Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[LewZephyr]

On 11/15/2021 at 2:48 PM, faatal said:

There is plenty of crunching going on. I logged 73 hours last week (I track my hours every day), which may be the most in a week of any game I've ever worked on. I don't mind. I love this game. Rest will come later.

@faatal

Not sure on your personal life, but make sure you enjoy the reason you work so hard.

I have worked in IT on the support / administrator side well over 25 years and you don't get that time back.

I'm 52 and it took the pandemic and me spending a bunch of time with my grand-kid (hes just over 2 now) during it to realize how much I missed pushing the envelope working. 

 

All the best to you and the team.  Stay healthy (especially mentally).

 

Thanks for your hard work.

[nielm269]

I have a suggestion for a later update especially with bandits coming in A21, any way that we could make some kind of shield out of a car hood or something? 

[dcsobral]

On 11/16/2021 at 8:48 PM, Spellslinger said:

Can someone please explain why there is so much hate when they have yet to release A20?  All most people have is videos they have watched as only a handful of people have first hand knowledge because they have played.  Will there be issues? Most likely.  Will there be people complaining? Hell yes.  I have been playing since 9.x and there have been so many changes that the game continues to be fun and interesting.  Do I like ALL the changes, no but I do see that they were the best for the long run.  I paid $10 for this game and have gotten more than my moneys worth and more enjoyment than most of AAA games I have played.   So please try to stay possitive or at least polite.

There's the odd troll every now and then, of course, and probably quite a few people who haven't grown out of the phase where people react to being denied by kicking and screaming.  But there's also many, many instances where the "hate" comes out of love. People who feel so strongly about 7 Days to Die that they feel deeply frustrated by what would otherwise be a minor issue. And the amount of time people have spent playing this game is truly no joke. I have 8,219.5 hours logged on Steam as of this moment, though a good chunk of it is probably due to the thousands of random gen seeds I've generated through an automated process without actually being present, and I've talked to people who have logged even more hours without that excuse. I agree with all you have said, but I think it's good to recognize a lot of it has more to do with a lover's quarrel than with hate.

[meganoth]

6 hours ago, Mistwraith said:

...

Our two cents to the inventory controversy: Please let us stack more items. Clothing items, cigars and tools with the same lvl/stats really dont need to be in seperate slots. There are always PhD's mods for those that really need to carry their whole neighbourhood with them, but as a former construction and metal worker I can assure you, that I can carry more then a few tools. Also, people that are stronger then others tend to be able to carry more, as well. They dont need a perk for that. Strength alone is sufficient. I understand and fully support limited inventory space. But not beeing able to loot a single house (at the beginning) just makes you run circels back to your chests all the time. And because you did that a few times now there are no zombies, nothing is happening. Therefore it feels like the "Slow Walking Simulator with nothing happening" always after you start a new game. Its gets better with the perks and mods during the game, but a new start always tends to be boring slowly walking back to your chest.

 

You are supposed to decide which items are important and which to scrap. Typical limitation of a survival game. Hint: Use secure storage chests in front of pois you loot to store away stuff you want but can't carry at the moment.

 

[Gazz]

I play A20 stealthily with knife and bow. In week 1 I found the compound crossbow book and scrounged enough steel together to make a QL 3 one. Got a lucky roll on it, too, so I'm Murdering All The Things.

Still gotta carry something with more sustained DPS. Whatever I find. Currently a pipe machinegun. End of week 2 I have like 8 stacks of 7.62 ammo and it's only piling up.

 

If this was a job I'd pick something with optimised POI clear times like fortitude or strength. I don't care, though. I play what's fun and can highly recommend doing that. =P

[Matt115]

1 minute ago, Gazz said:

I play A20 stealthily with knife and bow. In week 1 I found the compound crossbow book and scrounged enough steel together to make a QL 3 one. Got a lucky roll on it, too, so I'm Murdering All The Things.

Still gotta carry something with more sustained DPS. Whatever I find. Currently a pipe machinegun. End of week 2 I have like 8 stacks of 7.62 ammo and it's only piling up.

 

If this was a job I'd pick something with optimised POI clear times like fortitude or strength. I don't care, though. I play what's fun and can highly recommend doing that. =P

What the... guys you rly set up ammo loot so high?  Do you guys added ammo factory or what? in post apo (expectialy zombie post apo) ammo should be rare - 8 pieces of 7,62 could be sign of good luck that you find so much. Damnn.... fine l4d2 have a lot of ammo everywhere but it happens in short period after Day 0. 7dtd looks like 10-15 after day 0

[Laz Man]

11 minutes ago, Matt115 said:

What the... guys you rly set up ammo loot so high?  Do you guys added ammo factory or what? in post apo (expectialy zombie post apo) ammo should be rare - 8 pieces of 7,62 could be sign of good luck that you find so much. Damnn.... fine l4d2 have a lot of ammo everywhere but it happens in short period after Day 0. 7dtd looks like 10-15 after day 0

 

Balance is ongoing, ammo should be less available when compared to A19 and could possibly be reduced further. 

