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A20 Developer Diary Discussions


Roland

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8 minutes ago, Eromivus said:

One thing I just realized is that after the first couple of days in a new game, looting piles of clothes, dressers, hangers, clothing racks, etc. will provide the joy that book cases do, where instead of getting some garbage t-shirt i have a chance at an armor set piece.

Free cloth and paint you mean?

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2 minutes ago, Adam the Waster said:

Free cloth and paint you mean?

Getting cloth is legit, though by my first horde night i usually have more than i ever use. Having to find bits of stripped down cloth here and there might be a nice change. As for paint, using chrysanthemum and oil on the chemistry station is generous enough that i don't bother with that fussy game of pulling dye out of clothes before that point.

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On 10/30/2020 at 5:37 AM, toores said:

I saw the indoors darkening effect in the stream. Any chance this gets taken out?

 

It really feel more like a bug than a feature. You can see clearly what's inside a store and after 2 steps your screen dims to complete black. And if the POI has some areas where you go in and out a lot or there's a hole in the roof, your bightness keeps waving up and down.

 

I don't believe it adds much to the game, rather takes away and feels like something is broken in the lighting tech.

Eyes adjust the light that goes through the cornea in real life tho. In my case, it feels realistic, not broken lighting tech.

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22 hours ago, Sidney said:

...the things that are holding you back are:

  • The lack of variety as well as the hard tiering of weapons and armor.  For example the sniper rifle is strictly better than the marksman rifle, and there are only 3 rifles total.   

Pipe rifles are incoming.  Tiers are tiers... you can be better/worse with all rifles, but each +tier rifle is better in general, but there are some trade-offs (mag capacity, fire modes/rate).  How else are tiers supposed to work?

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Bugs, especially the gamebreaking ones like vehicle duping, item loss in vehicles, vehicle loss, crippling FPS hitching during weapon fire, zombies' attacks clipping through walls, jerky zombie movement (the micro rubberbanding not the pathing that attempts to juke the player, that's cool), the game deciding that you don't have a bedroll or that your bedroll is actually someone else's, etc.

You're saying bugs are holding this game back from achieving success?  First of all, many Bethesda titles (the entire Elder Scrolls, Fallout series for starters) shipped full of bugs of all sizes, and managed to still dominate because they were fun anyway (which does not excuse Bethesda, but is true nonetheless).  Secondly, telling the devs that bugs are bad is redundant.  They have massive lists... and stuff's being fixed all the time.

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Things that perhaps aren't bugs, but are super irritating like the almost random autosort order, inconsistent reload and draw with bows, camera position not staying the same when exiting a vehicle so you are always disoriented, inability to consistently pick up a thrown spear, respawning "near your bed" can place you on the roof of a nearby POI (like a Shamway), the cancerous amount of I-beam debris in the wasteland making the 4x4 unusable there, gaining zero exp from cooking food or from zombies dying to traps/bleeding/fire.

* Autosort:  Inventory management is vastly superior now.  If you want, you can even grab a super-tiny and easy-to-use "lockable slots" mod (Khaine's is the one I recall at the moment).  'Smart' autosort doesn't matter; you arrange your necessary stuff however you like, lock that # of slots, and mass-shunt everything else to/from containers / vehicles as you like.  You'll likely no longer need to use autosort at that point.

* I like the exit-vehicle camera angle suggestion.  Would be nice if your camera angle was auto-corrected to facing forward (the direction your vehicle is facing) when switching back to first-person.

* Spears are much easier to use, now.  The problem with retrieving them (as I see it) has nothing to do with how spears currently work; it's the grass that's typically blocking your line-of-sight to the spear (or whatever else).  If grass no longer blocked LOS for interactions, it would be a significant improvement.

* I never use "near your bed", merely "on your bed", and haven't had any issues with respawning.  In SP the things that killed you despawn anyway, so you don't need the "near" option, especially if you placed your bedroll somewhere wise.

* Don't try to drive through the wasteland if you don't like dodging debris / landmines in a vehicle... just stick to the roads to travel through the zone.  It's always faster, unless there simply *is* no road to get where you want, which presents an interesting challenge anyway, and makes a lot of sense in a carpet-bombed environment.

* XP from crafting has already been thoroughly addressed.  You get tons from doing everything else, and it discourages the safe, boring, and grindy 'spam-crafting in my base(ment)' scenario. It also gets weird in MP with multiple people using crafting stations and sharing XP via proximity, etc.
* If you want trap-kill XP, spec into the INT tree to get it.  I received XP for Z's that bled out from wounds I gave them (last build was heavily blades-oriented, with constant auto-bleed).

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Lack of special zombies.  Only the demo, and to a lesser extent the vultures, present a threat.  Everything else is a bullet sponge to one degree or another.

If your definition of "special zombies" simply means "presents a threat", as you seem to be saying, then I will refer you to your game settings (which have been improved / added to multiple times in recent alphas: BM controls, new difficulty levels, run speed controls, etc)... and to silent-killer Z-dogs, Dire Wolves, and Z-Bears in wandering hordes (I've had two Z-Bears & three Z-Dogs jump me without warning... tell me that's not a challenge).  You can't simply take a single example (even a zombie bear) in a 1-on-1 situation, in daylight, when you know they're there, and say they're not a threat because you can beat them in that fight; one of those you *didn't* see/hear coming while you were busy dispatching a normal zombie can easily ruin your day.  Ruined day = sufficient challenge = special enough for that definition, as I see it. 

