Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[Crater Creator]

Could there be limit how many blocks zombies would have to walk around to opt for straight route instead?

 

This is because while zombies take the path of least resistance they also the shortest path. If you move away. You will be too far from them and will move to the other side to get closer.

 

What sillls said. I haven't seen the code, but if it's like any AI I've seen before, this is built in already. Breaking through a concrete block has a high cost associated with it, but even walking across open ground has a nonzero cost, since it still takes time. Then the zombie can typically go for the lowest cost path, without the need for much special case behavior that is more easily exploited.

[saintones]

Roland,

I don't ever need to throw in an old movie to laugh, I just come read the boards. I think you may have missed your calling.

[Crater Creator]

Right! Once a zombie starts hitting something, he should go into a frenzy until that block is destroyed, THEN reacquire a new target. But never changing its target would be the counter to my plan.

 

Okay, I've come around on this. When I first heard the grid would be recomputed on the order of 1-10 seconds, I thought it would be a terrible casualty of performance limits. Now I see how a significant delay before they react could be beneficial.

[Aldranon]

The animal types changed. There are more animals than originally listed but they aren't exactly the ones named. I think there will be at least one more added at some point. Some things on the stretch goals will be added post launch replacing other things that were originally going to be post launch but moved up in priority once they got going.

 

A Horse world be fun. Something you need to protect.

[Crater Creator]

I reject that players who are not in the know would eventually learn to build double thickness on three sides and single thickness on the fourth. That way of building is so outside what is intuitive that the only people who do that are those who have learned how the AI works and are using that knowledge to their advantage (or they were clued in by friends who know).

 

Nonsense! The survivors set a goal at the start of the week to upgrade their base from single-thick steel walls to double-thick. Then stuff happens. The miner gets distracted, they don't get enough iron in the forges, yadda yadda, and the bottom line is they don't have enough steel to cover everything. So rather than have an uneven patchwork, they agree to get the north, east, and west walls finished, and concentrate their traps and guns on the south side to compensate. Voila: they learn the zombie's behavior organically, with no outside knowledge.

 

All of you who are lamenting how easy it will be to exploit the AI have only your own selves to blame for reading up on how it works.... So please remember that no AI is going to be smarter than human ingenuity and you only have yourself to blame if you spoil it for yourself by following the AI development so closely that you know how to beat it before ever booting up A17 and also that the first iteration is basics and faatal has advanced features planned that will help obfuscate and randomize zombie behavior so that they are not quite as predictable as what many of you are planning on (again provided you aren't using your early access privileges to fully analyze and overcome the AI before ever experiencing it ingame).

 

I don't see anyone lamenting how easy it will be to beat. I see people trying to poke holes in a design as soon as they're made aware of it. That's just to be expected. We always do that, whether the design is revealed in a video, post, actual release, or anything else. It makes up the majority of the on-topic discussion in the Dev Diaries.

[Aldranon]

Okay, I've come around on this. When I first heard the grid would be recomputed on the order of 1-10 seconds, I thought it would be a terrible casualty of performance limits. Now I see how a significant delay before they react could be beneficial.

 

Yeah, just a few tweaks to the AI is all that is needed. Bringing back the Spider Zombie's abilities would make things interesting as well.

[Aldranon]

Yeah, just a few tweaks to the AI is all that is needed. Bringing back the Spider Zombie's abilities would make things interesting as well.

 

Edit: Or, each zombie has a behavior:

 

-Nurses always target the player and always go for the easiest path.

-Bikers and lumberjacks will head straight for the player location and start attacking anything in there way.

-Spider zombies will quietly climb up the walls and only make a small sound when it sees the player.

 

This would give each zombie type some feel to them and no just a random, generic zed.

 

 

Opps! dang Internets not doing what I wanted!

[Gnomaana]

No they are too busy nerfing all the weapons just like we saw in the last video.

 

What? Giving us weapon mods instead of generic parts is a nerf?

[Crater Creator]

I agree.

 

When I found out that they attack doors none of my bases now have doors. I dig an underground tunnel to access the base.

 

That’s interesting, because I take the opposite approach. Doors are a linchpin of my horde defense. I spend the resources to make multiple strong doors the zombies have to breach before they can reach me, arranged in a way that I can take as many of them out before they do.

 

And the thing is, I’m certain I would do this even if I’d never been on the forums or wiki, and/or the zombies treated doors like other blocks. Why? Because doors (along with hatches and campfires) offer the unique benefit of allowing me to pass through them unhindered, then changing state to where they do hinder the zombies. I don't consider it to be exploiting any outside knowledge of the AI, which is one thing I like about my horde defenses.

