A20 Developer Diary Discussions

[BFT2020]

53 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

 

I might just eat some broken glass and respawn as fresh as a bee.

Make sure you don't have any mods loaded that keep the debuffs even after you respawn  😉

 

[meilodasreh]

15 hours ago, Forgotten Memes said:

You probably aren't even embarrassed that you're arguing against making the game better for everyone.

There might be enough players who get along well with highest difficulty, so I kindly ask you to not quote yourself as a speaker for "everybody else".

 

I myself am not embarrassed to admit that I mostly play on a mid difficulty level (one above default, sometimes even lower just for casual or trying out stuff).

I have tried higher levels, but those were too much for me, didn't have fun, so I reduced to levels which are challenging enough without bugging me too much. 

 

It wouldn't come to my mind, when I actively choose the highest difficulty level and see that it's too hard to survive for me, that the game is badly balanced.

Difficulty levels per se cannot be imbalanced, they ARE the option to change game balance from easy to hard.

 

It's not that you only have two levels, "insane" and "pony farm", there are many smaller steps.

And hardest difficulty level is called insane for a reason.

When you actively choose to play insane and even self-impose yourself further by deciding "permadeath", then you can't blame anyone else but yourself when it doesn't work out as expected or you can't make it.

 

There's no shame in lowering difficulty, it's your choice, just try and find a level challenging but not overwhelming for your playstyle.

Of course when you perk into machinegunning you can choose a higher difficulty than when perking into melee, that's part of it too.

Throwing a stone isn't the same than firing a shotgun...if you dont't believe me ask my barn door 😄

 

...just kidding I don't have a barn 🤭

Edited June 16, 2021 by meilodasreh (see edit history)

[ShellHead]

Game difficulties do skew the balance towards or against the player of course, but it’s harder to make good comparisons between weapons when the balance is skewed towards the player. At lower difficulties where you can consistently 1-shot, attack speed becomes inordinately useful whereas at high difficulties where 1-shotting is almost impossible, damage takes the fore. Additionally more defensive characteristics are less valuable at low difficulties and very valuable at high difficulties, as individual enemies become much more lethal. From a player perspective, you should absolutely play on the difficulties that are most fun for you (I generally play on the medium option myself) but from a design perspective they become more useful as ways to put elements into sharper contrast, since optimal performance becomes more of a necessity at higher levels and at lower levels everything over-performs.

[BFT2020]

Also please note that TFP has stated that they don't intend to balance the game out at the harder difficulties, the intent is to balance the game out at the default difficulty setting.

[BFT2020]

2 hours ago, sillls said:

I just saw the stream of Prime and Madmole talking about the quest  Restoring power to the gas station. It's nice to see a change from all the fetch quest but why restore power? 

What would that do? Open a treasure vault?  A workshop? Setting up a colony? 

I think it's good but not a very good end goal. 

Turns on the lights, duh  🙂

 

TFP are turning us into maintenance workers in the apocalypse

[ShellHead]

Of course, higher difficulties are just that: an increased challenge and shouldn’t be balanced around.

the argument as I understood it was that when you turned up the difficulty, the strongest (which is to say the largest power allocation) weapons gain even more of a lead on the rest which would say that the allocation of power amongst them had a wider gap than they ought.

[MechanicalLens]

6 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

Turns on the lights, duh  🙂

 

TFP are turning us into maintenance workers in the apocalypse

 

Let the zombies do it for us. They're super genius structural engineers already, why not make them electricians as well? 😜

[meganoth]

4 hours ago, hiemfire said:

Oh, you're basing it off of having found everything that buffs it and having fully perked into it...

 

I actually thought it was enough to experience it with any baton and perk level because I heard there was a bug with the baton so that the perk does not extend stun duration like advertised. But since you were asking I actually started a new game and tried it with a lvl0 points0 character and a stun baton from the creative menue

 

Result: Spawned in a biker and actually had him in stun lock for the whole time until he died (except for the first ~2 seconds until I got the stun effect). Headshot or not didn't matter but naturally body shots made it take longer to take him down.

 

Interestingly I got a stamina warning exactly when he died and my stamina was down to 30. So I spawned in a glowly biker and did the same stunt. Had him again in full stun lock, until my stamina ran out. So actually you should drink a lot of coffee if you want to combat highest level zombies with your lvl0 character and you definitely need the mod to stop their self healing. Other than that, yes, stun lock works.

