Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[hiemfire]

10 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

The door with buttons are primarily for level design purposes.  Think of them as quick save and/or quick exits for POIs so players don't have to run through an entire POI to get back in if they died or leave when they are done.

 

I believe we have a toggle switch as at our disposal as well for certain use cases.

The 7 Days 2 Die "Skyrim Door". A fast way out of a "dungeon" you've completed.

[Laz Man]

2 hours ago, Games'n'Grumble said:

Sorry, I don't know where else to ask this, but how can old prefabs be converted to new forms? I downloaded the location from A19, and it all consists of "lost blocks" and question marks. The devteam didn't rebuild all the prefabs manually, did they?

There is a fairly straight forward conversion process for A19 POIs.  Will see if I can find and post the info. later today.

 

Edit: see khaines post a few posts back.

Edited December 4, 2021 by Laz Man (see edit history)

[bachgaman]

39 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

@bachgaman : was it a "nay" because you don't like the video or just because you think I'm advertising someone?

(which is not the case since I don't even know those guys)

First. I am very annoyed that they are playing A20 right now, but I cannot

[Aldranon]

4 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Possibly. But it also could be the case that single players not speccing into FOR will depend on continued food scavenging while supplementing and improving the canned food from hunting and small scale farming. If single players **need** a couple of points in farming instead of at most one I would view this as a serious balancing bug.

 

 

Well TFP have room to tweak it for sure.  Some people made suggestions some pages back.  I believe it was to add the size of the harvest or to lower the chance of losing a seed.

 

Balancing that to a very low decline in crops (thereby making a non-speced player find value in looted seeds) might be the ideal spot. 

[bdubyah]

I think the issue I saw with the switch doors is they stay locked after you open them. So Woodle was gonna base in that building for the night(a new police station I believe) and had hit the switch to get into the loot cell, which I guess also opened a metal door at the back of the building as a quick way out. But it was now locked open so he couldn't close it. Not game breaking by any means, but would be nice if the switches also unlocked them as well as opening them. Or could even just unlock them and you have to find the way out.

[Orville Tootenbacher]

11 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

Testers have tried the change and it is still possible to be sustainable when perked up.  Of course balancing is ongoing.  We will see where things land.

Please don’t change it back. Farming was way too OP and food way too easy to come by. This is a survival game and hunger should be just as much of a threat as the zombies. How often does anyone actually die from starvation? Or infection or weather for that matter? All the survival elements just seem like minor inconveniences rather than real challenges. So please don’t make it simple to farm tons of food again.

[Blake_]

27 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

There is a fairly straight forward conversion process for A19 POIs.  Will see if I can find and post the info. later today.

 

Edit: see khaines post a few posts back.

Really? In the dev streams they painted it like an unfathomable task full of hickups and hardships. I'm glad it's at least doable. Thanks for the hint.

[faatal]

11 hours ago, Aldranon said:

There are several ways TFP could do bandits in my thinking and each one would require a smarter AI.

 

1) Bandits are just zombies with guns, very little changes needed.

2) Bandits have a "Shoot, Scoot, or Hide" algorithm based on damage done and received.

3) Bandits have the above 2 plus an "Elite squad" AI that tries to pin the player down with suppressing fire and flank the player for some kill shots.

1 & 2 would be a good guess.

[bdubyah]

Another random observation: there's new chainlink fence stuff, including a door piece. But you can't use the door. Would be pretty nice if you could...

[faatal]

10 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

I agree on the general idea that new features should be challenged by players depending on how fun or useful they seem to be.

 

However, there's still the balancing issue that the developer will need to address: we, as players, are of course all about keeping what is fun/convenient for us (e.g.: all cars should be drivable, crops should be a permanent source of food, pipe weapons should do more damage, the drone should be able to shoot zombies), but in the end most players will never make the hard choices which will effectively balance the game to make it more "fun" in the long run.

 

I'm not saying every choice the devs make is great, mind you, I'm just saying that we should at least give it a shot before taking up the pitchforks.

Many choices devs make are not great. Game development is a lot of experimentation. Dev teams internally often add or change features and later find them not fun or impractical or resource hogs. Early access just exposes this to the public, who then if they choose, get to experience all the back and forth of the design process. We try to minimize that with public releases, but there is only so much time to test things or else people complain you are too slow and don't release updates.

