Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[meganoth]

13 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

Go watch a drywall video

 

You wouldn't even know what a drywall is without learning it from your peers.

 

14 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

Going from musket to today's semi auto

 

But that wasn't one person who crafted a musket a hundred times to learn how to build semi autos. Each generation learned weapon crafting knowledge from previous generations (through teachers and books) and from that base knowledge sprang new ideas, improvements and innovations.  Do you know the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Every scientist will tell you that his innovation would have been impossible without the work of all his predecessors which he learned from teachers or books

 

 

 

[Guppycur]

5 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

You wouldn't even know what a drywall is without learning it from your peers.

 

 

But that wasn't one person who crafted a musket a hundred times to learn how to build semi autos. Each generation learned weapon crafting knowledge from previous generations (through teachers and books) and from that base knowledge sprang new ideas, improvements and innovations.  Do you know the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Every scientist will tell you that his innovation would have been impossible without the work of all his predecessors which he learned from teachers or books

 

 

 

You think drywall magically appeared into the universe?

 

Also, get out of the box; this is still a game and things have to be accelerated.  It'd be a pretty boring game if it took 100 years for an innovation.  

 

And again, for game purposes, lbr is fine to learn the skill, lbd is how you get better at it.  

 

... we're all saying the same thing here, but some of y'all are so dead set against the phrase "learn by doing" you are dismissing it without even thinking. 

 

 

[meganoth]

22 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

Eat the brightly colored frog, get sick.  That's not taught by a book.

 

Strange. I got the knowledge to not eat brightly colored frogs or some specific mushrooms like a death cap from books. Note the guy who learned that death cap is poisonous likely didn't survive and could not learn from that knowledge. Only his surviving friends could and likely gave that knowledge to the young, first mouth to mouth, later through books.

 

[Jost Amman]

1 hour ago, 4sheetzngeegles said:

I do. I temporarily turned off the horde.

Maybe you misunderstood my comment, or I wasn't clear.

 

40 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

No, what was wrong with "spam crafting" was being able to unlock steel because you spammed stone axes.

Sorry, but I think you missed the point there. Spam-crafting is wrong in itself as a way of playing.

 

I know, I know... now everyone will start to say: "why don't you mind your own business and let us play the way we want?" Fair enough, but am I free to at least say that LBD in most cases traps the mind of most weak players into a negative OCD loop, where he/she forgets to actually play the game and focuses mainly/only on raising levels?

 

That's, in my opinion, why LBD should be avoided to the maximum extent possible.

Unless you find a way to avoid artificial repetition to become the best thing to do to level up...

 

12 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Note the guy who learned that death cap is poisonous likely didn't survive and could not learn from that knowledge.

But his friends did... it's called "Learn By Watching Others Die", or LBWOD. 

It's the new frontier, I'm telling you! 

 

Edited August 4, 2023 by Jost Amman (see edit history)

[meganoth]

Just now, Guppycur said:

You think drywall magically appeared into the universe?

 

No, someone invented it and departed that knowledge through books. Is it more believable that that lonely adventurer you play in the game learned his knowledge to build a drone from some books or that he invented practically 200 years of innovation all by himself in a few years?

 

3 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

Also, get out of the box; this is still a game and things have to be accelerated.  It'd be a pretty boring game if it took 100 years for an innovation. 

 

You were starting the argument that LBD would be more realistic. But it isn't, it is much easier to believe that the lone survivor in this game uses knowledge of the lost civilization than inventing all knowledge again by crafting and improving something a hundred times. The latter is frankly ridiculous. Nasa didn't build a moon rocket by starting with building stone axes, they started with all the knowledge from previous scientists they read in books and built up on that.

9 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

And again, for game purposes, lbr is fine to learn the skill, lbd is how you get better at it.  

 

I didn't dispute or even comment on that. And I agree, it can be done that way.

 

 

 

[beerfly]

Many systems in 7 days to die have seen good and bad, have been improved or left away, but LBD and LBR, these two being together deserve a try. with proper balance and no spam crafting. 

[Guppycur]

17 minutes ago, meganoth said:

I didn't dispute or even comment on that. And I agree, it can be done that way.

It's what I've said from the very beginning, but you chose to cherry pick bits to argue against, because koolaid. 

