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Alpha 19 Dev Diary


madmole

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19 minutes ago, Daruma said:

Thanks for the polite response. I honestly expected less cordiality. 

 

I love the game. As does my wife. When we were looking for a co-op survival game that checked all the boxes, there was 7 Days. Literally nothing else had everything we wanted in that genre. 

 

But make no mistake - the big draw for us (and I have to assume more than 2% of other users) was building an effective base to "beat the hord", so to speak. It really seems like some of the updates I've seen on the PC end were implemented specifically to thwart that style of play. I can see and understand the flip-side of that too... just think it's possible to cater to both play styles at once. 

 

Again.. love the game. 

Well, building a defense base and building a VANITY base are different things.

 

5 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

Never knew that was a thing.  I wonder how challenging that be to program...sounds like a wonderful feature for not just players but the level designers as well.

and the death sentence for Fataal

 

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13 minutes ago, Daruma said:

I have to ask then - and honest question... sincerely not trying to be confrontational..

 

What was the deal with the digging zombies? It seems like that aspect was custom designed to throw a big wrench in the gears of people with underground bases that had effectively neutralized the hord threat.

Were you aware that it was once a thing where a player could dig a 3 vowel hole in the ground and cover himself and be completely immune from any threat?

 

As been stated many times before, the devs don't go out of their way looking for ways to make  players lives harder.  They focus on unintended AI behavior and fix accordingly.

 

People just get way too attached to X strategy and get upset when it no longer works.  I can understand the frustration but this is early access and should expect those type of changes...

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1 minute ago, meganoth said:

Well, building a defense base and building a VANITY base are different things.

 

On a fundamental level are they, though?

 

I'm not talking about a replica of the Sistine Chapel or anything, but I don't think wanting a functional and at the same time attractive/well decorated base should be mutually exclusive? And that is kind of missing the point. 

 

At the end of the day, building is building. If that's the aspect of the game I want to center around, rather than running around and looting POI'S, I would be a little angry at updates that, on the surface at least, seem to be intentionally nerfing my ability to play that way. 

4 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Were you aware that it was once a thing where a player could dig a 3 vowel hole in the ground and cover himself and be completely immune from any threat?

 

As been stated many times before, the devs don't go out of their way looking for ways to make  players lives harder.  They focus on unintended AI behavior and fix accordingly.

 

People just get way too attached to X strategy and get upset when it no longer works.  I can understand the frustration but this is early access and should expect changes.

The "3 vowel hidding space" is definitely an issue. One I'm not sure I'd have a good answer to. That being said, I would have liked to see something that struck a middle ground. Thwarting obvious attempts to "game the game mechanics" while at the same time, not completely invalidating 70+ in-game days of building a vast bunker complex. 😛

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11 minutes ago, Daruma said:

On a fundamental level are they, though?

 

I'm not talking about a replica of the Sistine Chapel or anything, but I don't think wanting a functional and at the same time attractive/well decorated base should be mutually exclusive? And that is kind of missing the point. 

 

At the end of the day, building is building. If that's the aspect of the game I want to center around, rather than running around and looting POI'S, I would be a little angry at updates that, on the surface at least, seem to be intentionally nerfing my ability to play that way. 

The "3 vowel hidding space" is definitely an issue. One I'm not sure I'd have a good answer to. That being said, I would have liked to see something that struck a middle ground. Thwarting obvious attempts to "game the game mechanics" while at the same time, not completely invalidating 70+ in-game days of building a vast bunker complex. 😛

Last I checked, they added a junk sledges, and made blade traps that don't trigger Demolishers.  Probably a great time to start playing again for players who shelved the game to try and innovate a new defense strategy.  The streamers out there don't seem to have any problems coming up with new innovative designs so there is no reason others cannot.  Isn't that one reason we play games?  To figure out ways to overcome the challenges they present?

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3 hours ago, STyK_ said:

part of my cheese rules, who builds and repairs in fight! I'm not a fortnite fan obviously. More suspense my way. It is a little scary after going and repairing and see how damaged the block got though and I didn't see it happening. Life could be easier but where is the fun in that.

 

Edit: I hope you guys were able to do something with that bug I noticed, I wasted alot of ammo confirming something wasn't right.

LOL  If I was in a castle and the barbarians were trying to beat down the door I'd surely be trying to shore up that door in the middle of the fight.  

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1 hour ago, Daruma said:

Alright. I had to say something at this point. 

 

I game on PC and console. I own and enjoy the game on console. I will not be purchasing it on PC until TFP becomes a little more responsive to the community that supports their work.