 

For example, during the dev playthroughs, lathan shows ammo quest rewards were less.

 

Also keep in mind, bow/Xbow players are slower but more efficient with gun ammo consumption and accumulate ammo faster.

[dcsobral]

On 11/17/2021 at 7:03 AM, Weazelsun said:

 

How would this work if someone wanted to have specific poi's match up with each other? Like for example someone makes police building 1, police substation 1, prison building 1. Would it be editable somehow via generation to have them spawn next to each other so it's interconnected in a way?

I know from the streams that it would be possible to create these things are parts and set them to always spawn but, on the other hand, you could also just make the whole thing in the tile itself. A tile is, essentially, a 150x150 (iirc) POI which is guaranteed to be placed adjacent to other POIs (tiles) according to certain rules, and which can have randomly selected sub-POIs chosen according to tags and semi-random sub-POIs (parts) selected from a pre-defined list.

 

So say you create a rural (I think) dead-end tile. That sort of tile spawns on city borders, and being a dead-end means there's a single road connecting to it. You could put ditch and fence on all edges, make a check post on the road connection, then fill the interior with "military"-tagged POIs and assorted parts such as explosion craters or barricades, and the end result would be a 150x150 military base POI with a lot of randomness.

 

I think that goes more or less along the lines you are thinking of.

[Matt115]

2 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Balance is ongoing, ammo should be less available when compared to A19 and could possibly be reduced further. 

 

For example, during the dev playthroughs, lathan shows ammo quest rewards were less.

i hope so- well i my opinion ammo in so much connected with setting - world is destroyed so everything should be rare and expensive 

[dcsobral]

On 11/17/2021 at 8:51 AM, nielm269 said:

I have over 1800 hours and have bought many copies of this game for people (maybe my favorite game of all time), I have one small request..... can you make it so I can cut the arms and legs off a striper zombie and keep it in my base......  for um weapon testing (yeah I'll stick to that reason).

That used to be possible. I believe it's still possible in a19, though harder because you'll usually kill a zombie before you can chop off all limbs. 

[Jost Amman]

@faatal Someone on the Steam forum was worried about A20 grass rendering at low resolutions (I'll quote him here)...

Quote

Posted on Steam by FT

When you lower the game's resolution, most items simply become more aliased (edges get more "stair-step" jagged looking). Trees and their branches/leaves still look pretty nice both up close and far away...except maybe their thinnest bare branches where the aliasing gets a little out-of-control and super obvious.
But most of the game can look surprisingly good even at really low resolutions.

..Except the grass and other ground-plants. For some reason their...stalk-width?..seems directly tied to in-game resolution. Lower resolution means really fat grass. I'm okay with thin and aliased grass because aliasing is expected with lower-res (and somewhat fixable with anti-aliasing). But big'ol fat grass can't be fixed aside from cranking the resolution, which obviously is limited by your GPU speed.

The Latest DevStream#5 showed a fair bit of the new grass in the playthrough. And it looks mostly good (plus they'll be adding a little more variety compared to what was shown).
BUT, it was already looking a tiny bit..thick, and that was with the game set to 4K resolution!

How many of you plan to play at 4K?
I can sort of do it, if I turn down some graphic settings and am fine with 30fps.

Can upcoming grass either be "un-tied" to resolution, or can its...fatness be more optimized/aimed for 1080x1920 or maybe even 900x1600? That way it'll look a little delicate at 1440, and maybe even a little wispy at 4K...but it'll still look GOOD at those high resolutions AND avoid looking super-chonk at 720x1280 and 1080x1920.

Pretty please.

Any comment or information on that?

Tks! 

[nielm269]

34 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

That used to be possible. I believe it's still possible in a19, though harder because you'll usually kill a zombie before you can chop off all limbs. 

I have tried for hours with no success, even my son tried to help.

[dcsobral]

14 hours ago, Khalagar said:

 

You must be on a really low difficulty then. Even fully perked into stealth and into the sniper (which isn't even in the stealth tree for some reason), a headshot wouldn't one shot an irradiated on the difficulty I play on

 

Stealth is a bow game. A compound crossbow has damage close to a sniper rifle (50 base damage on 7.62 ammo +14 of sniper rifle vs 45 base damage on steel bolt) but has 200% extra damage on sneak attacks on top of everything else. If I recall correctly, on headshot that's 400%, or 180 extra damage.  7.62mm HP has base 65 which goes a long way, but I don't think it closes the gap.

