Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Burrfly]

3 minutes ago, unlike them said:

Why I cannot hear the dynamic music? I have it on enabled and on 100%.

Maybe it isn't enabled all day long. If I'm correct there is a setting 'daily time alotted' which indicates how much percentage of a day the music is played.

[unlike them]

9 minutes ago, Burrfly said:

Maybe it isn't enabled all day long. If I'm correct there is a setting 'daily time alotted' which indicates how much percentage of a day the music is played.

yes, and I made it 100%, but still no dynamic music

[bukabyaka]

Is it possible to output a bundle between SteamID and EOS with some command? Most mods and commands on the server have fallen.

[Firecat]

Thoughts on alpha 20 after having played for several hours now...

 

New world generation and graphics upgrades? Fabulous. The game looks completely different in a good way. Road systems actually look good and work now, the jeep may get more use now that driving on the roads is both easier and more practical! New POIs and reworks I've seen so far are all really well done. I popped my head in the new factory and a few others in the POI editor (not too much, don't wanna spoil all the fun!), and most of them look totally sweet design-wise.

 

New loot system? I still want to see the actual numbers of what got changed how, but so far looting finally FEELS rewarding again. I like the rebalancing they've done of what loot shows up in what container, and the ability to run across more than a stone axe if you get super lucky really adds a lot of the fun factor back (I got a level 1 pistol on day 1! And equally important, I haven't found another yet, meaning they aren't lying around everywhere, either). I really approve of the addition of small amounts of resources, like sand, stones, cobblestone, in the trash piles and such. It does feel like there is some balancing yet to do with regards to how much or what spawns and how often certain things spawn, since I feel like I'm getting more of certain things than I should, but the new system itself? So far so good. As far as food is concerned, I haven't tested the new farming system yet, but what feels promising is I have run across a few various seeds in loot, they seem to show up a bit more often than before. As far as food is concerned without having farming involved, it feels just about right to me. I'm not dying of hunger to the point I can't do anything but desperately search for food, but keeping myself fed doesn't feel effortless either. Speaking of, the single inventory slot food pack that the airdrop now gives is neat. I like that, and the fact there are now tier rewards from the trader. Dude gave me a bike! Now I can spend my dukes on food and early essentials instead of having to try to hoard them in case he stocks a vehicle and I can't find the parts elsewhere. I bought some crops from him instead, to help get what I need to try that new farming system.

 

Gameplay? Pretty smooth 90% of the time. Every now and then there is like this little stutter or lag spike when a zombie gets knocked down, or you open a container, it can happen with lots of things, not sure what's up with it, but that said.. Bugs? Not really much of anything so far. Certainly nothing game breaking! This feels very finished for an experimental build, so well done, Fun Pimps! I did stumble across a block where an edge was unpainted and it caught my eye both times I went through that POI, but that's just an aesthetic polish sort of thing, doesn't affect gameplay at all (attached a screenshot of it). The bug where it doesn't show the decreasing durability if you power harvest an animal and then switch to normal harvesting still exists, but that was in alpha 19, too. One thing I did find that is annoying, is that when you knock a zombie down in grass, you can swing directly at its head an it will just break the grass instead of hitting the zombie! Honestly, though, that's my biggest complaint so far.

 

This is probably my favorite alpha so far since I started back in alpha 16.

[Blake_]

First impressions on my potato PC (GTX 780M, intel 4800MQ 4/8 2.7-3.6Ghz boost and 4x8 gigs DDR3 RAM 1600Mhz and 1tb SSD) . To the players: Don't install 7dtd on a HDD. It stutters often in heavy graphical areas.

 

-Generation time on 10k map is 14 minutes 53 seconds on minimum requirements. 16 minutes 30 seconds if we count the loading screen until player movement.

-For comparison, 8k map generation time  in a19.6 b8 was around 28 minutes .

-Performance: Equal to an 8k map . I would say that it's better, equal in Cities, but you have to turn off Vsync.

-I used 4 potato sticks of ddr3 ram and I now have 32 gigs of potato ram. No matter the potatoness of the RAM, if you have it you can do it with good enough stability. Dual channel is a must.