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by meganoth (see edit history)

[dcsobral]

14 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

 

Let the zombies do it for us. They're super genius structural engineers already, why not make them electricians as well? 😜

Different unions.

[Fanatical_Meat]

2 hours ago, sillls said:

Really glad that Random Gen and water is being worked on.  

I would like RG but when I tried it looked like a patchwork of biomes, roads and POI's all smashed together in places. 

But I haven't tried it in a while so.  

 

It is better in A19 but now it seems to generate sparse areas. Most of my map previews are maps with a few cities and town with large amounts of wilderness between them.

Not the type map I find fun but I won’t complain if that is the type map you may want.

Nitogen maps are the best. Not hyper realistic but fun to play on.

[ShellHead]

16 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

Different unions.

A21: established zombie AFL-CIO

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, meilodasreh said:

There might be enough players who get along well with highest difficulty, so I kindly ask you to not quote yourself as a speaker for "everybody else".

 

I myself am not embarrassed to admit that I mostly play on a mid difficulty level (one above default, sometimes even lower just for casual or trying out stuff).

I have tried higher levels, but those were too much for me, didn't have fun, so I reduced to levels which are challenging enough without bugging me too much. 

 

It wouldn't come to my mind, when I actively choose the highest difficulty level and see that it's too hard to survive for me, that the game is badly balanced.

Difficulty levels per se cannot be imbalanced, they ARE the option to change game balance from easy to hard.

 

It's not that you only have two levels, "insane" and "pony farm", there are many smaller steps.

And hardest difficulty level is called insane for a reason.

When you actively choose to play insane and even self-impose yourself further by deciding "permadeath", then you can't blame anyone else but yourself when it doesn't work out as expected or you can't make it.

 

There's no shame in lowering difficulty, it's your choice, just try and find a level challenging but not overwhelming for your playstyle.

Of course when you perk into machinegunning you can choose a higher difficulty than when perking into melee, that's part of it too.

Throwing a stone isn't the same than firing a shotgun...if you dont't believe me ask my barn door 😄

 

...just kidding I don't have a barn 🤭

 

To be fair to Forgotten Memes, that was not his argument. His argument was that higher difficulties pronounce small differences in weapons because those small differences can mean the difference between live or death.

 

Which isn't exactly true IMHO. That small margin between live or death is different for all players and a player can see it best if the difficulty is as high as he can play. A player who gets challenged by default difficulty will not see any small differences on insane because he will die constantly with any weapon.

 

Also and more importantly difficulty settings change balance. A weapon that is balanced at normal difficulty could be stronger on insane, or weaker. To show that with a simple example the stun baton is ideal. In 7D2D the damage of the stun baton will increase by the same percentage as the club, but a very important stat of the stun baton is its stun damage and stun duration and those two do not scale with difficulty. Should they? I don't really know. But you can imagine that there are a lot of effects in the game that would need to scale with difficulty to make the balance the same at all dificulties.

 

[Matt115]

49 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

Turns on the lights, duh  🙂

 

TFP are turning us into maintenance workers in the apocalypse

and turn on vending machines XD

[sillls]

55 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

Turns on the lights, duh  🙂

 

TFP are turning us into maintenance workers in the apocalypse

So what will be the next quest. Go up to Joe and he says. "Go to the city, there in the Deadhead hotel on the fifth floor the light are out. Go up and flip the switch ok?"☺️

 

Suuuuuuuure!  

[meilodasreh]

7 minutes ago, meganoth said:

A player who gets challenged by default difficulty will not see any small differences on insane because he will die constantly with any weapon.

Hey that's me 😬

 

 

7 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Also and more importantly difficulty settings change balance. A weapon that is balanced at normal difficulty could be stronger on insane, or weaker. To show that with a simple example the stun baton is ideal. In 7D2D the damage of the stun baton will increase by the same percentage as the club, but a very important stat of the stun baton is its stun damage and stun duration and those two do not scale with difficulty. Should they? I don't really know. But you can imagine that there are a lot of effects in the game that would need to scale with difficulty to make the balance the same at all dificulties.

 

Still don't really get the point that different difficulty levels can be better or worse balanced compared to others,

but given that I haven't really tried highest levels for a longer period of time, I will just assume you and Forgotten Memes have a point there.

 

So be it, you convinced me, balance has to be balanced better, because difficulties are too difficult...well at least some of 'em.

.

🤔

.

.

.

🤔

.

ouch my head aches...I will go throw stones at my barn door...and maybe give it a few shells too just to relax.

