Version 1.0 (Alpha 22) Dev Diary

[zztong]

I could appreciate an effort to improve iron sites, animations, more realism reloading, and so forth. And, if nothing changed I'd be completely fine with that too because the game plays really well.

 

What would trouble me is if the targeting reticle went away. My accuracy would drop and I'd make poorer decisions just like taking away the compass would disorient me.

 

Using the compass as an example. Obviously there isn't a projection of a compass in my normal vision in real life, but I do generally have a good idea how far I turn and which way is North. Unfortunately, moving a mouse doesn't convey the same relative changes when I turn in game. 

 

Related to using a ranged weapon in game, movement in-game doesn't convey to me the effects on my accuracy without the size of crosshair. I can't feel myself moving or what terrain I'm crossing as I hold down keys. Adding some visual bounce doesn't cover it. I once played on a server that had a modlet that took away the targeting reticle when aiming. As a bow user, it was horrible. When aiming with the bow (especially the primitive bow), the reticle changing as I move and my character's skill improving is very important information. Unlike firing a real weapon, there's more going on than the alignment of the gun and gravity. The crosshairs convey that.

[SnowDog1942]

Im still waiting on the patch notes so i can continue my tradition of printing them out and rubbing each page over my naked body.  

[FramFramson]

Complaints about gunplay aside, comparing this game to a regular FPS seems absurd considering it's a fully-destructible voxel survival-crafting world as well as a zombie shooter when no other FPS has the first and few have the second?

 

Devs have a hell of a lot more to do than just gun stuff, or even weapon stuff.

[seven]

7 hours ago, dcsobral said:

You are putting in a whole new drum or a whole new magazine. Even on revolvers there's fast loaders were you are replacing all your ammo at once. But in the specific case of these two guns you do load bullets one by one, and the animation does show you loading a fixed number of bullets.

 

 

So those magazines magically refill themselves when we hit reload, but we need to see 1 round at a time on a lever action?

[FranticDan]

1 hour ago, seven said:

 

So those magazines magically refill themselves when we hit reload, but we need to see 1 round at a time on a lever action?

There's this thing called balance, speed up the rate each round is loaded, like demonstrated in the video I shared. Loading 8 shells into a pump shotgun is still faster (4 seconds) than reloading the current pipe shotgun (5 seconds). And reloading 5 rounds into the level action rifle at an increased speed will end up equaling out to what it is now anyway. On the plus side, if you only need to reload 2 rounds, you reload faster than it is currently!

"Oh no, my guns are reloading too fast!"

Edit: Plus, as a bonus, if you have to swap toolbelt slot mid-reload (or you have a habit of swapping too early), you won't have to worry about having no ammo loaded, you'll have some ammo ready to go, unlike currently, you have to wait for the entire animation to play out before swapping.

Edit 2: Figured I'd make a pros and cons list, feel free to add anything you think I missed

Pros and cons for partial reload for pump shotgun and lever-action rifle (That I can think of)

Cons
- Pump shotgun reload time would increase roughly from 2.5 secs to 4 secs (which is still better than the Pipe's and Double's round/time ratio)
(No other cons as the level-action rifle reload time would equal out with the increased animation speed)

Pros
- Immersion.
- Ability to cancel reload without still having an empty gun due to no longer needing to wait for the entire animation to play out first.
- Time to reload will be quicker if gun only needs a few rounds to load

All-in-all, IMO the pros outweigh the con

Edited June 18 by FranticDan (see edit history)

[Riamus]

55 minutes ago, seven said:

 

So those magazines magically refill themselves when we hit reload, but we need to see 1 round at a time on a lever action?

Although I don't care at all about the reload animations and, for me, they are fine, I'd point on that if you're using a gun with magazines, you aren't generally refilling magazines in the middle of a fight.  If you're doing that, you've really miscalculated and are not likely to survive.  You'd refill magazines at home/base and then go out with a bunch of them ready-to-go and just drop the empty magazine and insert the already filled magazine.  You *might* refill empty magazines between fights, but not during fights.  So your comment isn't really relevant other than to suggest that refilling magazines be something you need to do at your base or between battles and that you can't use ammo found until you put it into a magazine.  Some people might actually like all that "realism".  I'd personally hate it.  And yes, I'd also not enjoy having to reload one shell at a time for lever action and shotgun.  I already don't use shotguns because of the limited ammo capacity and it breaking blocks so easily, though the latter has improved in A21.

 

I think if TFP wants to just sweep this topic under the rug and not add these animations based on number of shots used, they might just change the reload for shotguns and lever action to a single shell and just say that is an abstract of reloading all shells, regardless of number.  With it being 2 shells for shotgun (I don't know what lever action animation is), it gives the suggestion that it's based on shots fired when it isn't.  That might at least reduce the complaints... probably not, though. 

