Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[meganoth]

13 minutes ago, Riamus said:

 

Not necessarily.  He could be a special quest to find a trader and people might quest there.  Really, there's not much more chance of such a trader being useful right now.  Most players other than new players who don't know better will see there's no town and move on pretty quickly... often on day 1, or at least by day 2.  At the very least, they will as soon as they get a bike but I think most will go even before then.  Anyone who uses POI for their night base will almost certainly move on (at least to a wilderness POI) even though there is one tile next to these wilderness traders since it isn't necessarily a good place to hide out.  Right now, a wilderness trader as a starting trader is just a waste of time for most players.

 

I don't expect the wilderness to be as barren as it is now. And you don't necessarily know where the next town is, so it is a possible challenge. One player may decide to run into some direction and hope for the best. Another would take the nearest wilderness POI as hideout for the first days. Another might build himself a wooden hideout and use the nearest POIs as quest locations. Another would take the farthest quest POI from the trader in the hope that it is in a town.

 

13 minutes ago, Riamus said:

 

And you state that new players should start with Navesgane but the game does not in any way indicate such a suggestion to players.  It might be the first choice (I'm not positive) in the list and so many might choose that for that reason but it isn't like it is listed as tutorial or something that might make a new player decide to choose that over a pregen map.  Not positive if pregen maps ever have the wilderness trader as the starter trader.  If not, then what they start with wouldn't matter as long as they don't make their own map, so you're right for new players even if they didn't choose Navesgane.

 

Well, the game isn't finished. They very well could suggest to new players to start with Navezgane and the pregens. That solution would be my preference over treating wilderness traders as a bug in RWG.

 

Edited June 28, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Riamus]

11 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

I don't expect the wilderness to be as barren as it is now. And you don't necessarily know where the next town is, so it is a possible challenge. One player may decide to run into some direction and hope for the best. Another would take the nearest wilderness POI as hideout for the first days. Another might build himself a wooden hideout and use the nearest POIs as quest locations. Another would take the farthest quest POI from the trader in the hope that it is in a town.

 

 

Well, the game isn't finished. They very well could suggest to new players to start with Navezgane and the pregens. That solution would be my preference over treating wilderness traders as a bug in RWG.

 

I'm not sure if they'll increase wilderness POI density.  If they do, this may not be an issue.  If they don't, then it still is an issue.  You do know that you can follow the road to reach the next town.  It's possible that the first town you come to will be an old west ghost town but the odds are higher that it'll be a real town.  So it really isn't difficult to find a town.  Finding the trader in that town now that the trader isn't always at the town's gateway may be a challenge, though.  Yes, some might do the things you mentioned (I did also mention using a wilderness POI for a night base) but I think most people who aren't new players will move on within the first day or two once they see there isn't a town.  Besides the time to get to the quests that are usually close to 1km distance, you are wasting a ton of food and water traveling back and forth, which will put you at a disadvantage in trying to avoid running out of each.  Add in the new magazines and realizing that you are not going to be able to get many magazines just hitting distant wilderness POI and it will really leave you at a disadvantage.  Some people are fine with that disadvantage and will be fine staying at such a trader but most are going to want to find a town rather than waste their time, imo.

 

I don't really consider this a bug.  Just an oversight.  Even if you make new players aware that you recommend Navesgane and pregens over RWG, it still leaves RWG in a situation where most players will bypass that first trader pretty quickly if it's in the wilderness.  If it was an RWG option, that would be one thing.  But otherwise, it is really not a good thing to have that be the starting trader.

[Rince]

57 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

I don't expect the wilderness to be as barren as it is now. And you don't necessarily know where the next town is, so it is a possible challenge. One player may decide to run into some direction and hope for the best. Another would take the nearest wilderness POI as hideout for the first days. Another might build himself a wooden hideout and use the nearest POIs as quest locations. Another would take the farthest quest POI from the trader in the hope that it is in a town.

 

 

Well, the game isn't finished. They very well could suggest to new players to start with Navezgane and the pregens. That solution would be my preference over treating wilderness traders as a bug in RWG.

 

But why making the change to enable the loner trader start before making the changes for the lone trader to work as starter point?

 

I mean, with a trader with a town hydratation and food was a challenge. Can't imagine starting with a trader in the middle of nowhere.

[Kalex]

from patch notes:

 

• Dew collector creates activity heat when filling

That's some serious bs change there. Why the hell would the condensation dripping attract zombies????

[Slingblade2040]

So the dew Collector can now call in screamers? So you people caused a problem with the jars and the solution was oh put up dew collectors, you saw people use it by making a bunch So you increased the price for the filter and now you do a massive nerf to make them generate heat somehow and make them call in screamers? 