 

To create a game that is obviously centered around building and then lambast people who enjoy that aspect of the game is a little childish. I find the "2% vanity builder" stat to be highly suspect. I mean, c'mon - the very first description of the game I read, written by TFP, described it as a "voxel based zombie survival game." It really sounds like your feelings are a bit hurt over the fact your user base isn't playing the game exactly as you would like them to. Are you developing a game for others to enjoy, or for yourself to enjoy vicariously by dictating play styles that you don't (for some strange reason) agree with?

 

I think you're alienating a good portion of your fans at this point. Its a little ironic criticizing that style of play with a handle like 'madmole'. And to push the responsibility off on modders to "fix" what is obviously shortcomings in the core game itself is a little ridiculous. 

 

As I said - I love the game. I'd love to see it get to a place on PC where I could purchase and enjoy it for what I wanted it to be and what it was initially described as. Its just not there unfortunately. As I heard posted on a separate forum...if I wanted a standard FPS zombie game where the focus was on zombie hunting and looting, I have many other, more polished options. 

As if 7D2D doesn't already have a very complex building system? No other survival game on the market even comes close - Rust, Ark... Minecraft can't even hold a candle imo (especially in terms of available shapes and deco), and that's saying something. You've already found that mythical unicorn at the end of the rainbow. Sorry, but good luck finding anything more unique than that.

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2 minutes ago, Daruma said:

On a fundamental level are they, though?

 

I'm not talking about a replica of the Sistine Chapel or anything, but I don't think wanting a functional and at the same time attractive/well decorated base should be mutually exclusive? And that is kind of missing the point. 

 

At the end of the day, building is building. If that's the aspect of the game I want to center around, rather than running around and looting POI'S, I would be a little angry at updates that, on the surface at least, seem to be intentionally nerfing my ability to play that way. 

I'm a base builder but I never ever felt the need to get some special block from creative menue. I never add pictures, refrigerators, kitchen cupboards or stoves in my bases. In other words I am building 99% for functionality and the 1% visual embellishment is done with blocks I can simply craft. So when Madmole mentioned 2% vanity crafters I was sure to be in the 98% group.

 

Consequently having deco items from creative menue available in the main game (from trader or wrenching) is very low on my personal wish list. 

 

But you are talking now about digging zombies too. And even there all building is not equal. For someone trying to build a stylish bunker with living quarters digging zombies might be a nuisance and nerf. For me digging zombies were the precondition for wanting to build underground. Without the challenge in form of attacking zombies why even go there?

 

I built 2 horde bases and one crafting base in the underground, all of them after zombies started digging

 

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29 minutes ago, Daruma said:

I have to ask then - and honest question... sincerely not trying to be confrontational..

 

What was the deal with the digging zombies? It seems like that aspect was custom designed to throw a big wrench in the gears of people with underground bases that had effectively neutralized the horde threat.

Yes a horrible bug we lived with for years that was thankfully squashed. It is unfortunate some builder assumed the design was that underground was safe, it was never intended to be, it was just a bug that cropped up and didn't get fixed.

 

There shouldn't be any easy way to survive the hordes, nor anything guaranteed. There should be incentive to experiement and try things, and most things should have some form of success, but no easy way to be invincible. Just turn off horde night if that is what you want to do.

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2 hours ago, Gromit said:

Is that 2% from the data you've acquired so far? I would have expected the number of builders to be much higher than that.

The number of builders likely is higher, but the rest of us accept no as no and are using mods or creative menu to fix the problem as already suggested. 

 

The rest of you are busy beating that poor horse ... he's already dead, Jim, and I'm pretty sure continuing to beat him isn't going to get him back up again. But carry on.

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34 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

Never knew that was a thing.  I wonder how challenging that be to program...sounds like a wonderful feature for not just players but the level designers as well.

It would be for designers only, otherwise players would stack 10000 bars into one space and slow the fps and cheese the hordes. Another way to do it with zero colliders is to make it a "detail object" and it would parent to the voxel in the space and use the existing voxels collision and hit points and not contribute to block health. If we did it like that then maybe users could get it.

32 minutes ago, pregnable said:

 

Yeah I try to do a bit of both, but you can get to 4/4 miner and mother load really fast just building at the start.  I always have a large mine under my base at a 45 degree angle down to bedrock early game with just a stone axe.  I almost never tech up beyond stone tools.

 

This current world I was really unlucky though... all of my trader quests were like 1,500+ away(no dig quests), so I was like nope and did extra building for a day.  Been looting constantly since day 8 though. 

 

Usually when the quests are not all 1,500-2,000 away I will quest most of the day and do my building and mining at night. 

Why did to bedrock when the ore is right where you are?

28 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Were you aware that it was once a thing where a player could dig a 3 vowel hole in the ground and cover himself and be completely immune from any threat?

