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Alpha 19 Dev Diary


madmole

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5 hours ago, madmole said:

This is what I'm testing now which will be in the next build unless I change it again:

 

Changed: All small game (rabbits and chickens) and large game (boars, and deer) spawn every day or night at any time. Small game has a high chance to spawn, large game has a low chance to spawn.

Large Predator animals such as bears and dire wolves only spawn at night in the forests. Wolves have a very small chance to spawn in forests during the day

Changed: Enemy respawn time is reduced in the wasteland. At night, Zombies will respawn immediately, making the wasteland harder to survive at night

 

This sounds awesome, but I think that Large Predators should be able to spawn at day time also. Make it very very small and rare chance, but if they spawn only at night, then some people won`t ever see them as they are hiding/organizing stuff at night and that would be a shame. Also it adds for a great gameplay to change your plans/route because there is an unexpected predator in your way.

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Large predators spawn at night but can live into the day. Also, the restriction is only for the Forest so you can definitely run into cougars and bears in the snow biome during the day. Forest biome is the noob biome.  

There needs to be a pressure valve in the Forest. 

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Not sure if it's desired or the right place for it, but here is some feedback based on my gameplay. Although I don't think it matters much for most of this, my settings were Survivalist, Horde Every Night, 24 zombies BM spawn cap, 120 Min days (weak I know, but I like to have a little breathing room with horde every night), and Jog during the day, other settings at default. So far on Day 19, lvl 75 with 5863 kills. Also I play with self imposed rules of 'no cheesing/running away from the horde', I have to kill every horde and I can't use a defence that they can't meaningfully damage/get at me somehow. Started off with STR/INT for mining/crafting with no combat skills, then later on picked up AGI for Handguns as my main combat skill, with a side of explosives/shotguns for fun/situational use. Kept notes on overall progression (ie when I got vehicles, certain key items), but I don't think it's relevant here.

 

Loot Progression

 

While overall I feel like the loot progression is more or less fine (maybe could use more tweaks), there are a few rough patches that might need to be looked at. One of the issues is that the way loot transitions between 'tiers' is you go from getting Q5-6 items of a previous tier into Q1-2 items of the next tier. Sometimes this is fine, but in many cases a lower tier Q5-6 item is just straight up way better then a Q1-2 of the next tier. For example a Q5-6 AK is going to be way better then a Q1-2 Tac Rifle, since the Tac Rifle isn't really much better even at equal quality levels. Marksman to Sniper Rifle is also fairly bad, as the damage is basically the same and the only real advantage of the Sniper is it has a bigger magazine size. This is especially bad with stone to iron tools, as Q5-6 stone tools use little stamina and are superior to really bad iron tools. It's the worst with shovels, due to basically every diggable thing being 200 or 250 HP and this means in most cases the way the breakpoints play out, if you have points in mining a high quality Stone Shovel will usually dig as fast as a medium quality Iron Shovel. If you don't have points in mining to make the breakpoints more favourable, then you probably also don't have points in stamina since it's also under STR, so the Iron Shovel will be slower then the Stone due to stamina problems. However, this honestly is a problem with almost every item class. There are only rare cases I would use a Q1-2 item of a 'higher tier' then a Q5-6 of the previous, which would basically be Auger/Chainsaw over Steel Tools, and Marksman Rifle over Hunting Rifle (because the Hunting Rifle is just terrible), and probably a few others I'm forgetting.

 

Speaking of stone tools, if you are going to extend the stone age, adding a stone pickaxe would make sense, as trying to mine iron with a stone axe is like pulling teeth. It would probably help with all the complaining about stamina too, as people wouldn't feel 'forced' to use iron pickaxes before getting a few ranks in Sexual Tyrannosaurus. I got around this by just rushing mining/stamina perks and spamming drinks/coffee and crafting an iron pick, but I could see how it might be frustrating to some if you don't know how to make this transition.