 

The sniper headshot perk has lower effectiveness against irradiated, on top of that.

 

Here's the thing about damage and modifiers. Things have a base damage, let's call it B. For ranged weapons, it's the ammo that has the base damage, and for all other things it's the thing itself. Then you have absolute and percentage modifiers, like the sniper rilfe adding +14 damage or purple quality adding 50%. Sneak attacks, mods, attributes and perks can all contribute modifiers. The final damage (before headshot) is like this: B + B * (sum of all percentage modifers) + (sum of all absolute modifiers). So a purple sniper rifle loaded with normal 7.62 and no random stats does 50 + 50 * (0.5) + 14. If you get 20% sneak damage, it's going to be 50 + 50 * (0.7) + 14.  Every one of these percentage multipliers will apply only to the base damage so you might see 89 damage on that purple sniper rifle and think 20% sneak will be based on that number, but no.

 

Headshots, though, apply over the total (again, iirc).

 

As for difficulty, the default difficulty is really low. There's only one difficulty below that, but the default difficulty is the default difficulty. So you must be playing on really high difficulty instead.

[JCrook1028]

7 hours ago, Mistwraith said:

Beeing able to lay electric cables within blocks is a great plus as well, I hated the way Fallout handles power lines.

Wait, you saw something about being able to do this? cause...they have always said that they are going to stay with the wires exposed model.

[Roland]

Higher tier bow and xbow damage has been increased for A20. FYI.

[meganoth]

13 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

Stealth is a bow game. A compound crossbow has damage close to a sniper rifle (50 base damage on 7.62 ammo +14 of sniper rifle vs 45 base damage on steel bolt) but has 200% extra damage on sneak attacks on top of everything else. If I recall correctly, on headshot that's 400%, or 180 extra damage.  7.62mm HP has base 65 which goes a long way, but I don't think it closes the gap.

 

The sniper headshot perk has lower effectiveness against irradiated, on top of that.

 

Here's the thing about damage and modifiers. Things have a base damage, let's call it B. For ranged weapons, it's the ammo that has the base damage, and for all other things it's the thing itself. Then you have absolute and percentage modifiers, like the sniper rilfe adding +14 damage or purple quality adding 50%. Sneak attacks, mods, attributes and perks can all contribute modifiers. The final damage (before headshot) is like this: B + B * (sum of all percentage modifers) + (sum of all absolute modifiers). So a purple sniper rifle loaded with normal 7.62 and no random stats does 50 + 50 * (0.5) + 14. If you get 20% sneak damage, it's going to be 50 + 50 * (0.7) + 14.  Every one of these percentage multipliers will apply only to the base damage so you might see 89 damage on that purple sniper rifle and think 20% sneak will be based on that number, but no.

 

Headshots, though, apply over the total (again, iirc).

 

As for difficulty, the default difficulty is really low. There's only one difficulty below that, but the default difficulty is the default difficulty. So you must be playing on really high difficulty instead.

 

Sure, but when you compare crossbow to any gun you have to include firing speed as well. As long as you can get 7.62 ammo in heaps and waste 5 bullets per zombie without caring much a gun is still ahead in damage.

 

My expectation always was that the balance between the different weapons in 7D2D only works if ammo is somewhat scarce. Not too scarce, we don't really want to spend all nights in mines, but enough so that saving ammo is a part of your daily survivors life

 

 

[Blake_]

11 minutes ago, Roland said:

Higher tier bow and xbow damage has been increased for A20. FYI.

Is it a lot? Did the rest of the weapons also increase a bit on the top tiers due to their primitive version squeezing?

[dcsobral]

2 hours ago, WheezerAZ said:

I personally enjoy the hell out of playing as a stealth character. I'll only wear the padded armor, get the military stealth boots, max out my bow and assassination skills, throw a scope on a compound crossbow and steel bolts and it is freaking deadly. Reload is reasonably fast. The biggest thing is stealth is not fast going through a POI.

 

I had one play through that I concentrated on building up hand to hand. Steel knuckles maxed out and I threw stealth out the window. I just ran through the POI killing things with no worries. Completely different experience to stealth play and that is kind of the point.

 

Ultimately the game should be played the way you have fun. If you like maxed out XP earning and the easiest zombies then go ahead and play that way if you are having fun. Someone playing on 25% loot and insane mode only using the knife is not a better player. They are playing a different game and having fun doing it. 

 

 

The military stealth boots are a big disappointment for me. You can't get them to quality 6 and the padded boots make no noise to begin with.

[Roland]

Just now, Blake_ said:

Is it a lot? Did the rest of the weapons also increase a bit on the top tiers due to their primitive version squeezing?

