Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[JamsCB]

On the wildlife topic, I was just out at Yellowstone a couple weeks ago shortly after it reopened. In just 3 days, multiple bear and bison attacks were reported. Now there's a 100% chance it's because people were being REALLY stupid and getting close, but the bears aren't going to run at you in game from 100 meters away either. I think the aggro distance was fine. I do like the added element of danger,  I do think the sheer number of bears, wolves & dire wolves is way too much from an available food supply perspective, unless they're eating zombies.  I'm curious to try the changes madmole has been working on, but I'm hoping the feeling of danger doesn't go away.

[lord_ahriman]

2 hours ago, madmole said:

I've been working all weekend on this. I think I have it pretty good now. It might be even subjectively harder than it was before. So now, in an upcoming version there are a fair amount of rabbits and chickens and rare big game, but the chance respawns every day. So if you dedicate time to hunting, you can feed yourself, where before there was plenty on day 1 or so then it was dry for 3 weeks. So for MP people can hunt and get food, but you are getting a chicken here, a rabbit there. I haven't seen a stag or pig yet, but I also haven't been actively hunting, just doing quests and killing what I can in between quests.

Sorry for the rushed version you guys got. What seems good looking at what spawned flying round in the editor is completely different than playing the game for 3-4 hours.

That is being worked on.

No need for sorry, we should all be thankful because we get a new game every single year. 

 

About spawning. For me it will be chicken or bust. I know it sounds ridiculous but I never kill rabbits because when I was a little kid I got a rabbit as pet. So, yeah, it's a freaking game, but I just can't kill any rabbit.

[Khalagar]

2 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:

Also, those are AWFUL rewards for a T5 quest. AWFUL.

 

Yeah, I was pretty unamused lol

 

The Quest before, he gave me a level 6 Steel Sledge and level 6 Impact Driver, that go around nothing was even worth selling back to him besides the sniper rifle =(

[MechanicalLens]

Just now, Khalagar said:

 

Yeah, I was pretty unamused lol

 

The Quest before, he gave me a level 6 Steel Sledge and level 6 Impact Driver, that go around nothing was even worth selling back to him besides the sniper rifle =(

At least you weren't offered paper for all the 5 rewards.

[faatal]

7 hours ago, insaneroy said:

So no chance of a more flyable gyrocopter.

 

A more flyable gyrocopter is a helicopter, which I hope to someday add to the game.

[Outlaw_187]

20 minutes ago, faatal said:

A more flyable gyrocopter is a helicopter, which I hope to someday add to the game.

Now this will really piss of the "this isn't reality" people, lol. 

[Mechanimal]

32 minutes ago, faatal said:

A more flyable gyrocopter is a helicopter, which I hope to someday add to the game.

Make it so:

 

[Aldranon]

4 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

B163: is it normal that bucks and zombies happily stroll together like best pals? 🤨

...and they're all equally spaced.  Social distancing?

 

OR:  Is the player really in a coma and in Part 2 the truth will be revealed?  A much worse fate awaits you when you wake!

[Mechanimal]

Just now, Mechanimal said:

Make it so:

 

"But that's not real"... oh...

https://www.thedrive.com/news/34753/the-winnebago-heli-home-was-a-real-flying-rv-that-needs-to-make-a-comeback-in-2020?fbclid=IwAR3126dd84cQuKBaCznR7JKSugHCQWTRUtI2SqLhkEIGTlIPqWYHmZP6Nx4

[wolfbain5]

Just now, Aldranon said:

...and they're all equally spaced.  Social distancing?

 

OR:  Is the player really in a coma and in Part 2 the truth will be revealed?  A much worse fate awaits you when you wake!

yeah, noticed that some animals aren't interacting with zombie like they used to. deer, rabbit and chickens still run. wolves and bears kill deer, havent seen a reg wolf near a zed yet, but dire wolves might as well be zombie pets.

[MechanicalLens]

2 minutes ago, wolfbain5 said:

yeah, noticed that some animals aren't interacting with zombie like they used to. deer, rabbit and chickens still run. wolves and bears kill deer, havent seen a reg wolf near a zed yet, but dire wolves might as well be zombie pets.