 

As been stated many times before, the devs don't go out of their way looking for ways to make  players lives harder.  They focus on unintended AI behavior and fix accordingly.

 

People just get way too attached to X strategy and get upset when it no longer works.  I can understand the frustration but this is early access and should expect those type of changes...

And before that zombies dug, and dug hard, and would swiss cheese the ground under your base causing large sections to collapse. This was undesired too, so the fix to that caused the exploit to being safe you are referring to.

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53 minutes ago, madmole said:

I don't build on day 1 because then you have to mine with poor tools and low perks. I just loot until day 5 and by then I'll have a forge and can craft iron tools and have enough stone left over from mining gunpowder (at night) to build a nice base. At any rate unless you are looting daily you are not going to have a lot of parts.

 

Alphas past I used to loot until day 4, then mined up enough stone and clay, crafting it into cobble, to building myself a 9x9 or 11x11 tower to fight the horde at, eventually turning it into my main base of operations. Nowadays though, I've taken a humbler approach to things. I start off like usual, clearing out a small house isolated from a nearby town along a gravel path, boarding up the windows, replacing the doors, destroying all the deco and clutter, putting up lighting and laying down storage chests and eventually a forge and workbench, and using that as a temporary shelter for the first couple in-game weeks. I loot for the next 5 days, then I proceed to make a crude horde base (such as a ramp followed by a walkway, with iron bars between me and the zombies, usually positioned on the side of a large, flat wall of a building). After day 7, I continue looting until around day 11-12, after which I lay down the foundations for my actual base.

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8 minutes ago, Pegasus said:

The number of builders likely is higher, but the rest of us accept no as no and are using mods or creative menu to fix the problem as already suggested. 

 

The rest of you are busy beating that poor horse ... he's already dead, Jim, and I'm pretty sure continuing to beat him isn't going to get him back up again. But carry on.

New forum users usually have not measured the pulse of most horses here yet, friendly veterans could inform them of the medical condition of individual horses with courtesy, right? 😉

 

 

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5 minutes ago, madmole said:

Why did to bedrock when the ore is right where you are?

Harvesting stone down at bedrock is woefully inefficient. Any ore veins you encounter and that you wish to excavate, you're going to have to mine upwards, which is a royal pain in the rear end. Strip mining, primarily for stone, at levels +30 - +35 is much more attractive, since you're almost guaranteed to not breach the surface while any ore pockets you come across, you might be in the middle or perhaps even the very top of.

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4 minutes ago, Pegasus said:

LOL  If I was in a castle and the barbarians were trying to beat down the door I'd surely be trying to shore up that door in the middle of the fight.  

Well the other part I guess is I don't really have to. The base is big enough and designed so that I can just kite them to each room but I got scared, moment of lost faith in my build. Also the other windows were not converted to have the ramp/bars/trap door setup so its harder to shoot them but I'm changing it today now that I completed the wall all the way around the base. Then Phase one is done. Time to add the electrical goodies.

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14 minutes ago, Pegasus said:

LOL  If I was in a castle and the barbarians were trying to beat down the door I'd surely be trying to shore up that door in the middle of the fight.  

Yeah repair is a little slow and you could have blocks all over the place getting broken so I don't think it is cheesy repairing it, you can't kill zombies while you do it, so some blocks somewhere are getting DPS'd.

13 minutes ago, meganoth said:

I'm a base builder but I never ever felt the need to get some special block from creative menue. I never add pictures, refrigerators, kitchen cupboards or stoves in my bases. In other words I am building 99% for functionality and the 1% visual embellishment is done with blocks I can simply craft. So when Madmole mentioned 2% vanity crafters I was sure to be in the 98% group.

 

Most of those vanity items you mention can be done already without CM. Fridges can be painted, the coolers are craftable, cupboards, check. Stoves you can paint a box to look like one. That is why I build a lot of different bases, to test the limits of it and when I have to CM I think about it, and decide if that belongs in the main game or not... usually the answer is no.

 

 

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57 minutes ago, Daruma said:

Thanks for the polite response. I honestly expected less cordiality. 

 

I love the game. As does my wife. When we were looking for a co-op survival game that checked all the boxes, there was 7 Days. Literally nothing else had everything we wanted in that genre. 

 

But make no mistake - the big draw for us (and I have to assume more than 2% of other users) was building an effective base to "beat the hord", so to speak. It really seems like some of the updates I've seen on the PC end were implemented specifically to thwart that style of play. I can see and understand the flip-side of that too... just think it's possible to cater to both play styles at once. 

 

Again.. love the game. 

You really should try playing the game on PC before you make a judgement call.  

 

With each new alpha and revision there are changes to building.  But building is by no means limited.  Some people just want access to more blocks than are available in the base game play and are only available in the creative menu.