 

What the actual hell is the logic behind nonsense like that? Like I hope I'm reading that update wrong but if the dew collector does produce heat and calls in screamers then that's a massive nerf to a problem you all created in the first place.

Edited June 28, 2023 by Slingblade2040 (see edit history)

[beerfly]

Tier 7 ? Nice !

[hiemfire]

6 minutes ago, beerfly said:

Tier 7 ? Nice !

An Infested quest at tier 5 POI in the desert would be tier 7. Tier 9 in the wasteland if I'm remembering the skull values correctly.

Edited June 28, 2023 by hiemfire (see edit history)

[iamnuff]

• Adjusted all tool and weapon entity and block damage values to allow a standard linear progression between quality levels and tech tiers
• Adjusted mod slot counts on all tools and weapons to allow a standard linear progression between tech tiers

 

This is something I noticed in the previous experimental versions. Where it didn't feel worth upgrading from a T5/6 iron tool to a T1 steel one, because the stat-diffrence was minor and you lost all of your mod-slots.

 

'Adjusted' is a bit sparse on details, but I've got high hopes for this. 

 

  

21 hours ago, vergilsparda said:

As for gasoline—can't remember who was talking about it, but I'll throw my hat into the ring again—going into Salvage Operations tree is literally the best thing you can do—I'm currently running a Perception build and I maxed it out. It's crazy the difference in stuff you get between before I perked into it vs after. I wrench about 10-15 cars and have enough gas to fill more than half of my 4x4 tank

 

I'm also running a perception build.

You get roughly 240 gas per car (intact cars only) with maxed out Salvage Operations, which is basically a drop in the bucket of a 4x4. 

Mining oil-shale to make gas at a chem-bench seems basically mandatory.

 

I went out with a friend and I wrenched every car we found along the entire road to the destination, and every car in the carpark once we got there (twice) and by the time we got back to base again we were basically back on the amount of gas that we started with. 

It wasn't a short drive, but I must have wrenched more than a dozen cars. 

 

You used to get way waaaay too much gas this way (like a full stack of 6000 per car) but now it feels like too little. 

For a minibike it's easy to keep yourself topped up, but the 4x4 is a real guzzler. 

Edited June 28, 2023 by iamnuff (see edit history)

[Moldy Bread]

Lol, sorry, Dew collectors now create heat? What is the dripping sound too much!?

 

Very stupid change, modders! We need another fix.

[hiloboys]

3 minutes ago, Moldy Bread said:

Lol, sorry, Dew collectors now create heat? What is the dripping sound too much!?

 

Very stupid change, modders! We need another fix.

Hey now the zombies get thirsty too!

[Exxodous]

36 minutes ago, Slingblade2040 said:

So the dew Collector can now call in screamers? So you people caused a problem with the jars and the solution was oh put up dew collectors, you saw people use it by making a bunch So you increased the price for the filter and now you do a massive nerf to make them generate hate somehow and make them call in screamers? 

 

What the actual hell is the logic behind nonsense like that? Like I hope I'm reading that update wrong but if the dew collector does produce heat and calls in screamers then that's a massive nerf to a problem you all created in the first place.

Why is this a problem?  So the occasional screamer shows up, big whoop...they are just free XP and you don't even have to leave the house.  Same thing happens with forges and nobody is crying about that.  What some call a "jar problem" is awesome in my opinion as I threw away hundreds of jars previously and I'm glad they are gone.  Sure, glue is a bottleneck but it is a survival game after all.

[Slingblade2040]

1 minute ago, Exxodous said:

Why is this a problem?  So the occasional screamer shows up, big whoop...they are just free XP and you don't even have to leave the house.  Same thing happens with forges and nobody is crying about that.  What some call a "jar problem" is awesome in my opinion as I threw away hundreds of jars previously and I'm glad they are gone.  Sure, glue is a bottleneck but it is a survival game after all.

The fact you are even comparing a dew collector to a furnace shows the ignorance in your comment.

 

This is literally water. We aren't boiling it, it's not in a camp fire, it's not a torch, it's not a furnace that melts metals into ingots. It's literally dew dripping to make water. 

 

The idea of making this generate hate is almost as ridiculous as your reply.

[Razorpony]

8 minutes ago, Moldy Bread said:

Lol, sorry, Dew collectors now create heat? What is the dripping sound too much!?

 

Very stupid change, modders! We need another fix.

 

Why do you think the player is unable to sleep through the night? It's the sound of all that damned condensing water! 

[hiloboys]

Quote

Adjusted bicycle, minibike, motorcycle and 4x4 max speeds and torque and turbo now increases torque

Waait so I can install Turbo on my Bicycle and it will increase its torque?

