Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[STyK_]

21 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

That's the problem with percentages. With 25% you have a 25% chance of getting an item That means 25% of the default chance of getting, say, an egg, which is already low. That leaves you with no eggs. THERE. No omelet for you.

thats why its hard and great. Changes the way you look at the trader, you see a stack of eggs there is no doubt in your mind your buying them. Definitely starve from time to time but then you get lucky.
Technically I don't have to but I want my crops to get bigger so I suffer. There is a huge crop of corn right across from my base but I won't eat it cause of my self imposed rules. I just got a quest for the barn across from the supercorn house, I'll do that cause I got the quest otherwise I wouldn't do it. If I can do 25% loot with my self imposed rules I'm pretty sure anyone can do it playing normal. Part of the reason I do this is even though I'm playing Navezgane I'm trying to simulate what I would get from random gen though quests so its not as OP that I'm playing there.

36 minutes ago, meganoth said:

I would guess that you might make pathing cheaper by calculating shorter paths. But I'm sure you can't simply turn off pathing completely, because even if the zombie wants to go in a straight line to you it needs to navigate around or over pillars, walls or blocks, needs to ascend an incline, ...

so best case it would free up a little but not enough to make a difference.

2 hours ago, madmole said:

I run 2560x1440 with everything maxed.

That mite be why then your running it on 2k

[Phoenixshade35]

I love this forum for the diversity of things to talk about haha

 

First - @madmolei like the new archways, can make for some interesting builds in the future i think

 

Second - To the argument for having injuries persist past death, that idea intrigues me, it can be tied into an earlier comment about when you die a day goes by in game time, could have it if you die you can simply respawn, or respawn after existing injuries have healed, though if that were the case some people could completely circumvent horde night all together by dying that morning, thus eliminating that danger all together, sure early game the injury stuff could cause issues but late game we already got enough from hording to make all we need to fix said issues, all about balance there.

 

Third - In regards to the pathing, I know i said before i would love more random pathing for horde nights, but it gave me an idea, if the vultures came they could be written to attack player made blocks instead of the player, making us want to have a defence against them, another is a zombie that its only goal is to attack the player or all blocks made by the player should he not be able to be pathed too, this could make for some random destruction on horde nights as well.  Imagine versing the horde and all of a sudden your lights go out because this zombie went right for your generator because it was too loud, that would be amazing and @%$*#!ty at the same time, balance lol

 

Fourth - The Demolisher is awesome but i never get to face him, i feel he does not show up enough, i wouldn't mind him showing up randomly in the world normally and as a sleeper in the later dungeons, nothing says oh @%$*#! like a demolisher destroying the path you have to take

 

Fifth - If memory serves (i could be wrong) it was stated once that sometimes on rare occasions when looting pois that you could find a bike in the backyard or other vehicles ready to be driven away, is that still going to be a thing that is rare upon poi spawning or was that idea scrapped?  Cause it could make the no crafting playthoughs quite amuzing and give you the sense of Holy @%$*#!. lol

 

Ok im done, back to my 50% loot with only knives and pistols gameplay haha

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, madmole said:

I added a new round arch shape today

Castle Builders Unite! 😃

 

Edit:  Water park POI confirmed! 🤣

[BobbyLee298]

1 hour ago, madmole said:

Until the zombie larva come squirming out!

Sewer poi would be sick

[AtomicUs5000]

6 minutes ago, BobbyLee298 said:

Sewer poi would be sick

I'll tell you right now... waist high water loaded with crawlers in a dark sewer is pretty awesome.
At one time in my sewer POIs, I made it look like water was coming out of large grate-covered openings, but the water blocks changed a little and I had to remove them.

[EggsAisle]

You're making a sewer level, of all things?! Did you hit your head or something? "Yeah, let's do a sewer level, then it'll be like all those games with fun sewer levels like... uh... wait I must've gotten confused with those games with horrible unfun sewer levels such as all of them, ever."

 

(I'm just messing around, don't take me too seriously. Although I do hate sewer levels, so it'd be pretty cool if you made a good one.)

[Phoenixshade35]

If a sewer level is made, and there isn't a thrown together home made to reference the ninja turtles, i will be mad lol

[FileMachete]

12 hours ago, hiemfire said:

The sleeper hadn't been spawned in yet. When you got to the bottom of the stairs it spawned in.

Could be.? I might be mis-remembering but I thought back in a17 the devs said something like, "working on sleepers so they should never appear somewhere that a player has already cleared".

 

Might be that this is on the poi designers; they need to set something so when a player crosses into a trigger space the sleeper/s are spawned.

 

Like what @Darinth described about the hole in the floor. Maybe it just needs the trigger-spawn thingy adjusted to cover the upper area.

 

That said, things are a lot better.

[Blake_]

2 hours ago, madmole said:

Until the zombie larva come squirming out!

Are you serious? A special infected like that would scare the hell out of our grandmas! 

[FileMachete]

I'd really love to see Sewer and Subway POIs added to vanilla.

