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Developer Discussions: Alpha 17


Roland

Developer Discussions: Alpha 17  

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  1. 1. Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

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It's really smart to push back out of October. I know the devs "don't care" about the competition but releasing on top of Fallout 76 is a death wish for A17 exposure. Both games are competing in a similar niche but Fallout 76 has AAA backing with supreme marketing and some generally serious starpower through the Fallout IP.

 

If I was planning the release of A17 in the current game development climate I'd aim for either late November or January. The only downside is that you've exhausted all your hype for the stream event already, so now it's gonna be that much harder to rope people back in.

 

People will still come back of course but I think if we could do an A/B test on releases through some parallel universe shenanigans, you'd have found a much higher spike if it was released back in August compared to whenever you end up releasing it. Not due to anything inherent about how long it's been since A16 came out, but more so because of how the community clearly feels super led on by this "oh, it might be out this month!" sort of stringing along that we've all been going through month after month since June.

 

Yes I understand that those were estimates but many people were led to a false sense of extreme anticipation that keeps getting let down. People have been telling their friends that the new update is coming soon, people have spent money on new computer parts to prepare for it, streamers told their viewers that it's "coming soon" months ago now, people have been putting off starting a fresh A16 game in anticipation that A17E will be dropping any day. I think the end result here will be that most people will end up trudging back eventually instead of everyone springing back immediately.

 

Just some thoughts from a video game marketing perspective.

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How could end June/Mid July become luckily november? Every month since july Ive been creating a server to play with my brother, but we cant stand no more for a week playing on it, cos we think alpha will be out next week, which never happens :(

 

bro, I've been waiting since February.

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I know for a fact that when RDR2 and Fallout 76 release I will forget about checking this forum daily as I have been since July, but that’s a good thing. I need the distraction. Will I be back? Definitely! But I won’t care about A17 until at least December now so go ahead make this alpha the best you can! (Until December and then I want it now!😝)

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It is what it is, but that being said, the longer the release takes the more permanent damage it will do to the player base. It wouldn't have been so bad if they never have a date but they made that bed and now they have to lie in it. I will still hang around wait it out but with all the new releases coming out people will lose interest in 7dtd.

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It is what it is, but that being said, the longer the release takes the more permanent damage it will do to the player base. It wouldn't have been so bad if they never have a date but they made that bed and now they have to lie in it. I will still hang around wait it out but with all the new releases coming out people will lose interest in 7dtd.

 

Just so you post every once in awhile with that avatar I'm good.

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We had hearing up to about a14 or so. It was also cut for the same reason.

 

We have hearing in A17. Shoot a gun in a room full of sleepers and they will wake up. Jump up and down around a corner and a zombie will hear you and investigate.

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Arrows disappear with the body if they are not pulled out before the body disappears. It is actually an interesting minigame when fighting a horde to backtrack past oncoming zombies to pull arrows out of ones you killed before they are gone. I'm hoping that a new achievement might be designed where you kill a horde with one arrow and just keep pulling it out and reusing it until all the zeds are dead.

 

this would only work if all arrows had the option of being pulled out, but as watching the videos that had shown this in action, not all arrows seemed to have the option to be retrieved.

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Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. If I gave an approximate date I would have to be insane.

 

But how about this:

 

I am reasonably certain that the experimental version will be released before the end of 2018.

 

I am somewhat certain that the stable version will also be released before the end of 2018.

 

I am quite certain that the experimental version will NOT be released before the end of October.

 

 

Make of that what you will.

 

I'm going to start working on the fourth release date thread which will NOT include a friggin poll.

 

/insane since July 2018

 

ahh what a shame not in october.... but something i can work with.... even the time to time players that played with me come and ask "Hey sitting Duck, you are a forumduck, when is A17 done" Dam there it is the Roland feeling^^

 

Btw alle the playerbase is expecting a soon release and is still waiting... that makes us insane too.

Musik for the insane:

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this would only work if all arrows had the option of being pulled out, but as watching the videos that had shown this in action, not all arrows seemed to have the option to be retrieved.