 

In the end, I don't really care.  I'm not a gun nut and I aim with crosshairs and not the sights and I don't care if the animation is the right number of shells.  I'm not watching the animation and if someone didn't tell me how many the animation reloads, I wouldn't have any idea.  Obviously many people care about this realism, but I think that far more people are like me and just don't care or even notice.  I wouldn't be against it as long as crosshairs remain and reload speeds aren't worse because of the animation change.  I just don't care if it's left alone either.

[Zombiepoptard]

9 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Actually I wouldn't mind. In most games I notice the graphics for a few minutes, after that the only things going through my mind are gameplay-related.

 

Thankfully you posted a picture of the revolver and how you want the revolver to look like, otherwise I still would not know what people here are talking about. I never noticed and chances are that I have already forgotten the issue when I see a revolver in the game again.

 

Your version of the revolver looks better by the way, but mostly because it is a smaller revolver and doesn't take up as much screen space. I would suggest to TFP to make the weapons smaller or put them lower so they don't hinder the view so much. Especially melee weapons modded with the fire mod simply burn in my eyes because they fill up the screen

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for being honest that you don’t really have these kinds of preferences. You might notice you are a niche case in the general survival audience. Probably 7 days to die coagulated a lot of fans that don’t care as much about this issue. It doesn’t change that the gun play is subpar and needs to be improved a little if revamping isn’t in the cards.

 

The revolver picture is how most games do handguns. A lot of the issues with the gun play stems from them building off of bad bones. So i don’t know how much they can improve and what would be a tall order.
 

In gunplay department I’ve seen a ton of indie teams do better than this games doing not nearly as much resources as the fun pimps have. I’m not trying to compare this game to the leaders of the industry I just want any and many improvement to gun play. 

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, seven said:

 

So those magazines magically refill themselves when we hit reload, but we need to see 1 round at a time on a lever action?

Yes, because there's no animation for loading magazines. Or, for that matter, magazines. If there were magazines in the game that you had to load with bullets and watch an animation of it, it would drive me crazy if the animation showed two bullets being loaded however many bullets there were in the magazine.

 

I'm talking about animation. If it's not animation, it's not related. How much concrete you carry, how the bullets magically appear in magazines, etc. None of that counts, because I don't get to watch it. Feel free to come up with examples of other animations that I might be giving a pass, but stuff that doesn't have animation are not relevant.

[Adam the Waster]

2 hours ago, SnowDog1942 said:

Im still waiting on the patch notes so i can continue my tradition of printing them out and rubbing each page over my naked body.  

Same here I'll be slobbering it

[Zombiepoptard]

2 hours ago, FramFramson said:

Complaints about gunplay aside, comparing this game to a regular FPS seems absurd considering it's a fully-destructible voxel survival-crafting world as well as a zombie shooter when no other FPS has the first and few have the second?

 

Devs have a hell of a lot more to do than just gun stuff, or even weapon stuff.

Doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work on it and doesn’t mean the gunplay is good. They have the team and they should improve their weakest aspect of the game. 

 

When the animation team gets freed up from whatever they’re doing they should focus straight to implementing the basics on gunplay. Go to my other post to get the details. 

[Vaeliorin]

44 minutes ago, Zombiepoptard said:

they should improve their weakest aspect of the game

They should, but I don't know if they have any plans to work on the zombie AI.

[Zombiepoptard]

7 minutes ago, Vaeliorin said:

They should, but I don't know if they have any plans to work on the zombie AI.

 

please don't be the people that say the AI is to smart and needs it to be easily cheese-able 

[Vaeliorin]

5 minutes ago, Zombiepoptard said:

 

please don't be the people that say the AI is to smart and needs it to be easily cheese-able 

No, I think the AI is too smart and needs to be less easily cheese-able

[Zombiepoptard]

2 minutes ago, Vaeliorin said:

No, I think the AI is too smart and needs to be less easily cheese-able

 

you mean dumb?

Edited June 18 by Zombiepoptard (see edit history)

[Vaeliorin]

1 minute ago, Zombiepoptard said:

you mean dumb?

No, I mean smart.  Because it always knows the weakest point in your base, it's very easy to control where it goes, and thus simple to defeat.

[Zombiepoptard]

15 minutes ago, Vaeliorin said:

No, I mean smart.  Because it always knows the weakest point in your base, it's very easy to control where it goes, and thus simple to defeat.

 

 That's more understandable of a problem and more complicated to solve than not having the basics in gun animations. Got a little of topic but when in pois I love smart zombies that are challenging. Maybe they could have different pathing systems for each zombies assigned randomly. idk

[Jost Amman]

28 minutes ago, Vaeliorin said:

No, I mean smart.  Because it always knows the weakest point in your base, it's very easy to control where it goes, and thus simple to defeat.

