Questions about the A19 Release notes

[strask]

I enjoyed reading the release notes for alpha 19 (recently posted here: https://7daystodie.com/a19-official-release-notes/ ) but there were a few things I have questions about.

 

So, if anyone knows the answers to any of these, please share!

 

Quote

Enemy progression has been re-balanced. The chosen game difficulty no longer affects the game-stage value

So, would it be true to say that the game difficulty choice now affects ONLY zombie toughness/hit points? Or are there other effects?

 

Quote

[added] Vehicle driving increases food consumption

Is that only for bicycles, or do you get extra hungry when cruising in the 4x4, too?

 

Quote

Added support for whitelisting and admin permission levels via Steam Groups. For instructions check the serveradmin.xml and the console commands “admin” and “whitelist”

Any chance we could get a publicly-posted preview copy of serveradmin.xml, so that we can update our server copies in advance of A19 availability?

 

Quote

We have partnered with Super Nimbus and GameSparks

I appreciate the Dragonball-Z reference, but it seems to have confused some people over on the steam forums. Is it accurate to say "Fun Pimps have partnered with GameSparks, using software called Nimbus"? and that Nimbus is open source software, not a third company you have an additional contract with?

 

Quote

Entity physics rigidbody uses the actual mass

Does that mean that hitting a shopping cart with a high-speed 4x4 will now have more reasonable results?

 

Quote

Cooking pot land mines cannot be picked up

Thanks! But will we be able to pick them up still, if we have the explosives related perk to pick up landmines?

 

Quote

Merged the rod&spring and auto trigger group mods

I think this means, "you can no longer install both rod&spring and a trigger group mod on the same weapon", yeah?

 

Quote

Food/Water consumption converted to ISS v2.0. Both food and water stats increase up to 200 along with HP and stamina. There is no overeating/drinking but the first 20 points you eat above the cap will tick down more slowly

Wait, that was confusing. If there is "no overeating/drinking", then how can "you eat above the cap"?

 

Quote

Backpacks have a chance to disappear (improved logging to show id, player id, removal reason and entity unload)

Could we please get an enumeration of all possible values of "removal reason", along with human readable explanations where needed as to what they mean? Losing a backpack is one of the harshest player experiences, and it would be nice to know the situations where it is allowed so that we can at least attempt to avoid them.

 

Quote

Baseball bat is the T2 club, the steel club is T3

Do the "batter up" perks apply in any way to the steel club?

 

Quote

Burning shaft mod adjustments, can only installed in weapons and tools with a long shaft or blade

Insert vader-nooooooooooo.gif

 

Why would you do this? If I only had one burning shaft mod, it would always go directly into my wrench. If I had two, it would be the wrench and the knuckles. You have thus taken away my top two favourite uses for that mod. This makes me very sad.

 

Quote

Decreased chance to find workstation schematics in destroyed workstations 

As I recall, the old percentage was 25% which was about right, in my opinion. What is the new value?

[Feycat]

1 hour ago, strask said:

Insert vader-nooooooooooo.gif

 

Why would you do this? If I only had one burning shaft mod, it would always go directly into my wrench. If I had two, it would be the wrench and the knuckles. You have thus taken away my top two favourite uses for that mod. This makes me very sad.

OMG me too! That was my go-to for taking @%$*#! apart in dark POIs! And I hope knuckles got something to compensate, because flaming knuckles were A W E S O M E

[Laz Man]

23 minutes ago, Feycat said:

OMG me too! That was my go-to for taking @%$*#! apart in dark POIs! And I hope knuckles got something to compensate, because flaming knuckles were A W E S O M E

I would guess it was too OP and was rebalanced.

[faatal]

2 hours ago, strask said:

Could we please get an enumeration of all possible values of "removal reason", along with human readable explanations where needed as to what they mean? Losing a backpack is one of the harshest player experiences, and it would be nice to know the situations where it is allowed so that we can at least attempt to avoid them.

"Backpacks have a chance to disappear (improved logging to show id, player id, removal reason and entity unload)"

 

That was the name of the bug ticket and should not be in the release notes like that, because the chance it is describing is a bug not a feature. The additions to logging is to help track it down, since I can never get it to happen to debug it.

2 hours ago, strask said:

Does that mean that hitting a shopping cart with a high-speed 4x4 will now have more reasonable results?

No. That change simply adjusted mass values of some rigid bodies, which is what the physics system uses to move objects around. Shopping carts are blocks. They are immovable because they are part of a chunk and do not have a rigid body for physics reactions to happen. Shopping carts would have to be redesigned to be an entity.

