Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

@Joel -- nice video! One of the things that impressed me was the "linking" to needed perk in order to craft "x". Many times I have had people ask what do I need to unlock "x"? Or they would tell me "it took forever to find what opened "x"". I see this as a definite welcome QOL enhancement.

 

I have to say after viewing intellect / perception guy, STR guys' tree looked underwhelming. I like what you did with the intellect specialization in that they can craft turrets/stun baton, woulda been kewl to see that for the other base specializations as well - like Str can make a specialized club etc.

 

Thanks for the a18 nibble

 

Strength guy is a badass, and way easier than any other build so far. Agility starts a bit weak but gets pretty good once he gets ranked up a bit. You don't know what charging bull is yet. Its all new and will be revealed later when its fully working. There is an empty spot too, so it can always improve if we come up with another strength related perk idea.

[madmole]

Can raw meat raise heat? There ya go, smell system.

 

I'm not sure but we could make it do that. Then at least it wouldn't be a pain in the ass and a dead giveaway of your location when you have some on you.

[madmole]

Roads look awesome!

 

98% of them are. There are a few tiny things that aren't horrible but could be better. Overall it smashed any version of RWG though.

[madmole]

MM

 

Thanks for the video.

How about this for the Grease Monkey perk levels though:

 

Bicycle Boffin

Pokketbike Ninja

Motorcycle Mechanic

Grease Monkey

Whirlybird Wonk

 

I'll stick to my names thanks

[madmole]

Thanks for the Video Madmole

 

That was time you could have been relaxing, working on other things or even "Answering the Night Mother's Whispers" (We know)

The time and effort The Pimps have put into A18 is obvious and amazing and I can't wait to dive into 18 and beyond.

The new Perk system seems to make a lot of sense and the fine tuning to the RWG looks like just what the game needed.

Can't wait to see what you start to bring to the table when you start focusing on 19

 

Yes we feel like 18 will rectify a lot of the hard work that went into 17 unappreciated because it was tainted with some poor balance and performance. Better late than never. It really is a great game again, and we're playing every day to balance and fine tune it. This will be the best balanced build.

 

Hail Sithis.

[madmole]

Very cool.

 

Love the no level gates. :woot:

 

I'd swap Heavy Armour for Master Chef between Strength and Fortitude. Heavy armour is, well, heavy...and cooking healthy foods seem like a Fortitude thing. All IMO of course.

 

Thanks for the preview...can't wait to see more!!

 

That's actually a pretty good suggestion, but the reason we put it there was to give the strength guy access to healing. THe perception guy rarely gets hit because he snipes and uses explosives, he doesn't need a lot of healing. The fortitude guy has access to the regeneration perks for health, agility guy again doesn't need much because he's working from the shadows, and the intellect guy has all the doctor perks so he has healing covered as well.

[madmole]

• This 'spider sense' when a trap or enemy is nearby sounds great!
  
• The background music is going to take some getting used to. Maybe it just felt weird because you weren't doing anything; there wasn't anything for it to complement.
  
• Knocking the zombie's teeth out so it can't infect you will open up a whole new combat style.
  
• The weirdest change to perks is putting Master Chef under strength.
  
• There's a typo under Electrocutioner level 1. The long description says "Your smart," instead of "You're smart."
  
• One thing I like about the improved roads is that intersections have curved corners now.
  

 

Yes I was, I was exploring. There will be combat oriented music in the next alpha. Maybe we can play some happier tracks when you are near your land claim/bedroll and no enemies are close.

 

Thanks, I have a huge list of typos and grammar bugs to fix yet, I'm sure its in the task already.

[khzmusik]

There's a typo under Electrocutioner level 1. The long description says "Your smart," instead of "You're smart."

 

I thought that was intentionally sarcastic...

[PO_Man_3849]

That sounds like an intentional joke to me.

 

[DUST2DEATH]

Yeah its sad these devs can't make voxels look as nice as the leader of the voxel industry.

 

 

uh....

 

 

 

So Raytracing when?

[khzmusik]

Yes recipe scaling is in and working, but your suggestion is way OP. I'll have to put some thought into it and see what else we can do.

 

True, a decrease from 10 to 1 would be too much, I was exaggerating to get the idea across. It would probably be a percentage, scaled similarly to decreases in stamina usage with other perks.

 

Another option is to decrease the ingredients needed by (say) half - but only for the same recipes you unlock with that perk level. For example, if level 2 unlocks blueberry pie and level 3 unlocks meat stew, then when you reached level 2 it would take half the ingredients for blueberry pie, but meat stew would still need the full amount of ingredients.

 

Then again, I don't know what you have planned for recipe scaling. Perhaps that's in the next video?

