ALPHA 11 IS ALMOST HERE!

Happy New Year Survivalists,
We hope all of you had a wonderful game filled holiday break and that your loot chests we’re full from a great Christmas loot run. So now that we’re back we’re going to share our Alpha 11 plan, announce the Christmas screenshot winners and share a little more good news. Here goes!

Alpha 11 Status

Folks we’re back from our holiday break and ready to talk a little about Alpha 11 and some of the cool things we’re either working on already or our on our list and could make it in. A disclaimer Alpha 11 has an ambitious list so it could take us through the end of February to deliver. That said here is a list of our big ticket items depending how development goes there is no guarantee all items will make it into A11.

New Gun System – We’ve been planning on a new Gun system for a few months now and we’re finally ready to start on it. The new system allows players to find whole weapons that can be broken down to yield a specified number of good parts. The parts and assembled guns have 7 quality ranges including broken, damaged, poor, average, great, flawless and legendary. Once the player collects enough good parts he can assembly a working gun. The sum or average quality of all the parts determines the sum or average quality of the assembled weapon. The parts themselves govern attributes like damage, accuracy, degradation rate, scope zoom level, knockback strength, penetration and falloff range. This will allow for hundreds of thousands of permutations of guns. Later this system will also be used for Armor, Tools and Melee Weapons.

New FPS Hands and Animations – We have some awesome new high res first person male and female hands and will be integrating these as well as a whole new awesome set of first person animations.

New Weapons– We have a new makeshift Blunderbuss Muzzle loader and a new handmade bow that we’re working on integrating.

New First Person Camera Control System – We’re working on integrating a new first person procedural spring physics system with simulated gravity, mouse smoothing and acceleration

Wellness Improvements – We’re improving wellness stat change and top capacity feedback so players can understand the wellness system better.

Leveling & Leveled Loot – We’re enhancing our current player leveling system improving the criteria and adding leveled loot lists to the game so higher leveled players get better loot drops. This is needed to work with our new gun, armor, tool and weapon quality systems.

New Random Gen Mixing XML – We’re rolling out an XML random gen mixer so users can set up their own world including the selection of world size, biomes, height intensity, prefabs per biome, prefab chance to spawn and more

Usability Enhancements – We’re adding a new windows like Right Click function Menu for items in the players backpack, belt or loot containers. The player simply needs to right click on an item and a popup menu displays showing a list of item related actions which include: Take, Craft, Equip, Use, Eat, Drink, Read, Examine, Scrap and Compare. We’re also doing many smaller usability enhancements that just make the game a lot easier to play and learn.

Integrate Steam Networking – We’re adding, evaluating and integrating new Steam Networking code and are optimistic we will gain performance, stability and more reliable Nat punch through

Server Browser Enhancements – We’re integrating better server stat options that are easier to read as well as integrating a new server filtering system, icon tips and scrolling

That’s the main stuff and if time permits these features below might also make it into Alpha 11

New Armor System – Inspired by our new gun system we’re will also be working on new armor system where the player can craft or find in loot Leather and Iron armor pieces with 6 quality ranges including damaged, poor, average, great, flawless and legendary. Once the player reads the associated book or accumulates the minimum skill points he can begin crafting the lowest level leather or iron armor. To craft the higher tiered armor the player must either boost his skills or find higher tiered armor through looting.

Drivable Minibike –We’re adding a drivable minibike. Players must gain mechanical knowledge through books and skills and then find parts to craft and assemble a chassis, break and throttle cable, small engine, gas tank and more.

New Localization System – We’re integrating a new Spreadsheet based localization system allowing much easier multi-language support for in game items, crafting, dialogue, tips, in game help journal and quests.

Improved Random World Generation – We’re improving the random gen pathing system to allow vertical cutting as well as tunnels and a more robust town code.

Christmas Screenshot Winners

Folks we want to thank all of you for participating in the very first 7 Days to Die Christmas Screenshot Contest we had a lot of great entries so it made selecting the best ones that much harder. We deciding to add a free game key for honorable mentions.

So now without further ado we want to announce the winners of Christmas Screenshot Contest.

1st Prize – GeForce GTX 760 Video Card, Blue Fang 10 slot server for 6 months and 5 free game keys goes out to Forum Post # 47 by voxelgeek (The Snowman Shelter)

2nd Prize – Blue Fang Server 10 slot server for 3 months and 5 free game keys goes out to Forum Post # 83 by Dr.Agon (Deadlights Holiday)

3rd Prize – Blue Fang Server 10 slot server for 1 month and 5 free game keys goes out to Forum Post # 51 by japsmaps (Santa’s Secret Base)

Honorable Mention and a free 7DTD game key goes out to these fine screenshots

Forum Post # 26 by Ghoul Face (Chainsaw Santa)

Forum Post # 31 by QicCa (Reindeer Games)

Forum Post # 52 by Mr_Bigs_de (Santa’s Sleigh & Reindeer)

Forum Post # 57 by Wotan (Santa’s Sleigh)

Forum Post # 65 by Roo42 (The 7 Days of Christmas Song)

Forum Post # 66 by Monkey Boogers (Giant Zombie Tree)

Forum Post # 68 by Andel (Santa’s Soldiers)

Winners please PM The Fun Pimp on the 7DTD forums to collect your prizes.

