Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[wolffblood]

Does anyone know if it's intended (or a bug) for Zombies Never Run to also apply to 7th nights now?

 

In previous alphas, zombies always ran on the blood moon horde regardless of your choice, but now it's respecting that setting. I don't remember seeing anything about whether it was an intentional change or not.

 

They always walked for me in A16.4 when I did never run. Only ones that did run were the ferals.

[Mechanimal]

HALK mode for armor, it is awesome!!! )))

 

 

! omg what did I just watch, is that a real armor mod? Whoa, so THAT is how you make a gap entrance to your base the Z can't cross but you can. So, no broken legs upon landing? That's so dang high. Wait, I need to watch that again...

[ivailogeimara]

HALK mode for armor, it is awesome!!! )))

 

 

WTF!!??

[Mechanimal]

Does anyone know if it's intended (or a bug) for Zombies Never Run to also apply to 7th nights now?

 

In previous alphas, zombies always ran on the blood moon horde regardless of your choice, but now it's respecting that setting. I don't remember seeing anything about whether it was an intentional change or not.

 

Oh, I thought they ran on BM too, even with running off. I usually keep running on, HOWEVER I caved and turned it off because the AI is so damn good now that if I so much as make a jar of water at night the next thing I know I have Z bee-lining up into my attic base one after the other, made every night feel like Blood Moon, it was too much, I couldn't get anything done and was constantly dealing with that crazy long death debuff.

 

But I think it's fine, preferable even, on Blood Moons, even if for the challenge alone. I'm about to face my 14 day, running was still active on my first one. If it is too lame I might at least reset it to run for BMs, then back to nope in between. I rly don't know how they freaking find me so easily, and precisely, with the slightest noise, I'm up pretty high with no line of sight, and there's a decent maze of house to get up to me, but still they run up and freak me the F out, use up all my ammo, which just attracts more. I was dying, a lot. Every. Dang. Night.

[FirefightGI]

My experience with Unity store assets is they are ok to quickly prototype something, but usually are not optimized and aren't just a drag and drop in experience. Especially with our game, its more like the 7 days engine and unity is a small subset of code. Usually they aren't worth the effort to try and get them in. By the time you do that you could have coded your own that does exactly what you wanted it to without bloatware. (UMA, UFPS) Then there are the performance considerations.

 

@ZehMatt As an asset store publisher I sort of agree, depends on the asset though. Personally I think A* pathfinding project is to complex for most uses, Unity's own A* pathfinding (that you find on GitHub) in my opinion is far superior but most people don't know about it. The only thing UFPS really has going for it is the procedural camera bobs/shakes and UMA is open sourced so is a bit messy (at least since I used it last). As it stands it would probably take way to much time to upgrade 7DTD to UFPS 2 considering they have already modified a lot of the code for their project but UMA to MCS might take me a day to two. The asset store you either need to publish very niche or very broad to cover use cases.

 

 

My experience on the store is, don't publish anything with stock art and don't add any more scripted extensions than necessary. Users will recognize stock art and feel standard settings for things like UFPS. Currently I'm writing a tool to upgrade all textures in a scene/project to PBR and optimize 3D assets in which users wont notice and developers don't need to extend, assets like that are preferred. It is a shame that people think they can just buy things and make a game out of it, you can but probably shouldn't.

 

btw @madmole if you still are upgrading PBR textures after December hit me up, my tool will make things 100 times faster (still writing the custom editor).

[sinda]

 

Also, the spawn range is now 8m away from the sleeper volume, which seems pretty big to me.

 

that's better.

[ussugu]

How can you tell the tier of a found schematic?

 

Sorry if previously asked

[faatal]

Hate to tell ya, but the trickle is still there, and actually, the spawning literally stopped for my friend and I in our blood moon at 11:something PM. This was in b199 -- just happened earlier today.

 

Just saw you said they're not infinite during horde nights, sorry lol. I do think that it should be infinite during blood moon hordes, it's supposed to be the night of Hell *shrug*. I can always edit the XML but still, I think the "Be prepared to die" factor would drive more people to be interested in it (future attraction of players). Just my thinking, although.