-City is.... I find it way better than I thought, good stability and drops don't go too far and stutters are non existent if you remember to disable CPU-intensive options like Vsync. Distant mesh is default and I turned to low graphics preset, but without AA and view distance Medium.

 

Don't play on an HDD. I installed it in one and the fps stutters are noticeable every once in a while.

 

Suggestions:

 

There are new CPU intensive tasks that should be tweaked:

 

 VSync should be NO by default in high, medium and low presets, I wouldn't necessarily turn it off for Ultra though, to each their own .  Screen tearing is minimal due to the game being designed to go exactly at 60 fps most of the time and "Yes" just results in a big drop in average fps , due to the high CPU comsumption in Downtown , also resulting in  heavy stutter. I'm talking up to 3.6ghz Cpus which is not a laughing matter. Disabling it relaxed the situation and the sudden drops (+ the AA off).

 

-AA should be off in lower end computers. Same as above. Detecting CPU could be a nice thing.

 

I suggest creating at least a LOWEST preset that disables VSync and AA AND reflections. Postprocessing and CPU-heavy tasks should not be included in the lower settings. Near shadows should take priority if need be so does the occluder, as they directly affect gameplay experience.

 

-Zds in "Feral Sense : On" lack sufficient audio cues, resulting in more silent hits from behind. The audio sound frequency of entities should be increased a bit.

 

 

 

 

What I tested: I turned ALL to Ultra and Ultra++++ with custom for highest settings with Vsync off and the result was 20-30 fps in ALL the 10k map running in god mode and teleporting and doing whatever the heck I wanted. The lowest drop was a second in Downtown with 10 fps. I didn't test exploding stuff, but my guess is it might be ok to explode POIs if the environment isn't too crowded.

 

I'd say that if my potato can handle 30fps on 1080p highest, the game is very optimized. It needs that Vsync and AA off to bring fps up on low end rigs.

 

Edit: This post should be of some help to you, @faatal. Good job!

Edited December 7, 2021 by Blake_ (see edit history)

[meganoth]

6 hours ago, Khalagar said:

It kind of hits two targets, but I don't think it sweeps as much as a sledge or anything. I would compare it's AoE to a club, which can also sometimes stagger two targets I'm 99% sure. The only times I've had the pipe baton do it, is when I use the power attack and they are lined up to both get poked by the thrust, so its' not exactly reliable AoE and I don't feel like the pipe baton is staggering any more than a club does, so it's not really carving out any kind of niche besides just "It at least scales with your perk stat and has cool animations"

 

 

 

Are you sure you are not just seeing grazing hits that were introduced in A17 or A18?

[Darthjake]

Oh yeah, when Trader Jen closes it's still the default male voice, is that ever going to change or is it just going to be flavor text.

[Outlaw_187]

1 hour ago, Darthjake said:

Oh yeah, when Trader Jen closes it's still the default male voice, is that ever going to change or is it just going to be flavor text.

Yes Jen needs her own closing & opening notifications. Her voice is super sexy 🤤🤤🤤🤤

 

And Pimps.....where is her jiggle tech??!! 🤨 This IS Alpha 20 after all......

Edited December 7, 2021 by Outlaw_187 (see edit history)

[overgoat]

Quick comment on my new favorite feature:  Feral Sense.  My friends and I are 'good' at this game and usually have very few deaths.  We had early game down to a science and used to get well established very quickly.  On warrior difficulty with feral day & night on we are getting our butts kicked a lot!  The game feels super scary again which it hasn't for a long time for me.  It was rare to be surprised before and it happens all the time now.  I had about 10 nearby zombies visit me in a house while doing a tier-1 fetch... it didn't go well, but was so much fun.

 

If you are a veteran player and haven't tried it, I highly recommend it!

