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Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!


madmole

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!  

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  1. 1. Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

    • A18 Stable is Out!
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@madmole:

with all the talk about death penalty, there is ONE thing you need to fix first before the deathpenalty can be harder/playing with lives:

 

hordenight. If you die in your defenses, because they breached within an hour, the only thing you can do is spawn randomly and run.

You cant get into your house bc zombies are there/would be a deathtrap, so no backpack.

So all you can do is run. Its not fun. Its frustrating.

 

Especially if you implement one of the great ideas of the community (toxic rain on hordenight) this becomes even more of an issue.

Once you die (or all of your party) the horde should end/pause.

Because otherwise its just a running/dying simulator.

 

I have to say I disagree with this.

 

I always build a "oh crap I died" outpost somewhere. Not too close to my base, but not too far away from it either. In this little outpost I keep a small supply of basic "re-stocking" materials, that I add to as my game progresses. At first, it might only be a few cans of food, bandages and a club/axe etc, but as I progress, it's stocked with an increasingly good supply or "rebuild materials".

 

Players should, I think, have to think about dying during the horde, and plan for that contingency accordingly.

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I have to say I disagree with this.

 

I always build a "oh crap I died" outpost somewhere. Not too close to my base, but not too far away from it either. In this little outpost I keep a small supply of basic "re-stocking" materials, that I add to as my game progresses. At first, it might only be a few cans of food, bandages and a club/axe etc, but as I progress, it's stocked with an increasingly good supply or "rebuild materials".

 

Players should, I think, have to think about dying during the horde, and plan for that contingency accordingly.

 

Same. Thinking ahead is good in many situations in this game. If SP, I like to make these little stashes of items that I might need in a bind throughout the world, coupled with a small beacon so I can spot them better in the dark. A lot of things that you might scrap, sell, or simply trash because you don't want to deal with them, are useful when you have nothing.

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Honestly, I feel players should only be able to craft up to tier 3 (of 6) items max, this way there is always a reason to go out looting at least till you got a full set of tier 6 everything, which when you cannot craft it, will take a while. It'll be even more important as didn't I hear that higher tier items will finally have higher base stats as well?

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@madmole:

with all the talk about death penalty, there is ONE thing you need to fix first before the deathpenalty can be harder/playing with lives:

 

hordenight. If you die in your defenses, because they breached within an hour, the only thing you can do is spawn randomly and run.

You cant get into your house bc zombies are there/would be a deathtrap, so no backpack.

So all you can do is run. Its not fun. Its frustrating.

 

Especially if you implement one of the great ideas of the community (toxic rain on hordenight) this becomes even more of an issue.

Once you die (or all of your party) the horde should end/pause.

Because otherwise its just a running/dying simulator.

 

I agree, but this is why the player has to plan escape routes, I always make sure my base has several exits, one easy one that zombies will swarm in from, then the rest are a small drop down. Zombies won't come up into those ones, but I can surely jump down from them to get away. I get what your saying though, if you were to make a house your base and your spawn point is inside and you die, your pretty much screwed as you'll just be spawn camped. They do have the spawn near bed option but thats a crapshoot as you never know where that'll drop you, I had it drop me right back into the middle of a horde before.

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I'm not really sure the sandstorms add much. It takes the player out of the game for no good reason. You can stand by a cliff wal l that spawns the shelter popout and go afk until its over. Its tolerable, but I generally dislike things that take the player out of the game.

 

Me too, and infection in A17 seemed exactly the same way. By (primarily) slowly weakening the player instead of just directly depleting their health, the best way to deal with infection seemed to be to stand still (even going AFK) and wait it out. Realistic or not, I didn't think this was fun gameplay, because it took the player out of the game in the same way you're describing the sandstorms in Conan.

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I have to say I disagree with this.

 

I always build a "oh crap I died" outpost somewhere. Not too close to my base, but not too far away from it either. In this little outpost I keep a small supply of basic "re-stocking" materials, that I add to as my game progresses. At first, it might only be a few cans of food, bandages and a club/axe etc, but as I progress, it's stocked with an increasingly good supply or "rebuild materials".

 

Players should, I think, have to think about dying during the horde, and plan for that contingency accordingly.

 

I do too, but isn't it "gaming the system"?

 

Madmole should remove the ability. :)

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Honestly, I feel players should only be able to craft up to tier 3 (of 6) items max, this way there is always a reason to go out looting at least till you got a full set of tier 6 everything, which when you cannot craft it, will take a while. It'll be even more important as didn't I hear that higher tier items will finally have higher base stats as well?

