Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[GoofMcGee]

So how is the Thick44 Magnum coming?  Asking for millions of frens.

 

Maybe it could Thick people and give them a bleed.  Who knows. 

Debuff list says "Thicked" bleed damage.

 

Ya'll live in imaginationland, I just go there from time to time.

 

 

 

Edited March 6 by GoofMcGee (see edit history)

[Druid_Koldun]

Ребята, скажите, пожалуйста, будет ли новая модель в alpha 21 с новыми качественными текстурами? или новая модель символов была портирована на alpha 22? И расскажите подробнее, пожалуйста, есть ли планы по внедрению плота или лодок с новой водой? Я очень на это надеюсь. Пожалуйста, кто знает, если возможно, ответьте мне

[faatal]

On 3/3/2023 at 2:38 PM, Roland said:

Terrain blocks are not cubes like player placed blocks are. They are octahedrons I believe. The terrain used to be cubes in the earliest alphas but they changed them from cubes and actually experimented with a few different polyhedra before settling on what we still have currently. I'm pretty sure most if not all other voxel games base blocks on the same cube shapes whether they are crafted or terrain-- so they fit together perfectly. 

Terrain uses the marching cubes algorithm, which makes a diamond shape that merges into their neighbors, so they stretch in each direction. They also stretch into air, so the density of the surrounding air also effects the shape and there are some density combinations that make a bad mesh, but normal terrain manipulation does not create those combinations.

Edited March 8 by faatal (see edit history)

[Vintorez]

As a player I feel like an intuitive enough way to fix the terrain gap would be to have a tool, like a trowel or alternate function for the shovel, that sets terrain voxels to fill their area. Not sure how feasible that would be on the dev side but it sounds better than having like a special block to select and would work with any voxel terrain type.

Edited March 9 by Vintorez (see edit history)

[Lennie]

I'm no programmer, but couldn't you use the same method you use to draw both terrain and water blocks in the same place (I understand that's how it will work in the next alpha) to draw terrain and player placed blocks in the same place? Have terrain flow into blocks the same way it flows into water voxels? I know you can't have a terrain block and a player block in the same place, but maybe a player block that touches a terrain block on any side could count as a terrain block when calculating the terrain mesh. This is probably really stupid. It makes my brain hurt. I'll go to sleep now.

[faatal]

3 hours ago, Vintorez said:

As a player I feel like an intuitive enough way to fix the terrain gap would be to have a tool, like a trowel or alternate function for the shovel, that sets terrain voxels to fill their area. Not sure how feasible that would be on the dev side but it sounds better than having like a special block to select and would work with any voxel terrain type.

Terrain voxels by themselves are diamonds, so they can't fill a block voxel, which is a cube. Terrain voxels only fill a cube when blending into adjacent terrain or multiple terrain voxels together blending into air blocks, but that shape is a spike in that direction. Adjacent terrain spikes merge together and then remove hidden faces. You can change an adjacent block voxel's density to blend terrain into it, but that is a spike, not a flat face.

Edited March 9 by faatal (see edit history)

[Jost Amman]

3 hours ago, faatal said:

Terrain voxels by themselves are diamonds, so they can't fill a block voxel, which is a cube. Terrain voxels only fill a cube when blending into adjacent terrain or multiple terrain voxels together blending into air blocks, but that shape is a spike in that direction. Adjacent terrain spikes merge together and then remove hidden faces. You can change an adjacent block voxel's density to blend terrain into it, but that is a spike, not a flat face.

So... you mean that COVID-19 was made with Voxel technology? 

I mean, it has spikes after all. 

[Neminsis]

15 hours ago, Vintorez said:

As a player I feel like an intuitive enough way to fix the terrain gap would be to have a tool, like a trowel or alternate function for the shovel, that sets terrain voxels to fill their area. Not sure how feasible that would be on the dev side but it sounds better than having like a special block to select and would work with any voxel terrain type.

I'm not sure but what it seems like you're describing here is adding a function to a shovel to change the blocks below it into adaptive terrain blocks rather than opening creative mode and replacing them by hand to get rid of the gaps between placed blocks and the terrain. 

I think that the gaps that everyone was talking about before was a terrain generation bug.

[Trankitas]

Is Alpha 21 coming this year right?

[faatal]

36 minutes ago, Trankitas said:

Is Alpha 21 coming this year right?

I sure hope so!

[n2n1]

10 minutes ago, faatal said:

I sure hope so!

Will there be any changes?

