Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[hiemfire]

35 minutes ago, faatal said:

That has been addressed in A19 by the use of Vultures.

…. /cringe More reason to hate the blasted things. 😁

[Sigil_Thane]

5 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:

Anybody care to provide a brief explanation on the niche appeal towards Linux and, more importantly, while it's still around? 😛

.... I can spot a troll a mile away, and that looks like a troll. :-D

 

4 hours ago, Khalagar said:

 

Extremely customizable so it allows a lot of freedom and there isn't a governing body that decides how you have to use it. The double edged blade side is it's extremely customizable which allows a lot of freedom and there's no governing body to decide on OS wide standards, so developers of software have to account for 400 bajillion variables. 

 

It's basically just used for servers or by ultra niche turbo nerds who feel like spending 2 hours trouble shooting issues every time they want to log in and do basically anything

Oooo... I'm and Ultra Niche Turbo Nerd! (UNTuN for short.) and yes, breaking your computer and fixing it to learn more about how it "thinks" can be fun and rewarding. once you know that you can ensure that it does exactly what you want it to do, and absolutely nothing more.

 

1 hour ago, The Gronk said:

The game runs faster.

BIG reason here... (Also the cost is a big factor as well... I prefer to spend my cash on hardware instead of software.)

 

1 hour ago, Nfg said:

Because I get tired of fixing windows. Also Linux is not niche, it's probably running on every device you own. Yes even your windows PC uses it. 

Linux is easier to fix than windows usually because of just how accessible everything is! (Although, you can also completely screw things up that way, so it pays to know your limits, and when in doubt google it.)

 

1 hour ago, Nfg said:

I'm sorry you're computer crashed but if you set it up with a real disk she would fly. Let me know if you need some help, I don't mind helping people convert. 🐧

THIS is one of the reasons right here... there are So Many Linux Users that are willing to give time to help. Good on you Nfg!

[faatal]

5 hours ago, PoloPoPo said:

"And let's be honest it does absolutely make sense at least for the bicycle."

--> No, it still does not make sense. Jogging burns more calories than cycling.

Running or turbo on the bicycle use stamina at the same rate. Stamina regen uses food, so they are the same, except you traveled farther on the bicycle for the same amount of food.

[meganoth]

5 hours ago, Khalagar said:

 

From the numbers I've seen for most companies, it's usually something like Linux users are less than 0.1% of the user base and over 20% of the support tickets. I'm honestly a bit surprised this game works on Linux. If they were going to hire full time staff just to support weird things, they would get a way, way, way higher RoI to just hire someone who knows consoles to port the updates to consoles. There's still a weirdly high amount of people who insist on playing the ancient console version, judging by every TFP Tweet having 400 "WHERE'S MY CONSOLE UPDATE" comments

Usually?

 

https://mobile.twitter.com/grumpygamer/status/858387467187101696 , "Over 1/3 of Thimbleweed Park sales are are on Mac and Linux. You're being silly if your ignoring that."

 

Now granted, that surely was an outlier.

 

Your tweet talks about 20% of "automatic crash reports and support tickets", which is a bit of a difference. A lot of automatic crash reports could just be from a small group of players who coped with the crashes by saving a lot.

 

[MechanicalLens]

deleted

[Sigil_Thane]

2 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

Not trolling, I had just assumed Linux was one of those "brands" (for the lack of a better term. Types of devices??) that was very rare and thus was hanging on by a thread, but apparently there is more to them than I thought. Still, as much as I hate Windows 10, that's where I'm sticking.

Nah, I was referring to the ..."and why it's still around" part. (It made me chuckle tbh)

 

...also realize that some Linux users are playing the games via WINE (an interface layer that stands for Wine Is Not Emulation), and so to the reporting system it looks like it is running on Windows 10 or 8, but is actually being translated in real-time to native Linux instruction calls. Like I said it can be fun to learn what is possible, and even push those bounds some times.

[MechanicalLens]

deleted
 

 

[DaVegaNL]

13 hours ago, SnowDog1942 said:

Theres Noaa way -- I can tell by the look in his eye.  Try not to twister his words.

 

Sorry DaVega, not all bad puns are rock related

No worries, I see the need to make other puns. You're just between a rock and a hard place now. I'm afraid what you're hard place is though.

[PoloPoPo]

3 hours ago, faatal said:

I already said it has nothing to do with horde nights. That has been addressed in A19 by the use of Vultures.

Would you care to elaborate, please? Will Vultures catch you in any vehicle during horde night and deal an insane amount of damage or what does that mean?