[Roland]

Difficulty affects enemy health, enemy  variable speeds, and zombie rage chance. There may be more. They talked at one point about it affecting the critical injury percent and cool down rate but I don’t think that actually happened. 
 

it’s good that gs has been separated because even though it sped up the appearance of tougher enemies it also sped up the appearance of better loot which is....easier  

[Viktoriusiii]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

Difficulty affects enemy health, enemy  variable speeds, and zombie rage chance. There may be more. They talked at one point about it affecting the critical injury percent and cool down rate but I don’t think that actually happened. 
 

it’s good that gs has been separated because even though it sped up the appearance of tougher enemies it also sped up the appearance of better loot which is....easier  

honest question then: besides modding... is there any way to increase the amount of zombies now? I mean it was an issue ever since they removed that setting, but at least at highest difficulty you barely noticed it. I have a powerhouse, so my pc can take it. Hell it can probably take 128 enemies at a time if needed.

*edit*
"The loot quality for player parties is equivalent to that of the highest level player and perk effects like Lucky Looter are not shared. The only loot advantage is that parties face tougher opponents which have a higher chance to drop loot of better quality."

It would be much better if the lucky looter is shared in a 20-50m radius. That way you can loot a house together without saying "oh you loot the good loot you have the perks for it!" I know it would slightly unbalance it since only one needs the perk... but only 1 needs the perk anyways
It is just a gamefeel adjustment.

*edit edit*
"We’ve re-imagined tons of older locations with a complete art and game-play overhaul converting them to beautiful and quest-able dungeon experiences and added many brand new locations to the game. In all over 40 new or updated locations and counting. Some of the new or re-imagined locations include:"
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! It was always the talk of dungeon POI's beeing less widely spread! They are meant to be a rarity!!!
Why would you do this? The ONLY way to do this would be to increase the amount of dungeon pois, but decrease the chance of it spawning in the world!

[SylenThunder]

2 hours ago, faatal said:

No. That change simply adjusted mass values of some rigid bodies, which is what the physics system uses to move objects around. Shopping carts are blocks. They are immovable because they are part of a chunk and do not have a rigid body for physics reactions to happen. Shopping carts would have to be redesigned to be an entity.

Ya know, if they were entities, we could push em.......

[Sydious]

24 minutes ago, Viktoriusiii said:

It would be much better if the lucky looter is shared in a 20-50m radius. That way you can loot a house together without saying "oh you loot the good loot you have the perks for it!" I know it would slightly unbalance it since only one needs the perk... but only 1 needs the perk anyways
It is just a gamefeel adjustment.

Me and my wife give this a thumbs up.

[RestInPieces]

Quote

random animation probabilities

At last! My favorite change, and hope it opens the way for more.

[pApA^LeGBa]

Couldn´t find anything about the adjustable spawn rate coming back  to the options. I remember we were told this was only removed for balanncing issues and is supposed to come back. When?

[diegodgo87]

3 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

Couldn´t find anything about the adjustable spawn rate coming back  to the options. I remember we were told this was only removed for balanncing issues and is supposed to come back. When?

But there is a way to change the stat in some game file? me and my mates were looking for this (the wiki is outdated and still says that there is an option ingame).

We want more zombies!!! hell we been building, mining for days and just find 3 or 4 zombies in the area... how is this possible?

[meganoth]

6 hours ago, Viktoriusiii said:

honest question then: besides modding... is there any way to increase the amount of zombies now? I mean it was an issue ever since they removed that setting, but at least at highest difficulty you barely noticed it. I have a powerhouse, so my pc can take it. Hell it can probably take 128 enemies at a time if needed.

*edit*
"The loot quality for player parties is equivalent to that of the highest level player and perk effects like Lucky Looter are not shared. The only loot advantage is that parties face tougher opponents which have a higher chance to drop loot of better quality."

It would be much better if the lucky looter is shared in a 20-50m radius. That way you can loot a house together without saying "oh you loot the good loot you have the perks for it!" I know it would slightly unbalance it since only one needs the perk... but only 1 needs the perk anyways
It is just a gamefeel adjustment.

*edit edit*
"We’ve re-imagined tons of older locations with a complete art and game-play overhaul converting them to beautiful and quest-able dungeon experiences and added many brand new locations to the game. In all over 40 new or updated locations and counting. Some of the new or re-imagined locations include:"
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! It was always the talk of dungeon POI's beeing less widely spread! They are meant to be a rarity!!!
Why would you do this? The ONLY way to do this would be to increase the amount of dungeon pois, but decrease the chance of it spawning in the world!

