Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[jorbascrumps]

We should be able to pick them up from the ground first, before we get a mod like that.

 

I disagree with what you think we should be able to do. As stated by another, the performance impact of that many physics objects dropping in the world would be too high. Not to mention how tedious it would be to pickup dozens of dispelled casings after an encounter. I don't necessarily agree with the mod suggestion but at least it simulates the same result with little performance implications and code changes.

[Lemmers]

You don't really need brass to be a physics object. After the ejected brass animation, just slap an inexpensive empty casing decal on the ground where the player was standing when the shot was fired. Multiple brass fired on the same tile stacks onto the same decal, and maybe have three different decals for low/medium/high brass density on that tile. Then you harvest them with E, or require an "Empty Brass Sack" in your inventory to hold them or whatever.

 

Not saying it's something I'm advocating for necessarily, but it's completely possible without the huge impact of thousands of small physics objects.

[RestInPieces]

but you are forced to to some things in order to survive, instead of doing what you like. so it's not 100% sandbox. Im not arguing that it should be 100%, i just think it should be more.

 

There are already so many options to accommodate what you describe, that there is no excuse for complaining about such a thing. What does "more sandbox" even mean to you? Try to be more specific about it.

 

Besides creative mode that doesn't ...force you to actually play the game, you can set loot to 200%, increase player block damage etc, and through XMLs you can disable pretty much all needs. You don't even need XML edits to never have to care about food or materials... So what are you trying to say?

[Aerial]

No, it doesn't grow exponentially. At least not in A17 until you have invested a lot of points. In A17 you need 4 items to create a seed. To get 4 items from each plant you have to be level 4 in "Living of the Land". But you have to be at level 7 at Fortitude. In total you have to invest 14 points and get to this point that you have exponential growth. In addition you need a hoe to be able to create a garden. You have to find one or to create it yourself you have to be at least level 20, with "Hammer and Forge" at level 2 and with intellect at level 5.

 

Or you can find one corn field and get 58 corn that you turn into 14 seeds. Then all you need is to find a hoe (not usually difficult) and 1 point in fortitude for the first level of Living off the Land and you get 14 corn every other day. Two points, I think, gets you 28 per harvest? (Might be three, I can't remember for sure.) But still, not a huge investment. I've been finding 4 or 5 fields, minimum, in any given city, so nerfing those in some manner would also help.

 

To truly get to exponential growth does take investment but it takes far less than that for a single player or small group to be swimming in grown food.

[AtomicUs5000]

Especially when I don't know what species of bird it is that nests in such vast numbers in such a stupid place. It does explain why the wolves are so well fed and I can't find an egg to (literally) save my life though :-)

 

Just a hunch, but I'm going to say either chicken or vulture. Maybe there is a third bird in the game. We'll never know if we keep eating their eggs.

[Trankitas]

That is done by raycasts against block/item colliders. You make them bigger and they start to overlap and then you can't tell which one will get hit, which would be annoying trying to interact with what you are looking at and it hits something else.

 

You can't prioritize the center when hitting with tools/weapons? Or separate them entirely? Hits with tools and weapons the old raycast way, but interactions the way i said?

[Trankitas]

It was dropped, deliberately, to get the zombies overconfident and henceforth, make mistakes.

 

GENIUS is rarely understood in its own time...

 

 

 

MM, can I get early access to A18 now?

 

LOL, I remember that... I laugh very... very much. Poor Madmole, see, someone rebinded the drop key right before he started playing

[meganoth]

Specialising in fortitude is not a favourite early game strategy. Unless you find a large farm POI it will take game weeks for that farm to kick into gear if you are actually using part of it to feed yourself.

If you don't use your farm for food then the whole argument is a straw man because that farm is only a hobby.

 

Should a farm eventually guarantee that you won't starve?

I would think so. Humans have been using this exploit for thousands of years and nowadays many consider it a legit strategy.

What you surely can do is make the exponential curve so flat that the linear growth from finding seeds through scavenging or trader makes the exponential growth of seed production irrelevant. If not, you are surely right that the curve of growth can be drawn out very far, but then farming also stays irrelevant for a very long time.

 

No, it doesn't grow exponentially. At least not in A17 until you have invested a lot of points. In A17 you need 4 items to create a seed. To get 4 items from each plant you have to be level 4 in "Living of the Land". But you have to be at level 7 at Fortitude. In total you have to invest 14 points and get to this point that you have exponential growth.

 

What you described is the point at which the growth is doubling on each step (i.e. 100% more on each step or 2^x), but even if you only grow by 50% each step (1.5^x) it is still exponential growth.

[KingSlayerGM]

There are already so many options to accommodate what you describe, that there is no excuse for complaining about such a thing. What does "more sandbox" even mean to you? Try to be more specific about it.