 

...On the subject of further videos - the RWG is looking good, the roads are 1000% better than in any alpha I've played. Could you maybe do an entire video on RWG, once that epic is done?

[AtomicUs5000]

True, a decrease from 10 to 1 would be too much, I was exaggerating to get the idea across. It would probably be a percentage, scaled similarly to decreases in stamina usage with other perks.

 

Another option is to decrease the ingredients needed by (say) half - but only for the same recipes you unlock with that perk level. For example, if level 2 unlocks blueberry pie and level 3 unlocks meat stew, then when you reached level 2 it would take half the ingredients for blueberry pie, but meat stew would still need the full amount of ingredients.

 

Then again, I don't know what you have planned for recipe scaling. Perhaps that's in the next video?

 

...On the subject of further videos - the RWG is looking good, the roads are 1000% better than in any alpha I've played. Could you maybe do an entire video on RWG, once that epic is done?

 

That would end up with all of the original requiring double the ingredients to make multiple of two so that it can be divided in half. It would be the meat X 5 debacle all over again.

[Blake_]

Yes we feel like 18 will rectify a lot of the hard work that went into 17 unappreciated because it was tainted with some poor balance and performance. Better late than never. It really is a great game again, and we're playing every day to balance and fine tune it. This will be the best balanced build.

 

Hail Sithis.

 

My humble opinion opinion about the video:

 

Pros:

 

I loved what I saw in that video. That was a beautiful everything. Turret bug was also funny.

 

 

Tiny issues that I will write below, but a18 is really looking quite experimental to me.

 

Miner 69r description is odd. It should say tool damage and TOOL block damage. The way its written we don't really understand if you are talking about block damage of ALL the weapons in the game or tools only. Also,(blades perk) the blades power attack does also 6? 6 what?. 6 bleeding wounds? . Lot's of polish remains, but I shall staph watchin' the video over and over again. Not healthy lol.

 

By Azura, Sithis is off limits until bandits. Speaking of that, It would be nice to have legendary "enchanted" weapons/tools. I would LOVE weapons with effects (non removable-non mod type ) like pistol with +1% to +5% attack against (insert entity or block here) or -5% to +5% durability loss or something. With preequiped mods should be hard to balance, but a tiny inserted effect and a random name? how cool is that? . You can even rationalize that THE PISTOL OF JACK THE LOVER is good against male entities because REASONS, right?

 

thx for this jewel.

[Frisky Minx]

Hello MadMole,

 

i love the Video, and thank you for answering all our Questions! <3

 

You mentioned earlier, that you'd like to see CBBE support. Are you referring to Calientes Beautiful Body Enhancer? If that is the Case, can we expect some love for the Playermodels somewhere down the Road? Some Characters look scarier than some of the Zombies bodywise.

 

Much obliged!

[Damocles]

We simulate that in a more fair way with the stun system. Spam pressing a key or combo of keys to get out is so 80's.

 

Quicktime events where a plague several years ago. Most game developers fortunately moved past that.

[Crater Creator]

Yes I was, I was exploring. There will be combat oriented music in the next alpha. Maybe we can play some happier tracks when you are near your land claim/bedroll and no enemies are close.

 

Sorry, I could've been more specific.

 

For the first 30 minutes in the video, you're standing still going through all the perks. We the viewers appreciate you talking us through everything, but I meant in terms of gameplay, you weren't doing anything during that time. To my ears, the way the game switched between different music tracks and silence felt inconsistent, given how consistent the (in)action on the screen was (fine for a first pass though).

 

Now you might be thinking, big deal, you're not going to sit around like this in a real game, and the music can't be expected to make doing nothing feel exciting. But when I think about what actually consumes my time in the game, there's a lot of mining and farming and organizing inventory and figuring out what to buy where I am idle or nearly so for long periods of time. So combat music and spooky dungeon crawling music may be givens, but your music guy might also want to think in terms of music to mine by, music to build by, music to farm by, etc. - even if the game isn't programmed to play separate tracks for those cases - because they are big use cases, all the same.

[madmole]

My humble opinion opinion about the video:

 

Pros:

 

I loved what I saw in that video. That was a beautiful everything. Turret bug was also funny.

 

 

Tiny issues that I will write below, but a18 is really looking quite experimental to me.

 

Miner 69r description is odd. It should say tool damage and TOOL block damage. The way its written we don't really understand if you are talking about block damage of ALL the weapons in the game or tools only. Also,(blades perk) the blades power attack does also 6? 6 what?. 6 bleeding wounds? . Lot's of polish remains, but I shall staph watchin' the video over and over again. Not healthy lol.