I think they said they would add some more remnants to give alternatives for early game. I don't think they ever said they want the dungeon pois being a rarity.

 

In the stream#4 (?) the POI designers said they made the store pois more open, so while they are bonafide dungeons now they seem to have a big main store room like the old ones.

 

[Viktoriusiii]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

I think they said they would add some more remnants to give alternatives for early game. I don't think they ever said they want the dungeon pois being a rarity.

 

In the stream#4 (?) the POI designers said they made the store pois more open, so while they are bonafide dungeons now they seem to have a big main store room like the old ones.

 

better than nothing, I guess... but... ugh... I was absolutely certain that they listened to the feedback for once asking for dungeon POIs beeing a bit better spread out...
but thats what you get for believing they... I wont start xD thx for the answer tho

[Laz Man]

19 minutes ago, Viktoriusiii said:

better than nothing, I guess... but... ugh... I was absolutely certain that they listened to the feedback for once asking for dungeon POIs beeing a bit better spread out...
but thats what you get for believing they... I wont start xD thx for the answer tho

Its designed with an open floor plan so the players can engage in it in a less linear fashion. Give it a try when it lands then come back here with some objective feedback so perhaps they can do something with it...

 

Edit: Less cranky response.  Drinking coffee...lol

[Viktoriusiii]

20 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

Its designed with an open floor plan so the players can engage in it in a less linear fashion. Give it a try when it lands then come back here with some objective feedback so perhaps they can do something with it...

 

Edit: Less cranky response.  Drinking coffee...lol

sorry wasn't talking about more variety ind better dungeonpois. I do think they look nice from the way they looked in the devstream.
I was talking about making other, non-dungeons into dungeons, reducing the "normal" pois even more than they already are.
I like simple pois where you don't need to commit. In, out, done.
I love dungeons... but only once in a while. And the more there are percentage wise the less I want to do them.

[Boidster]

2 hours ago, diegodgo87 said:

But there is a way to change the stat in some game file?

Yes. The file is called...you may want to sit down for this..."spawning.xml". It's in the ...\Data\Config folder. Here's the section for the pine forest (A18). Change "maxcount" and "respawndelay" (which is in game days) to whatever you want.

 

We have our zombies set to 4x spawns and 0.5 day respawns (every 12 in-game hours). Never a dull moment.

 

<biome name="pine_forest">
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="4" time="Night" entitygroup="ZombiesNight" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="14" time="Any" entitygroup="EnemyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="21" time="Any" entitygroup="FriendlyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
</biome>

 

[Laz Man]

4 minutes ago, Viktoriusiii said:

sorry wasn't talking about more variety ind better dungeonpois. I do think they look nice from the way they looked in the devstream.
I was talking about making other, non-dungeons into dungeons, reducing the "normal" pois even more than they already are.
I like simple pois where you don't need to commit. In, out, done.
I love dungeons... but only once in a while. And the more there are percentage wise the less I want to do them.

What would be great is if there was a setting for POI types for RWG games.  Like a slider for more remnant type to dungeon type so a player can tailor their games to the amount as a % when the game generates is pool of POIs to spawn in.

4 minutes ago, Boidster said:

Yes. The file is called...you may want to sit down for this..."spawning.xml". It's in the ...\Data\Config folder. Here's the section for the pine forest (A18). Change "maxcount" and "respawndelay" (which is in game days) to whatever you want.

 

We have our zombies set to 4x spawns and 0.5 day respawns (every 12 in-game hours). Never a dull moment.

 

<biome name="pine_forest">
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="4" time="Night" entitygroup="ZombiesNight" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="14" time="Any" entitygroup="EnemyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="21" time="Any" entitygroup="FriendlyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
</biome>

 

Yeah, its a really quick change.  Only caution with changing those settings is they are per chunk (16x16 zone) and not biome so its easy to go over board if your not careful lol...

 

Edit:  I havent tried it yet, but I think a respawndelay of "0" means infinite respawn so if you want to recreate the feel of the old wasteland with relentless biome spawns you can.

[Boidster]

12 hours ago, strask said:

Quote

[added] Vehicle driving increases food consumption

Is that only for bicycles, or do you get extra hungry when cruising in the 4x4, too?

Yes. Wanna know about this. Will reserve my ranting considered and thoughtful opinion until we get clarification.