 

I agree 100%. Pre war tools, armor, and weapons should be bis by a larger margin

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I build two bases.

 

One base, if you want to call it that, is just a 6x6 platform of wood frames where I do my crafting and such. Amazingly, zombies never seem to bother it. Once I get a generator, I put up some remote turrets to zap screamers and the random roamers.

 

The second base is the horde night base and that is its only purpose. If I survive, cool, if I don't, oh well, no biggie. I lose a little time cleaning up, rebuilding, and trying to make it tougher for the next horde night.

 

The system works well mostly because I don't have to worry about the horde getting in and wrecking all my storage containers.

 

- P

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Yeah!!! that's just what i came up with!

 

Life should be bought for experience points!

 

Or

 

The death deducts some accumulated points (XP point), and if they are not - then it is recorded in debt!

 

Experience points can also be taken away if the player fails the traider quest )))

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We don't even have the tech and reingineering every zombie asset again (already on version 3.5, would be a huge amount of work for something average consumers could care less about. We could possibly add some more zombies that maybe have the tech, but we're not redoing all the standard ones another time.

 

Regarding average consumers, remember that even the 10 hour player is going to see lots and lots of zombies, whereas they may not even see bandits at all. But, fair enough. You have to worry about rework, the art pipeline that's already in place, and other production concerns.

 

I really do hope you'll at least try it with some zombies, though, because I think you'll find it's a more efficient approach than what you've done so far. If it works out, then maybe your next game can take full advantage of this from the start. :)

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Would it be possible to reconfigure how recipes work so that one recipe could have several options? For instance, right now bottled water can be made in a couple of way (murky water or glass jar + snowball) and these have to be separate recipes in the list. It's a small thing, but having only one recipe entry in the list regardless of how many ways there are to create it would be cleaner and less confusing from a UI perspective, and would benefit modding as well.

 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if there’s only one recipe shown in the UI, how does the player know what the alternative ingredients are? The last thing we want is to further hide how to do things.

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Regarding average consumers, remember that even the 10 hour player is going to see lots and lots of zombies, whereas they may not even see bandits at all. But, fair enough. You have to worry about rework, the art pipeline that's already in place, and other production concerns.

 

I really do hope you'll at least try it with some zombies, though, because I think you'll find it's a more efficient approach than what you've done so far. If it works out, then maybe your next game can take full advantage of this from the start. :)

 

I'd like some color variations at least for clothes/skin color. Pretty jarring when you are in a pop'n'pills store open the bathroom door to find 4 of the exact same identical clone of each other zombie in there as the sleepers. Happened in 2 pop'n' pill stores in a row. Both times it was the skaterpunk zombie.

 

I also feel the SI calcs need to be simplified, when zombies hit anything it causes massive lag especally if your inside the structure they are hitting, because its checking the SI seemingly on every hit they do, Insted, the SI routine should only fire if its the last block holding up something. It won't look as pretty, but it'll free up a ton of performance. As long as there is at least 1 block supporting it, it won't topple over. Again doesn't look the best, but performance wise? yeah.

 

Then again the game being voxels is probally a part of the issue, thats a ton of calculations it has to do in real time, even moreso if its with 3d objects and not just 2d ones. Might be part of the reason why no other studio has tried to copy 7dtd's voxel nature for a simmlar game.

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Regarding average consumers, remember that even the 10 hour player is going to see lots and lots of zombies, whereas they may not even see bandits at all. But, fair enough. You have to worry about rework, the art pipeline that's already in place, and other production concerns.

 

I really do hope you'll at least try it with some zombies, though, because I think you'll find it's a more efficient approach than what you've done so far. If it works out, then maybe your next game can take full advantage of this from the start. :)

 

Honestly I don't even want bandits, when they hit, it'll prob be something i'll mod out after giving them a chance, once you add shooting enemies to a zombie game like this wheter it be other players in pvp or npcs in pve, it kinda ruins a lot of the aspect of zombies as a threat. I mean i'd never worry about zombies, when I got run toting bandits that can shoot me at anytime. I will give bandits a chance, but I can see me modding them out, depending how prevalient the gun using ones are and how much damage per shot they do, Average zombie hits for 10-20 dmg between normal and fatties on nomad, so bandits using guns should use that as a baseline. Hopefully it'll be like fallout 4 npcs, where they usually call out before they attack so you know its about to come to give you a chance to get into cover.

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We added unity's incremental garbage collector, so we'll see. Hopefully. We're also editing the low settings to be more stripped out so hopefully some people get some speed back or its playable for people who couldn't.