 

Besides creative mode that doesn't ...force you to actually play the game, you can set loot to 200%, increase player block damage etc, and through XMLs you can disable pretty much all needs. You don't even need XML edits to never have to care about food or materials... So what are you trying to say?

 

You are probably the 1000th person who, to a thought of player, just replies that the game offers options. Of course we all know that.

[Menace312]

Its the classic usecase for mods to make thing easier, more overpowered, convenient and have bigger boobs.

 

The developers of the vanilla version need to have other priorities than the mod authors.

 

You are correct sir.

But then, I didnt contradict any of that, in my post... I just chimed in

[RestInPieces]

You are probably the 1000th person who, to a thought of player, just replies that the game offers options. Of course we all know that.

 

If you just say that you want to be less forced to do stuff, can you blame me for telling you that there are options that should already take care of that need? For example - when it comes to food, if you set your loot to 200% you can't possibly, no matter if you know the game or not (as long as you know the controls), starve, even if you never use farming, so what is the problem with them trying to balance it, for those who don't want to have infinite food at 25% loot, so that they can enjoy a rudimentary survival experience?

[n2n1]

Perhaps another option would be to raise/lower surrounding ground to the level of the nest.

This is easily doable but not worth it and will unmask the nest..

 

Nests on the ground are a bad idea for a bird, but good for a player. The point of this proposal is that it does not require any changes other than the geometry of the nest.

 

/// I'd be happy with either option, my inner pedant has far bigger things to worry about than the precise geometry of a bird nest. ////

Oh, don't even start with that, or I'll get carried away

I just thought - if for us do not give a normal gameplay, RWG, AI .... - then let at least the nest looks good on the slopes!!!

[madmole]

We should first have bullet casings shown to be ejected from the gun and have visual casings fall on the ground.

 

This isn't just a single player game. Everyone on the server ejecting brass that could be picked up that has physics would add to performance problems.

[madmole]

I appreciate your optimism but there ain't no maybe about it without some form of NASA supercomputer or a secondary (primitive) physics engine running on a separate thread or five.

 

You're looking at around 30 physics objects per clip per person in a multiplayer environment, worse if they have SMG's, and that's not counting turrets or bandits pumping out rounds.

 

100 rounds without mods on the M60.

[madmole]

I don't know, some low-poly casings could do the trick. I mean we already have items that kind of have physics, they don't lag out the game. Maybe @faatal could give some insight if this is a realistic idea.

 

When people used to spam craft stone axes put them in crates, then bust the crates it was killing the server. This would be that all over again but worse. The best solution would be to add ejecting brass as a client side visual but don't bother with collision or interaction, and then some kind of perk or mod that adds a % of them back to your gun. I'm on the side of just go find more brass. Much more brass is coming to A18, in various wasteland treasures books.

[beerfly]

100 rounds without mods on the M60.

 

Badass. I'm not rushing you, but a video with it will be nice.

[madmole]

Well, some players have been known to hurl their only bow over their base wall, during horde night, and get it on video. Does that count?

 

I needed to handicap myself, the zombies are too easy with guns.

[madmole]

If building supplies were just used for building your base, then the huge stack sizes would be fine. However, they take away from the game for adventuring or looting.

More specifically, it takes away from the emergent gameplay of using the environment to your advantage. Let's say there's a house where one room has 20 zombies, and there's a large wood pile outside. A cool solution would be to use the wood outside to make spikes and use those to ensnare the zombies.

 

With insane stack sizes however, I already have 1000 wood on me at all times. Maybe I'd use spikes, but it would be because I considered the time spent whaling on a tree to recoup the loss to be more valuable than the potential ammo/hitpoints I'd lose going solo. Maybe I'd also harvest the wood pile, but it would because they yield more material per hit than a tree, saving me time in the long run, not because of any strategic decision based on my unique circumstances.

 

I would much rather the moment-to-moment decisions be "how can I make use of the limited resources available" rather than "Is this going to be worth the grind I'll have to do to make it up?".

 

I do have a few rough ideas on how to fix it, but player feedback is probably more important

I don't think very many people consider building tactics to clear out a POI.

[Perlin_Worm]

I'm kind of sad that TFP seem to focus only on the survival aspect of this game. Let's nerf this, let's make this harder to get, let's make it more punishing to die, or else the players will get bored. Let's reduce stack sizes, otherwise it's too easy..

 

What happened to the sandbox part of this game? That was in the Kickstarter too, but nobody seems to mention it anymore..

 

Survival for me is boring. What I like is building awesome structures and contraptions, crafting, killing bosses, doing quests, pvp.. worrying about food is not for me sadly

 

I agree with the premise that too much micromanagement added to the game interferes with ambitious structure builds as BUILDING is the highlight of an open world voxel game.. Which is why ideas like spoilage need to be cast into the nine planes of hell.