 

By the way, while I am writing in this topic already, it is worth to start new topics for following two bugs (in Alpha18)

 

- campfire sound remains even if the campfire has been slacked (happens to forges as well sometimes)

- marksman rifle bug where I have around 80 bullets in the magazine that can be used without another reload (instead of 8 bullets I should have with the mag extender mod)

 

or are they known already?

[FileMachete]

Food consumption numbers while driving seem pretty high, but as we're not actually spending rl hours in them maybe the %'s are so high so they have a noticible impact? We'll have to see.

 

In that vein (and plz don't hate me for posting this): wouldn't the Auger be a natural target for increased food consumption?

Maybe it is already, but I've never noticed it if so.

Having run a 90lb jack hammer a few times I can tell you that _that_ will drain you, far more than four wheeling will, and I envision the Auger as something like a jack hammer, so...

 

Speaking of four wheeling; breakage & maintenance are a non-trivial thing in rl.

In-game 'wear' is so slight I can't even say with certainty if we use Repair Kits to repair vehicles in A18, as I haven't even had to think about repairing one.

 

While I like the general shift to using Repair Kits for most things (still think Leather Armor should use just leather), for vehicles maybe needing RKs + Electrical/Mechanical Parts + Iron & Steel Ingots to repair from serious degradation could add in more of a "oh oh, I broke down in the middle of nowhere, now what do I do??" feel to things.

Maybe 'top off' repairs with RKs, but if you let it get damaged to <75%, chances of not being able to get it running again without more than RKs increases.

As 'late/end game' mechanic. Not suggesting a freshly crafted 4x4 should get to <75% in it's first run, unless you drive it off a cliff of course.

And if repairing found vehicles ever becomes a thing, that could add to gameplay, "hmm, I like this bigger truck, but it's been hammered and will take a lot of rare-ish mats to fix up, while that minivan over there is in decent shape.."

------

 

"Linux" was primarily 'just' a re-write of generic "Unix" (done by a crazy guy named Linus) so it was open source, thus 'free'. Once free it went nuts & folks all over added/tweaked/created new things, because they could. Not just 'programs' that had to run on top of the OS but significant changes to the OS itself.

 

When Apples OS went to version 10 it was (and is) running Linux (Edit: correction) instead of their own proprietary OS. That they'd been developing since Apple was started.

iPhones (Edit: correction) & Androids & Chromebooks are all running Linux. Google runs on Linux.

Not just the net-box you use to connect to the Internet, but your TV, fridge, BR/DVD player, all are almost certainly running Linux.

 

Edit: correction; Apple OS & iPhone iOS are not "Linux" per say. From wikipedia;

"Darwin is an open-source Unix-like operating system first released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, Mach, and other free software projects.

Darwin forms the core set of components upon which macOS (previously OS X and Mac OS X), iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and iPadOS are based. It is mostly POSIX-compatible, but has never, by itself, been certified as compatible with any version of POSIX. Starting with Leopard, macOS has been certified as compatible with the Single UNIX Specification version 3 (SUSv3)"

 

Vast majority of finance & pretty much anything considered "critical" is handled by *nix (either Linux or Unixs' like HP-UX/Solaris/AIX).

 

The concept of "Virtual Machines" started way back when in Unix since way back when (1970s) there weren't 'desktop computers', users used 'dumb terminals' to connect into large computers (which could support hundreds of users at the same time) to get their work done. Necessitating seperation of access/rights/privileges/resources, eventually leading to the idea for entire VMs.

So the basis, and underlying tech, for Cloud Computing.

 

Consider Info-Sec at any significant scale. I think there was one firewall vendor that offered their product to run on Windows Server? And I'd assume it was for a niche market of the very rare (& likely only small) Windows only IT shop. Everything else I know of used to protect the internet & data runs *nix.

 

While Gates/Microsoft did leverage hobbiests simple brilliance of cobbling together non-propritary off the shelf hardware to create home or desktop computers. By selling a, mostly, hardware agnostic Disk Operating System for the masses, it was both a marvel and a complete mess. And to this day Windows is still playing catch-up to *nix for stability, freedom & speed.

For perspective I've worked at a company where we had Unix based firewall clusters that were handling hundreds of thousands of connections per day that had uptimes of multiple -years-. Imagine that. Huge rule sets, lots of dynamic changes, gigabytes of daily logs, and the dam things were so solid, from filesystem/IO code to zero memory leaks they could be up for that long running at high utilization.

