Jump to content

A20 Developer Diary Discussions


Roland

Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, meilodasreh said:

It will require a 3D-printer connected to your PC.

Every time you open the shape menu, the printer will commence to produce a 1m x 1m x1m ABS block, a chisel and a hammer. (printing time is assumed to make the game more realistic considering building time).

Once the block is finished, you can enter "creative mode" with hammer and chisel, and have absolute and total freedom shaping the block.

Then you 3D-scan it (oh didn't I mention you will have to own such one too?) and it then can be placed inside the game.

 

 

If I had a 3D printer.  Can I print out a copy of  Asa Akira?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

I can already see an incoming "Wet Concrete Gate"... :heh: 

We should create an entry in the a20 bug report forum that reads: "Stainless Wet Concrete bee hive not working properly when punching it with sticks" . Deep thoughts.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Blake_ said:

We should create an entry in the a20 bug report forum that reads: "Stainless Wet Concrete bee hive not working properly when punching it with sticks" . Deep thoughts.

 

Either that or, "Wet concrete door solidifies and fuses itself to the walls surrounding it. Cannot escape my base. Send help."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, NinjaMoa said:

Will there ever be a visual representation of block support / strength?

 

Valheim does this very well and leads to far less wasted time while building.

 

This already exists. Go into DM mode, press Esc, and show structural integrity; it'll be one of the options shown to you. It'll all be in green; the darker the shade, the less structurally stable it is, if I'm not mistaken. Nonetheless it could be improved upon to use the more universal system - red, orange, yellow, green.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

 

This already exists. Go into DM mode, press Esc, and show structural integrity; it'll be one of the options shown to you. It'll all be in green; the darker the shade, the less structurally stable it is, if I'm not mistaken. Nonetheless it could be improved upon to use the more universal system - red, orange, yellow, green.

 

If you can see any difference between the lighter and darker shade of green you either have a better graphics driver, monitor or better eyesight than me.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, meganoth said:

 

If you can see any difference between the lighter and darker shade of green you either have a better graphics driver, monitor or better eyesight than me.

 

 

 

It's probably the former; my eyesight ain't worth anything. Remove my glasses and I can't see the world half an inch in front of me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

This already exists. Go into DM mode, press Esc, and show structural integrity; it'll be one of the options shown to you. It'll all be in green; the darker the shade, the less structurally stable it is, if I'm not mistaken. Nonetheless it could be improved upon to use the more universal system - red, orange, yellow, green.

 

I am meaning as part of in game building rather than a debug tool.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Numberz said:

 

This would be an absolute travesty.  Please reconsider this.

 

I know modded discussion is not permitted here, but Darkness Falls has this very system (if this is indeed what madmole meant) and while it took a bit of getting used to, it is definitely more convenient and streamlined versus the current version.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, Numberz said:

 

This would be an absolute travesty.  Please reconsider this.

No. It would be nice. It's just that we are so used to the smelting system (which is nice and moderately realistic) that we often do not fathom the butt ton of headaches it creates versus a simple recipe workbench. 7dtd needs quests, campaign, gameplay, fun. Simplifying the forge would save time and tutorials.

 

I'm ok either way, though the current forge is less performant than a workbench recipe crafting system, so there's that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

59 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

No. It would be nice. It's just that we are so used to the smelting system (which is nice and moderately realistic) that we often do not fathom the butt ton of headaches it creates versus a simple recipe workbench. 7dtd needs quests, campaign, gameplay, fun. Simplifying the forge would save time and tutorials.

 

I'm ok either way, though the current forge is less performant than a workbench recipe crafting system, so there's that.