 

Would that include, for instance, disabling screen space reflections when "reflection quality" is set to "off"? I was surprised recently to learn the only way to actually turn off reflections is through the new console command (gfx pp ssr 0), and it resulted in a major performance boost.

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I think some balance would help. I don't think its too easy to get a farm, unless you luck into a POI with 80 corn.

 

Nitrate is a fertilizer. We could make seed crafting require 200 nitrate, then its seeping into your gunpowder making ability significantly. Do you want to eat easily, or have ammo to kill these brain eaters that keep moaning outside? Choices are always good.

 

I think this is a good idea. It's a better way to accomplish the interesting decision making with the old fertilizer system without the waiting game that came with crafting it.

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Same. Thinking ahead is good in many situations in this game. If SP, I like to make these little stashes of items that I might need in a bind throughout the world, coupled with a small beacon so I can spot them better in the dark. A lot of things that you might scrap, sell, or simply trash because you don't want to deal with them, are useful when you have nothing.

 

100% agree.. I call these locations my "Bug Out" bases.. I toss a spare lv 1 or 2 Pistol and some ammo.. some bandages and some bottles of water and canned food from an airdrop for those "Just incase" I need to bug out moments. The 50 some odd Dukes i'd get for selling them are not worth the security of having even the basics after a collapse.

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Regarding farming, I believe it can’t be balanced by just changing some numbers. The math doesn’t work out.

 

Under the current system, crops grow exponentially. That’s in opposition to a progressive learning curve, where things start easier and get harder over time. No matter how you adjust that exponential curve, it’s going to be too hard for players at the low end of the curve or too easy for players at the high end of the curve. You'll never find values for vegetables per stew or yield per plant that accommodate both ends of the spectrum.

 

Now, you can dismiss the problem by concluding that you shouldn't bother fixing it because food isn't a big part of the game, or that experienced players are just too good to be worth balancing the game for them. But I would point out that other parts of the game do have a balanced progression curve, namely the game stage and heat systems. These systems already accommodate all kinds of players well, from the 10 hour player to the 1,000 hour player, by scaling the zombie threat based on how successful you’ve been.

 

Farming could draw inspiration from these systems to have its own progression curve. What's critical is that there be some mechanism whereby the more plants on your farm, the more challenge you're given. This could take many forms. I would favor a system directly analogous to the above, where rabbits and deer attack your crops, and their number and frequency is related to the number of plants making 'heat' in a chunk.

 

Most of the pieces for that, both art and code, you already have. And that's good in part because it means there's gameplay there you already have, too. I.e. there would already be different ways to counter animals attacking your crops. Whereas if crops randomly die for no reason, what does the player do about these random failures? Buy a perk? Engage in some new farm-specific gameplay you have to code? Nah. Just lean on the tower defense, traps, gunplay etc. you already have.

 

But again, I'm not attached to animals eating crops in particular. I'm just looking for some way that a bigger farm is harder than a smaller farm.

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@Madmole

 

Thinking of interesting decisions, what about recieving a large amount of acid, say 4 or 5, for scrapping a battery, along with the current lead of course.

 

Batteries are very valuable but it's possible to be in a situation where the player is lucky enough to find a battery or two and no acid.

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I have to say I disagree with this.

 

I always build a "oh crap I died" outpost somewhere. Not too close to my base, but not too far away from it either. In this little outpost I keep a small supply of basic "re-stocking" materials, that I add to as my game progresses. At first, it might only be a few cans of food, bandages and a club/axe etc, but as I progress, it's stocked with an increasingly good supply or "rebuild materials".

 

Players should, I think, have to think about dying during the horde, and plan for that contingency accordingly.

 

I've said it before, but I find that planning for what I should do after my own character dies, at least in a first person survival game, creates a disconnect. It takes me out of the game.

 

This game is... weird about what happens after the player character dies on horde night. You don't see other games where, under default rules, you respawn empty handed while a long battle continues. Other games handle death in the usual ways, which for illustration I categorize as Half-Life style (rewind time to when the PC was still alive), Team Fortress style (respawn immediately with stuff), or Counter-Strike style (spectate until the 'round' has finished).

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I love the idea of food scarceness and being forced to eat bad food at certain times of the game, forcing you to build up a collection of meds to counteract the bad food, find different herbs, have better hygiene and fridges.

 

This is also why I think an added 'morale' meter would be great to add to the game (I know, maybe version 2 of the game). Bad food or always the same food can lower it (to a certain level). Too much of any one task can lower it (digging all day doesn't sound fun). So it's not just trying to survive, it's trying to survive in as human way as possible.