[Annihilatorza]

5 hours ago, Rust Buddy said:

this is unbelievable!

 

guarinteed this stupid food drain is the dumbed down cop out version of what MM told us months ago how parts of the car would wear out and we’d have to repair it or if we hit something there could be a critical malfunction we would need to repair. 

but when it came time to actually do it they said nope. Let’s just have their food drain instead if using a vehicle—- way easier!!

come on!  Just do a proper food spoilage system instead of using all these weird and lame bandaids to fix the food survival problem in the game. 

candy in a vending machine is nothing to brag about. Having food spoil and crops die and using electricity for fridges to preserve food is something to brag about. 

if my car consumes food can I consume petrol!??!

On page one the first post of this topic Madmole posted that:

 

Vehicle Update - pushed to A20

• Vehicle Mods
• Vehicle break down and collision system

The new ISS system alone will change the way eating and drinking works.

 

I want the zombies to be able smell the food you are carrying again unless its in a tin can or another kind of seal container.

 

You should try driving for 18 hours straight, through the night on bad roads at 40 mph or less because any faster and you will die, while there are pot holes the size of your head, all the while you are carrying live cargo.

 

It makes you both physically and mentally exhausted.

 

I am waiting to see how this new system works and give it a fair chance before I leap to conclusions and fly off the handle.

 

There is so much that is been added I will wait and see how everything goes.

[quyxkh]

9 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:

Anybody care to provide a brief explanation on the niche appeal towards Linux and, more importantly, while it's still around? 😛

It's difficult to convey the feeling of actually owning your own computer to someone who's never experienced it.  

If you've got the attention span for it, read Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line, starting at the "GUIs" section (before that is now-utterly-unnecessary background material for people who've never seen a computer).

[Marinxar]

13 hours ago, faatal said:

Vehicles got some attention the last two days:

 

Added vehicle driving increases food consumption (added vehicles.xml foodDrain (normal,turbo), driving tag and _vehicleFood cvar).

Fixed SDTD-12623 Vehicles remember the player velocity when falling. (a19 bug)
Fixed vehicle physics not transferred when client or server took control (stuck gyrocopters).

Fixed vehicle engine would not stop if broken.

Added players exiting vehicles retain most velocity.
Added vehicles keep full velocity when driver exits and no wheel on ground.

Changed: Driving a vehicle adds 25% to your base food/water drain that you normally lose just standing around. Sprinting a vehicle adds 60% (minibike) to 40% (gyro) of the food/water drain that you would have while sprinting on foot. (Gazz)

 

Yes, driving vehicles in the dirty, rundown, apocalyptic world now consumes food.

I really like this . 

 

Honestly took me a few moments going back and forth, but thinking about it, it will add a lot to the late game, and won't have much impact in early game. It increase the necessity for cultivating food.  Yet, with good planning and thoughtfulness this will in no way be debilitating . 

[Onarr]

14 hours ago, faatal said:

I challenge you to drive a car down a beat up gravel or dirt road and see how easy it is. My wife and I did last year in a rental car and it was tense. Rock noise, bumping up and down, trying to not hit the big dips that might damage the car. That constant alertness and stress was definitely using calories.

 

Decaying old roads are not like the streets you are driving on now.

 

Now the gryo would not fall into that category, but I'd think sitting on a metal frame, looking down at the world with wind blasting you in the face and trying not to crash into something, would be equally stressful.

This is stupid. what purpose does it serve? You will essentially punish player for using vehicles. You can frame it however you want, but that is how it will feel. Especially stupid is that it is blanket solution, so there is no gameplay to decrease this consumption. And even if there was, how are you going to communicate this concept to players? It only brings frustration, nothing else. 

[Ryfyle]

21 minutes ago, Onarr said:

This is stupid. what purpose does it serve? You will essentially punish player for using vehicles. You can frame it however you want, but that is how it will feel. Especially stupid is that it is blanket solution, so there is no gameplay to decrease this consumption. And even if there was, how are you going to communicate this concept to players? It only brings frustration, nothing else. 

I think it was Iron Gut or Slow Metabolism that controls food bar decay. However your right, it does seem to be a way to punish people for using vehicles. Imagine If you can drive over a few pot holes IRL you have enough stamina to compete in the Iron Man Triathlon  in 7 DTD.

[Jost Amman]

21 minutes ago, Onarr said:

This is stupid. what purpose does it serve? You will essentially punish player for using vehicles. You can frame it however you want, but that is how it will feel. Especially stupid is that it is blanket solution, so there is no gameplay to decrease this consumption. And even if there was, how are you going to communicate this concept to players? It only brings frustration, nothing else. 