 

Another problem with these loot tier transitions, is that back in A17 experimental, I remember how sell prices of items were re-balanced such that Q1 items were basically worthless, because in A17 you would get dozens of Q1 guns all the time from loot and it flooded the economy from day 1. However this doesn't make much sense anymore, because now you have situations where you are going from getting Q5-6 Pistols for example, that sell for a lot, to getting Q1-2 Magnums which basically sell for nothing. This obviously isn't game breaking or anything, but it feels pretty bad that often times 'going up' a tier means you actually get worse loot (both in terms of usefulness and sell value) for a while until the quality levels catch up.

 

While this might not be a serious issue, and there may be other possible solutions I would suggest compressing quality based sell modifiers a little more; ie make Q6 sell for less then currently and Q1 sell for more, as the old issue of getting dozens of Q1 guns on day 1 is no longer the case due to the gated loot. Also making the highest tier items sell for slightly less would probably help the late game economy a little.

 

Loot Gating

 

While I already mentioned I generally feel the overall loot progression is fine, I have heard talk of gating things even more, and I would like to voice my concerns about it. Even during my playthrough I honestly seriously considered just stopping looting once I had the absolute basics and just waiting until I leveled up to loot more, as getting more random stone tools/blunderbusses wasn't particularly useful to me. The reason I kept looting was the chance for good mods/schematics/ammo. If more of these 'misc' items were to be tied to gamestage in loot, then I probably wouldn't have bothered to loot more then a few houses for the bare minimums like a Wrench until I was lvl 15-20+. I could see a few top tier schematics being partly level gated, but I don't think the majority should have level gates (and even the high end ones should only have low gates just to avoid them dropping on day 3 or whatever).

 

Also this is only vaguely related, but while I do think gun ammo should keep dropping even at low levels, there probably is a little bit too much of it. Magnum ammo is still very rare, but 7.62 and 9mm are absurdly common and you can easily get stacks and stacks of them just from loot, esp if you get the magazine for 'more ammo from loot'. Probably could use a tweak.

 

Difficulty

 

Now that Gamestage isn't modified by difficulty level, the hordes/sleepers feel pretty weak compared to what I was used to at the same point in progression. I realise this was probably changed to avoid difficulty level affecting loot quality, and it could be argued difficulty scaled gamestage a bit too much before, but I think there is a middle ground to be found here. But I assume this is something, that if it were to be changed back, would be in A20 as it would probably require adding a different GS calculation for hordes/sleepers then for loot.

 

Weapons/Gunplay

 

There seems to be this weird jitter/delayed recoil after firing guns now. First you shoot, and you get the recoil. Then about 0.1-0.2 seconds later you get this jitter/jerk, usually back towards the original position as if your character is trying to compensate for recoil. The first time I shot guns in this alpha I thought my hand had a tremor or my mouse was broken, it was pretty strange. Not sure if this is intended functionality, but it doesn't really feel right (the initial recoil is fine, just talking about the 'after jitter').

 

Zombie Armour/Armour Piercing seems to be broken. When testing hollow point ammo vs AP ammo, HP ammo always did more damage, even vs armoured zombies like Soldiers or Demolishers. What is even more interesting is that Demolishers do still take greatly reduced damage, but they don't seem to care about the ammo's armour modifiers at all; HP ammo does more damage vs them then AP ammo (since HP ammo does more damage by default). So it does seem like armour exists, but ammo isn't interacting properly with it. Penetrator seems to suffer from the same issue (it makes no difference to have it or not vs armoured zombies). Ultimately this means there is little drawback to always using HP ammo (except for Sniper Rifles, which penetrate up to 5 targets with AP ammo making them insane for blood moon hordes).

 

In terms of general weapon balance, I already touched on some of this, but it's a bit of a mixed bag. The Tac Rifle feels like an AK with a burst mod built in, which is not really all that useful since it's easy to just practice some trigger discipline and go for headshots instead of spraying full auto. It doesn't really feel like a higher tier weapon. Sniper Rifle vs Marksman Rifle is basically an extra extended Mag upgrade, which is nice, but again doesn't really feel like 'higher tier'. Probably the only new weapons that actually feel like a real upgrade over the previous tier is the Desert Vulture over the Magnum, due to higher fire rate, bigger magazine, and way faster reload, which makes it way better despite it's slightly lower damage per shot, and the Combat Shotgun over Pump due to bigger magazine/faster fire rate. 