 

You can build an incredible base using only the blocks available in vanilla.  There has been nothing implemented to thwart building a base to "beat the horde".  There has been nothing implemented to thwart building at all.

 

Some people are hacked off because there not recipes in the vanilla game for every possible block combination and decoration known to man.  The devs have stated that they cannot add those recipes right now because 1) it would take away from developing key features of the game and 2) because having that many recipes in the crafting menu would cause significant lag.

 

Has everyone forgotten the crafting menu lag from around a16?  Have you forgotten the approximately 857 billion posts from hacked off players because every time they opened their forge menu their game crashed or stuttered?  

 

I would expect that most people, me included, can build a perfectly nice base using the blocks available in the vanilla game.

 

If, for whatever reason, you, personally, need a coffee pot ... then bring it in through creative or mod it in or get one of the approximately billion beautiful mods that are out there for decoration.

 

Please don't judge the game progress based on comments made by the vocal few when you haven't tried the game out for yourself.

 

 

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4 minutes ago, STyK_ said:

Well the other part I guess is I don't really have to. The base is big enough and designed so that I can just kite them to each room but I got scared, moment of lost faith in my build. Also the other windows were not converted to have the ramp/bars/trap door setup so its harder to shoot them but I'm changing it today now that I completed the wall all the way around the base. Then Phase one is done. Time to add the electrical goodies.

Which is why I don't care for dead is dead, I like my leeroy Jenkins moments :)

6 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

Harvesting stone down at bedrock is woefully inefficient. Any ore veins you encounter and that you wish to excavate, you're going to have to mine upwards, which is a royal pain in the rear end. Strip mining, primarily for stone, at levels +30 - +35 is much more attractive, since you're almost guaranteed to not breach the surface while any ore pockets you come across, you might be in the middle or perhaps even the very top of.

You lost me at mining stone. Who the @%$*#! mines stone? Why?

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2 minutes ago, madmole said:

You lost me at mining stone. Who the @%$*#! mines stone? Why?

Take a look at my builds and you'll understand why. I've got to have some method of feeding my 4+ forges dedicated to stone around the clock. And before you suggest anything, what works for me works for me, alright? :)

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3 minutes ago, madmole said:

You lost me at mining stone. Who the @%$*#! mines stone? Why?

Ever needed 100.000 Concrete mix  for a building ? i guess not....but some of us do ;) 

ull never find that much in pois in a short time.

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19 minutes ago, madmole said:

Yes a horrible bug we lived with for years that was thankfully squashed. It is unfortunate some builder assumed the design was that underground was safe, it was never intended to be, it was just a bug that cropped up and didn't get fixed.

 

There shouldn't be any easy way to survive the hordes, nor anything guaranteed. There should be incentive to experiement and try things, and most things should have some form of success, but no easy way to be invincible. Just turn off horde night if that is what you want to do.

 

Okay ... I do have a question though ... and I've not seen an answer to it.

 

Why does being dead give these zombies superhuman senses?

 

How is it possible that a zombie can sense me when I am sitting at bedrock under a mountain?  It can somehow hear me/smell me/sense me through 3,000 feet of dirt and rock.

 

By the same token, I can't figure out how rain can get through a vault hatch either, and sunlight get through that same 3,000 feet of dirt and rock.

 

But seriously, how do the zombies sense you that far underground?  I mean a tried and true method of zombie avoidance in zombie films is to find someplace to hide and stay really really still.

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1 hour ago, Daruma said:

Thanks for the polite response. I honestly expected less cordiality. 

 

I love the game. As does my wife. When we were looking for a co-op survival game that checked all the boxes, there was 7 Days. Literally nothing else had everything we wanted in that genre. 

 

But make no mistake - the big draw for us (and I have to assume more than 2% of other users) was building an effective base to "beat the hord", so to speak. It really seems like some of the updates I've seen on the PC end were implemented specifically to thwart that style of play. I can see and understand the flip-side of that too... just think it's possible to cater to both play styles at once. 

 

Again.. love the game. 

I bit of kind advice. If you like building, this is the game for you. There is many ways to make your base look awesome. I build all the time and mainly for the look. I am a vanity builder and I have no problem making my base look good. If you see something you want and you cannot craft it in the normal menu, take note of a similar item's resource cost and throw it on the floor then put one in from the cm.

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23 minutes ago, madmole said:

Which is why I don't care for dead is dead, I like my leeroy Jenkins moments :)

I'll get those in eventually, the guys on twitch have been talking about doing an RP pvp server eventually and I'll probably want to go check that out, it won't be permadeath or insane nightmare for that matter, I wish. If I keep playing at this level though that will be a walk in the park.

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