[meganoth]

1 minute ago, Guppycur said:

It's what I've said from the very beginning, but you chose to cherry pick bits to argue against, because koolaid. 

 

You are correct, but see it this way. If I said that Australia and New Zeeland are continents, wouldn't it be sensible to correct me on the wrong part even though the other part was correct?

 

[Guppycur]

4 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

You are correct, but see it this way. If I said that Australia and New Zeeland are continents, wouldn't it be sensible to correct me on the wrong part even though the other part was correct?

 

...I guess you haven't heard...

[meganoth]

1 minute ago, Guppycur said:

...I guess you haven't heard...

 

You mean about Pluto being no planet? Yes, what a shame 😉

 

[meilodasreh]

52 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

lbr is fine to learn the skill, lbd is how you get better at it.

cool idea,

a "mixed" system where you get better with lbd up to a certain threshold, and then you have to find some written knowledgebase to get to the next level.

lbd could also be devided into crafting and also time of real usage, to prevent "spam crafting lbd".

I'd take it.

Damn one day I have to start learning how to make my own mods.

...but how would I start?

Reading a book about coding first, or just start typing totally uneducated nonsense into the .xmls and see if I get it to run? 😄

Edited August 4, 2023 by meilodasreh (see edit history)

[Guppycur]

27 minutes ago, meilodasreh said:

cool idea,

a "mixed" system where you get better with lbd up to a certain threshold, and then you have to find some written knowledgebase to get to the next level.

lbd could also be devided into crafting and also time of real usage, to prevent "spam crafting lbd".

I'd take it.

Damn one day I have to start learning how to make my own mods.

...but how would I start?

Reading a book about coding first, or just start typing totally uneducated nonsense into the .xmls and see if I get it to run? 😄

Ask any of the very skilled old school modders.  We all typed totally uneducated nonsense into the XMLs.

 

Learn by Breaking. 

[Uncle Al]

A major issue with LBD systems is you have to do lots of what you don't like doing in order to avoid doing it. I find digging and tunnelling boring in 7DTD, but I like doing extensive construction, often with foundations. That means I inevitably end up putting some points in Miner 69er every playthrough. I trade time killing zombies for time I don't have to spend digging, basically. If I had to spend time digging in order to cut down time spent digging I'd be a lot less happy.

 

LBD for crafting has inevitable issues, even if you avoid the error of the past of not tiering advancement. Even if you can't learn steel crafting by knapping enough flint, the actual process of advancement is pretty dull. Crafting a bunch of stuff is not an engaging process. You're watching a timer tick down.

 

Now if crafting was destined to be something like what Everquest 2 aimed for, then great. Sadly I'd say EQ2 failed, but their design intent was to make time spent crafting as challenging and engaging as combat. It's basically a minigame of balancing some parameters and dealing with events as they occur, with some events giving risk reward options of gambling for a potential outstanding result at the risk of ruining your craft.  It's not great in EQ2, but what they were trying to do is laudable. A crafting system like that might make LBD at least fun, although it runs into the problem above: People who hate the minigame don't have a method to avoid having to do it if the only way to skill up is by doing the thing you hate.

 

I'm fairly certain a crafting revamp of that degree is not on the cards for 7DTD.

 

I guess this whole discussion is a bit off piste, as there has been a 'never going back to LBD' proclamation by the devs, but I think it's worthwhile exploring what makes a good advancement system, generally.

[meilodasreh]

1 hour ago, Guppycur said:

Learn by Breaking.

welcome to my life

[Matt115]

4 hours ago, Roland said:

I didn’t miss that part but I was simply responding to the part of your post that was incorrect regarding how knowledge acquisition actually works. 
 

As to your suggestion, I would be fine with a hybrid system of LBR and LBD but not how you organized it. Reading to unlock a recipe and then use LBD with crafting to push the quality tiers up is exactly what was wrong with the game in A15 which is why all forms of “spam crafting” were finally removed for A16 even though LBD was still in force for other skills. 
 

LBD would be great for improving skill in using items which is what the current point system handles. So the LBR would need to remain intact as it is for crafting recipes including the quality tiers. The point spending system of getting better at skills is the only thing that would be replaced by LBD. 
 

