7 Days to Die: Alpha 13 News!

Happy 2 years anniversary to the game 7 Days to Die.  There is a debate on if the fun pimps will continue the trend and make an Alpha 12.5 patch or jump straight to Alpha 13.0. From what I'm reading on the developers website, I would say that we shouldn't hold our breathe for the 12.5.  I'm thinking that 13.0 is the project developers are focusing their attention on. I got a lot of credit and subscribers last time for predicting the release date and info for 7 Days to Die Alpha 12.4 patch.  Here is the news I found out about Alpha 13.0.

Developers are working on a tool which lets us see a map view of a random gen world very quickly. This will be invaluable for us to fine tune roads, poi distributions, biome placements, rivers, lakes everything.

There will be a proper eye shader that uses unity 5′s reflection probe. This means the eyes are a mirror to the world and you can see reflections in them now. I noticed the torch light was behind the player instead of on the torch. It's fixed so that you can see the torch light moving around in the iris of the character. Also, the shadows of the torch to hard instead of soft, and it seems to fix the weird glitchy shadows that were on stuff near torches.

Here are some more improvements to the characters. The neck and hand seams are fixed, they’ve added more polys to the shoulders, and re-rigged the armpit area to deform much nicer getting rid of that pinching effect it had.

You can see how much better characters are going to look using UMA2, which takes advantage of Unity 5′s physically based lighting system on our characters. It’s also a lot easier to import new clothing and hairs, and here is the new dreadlocks style.

They plan on rounding out shoulders and making a lot more character improvements yet, and have a whole new leather armor design in the works, something a lot less star wars. It should look great when worn over the top of clothing and a coat over the top of the armor. They plan for an open coat design so you can wear dusters, parkas etc over the top of your armor and clothing, yet you will see if they have armor on because the front of the coat will be open or unbuttoned/zipped.

The new zombies not only look better and have mocap, when you hit their head they might move in a way you can’t even predict, making the next shot harder to do. They actually are root motion driven, meaning their feet are planted to the ground and the animation is what moves them instead of a static moving object at a set speed with its feet moving. Now when you hit something and they fly back with force, it’s real force driven movement, not the other way around. It’s a bigger impact than I thought it would be.

The hordes will even scale, so a level one guy who joins a server on day 798 who gets the horde isn’t completely hosed, and the guys who have been there since day one and have a group of level 50 players aren’t yawning at the underwhelming horde coming to get them, or a horde that didn’t come at all who went after someone else. 

Other new additions expected for Alpha 13.0 are a zombie named Darlene, and an update to the harvesting system. It seems like there will be less vacuuming stuff up and notification when your inventory changes, when crafting items are finished, etc.