[Laz Man]

8 minutes ago, Slingblade2040 said:

The fact you are even comparing a dew collector to a furnace shows the ignorance in your comment.

 

This is literally water. We aren't boiling it, it's not in a camp fire, it's not a torch, it's not a furnace that melts metals into ingots. It's literally dew dripping to make water. 

 

The idea of making this generate hate is almost as ridiculous as your reply.

 

The HEAT system should really be renamed to "Activity"  as its not technically a measure of actual HEAT.

[Exxodous]

7 minutes ago, Slingblade2040 said:

The fact you are even comparing a dew collector to a furnace shows the ignorance in your comment.

 

This is literally water. We aren't boiling it, it's not in a camp fire, it's not a torch, it's not a furnace that melts metals into ingots. It's literally dew dripping to make water. 

 

The idea of making this generate hate is almost as ridiculous as your reply.

While I appreciate the implication that I'm ignorant and ridiculous....I like the change.  You still didn't answer why it was a problem?  Is it that it's not realistic? 

[OgreSlayeR]

I'm ambivalent on the "heat" change with the dew collectors, but what I'm curious is if they really fixed the progression with the tiers of weapons and tools now. I wonder if a tier 1 iron spear will be better than a tier 5 stone.

[Jost Amman]

58 minutes ago, Slingblade2040 said:

So the dew Collector can now call in screamers? So you people caused a problem with the jars and the solution was oh put up dew collectors, you saw people use it by making a bunch So you increased the price for the filter and now you do a massive nerf to make them generate hate somehow and make them call in screamers? 

That's not so different from real life if you think about it... they created a virus that started a pandemic (caused a problem), they then sold us the vaccine, and then they raised the price of sale to governments, even during the pandemic. Then we found out the vaccine was unsafe. This generated A LOT of hate! ... And people will start screaming!

 

See? Not much different from real life! 

[Slingblade2040]

4 minutes ago, Exxodous said:

While I appreciate the implication that I'm ignorant and ridiculous....I like the change.  You still didn't answer why it was a problem?  Is it that it's not realistic? 

Explain how a dew collector would generate heat. An item with no electrical parts, no moving parts, no source of fuel to burn or anything of the sorts.

 

A furnace makes sense, a campfire makes sense, hell a torch makes sense. This is the equivalent of saying water will generate heat. That puddle next to your base? Heat block. This update is peak nonsense from the pimps. 

[Kalex]

10 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

The HEAT system should really be renamed to "Activity"  as its not technically a measure of actual HEAT.

Condensation of dew is not a human-based activity, it happens EVERYWHERE.

[Slingblade2040]

3 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

That's not so different from real life if you think about it... they created a virus that started a pandemic (caused a problem), they then sold us the vaccine, and then they raised the price of sale to governments, even during the pandemic. Then we found out the vaccine was unsafe. This generated A LOT of hate! ... And people will start screaming!

 

See? Not much different from real life! 

Lol. The joys of going back and fixing a typo. Would be great to get the pimps to fix their mistakes also. 

[faatal]

On 6/20/2023 at 5:50 PM, hiloboys said:

Just wanted to update my post here about the game running worse than A20. I just realized when launching the game client, I guess my steam beta settings were default set to use Vulkan to render. I changed it to direct x 11 and the game now gives me 25+ fps instead of 8-12.

Vulkan is still very much an experimental feature in our game and Unity. We will be updating to Unity 2022 LTS for A22, which should have better Vulkan and DX12 support as Unity does improve them each year.

[Exxodous]

3 minutes ago, Slingblade2040 said:

Explain how a dew collector would generate heat. An item with no electrical parts, no moving parts, no source of fuel to burn or anything of the sorts.

 

A furnace makes sense, a campfire makes sense, hell a torch makes sense. This is the equivalent of saying water will generate heat. That puddle next to your base? Heat block. This update is peak nonsense from the pimps. 

Well, the heat map really has nothing to do with "heat" or temperature.  Noise also increases the "heat map" like chopping a tree down or mining.  Is it inconceivable to to imagine that that constant drip drip drip drip drip drip (like a faucet) might not cause zombies to want to investigate the noise?  They already seem to have super human hearing when I'm sneaking in a POI.

[Lostyouthkhat]

Update:

Tier 7 difficulty custom POIs will throw IOOR exceptions when a sleeper volume is triggered

 

Anyone know if tier 7 quests exist or what is meant by that?

 

[Old Crow]

So dew collectors generate activity heat now. Why? You guys wanted us to have tons of them - the only purpose I can think of behind this change is that you've added it for the sole purpose of being a-holes. There's no reason something that passively collects a small amount of water should be attracting attention from zombies. At the very least, TFP could increase the amount of water from dew collectors to 4 or 5 in a 24 hour in-game period.