Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[SnowDog1942]

Could be wrong and they could just be very very rare, but pretty sure they won't...yet!

The new RWG, still seems very much like a WIP, from what I'm seeing.

I'm liking what I see though and it looks very promising for the future (imo).

 

Someone put in a bug report for missing cities/skyscrapers in random gen ... im too lazy... yea I admit it.

[Laz Man]

Yup. I got disoriented a few weeks ago, ran the wrong way. I was the meat in the sandwich. Another time I was already knee deep in POI walkers when a wandering horde busted in (They hate being excluded from anything and like to crash parties) so I fled but hit a dead end in a bathroom. I went out in a Blaze of glory emptying my AK like Carl Weathers in Predator and got rekt so hard.

 

Happy Thanksgiving MM, thanks for checking in today. Greetings to you Rick and your family. I am grateful you and your brother decided on this day many years ago to make your vision into this game that brings us fans so much joy.

[Gamida]

Issue w Fresh game for b199. Placing last of anything via R-click results in placement then immediately a Punch.

 

Place last Wood Frame, punch. Place Campfire, punch. Place last sapling, punch.

 

Same issue, place seed with R-Click, punch and pick seed back up. Have to place it and immediately look away.

[Thecolours]

This is literally my only real complaint from 17 so far. They did such a GREAT job making everything ELSE more difficult and slowed down but the removal of the parts system and the removal of the action xp and quality levels has GREATLY diminished any variety or reward for getting better loot. Mind you i looted a level 4 spiked club on day 3 in my game and i feel ZERO need to ever replace it or upgrade it. it has 2 mods so far and for me it feels like an endgame weapon... on day 3.

 

The mods are not THAT great at all, and so far they haven't offered me enough variety to compensate for what we lost in the 1-500 quality system. A combo of the two would have been EPIC. But unfortunately it seems they went the way of simpler is better when it comes to stats on weapons.

 

I mean Im told that using your axe to level it was a stupid RPG type style of gameplay that felt grindy, yet adding black dye to my club to make it stronger is what...immersive? If anything skilling up through USING your weapon makes WAY more sense and its a very rewarding system.

 

Combining the two systems would be perfect. I would still would get rid of gun parts, though. This would be on the top of my short list of something I hope modders address if MM doesn't do so himself. Finding a lvl 600 fully modded weapon and tools would be a great end game grind.

[toxicbubble]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]25508[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]25509[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]25510[/ATTACH]

 

 

What graphics mod for A16 is that? /s

[meganoth]

Really -low- RAM use??

 

Just noticed that 7DaysToDie.exe is only using 3.5 GBs. wth? I know w 16.4 mods it would use 9 GB +.

 

One of the developer hinted months ago that they massively reduced memory usage.

 

I'll say it again since my post may have been overlooked. My dedicated server cannot be joined. Even I am having trouble viewing it in the server list now. My sis can't see it, nobody can at this point.

 

With that error description and lots of possible causes it is nearly impossible to help you. Relevant parts of the log files and config files would help

 

Because thats exactly how the game is designed

 

A hard start you have nearly no chance if RNG dont like you

A good middle

And a easy tralalala wonderland as soon as you have your perks up

 

The quote you cited was talking about people learning the tricks of the game, not the difficulty curve of one game. You may be right, you may be not, until you have seen the middle game you can't know.

 

Besides that as sidemark, when i say Glue17 feels like you play in glue i dont speak about difficulty.

 

Do you have stutter when looking sideways? Low fps? If one or both, try a lower resolution or hope for optimizations. Experimental is expected to be a rough ride.

[Guppycur]

Combining the two systems would be perfect. I would still would get rid of gun parts, though. This would be on the top of my short list of something I hope modders address if MM doesn't do so himself. Finding a lvl 600 fully modded weapon and tools would be a great end game grind.

 

Agreed. Gun parts was weird in a country with 300,000,000 guns (of which, I own a decent percentage of).

 

...but a merging of say, axe usage actually improving axe skill AND mods, would be more fun and make more sense.

 

I was just reading a modder talk about that usage based skill progression is no longer moddable via the old method, so I think the new method will be to attach a cvar onUse for items that increases the skill level.

 

So still doable.

[Aurelius]

Besides that as sidemark, when i say Glue17 feels like you play in glue i dont speak about difficulty.

 

Do you mean the mouse controls feel sluggish to respond? If so I've gotten that impression too...

 

-A

[Ghoul Face]

I made my base at Spillway Lake in the cabin with a broken forge. On horde night I stay on the edge of the roof and the zombies always climb a large boulder and run around in circles all night.

[4sheetzngeegles]

@Madmole

I promise not to undermind the work you and the team put in to this.

I like to enhance visuals, and create an eerie horror movie atmosphere.

You did the hard part, and thanks for the light flicker, and removing the

ta_cutout rails on the stairs. I see combo of legacy and new in this version.

 

The shaders are crazy sexy cool, allowing the Normals to pop now.

I primarily like art and texture ergo my first examples.

