hotpoon Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 The lack of block knowledge you describe and then acquired by seeing would be expensive. Each zombie would have to be raycasting all over the place to check visibility and store that block visibility for themselves and path calcing would have to use that zombie's visibility data as it checked each block. Animals make assumptions about 3d space and randomly run around to look for access, so zombies could too. You could also look at it this way. Zombies do have xray vision in the form of heat and air current sensing, so they do see more heat leaking through weaker blocks and a hyper sense of smell, so every crack entices them. Zombies might have better senses in terms of smelling where brains are and being able to see heat maps, but in the example, they had knowledge about the structure that they hadn't seen. Nothing to do with me as a player. In my mind I don't think they really need to acquire the block knowledge at any point. The only knowledge they should have is that BRAAAAAINS are in that skull of the person they are looking at, and then they go for it. Like they did in previous alphas. When A17 first hit, I saw a lot of angry posts about the 'structural engineer' zombies, but then they mostly quietened down when Roland said the new AI was just a baseline for the bandits, and would be be adjusted down for the zombies. It does not sound like that is your intention. It sounds like you are happy with how they behave. Am I correct in thinking that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Gronk Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 hell he has even replied to himself just to get more points... he had to be banned for a week because he got in a serious cussing fight with himself... it was rough... everybody was walking on egg shells around here. if you believe that, i will cook up another one. That's not too far from the truth anyway. If memory serves Guppy has replied to his own posts with counter-arguments quite recently. That's either a sign of someone who can see, and propose, multiple viewpoints at the same time or a symptom of severe cognitive dissonance. :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zombiepoptard Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 Dude our art team made Rage and various Doom games. Let our art team do their job. It looks better than it ever has and if you think otherwise you need your head or eyes examined, as id games are always praised for their art. I'm sure 7 days will look amazing when its finished we're in the best hands money can buy. As I said its a WIP and until the new renderer comes online and every texture is redone its not going to look right. Not to go back to this but I've been thinking about those wall textures a lot lol. I hope you're right Joel and I hope the art team makes the textures less grim not the other way around. Alpha 17 was great on deco and poi building as far as level design goes. So yes it does look better but I don't think it was the textures that did it. I'm sure the guys from id are doing an amazing job but can the pois feel relatively hospitable so that touring around them is slightly pleasant. What is the new rendering going to improve? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meganoth Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 No worries, I took those stamina-enhancing pills! - - - Updated - - - .. And after crying? We don't want to know!!!!!! I'm sure Snowdog is like a benevolent father figure to many young forum users here. We have to protect their innocent souls. Won't somebody please think of the children? And yes, Unicorns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gazz Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 As a former QA Lead in the gaming industry, it's refreshing for me to hear this sentiment from a dev. A lot of devs paid lip-service to it, but would shut you down with prejudice the second the philosophy became inconvenient for them. You say it like you actually mean it. You QA people can be an annoying bunch but unfortunately... this just doesn't work without you. It's extremely rare that a report will be ignored and even then the design gets looked at because even if something works as designed - if it looks like a bug then the design was not very good. You do need considerable self-confidence to go ahead and design anything but once you start ignoring everything that disagrees with your vision you have a problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TSRViper Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 What do you mean, in two weeks? If we can't play A18 after the coming weekend, there'll be riots! We'll even bring the console crowd and write many forum posts expressing how angry we are, right after the letter we sent to the United Nations Council due to the crimes against humanity committed by the pimps because they let us wait so long, which is psychological torture as defined by the Geneva Convention. They might even consider a "military option" to end our suffering and drop supply crates with "liberated" copies of A18. Viva la instalaciَn! Yeah...or that 😉 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
canadianbluebeer Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 QA: "if someone does this, it crashes the install" Dev: "why would anyone do that?" QA: "let me show you..." Dev: "oh! I guess I better fix that" yes, actually happened. Mind you, it was a reasonable question from them, and the response funny. Even other testers said the same 'why would anyone do that?'. (issue was, if you held the enter key down during install, it would barf. stupid right? why would you do that? installing from FLOPPIES took time, so you get out of your chair, shove it in towards the desk, and the right arm of the chair happens to push down on the enter key of the number pad on the keyboard... "Oh! guess I better fix that" indeed. One of those found totally by accident bugs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gazz Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 One of those found totally by accident bugs. The best bug I found (different game) was that you put a medic into a shuttle, flew him down to the surface and disembarked. Then used the shuttle's tractor beam to tow the poor sap to space. Then you used the battlecruiser's emergency vehicle recovery tractor beam to try and recover the medic. That would crash the game. That wasn't accidental, though, but me actively trying to break the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