The thing is that in my opinion the point spending system is also fun and enjoyable and perfectly adequate so it doesn’t really need to be replaced. It can be played in a way that feels like you’re progressing in an organic and natural manner and still gives the freedom of not having to grind in those categories you don’t really enjoy but want to improve in. 
 

If they changed the skill point spending part of the game back to LBD and kept the crafting progression as it is now by looting magazines, I would be fine with that but— I’m also fine with the current system. They both represent skill mastery but just in a different manner and they both can be abused in different ways. 
 

The original post I was responding to claimed that the current system of reading to learn how to craft new recipes is nonsensical because it isn’t how people learn. I simply demonstrated that we learn new knowledge easiest by having a teacher of some form—in this case magazines and that in most cases we don’t learn something new by practicing something we already know.
 

We hone acquired skills through practice which can be represented by either the LBD or point-spending systems. Even if LBD was to be ultimately chosen over point-spending it would STILL be a good idea to keep the quality tiers as “new recipes” rather than as “improved skills” since spam crafting was really bad for gameplay. 

Spam crafting was good and realistic - you want do make good tool you need make them a lot to finaly learn it how to do good. That's why technical school take 4 years xd . LBL forcing for... looting which is annoying and "filler" content

 

3 hours ago, Guppycur said:

No, what was wrong with "spam crafting" was being able to unlock steel because you spammed stone axes.

 

With regards to how "knowledge acquisition really works", I'm correct about that as well, but I can see why you as an academic, believe knowledge can only be acquired by being taught.  That's simply not the case however.  In the real world, people learn things by trial and error as well, and frankly they learn more that way than from books.

 

Doing x works, doing y doesn't, so we do x.  Maybe rust buddies continue to do y, but thankfully they aren't the majority.

 

Hell, look at animals.  Eat the brightly colored frog, get sick.  That's not taught by a book.  Chasing a porcupine is a bad idea.  Also not in a book.  Humans are the same, we're just more sophisticated about it.  Sure, we *can* acquire knowledge from books but we only get good at something by doing it.  Go watch a drywall video and patch your first hole, lemme know how well you do compared to a drywall guy.

 

Look at the evolution of a pistol.  Going from musket to today's semi auto, they're two completely different technologies but rooted in the same idea.  That technology developed over time from doing, not reading, and as I mentioned in my op we simply accelerate that for game purposes.  

 

...also, good morning.  You up early or late?

Agree - make 100 axes to get  iron pickaxe then 100 iron to get steel would be better. 

 

1 hour ago, Uncle Al said:

A major issue with LBD systems is you have to do lots of what you don't like doing in order to avoid doing it. I find digging and tunnelling boring in 7DTD, but I like doing extensive construction, often with foundations. That means I inevitably end up putting some points in Miner 69er every playthrough. I trade time killing zombies for time I don't have to spend digging, basically. If I had to spend time digging in order to cut down time spent digging I'd be a lot less happy.

 

LBD for crafting has inevitable issues, even if you avoid the error of the past of not tiering advancement. Even if you can't learn steel crafting by knapping enough flint, the actual process of advancement is pretty dull. Crafting a bunch of stuff is not an engaging process. You're watching a timer tick down.

 

Now if crafting was destined to be something like what Everquest 2 aimed for, then great. Sadly I'd say EQ2 failed, but their design intent was to make time spent crafting as challenging and engaging as combat. It's basically a minigame of balancing some parameters and dealing with events as they occur, with some events giving risk reward options of gambling for a potential outstanding result at the risk of ruining your craft.  It's not great in EQ2, but what they were trying to do is laudable. A crafting system like that might make LBD at least fun, although it runs into the problem above: People who hate the minigame don't have a method to avoid having to do it if the only way to skill up is by doing the thing you hate.

 

I'm fairly certain a crafting revamp of that degree is not on the cards for 7DTD.

 

I guess this whole discussion is a bit off piste, as there has been a 'never going back to LBD' proclamation by the devs, but I think it's worthwhile exploring what makes a good advancement system, generally.

It was good - because you have alternatives : looting, quests or mining. now only looting and quests are effective. Devs wanted to force players into looting too much. Which is the most boring thing in this game and just neccesary waste time. So that's why LBD was the best 

[Morloc]

5 hours ago, Guppycur said:

You think drywall magically appeared into the universe?