To view the original post click here: Christmas Screenshot Contest

Really great Rock, Paper , Shotgun 7Days Writers Diary

Folks Rock Paper Shotgun has done a really nice feature on 7 Days describing the writers diary of an in game week check it out:

RPS & Days Diary



We Broke our Highest Online User Count

Folks we reached our highest concurrent player count of 12,839 players on steam charts this week! All I can say is wow!

7 Days breaks online user record

We’ll thats all folks now its back to the Bat crib for Alpha 11 work

You Stay Cool,

The Fun Pimps

Alpha 11 update! Using our new block shape importer, I made these new window plugs. I know they aren’t anything special except for the fact that they are rendered like a block rather than a model which our other upgrading windows are made from which means these new ones render much faster. The old windows took several draw calls and you can have a bunch of these and it only takes one draw call.

So what does that mean? Well for some people’s computers draw calls are the death of their precious frame rate. So we’re taking a lot of stuff that doesn’t really need to be a model and we’re converting it to a block so the game runs way faster.

And we’re making it so that every old broken piece of glass in the game can be upgraded to a window plug, and then a plug with one board, two boards, and finally three boards and probably a piece of scrap metal after that.

And before you rant why are you working on art when we don’t have x feature or y bug isn’t fixed yet, well this is my blog. I don’t represent the whole team. But I do keep an eye on them so I’ll spill the beans about what everyone is up to.

Chris changed the moon light so its controlled by a spectrum texture. This means I can make a purple and green moon now, not that I’d do such a thing, but a bright moon in the burnt forest doesn’t make sense, so I can make the moon light much darker at night during a certain time, or all night, or make it a different color per biome to kind of simulate the fog and overall ambience of that biome.

Rick is working on more prefabs and designing lots of new systems. We’ve got a grocery store coming called Shamway that seems to have well SHAM products. So you can finally get all the sham and sham sandwiches you want because I know you guys can’t get enough sham sandwiches.

Joe is hooking up the new ufps controller. It does loads of cool stuff like weapon bob, camera tilt, spring on weapons, a nice squish when you jump and hit the ground and it feels like a AAA shooter, nice and fluid. To make this even more exciting we’ve got new hands and the animation team is making brand new first person hand animations to go along with it. Nobody will every know this was an indy game when they get done

Chrisopher is working on the terrain shader so hopefully the terrain won’t have any more hard edges where multiple materials meet. He also integrated steam chat or something like that, its a voice system to talk like the old one, but it actually works

Ryan is modeling decor for caves, like mushrooms, moss, cobwebs, stalactites, etc.

Joey is working on a feral zombie, I will post screens of it soon.

Eric is rocking out some nice sounds. He gave us four blunderbuss sounds and we liked all of them so much we decided to try making a weapon have random sounds and it plays one of them at random. It’s pretty cool because something that shoots scrap metal and rocks might not sound exactly the same each shot.

Christian switched to steam networking. Hopefully its faster and no more connection problems!

And last but not least Robert is working hard on random gen 2.0. Not only do we have curving roads on hills but now we have perlin caves. They don’t have any decor yet but the overall shape and the tunnels are looking great. And we’ve talked forever about having perlin worms for mining and its finally in. Yes we do actually do what we say we’re going to, despite popular disbelief. So basically there are gravel tunnels inside caves which you mine out, revealing the soft creamy filling inside…or the ore deposits. It’s a ton of fun mining out the gravel just like the old days except more natural and organic and the ore veins are little worms you dig out.

New Atmospheric Effects!

New effects such as smoke and hot embers in the burnt forest, blowing snow in the snow biome, and sand storms in the desert.



Block shapes!

Well instead of programmed block shapes with coded in uv coordinates we now support fbx block shapes. What this does is allow us artists to make our own blocks. They also have the added benefit of rotations, so you can run your floor planks on a cube north and south, or east and west. Plus we can fix all the bad uvs on blocks and make lots more shapes. It also supports smoothing groups so we can have nice smooth shaded pillars and stuff. First thing on my list is to make some nicer stairs! Users should be able to make their own block shapes with any 3d program as well.

RANDOM GEN LOOK

Random gen is taking on a whole new look. We have curving roads on hills now, nicer road trimming and just overall much more natural looking terrain. I’ve seen lakes near roads, and lakes look more natural now too. The hills and bluffs just look more natural the way they flow. We also got some new aviator goggles to wear which look pretty cool. And the last two shots you can see our new hands, hand skeleton, etc. We’re redoing every first person hand animation to make the game feel much more immersive. Oh and that big ass hole in the ground is a CAVE! Oh and one last little detail, the shotgun you see has a flashlight mod on it, so weapons will have attachable mods. A11 is shaping up nice. More to come!















Sod houses!

Well we’re back at it planning out Alpha 11. In between things I made sod blocks you can craft out of dirt and grass for a quick first house. They are twice as hard as dirt but nothing you want to call home for too long. But they come in handy when your having one of those random games where you have bad luck and the sun is going down soon and need a quick shelter for the night. I also made a health storage crate as seen in the back of the third screenshot.







WOW! So many awesome things in Alpha 11! I really can't wait! I'll keep posting updates as I see them. Feel free to post if you find anything yourself!