Too bad. My favorite tactic when being chased down by a wolf was to get a zombie between me and it; worked a treat every time.

[Laz Man]

1 minute ago, MechanicalLens said:

Too bad. My favorite tactic when being chased down by a wolf was to get a zombie between me and it; worked a treat every time.

I think zombies vs wolves is still a thing.  I had one attack a burning zombie and the zombie won.

[MechanicalLens]

1 minute ago, Laz Man said:

I think zombies vs wolves is still a thing.  I had one attack a burning zombie and the zombie won.

Fun fact: I held some "Zombolimpics" in a creative test world one time. 50 strippers vs 50 bears... The strippers won every time, even 1v1.

[Mechanimal]

5 minutes ago, wolfbain5 said:

yeah, noticed that some animals aren't interacting with zombie like they used to. deer, rabbit and chickens still run. wolves and bears kill deer, havent seen a reg wolf near a zed yet, but dire wolves might as well be zombie pets.

I have seen a zed fighting a wolf, the zombo won, that time, I was too busy fighting multiple bears and yet another dire wolf.

[hiemfire]

22 minutes ago, Mechanimal said:

Make it so:

 

 

21 minutes ago, Mechanimal said:

"But that's not real"... oh...

https://www.thedrive.com/news/34753/the-winnebago-heli-home-was-a-real-flying-rv-that-needs-to-make-a-comeback-in-2020?fbclid=IwAR3126dd84cQuKBaCznR7JKSugHCQWTRUtI2SqLhkEIGTlIPqWYHmZP6Nx4

Ya, it's real. Good luck fitting a couch where the PM artist drew it though. The engine is in the nose of that one with the necessary firewall right where the foot of the couch would be (the powershaft runs into a gearbox just about where the upper cabinets in the PM drawing are so half of them would be unusable). Personally I'd prefer a Unimog for a mobile operations base over the Westland.

[Mechanimal]

3 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

 

Ya, it's real. Good luck fitting a couch where the PM artist drew it though. The engine is in the nose of that one with the necessary firewall right where the foot of the couch would be (the powershaft runs into a gearbox just about where the upper cabinets in the PM drawing are so half of them would be unusable). Personally I'd prefer a Unimog for a mobile operations base over the Westland.

Yeah it certainly was not the most practical thing. I'm surprised they actually built it, albeit looks like little more than a rough proof-of-concept slapped together by modifying a Sikorsky. To really do something like this right it would be better to design it for this purpose from scratch. Ideally use the general idea for inspiration to make something appropriate and useful in 7dtd. It's a game, the rule of fun is enough to justify it imho.

A Unimog would be nice, yeah, but the Jeep now is not all that different. If we got another large vehicle I'd prefer it be more different than that, maybe something like an RV. And no I don't think an RV would be overkill or OP... think about it. Slow, a gas hog, haha-nope for effective offroading, and a serious death trap if caught in a mob of zeds, so using it on horde night should be more than a tad risky. But it would be a rly nice mobile mini-base, have decent storage and a built in campfire/stove, forge, and chem station, and so on, which could maybe be mods. Could probably access them from the side or something, having an actual interior may be difficult to pull of for a vehicle, dunno, fun to think about though.

[hiemfire]

11 minutes ago, Mechanimal said:

Yeah it certainly was not the most practical thing. I'm surprised they actually built it, albeit looks like little more than a rough proof-of-concept slapped together by modifying a Sikorsky.

Was getting ready to argue about who made the design but I decided to go back and double check. We're both right.  Westland licensed the Sikorsky design and produced it under the name of Whirlwind. 

 

11 minutes ago, Mechanimal said:

Could probably access them from the side or something, having an actual interior may be difficult to pull of for a vehicle, dunno, fun to think about though.

Hmm, pop out style? That'd be interesting. What size of RV we talking about anyways? They range from the size of a small pickup to the size of a semi-truck.

 

There is also having a portable module for a Skycrane/Tarhe to lug around.  

[Roland]

7 hours ago, Khalagar said:

Bacon and Eggs should get schematics, but the higher tier foods should be perk only, so there's more reason to actually pick the perks

That takes us back to A17 where everything was perk only. Maybe it would be okay if limited to food but the game gets pretty boring when everything is unlocked by perks. 