 

That is changed since the video. You can retrieve all the arrows provided the corpse doesn't fall so that they are obstructed from you.

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It is what it is, but that being said, the longer the release takes the more permanent damage it will do to the player base.

This is factually true.

We see our tester's bases take more and more damage during horde nights as zombies get smarter.

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I hope someone (Roooolaaaand) answers this :)

 

I've been eagerly awaiting A17 for months now (7dtd has been in my blood for 3,5yrs+ on and off) and my question is..

 

In Video #7 MM shows the new vehicles including a MUST-HAVE! Gyrocopter yet there is no mention of it anywhere on the new vehicles list OR on the dropped/ waiting for A18 features list at the end ... Are we going to be able to fly around in A17 or not?

 

Pls update info page - ta muchly.

 

I apologise if this has been answered on one of the 2k+ pages already :02.47-tranquillity:

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Smell-by-range is okay but it has quite a few loopholes. Unless intervening blocks are taken into account I could be on the inside of a hermetically sealed vault and still be smelled. The only way to do it properly would be to use the same sort of pathfinding algorithm that the spiders require, three dimensional pathing and one block ingress. That's not going to happen any time soon.

 

That said, smell-by-range would be a good placeholder until then.

 

Or if they ever do that audio occlusion that was mentioned, the same system of calculations would seem to apply well for smell, too. Since they both travel through air, a smell could in effect be modeled as a sound with a delay. Not to mention other air-based phenomena, like ventilation. :)

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We have hearing in A17. Shoot a gun in a room full of sleepers and they will wake up. Jump up and down around a corner and a zombie will hear you and investigate.

 

Sorry if it’s a stupid question but how is smell different? When you make a sound, in a certain radius a zombie will hear it - if you carry smelly item, in a certain radius a zombie will smell it. The “smell scan” can be made as often/rare to avoid performance loss...

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I believe they've said before that art isn't holding back the build; bugs are. In other words HD textures are a good use of their artists' time while others, especially programmers, have a full plate fixing bugs. Also, the game's bottleneck historically has been the CPU, so in general there's room to 'lean' more on the GPU with things like HD textures without hurting performance.

 

Unity 2018 definitely multithreads a lot better than Unity 5 and Unity 2017 too.

 

But it does mean they'd need to tweak the code for that, which is one of the things I'm assuming they're doing. If I'm correct, then it's going to REALLY help. Just having the game using 4 threads properly will really let it stretch it's legs. :)

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Sorry if it’s a stupid question but how is smell different? When you make a sound, in a certain radius a zombie will hear it - if you carry smelly item, in a certain radius a zombie will smell it. The “smell scan” can be made as often/rare to avoid performance loss...

 

I'm curious about this myself and it's a question worth asking if only to stop this forum from further descending into a "Lord of the flies" text adventure.

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I'm curious about this myself and it's a question worth asking if only to stop this forum from further descending into a "Lord of the flies" text adventure.

 

The difference is, that there can be many items emitting the smell, in contrast to the single noise source.

So the game needs to iterate through all items in the players inventory, toolbelt, stored in a box, lying around.

That could be factor making the calculation perform worse.

 

And then send this over the network.

 

But overall, such a smell system does not actually sound like a big performance hog, compared to other systems.

The update frequency could be just tuned down..

 

I guess a "smell" system is not very intuitive for the player. Making noise (or light) is easier to understand.

"you currently emit 12 olf units of smell" would be kind of aqward

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The difference is, that there can be many items emitting the smell, in contrast to the single noise source.

So the game needs to iterate through all items in the players inventory, toolbelt, stored in a box, lying around.

That could be factor making the calculation perform worse.

 

And then send this over the network.

 

But overall, such a smell system does not actually sound like a big performance hog, compared to other systems.

The update frequency could be just tuned down..

 

Only the item with the greatest smell range needs to be known and smell is invisible so that calculation can be done at a relatively slow rate. As far as I know only items in the players inventory currently emit smell, those on the toolbelt more so than those in the backpack. Anything on the floor or in a storage container isn't calculated.

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