 

Maybe some kind of "food variation morale bonus", that is calculated by the game, and indicated in the UI before eating the food, like

"Stew: +10 morale", "Bacon & Eggs: +0 morale", "Water: +0morale", "Beer: +20 morale"

 

If the player repeats eating the same food, the morale bonus drops to zero for that type. A timer will reset the morale bonus over time.

 

The morale could be acting similar to the old wellness system (boosting a stat), but degrading slowly over time.

 

Its increase by:

-food

-using luxory items at the players home (you could get a boost once a day by sitting on a sofa + drinking a beer)

-killing 10 zombies within 1 minute

-finding a high-value loot crate

-finishing a trader-quest

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I've said it before, but I find that planning for what I should do after my own character dies, at least in a first person survival game, creates a disconnect. It takes me out of the game.

 

This game is... weird about what happens after the player character dies on horde night. You don't see other games where, under default rules, you respawn empty handed while a long battle continues. Other games handle death in the usual ways, which for illustration I categorize as Half-Life style (rewind time to when the PC was still alive), Team Fortress style (respawn immediately with stuff), or Counter-Strike style (spectate until the 'round' has finished).

 

Add a drop nothing on pve death and make it default? would solve the problem, currently you need to do it via mods unless running a server, as its currently not in the options. Could even set it to only apply during horde night hours 22:00 till 4:00 am, if having it always active is too much.

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Regarding farming, I believe it can’t be balanced by just changing some numbers. The math doesn’t work out.

 

Under the current system, crops grow exponentially. That’s in opposition to a progressive learning curve, where things start easier and get harder over time. No matter how you adjust that exponential curve, it’s going to be too hard for players at the low end of the curve or too easy for players at the high end of the curve. You'll never find values for vegetables per stew or yield per plant that accommodate both ends of the spectrum.

 

Now, you can dismiss the problem by concluding that you shouldn't bother fixing it because food isn't a big part of the game, or that experienced players are just too good to be worth balancing the game for them. But I would point out that other parts of the game do have a balanced progression curve, namely the game stage and heat systems. These systems already accommodate all kinds of players well, from the 10 hour player to the 1,000 hour player, by scaling the zombie threat based on how successful you’ve been.

 

Farming could draw inspiration from these systems to have its own progression curve. What's critical is that there be some mechanism whereby the more plants on your farm, the more challenge you're given. This could take many forms. I would favor a system directly analogous to the above, where rabbits and deer attack your crops, and their number and frequency is related to the number of plants making 'heat' in a chunk.

 

Most of the pieces for that, both art and code, you already have. And that's good in part because it means there's gameplay there you already have, too. I.e. there would already be different ways to counter animals attacking your crops. Whereas if crops randomly die for no reason, what does the player do about these random failures? Buy a perk? Engage in some new farm-specific gameplay you have to code? Nah. Just lean on the tower defense, traps, gunplay etc. you already have.

 

But again, I'm not attached to animals eating crops in particular. I'm just looking for some way that a bigger farm is harder than a smaller farm.

 

There is probably no way to nerf the output of farming for an experienced player. Any location-based threats can be avoided by smart base design. Forcing a personal time investment (like weeding) would be deemed as no fun by many. Higher stage players will always be able to create more output than can be consumed for that single player.

 

Hence some other limit, such as a variation bonus (bonus for making and consuming different dishes regularly) or the mentioned spoilage (requiring to cook up dishes on demand).

Or some type of "oft spoilage", such that a food gives more bonuses for 15 minutes after being cooked. (the player can not spam-cook, and live from the stockpile to receive the best bonuses)

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I've said it before, but I find that planning for what I should do after my own character dies, at least in a first person survival game, creates a disconnect. It takes me out of the game.

 

This game is... weird about what happens after the player character dies on horde night. You don't see other games where, under default rules, you respawn empty handed while a long battle continues. Other games handle death in the usual ways, which for illustration I categorize as Half-Life style (rewind time to when the PC was still alive), Team Fortress style (respawn immediately with stuff), or Counter-Strike style (spectate until the 'round' has finished).

 

While, in IronMad mode, such a "oh crap" outpost would be redundant.

 

Given that, the way I play anyway, I do re-spawn (I try not to die, but I'm never going to play Ironman mode... hehe), an emergency outpost of some description makes sense to me.

 

Since the game (at least currently), has the player respawning after death, then I think the player ought to have to think about what they want to do after such a death. If you're playing Dead-Is-Dead, then that's easy, exit the game, delete the file, start again, but if you're not playing that way, then a go to shelter of some kind only makes sense to have I reckon.

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