seryie8a7 Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 when will the a 18 stream start ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 Something like that Quest 1: Clear Zombies Quest 2: Collect 15000 Wood, 15000 Cobblestones, 15000 Iron Quest 3: Craft Spikes, BarbWire Fence, Landmines, Flagstone blocks Quest 4: Craft WorkBench, Forge, Cement Mixer Quest 5: Craft Iron Club Quest 6: Find Survivor and force him with ur iron reinforced club to become trader Quest 7: Deliver Crafted Items Questline complete: 5% discount at trader and 5000 dukes More like gather resources (Not as much as you have lol), repair the highlighted blocks, he's open for business, no discounts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 That is cool. Just thinking alot of people will see it as an end and move on. I guess that's what some people want. Ah well. In Skyrim/Fallout you can keep going, but I tend to save that for last and then roll a new character and start over. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 I believe Madmole's reply to that one was that adding animals is just like adding zombies. The more animals, the less zombies you can realistically have. So having the ability to have an entire farm of animals isn't the idea of the game when you need to have enough zombies to be a threat. But I remember countering with a suggestion. The game allows you to have up to maybe 5 low AI animals, but these are extreme 'heat' sources for zombies. Any more than that and it draws crowds of zombies that just make it impractical to maintain. So this wouldn't work with harvesting animals because they don't re-produce, however it could work for things like chickens and collecting their eggs, sheep and collecting their wool or cows for milk. Fish reproduce pretty quickly I think, so maybe it could work with them? If we go there (no discussions of it at all for years tbh) we'd do some kind of animal forge (chicken coop block) where you put a chicken in and the 3d model and ai disappear, you then add feed and it produces eggs and feathers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roland Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 Zombies might have better senses in terms of smelling where brains are and being able to see heat maps, but in the example, they had knowledge about the structure that they hadn't seen. Nothing to do with me as a player. In my mind I don't think they really need to acquire the block knowledge at any point. The only knowledge they should have is that BRAAAAAINS are in that skull of the person they are looking at, and then they go for it. Like they did in previous alphas. When A17 first hit, I saw a lot of angry posts about the 'structural engineer' zombies, but then they mostly quietened down when Roland said the new AI was just a baseline for the bandits, and would be be adjusted down for the zombies. It does not sound like that is your intention. It sounds like you are happy with how they behave. Am I correct in thinking that? Are you still arguing from a 17.2 perspective or have you tried 17.4 yet? There were a lot of adjustments to randomize behavior and make it so that zombies would abandon long pathways. You’re right that I made the statement at 17e that the perfect knowledge AI without variations were just a first pass and that zombies would be dumbed down and bandits would be the smarter enemies. Since that time zombies have been dumbed down and variations of behavior have been coded in. It does sound to me as well that for the sake of challenge and thrills there will always be some zombies that will take a long path so that you get them coming at you from everywhere— even across a plank connected to an adjacent building. Personally I love that and have fun trying to block all access points to where I am. I think that 17.4 is close to the right amount of variation Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 is unity that bad to where you cannot have 20 zombies and 20 animals? that's a lot i know but just for examples sakes I always wondered too, why unity..? Its pretty bad. Our lead programmer had a minecraft like engine when my brother and I were looking to do this game so we partnered with him and he was using Unity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 Very cool, thanks! Really looking forward to the Grenades. And faatal recently mentioned he had done some work on the molotovs, so keeping fingers crossed on their 'look out below!' usability Electricity Tip. I just had a horde night after taking a couple rl weeks away. Something weird happened within the first couple minutes. There was an explosion, inside my bird cage! And a wierd boomy at that. I lost half of the switches I had mounted on the floor (concrete blocks), and a couple of e-fence posts that were 5 blocks away, while -not- losing a couple of e-fence posts that were in between the lost switches and the far fence posts. <definately a one-off, and running a few modlets so no bug report> Anyway. The 'tip' is to protect your switches better than I did (though I've never had anything like this happen before, heh). Due to the switches demise I lost -all- of my traps, eep! Which led to quite a bit of advanced sailor speak while trying to suddenly fight all the zeds strolling right in to my small 7x7 birdcage. Hell, I hadn't even bothered to put an e-tool in my backpack, though I did, thankfully, have one in a flush mounted floor chest in the cage. Which allowed me to make a couple frantic connections to get the e-fencing back up. Fun, though -wildly- unexpected! --meilodasreh, funny stuff! and just in case it wasn't clear; the shower comment was meant as, 'MMs working so damn hard to get A18 out he doesn't have time to shower!' ... since MM & I are of an age I'm 99% certain he got the intent (and obviously meilodasreh got it and expanded on the joke), but just in case any of you young whipper snappers were wondering LOL on "advance sailor speak". Yes the game produces a wide variety of things you don't always expect, that is one of the most amazing things about 7 Days IMO. Its a bug,but I was at some old