Add to that the ever-increasing likelihood of suffering max-HP-lowering & often nasty debuffs for being hit by even the most common zombie, and you have all sorts of potential trouble to deal with.

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Game progression, especially loot not being better in harder POIs and harder biomes.  I understand you're working on this one, so this may not be valid for long.

All of that has been promised and is incoming.

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Low worth/Worthless game content like stealth, gillie suits, knives, spears, batons, buried treasure perks, etc.

Calling gameplay elements which contribute to - or even define - other playstyles which you obviously haven't experimented with "worthless" is simply a disservice to both the game, the devs, other players, and yourself.  It's also lazy.  Any of those listed things can be quite fun & useful, if you actually tried them out.  They don't have to be the absolute 'best' way to play (as if there could be a 'best' way).  They work, add variety (something you complain about the lack of in the same post), and are fun if you let them be.  Time to find a bigger box to think in!  Try something different.
This point is one of the biggest reasons I even went to the effort of addressing your rather rant-y list of 'problems with the game'.  

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Terrible FPS, especially during BMs, even with the graphics turned way down.  My PC isn't a potato, but I never saw my frames break 30 on a BM after night 14.

Experiment with your BM settings.  TFP have mentioned how high numbers of AI entities are a heavy load on the CPU.  It may have very little to do with your graphic settings (though certain things like shadows are performance-expensive; it's worth trying each setting @ min/max to see if it helps).  Try lowering your BM 'max alive per player' numbers, etc.  I find a lower number does not necessarily result in under-populated BM hordes; the total kill count after a horde night is mostly affected by how fast I can kill them, not how many were incoming at once.  If fewer Z's active at once noticeably improves performance, and smoother play leads to more kills, then that might be the way to go.

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Lack of features common in other FPS games such as different mouse sensitivity settings for different zoom levels, autorun, configs stored in a universal and portable .ini/.cfg file instead of the damn windows registry (really guys?), and changeable crosshairs.

All of this is what I'd call polish... and more appropriate / logical to address once the core elements / features of the game are done, which they're not.

22 hours ago, Sidney said:
  • Not enough "knobs and dials" to customize the game without mods.  For example you can't turn off the death penalty, nor can you remove the noobie weather protection.  There are a LOT of settings that should be configurable when creating a new world that aren't there.

I agree that Random Gen customization controls would be very cool. 

You can already disable 'drop on death' entirely... and if you meant the debuff when respawning, I'd agree that it might be nice to be able to adjust it's severity/duration in game... but you can do it manually if you need to.  This game is very easy to mod, as most things are easily changed in Notepad++ (free) via XML files.  At one point, I found and changed the death penalty debuff duration to 1 in a few minutes, for example.  I imagine the low-level thermal buff would be even easier to alter.

 
Edited by CrazyCelt (see edit history)
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50 minutes ago, Demonoid74 said:

I wish there was a drop All on death-your dead body is now reanimated with all your stuff option

Hunt that thing down and kill it for your loot

I remember that was a thing in Zombi, and if you died on the way to the corpse with all the weapons they got scattered and lost all over again

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2 hours ago, Demonoid74 said:

I wish there was a drop All on death-your dead body is now reanimated with all your stuff option

Hunt that thing down and kill it for your loot

Maybe add a “spawn near your body” option but if you don’t then it won’t spawn a corpse so it would work in multiplayer? ;). Otherwise anyone could kill your corpse before you got there, or corpse would need to despawn if too many existed, etc.

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42 minutes ago, Scyris said:

As for the autorun its real simple just have a keybind for it that user can switch in the options. Then they can set what ever key they want, its simple and it works which is why most games with a auto-run function have a user configurable key.

If you have a keyboard from corsair, logitec, Asus, steel series, and many more. They have software to set up your own keybinds and macros. Even if your keyboards brand doesn't have any, there are other programs available to do the same thing.

 

I've had an auto run macro bound to right shift since A16. I also have auto mine altho it can't be left alone for long since it can't target ores and just mines where you're looking. But the point is, it's not hard to set it up, the more you know ;)

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21 hours ago, Trankitas said:

Eyes adjust the light that goes through the cornea in real life tho. In my case, it feels realistic, not broken lighting tech.

After stepping in a dark room you eyes adjust and you start seeing a bit better. So it is exactly the opposite of realistic. That's why it feels so unnatural and it's why I brought it up. :)

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5 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

As of right now, and probably for a very, very long time (maybe forever).

 

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Dark mate... i like it :D

 

28 minutes ago, ShaneTheCat13YT said:

What about console?

Please see the Console Forum for that, you are in the PC Section.

But to be frank: The Fun Pimps had to bought back the rights to their console version because Telltale went belly up ugly.

Since they now have to port it themselves, they decided to spend the ressources first in getting the PC Version to gold and after that bring the Console Version.

 

Anybody feel free to correct me :)

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So if you have any questions or concerns my good sir/ma'am, I suggest calling technical support. The number can be found above. 🙂 If you have any complaints, they will be immediately written down and then tossed into the nearest fireplace/shredder, yadda yadda yadda, you get the picture. Thank you, and have a nice day. 🙂

 

Edit: Ahh Roland, thanks for taking out the trash. Just don't delete this interaction, it's made my day honestly.

Edited by MechanicalLens (see edit history)
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