Think of that as an alpha rendition, for a Fantasy themed mod.

 

I need a good foundation, before I add the amenities. So i clear all, to develope

a scene, and it also showed that it is not impossible to adjust and get a wide

variety of environments easily. This game and your progressive use of the new

Unity tools.

 

Prompted me to not just play but read and

explore possibilities Big frigging manual. The next step is

using the tools available to add volumetric lighting and 3d atmospheric

fog but to watch out for performance hits.

[meganoth]

Mutated seeds? Where are them?!?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]25520[/ATTACH]

 

They mutated to turds and then vanished because there are no turds in the game

[Gamida]

I am unable to reproduce this. I just planted several saplings and blocks and it worked fine for me. No second hit. Maybe TFP will need more information to reproduce this. I've seen several people mention this though. Are you using a controller? Is your mouse going bad?

 

EDIT - Just planted a bunch of crops no change. Maybe this a FPS issue. My FPS hovers around 60-80. Faatal said that things start breaking around 20 FPS because of how ticks work in the game.

 

I have had it happen also. I really noticed it while planting seeds. I would right click to plant the seed and it would hit the seed again right after and pick it up. I had to plant seed and quickly look away. My FPS is usually up around 60 so don't think that is it.

[wolffblood]

Yes I was saying the same thing, in a month the same people will be "its too easy", so we're not changing the difficulty. We are looking at boss rooms, those seem to be too difficult. However once firearms are fixed it might not be so bad.

 

You might come around on the perk system. The perks are way better/more interesting but some people are fixed on skill grinding. I like playing how I want, crafting ONLY what I need and not jumping through hoops to build my character. People complain about level gates but skill gates are worse... who wants to fall 5000 times to level up your agility? Or run on foot 200k miles when you have a perfectly good motor vehicle sitting there?

 

The caveats of skill grinding are not as great as you think. Now you just play and focus on survival and the rest comes together. I'd rather focus on real NEEDs like food/water/shelter/scavenging/fighting than be forced through artificial mechanics like falling to get better at parkour, taking damage to get better at light/heavy armor etc. Those systems are impossible to balance and more frustrating to most players IMO.

 

I agree with you there. Many games I'd be at least day 30, and my armor is still at lvl 1 because I rarely got hit (I was always cautious, and admittedly, played on never run because for some reason, the always run seemed to bug the AI out for me on A16.4). By the time I got to higher gamestages where I need the higher lvl in armor to be effective, I didn't have it, so was killed so many times so easily even with higher tier armor. I'm loving the perks, less to worry about while having and getting to worry more about what matters since food and water is more scarce. Loving this update. Now just to have the server connection issues fixed so I and my friends quit raging on all the server kicks, high ping, interact being broken, and more, lol.

[Blackgryphon]

8k is huge. North pole is north. There are good sized towns for sure, not sure about cities. The big accomplishment is RWG now uses a height map like Nav, so no special snowflake code once the map is generated its identical to playing NAV which is good for performance. We can make it prettier and improve it.

 

ROFL No, it's not. In fact, it's 136 SqKm SMALLER than the default map size for A16. I did the math. Most servers, especially the good ones, run at 50 people playing at once. There is no way a map this tiny is going to work for that. I know you have said that "the game is made for 8 people" before. But, here's the thing, you make the game for your player base, not for you. And I can promise you that your player base doesn't want tiny little 64 sqkm maps. Now, if your goal is to stop people from playing the game, then by all means, continue the way you are going with A17.

[Guppycur]

ROFL No, it's not. In fact, it's 136 SqKm SMALLER than the default map size for A16. I did the math. Most servers, especially the good ones, run at 50 people playing at once. There is no way a map this tiny is going to work for that. I know you have said that "the game is made for 8 people" before. But, here's the thing, you make the game for your player base, not for you. And I can promise you that your player base doesn't want tiny little 64 sqkm maps. Now, if your goal is to stop people from playing the game, then by all means, continue the way you are going with A17.

 

So... Generate a 32k map? Any server manager should have the basic skillset to do it, especially the ones hosting 50 players at once.

 

This is a non issue.

[Aldranon]

Following the words of the A17 master, I now have no problems winning.

 

[madmole]

I'm glad you're enjoying it. But I'm not finding the game fun anymore. It's not too hard. Yes, I got killed a couple times when I started because I didn't expect ninja zombies. I even turned it down to scavenger (I normally play on nomad) and I didn't find it any more fun. Turned it back up to nomad, didn't die, still not fun.

 

Again, glad you're enjoying it, but if that's how the game is meant to be played now, it's not a game I want to play anymore, and that sucks. I've never done a horde night in a POI. I want to build bases. I watched this game on Youtube for several years (at least since the minecraft-style crafting grid was still a thing) thinking how awesome if would be if they just added a couple things, they added them in A16, and I bought the game. Loved it. Almost 500 hours played.

 

Now...it really does feel like a different game, and it's a game I don't want to play, because it just isn't fun anymore. If I'd only seen people play A16, I'd have blamed myself for not realizing what direction the devs wanted the game to go, but for it to so drastically change in the course of 1 Alpha after being so similar through many previous is kind of shocking.