 

6 hours of zombies would just be too hard early on. Their block damage would overwhelm more so than it already does. Less block damage, but more zombies could work, but we are still doing a ton of balance changes. It is Saturday, but many of us are chatting away on Skype about all these issues. Give it a few weeks and I think it will be much better balanced, but there will always be people who don't like where we end up.

[SnowDog1942]

6 hours of zombies would just be too hard early on. Their block damage would overwhelm more so than it already does. Less block damage, but more zombies could work, but we are still doing a ton of balance changes. It is Saturday, but many of us are chatting away on Skype about all these issues. Give it a few weeks and I think it will be much better balanced, but there will always be people who don't like where we end up.

 

Assuming difficulty was the same and I had my choice... I would want more zombies and less block damage... rather than less zombies and higher block damage.

[saintones]

Made an iron pick have 1 skill in miner 49. My stone axe is doing the same damage to a stone as the iron pick is?Anyone else getting this?

[faatal]

Well most of us dont play this game as a realistic life simulator ye true maybe selling unlimited guns is not realistic but it would be a better game decision. The stuff i looted was hard work and i dont wanna scrap all this stuff because i cant sell them. Finding good stuff should give you a reward, thats the main motivation too loot all the locations with tens of zombies in it.

 

I think part of the problem is way too many guns. I want it to feel more special when I find one, not oh I already found 20 of these. Then when I have one and the ammo to use it, I want to be blowing their heads off.

 

We have plans to up gun damage, but they are limited by the ammo you can find/make, esp early game. Then later as I'm are feeling tougher, the nastier zombies start balancing that out.

[faatal]

actually...

barb wire laid horizontally on the surface

below this is iron bars set horizontal bars up.

below this flame throwers to get the party started.

 

slows em for the fire to work, by the time they fall they are at low health, fall and die or near death. he should still have the fire debuff upon landing. will test.

 

 

hopefully, it isnt 33% of current health and is 33% of max. how fat do they need to fall to take the max damage?

 

That's the spirit. Find new creative ways to kill them.

 

It is 33% max health.

[SnowDog1942]

6 hours of zombies would just be too hard early on. Their block damage would overwhelm more so than it already does. Less block damage, but more zombies could work, but we are still doing a ton of balance changes. It is Saturday, but many of us are chatting away on Skype about all these issues. Give it a few weeks and I think it will be much better balanced, but there will always be people who don't like where we end up.

 

Faatal, I saw you mention that when zombies are together they do more block damage...is that a setting exposed in XML?

[faatal]

The trader is already a fountain of goodness, doesn't need to be even better. Find more traders and you can sell more of the same item. And really, if you find so many of a single item it follows it isn't really the GOOD stuff.

 

Developers also said the next alpha will have A LOT more items which should also decrease the chance to find only dozens of pistols

 

 

 

Maybe record your complete play sessions. If it happens again, cut the video to the relevant sequence and post it with the logfile in the bug section. It is possible that this happens only in specific circumstances that don't occur in Fataals tests.

 

 

 

My guess: They changed it so LMB is always the primary, most applicable, action.I.e. if you focus on a plant you want to harvest it almost always. Same with med packs: If you have a med pack selected you normally want to use it.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

 

 

I think it is minimum of %33 of max health and 50% of current health. So basically a zombie can never die from it but be reduced to 1 HP. And if they round down, a zombie with 1 HP finally really dies fromt he fall

 

The 50% is just vs the damage a player would take. It rounds up.

[Damocles]

Just balance it to make the gun noise will attract zombies from far away. (this is realistic too) Maybe even feral randomly.

This way the player can use a gun, but will have a disadvantage doing so when raiding a POI.