 

Int weapons in general badly need some love, although I assume it probably won't happen until A20 since it would require adding more weapon types. Stun Batons are just bad, and really need higher/lower tier versions to compete with other melee weapons. The Sledge Turret is serviceable after the buffs, but idk if it's really 'good' still or worth investing in. And the Junk Turret, while stronger then before due to the new ammo types, still has the issue of constantly setting off Demolishers in late game hordes, so you basically can't use it when demos show up, which kinda makes it way too situational. Not sure what the solution is there, because making Junk Turrets NEVER set off Demos would probably be too OP, but as it is you are just playing with fire using them during a late game horde, and it makes it feel even worse to invest into INT weapons, because they basically suck early game due to not being available/the sledge turret being iffy, and then they suck in the late game because of this.

 

I really like what was done with knives/bows with the sneak damage modifier. At least means crossbows aren't strictly worse then guns in all situations anymore, although still situational.

 

I think this has been mentioned, but the Sniper Rifle first person model needs to be a bit smaller, and it's iron sights/reflex sight need to be improved as they are basically detrimental to you. I know it's intended to be used with a scope, but it could be improved.

 

I like how Handguns are sticking to the theme of 'resource efficient' with cheaper ammo/good damage per cost ratios combined with high accuracy even in hip fire. Good way to make them distinct. Although I'm not sure the SMG belongs in T3 with the Desert Vulture, as the Vulture is pretty powerful, while the SMG is just a Pistol with a better fire rate and a bigger mag. But to be fair, I don't think Handguns are in any way 'weak', they might actually be the best overall gun type tbh.

 

Demolishers

 

It seems a bit odd you can 'trigger' the detonator on a dead Demo (it's purely visual, but if the corpse can't detonate it probably shouldn't be able to visually be primed either). And sometimes when shooting a Demo corpse and removing a limb from it, they will emit a grunt as if they were still alive.

 

Performance

 

Not sure what is causing this, but when I am indoors, my GPU is underutilized (1080TI, but I'm not sure the type of card matters tbh) like crazy. The game has no issue using 100% of the GPU outdoors, but when I am indoors (like inside a POI, or inside a horde base), it starts dropping GPU usage over time, down to in some cases 10-30% which causes framerates of 15-20 which is basically unplayable (and it's not some kind of heat throttling, because the card cools down to 50-60C when this happens, it's basically going idle). Usually going outside seems to partly fix the issue, but it's very inconsistent. Sadly I don't really have much more useful information on this and there could be many causes. I just haven't seen anything like this in other games however.

 

Animals

 

I'm sure it's already been said, but yeah there are way too many animals since the most recent experimental. Food was already a total non issue even on day 1 before, but now it's completely silly. Too many predators as well, if this many animals are going to spawn, predators should probably be at least partly linked to gamestage (so that there are less of them at lvl 1) to make the game more beginner friendly. 

 

Non A19 Specific Misc Stuff

 

I don't think this is A19 specific, but I don't like how you get less EXP per block mined with higher tier tools (ie Steel Pick gives less exp then Iron Pick for the same block, and Auger gives less then the Steel pick). While I understand it's likely to curb crazy power leveling via mining (like it was in A16), it's probably too far in the direction of making mining exp almost irrelevant in the late game. Most other sources of EXP naturally scale; higher tier zombies give more exp and you generally kill faster with better weapons, loot exp directly scales with level, and construction exp scales because you tend to build bigger/gather resources faster in the late game. Mining exp feels almost static due to this exp reduction mechanic, and while I was noticing meaningful exp gains from mining in the early game, my exp bar would barely even move later in the game, even speed mining with an auger. Obviously part of that is it just takes more exp to level at higher levels, but I was still levelling almost as fast from looting/killing due to just getting more exp from that for the before mentioned reasons. 

 

This also isn't new, but the Auger and Chainsaw are I think literally the only items still using the old durability system, where their damage goes down as durability goes below 50%. I think all other guns/tools/armour have been changed to work the same at 100% to 1% since multiple alphas ago. Should probably be changed for consistency.

 

Anyways, there is a lot more to say, esp about perk tree balance, but I think this is enough misc ramblings for one post.