[Aldranon]

10 minutes ago, Roland said:

That takes us back to A17 where everything was perk only. Maybe it would be okay if limited to food but the game gets pretty boring when everything is unlocked by perks. 

I don't know.  If you take my wife's opinion of my culinary skills, a boiled water schematic and three or four perks might be necessary.

 

[wolfbain5]

like I said, it was the dire wolf. and yeah I see zombies attacking. but not the dire wolf attacking.

 

also, they said something about writable storage? how is that done. I don't see the option.

 

 

***************************************
here you go.
QA Tester-unholyjoe
***************************************

[beerfly]

7 minutes ago, Aldranon said:

I don't know.  If you take my wife's opinion of my culinary skills, a boiled water schematic and three or four perks might be necessary.

 

The one from 7dtd works IRL, just don't put the campfire inside. Gets smokey mate.

[hiemfire]

5 minutes ago, beerfly said:

The one from 7dtd works IRL, just don't put the campfire inside. Gets smokey mate.

Cowled box fan in wall pulling the smoke outside. Heck, the blower from a swamp cooler would work if set up right.  

[max2k]

7 hours ago, meganoth said:

You may have gotten that impression because stone tools don't have random stats (they never had AFAIK). In XML there still is the random range of plus/minus 15%.

 

Speaking about it got at least missinformation out of my head i would hav e carried for who know how long ....

[Gazz]

Stone tools would be super easy to spam craft until you get a "good roll". That would be the dumbest design ever.

[Blake_]

9 hours ago, faatal said:

It already is an entity. It already has position checks that fix it when it falls off the world. I can toss one underground and it teleports above ground just fine and repeats with random xz jitter and height over and over if needed. That is not the issue. All of the destruction cases are logged. My guess is they are not reloading somehow when their chunk loads.

Oof. I see. That's a harder nail to chew. Seems as easy to solve as the square Vram artifacts that appear when I create a new game, play an 8k or explore too much in a 4k map, but with no restart workaround this time.

 

Uploading the bag info to all the players minus the sprite upon death and reloading the chunk for all the absent/reentering players  isn't guaranteed to solve it either, but last time it happened to me we were away from the chunk as we both died. Then came back, my partner saw the bag sprite and I of course couldn't. He "god moded" and nothing. Anyhow, this issue is RARE as ballz. 

 

I'm confident that deleting all on death will result in a lot of positive feedback from the players (...runs away laughing hysterically...)

 

But I think I have a bit of feedback for you regarding recent fixes and some other "new" annoying stuff that might be real easy to tweak, @faatal 

 

 

-ZDs still die standing. Now it is EXTREMELY rare though, and it happened to me as an admin with the hanging-eyeball woman. I would say, if before it was a 10% , now it is a 0.001%. 1 in 1000 zds is kinda guaranteed to happen if you use high damage weapons and fight huge numbers. To try and repro it, spawn 1000 ordinary Zds in sets of 100 and kill them with, say, a fully modded tactical assault rifle. I could recommend you test with a partner and both of you try the massacre simultaneously, but somehow I think clients are fixed? I can't know for sure.

 

Animal stuff:

 

1.Animals bunny-hop too much in a19 . They won't stop jumping all the time. Also I'd rather see them rotate, or rotate upwards in a weird way to avoid obstacles until proper spine animations or pathing code is in place.

 

2.Animals need to avoid POIs when moving around the world or "fleeing from the player". They get stuck or delayed or glitched too much inside the POI limits, and also commonly in fences and walls. Rather than emergent gameplay that is always ugly to see and doesn't really offer much in return.

 

3. Bears/Grace need custom AI code in order to not glitch that much through everything, doors, walls, etc.

(I understand that change is planned an requires code, so I just casually let it drop here). It would also scare the hell out of me if they had trader REKT's voice when chasing you.

 

 

4. Ragdoll entity limbs glitch through ALL the entities on death. Looks bad, like me at 3 A.M.

 

A19 is awesome. I must say, I'm not in the least impressed by the new content this time, but the lightning AND the entity feedback from combat in general is amazing.