[Aldranon]

What? Giving us weapon mods instead of generic parts is a nerf?

 

I havent commented on that because I was waiting until I see a high level player with skills and good mods.

 

If a max player/modded up Pistol cant one shot a normal zed in the head, then something is broken. We'll see.

[Gnomaana]

I havent commented on that because I was waiting until I see a high level player with skills and good mods.

 

If a max player/modded up Pistol cant one shot a normal zed in the head, then something is broken. We'll see.

 

I agree. But isn't that already true? So even if it persists, it's not a nerf. It would just be a balance issue not fixed yet.

[Crater Creator]

Ps. No matter how difficult the developers will make the AI, players will always find a way to exploit it.

 

I agree only insofar as adjusting the difficulty and fixing exploits are separate goals, so addressing one doesn't necessarily address the other. Since the developers define the rules of the game, of course they could construct a set of rules such that the zombies can't be exploited in-game. It doesn't even require much imagination. I find this notion that this is a 'fight' the developers can't 'win' as irritating as it is wrong.

 

The real issue is the result may not be fun. With too much focus on whether the human can always beat the AI or the AI can always beat the human, one can lose sight of that goal. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess in 1997, but it wasn't designed to be a fun match.

 

In the case of 7DtD, I think the measure of a good AI is that it makes the obvious, natural, and/or least costly move. If the AI reaches a point where you can watch it and no longer say to yourself, "That's not smart - why doesn't the zombie simply do xyz instead?" we'll be in good shape.

 

Obviously we don't have real zombies to compare to. But if you imagine being chased by something like a dog or bear hell-bent on eating you, there are deterrents you’d reasonably expect to work. You can put a tree between you and the animal, and it has to either go around left, right, or through the tree. If the AI can handle this case as well as an animal or even a human could, then it’s good enough, and using this tactic is not exploiting the AI since it's already optimal.

[JayzenFreeze]

The tooth kraken demands A17 release lol.

[Crater Creator]

What's interesting is that if we were watching a movie or reading a book about a guy who woke up in a zombie apocalypse after being in a coma and he found some helpful survivors and one of those survivors said, " We discovered months ago that the zombies favor doors so we always use tunnels with camouflaged entrances. We think they must have some residual knowledge from before they were infected that makes those bastards instinctively seek out doors." -- we would then accept that exposition as the way the universe of the movie worked and happily watch the rest of the movie without thinking that those survivors were being cheap exploiting recognizable zombie behavior. (In fact, it is inexplicable why the characters in TWD never routinely rubbed guts on themselves whenever going out since they learned early on that it worked...)

 

But in games, we don't want to be bored by predictable enemy behavior.

 

In a movie or book, we care about dramatic tension. We care about that sometimes in games, too, but it doesn’t have to be fun or balanced for the characters. The audience can still be entertained while the character's situation is unpleasant, since they're different entities. Since we don’t get to choose what the character does in non-interactive fiction, we can lament their poor choices, but we’ll never know what would happen if they did something other than what they did.

 

In the case of TWD, I'm sensitive to plot holes too, but I didn't find the rubbing guts thing to be one. There are reasons the characters wouldn't do that as a matter of course: because they're confident in their ability to defend themselves, because they put a greater value on retaining their feeling of humanity, because it'll hurt their charisma the next time they deal with a survivor, because they'll puke and food is hard enough to come by, etc.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

weve found out that zombies only go after doors on horde night

 

What? Nobody said that.

[Roland]

Nonsense! The survivors set a goal at the start of the week to upgrade their base from single-thick steel walls to double-thick. Then stuff happens. The miner gets distracted, they don't get enough iron in the forges, yadda yadda, and the bottom line is they don't have enough steel to cover everything. So rather than have an uneven patchwork, they agree to get the north, east, and west walls finished, and concentrate their traps and guns on the south side to compensate. Voila: they learn the zombie's behavior organically, with no outside knowledge.

 

Okay...I admit that people might eventually learn such zombie behavior -- IF -- the zombies actually will all go to the single layer side of the base and leave the double layer side alone-- which I still doubt will happen except for very small bases and once faatal is done it may not even uniformly and predictably happen for very small bases.

 

 

I don't see anyone lamenting how easy it will be to beat. I see people trying to poke holes in a design as soon as they're made aware of it. That's just to be expected. We always do that, whether the design is revealed in a video, post, actual release, or anything else. It makes up the majority of the on-topic discussion in the Dev Diaries.