IDK...I just remember Madmole ordering it be done and a ticket made up for it. It was just for the higher tier bows and xbows. No other weapon was discussed.

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, Matt115 said:

What the... guys you rly set up ammo loot so high?  Do you guys added ammo factory or what? in post apo (expectialy zombie post apo) ammo should be rare - 8 pieces of 7,62 could be sign of good luck that you find so much. Damnn.... fine l4d2 have a lot of ammo everywhere but it happens in short period after Day 0. 7dtd looks like 10-15 after day 0

I'm guessing he rarely ever spends ammo (other than bolts). That's the case for me.

[meilodasreh]

19 minutes ago, Roland said:

Higher tier bow and xbow damage has been increased for A20. FYI.

Nice, thx for the info.

Making the arrows/bolts able to pierce the limbs, so we can nail Zeds to the wall at least for a few seconds would add to the fun too.

[Matt115]

9 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

I'm guessing he rarely ever spends ammo (other than bolts). That's the case for me.

Well this it is too much- in my opinion ammo should be rare like 2-10 bullets per day max to find by first 2 weeks. Why? to make it's looks like late zombie outbreake not 1 days- you know 99% places was scavenged before you came there so you just talking what was left. Bullets became rare thing using mostly during blood moon only. for rest of time using melee / bow would be neccesary to avoid waisting bullets. So -  how to survive blood moon after this change? garthering resources - iron and wood to make tons of spikes and barber wire in WW1 style

[Khalagar]

2 hours ago, nielm269 said:

I have a suggestion for a later update especially with bandits coming in A21, any way that we could make some kind of shield out of a car hood or something? 

 

Shields are one of those "That'd be nice but that's a whole lot of work" things, while they are trying to content lock the game and push the full release out. Adding in an entire blocking system along with all of the animations and hit detection etc is a lot of things to add in, and shields would likely be pretty OP because of how easy it would be to block zombies attacks and club them down

 

  

57 minutes ago, Roland said:

Higher tier bow and xbow damage has been increased for A20. FYI.

 

 

Pretty much shuts any debate about whether the bow was under powered or not in A19 lol. I'd love for it to be viable again, but imo, they are fairly pointless as is. I wish they would make the crappy bow less crappy. The primitive bow is . . . . no. I used to always use the bow a ton in the first week, but after wooden bow was moved to t1, the t0 bow is pretty painful to use even compared to just using melee

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, Matt115 said:

i hope so- well i my opinion ammo in so much connected with setting - world is destroyed so everything should be rare and expensive 

That's a common trope on apocalypse fiction that just doesn't stand to scrutiny. People usually think of gas or toilet paper scarcity in times of panic, but there are two key differences. First, the people doing panicking and buying stuff are all alive to do it. Second, the scarcity is happening on the point of sale -- basically, there's people with stocks large enough to last for months or years which is why others have nothing.

 

On the traditional zombie apocalypse, though, we are talking about 99% fatality rate within days, and then up from there. People had little time to buy stuff, and no time to use it. Supplies that would last one week for ten thousand people will last 25 years for one.

 

An 8-players server on an 8k map has 21% the population density of Wyoming, less than 3% of Arizona. And 8k maps are really rather urban compared to a whole state. If we are going to go with what the setting calls for instead of what gameplay balance calls for, loot is way too scarce.

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, JCrook1028 said:

Wait, you saw something about being able to do this? cause...they have always said that they are going to stay with the wires exposed model.

I hate how wiring works in 7d2d. Night of the Dead is a clear visual improvement (imho) with a similar model, in that the wires only show up when yielding the wiring tool, but what I'd really would have liked in 7d2d is to actually have those electrical pipe blocks actually work. To have blocks that carry electricity to adjacent blocks, "wall" blocks that carry electricity from outside to inside (or vice versa), etc. Electrical wires are just unlike everything else in the game. They aren't shapes, they aren't blocks, they aren't items, they aren't entities. They are an ugly aberration.

 

But what I have heard even all the way back to alpha 19 is that there won't be any further changes to electricity, on any alpha. I cheer myself up at night by recalling they also wanted a20 out on Halloween.

 

(*) NotD is a clear improvement on almost all regards when it comes to electricity. The power sources are more interesting, the visual signals are cool and helpful, it has blocks that take multiple inputs, and, of course, it has a Not gate (technically, an X-or). 7d2d is far better on sensors, but that is somewhat blunted by the Trap Controller.

1 hour ago, nielm269 said:

I have tried for hours with no success, even my son tried to help.

Have you used a machete and maximized Agility/Deep Cuts? Actually, maximizing Deep Cuts might well get the zombie killed before you can do it. Another good tool is the fireaxe, without points in Miner 69r so as to avoid increasing the damage.