 

By Azura, Sithis is off limits until bandits. Speaking of that, It would be nice to have legendary "enchanted" weapons/tools. I would LOVE weapons with effects (non removable-non mod type ) like pistol with +1% to +5% attack against (insert entity or block here) or -5% to +5% durability loss or something. With preequiped mods should be hard to balance, but a tiny inserted effect and a random name? how cool is that? . You can even rationalize that THE PISTOL OF JACK THE LOVER is good against male entities because REASONS, right?

 

thx for this jewel.

The perk should say what it governs on the initial description heading, so adding its effect could be redundant, but I'll have a second look at it. Gazz changed the knife to a new design and wrote the blade perk descriptions, its placeholder so testers know what it does, until I craft it to feel like the rest which I authored 100% of.

 

Legendary weapons are probably an A19 thing. We can have invisible mods so yeah basically under the hood we make a mod and attach it, or just write the effect into the base item, but procedural is better. Grandpa's asskicker (legendary shotgun) has been talked about for years, hopefully A19 it will see the light of day finally

[Henrique]

MM well we be getting the knock back system?

 

Thx for the video bud!

[Telly G]

The perk should say what it governs on the initial description heading, so adding its effect could be redundant, but I'll have a second look at it. Gazz changed the knife to a new design and wrote the blade perk descriptions, its placeholder so testers know what it does, until I craft it to feel like the rest which I authored 100% of.

 

Legendary weapons are probably an A19 thing. We can have invisible mods so yeah basically under the hood we make a mod and attach it, or just write the effect into the base item, but procedural is better. Grandpa's asskicker (legendary shotgun) has been talked about for years, hopefully A19 it will see the light of day finally

 

I'd just be happy with more models for modifications like rad scrubber etc having a model of what the icon is represented attached to your weapon. Really makes your weapons pop and look much more varied that way.

[Odetta]

Grandpa's asslicker (legendary shotgun) has been talked about for years, hopefully A19 it will see the light of day finally

 

Fixed it for you. Demolition Man anyone?

[madmole]

Hello MadMole,

 

i love the Video, and thank you for answering all our Questions! <3

 

You mentioned earlier, that you'd like to see CBBE support. Are you referring to Calientes Beautiful Body Enhancer? If that is the Case, can we expect some love for the Playermodels somewhere down the Road? Some Characters look scarier than some of the Zombies bodywise.

 

Much obliged!

Yeah, it was a joke but I do like the Fallout character tech. I don't know for sure, its one of those huge cans of worms.

[madmole]

Sorry, I could've been more specific.

 

For the first 30 minutes in the video, you're standing still going through all the perks. We the viewers appreciate you talking us through everything, but I meant in terms of gameplay, you weren't doing anything during that time. To my ears, the way the game switched between different music tracks and silence felt inconsistent, given how consistent the (in)action on the screen was (fine for a first pass though).

 

Now you might be thinking, big deal, you're not going to sit around like this in a real game, and the music can't be expected to make doing nothing feel exciting. But when I think about what actually consumes my time in the game, there's a lot of mining and farming and organizing inventory and figuring out what to buy where I am idle or nearly so for long periods of time. So combat music and spooky dungeon crawling music may be givens, but your music guy might also want to think in terms of music to mine by, music to build by, music to farm by, etc. - even if the game isn't programmed to play separate tracks for those cases - because they are big use cases, all the same.

 

Right now its a structure with some really nice tracks considered exploration music. We have combat music too but it will be disabled so we can focus on volume, frequency and fine tune the rules for when combat music should play. We can decide other activities that might warrant different music but those are the two categories we have now. Settlement/base music might make sense, we'll have to think about other situations yet.

[Frisky Minx]

Katana anyone?

[Odetta]

Its not meant to justify, we feel the best design is ladders with freedom and no food spoilage. Adding this garbage is taking away from time to do things we KNOW people do want, like bandits, factions, more npcs, more quests, main story, bugs fixed, optimizations and a gold version.

 

Thinking ahead here. I know food spoilage is off the table so I won't suggest it here. What would be cool is when or if you get a reputation system in game with different factions you could tie food to said system. Say a specific reputation quest where you need to feed the colony. You can base the requirement on "Max Stamina" for food and "Water" for drink.

 

It would work like this:

 

Quest - The White River Clan needs Food Items Worth at least "600 Max Stamina (food) and 300 Water (drink)". Doing this quest will grant you +Reputation or put you in good standing with them for a certain amount of time. Depending on system you go with.

 

This system is intentionally left arbitrary so people with different recipes can complete the quest.

 

This would provide a late game Item Sink when you have more than enough food and drink. Best part is it will benefit you too.

 

This system could also apply to other items in the game like weapons, clothes, building mats and would be highly moddable.

 

 

This would be a cool system imo.

[Drithyl]

uh....

 

 

 

So Raytracing when?

 

When a company unrelated to the developers of the game puts in the amount of effort and money required