 

There are some new theories...

 

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

[beerfly]

23 minutes ago, Morloc said:

 

There are some new theories...

 

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

Magic insurance or insuring magic ? This is the question. 

 

      beerfly 

    1984-2023

[Aero]

I got some weird bug/glitch that f'ed my savegame it seems.

 

I was just driving on my motorcycle over mountains etc. and all of sudden the game became very choppy/laggy (very few frames).

But for some reason I was driving insanely fast on my bike, like 10's of meters in a sec from standing still, but again, very very low frames.

 

So I quit the game, restarted my computer and the bug is still here... so I guess it's in my savegame...

 

Anyone had this and is there a fix for it?

 

[q123]

27 minutes ago, Aero said:

Anyone had this and is there a fix for it?

 

For any chance, do you have a drone? If yes, than it's most likely this issue:

 

Not sure if it is fixed in A21.1...

Maybe you are able to manually fix it with deleting your "drones.dat".

Edited August 4, 2023 by q123
origin url (see edit history)

[mstdv inc]

16 minutes ago, Aero said:

I got some weird bug/glitch that f'ed my savegame it seems.

 

I was just driving on my motorcycle over mountains etc. and all of sudden the game became very choppy/laggy (very few frames).

But for some reason I was driving insanely fast on my bike, like 10's of meters in a sec from standing still, but again, very very low frames.

 

So I quit the game, restarted my computer and the bug is still here... so I guess it's in my savegame...

 

Anyone had this and is there a fix for it?

 

I have several times encountered a sharp drop in fps, blurring of the image and teleportation by 20-30 meters during a fast ride.
The world did not collapse, the saves remained untouched after that.

Just now, q123 said:

 

For any chance, do you have a drone? If yes, than it's most likely this issue:

 

Not sure if it is fixed in A21.1...

Maybe you are able to manually fix it with deleting your "drones.dat".

hmm, it really only happened when the drone was flying after me..

[q123]

21 minutes ago, mstdv inc said:

hmm, it really only happened when the drone was flying after me..

 

the following is from A21.1 b12 EXP Patchnotes:

 

Junk drone path smoothing, better door and teleport decision reaction 

 

not sure about, but it may help here (?) we will see 🙂

[Aero]

17 minutes ago, q123 said:

 

For any chance, do you have a drone? If yes, than it's most likely this issue:

 

Not sure if it is fixed in A21.1...

Maybe you are able to manually fix it with deleting your "drones.dat".

THANKS for this!

 

I guess that was the problem, because without the drones file, everything works like it should be again. Weird bug.

 

Thanks again!

 

But, since I don't want to completely give up on finding the drone:

With the file still there, I used Debug menu to teleport myself back to the PIO that I cleared for a quest, because all went to @%$# when I drove back to the trader. When I got there, everything was fine again with the FPS, but no drone. Then I used the fly mode to go to the trader again to see if the drone was anywhere on the route there. At some point, all when wrong again FPS wise. Used teleport again to the PIO and FPS was fine again.

Guess the drone is truly lost for me.

Time to spawn in a new one.

 

[zztong]

3 hours ago, Matt115 said:

Spam crafting was good and realistic - you want do make good tool you need make them a lot to finaly learn it how to do good. That's why technical school take 4 years xd . LBL forcing for... looting which is annoying and "filler" content

 

I don't think that's the whole story, or even the correct story. Yes, there is truth to "practice makes perfect" and "necessity is the mother in invention." But they're not the only sources of the information, techniques, and ideas that lead to improvement. People learn much more quickly as part of a community where they trade information, techniques, and ideas. Magazines and books would be really valuable in allowing our survivors to learn more quickly than just starting with medieval blacksmithy and reinventing centuries worth of wheels.

 

And Trade Schools do not involve extensive repetitive manufacture. They have lots of topics to cover. That said, a career machinist has lots of tricks of the trade that separate them from the fresh graduate. LBD certainly was part of that machinist's education to date.

 

But I don't think this is supposed to be a perfect simulation of education, but a game instead. To me, the best argument for mixing in some LBD beside the LBL approach is (1) the magazine points offer a decent enough system for accounting for an accumulation of knowledge, and (2) some LBD tasks would both give the player some agency and break up any monotony associated with collecting magazines alone.