mine POI and the thing literally started collapsing and I was dodging falling blocks and zombies while trying to spam med kits and survive. Most games need months and months of work to achieve a bug that fantastic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sigil_Thane Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 @MadMole any insights into the state of Vulkan implementation for A18? The last review I saw ( granted, not on Unity... ) had it running at 2x the frame rate of OpenGL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 well this bug exists since LCB appeared so i can assume it will never be fixed and its known bug What bug exactly? Dropping a vague hint that we will never do something is useless to both of us. Please say exactly what the bug is so something positive can happen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SxR Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 Official 7 Days Coffee mugs! I'm so stoked about these! It would've been special if you had the classic gore block (dead wight) on the bottom of it in the mug. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 Will it increase your chances at getting better stats on weapons? I don't think so. You'll get a better chance to get a "pink" but once it decides what color you get the RNG runs again and you get what you get. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 hey Madmole you havent removed my strike, even though I was totally quiet. I will forgive you, but only if you implement a certain questtype: Delivery - Devliver Item X (like the stash you find in the find item quests) to another trader within meter x seconds Why? 1. because its a type variation and this game needs it 2. and more importantly, because this way we can find other traders that have managed to hide away. Well "traders are easy to spot from high places" and you are right... and I am pretty good at finding all the traders withing 2km radius... but sometimes I go 40 days without finding the second trader, either because there is no highpoint or because its too mountainy so they block the field of view. This quest would give far less reward but is a Tier 1 quest (because lateron you probably dont need that anymore and it is riskfree with only time beeing the ressource you spend, since oyu are most likely on foot still) Pretty please? Yes we are planning some kind of quest that lets you find the other traders, most likely delivery or a trader needs assistance quest. Roland can remove your infraction, I don't know how to do it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 Finding another trader is part of the exploration "mini-game", one of the challenges. I don't think it should be trivial. In the early game a second trader is sure nice, but only if he is in less than 2km radius around the first one. Otherwise you waste too much time traveling. Only after you have at least a minibike traders really become the OP source for everything plus quests. With so much you want now, and the random purchase of a hundred thousand duke gyro, you tend to save money and only buy what you absolutely need now. A book, maybe some ammo before you can make your own, schematics, steel anything, meds, what ever you really need. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 Watching the A18 TFP playtest - looks like the per zombie XP was lowered? Lowered on some, raised on others (like radiated for late game XP). I think some code is crunching it too, its not what I put in XML. It was scaled because lowering zed xp was easier than changing something else to make it balanced. You should get good xp doing any major archtype now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 Sounds like me; I'm anti magical trader protection (hate lcb's too, suck it up)... If someone kills him then so be it. Their reputation drops and other trader's shoot on sight. You know this will never work. All traders would get killed off and a big portion of the game would be broken just so a few jerks can try to be bandits. We could make it work, but its probably not worth the effort. Basically the trader would insta gib you if you attack him and have auto turrets running and make the game a lot slower all a bunch of work just to let players try to kill him. THen if they did we'd need to resurrect him or make him defeated but not dead. We'll have bandit forts you can raid for that sort of thing, might as well leave traders alone, the end result would 99% of the time be the same as what we have now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 So trader gets killed and players can go raise a fund to bring back a trader like 10K dukes. And everyone doing quests for that trader gets a "Mission failed" and rage quits. Its just a bad idea to let people raid/kill traders when we could be doing cool stuff like bandits, infiltration quests, blow up the building quests, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmole Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 So, this is my first post here... Love the game! We have a dedicated server running with 5 of us that play local lan almost every weekend...! (From ages 11 to 69!) We each have a role in the game and it absolutely makes a huge difference in the outcome! We always enjoy the progression and each time we start over it is never the same! Love that about this! We are eagerly awaiting A18 and are really looking forward to the changes! A couple of ideas we have for either A18 or in the future... 1) For the Gyro copter... (I apologize if this has been mentioned before) Could you add in a hotkey where it allows "autorun"? We do questing together and having to hold down "w" for 10 minutes at a time can get... Crampy! A couple of us have gaming mice to "fix" this, but we give a bunch of crap to them for having this luxury! 2) For the Gyro copter... If you were to add in the auto run or even not, could you make it so you can view your map/inventory/char. without losing momentum? 3) Maybe add in a mod/skill to upgrade the 4x4 to hold 4 players..? Again just thinking out loud... Really looking forward to A18! Have been watching the Y/T vids and the forums for any update info... Keep up the great work! Welcome aboard, and those things are certainly possible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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