[yisssnakk]

I know that melee weapons were doing grazing hits in A19 as well, so no surprises there. The zombies, on the other hand...holy crap! I've had it happen three separate times where I'm playing the door-in-face game (zombie beating on an unlocked door, wait for zombie to swing, open door, pound zombie in da face, close door again) and after about the third swing, I opened the door to take another shot and the zombie ducks under my swing and swipes my kneecaps!  I've observed zombie dogs surrounding me when I'm standing on an obstacle, as opposed to the swarm beneath you or as close as they can get to you. This looked suspiciously like strategy and pack hunting! Awesome if it is and keep an eye out if it's not planned behaviour!

5 minutes ago, overgoat said:

Quick comment on my new favorite feature:  Feral Sense.  My friends and I are 'good' at this game and usually have very few deaths.  We had early game down to a science and used to get well established very quickly.  On warrior difficulty with feral day & night on we are getting our butts kicked a lot!  The game feels super scary again which it hasn't for a long time for me.  It was rare to be surprised before and it happens all the time now.  I had about 10 nearby zombies visit me in a house while doing a tier-1 fetch... it didn't go well, but was so much fun.

 

If you are a veteran player and haven't tried it, I highly recommend it!

Oh yeah! I used to only die in early game if I did something stupid. Feral sense at night did me right the f00k in! I was (imo) quietly raiding a building I'd cleared (one of the fast food joints) and started hearing a "couple" of zombies beating on things outside. I made the mistake of not planning a quick egress when I first heard them. By the time I realized that I had a problem, it was too late! It was almost like a screamer horde! 6+ dogs, 3 or 4 spiders, multiple ferals of various flavours, and they were at every door! Their pathing seems to have improved quite a bit!

[madmole]

14 hours ago, MisutoM said:

I hate to necro the new farming complain train, but I had a shower thought that might put some players mind's at ease about it. 

 

We have to remember that we aren't playing this theorycrafting game with a full deck of cards, the devs know what is going to happen in future updates so things that come out today might be setting up for future things.

 

In this case, they did give us a teaser over a year ago that likely most of us forgot about:

 

 

A lot of these bonuses didn't sound good back when they were revealed... but suddenly they look pretty spicy. Granted, this all got delayed to a21 (hopefully) and obviously anything could change and numbers aren't set in stone. But let's consider that this is roughly what they are still looking at and math out how crazy late game farms could be for an actual dedicated farmer.

 

With a quality 6 farmer armor (farmor?) set, we'd be getting an extra crop per harvest and a 60% chance at a seed. So in the 10 crop example, for a19 you'd get 30 crops per harvest. In the optimistic future of a21, this set combined with maxed LOTL would give 90 crops (2+1 base times 3 so 9 per harvest) and average 6 seeds per harvest, resulting in a staggering 70 crop profit; more than double that of the a19 system. Heck, even if you massively low roll and get 0 seeds back, you'd still see a 40 crop harvest after crafting 10 new seeds thus exceeding the previous alpha even in a catastrophically unlucky scenario. But, having to find high quality of this armor which would likely be loot stage gated is going to push this to a much later point in the game compared to a19 where you could set up a passive farm in the first week or so and remove hunger forever.

 

Basically, farming may be intentionally nerfed at the start especially for players who don't perk into living off the land, but if you want to fully invest in farming, it may end up being even more rewarding than what we have now. I'd pay the cost of re-sowing my seeds each time if I were able to get double the rewards in the future. We may just have to suck it up for a20 for the promised land future of a21 lol. Super corn aside, casual farming is still fine averaging only 0.5 crops less per harvest if you have 1 point in the skill. (seriously though, farm bundle 3 needs to give 2 super corn seeds to remove most of the feel bad moments!) 

 

As with anything planned, stuff will need to get rebalanced to fit the current system once it's implemented.

[Jost Amman]

A20 is giving me a very good vibe... I think it's the best 7D2D Alpha version yet.

Congrats FP! 

[madmole]

I'm so happy to hear everyone is enjoying the new challenges of A20. I really enjoyed feral sense and the extra spawns downtown has. Random gen cities/towns have some areas that are sort of closed off so you can take a wrong turn and have to back out and be in serious trouble, where before it was so spread out you could always turn a corner and lose the pursuing zombies so having some dead ends was a great improvement.