[dcsobral]

7 minutes ago, sillls said:

So what will be the next quest. Go up to Joe and he says. "Go to the city, there in the Deadhead hotel on the fifth floor the light are out. Go up and flip the switch ok?"☺️

 

Suuuuuuuure!  

Well, I might take it from Joel but not from Rekt that's for sure.

[ShellHead]

50 minutes ago, meganoth said:

That small margin between live or death is different for all players and a player can see it best if the difficulty is as high as he can play. A player who gets challenged by default difficulty will not see any small differences on insane because he will die constantly with any weapon.

I agree and you can’t completely design around all skill levels, which is why you try to look at it from both a relative balance perspective and a skill floor/ceiling perspective.

50 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Also and more importantly difficulty settings change balance. A weapon that is balanced at normal difficulty could be stronger on insane, or weaker. To show that with a simple example the stun baton is ideal. In 7D2D the damage of the stun baton will increase by the same percentage as the club, but a very important stat of the stun baton is its stun damage and stun duration and those two do not scale with difficulty. Should they? I don't really know. But you can imagine that there are a lot of effects in the game that would need to scale with difficulty to make the balance the same at all dificulties.

Exactly, not every trait a weapon has can be modified by difficulty. Take your stun baton example, because more of its power is in its stun rather than its raw statistics (damage, stamina cost, etc) the baton is less directly affected by difficulty level but the stun becomes more necessary to survive as enemy damage increases and player damage decreases, making it more useful on higher difficulties and as the gamestage increases. Same with the spear’s long range and armor penetration, less useful when enemies are weaker and have little or no armor but more useful when they do more damage and have higher armor rating. Since armor rating isn’t a part of difficulty modifiers, the spear also isn’t as affected by difficulty.

So difficulty isn’t overly useful a metric for weapon balance but can be useful to reveal where weapons power allocations are distributed and whether or not those allocations are within a reasonable margin of each other.

Edited June 16, 2021 by ShellHead
Clarity (see edit history)

[MechanicalLens]

1 hour ago, dcsobral said:

Well, I might take it from Joel but not from Rekt that's for sure.

 

Rekt: I want you to retrieve a shipment from the Amigone Funeral Home. Make it snappy!

 

*Upon the player returning, bruised, bleeding, broken...*

 

Rekt: Good, ya brought it back. Leave it on the counter and #@%$ off.

 

😜

[samljer]

16 hours ago, dcsobral said:

You can make a modlet to add the prefab to random gen with alpha 19. No need to add them by hand. Ah... I recall now that the problem is that modlets aren't loaded at the time the world is generated. I seem to recall some change in that regard, though.

whats a modlet?

Is it a third party program (not really what i was asking for it if is)

 

how can i do this?

I want to create the prefabs, not download others.

Edited June 16, 2021 by samljer (see edit history)

[dcsobral]

11 minutes ago, samljer said:

whats a modlet?

Is it a third party program (not really what i was asking for it if is)

 

how can i do this?

I want to create the prefabs, not download others.

Check 

 

 

[samljer]

Just now, dcsobral said:

Check 

 

 

A17. is that still relevant?

 

Ill take a look, thank you!

[dcsobral]

Just now, samljer said:

A17. is that still relevant?

 

Ill take a look, thank you!

Yes, it is still relevant. I believe the post itself was updated with things that were added since. The question is whether rwgmixer.xml, the file that tells what prefabs to put in random gen, is updated with modlets before generating a world. I think there was a change to make it so in alpha 19, but I honestly can't tell for sure. 

[samljer]

Just now, dcsobral said:

Yes, it is still relevant. I believe the post itself was updated with things that were added since. The question is whether rwgmixer.xml, the file that tells what prefabs to put in random gen, is updated with modlets before generating a world. I think there was a change to make it so in alpha 19, but I honestly can't tell for sure. 

sounds perfect thanks.

 

This is what my original post was about though. a tick box in the prefab editor that would make these changes for you

and just start using the prefab you made

[dcsobral]

Just now, samljer said:

sounds perfect thanks.

 

This is what my original post was about though. a tick box in the prefab editor that would make these changes for you

and just start using the prefab you made

Yes, I'm not dismissing the suggestion. We'll have to wait and see how the new alpha 20 random gen works. So far there's been very little information about it.

 

[samljer]

1 minute ago, dcsobral said:

Yes, I'm not dismissing the suggestion. We'll have to wait and see how the new alpha 20 random gen works. So far there's been very little information about it.

 

lol i know you wernt