[faatal]

https://i539.photobucket.com/albums/ff356/stanshome/Untitled.png

 

please tell me this isnt going to remain. They pop in when you get near camps and it kinda looks ridiculous. They would be better randomly walking places. Not to mention they don't attack if you leave them alone so you can walk past them and loot right next to them. They cant move through door ways so range attacks can easily kill them to then get lots of meat and hide. I found a camp with 6 and did this and no longer need food.

 

 

 

Other then that I have been enjoying all of A17 so GREAT work.

 

I have never seen those in game, but I'd guess some unfinished xml settings.

[SnowDog1942]

I saw a flamethrower trap in the creative menu, but I can't find anyway to build it.... is that intended?

[faatal]

Noted: Cold weather makes you vulnerable to vultures. Also noted: You cannot outrun a vulture on a bicycle.

 

Confirmed - bicycle riding vultures. I almost corrected the above sentence, but what fun would that be.

 

Vultures will aggressively attack vehicles. Best option is exit vehicle and kill them.

[faatal]

Just balance it to make the gun noise will attract zombies from far away. (this is realistic too) Maybe even feral randomly.

This way the player can use a gun, but will have a disadvantage doing so when raiding a POI.

 

Guns are already the loudest noises in the game. Sleeper volumes are different, since designers do not want every zombie waking up and destroying the place, when you walk in the front door and fire a few rounds. You have to touch a volume before those zombies will react to noise.

[faatal]

Yeah. Happens a lot to me too. I think it may be if they heard you, they go into the InvestigateSound mode, then once they don't find you, they revert back to a normal Wandering mode that you would normally find and don't go back into a wandering horde mode which they started out in. I've had them keep walking twice, but both times was me sitting in my base looking through perks, so I was making zero sound. Every other time, I had been crafting, gathering resources, base building, something that makes noise and they end up checking it out then wander around.

 

That is how it works. Hordes travel by investigating a far off point when spawned. If distracted they no longer have that point and just wander.

[sillls]

I saw a wolf attack a total of three zombies and none of them fought back.

 

 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1573475086

[wolffblood]

That is how it works. Hordes travel by investigating a far off point when spawned. If distracted they no longer have that point and just wander.

 

Oh, okay. I was not sure if that was intended or not. Good to know, and glad I was smart enough to figure it out, haha. Though I did run into a wandering horde already wandering while I was on the bicycle. Is the InvestigateSound only triggered by player made sounds? Just seemed odd I was never in that area and ran into one.

[sillls]

Guns are already the loudest noises in the game. Sleeper volumes are different, since designers do not want every zombie waking up and destroying the place, when you walk in the front door and fire a few rounds. You have to touch a volume before those zombies will react to noise.

 

Trying to smash through a door even in stealth seems to make as much noise as a firearm (in this game). I had cleared out part of the house and was trying to get to the kitchen when five of them come strolling into the bathroom.

[faatal]

part of the problem is and has been in the sleeper volume sizes. this was true for a16 also.

 

larger volumes would help make up for that "lag".

i personally rarely see this issue on SP, but see it more on MP. larger volumes do help to negate this.

 

https://puu.sh/C70A9/8c87e8593f.jpg

 

There is an 8m XZ and 1m Y padding around volumes when zombies start spawning. And just making the volumes bigger for interior spaces makes a mess of overlapping volumes and then sleeper blocks would often be in multiple volumes, but are only supposed to be inside 1 volume.

[Jugginator]

6 hours of zombies would just be too hard early on. Their block damage would overwhelm more so than it already does. Less block damage, but more zombies could work, but we are still doing a ton of balance changes. It is Saturday, but many of us are chatting away on Skype about all these issues. Give it a few weeks and I think it will be much better balanced, but there will always be people who don't like where we end up.

 

Ah, too true. I noticed they went through cobblestone like it was butter. Perhaps, to fill the "stop swarming", to add tiny-groups of 2-3 every so often? Well, actually, I guess it kinda makes sense having it stop; every horde night procedurally getting harder / lasting longer, eventually lasting all the way till daylight. Sometimes I forget that I've been around the block and know what to do in case of emergencies.