percentage of your whole iron throughput is the amount of smelting you could possibly safe by this change now. In my case at least that amount is rather insignificant and I loose a lot more potential smelting time by having the forge run out of wood or material to smelt.

[JaxTeller718]

Exactly. And a decision that is easy is never a hard one. Do I take the 1000 gold or the apple? Well, the decision is easy.

 

Not really. What if you have 5,000 gold but the traders are out of food, you just got food poisoned and a zombie is after you. Id say the apple is way more valuable.

[MechanicalLens]

I looked everywhere and, because I'm often as blind as a bat, I couldn't find the official bug tracker, so I thought I'd just might as well post this here.

 

Yeah... player planted trees currently have issues. Lol

 

https://youtu.be/Znkmb-CQL2Y

[madmole]

From what I understand there's no "city marker" somewhere in your data. That being said, I suppose there is a POI marker. What you could probably do is create a new "heatmap" metric that only goes up when there is a POI close by. This heat would obviously spawn zombies in its vicinity, but the toughness of those zombies would be decided by how much the heatmap indicator is : in other terms, how many buildings are close enough to raise the marker. Basically, more zombies around POIs, and cities will automatically be a bit more swarmed overall. No need to actually spawn 20 of them to give us a challenge, if they get harder the more buildings are around.

 

I understand that you have to actually account for MP, because this could create deadends in your maxAlive pool. I guess I don't have a perfect solution, but you have some options :

- have a limited number of zombies a player can spawn at once, the first to spawn is the first to die of old age when the max is hit

- reduce sleepers in POIs if there is a lot of spawning around it

- make it an option, because for SP the maxAlive would actually never be an issue unless you cheese it, and it would just work great

 

People say they want more zombies, but the game isn't what it was back in the day when we had hub cities. Zombies were stupid and you could kill a couple and POIs were so short to loot it took 30 seconds to get everything and get out. Worst case scenario was maybe one might here you and beat on the wall out side. Rarely would they come in after you, or find you in a POI, and they were so basic getting out was a no brainer.

 

Now a quest and reward is at stake, and half a dozen zombies wandering in (or way more with the good AI we have now) would be a death sentence. In my opinion, even if we could add lots of zombies to cities, it would make the game worse. There is no pacing with a city full of zombies. You have to waste all your ammo and time clearing a block area so that you can even attempt to start on the POI, and often you would not have the ammo, meds and time left in the day to do it. I know, because priort to A18's release the thicker zed outdoor population was annoying as hell, and thats way thinner than what it was in the past.

 

So what sounds cool, isn't always fun. It ruins your plans and becomes a nuisance instead of something cool. I think the random encounter system will be better than just a hundred guys mulling around outside. Once in a while you might get sandwiched in, but not every time, and it won't always be kill 50 guys so I can get started on this POI.

 

I'm not saying it couldn't be cool, but it would be more work than simply spawning them and letting the AI take place.