 

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6 hours ago, Adam the Waster said:

how come you can craft a steel club in you're backback?

and it is faster to craft then a Baseball bat!

 

A level 2 baseball bat takes 3:05 while a level 2 steel Mace takes 2:30!

 

 

Same with the Impact driver! (in crafting with a backpack)

Will be fixed in the next patch.

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5 hours ago, Blake_ said:

Elementary, dear Madmole. Sounds like you are describing kind of an event system for animals that rules threat and spawns organically by animal type and amount of players. Imma wait for a20 before honouring my forum title again. This animal tweak ruined meat abundance for a19 though. b157 had the sweet spot with maybe too long of  a spawn cycle for the meat bearers (7 days if I'm not mistaken). Today, in a little more than 1 hour I got 375+ meat and the level of threat was through the roof despite being just day 1.

Yeah I'm working on it. I think I have a solution for sp and mp though that will work pretty well, I just have to get the right balance.

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8 minutes ago, madmole said:

Yeah I'm working on it. I think I have a solution for sp and mp though that will work pretty well, I just have to get the right balance.

It's a delicate balance alright. If wolves/bears/etc. only spawn at night, then many of us will very rarely, if ever, encounter them as we passively play the game, which would be a mighty shame; on most nights a lot of us are mining, organizing our storage, etc. On the other hand, if wolves, for instance, had a small chance to spawn during daytime, then we might end up with a beaker situation - beakers are rare, but by the time you are crafting a chemistry station, you probably already have at least 3, maybe 4-5 beakers at base. "Implausible" doesn't always lead up to its name.

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27 minutes ago, betam4x said:

Just need a basketball!

You can use rocks and snowballs for now lol...

 

Edit:  I wonder if the rocks/snowballs  go through the ring though...Time to find out ... FOR SCIENCE!

 

Edit2: NOPE....😑

...like the invisible Shaq is standing there to reject me everytime lol.... 🤣

 

A19.0_2020-07-11_19-30-32.jpg

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19 minutes ago, madmole said:

Yeah I'm working on it. I think I have a solution for sp and mp though that will work pretty well, I just have to get the right balance.

Hey MM, thanks for hanging with us on a Saturday and not letting the "passionate" get the best of you. :)  We appreciate you!

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Does anyone besides me do a Junk Turret build? Shocked I've not seen a single person mention either new Junk Ammo or discuss them. As the resident Guy Who Rambles About Junk Turrets A Lot™ I guess I'll give my opinion and gladly welcome any tests or initial impressions

 

AP Ammo -  This is interesting and what I've transitioned to late game because why not, but I'm not sure it's really all that much better than normal ammo. It has two critical flaws for me that hurt it. 1 is that you can't craft it in your pocket, so you have to go back to your workbench to make it which means you can't just pocket craft Junk Ammo on the fly while doing a PoI, which is important because the other issue is you will burn through A LOT of iron.

 

I have started using the Junk Turret only for the big fights and use the Junk Sledges instead to save  ammo, and will still easily burn through 1K AP Junk Turret Ammo on a single Shotgun Messiah run. Which is 3200 iron I think, with the bulk crafting discount, and 5,000 iron without it. I can burn through 20K Iron in a horde night easily if I'm not careful. Of course, I can go mine 20K iron in 10 minutes so it's not that bad

 

Overall - 8/10. Objectively superior to regular ammo, but the upgrade is very minimal. I use them because I can afford it, but I'm pretty skeptical of it really making a very big difference, and it's a MASSIVE iron sink. I cannot stress enough how fast you can burn through a 1K stack of it lol. I bet if I used only junk turrets for a Shotgun Messiah, I would easily go through 2-3 thousand AP Turret Ammo which would be 15,000 iron to replace. Compared to me using Auto Shottie and Sledge only and using like 100 Shotgun shells max for a Shotgun Messiah run

 

 