[Zombiepoptard]

34 minutes ago, faatal said:

I sure hope so!

Will there be zombies?

[unholyjoe]

1 minute ago, Zombiepoptard said:

Will there be zombies?

geeesh next youre gonna want looting or even weapons.

[meilodasreh]

15 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:

geeesh next youre gonna want looting or even weapons.

please don't act if this were a forum about some "open-world game that is a unique combination of first-person shooter, survival horror, tower defense, and role-playing games, and it presents combat, crafting, looting, mining, exploration, and character growth..." or similar (just randomly chosen terms here, despite text format looking copypasty...)

You'd only raise expactations, and then next time you look people would be coughing about airport-pois, skeletons and other weird stuff.

 

[Morloc]

14 hours ago, faatal said:

Terrain voxels by themselves are diamonds, so they can't fill a block voxel, which is a cube. Terrain voxels only fill a cube when blending into adjacent terrain or multiple terrain voxels together blending into air blocks, but that shape is a spike in that direction. Adjacent terrain spikes merge together and then remove hidden faces. You can change an adjacent block voxel's density to blend terrain into it, but that is a spike, not a flat face.

 

 

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

[beerfly]

33 minutes ago, meilodasreh said:

please don't act if this were a forum about some "open-world game that is a unique combination of first-person shooter, survival horror, tower defense, and role-playing games, and it presents combat, crafting, looting, mining, exploration, and character growth..." or similar (just randomly chosen terms here, despite text format looking copypasty...)

You'd only raise expactations, and then next time you look people would be coughing about airport-pois, skeletons and other weird stuff.

 

Yea, I`ve even heard about a one game called 7 days to die, people spent thousands of hours of pure fun, a brilliant mods are made, because devs not only allow it, but love to see how the community loves the game. Worst, there is indeed a forum for it.. What a shame. 

[unholyjoe]

24 minutes ago, beerfly said:

Yea, I`ve even heard about a one game called 7 days to die, people spent thousands of hours of pure fun, a brilliant mods are made, because devs not only allow it, but love to see how the community loves the game. Worst, there is indeed a forum for it.. What a shame. 

yeah... where can we find this game, sounds like something cool to try.

 

please tell me it doesnt look like lego land game play as i never cared for legos when i was a kid and 50 yrs later... i still dont play legos.

 

 

but i do still break out my Lincoln logs and build a few things.

 

Edited March 9 by unholyjoe (see edit history)

[beerfly]

27 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:

yeah... where can we find this game, sounds like something cool to try.

 

please tell me it doesnt look like lego land game play as i never cared for legos when i was a kid and 50 yrs later... i still dont play legos.

 

 

but i do still break out my Lincoln logs and build a few things.

 

Ah, I forgot, Joe. But last time I saw, it was around 47th most played game in Steam. Skyrim is just above it so, probably doesn`t worth it. 

Edited March 9 by beerfly (see edit history)

[KOLAND]

    I welcome everyone. I've been familiar with this game since its inception in 2013. But just now I created an account here to ask the opinion of the community and maybe if I'm very lucky to get a response from the developers, but before that I would like to tell my little story.

 

     As I mentioned above, I bought this one literally two days after it came out on steam. To be honest, the product was barely playable. There was practically nothing to do, the graphics were super terrible and the optimization is generally terrible, so I gave up on this game and thought it would fail, but what was my surprise when I went in a couple of years later and the game became much more beautiful and much more playable. I spent a decent amount of time in it and played over 3000 thousand hours and 7 days to die became my favorite game.

 

     What was only alpha 16 worth when I saw tons of updates in it: turrets, bandits, a huge zombie behemoth they call it, if I'm not mistaken, the survivors and the future plot. Although this was not on the main version of the game, but then I really got carried away. In anticipation of a fresh alpha when I didn’t have much to do, I decided to dig into the news about this game and find out what will be added in the future and what the project will look like for release, however, the future seems a little meager to me. That is, only bandits, a plot, new armor and weather will be added to the release? No, it's certainly great that the game is being developed and really necessary things will be added, but I think this game deserves much more. I've read all the posts on the forum, there's a real mass of great ideas! I understand that this is all pretty hard to implement, but still I would like future development. And I also read that after the release of 7 days a small team will stay and continue to update 7 days. Will these updates be just for fixing bugs or for enriching the game with content?

 

     I noticed that on the forum, many are pessimistic about the future content of the game and say to be happy with what is. Of course, it's great that the studio has done such a hard job and was able to give us a unique game, but I really want more. Yes, they promised mods, but it seems to me that mods cannot replace real content from developers.