[Dreyseth]

 

Trader Joel is struggling to pay the bills; he always comes up a little short.
Secret Stash may be gone, but Trader Joel will do special deals under the table.
Trader Joel apears to be ahead, compared to the other traders.
Trader Joel is very wise; he tries to see things from different perspectives.
Trader Joel is a prominent advocate for Learn By Praying.

 

[Riamus]

20 hours ago, Mr. Perfect said:

@faatal What is the math behind the skill magazine bonus find from perks? How much does it increase with multiple points in a perk?

 

A friend has a new method in A21 where you max out the perk that adds a find bonus for a given magazine, then when you get up to 100 magazines use a Fergettin' Elixer and max out the next magazine perk. I thought that would just mean he'd be working on magazines in series instead of in parallel like I'm doing by spreading points around multiple perks, but he's blasted past me in every magazine. I've got about five magazines that are all middling in progression, but he's got five maxed out at the same level.

 

It certainly seems to work, so I'm wondering how the math scales. Linearly? Faster?

If you are parked into one thing, your bonus is only for that one thing.  If you perk into multiple things, it gets split.  If you are going to get one magazine and are parked into only one thing, you have a good chance of getting that magazine.  If you have multiple perks, it could be anything.  Because you stop collecting magazines you have maxed out, it makes collecting other magazines faster.  This is probably why they are progressing faster.  Even so, it sounds like a dull way to play the game so I know I wouldn't ever game the system that way.

 

 

7 hours ago, Guppycur said:

You think drywall magically appeared into the universe?

 

Also, get out of the box; this is still a game and things have to be accelerated.  It'd be a pretty boring game if it took 100 years for an innovation.  

 

And again, for game purposes, lbr is fine to learn the skill, lbd is how you get better at it.  

 

... we're all saying the same thing here, but some of y'all are so dead set against the phrase "learn by doing" you are dismissing it without even thinking. 

 

 

As I mentioned yesterday, the game only represents getting better at something when talking about quality levels.  Everything else is a new skill.  So having LBD for quality levels could make sense but not for everything else.  The problem is that everyone would max their quality levels in a very short time, which is what they don't want.

 

6 hours ago, meilodasreh said:

cool idea,

a "mixed" system where you get better with lbd up to a certain threshold, and then you have to find some written knowledgebase to get to the next level.

lbd could also be devided into crafting and also time of real usage, to prevent "spam crafting lbd".

I'd take it.

Damn one day I have to start learning how to make my own mods.

...but how would I start?

Reading a book about coding first, or just start typing totally uneducated nonsense into the .xmls and see if I get it to run? 😄

The difficulty is making something that works well without it being too easy.  LBD is notoriously easy for crafting.  All it takes is time and resources to craft tons of things. They isn't any challenge.

 

We do have a mix in the game already... Everything but crafting is basically a form of LBD.  It's is just abstracted (experience affects everything and not specific skills).

 

3 hours ago, Matt115 said:

Spam crafting was good and realistic - you want do make good tool you need make them a lot to finaly learn it how to do good. That's why technical school take 4 years xd . LBL forcing for... looting which is annoying and "filler" content

 

Agree - make 100 axes to get  iron pickaxe then 100 iron to get steel would be better. 

 

It was good - because you have alternatives : looting, quests or mining. now only looting and quests are effective. Devs wanted to force players into looting too much. Which is the most boring thing in this game and just neccesary waste time. So that's why LBD was the best 

Your opinion is that grinding crafting is better.  Others hate that.  Others think that questing is better.  You appear to hate that.  The problem is that people like and dislike different things.  No matter which way they make the game, there will be people who don't like it.  They have chosen a specific path and that path includes looting and questing as core elements.  And with each new version through gold, that will get more and more apparent.

 

Regarding mining, I've never really understood this issue.  The idea seems to be that you can play the game where you do nothing except mine.  This is still possible.  The change is that you need magazines to craft better tools.  If you want nothing to do with looting magazines and you aren't in a group who will either give you those magazines or craft you better tools, then you still have the option of mods or using the creative menu.  I wouldn't even consider the creative menu cheating because you are essentially wanting to play the sandbox part of the game, which is what the creative menu is for.