Shotgun Ammo - A bit too costly to make since it takes lead from Buckshot which could go to the vastly superior shotgun shells. I don't have the game open atm, but I think Shotgun shells are something like 240 damage each (I think it's 24 x 10 pellets) and the Junk Shells were something much lower like 8 x 10? I think? Don't quote me on the exact numbers, I was looking at them at like 5 in the morning last night. Their damage is quite low, even a level 1 unperked Double Barrel or even Blunderbuss will almost certainly do more damage.  Turret Shells have a much higher clip though so you can spam out a barrage if you need compared to the Double Barrel

 

I think they are okayish for handheld, but the bigger issue is they don't seem to function well at all in placement mode. My turret burned through like 45-50 almost instantly because it went nucking futs on a single zombie walking towards it. It seems to fire REALLY fast when the zed isn't even in range and will blow half it's load before the zed dies

 

Overall - 6/10 in handheld, 3/10 in placement mode. As a hand held weapon, a Junk Turret with Turret Shells leaves much to be desired, but is functional. In placement mode I do not see any benefit to it over regular Junk Turret ammo nor can I think of any situation where it would ever be more practical than just using default Junk Ammo. If you could craft this by default it might be a bit better, but requiring RNG to even find the book to craft it doesn't help

 

Needs more testing on the shells especially, but I'm curious if anyone else has tried them yet.

 

Also for AP ammo, what zeds even have armor? Is it just the military zombie and biker / construction worker helmets? I basically never use AP or HP ammo on any weapon tbh

 

 

Edit: I was WAY off on my numbers, the Junk Shells are only 2 damage x 8 pellets . . .16 damage lol. Shotguns are 14 x 10 so 16 damage vs 140

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6 minutes ago, Khalagar said:

Does anyone besides me do a Junk Turret build? Shocked I've not seen a single person mention either new Junk Ammo or discuss them. As the resident Guy Who Rambles About Junk Turrets A Lot™ I guess I'll give my opinion and gladly welcome any tests or initial impressions

 

AP Ammo -  This is interesting and what I've transitioned to late game because why not, but I'm not sure it's really all that much better than normal ammo. It has two critical flaws for me that hurt it. 1 is that you can't craft it in your pocket, so you have to go back to your workbench to make it which means you can't just pocket craft Junk Ammo on the fly while doing a PoI, which is important because the other issue is you will burn through A LOT of iron.

 

I have started using the Junk Turret only for the big fights and use the Junk Sledges instead to save  ammo, and will still easily burn through 1K AP Junk Turret Ammo on a single Shotgun Messiah run. Which is 3200 iron I think, with the bulk crafting discount, and 5,000 iron without it. I can burn through 20K Iron in a horde night easily if I'm not careful. Of course, I can go mine 20K iron in 10 minutes so it's not that bad

 

Overall - 8/10. Objectively superior to regular ammo, but the upgrade is very minimal. I use them because I can afford it, but I'm pretty skeptical of it really making a very big difference, and it's a MASSIVE iron sink. I cannot stress enough how fast you can burn through a 1K stack of it lol. I bet if I used only junk turrets for a Shotgun Messiah, I would easily go through 2-3 thousand AP Turret Ammo which would be 15,000 iron to replace. Compared to me using Auto Shottie and Sledge only and using like 100 Shotgun shells max for a Shotgun Messiah run

 

 

Shotgun Ammo - A bit too costly to make since it takes lead from Buckshot which could go to the vastly superior shotgun shells. I don't have the game open atm, but I think Shotgun shells are something like 240 damage each (I think it's 24 x 10 pellets) and the Junk Shells were something much lower like 8 x 10? I think? Don't quote me on the exact numbers, I was looking at them at like 5 in the morning last night. Their damage is quite low, even a level 1 unperked Double Barrel or even Blunderbuss will almost certainly do more damage.  Turret Shells have a much higher clip though so you can spam out a barrage if you need compared to the Double Barrel

 

I think they are okayish for handheld, but the bigger issue is they don't seem to function well at all in placement mode. My turret burned through like 45-50 almost instantly because it went nucking futs on a single zombie walking towards it. It seems to fire REALLY fast when the zed isn't even in range and will blow half it's load before the zed dies

 

Overall - 6/10 in handheld, 3/10 in placement mode. As a hand held weapon, a Junk Turret with Turret Shells leaves much to be desired, but is functional. In placement mode I do not see any benefit to it over regular Junk Turret ammo nor can I think of any situation where it would ever be

 

Needs more testing on the shells especially, but I'm curious if anyone else has tried them yet.