 

     And so I had a question: if the studio does not have enough funds for the development of the game, can it add donations to the development of this great game? Just like they were collecting donations for the kickstarter in 2013 at the beginning (sorry, maybe I spelled it wrong) I think it's a great idea to breathe more life into the project. Personally, I have about 10 friends and acquaintances ready to donate their money for the development of the game. For example, you can add skins or some interesting small DLCs for blocks, weapons, armor, additional missions, new maps, and the like. Personally, I am ready to help the studio in the development of the game! Even though with small funds, it seems to me that many will support the game so in it, despite the long downtime in updates, it still keeps a good online! In the game, you can really add more cool animations, more weapons, more activities, horses as an alternative to transport, enemies, a dialogue system, a plot at the level of role-playing games like fallout, skyrim and other similar games (I just haven’t played more similar games) in addition to return hippopotamus and add really more activities so that you don’t want to leave the game at all, since at the moment there are not so many activities in it that can drag you out for a long time, that is, this is a seasonal game for me personally. So I think donations are a really cool topic.

 

    Thanks to everyone who read my huge text to the end. I just work as a teacher and I'm used to writing a lot)) I apologize if there are errors in the text. I would be grateful to those who answer, thanks again

 

Edited March 10 by Roland (see edit history)

[rateds2k]

1 hour ago, KOLAND said:

 Personally, I have about 10 friends and acquaintances ready to donate their money for the development of the game. For example, you can add skins or some interesting small DLCs for blocks, weapons, armor, additional missions, new maps, and the like.

 

This is the last thing that this game needs. Skins and fluff like that are just a money grab. Ruins a lot of games.

[Trankitas]

14 minutes ago, rateds2k said:

This is the last thing that this game needs. Skins and fluff like that are just a money grab. Ruins a lot of games.

But it certainly help the long term health of the game, if money still flows, content will follow.
How do you think games like Fortnite are still alive?

I mean if it's only cosmetics, no p2w bull****, it shouldn't hurt anyone.
 

Maybe some bike, 4x4 and gyro skins or something, it would be cool to be able to obtain them via gameplay too.

Just thoughts, don't @ me 

[Riamus]

43 minutes ago, Trankitas said:

But it certainly help the long term health of the game, if money still flows, content will follow.
How do you think games like Fortnite are still alive?

I mean if it's only cosmetics, no p2w bull****, it shouldn't hurt anyone.
 

Maybe some bike, 4x4 and gyro skins or something, it would be cool to be able to obtain them via gameplay too.

Just thoughts, don't @ me 

It really isn't necessary.  A developer who wants to continue supporting their game can do so without needing to sell cosmetics.  They have other games that they are going to be releasing that will generate income so they aren't going to be unable to support this.  How much they add after the gold release will be up to them and it is entirely possible they won't add much after gold.  That is up to them and doesn't cause the game to be any worse.  Most of those cosmetic type DLC do not in any way benefit the actual game development and are just a money grab add was mentioned.

[Roland]

15 minutes ago, Riamus said:

  Most of those cosmetic type DLC do not in any way benefit the actual game development and are just a money grab add was mentioned.

 

Well....if they were to do a money grab and successfully grabbed some money that would benefit the actual game development. Money is money.

 

However, they don't need to to do this. They aren't exponentially increasing their scope to fulfill the whims of every member of the community because they don't have enough funds. They aren't doing it because they are sticking to their own plan.

[Riamus]

24 minutes ago, Roland said:

Well....if they were to do a money grab and successfully grabbed some money that would benefit the actual game development. Money is money.

What I meant is that most games adding cosmetic DLC don't end up really using that money on the game that was already released.  At least, not for more than adding more cosmetic DLC.  Usually the money does get doesn't in game development of other games, so it does help the company develop games and you do support future games by buying those DLC.

[beerfly]

37 minutes ago, Riamus said:

What I meant is that most games adding cosmetic DLC don't end up really using that money on the game that was already released.  At least, not for more than adding more cosmetic DLC.  Usually the money does get doesn't in game development of other games, so it does help the company develop games and you do support future games by buying those DLC.

Yeah, but money is a result, not a goal for The Pimps. There were some talks about some DLC after gold, though, don`t think will cost us anything also, just for the sake of how much the game went good and further than we all thought, and to have more fun of it of course. But that is future and talks, we`ll see.