But many of us like the progressive feeling of the game as we improve out items and build new things that unlock better things. I'm all for so many different workstations to: 

  • improve our clothes,
  • improve combat skills,
  • train strength
  • computer station to monitor our base (cctv), send/read help from other districts, receive threats from the Duke or any other news
  • oven/food station to make more advanced foods
  • station for sanitization (washing self or clothes)

many others but I know these are more work than TFP's care to give it at the moment. Too much on their plate already, it seems. Hopefully modders can do these things in the future?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, ZombieHorde said:

But many of us like the progressive feeling of the game as we improve out items and build new things that unlock better things. I'm all for so many different workstations to: 

  • improve our clothes,
  • improve combat skills,
  • train strength
  • computer station to monitor our base (cctv), send/read help from other districts, receive threats from the Duke or any other news
  • oven/food station to make more advanced foods
  • station for sanitization (washing self or clothes)

many others but I know these are more work than TFP's care to give it at the moment. Too much on their plate already, it seems. Hopefully modders can do these things in the future?

 

As TFP always say, don't get married to old, inferior systems. This might be one of those cases.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Do you remember sticks? We where all oh warpath when MM wanted to remove them...

I think paint does a lot of the flavor stuff so no problem for me with simplyfication.

I mean seriously, 99 % build Wood-Stone-Concrete-Steel. It´s the most effectiv way to do it in the game in a long time and if the 1 % is removed, i don´t mind it.

Also the allmighty MM ( and his brother, don´t forget him! He got the awesome hair ontop of the head) takes away but also gives shiny new stuff. Mostly the remove to make space or reduce to improvement more easy. 

 

BTW water improvement? hell yeah gimme that moat

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Brian9824 said:

 

Just out of curiosity does that come with other balance changes like reduced zombie damage to higher tier blocks or increased hp?  The change would result in the higher tier blocks losing a massive amount of durability otherwise.  

 

Occams Razor: If they just add up the hp of lower tier stages to higher tier stages they don't need to change anything else to keep the current balance (with a minor exception). If they don't they would need to waste hours of development time for a rebalance of everything else. 

 

7 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:

@madmole What would you say about the fuel requirement for the chem station, forge, and campfire being removed? It adds no challenge and it just disrupts the flow. Sure it's realistic, but that doesn't help it from being an unnecessary extra step in my opinion. It's easy enough to gather wood for fuel anyway, so I don't see balance being an issue.

 

A compromise could be that one of the mods you put into the workstations also reduces fuel use greatly. So once you have that you just need to put in say 100 or 500 wood and never need to add to it for the rest of the game.

 

If you remove all resource sinks for wood, why is there even a need for steel fireaxe and chainsaw in the game? They would be the next to cut. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Xtrakicking said:

This streamlining stravaganza sure is frightening...

I don't care much about the streamlining of building, but I can't help but wonder what's next on the streamline list and where exactly will the line be drawn...

 

yeah its like they are intentionally burning everything down that created this fanbase, what made the game big. These news just being the tip of the iceberg sicne A17/18-ish.

 

I still got trust in TFP, but i dont like the way they are going AT ALL.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Xtrakicking said:

This streamlining stravaganza sure is frightening...

I don't care much about the streamlining of building, but I can't help but wonder what's next on the streamline list and where exactly will the line be drawn...

The building changes are part UI improvement, part streamlining of materials. And I would assume the former is undeniably positive and without downsides.

 

The latter is a two-sided coin. On the one hand it is safe to say that the majority of people will use the better variant of any material almost exclusively whenever they build something. I.e. they will always use reinforced concrete when building with concrete.

So in this respect the removal of simple concrete is generally similar to the removal of wooden sticks even though in actual gameplay there are lots of small exceptions to the rule. I actually often think about upgrading specific blocks or not, while my 3 co-players deftly apply upgrades to everything in reach.

 

Another difference is in POIs. Here we will loose a finer differentiation in buildings. I.e. when we are taking over POIs as bases there are weaker and sturdier stone buildings depending on the stone used. Or a building with lots of concrete still might need some upgrades but could be easier to adapt for a low level character (hacking away those stairs before nightfall takes a lot longer if the blocks have HPs doubled). Still, the impact is small

 

In summary, as a long time player I don't like the removal of the material variants and it isn't just because I'm used to them. But I can live with the change.

Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

Why don't they just remove wood, stone iron, coal, lead, KNO3 and shale and make ONE generic blob we can collect called "Material"?

It'd streamline the game and make every recipe so simple after all.

 

On a serious note... I'm all for streamlining "the process", but what about maintaining some "flavor" in the game?

@madmole Don't you think you've gone too far with this simplification process? :suspicious:

Do you mean the forge suggestion from madmole a while ago ? While we currently have an interesting and original take which balances realism and simulation while making the forges "gamey", doing them cost a lot of balance and coding time and it's currently still a bit confusing in a few aspects for newbies (recipe availability, resource cost balance, etc).

 

The main problem is performance. A revisited forge with no "melting" will help performance in workstation heavy areas A LOT, because 4 workbenches = 1 forge in terms of performance (that's a minimum. It's actually a bit more costly than that; we could compare a forge to 6 whole entities at runtime ).

 

I would like to hear the opinion of @Gazz and @madmole on this one, because this is a very interesting subject.

 

I believe it's a change to consider (if not for a20, for the future) because:

 

1-Performs more than 4x better than the current forges.

 

2-We already smelt iron into iron, lead into lead, clay into clay, brass into brass, stone into stone (really ?). What about just using the resource as is and stop with the sharp sticks ? Ingots would be just recipes and the forge animation would be the same. Virtually no change there. 

 

3. The game really needs npcs and quests and awesome threats that result in emergent gameplay and awesome PvP and PvE experiences, not convoluted #forgegates everywhere that take us away from that by staring at a timer. I've never heard a party talking about "that awesome weekend when we smelted that sweet brass".

 

4. The new recipe-based forge would be faster, simpler and easier to understand both for newbies and veterans and would help managing time for the horde.

 

5.The new forge would be fast to do in dev time terms and easy to balance compared to the old one.

 

6. You wouldn't need to have that many forges and to micromanage the smelting process like a madman/madgirl. Just select the recipe while having the resources and craft away like cement mixers, chemistry stations or workbenches already do now.

 

7. You could still improve them with mods, which will make the proper gating for end game resources like steel.

 

8.You could argue that smelting allows to store resources in a place and adds an extra threat or losing said resources, but in reality that is easily solved just by increasing current resource stacks to 10000 and if you lose the chest you would be in the exact same situation. So no gameplay change there either.

 

So, you see, when you think about it you already start to hate the old system. Surely enough, the game lacks quite a bit of content right now, but that won't be the case in a couple of years and by then we will wonder what is this smelting nightmare all about. We just want to kill sexy bandits.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

So, you see, when you think about it you already start to hate the old system. Surely enough, the game lacks quite a bit of content right now, but that won't be the case in a couple of years and by then we will wonder what is this smelting nightmare all about. We just want to kill sexy bandits.

Frankly, I'm not convinced. You also ignored the part where I was talking about flavor in the game.

If I want a simplistic experience with lots of action I'll go play (e.g.) Left 4 Dead.

 

7D2D has always succeeded in striking a balance between a survival simulation and an action FPS game.

TFP seem to be heavily shifting toward the latter, which can be partly ok, but my question is: when is much going to become too much? :decision:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/12/2021 at 6:35 AM, Chanster111 said:

Will we get bullet counted Reloads? As in we shoot 5 rounds in the pump shotgun we reload 5 rounds and so on.

 

Don't sweat it. In the interest of improving performance and simplifying the overly-complex and antiquated "ammo" systems the firearms use, (IT IS RUMORED) that the devs plan to move toward a system of fungible ammunition like we saw them do in Mass Effect. No more having to carry all these weapons and their required ammo types! You just bring your weapon...say...Light Pistol to a Weapon Locker (distributed throughout the map) and your total ammo is scaled with the weapon you take out of the locker. If you start using a .50 weapon, you might see your 300 rounds of Light Pistol ammo drop to 40 rounds of .50.

 

We can all rest easy and focus on the main point of the game which is killing zombies! You can still craft ammo, but now it will fit all of your guns! No more of that micro-management that the 7D2D community just hates!