[Roland]

1 hour ago, JCrook1028 said:

But random negative results are not the only issue. They've re introduced the tedium of replanting the farm every harvest.

 

heheh...I never really farmed very much at all during the era of regrowing plants so to me replanting is just the same as it ever has been and regrowing plants is just a rumor....

 

Back when the game was still a loose mess of placeholder features there was always the possibility that farming could be one of those aspects of the game that could be really developed and be a big part of the game. I remember imagining what it could become. But the devs weren't interested in making a farming game so farming has remained basic and uninteresting. What they have gets the job done and it isn't ever going to become an involved and detailed design.  I came to terms with that years ago. This is not a farming game. 

 

Some people treat it that way though and create huge sprawling farm fields that I can imagine would be extremely tedious to have to replant. But to survive you don't have to play farmer and I don't. My mom enjoys doing the farming and she just plants a nice garden sized plot that supplies our needs. Replanting the size of garden she does isn't going to be tedious.

 

But yeah, if you like farming and you like to do 100 plots then I agree that it is really tedious. I might get into farming like that if farming was more interesting-- like in a farming game.

[Jost Amman]

19 minutes ago, Roland said:

But yeah, if you like farming and you like to do 100 plots then I agree that it is really tedious. I might get into farming like that if farming was more interesting-- like in a farming game.

7D2D Farmer Simulator confirmed for A21! 

[hiemfire]

13 minutes ago, Roland said:

like to do 100 plots

Teas, Stews etc (every recipe past the early game straight meat or meat + water requires crops) for 2+ players from one field with how quickly food and thirst bars deplete (without running constantly, it's even faster with running around like a YouTuber on crack with a deadline) and have the ability to have a sufficient stockpile to cover any game glitches that kill off the player planted crops or destroy the portion of the players base that has the crops can result in 100+ plots being necessary in A19 even for a small group.

[Jost Amman]

28 minutes ago, faatal said:

Many choices devs make are not great. Game development is a lot of experimentation. Dev teams internally often add or change features and later find them not fun or impractical or resource hogs. Early access just exposes this to the public, who then if they choose, get to experience all the back and forth of the design process. We try to minimize that with public releases, but there is only so much time to test things or else people complain you are too slow and don't release updates.

I can emphasize with that. I've been literally fighting in long discussions with some self-proclaimed "devs" on Steam, that come to the forum and say that doing what you just said is unprofessional! That it shows a lack of project management and so on and so forth... According to them, you plan something on paper, determine the time it will take and deliver at the scheduled date in time! When I ask them which successful game they developed, then they find any possible reason why they can't tell...

 

Geez! I'm so fed up with those self entitled braggarts! 

[Blake_]

@faatal there seems to be a bit of a problem with thin obstacles with Zds and animals (like street signs) and fence avoidance (also both, but that would arguably make sense with Zds, not animals, as they can perfectly avoid obstacles).

[Jost Amman]

4 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

Teas, Stews etc (every recipe past the early game straight meat or meat + water requires crops) for 2+ players from one field with how quickly food and thirst bars deplete (without running constantly, it's even faster with running around like a YouTuber on crack with a deadline) and have the ability to have a sufficient stockpile to cover any game glitches that kill off the player planted crops or destroy the portion of the players base that has the crops can result in 100+ plots being necessary in A19 even for a small group.

I've got a solution! 

Spoiler

CANNIBALISM 

 

[Matt115]

39 minutes ago, faatal said:

Many choices devs make are not great. Game development is a lot of experimentation. Dev teams internally often add or change features and later find them not fun or impractical or resource hogs. Early access just exposes this to the public, who then if they choose, get to experience all the back and forth of the design process. We try to minimize that with public releases, but there is only so much time to test things or else people complain you are too slow and don't release updates.

Well i think newsstands looks great this is the most important thing ^^

Just now, Jost Amman said:

I've got a solution! 

  Reveal hidden contents

CANNIBALISM 

 

Okay i need to remember to run away from you if we someday stuck on desert island

[hiemfire]

10 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

I've got a solution! 

Already in game, 2 require crops. Just eating the "meat" raw requires vitamins which, if what I read in the changelog means what I think it does, got rarer to find in A20 and are not craftable.