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Viktoriusiii said:

better than nothing, I guess... but... ugh... I was absolutely certain that they listened to the feedback for once asking for dungeon POIs beeing a bit better spread out...
but thats what you get for believing they... I wont start xD thx for the answer tho

What makes you think they didn’t listen to player feedback?  There are more perspectives than your own and additional voices that they listen to. If they had done it your way there would be others disappointed wondering why the devs didn’t listen to them. 
 

They are listening. Laz’s  idea of a slider for POI types is pretty cool. 

10 minutes ago, Boidster said:

Yes. Wanna know about this. Will reserve my ranting considered and thoughtful opinion until we get clarification.

Any vehicle.  It keeps food relevant even once vehicles are utilized for travel and is something that wouldn’t even be noticeable if it wasn’t pointed out. As for immersion....the rationale is that the roads are rough and gut wrenching to drive so you are definitely burning calories as you travel. But, that’s just a rationale to try and bring some sense to it. The real reason is to add another food sink even during the late game. 
 

Rant away 😀

[diegodgo87]

32 minutes ago, Boidster said:

Yes. The file is called...you may want to sit down for this..."spawning.xml". It's in the ...\Data\Config folder. Here's the section for the pine forest (A18). Change "maxcount" and "respawndelay" (which is in game days) to whatever you want.

 

We have our zombies set to 4x spawns and 0.5 day respawns (every 12 in-game hours). Never a dull moment.

 

<biome name="pine_forest">
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="4" time="Night" entitygroup="ZombiesNight" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="14" time="Any" entitygroup="EnemyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
	<spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="21" time="Any" entitygroup="FriendlyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
</biome>

 

I don't know what those numbers mean or do, so i'm not touching unless someone says put "x" here and "x" there if you want 50% more, or something like that.

 

[Roland]

2 minutes ago, diegodgo87 said:

I don't know what those numbers mean or do, so i'm not touching unless someone says put "x" here and "x" there if you want 50% more, or something like that.

 

 

[Viktoriusiii]

8 minutes ago, Roland said:

What makes you think they didn’t listen to player feedback?  There are more perspectives than your own and additional voices that they listen to. If they had done it your way there would be others disappointed wondering why the devs didn’t listen to them. 
 

ah yes of course. I am just imagining the feedback and only see my own ideas as valid... right... forgot that again Thanks for reminding me.

🙄
It's not that I clarify every time it is an opinion or an opinion based on facts that can be interpreted differently.

And I am 100% sure that in the feedback there was an overwhelming majority of feedback that said "now there is only Dungeon-type pois and someone official stated that they would tone it back. Sadly There is no way I will ever read all 2000+ pages of one alpha, but I know it was the case. If they already toned it down and descided now to add more in with more variation, I don't know but that was what they said.

[Boidster]

22 minutes ago, Roland said:

Rant away 😀

I would never!

 

22 minutes ago, Roland said:

But, that’s just a rationale to try and bring some sense to it. The real reason is to add another food sink even during the late game.

THIS IS TOTAL BULL**** AND TFP OBVIOUSLY HATES ALL OF ITS PLAYERS AND I WANT MY MONEY BACK! WORST 1,700 HOURS I EVER SPENT ON A GAME!

 

It is kinda silly though. Driving is not an end in itself in the game. Nobody* just drives around for the sake of driving. They are driving to the trader, to a quest, to a new city to explore, back to base, to Jen's house for wine and a moan. If late-game food-sinkage is an issue, I think food use during non-driving activities ought to be bumped upwards a bit. Maybe even make it GS related, as fighting harder enemies is going to take more out of you (you'd think). Tying it simply to moving in a vehicle is silly. I try not to quibble much about "realism" in games and all sorts of rationalizations are acceptable. But this...is silly. I ain't even mad. But I am thinking of putting on my British Army Colonel outfit.

 

 

*There is that one guy, but best not to get him riled up

[meganoth]

36 minutes ago, Boidster said:

Yes. Wanna know about this. Will reserve my ranting considered and thoughtful opinion until we get clarification.

In A18 your food digestion simply stopped when you were driving. In reality you use food any second of the day. Drive 8 hours and you will be hungry, do nothing for 8 hours and you will be hungry, just not as hungry as if you were running for 8 hours. And according to (I think) MM that difference is just 20% more. Even if that was wrong and it was 50% or 100% more it would be unrealistic if you did not digest food while driving. (Not that realism is important, but it also makes sense for gameplay reasons, so a win on all fronts)

 

The only unrealistic part that is left is that digestion stops if you don't do anything, but that is actually there for gameplay reasons

 

[hiemfire]

What people think the roads in 7d2d are:

Spoiler

 

What the roads in 7d2d are:

Spoiler

Spoiler