Thinking of the big skyscrapers on their side, which I know went a bit too far, but I think? that had more to do with with all the stuff in them, not just the overall size.

 

For sewers/subways it would make sense for a lot of their overall length to be pretty simple (just pipes or tunnels), with junctions, rooms & platforms having most of the deco bits.

 

Also noticed something recently that could possibly be leveraged for pois like these that would be a real change of pace; forced crouch, claustrophobic confined paths.

In attics where the roof comes down inside at a 45 degree angle, if you're sneaking and walk under those angles it forces you lower. So guessing it might be possible to build pipes/access-tunnels that are only 1 1/2 blocks high. Make them 1 wide and they'd feel really closed in and spooky.

 

Problem would be if a player logs out/gets disconnected while crouched/compressed. Don't know how the engine would deal with that on re-entering. And whether any zeds could path into those tunnels to attack the player.

[MechanicalLens]

3 hours ago, madmole said:

I added a new round arch shape today

Madmole, you are a legend! Thank you for this! 

[faatal]

On 8/10/2020 at 4:45 AM, WhiteLion said:

@faatal

 

Will we see parallax occlusion for this game ?

Probably not.

[Junuxx]

2 hours ago, Phoenixshade35 said:

Fourth - The Demolisher is awesome but i never get to face him, i feel he does not show up enough, i wouldn't mind him showing up randomly in the world normally and as a sleeper in the later dungeons, nothing says oh @%$*#! like a demolisher destroying the path you have to take

Couple demolishers in the loot room would be hilarious.

 

Edit: Except not I guess.

[faatal]

On 8/10/2020 at 12:19 PM, STyK_ said:

its the pathing. It would be more realistic to have them spread out hitting your base from all sides which you can make happen initially by sealing your base and having a uniform defense but as soon as that breaks they bunch up. Its AI difficulty scroll bar solution I've been pushing, destruction over pathing to the weakest point.

They are going to say its a tower defense game at the end of the day. To many people like just setting up an easy defense and having them all walk right in from one way. You maximize kills and xp, don't waste any zed lives setup correctly. Self-control and self-imposed handicaps are going to be the easy solution. I do my best to be ready to fight from all sides cause thats how I would have liked the game to be. All goes back to challenging yourself 👍.

People make a lot of guesses as to why the AI does something and it is often wrong. I see people test their designs with a bunch of the same zombie thinking the other types will do the same thing, which is sometimes not true.

 

Blood moon spawner does attack your base from multiple directions, but not all at once, it changes over time, because that is more efficient for pathing. The typical dumb zombie will not go very far to find a weak spot or opening, often preferring to beat on a wall near it instead of walking a bit to go through an opening. Yesterday I was just looking at that issue of being too dumb and beating the walls around a cemetery POI instead of using the opening, but really that is correct, since those are set to be that dumb. Thick walls would change that behavior, just like many things can change their behavior.

On 8/10/2020 at 1:12 PM, pregnable said:

Agility is kinda cool, not sure about balance currently, but being able to sneak really well without a base is a nice alternative.  Random dog packs should probably not be able to zero in on  you when you are sneaking though... not sure if they do.

No zombie auto targets you except for blood moon spawns and POI volumes set to attack.

[faatal]

On 8/10/2020 at 9:40 PM, Blake_ said:

Hi again @faatal. Seems like I spoke too soon. There are freezes. Quite a few of them. Music turned OFF improved things quite a bit in many cases, though not as much as I expected .  Most of the freezes happen before Warnings regarding blocks PLUS sleeper spawning of several entities in SEVERAL POIS at a time. Seems like it's not as cheap as you make it sound or there might be an issue in timing in the spawning of the volumes between more than 1 POI.

I was referring to it spawning from a sleeper volume. There is no coordination across sleeper volumes. I added that to my todo list, but it will probably not be in A19.

14 hours ago, Darinth said:

This is one of the major downsides to the sleeper volumes, and something I hope they address as time goes on. Depending on circumstances, the 1st floor room of the 6 story apartment that you get dropped into from the breaking floor on the 2nd floor can actually be completely empty with you looking down into it... and then spawn a dozen zombies directly in front of your face as soon as you drop down into it. Hopefully we'll get something in the future so that any time where you get Line of Sight to where zed should be, it will go ahead and spawn it, along with potentially the rest of it's volume. Actually legitimately looking into a room that is empty and so not going into it I suspect may be one of the culprits for people having difficulty with clears. It's not been the problem on any of the clears that I've gone to when someone was having issues, but I can easily imagine looking into rooms and not seeing zombies because they're not physically there being a problem.

Not likely to change much. Way too expensive checking line of sight to all the potential blocks you could see.

[Jeffny]

4 hours ago, madmole said:

I added a new round arch shape today

Good job 😍

Can you re-add the fonctionnal jail door please?? 😍

[faatal]

7 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

Not quite, faatal mentioned once that AI pathing is the real problem... the more entities you have the more processing power you need.