[Hek Harris]

Madmole, for new players, there is a modification that could be interesting. After playing with a dozen players who didn't know the game, I had to teach them each time that to know the function of an object, it was necessary to click on the object then on "recipes". Each time, they were surprised and could thus discover craft possibilities they didn't know or even imagine.

 

Would it be possible that each time you click on an item in the inventory, the possible recipes appear automatically ?

[madmole]

It was dropped, deliberately, to get the zombies overconfident and henceforth, make mistakes.

 

GENIUS is rarely understood in its own time...

 

 

 

MM, can I get early access to A18 now?

 

Flattery gets you everywhere

[RestInPieces]

I agree with the premise that too much micromanagement added to the game interferes with ambitious structure builds as BUILDING is the highlight of an open world voxel game.. Which is why ideas like spoilage need to be cast into the nine planes of hell.

 

Really? Can you explain how exactly spoilage would "interfere" with building? Zombies "interfere" with building too, does that mean that zombies are problematic? I think that what you really mean is that "I want to be able to ignore any part of the game I don't like" - which I (and others I bet) would respect more, if you were straightforward about it.

 

The game is a combination (aka elements in synergy) of various genres and already offers menu options that allow you to have no "interference" to what you like - if you like to focus on building only, use creative mode, if you like to focus on building with zombies, use the lowest block damage, and while at that you can also use 200% loot so that the need to get materials does not ...interfere with your builds.

[madmole]

NO don't nerf feather, I love arrows. And do whatever you want, but arrows are not enough ever.

 

Sorry but we never nerfed how many nests there were or the feathers when we added the retrievable arrows, and there is a perk now that lets you retrieve even more. That said on day 1 I have 400 feathers and its ridiculous. People are talking about spoilage but this is a more serious issue having endless ammo. There are vultures added too, which farm feathers. I can cut nests in half and stop the bacon and egg endless food in one line of code.

[Trankitas]

Madmole, for new players, there is a modification that could be interesting. After playing with a dozen players who didn't know the game, I had to teach them each time that to know the function of an object, it was necessary to click on the object then on "recipes". Each time, they were surprised and could thus discover craft possibilities they didn't know or even imagine.

 

Would it be possible that each time you click on an item in the inventory, the possible recipes appear automatically ?

 

Cool idea (for new players), but for the people who knows how to play, it would be a little bothering. If you are looking at a recipe, and you want to heal or something, you'll have to search the previous recipe again.

[madmole]

Definitely. Bow and arrow is the go to weapon in every single of my groups playthroughs. Craftable on day 1, 100% reliable, unlimited ammunition, surprisingly accurate even at its lowest quality/tier, totally stealthy and basically fits every single situation, even indoors. I'm forcing myself to go melee early game because I feel like playing 100% bow & arrow is way too easy, at least melee forces you to have a little bit of finger sync and messing up your timing has an actual consequence.

 

Oh, and the makeshift bow is way too powerful. I mean, WAY too powerful. With 1 or 2 points in the perception tree (like Boom! Headshot) you can very quickly 1-shot basic zombies if you crouch, even on Warrior difficulty. It should do less damage, be less precise and have a way shorter range (with some technique you can snipe zombies from a very long distance since it has "arrow-drop" but no damage fall-off). Honestly it's so good that I don't even play with guns other than using them as a backup plan if ♥♥♥♥ gets mad crazy, just because gun usage comes with so many disadvantages (repair cost, ammunition cost/craft time, noise) while you don't really need the extra damage in a lot of situations.

 

That being said i'm TOTALLY convinced higher-end bows (compound, crossbow) should be a very viable playstyle so probably don't nerf those. The real issue is coming from the makeshift bow.

 

Also yeah, feathers. If feathers were (way) less abundant it would make you think twice about using your bow when you have other, more risky solutions available.

 

Since you're talking a lot about stack sizes these days, have you thought about having a max stack-size of like 20 arrows per slot but adding quivers to the game ? Quivers could work nicely with your new 3-tier system, along the lines of having stack-sizes of respectively 50, 100 and 200, and possibly improving reload time.

We have this new slick "open" item feature that unpacks a bundle of something. We could make a quiver that holds 100 arrows, but you unpack it and it would make 5 stacks of 20 arrows then. So you could carry a few of these and "open" them when you need to use the arrows. Not sure we're going there, just saying its possible.

 

Currently we use it to open a box of ammo and the new "art of mining" book has a perk that lets you craft bundles of ore, so you can carry 5 bundles (6k rocks in each one), so 30k of stone in one slot. I'm sure this feature will provide some use as we get into inventory management, like maybe be able to have a "case of purified water" as a rare loot from an air drop that you wouldn't want to unpack right away until you get back to your base. I can see some funny scenarios too where someone unpacks it and most of it spills on the ground because they didn't have enough room for it.