 

All that said, and no reason why it isn't fun for you?

[The Gronk]

Feedback so far...

 

Farming : The introduction of a primitive stone hoe would be a good idea, separate farming from metallurgy entirely. Keep the upgraded iron and steel versions but you can make a primitive hoe from a deer antler or the fork in a tree branch without the use metal at all. The requirement for ironwork seems a little forced to gate farming and I feel farming should essentially be a "side project" that you can start very early on but only starts paying dividends after a while.

 

Forge : The forge is ironically both the most useful thing and the most powerful thing in the game. The current level requirement may be a little high although, that being said, there are plenty of forges available to find if you look.

 

Tools : The basic requirements for iron tools may also be a little high, if I specialize in crafting feel I should probably be making simple iron tools at the end of the first week.

 

Stamina : The basic stamina regeneration seems a little fast. The timing I'd be going for is that the player runs out of stamina, picks up a cup of coffee or a snack in real life, takes a mouthful and then has a second or two to get ready for another round of harvesting. Note, my opinion may be skewed by the embarrassingly long amount of time it took me to realize that normal bandages regenerate health.

 

This is all under the caveat that I'm only using the first week of game-time to form this opinion and I may feel differently after a month or two in-game.

[madmole]

I got the new gore blocks in my navezgane world w/o starting a new game.

 

Unexplored areas will spawn new deco.

[Blackgryphon]

So... Generate a 32k map? Any server manager should have the basic skillset to do it, especially the ones hosting 50 players at once.

 

This is a non issue.

 

It won't let me. No matter what I (and lots of other people) do, the map is locked to that tiny size.

[toxicbubble]

I am unable to reproduce this. I just planted several saplings and blocks and it worked fine for me. No second hit. Maybe TFP will need more information to reproduce this. I've seen several people mention this though. Are you using a controller? Is your mouse going bad?

 

EDIT - Just planted a bunch of crops no change. Maybe this a FPS issue. My FPS hovers around 60-80. Faatal said that things start breaking around 20 FPS because of how ticks work in the game.

 

I've had this too, placed a door, it gets punched. Place a chest, same thing. I would say it's a bit inconsistent though, I couldn't find how to fully reproduce reliably.

 

It's funny, because you place it with right click and it seems to trigger a left click attack after your hand becomes empty, so it's definitely not a faulty mouse, glitching out a different button than was pressed in only this game.

 

For me, my fps is about 60-80 (using gsync, vsync disabled) at 3440x1440 res so definitely not low enough to be causing problems.

 

Might have to do with how long buttons is held for or something?

[fazz68]

love you man. you are obviously very good at what you do. the changes you have done have me on the edge of my chair with panic and exitement.

but...

some choices that have been made are straight wack.

the only one i am not willing to roll on is the toggle run on the controller being removed. it physically hurts the thumb. no kidding. and removes any chance of combat finesse. we play for hours and hours ar a stretch. get the twits who made the decision to play for 4 hrs with a controller and ask how their left thumb is.

this is the one and only thing that ruins the game for me. if it isnt fixed i will not be able to continue to play.

 

seems like many others also dont like this change.

 

roland - is this a candidate for a poll?

how many use controllers and of those who want left stick toggle run vs numb thumb9

at the same time left click vs right click for the mouse users.

 

 

yup agreed. a15 unplayable for my arthritic hands... a16 proper controller support opened a world of awesomeness... a17 back to uplayable with no run toogle on left thumbstick

[Guppycur]

All that said, and no reason why it isn't fun for you?

 

Building day 1 is effectively gated, is his point.

 

And it's a solid point, even if I like the current change. A lot of people like building early.

[Skykemn]

ROFL No, it's not. In fact, it's 136 SqKm SMALLER than the default map size for A16. I did the math. Most servers, especially the good ones, run at 50 people playing at once. There is no way a map this tiny is going to work for that. I know you have said that "the game is made for 8 people" before. But, here's the thing, you make the game for your player base, not for you. And I can promise you that your player base doesn't want tiny little 64 sqkm maps. Now, if your goal is to stop people from playing the game, then by all means, continue the way you are going with A17.

I would rather have an 8k map that is normal than having the old large maps that were half water and half mountains

[FileMachete]

Now that perks are done Gazz can properly balance the firearms. I'm shooting for 2 pistol shots to the head with no perks to kill a weak zombie, so by the time you get a couple perks or mods you'll be one shot killing easy zombies to the head. But yes they are pathetic in current form it took 5 shots to kill a weak zed to the head and 5 point blank shotgun headshots to kill a biker. That is just wrong.

 

^ That is incredibly good news, looking forward to it!

 

One of the developer hinted months ago that they massively reduced memory usage.

 

That certainly may be it. But I'd feel better if someone could confirm that they are using more than ~3.9 GB of ram.

 

After my post I teleported around about 10 times, all over the map, and still couldn't get ram above ~3.7. Not sure what else to try...?