Dude, before throwing around stupid this and stupid that you could still give your feedback when A19 comes out and you actually get to play with it.

You know... like REAL feedback, not biased banter on something you can only make a wild guess on. 🙄

[Ryfyle]

5 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Dude, before throwing around stupid this and stupid that you could still give your feedback when A19 comes out and you actually get to play with it.

You know... like REAL feedback, not biased banter on something you can only make a wild guess on. 🙄

We have actual percentages. We can make models with these figures. We will have to bring 2 stacks of stew before we even think of looking at a Minibike. It's a pointless penalty for having a vehicle and excess food.

[Marinxar]

18 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Dude, before throwing around stupid this and stupid that you could still give your feedback when A19 comes out and you actually get to play with it.

You know... like REAL feedback, not biased banter on something you can only make a wild guess on. 🙄

Spot on .

With every major change you get people with knee-jerk reactions to it. Hell, I been there couple times myself in the past, but especially TFP have taught me to try something before jumping to conclusions.  

[beHypE]

25 minutes ago, Ryfyle said:

We have actual percentages. We can make models with these figures. We will have to bring 2 stacks of stew before we even think of looking at a Minibike. It's a pointless penalty for having a vehicle and excess food.

Wait what lmao.

 

Please go ahead and make models and predictions because all I can see is you overexaggerating stuff to make a case for your point of view. Let's take the highest value of 60% of added food drain on the vehicle, with the worst vehicle : the bicycle.

 

The bicycle has a sprint sprint of 10 blocks and I believe (this may be wrong) the sprinting speed is 5 blocks. That means you'll spend 2 times less time on a bicycle to get anywhere compared to sprinting, while also "only" having 60% of the drain. 

 

Basically, if you really think you need 2 stacks of stew to go somewhere with the worst vehicle in the game, that means going there by foot would have taken you around 7 stews... that's a hell of a trip bud.

[Gazz]

I don't know what "percentages" they think they have but I do know that I went over the balancing sometime Fri/Sat.

 

And no. I'm not discussing this in detail because some have clearly made up their mind already.

[Kanaan Brood]

I am really looking forward to ALL of the changes. Everything I am hearing is just going to add to all of the stages of the game. Early, mid and late stages are going to be a lot more interesting. I'm looking forward to new strategies for all of it. Great work gang. Cheers

[Jost Amman]

1 hour ago, Ryfyle said:

We have actual percentages. We can make models with these figures. We will have to bring 2 stacks of stew before we even think of looking at a Minibike. It's a pointless penalty for having a vehicle and excess food.

Look, even if I don't agree with your knee jerking approach I'm not saying you may not have a point there... I'm just saying that theorizing about something and actually playing the game to get the feel of it are often two different things. Sometimes even when a plan sounds bad to you on paper it can still give great results when it plays out.

 

Also, as Gazz said, you don't have all the information you need to really understand the balancing behind it.

[FileMachete]

Just my .02 cents but were I in TFPs shoes I would consider the initial, 'knee jerk' reactions. Maybe just to consider different ways to 'message' it.

I doubt many will argue against saying that there are a lot of folks who do, 'judge a book by it's cover'. And once judged, are reluctant to re-examine.

 

So while this is an assumption, I do expect that TFPs will maintain a somewhat 'rational' food consumption hierarchy. Something like;

Least consumption to greatest:

1) standing still

2) walking

3) driving any gas powered vehicle

4) riding bike

5) auger mining

6-7-8) fireaxe/pickaxe use / melee fighting / running

(certainly open for some debate. just off the cuff assuming 5 minutes continuous activity)

 

The pothole (pardon the pun) to avoid is something like winding up with a player who pedals a bike 2 klicks using far less food than someone who drives.

 

And might be worth noting that this is just a new piece to a larger puzzle they're working on.

If TFPs manage to make 'food', as a broad category, actually 'fun' then they be wizards!

Yet certainly it won't come easily, so I'm expecting, & ok with, some redos/rebalancing/changes. (think wolves. anyone expecting them to remain so weak?)

[canadianbluebeer]

I'm going to just wait and see:

 

A) how the food consumption works out when actually playing,

B) above know that TFP can/will tweak it if need be,

C) knowing *I* can tweak it if need be.

 

 

until then, non-issue.  (and I'm outta popcorn darn it!)

 

[Gazz]

As so often people are freaking out over their own imagination.

 

And then they wonder why "the Fun Pimps never tell us anything!"