The problem here is that this is also a game that's supposed to be with "tower defense" elements in it. The AI was programmed like that so that on horde night you can do exactly what you don't like.

 

A possible solution would be to have Blood Moon AI to be turned back to "dumb" and all other AI (during week-days) would be the current one.

 

I would support this kind of change only if it was togglable in the options though.

 

Edited June 18 by Jost Amman (see edit history)

[Vaeliorin]

9 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

The problem here is that this is also a game that's supposed to be with "tower defense" elements in it. The AI was programmed like that so that on horde night you can do exactly what you don't like.

 

A possible solution would be to have Blood Moon AI to be turned back to "dumb" and all other AI (during week-days) would be the current one.

 

I would support this kind of change only if it was togglable in the options though.

 

Honestly, I'd like the A16 AI back, just fix the spinning, make the zombies aware of elevation, and add in rage mode.  It was possible to control zombie pathing back then (without exploiting them not understanding if you were above/below them) but it was hard.

 

For example, this base only kinda controlled their movement, because a decent portion of them would just throw themselves off the edge and start destroying everything down below.

 

 

And I say this as someone who's primary interest in the game was because of the Tower Defense part.  I watched the game for years, and thought "If they ever add mechanical traps, I'll definitely buy this."  They did, and I did.

Edited June 18 by Vaeliorin (see edit history)

[Zombiepoptard]

20 hours ago, Laran Mithras said:

Carrying around 11 tons of concrete, eating a meal in 1 second, cutting a tree into lumber in 3 seconds... none of that matters, but BY GAWD there better be hyper realistic aiming and loading animations in this game, OR ELSE.

 

Some people just cannot let go.

 

Happy with my zombie survival sandbox game. When's 2.0?

“Hyper realistic” You mean the thing that they put in most games. Wanting the reload animations to be on point with every other game isn’t as far of a reach as you think. 

[Zombiepoptard]

8 hours ago, zztong said:

I could appreciate an effort to improve iron sites, animations, more realism reloading, and so forth. And, if nothing changed I'd be completely fine with that too because the game plays really well.

6 hours ago, Riamus said:

 

I think if TFP wants to just sweep this topic under the rug.

Joel responded to me with gunplay is fine  3 years ago. The thing is it’s not fine in any stretch of the imagination it’s subpar trash. The only thing that has seen big improvements was the reload animations. But the gunplay generally is still awful. I know they have the resources give the word to the animation team to go fix that stain on the game. 

Edited June 18 by Zombiepoptard (see edit history)

[Teezer]

26 minutes ago, Zombiepoptard said:

Joel responded to me with gunplay is fine  3 years ago. The thing is it’s not fine in any stretch of the imagination it’s subpar trash. The only thing that has seen big improvements was the reload animations. But the gunplay generally is still awful. I know they have the resources give the word to the animation team to go fix that stain on the game. 

 

They will remain in denial, unfortunately we will have to wait for the modders to work on this after the game goes gold

[Zombiepoptard]

8 minutes ago, Teezer said:

 

They will remain in denial, unfortunately we will have to wait for the modders to work on this after the game goes gold

i have hope. That’s why i’m on the forums wishing and stating the case. I’ll see if i can’t make a video about this.  

[meganoth]

4 hours ago, Vaeliorin said:

Honestly, I'd like the A16 AI back, just fix the spinning, make the zombies aware of elevation, and add in rage mode.  It was possible to control zombie pathing back then (without exploiting them not understanding if you were above/below them) but it was hard.

 

For example, this base only kinda controlled their movement, because a decent portion of them would just throw themselves off the edge and start destroying everything down below.

 

 

And I say this as someone who's primary interest in the game was because of the Tower Defense part.  I watched the game for years, and thought "If they ever add mechanical traps, I'll definitely buy this."  They did, and I did.

 

But this type of thing is the only example that is ever posted when A16-AI proponents claim that A16 has tower defense. And it needs advanced knowledge and a massive effort , something only veterans might do from day 30 on. And it is still tricky as you have to be sure the zombies don't collapse your base from below. Its an expert thing. I started with A15 and after a few tries to utilize traps in a tower defense way I gave up.

 

The current AI gives tower defense to everyone. Novice players can use it after the first horde night seeing how zombies react or even with an assumption that narrow passages work as expected, veterans can use it from day 1.

 

Edited June 18 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Vaeliorin]

20 minutes ago, meganoth said:

And it needs advanced knowledge and a massive effort

You say that like it's a bad thing.  Currently, the game is like the first 2 or 3 missions in a tower defense game.  I'd like to be able to play the last 1 or 2 instead.

[AaronG85]

Can we just have a single zombie with a randomized AI so you dont know if its going to path directly to you or destroy everything in its path to get to you