 

th?id=OIP.K28CP9EWZGhC6SyCdCKcQwHaE8%26p

 

 

You can make up for any realism sacrificed by using your imagination....

 

 

?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse4.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3

 

 

-Morloc

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Blake_ said:

 

1-Performs more than 4x better than the current forges.

 

2-We already smelt iron into iron, lead into lead, clay into clay, brass into brass, stone into stone (really ?). What about just using the resource as is and stop with the sharp sticks ? Ingots would be just recipes and the forge animation would be the same. Virtually no change there. 

 

3. The game really needs npcs and quests and awesome threats that result in emergent gameplay and awesome PvP and PvE experiences, not convoluted #forgegates everywhere that take us away from that by staring at a timer. I've never heard a party talking about "that awesome weekend when we smelted that sweet brass".

 

4. The new recipe-based forge would be faster, simpler and easier to understand both for newbies and veterans and would help managing time for the horde.

 

 We just want to kill sexy bandits.

 

 

I took the liberty of condensing your post.  No offense intended.

 

1/2. Of course it is more performant.  You are taking what some of us find to be a valuable time sink and reducing it into nothing more than base decoration.  Don't we already have enough workstations that offer nothing in terms of gameplay?   It may be hard to believe but some of us enjoy the early parts of the game and all of the quirky mechanics and time sinks much more than the late game FPS aspects.   I usually quit and start over once vehicles beyond minibikes are unlocked and tier 3 weapons appear.

 

3. Bandits and NPCs?  Truthfully, do you really think that the AI for these will offer any real challenge or even interest beyond a few hours?  I'm not too sure.  Frankly, I think TFP would be better served to forget NPCs and bandits beyond a very rudimentary implementation and focus more on PvP.

 

I just don't think there is any way that we can ever agree... and that is ok.  You want a pure looter-shooter.  I came to the game more for survival-crafting.  The issue is just that it is the survival-crafting that is always getting stepped on to the point that much of the character or, as some may put it, flavor is being excised from the game.

 

The problem with simplification is that it tends to go too far and the baby gets thrown out with the bath water.  For instance, this is why we no longer have a thoughtful repair system in the game.  For that matter, why is item degradation still in the game?   Repair kits are now irrelevant, so isn't degradation now pointless too?

 

On a positive note, the new shape menu sounds great.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

Why don't they just remove wood, stone iron, coal, lead, KNO3 and shale and make ONE generic blob we can collect called "Material"?

It'd streamline the game and make every recipe so simple after all.

 

On a serious note... I'm all for streamlining "the process", but what about maintaining some "flavor" in the game?

@madmole Don't you think you've gone too far with this simplification process? :suspicious:


I understand your fear but in this case I think aligning the forge with the other workstations is a good thing. Imo, the flavor comes from having various workstations that manage specific recipes more than how complex a process it is to use those workstations. 
 

Valheim workstations are very simplistic in use. The complexity is in adding mods to them and the fact that there is a large variety of workstations to build. Valheim’s forge is a simple crafting station but is still very flavorful. 
 

I do like processing raw ore into refined ingots which Valheim also does with a separate smelter. I would be all for that although I think just fueling it with wood or coal would be fine instead of requiring an additional process of making charcoal. 
 

So anyway, I think in this instance simplifying the forge to being a workstation would be fine but I would love for a simple and separate smelter to be added and then bring back ingots for the raw iron, brass, and lead that we mine and scavenge. As was brought up, the smelting process is a reason to harvest and use wood. Remove that and a major reason for the existence of wood would be gone. Smelting keeps us needing wood beyond the early game when we build with wood. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Roland I don't know, I'll need to see how the new forge will "feel" before agreeing or not. My concern is not only with the forge, but also with the building materials streamlining and so on... I'm not saying it's negative "per se", I'm just saying TFP should be careful with these kinds of changes since they risk upsetting the nature of the game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Crater Creator changed the title to A20 Developer Diary Discussions
  • Roland unpinned this topic

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...