Traveling at night on foot with feral sense on is pretty risky. Food management feels great to me and farming is a short bandaid to a constant problem. Eventually I got a lot of food, but I never was able to eat unlimited stews, I had to make whatever I could scrounge up, buy every can in every vending machine, kill every chicken, etc for at least the first 30 days. It feels good when you are constantly worried about honey/antibiotics/food. I never did get a surplus of big med kits or casts in my 70 some day game, and I had so many times I was beat up with 4+ crits on my screen and very close calls, that to me is what makes a memorable play through.

[Astronomical]

So far A20 is definitely as great as I'd hoped. RWG looks amazing, the new weapons are fun, and the level design team have really outdone themselves. I never thought we'd see such awesome towns and cities in this game! Even the grass looks fantastic! 🙂

 

One problem I have encountered is that the indestructible zone surrounding traders needs to be shrunk. With the current, very cool way that A20 stacks POIs so closely together the trader zone can bleed over making a POI unlootable and even creating a situation where players can get stuck. For an example just hop into the pregen 10k map and check out the POI right next to the first trader the quest points you to.

[meilodasreh]

just some short impressions I wanted to cummunicate, before stepping back into an evening session...sorry if it has been already adressed or even been fixed.

 

World feels much more immersive/real and "vivid" (don't know a better word, sorry, I know that's not the most fitting term for a postapocalyptic scenario)

No fix needed here by the way 😀 great work TFP!

 

boars are now the fierce things they should be, attacking spontaneously instead of just stepping around waiting for the first hit. Love it! (made me poop)

 

some issues/odd things i came upon:

 

doubleswing/unwanted extra attack animation is back with the bone knife

 

Am I really supposed to be able to loot a handful of garbage bags on the streets and then have the mats and being able to craft a pipe MG from my backpack?

Also some 7,62ammo was there lying in a small barn (well, leaving out the short episode me being almost killed by wolf inside that barn...made me poop again)

So I had a DPS monster available before noon day 1 with almost no effort. Hm. Felt strange. (felt like bachgaman 😀)

 

Thats it for now. Have to settle in that abandoned gas station for the first night, so bye again.

 

 

[Jost Amman]

1 minute ago, Astronomical said:

One problem I have encountered is that the indestructible zone surrounding traders needs to be shrunk. With the current, very cool way that A20 stacks POIs so closely together the trader zone can bleed over making a POI unlootable and even creating a situation where players can get stuck. For an example just hop into the pregen 10k map and check out the POI right next to the first trader the quest points you to.

Yeah, there's still stuff that need fixing/tweaking.

Hopefully, we can help them squash  as many bugs as possible before stable. 

[Yopo]

Heyo, great update. Really enjoying it so far, since I couldn’t really play a19 when it came out due to inadequate hardware, which didn’t get fixed until a couple months ago. 

 

so something I’ve noticed, and can’t find any answer or info on it is this. 
Every time I move my mouse to look around or when I move my character, there’s this quick dimming effect taking place, it’s most noticeable when outside. When I stop moving, it brightens back up/ gose back to normal. 
so when I move my mouse really slowly in a slow scanning of my surroundings motion, that dimming effect becomes a flickering because of the raid switching between moving and stopping. It’s kinda annoying to see that constantly. 
man’s i don’t really no if that’s normal or something that can be fixed. I hope it can tho, but I haven’t figured it out, so hoping to see if anyone here has any insight to this. 
Ty

[Red Eagle LXIX]

58 minutes ago, madmole said:

in my 70 some day game

 

Just 1 question: How many deaths during that 70 some days?

 

 

Edited December 7, 2021 by Red Eagle LXIX (see edit history)

[Matt115]

56 minutes ago, madmole said:

I'm so happy to hear everyone is enjoying the new challenges of A20. I really enjoyed feral sense and the extra spawns downtown has. Random gen cities/towns have some areas that are sort of closed off so you can take a wrong turn and have to back out and be in serious trouble, where before it was so spread out you could always turn a corner and lose the pursuing zombies so having some dead ends was a great improvement.