That's why we can't have hundreds of zombies at the same time all "pathing" around. 

It tends to be the character controller colliding with the world, not pathing that uses a lot of CPU.

6 hours ago, AtomicUs5000 said:

Yeah, see.. that crisp res means sacrifices must be made. 
It's pretty cool though that you can tweak things to go either way. You can't do that with most games.

Resolution makes a large impact on 7dtd. Often people say I have blah blah specs, but fail to mention details like the resolution they are running the game at. If things feel laggy/choppy/bad, I'd be dropping the game to 1920x1080 and compare.

[FileMachete]

39 minutes ago, faatal said:

Not likely to change much. Way too expensive checking line of sight to all the potential blocks you could see.

Totally guessing here; from a couple vids on how to make a poi it looks like there are 'sleeper volumes' in which can be 1 or more zeds. The volumes are 6 sided 'cubes', and if (not sure) there's such a thing as a "trigger spawn in" I'm guessing it's a cube as well.

 

For performance reasons poi designers likely keep "trigger spawn in" cubes as small as possible.

 

Wondering if it might be possible to exend the "trigger spawn in" code to allow additional cubes? If it isn't already.

 

So in the situation I experianced, coming down the stairs, pop a closet, no zed inside, get to foot of stairs, zed spawns in; if the designer could draw in a nother "trigger spawn in" cube that just covered part of the stairs, without extending up through the floor in a wide area, it could be less performance impact.

 

Edit: oops, meant to say that yeah, can imagine the overhead of constantly tracking player FOV, so put that on the poi designers instead.

 

Just a wag

[Junuxx]

1 minute ago, FileMachete said:

The volumes are 6 sided 'cubes',

The word you're looking for is a cuboid aka a box.

 

Is the distance at which sleepers get spawned in any way exposed in the XML?

[DaVegaNL]

5 hours ago, madmole said:

I added a new round arch shape today

 

I love your round shapes, MM.

[FileMachete]

1 minute ago, Junuxx said:

The word you're looking for is a cuboid aka a box.

"cub-oid" robotic bear cubs! and yep, couldn't get it off the tip of my tongue, thanks!

3 minutes ago, Junuxx said:

Is the distance at which sleepers get spawned in any way exposed in the XML?

No idea, haven't noticed it anywhere. (if this was for me, likely for faatal )

[wolfbain5]

will arrows and bolts get fixed soon? arrows and bolts float away from zombies. I mean the 2nd pic was a head shot. and the first pic, the bow is loaded and aimed, but no arrow

[Laz Man]

45 minutes ago, FileMachete said:

Totally guessing here; from a couple vids on how to make a poi it looks like there are 'sleeper volumes' in which can be 1 or more zeds. The volumes are 6 sided 'cubes', and if (not sure) there's such a thing as a "trigger spawn in" I'm guessing it's a cube as well.

 

For performance reasons poi designers likely keep "trigger spawn in" cubes as small as possible.

 

Wondering if it might be possible to exend the "trigger spawn in" code to allow additional cubes? If it isn't already.

 

So in the situation I experianced, coming down the stairs, pop a closet, no zed inside, get to foot of stairs, zed spawns in; if the designer could draw in a nother "trigger spawn in" cube that just covered part of the stairs, without extending up through the floor in a wide area, it could be less performance impact.

 

Edit: oops, meant to say that yeah, can imagine the overhead of constantly tracking player FOV, so put that on the poi designers instead.

 

Just a wag

Yes, you can do this already,  Just make sure all "attack" trigger sleeper volumes have the same Group ID # (excluding zero).  There is at least one vanilla POI in the game that already does this. 

 

Edit: Not sure if this impacts when the sleeper actually spawns into the game though.  What I mentioned allows you have to have different trigger zones for the same group of zombies.  For example, 2 empty attack trigger sleeper volumes "triggering" 1 filled with sleepers.

[FileMachete]

4 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

Yes, you can do this already,  Just make sure all "attack" trigger sleeper volumes have the same Group ID # (excluding zero).  There is at least one vanilla POI in the game that already does this. 

 

Edit: Not sure if this impacts when the sleeper actually spawns into the game though.  What I mentioned allows you have to have different trigger zones for the same group of zombies.  For example, 2 empty attack trigger sleeper volumes "triggering" 1 filled with sleepers.

Cool. So maybe, if they wanted to, they could leverage that bit to trigger the zed/s spawning in.

[x3eemguy]

Hello all, My wife a I have been playing this game for a little over a year now. Since the new update my wife died randomly 3 times now, first time just digging for a buried supply, then in a poi and then again digging for another buried supply. There was no mine or explosion or any other threat whatsoever. We were together at same location, like less than 1 meter and just puff out of the air death comes. This issue never happened before to her or myself, now this looks like a bug and it sucks. We only play permadeath. If any player dies in our group of 3 we start over. Anyone else experience this? It sucks now with this random death issue.