Hobo Stew - Official 7 Days to Die Wiki (fandom.com)

Can of Sham - Official 7 Days to Die Wiki (fandom.com)

Sham Chowder - Official 7 Days to Die Wiki (fandom.com)

Edited December 4, 2021 by hiemfire (see edit history)

[faatal]

18 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

I can emphasize with that. I've been literally fighting in long discussions with some self-proclaimed "devs" on Steam, that come to the forum and say that doing what you just said is unprofessional! That it shows a lack of project management and so on and so forth... According to them, you plan something on paper, determine the time it will take and deliver at the scheduled date in time! When I ask them which successful game they developed, then they find any possible reason why they can't tell...

LOL!

That only works when your feature takes 5 minutes to do or you are just copying someone else's idea. I exaggerate, but it is usually the case.

 

I never trust how long someone says it will take to do something in game dev. Usually it is x2 and I've worked with people where it was x3. At a past company we would ask if it was "done, done, done", because at "done, done", it was still not.

25 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

@faatal there seems to be a bit of a problem with thin obstacles with Zds and animals (like street signs) and fence avoidance (also both, but that would arguably make sense with Zds, not animals, as they can perfectly avoid obstacles).

I saw a case with horizontal bars (yes, saw it on a stream!). Possibly path gen top down ray casts are missing their collider (thin or off center?), so it looks open.

[Matt115]

10 minutes ago, faatal said:

LOL!

That only works when your feature takes 5 minutes to do or you are just copying someone else's idea. I exaggerate, but it is usually the case.

 

I never trust how long someone says it will take to do something in game dev. Usually it is x2 and I've worked with people where it was x3. At a past company we would ask if it was "done, done, done", because at "done, done", it was still not.

 

Well people like speedruns right? we have , complete game speedrun, boss speedrun, even make  games speedruns.

so..... updates speedruns!

So - take 10- 20 modders and 2 guys from devs teams.  make condtions like : 2 hd zombie models, 1 gun and 1 type of quest + version must be stable. 

Who do this first win^^

[Roland]

38 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

have the ability to have a sufficient stockpile

 

This is exactly what is being nerfed-- your ability to stockpile and thank goodness since there is zero spoilage in the game. It was too OP. You probably do need a 100+ farm to collect stacks of 64 stews and have them in storage for whenever anyone in the group needs it but Madmole already stated he doesn't want a design where having a stockpile of stacks of food is easy to do.

 

Besides, you don't balance a game to cover the possibility of glitches. You design it for how it should work. The creative menu and console commands are available for when there are glitches but a farm doesn't need to be able to automatically and easily produce a stockpile of food just in case something glitches.

 

I would be all for the food progression arc being a scramble to just find enough food to stay alive to sustainable food production to meet daily needs, to self-sustaining food production to stockpile for the future IF there was also spoilage and a need to refrigerate/preserve as an entropy loop for all the production. But there isn't and likely never will be any of that which means that being able to easily create stockpiles ends that part of the game.

[beerfly]

 

[Eromivus]

I'm sorry if these have already been pointed out or this is the wrong spot for it, but a few things I've noticed watching Jawoodle's two videos:

 

1. Zombies on his horde night wouldn't climb ladders to get to him, so they just milled about and randomly swatted at stuff below him

2. Raining indoors again

3. This could be pre-existing behavior and I'm only noticing it because there's more stuff in the world, but zombies seems to be getting distracted and caught by objects that pose no threat. They just seem to be ignoring the player more to do inane things, but again I can't swear to this.

[SnowDog1942]

5 hours ago, bilibili-wayne said:

Unfortunately, most of them do not understand English, and don't know how to come to the official BBS:)
 

 

Ive been rejected.

 Please tell them I love them anyway.

Edited December 4, 2021 by SnowDog1942 (see edit history)

[MechanicalLens]

13 minutes ago, Eromivus said:

I'm sorry if these have already been pointed out or this is the wrong spot for it, but a few things I've noticed watching Jawoodle's two videos:

 

1. Zombies on his horde night wouldn't climb ladders to get to him, so they just milled about and randomly swatted at stuff below him

2. Raining indoors again

3. This could be pre-existing behavior and I'm only noticing it because there's more stuff in the world, but zombies seems to be getting distracted and caught by objects that pose no threat. They just seem to be ignoring the player more to do inane things, but again I can't swear to this.

 

1. There seems to be an issue with zombie pathing on ladders. If there is a block above the ladder, even if it's 100 blocks in the air, the zombies may no longer see it as a viable path to the player, even if the ladder itself touches the floor.