a18 Mini-Critique

[Blaquestone]

I don't involve myself with the community too often, and typically only play with my wife and kids instead of servers, but some changes I've noticed in a18 have left me feeling opportunities were overlooked. All-in-all, still love the game, love a lot of the progression so far and in tandem with planned features. Looking forward to the new AI encounter system to hopefully fix the FPS problem on my wife's PC. Still, after catching up with as many bug reports and comments I could handle, and doing a few searches, I don't think these topics were covered elsewhere. If any of them were, link me up please.

 

• Reusable Assets (Animations)
  Adding stamina costs to harvesting could have used the old knife harvesting animation, using both hands, but with no knife and a different sound effect. That said, does anyone know why the knife harvesting animation was removed? The sound was oddly comforting and the animation was fairly solid; leagues above punching a corpse with a knife in your hand.
  

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• Available Game Options
  I'm hoping that the encounter system will add back in a lot of the options which have come and gone through development. The more control players have over how their zombies act, the more tailored their experience will be and the more fun they should have. An example is the zombie speed burst that happens right now... I love difficulty, and prefer Insane mode; my wife enjoys playing with me but has a huge fear of zombies. We compromised by having large numbers of insane difficulty walkers (day and night). We don't have an option to turn that gimmick off, so she's extremely reluctant to play at all, and will refuse at higher difficulties, making compromise between us impossible.
  

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• Co-Op vs. PVP Spawning
  Probably a sub-critique of available game options, but important enough to me to separate, is the fact that I have no way of ensuring my wife or kids spawn near me at the start of the game like they do in the console version. With my wife's zombie fear and my daughter's age, either of them spawning 4Km away is a big "Nope" and near death sentence. Some options I think might be nice: allow hosts to set spawn points to a certain set of coordinates; the coordinates the host player (first player in the game) first spawns at will spawn all players; or new players spawn nearby existing players/player beds/land claims. These are primarily co-op focused, of course.
  
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[DarkRitual]

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?114207-Tool-NITROGEN-a-random-world-generator-for-7DtD

 

It has an option when generating a map to have a single spawn point. Doesn't work on the Navezgane map, but their random gen is ages faster and IMO generally better than the in-game one.

 

Also after creating a map, you can go into the file and change the spawnpoints.xml. Generated maps are stored in C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Roaming\7DaysToDie\GeneratedWorlds\

 

Just delete all of but one of the entries (either all but the one you spawned at, or just pick one then teleport yourself to that spot after. This may need the game/server to reload for the xml change to take effect.

[HungryZombie]

Another stop-gap solution for your spawning issues is you should be able to use the teleport command if you enable creative mode. Not sure if you were aware of that or not. Awesome you play with your family btw.

[Hek Harris]

You also can set spawn = no in the configuration panel, group your family in a world without zombies then set spawn = yes.