 

Also for AP ammo, what zeds even have armor? Is it just the military zombie and biker / construction worker helmets? I basically never use AP or HP ammo on any weapon tbh

Im a junk head and im proud of it...just havent had time to do a full SP playthrough yet...

 

I already know how I am going to adapt my A18 horde base with the new robo sledge.  Here is my A18 horde night progression in A18 (PER/INT build) if your interested.

 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLImfSL_y9jpjN5H_26OOENrpnSuo3FQv5

 

Edit: Demo's are armored targets.

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As I mentioned in my long post above, armour piercing seems to be bugged ATM in A19, as a even vs armoured zombies HP ammo does more damage since the armour modifiers from the player/ammo seem to be ignored entirely now, HP doesn't boost armour and AP doesn't lower it (but I haven't tested this with junk turrets specifically, just regular guns). Makes Demo zombies extremely hard to kill currently.


For example, a maxed out Desert Vulture (Q6, 10 Agi, 5 Gunslinger, 4 mods), deals about 170 headshot damage (depends on the weapons' damage roll ofc) to a Demo zombie with HP ammo, but only 130 with AP (and 130 with regular too) Shouldn't be the case, HP should be basically worthless and AP should be stronger then regular. Ranks in Penetrator also don't change the damage in the slightest.

 

In comparison the same gun with HP ammo does nearly 450 headshot damage to an irradiated cop and about 350 to an irradiated biker (would have to double check, but rough ballpark). So it's not that zombies don't have armour, but the ammo modifiers aren't being used.

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5 hours ago, Adam the Waster said:

@faatal is it even possible that the "bag disappearing" will go away?

 

or is it impossible to fix 

 

cuz i already lost 2 Bags worth of loot! i died 2 times in my map and each time my loot just Vanish!

I'm sure it is possible to fix, but bugs don't get fixed until a cause is found (or sometimes changes just happen to fix a bug).

Testers have never been able to reliably reproduce it. When I test it, it does not happen.

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On the subject of progression, I think either craft XP needs to be shared within a group OR craft XP needs to be reduced by 40% or so. My husband and I started our characters in our joint game at the same time and play at the same time. He has 5x my kills but I'm 9 levels/10 GS above him because of my crafting.

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52 minutes ago, faatal said:

I'm sure it is possible to fix, but bugs don't get fixed until a cause is found (or sometimes changes just happen to fix a bug).

Testers have never been able to reliably reproduce it. When I test it, it does not happen.

Seems to me that the only solution is treating it as an entity when player drops it, an entity with position checks that teleports to the closest visible location (both sprite and bag) whenever the check notices too much rolling or bad coordinates.

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9 hours ago, Vintorez said:

I know there are just sometimes traps adn that's fun, gotta go toe to toe now and then. But I'm talking entire PoIs, entire buildings that seemingly just say "Sorry, should have gone strength or fortitude."

Some attributes are hard mode compared to Fortitude (Mid-late game) and Strength (The whole game).

 

I consider the choice of attribute(s), another difficulty settings!  I'm always impressed when someone like, Glock9 or Kage848 do something hard, because it is hard!

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On 7/11/2020 at 12:53 AM, Marinxar said:

Yeah, we not talking about the plastic bows you shoot the stick-on arrows with. That, contrary to believe, won't kill a zombie.

 

Go try and @%$*#! a proper 75lb break power compound bow, which is probably what you need to do any serious hunting with. Unless you just want to anger a boar.

I own a compound bow and I actually enjoy archery IRL, it still doesn't take that much strength to fully pull a bow back if you use the proper method.  And once they are pulled back extra strength doesn't matter.  Besides the fact that the bows in the game are not compound bows, they are simple bows which take even less strength to fully pull back.  My point still stands.

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Just now, GoldsharkROU said:

the boars are broken !, it can't be that they are harder than the bare MOE!
I died several times trying to hunt with bow and arrow or trebuchets ...

 

Boars NP for me...Wait until you meet the direwolf...😂

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