 

I saw a bit of premature lamenting...and poking holes in something shared the moment it is shared and even warned that it is just the very beginning of the process isn't always the best thing to do. Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you should. Jurassic Park taught us that.

[Aldranon]

A17 cant be released yet!

 

I just started a new game, this time to test the shotgun perks, as I now know I can make a ton a shotgun shells consistently. This is truly a potential game changer for me and I want to make sure that using a skilled up shotgun wielding player is just as useful as a rifle expert.

 

Even if a maxed out shotgun player is slightly less than a rifle expert, it would still be a VERY strong choice!

 

Anyone ever do a shotgun focus and if so, what do you think?

[JayzenFreeze]

Any ETA on the next video preview of A17? Starting to get the itch need more visuals lol.

[toores]

Yes.

 

If there were multiple penalty types in each grid location, zombies could even use different weighting combinations, so they would have varied behavior, like weaker ones place a stronger value to block health, while higher damaging zombies don't care to go around as much. More data in the grid will use more memory, but should be fine.

 

Thanks for the answer!

[Xrt]

Kind of off topic, but since someone posted the original kickstarter page I couldn't help but notice the 300k goal had oculus rift support. Is that still on the list of things to do once this game is gold? I'm in no hurry for it, but it'd be freakin' awesome. Cause I don't know about you guys but one thing that'd make this game terrifying at night would be seeing a (silent) wandering horde at night in VR.

 

Yes. 7D2D will get VR support somewhere down the line, I believe.

Since it was a kickstarter goal.

 

If they fail to deliver these goals they are looking at 10 years in prison, and a fine for up to 250.000$

 

 

 

JK

I'm really looking forward to VR support!

But for now, I'm just really looking forward to A17

[archergod]

Okay...I admit that people might eventually learn such zombie behavior -- IF -- the zombies actually will all go to the single layer side of the base and leave the double layer side alone-- which I still doubt will happen except for very small bases and once faatal is done it may not even uniformly and predictably happen for very small bases.

 

 

I am not sure why people are worrying about Zombie AI been learn and workaround by player is done, for example no one make doors in their base. It is just A17, not end of development. When we start to learn with AI of zombie as they throw, they will take our feedback and redevelop it .. making them smarter .. And eventually whatever a development team do. one day most user start to learn how to win a game. It is just matter of time. So, whatever they come up with AI. I am pretty sure it cannot be Invincible forever.

[Death Wish]

Would love it for this game to have the ability to shove zombies away, maybe it cost a lot with stamina and/or not possible with bigger fatter zombies and/or certain timing with it like in between zambie attacks or like whatever. Thanks toodles

[Menace312]

I just found Kenshi...

 

I'm absolutely NOT in a hurry for A17 now... What a game...

[Laz Man]

What's interesting is that if we were watching a movie or reading a book about a guy who woke up in a zombie apocalypse after being in a coma and he found some helpful survivors and one of those survivors said, " We discovered months ago that the zombies favor doors so we always use tunnels with camouflaged entrances. We think they must have some residual knowledge from before they were infected that makes those bastards instinctively seek out doors." -- we would then accept that exposition as the way the universe of the movie worked and happily watch the rest of the movie without thinking that those survivors were being cheap exploiting recognizable zombie behavior. (In fact, it is inexplicable why the characters in TWD never routinely rubbed guts on themselves whenever going out since they learned early on that it worked...)

 

But in games, we don't want to be bored by predictable enemy behavior.

 

Sheesh Roland, wearing zombie guts all the time is even a stretch for "no shower" rick. Look what happen to father gabriel.

[Marinxar]

The tooth kraken demands A17 release lol.

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I think the kraken is a bit early this release, lol

[Scyris]

What's interesting is that if we were watching a movie or reading a book about a guy who woke up in a zombie apocalypse after being in a coma and he found some helpful survivors and one of those survivors said, " We discovered months ago that the zombies favor doors so we always use tunnels with camouflaged entrances. We think they must have some residual knowledge from before they were infected that makes those bastards instinctively seek out doors." -- we would then accept that exposition as the way the universe of the movie worked and happily watch the rest of the movie without thinking that those survivors were being cheap exploiting recognizable zombie behavior. (In fact, it is inexplicable why the characters in TWD never routinely rubbed guts on themselves whenever going out since they learned early on that it worked...)

 

But in games, we don't want to be bored by predictable enemy behavior.

 

As for the walking dead comment.. I think the smell would have alot to do with it. Who would want to constantly coat themselves with putrid smelling rotting flesh everytime they go outside?