Traveling at night on foot with feral sense on is pretty risky. Food management feels great to me and farming is a short bandaid to a constant problem. Eventually I got a lot of food, but I never was able to eat unlimited stews, I had to make whatever I could scrounge up, buy every can in every vending machine, kill every chicken, etc for at least the first 30 days. It feels good when you are constantly worried about honey/antibiotics/food. I never did get a surplus of big med kits or casts in my 70 some day game, and I had so many times I was beat up with 4+ crits on my screen and very close calls, that to me is what makes a memorable play through.

@madmole please ! i have small request : could you and team talk about adding old skeleton prop - like skeleton in rags sitting on chair or lying, please 🙏

[Aldranon]

Food is not a thing unless chickens don't respawn.

I "drove" my bicycle to another town (The trade route quest) and back and ended up with 100 meat. (7 chickens and a deer) with 1 point in cooking that's 200 food "grilled meat".

Just killing the chickens on the road with pistol ready while riding bike.  Quickly hop off bike, crouch for accuracy then fire pistol.  Boom repeat.

 

With dying:

My first (and still no deaths) is a hard push on clubs/shotty with 1pt in cooking and 1pt for the forge.  Probably not going to die now.

My second and third were a perception/archer focus and a fortitude focus.  They both died.

 

I like the archer, its strong but I don't play that well yet.

Edited December 7, 2021 by Aldranon (see edit history)

[madmole]

3 minutes ago, Red Eagle LXIX said:

 

Just 1 question: How many deaths during that 70 some days?

 

 

7. A couple on day 1, and a couple unfair ones in an attack volume. Nomad, feral sense, light armor agility build, 16 alive, no air drops. I wanted a challenge Bear den got me a couple times too.

[Raptortwenty2]

I understand they worked the block health but Im not sure why they removed reinforced concrete Because it was just another type of block you could build with and it just seems like a interesting removal  

[Burrfly]

My first-look review, just like other people do now

 

I playtested it for a short amount of time and the towns and RWG is, as everyone is saying here, amazing. It feels so much more real and scarier and more epic.

 

However, I do feel that I have gotten too much loot in this very first stage in the game. I already got more than 60 ammo rounds after looting just one kinda basic POI, and even found 2 guns (while I wasn't even in a boosted biome, I was in just the plains). I personally like it more if I have TOO LITTLE ammo VS too much ammo. This way we have to strategically think about wether we have to use our scarce ammo or not, which makes it a lot cooler IMO. In alpha 19 my friends and I came across our first gun at around day 15 or something (which felt very epic), and now I already got 2 guns before the night in the first day, which feels OP and not special anymore because I already have a lot in a very short amount of time. 

 

The amount of ammo I got and schematics I already learned also feels too much. I hope this will get fixed by stable, because this is my single ONLY very bad feeling. The rest is AMAZING, but even those amazing things will quickly feel not special anymore if you already have multiple guns by day 1. I remember playing at day 120+ in alpha 17 and still finding new cool loot, while now I think I would have everything by day 30.

 

I hope this will be read by the fun pimps and balanced by stable, because I love this game and also see that multiple people think the same as me. Trader ammo rewards are halved but personally still feel a little too much.

 

Long story short:

In my opinion, especially ammo and guns found in loot early-game need to be lowered. For the rest it's amazing.

[omegarte]

I'll do a formal bug report if necessary but I've got a dedicated server running the pregen 8k map and one of my players is getting the "no trader" message when trying to complete the starter quest.  Any quick/easy way to fix this?

Edited December 7, 2021 by omegarte (see edit history)

[Morloc]

20 minutes ago, Burrfly said:

However, I do feel that I have gotten too much loot in this very first stage in the game. I already got more than 60 ammo rounds after looting just one kinda basic POI, and even found 2 guns (while I wasn't even in a boosted biome, I was in just the plains). I personally like it more if I have TOO LITTLE ammo VS too much ammo.

 

While I haven't jumped into A20 yet, you can adjust the loot rate to something less than 100% to correct too-much-loot problems.

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc