Koishi

It's been what ten years now? I have to admit for PVE A8 is a personal favorite but really the best balance between pve/pvp i've seen in any alpha has to be around A16 ish. The new stuff just pulls further and further away from the spirit of being a survival horror or even much a tower defense game. The zombies are really more of a challenge if you keep their pathing more dumb ish like how it was, maybe some spiders again, the zeds that used to climb walls. Cops used to be really painful to deal with but this was before armor was so effective and before guns were neither cheap to fire/maintain nor OP. The modern armor rating honestly feels too high a percentage considering nothing really seems to hit you with some kind of DOT nor seems to have any AP potential for later game to help even the odds. The design doesn't have direction. I legit miss being two shotable and having to use mostly crossbolts to headshot most things till the time came to actually whip out the firepower. Level grinding for gear levels strictly from looting main stashes off quests entirely kills the fun in scavenging every corner and being concerned with any measure of economy. At least you used to be able to combine gear into lvl600 eventually, I really miss that. I miss when PVP used to be about economical/territorial wars for example planting traps and steel doors on POIs, prepping for a week or two to finally collect the stuff to build a raid base outside their base, spend hours going to town online and trying to get favorable bag trades (like rust). I miss the DOTs being actually strong against players when the tick timer for DOTs seem to be shorter yet DPS was higher. Made PVP more fair and interesting against lower geared players that didn't have 95%+ armor rating yet you're just starting out. I miss having to work for my base materials instead of looting for it in crates. I miss there being a meaning to having a base in PVP and PVE. I miss zeds being a constant casual threat, they used to roam everywhere you went even out in the open. They used to be scary. Anyone remember when vultures or even dogs used to chase you down to no end in destroyed bioms and likely one/two shot you? Even if they didn't kill you the bleed likely did. You got caught off guard a lot for being careless. You usually didn't go loud since that attracted hell from around you. Bandits aren't a big deal to me hell we were told they'd be adding in ally base builders NPCs forever ago. But these recent alphas aside the visuals seem mostly a downgrade to me from the perspective of having a design that actually retained it's spirit. And I don't blame them that's the natural outcome to something this old when more hands get involved maybe. The god knows how many hours i put into this game was in the hopes that i'd actually see improvement over time but that just doesn't seem to be the case. Hell anymore remember the smell mechanic? How having food on you made you have a smell radius where zeds within that radius would start hovering closer to the player almost subconsciously and kinda slowly. But in a way that would potentially spank you if you were too careless as you might accidentally alert too many at once. Just while roaming in the woods. You rarely felt safe. Without even needing to activate feral.

I actually really love your response despite disagreeing. It really feels human somehow. It wasn't right of me to drop all of this in an unrelated forum thread. I've been acting on years of pent up frustration as it's been exceedingly difficult for modders to actually coexist and help fix things but the past is the past especialy if this is to be dropped in a year. That's my fault as well for not keeping up with that I assumed this would be another ten years. Maybe if this was five years ago and I had the skill then I do now maybe it'd have been different. Understanding more context and taking a step back now yeah I deserved the responses I got. But to tackle this one specifically. So personally his lectures while I might not entirely agree with I do actually appreciate. There's also been past drama with people trying to cancel the guy which wasn't a fun situation. Now refactoring itself isn't a bad thing. There's some good points he makes. But he does have a strong obsession with OOP and expects it be used in basically all contexts and has been giving a lot of bad examples and constraints in that book and in general that's been polarizing people to never look at ideas such as batch processing. If I may I'd like to share some links to better explain this. So first link is by gingerbill whom has made the odin language so he is a bit personally biased towards more DOD practices but even he's at least seemingly trying to find a respectful middle ground on things as far as i see which is a bit jarring since usually people get into DOD as a sort of traumatic response to realizing obsessive OOP practices cripple a lot of code. And I was one of those people whom had to gradually come away from that and try to see the bigger picture. Also apologies by saying CS. By that i mean "component systems". I'll post a second link that explains the actor pattern and CS pattern in relation to ECS and their historical significance. Mostly because it nit picks various issues with the former patterns and i'm not saying any of them are entirely superior in all contexts. The former two patterns fall within the OOP domain, ECS is generally considered to be more leaning towards DOD and can be a nice contrast. I do think it's a nice thing to actually learn in depth even if it's not used since it at least promotes thinking on different ways to solve problems. (huh these aren't posted in the order i expected my bad the videos are in reverse order) Honestly we do need exposure. Bad exposure is one thing but it's not right when we entirely close ourselves off. To put things right a larger forum of sorts has to be created rather than this situation where we end up too divided and unable to bridge build. Now I don't mean it's always a good idea to say join larger discord servers, there's usually too much social density in those places if they are too active, it ends up leading to pathology, i find a good approach so far is looking for a mix of grassroots ones and ones spirited similar to the bigger ones but trying to get away from the pathology and encourage actual discussion rather than the usual plzbro attitudes you'd see otherwise, maybe not always ideal. But I never would've gotten where I am entirely on my own it's the social experience i've had with others and the lucky articles i've come across from different perspectives that really opened opportunities for learning. Also in hind sight if this isn't really the place to be doing this am sorry for that.

I'm ashamed of myself for getting easily frustrated but this is a seemingly honest question. To answer I could say the code architecture itself, which i guess you could call it the design of the code base in general, it's just unmaintainable to the point adding new features is too painful to actually meet a lot of the design goals. It's one of those things where the more things get piled on the harder it gets to fix and maintain anything. This style of design I totally use for game jams but for projects lasting more than 2 months it gets exceedingly painful and adding more people on doesn't really make pumping out features actually much faster least not over the span of years. It's the game design coupled with the architecture to be more specific. They don't mix. A lot of hyped past wanted features and goals literally can't be done as a result of this. Now this doesn't need to be acknowledged directly but an extremely powerful first step would be to pull things out of Entity.tick and EntityAlive.tick and gradually move it over to what we'd call a game system or game manager. It's an abstraction where you're doing exactly one piece of logic over a buffer of work (this case Entities with X criteria), this buffer should be maintained and added to and removed before this system is ran to make it easier to do things like batching and threading far as runtime but the real meat of doing this is that it'd actually pull things out of that virtual tick method and actually make it easier to see what's going on. Or i guess to say this simply though I hate using this expression. It's impossible to maintain spaghetti. And I mean no shame by this but the code is spaghetti and past it's limit. If anyone has understanding of software at all go look at Entity.cs or EntityAlive.cs and actually try to make sense of it. There's too much nested complexity and weird mixes of state checking that make it hard to figure out when something should ever be called or even what it's job is. Code comments would never fix this. I've had a hell of a time trying to wrangle this when helping someone make an optimization mod back in A20. He managed to get the game in an insanely runtime efficient state relatively but the tricks he had to do even if he was on the team wouldn't really be maintainable sadly (without architectural changes). Hundreds of zeds on 40 man servers with 80FPS though yeah it had it's problems. He's more qualified (for the moment at least) to work on the project than whoever's the lead engineer and he's not even a dev but a modder. It's not because he's a genius it's just because he actually put in effort to learn how to do things better and got a gentle push in the right direction. To reeeeeally sum this up as to why at it's more root cause. There's a guy in the world of software with the handle "uncle bob" whom put out a book called clean code. He's been pushing insanely fanatical OOP is the end all be all kind of concepts on all of the software industry and it's the backbone of why unity uses the CS pattern in the first place, it's why indie devs and devs in mid sized studios have an extremely difficult time making projects like this. It's not exactly their intelligence it's just they don't know any better and are following convention too much. A better engineer knows a multitude of patterns and tries to pick the best one based on the task at hand and isn't afraid to refactor. The code here sadly doesn't have any evidence of that. It just takes one guy whom is interested in walking down this path, that person alone would be more productive than 10+ typical programmers and it's just mostly because of a difference in attitude and exposure to specific topics. A lot of modders over the years seem to perhaps mistakenly think that the engineers themselves aren't interested but i've come to think it's probably that it's not their fault but that they are entirely outside our reach to the point none of us can actually give advice when we see issues. That's a damn shame. At the least the engineers should be hanging around software communities to exchange ideas, and should be reading articles to learn new techniques probably about at least once every two months ish or something akin. The code reflects that they are just too isolated and unexposed. Well that or someone doesn't have the balls to say no to bad direction. One of the two.

I mistakenly thought the other dude responding was you responding for some reason crap. Am sorry for that. But it's fine I'll just get a hold of them directly. Now that aside that was a fairly honest response it was and even still is aiming too high least for the current skillset. Yeah it's kinda in the domain of AAA devs least usually but all that's required is really just one guy with a gentle push in the right direction. It wouldn't take no time to actually rectify all the major problems and even potentially go gold if that push was given. Without it though it'll be literally impossible no matter how much time is spent which is the depressing part. I can pass out a few articles and keywords to look up and that's really all that's needed if the person actually cares about his work. 1 year is all that'd take to see fairly decent benefit. If that timeframe isn't too long to care, then it's inexcusable.

This doesn't make any sense to me. AAA software devs (even outside games) aren't this shut in they openly communicate all the time because that's the way we grow over 90% of the time. Because go figure software in all fields is actually yes a science. Regardless if you're in a closed sourced project or not. Architecture and ideas aren't under lock and key as intellectual property that's not how we operate. It benefits literally no one. I'll gladly bring in multiple folks from that domain to make a point. Hell even blizzard of all companies openly encourages this even so far as to do video lectures on the architectural backends they implement because they know it benefits them in the long run. The only reason you'd not do this is if you have something shady to hide. I refuse this as an excuse. If you actually talk to anyone competent in the field they know better. These kinds of things are general ideas, not something copyrightable or in any way involved with contractual work. Actually to clarify I can see extremely clearly what you all need is a simple game systems engineer that actually knows what they are doing. The problem is that finding them will require you to search about more, probably AAA companies and try to offer a competing salary (they go for well over 100k USD annually each), they will not be as apt to just come to you for multiple reasons. 1 You're not a big title AAA studio with any kind of reputation which would attract them which is a suck because the problems being worked on are difficult and would require one. And 2 I've seen the job offers put out for lead engineer ect however many months ago that was. You're advertising for engine specific workers when it doesn't mean a thing to someone that's actually competent enough to fix the architectural issues since really the important fundamentals which are more important and take longer than a week to catch up to is the actual bread and butter. When the job requirements involve UE/Unity experience that's an automatic red flag. It shows whoever put up the job offers didn't know what they were doing, and believe me there's tons of work to go around they aren't desperate. Though to be fair I don't recall a job offer specifically geared towards "game systems engineers" since am sure that's a job title most hardly anyone knows about whom isn't in touch with AAA. But this is the skillset exactly needed. Now regardless that far as this project goes. It could actually bounce back in a year or two max without much issue if whoever the lead programmer/engineer was would do some reading on specific subjects, If you mention these it should be enough a starting point. "Batching/Batch processing" "Existence based processing" "Structure of arrays" "DOD" //just learning it helps doesn't need to be obsessed over the goal is to break away from excessive OOP and get back to fundamentals "Every single possible alternative to over inheritance style code that CS/Actor tends to beget (which is factually used way too much, though a little may be fine) ^ https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html "Do a little exploring with the ECS pattern or something akin to enforce ideas of batch processing and maintainability just for practice" ^ decent resource that is the backbone of my own work though of course my needs vary slightly: I will not relent on trying to get the engineer's attention absolutely anyway possible am just trying to be polite about it first and get the rest of everyone else comfortable before barging into one of their DMs. We know what our NDAs are we can talk like grown ups and even then the NDA isn't a thing to care for nor hold folks accountable for especially on a product that's already released. I learn, I test, I share ideas, and I teach. As a lot of us do. I do this with indies and AAA devs alike regardless how closed a project is or how much they want to think of themselves as professionals, it makes no bloody sense. I might be a bit harsh here and maybe I deserve some hell but whatever I'll roll with the consequences. If this game doesn't take some help in this specific but super crucial department in some way shape or form, it will "never" go gold. It doesn't take a genius it just takes a little interest in doing things better, a little pointer here and there especially over general concepts, a desire to learn, and just a little bit of time really at least to get started and start seeing vast improvements, pretty much within the first year. I tried all the same stuff you and countless others have tried but eventually got lucky, found some interesting articles, got tired of the usual mess things turned into following basically the same code styles to similar extremes, and grew my skillset. I hope the engineers aren't of this mindset because if they are that's an absolute disgrace to the entirety of all the game dev community. And by the way. Whoever was trying to implement that UtilityAI backend that was partially visible least conceptually in A16, give that dude some praise. That's actually thinking outside the box a bit. You don't have to confirm it to me just praise the dude that's one of the few intelligent things i've seen browsing the source. I don't know why the idea was scrapped. But I hope whoever was exploring it wasn't discouraged from doing so. Ah crap, if that last post went through, I'm sorry, i read Jost's post and thought it was ronalds post. So i incorectly assumed it was him being like that I guess that exposes a bit of my pent up frustration though.

Arguing no but I was genuinely surprised/impressed. But what do you mean by "those" threads though? There's some things the company does right but there's a lot they do wrong which isn't a bad thing. Everyone's going to @%$# up. A professional software engineer doesn't close themselves off from another engineer offering perspective. That entirely goes against our professionalism. It's not even like it would be problematic from a contractual point to at least dialog about general architecture. it's casual. A lot of us do this and are supposed to be doing it constantly to improve ourselves and one another. If we don't do this the industry as a whole dies. I don't want to be the only one here exploring bleeding edge solutions entirely alone because everyone else has a stick up their ass to actually be a proper human being. From an architectural standpoint I can say factually no this isn't professionally done, but that's not their fault unless it's intentional.

He didn't exactly understand the kind of help am offering and to be fair i probably didn't spell it out. Essentially i cam to the forums to ask what's in this thread. I'd like to chip in help on the architecture side of things without anything in return except maybe some vague credit if possible. I've been here since alpha 8 the pacing and runtime have both been so problematic that most their past unmet goals are a direct result of the architecture (which is easy to improve a great fair bit). They aren't in the mood to hire, i'm not in the mood to work for money for various personal reasons, but I do have a skillset to offer which should generally chill out the fanbase and make everything easier for everyone. If nothing else, at the very least, if i can talk to the lead engineer whom is responsible for the architecture and saying no to design decisions, I can share non 7d2d code specific advice and general experiences and articles that would fix this up extremely quick. Practically in an alpha it'd be an immediate improvement with less work per proceeding alpha.

No what and why?

To be honest I'd be surprised if that's correct considering it's been ten years and on the front of actually getting anything done it's been extremely difficult. Handling that and not being stressed would be impressive. But to clarify my skill set it's game systems engineering and i've yet to see an ambitious project like this be taken with grace, everyone on the software side alone would normally be arguing since at least in the non AAA space you have a majority of game programmers obsessed with doing OOP everything to the extreme almost to the obsession of uncle bob, there's nothing in this game that's been batched yet so far that i've seen in the code base. Which is the direct cause of slow dev times and runtimes. I'm not joking that doing that alone would multiply productivity by probably about 5x, if the architecture was actually planned and had it's metal tested ground up (though to be fair it's late for that now) it could easily be double that. It's just very hard to find anyone whom understands this and isn't working at say blizzard. Usually when I bring this up to other indie game programmers the common response is to resort to belittlement, no kind of dialog what so ever. AAA companies will never seriously risk or innovate least not at large scale it's up to the indies and medium sized companies to actually take up the mantle. I do very much wish to get into contact with the team working on this and exchange perspectives. I should've done so a couple years ago but only now actually have an opensource project to actually demonstrate the experience and points I have to make.

Also on a similar note i've been trying for months to see about encouraging various mod devs to start unifying efforts on a singular shared API/Framework so that it'll be easier to maintain/port mods between alphas but haven't gotten traction. Maybe there's not enough large servers to justify it. At the very least maybe now they are talking more which is good to see.

Indeed I do!~ I mentioned it above but i suppose if it's against rules to link directly I can edit/remove this post later. Am considering making this my magnum opus before leaving the industry behind depending how things go. Discord server link inside is ideal for getting updates and it's how I can be reached. It's here: https://github.com/redhatdragon/YearsOfShadow At least as the project continues to grow it'll prove that maintainability is actually not much an issue. There's a lot of very unconventional design decisions going on and odd goals being reached. There should be a design doc in here to detail all that. Yes the doc complains about some things with this game in contrast as it's meant to be a similar genre mix, and maybe I was harsh with it. But maybe I can rectify that and still make this something to lead by example rather than be purely an act of frustration. I welcome all walks of life. The project may be a data oriented C++ sort of approach but I do have very skilled C# programmers in there whom share perspectives with. It's starting to become a home for bridge building and sharing ideas. And really that alone brought joy to my heart. Gamers would be very surprised the amount of in fighting that goes on just on the software side of things not counting the contrast of designer vs engineer and so on that can easily crop up.

For the sake of transparency I've had spite in my heart about this since many years ago and it actually oddly inspired me to improve my own skillset a lot for the industry's sake. But it's come full circle. I want to bury the hatchet if possible and actually bridge build again and maybe find a way to help push things in a better direction. I've had many years of experience of trying to do things with indie devs specifically, with most of them shunning any kind of desire for considering architectural implications (the thing someone in game systems engineering would specialize in). I've come to realize at least some of the fault is in myself and how I've approached people. And i've learned a lot since then. And now I actually have evidence to back up ideas and have the patience to dialog properly and have come to wonder maybe the devs for this game aren't at least all the same as the ones i've had past experiences with. I really want to contact them and see what kind of people they are. I can sympathize and empathize with them even if the game took 10 years to get to it's current point, @%$#ups are ok. It's just honesty that matters. In a lot of various ways the industry as a whole is caught in a cycle of spite that needs to end. I've tried emailing them to. If I can't get a proper dialog i'll be stuck just doing my own project, getting it playable eventually, getting people to wonder why a single person adding features to something like that takes about the same time or less as long and why the scale is so insanely big, but without a way to bridge build even still. Sure I can make an example and get people upset about the current bar for games in this mix of genres. But what's really the point if it's so polarizing that it feeds the cycle of hatred. Even best case, i could see devs jumping ship to whatever various techniques this made example and trample on previous norms entirely regardless of context and that's not healthy either. I got tired of people shoving uncle bob's "clean code" philosophy down my throat at every turn due to the bull@%$# polarizing fanaticism he had for OOP but i'm no better if i encourage others to experience the same traumatic response i had where for a while i entirely abandoned all past conventions and had to start ground up, lost, and unable to bridge build for multiple years and see the mixed good in things. Sorry if this was a bit of a monologue I hope am forgiven. These past ten ish years of learning game programming generally feel to be coming to a head in a kind of spiritual journey almost. I hope the ramblings mean something to someone if nothing else >.<

Trying to figure out how to reply without quoting am sorry for that >.< Look i realize I'm autistic as @%$# and I'm guessing you've been eating @%$# in general in the past. I'd like to open up and honestly talk with ya 1 to 1 if you'd be ok with that. Or in a public space whichever's more comfortable. But somewhere that's a bit easier to dialog about and clear misunderstandings. I can admit i'm a @%$#up a fair bit of the time but I do mean well and wish to actually contribute something and perhaps not as great as it could be there's probably something I can offer to the developers which is why am trying to make a bit of noise in the forums as of recent. I did ask about you and someone mentioned you were a developer I think. I've no idea how true that is but even regardless i can imagine you probably eat a lot of @%$# and might just be wary. Please. I can use critique for my social behavior i know it sucks, am really mostly wanting honest constructive dialog.

I'm sorry where is all this coming from? Is there context am missing?

Reading all this i sense a huge disconnect in the team between the programmers/engineers and the artists/designers. The software side isn't managed properly whether it's lack of a decent lead or in fighting or whatever else. It's plain as day to anyone whom is into making game systems and happens to read their code. Implementing new features is going to be very difficult with the current general architecture giving any kind of deadline would be pretty difficult on top that it's normally risky to begin with. We need a lead engineer to talk on the forums to actually get an idea what's going on much like I stay in contact with the community for my own project, I can actually give mechanical insight and be held accountable for dumb mistakes even if it's an opensource project. Unless your ideas guy happens to be your lead designer and lead engineer, he's not the reliable source to mention what's going to happen or not. The entire reason i got into software instead of just game design is because i've realized i want very difficult to achieve things and no one else is going to do it for me, you have to be in the trenches to really gauge the possibilities. For a project like this the main job of someone who's leading the software team is to understand game systems engineering and general architecture, and two is someone who goes to the lead designer and say "no we can't accomplish this with our current architecture" or "to accomplish your desired X we need Y time to do Z rework" I'd also like to add that realistically for stuff like this you're better off abstracting away from the backend engine you're using unless there's very good reason not to, even if it's UE, it makes porting easier, makes the API generally more clean and easy to understand, usually helps iteration times to least with statically compiled langs. A lot of devs are only recently learning the value of this somewhat thanks to unity's situation, though legally speaking if they stick to the version of unity they are using there shouldn't be issue, if there is, well it wouldn't really hold up in court. Changing ToS for an existing software you already use isn't really supposed to be a thing. Anyway though to really achieve what they want in the end eventually they are going to need to peal away from unity if they want to "go gold" as they put it. That's non negotiable. But it doesn't have to happen off the bat all at once. It can be a more gradual process if they are determined to stick to the Actor/CS mixed pattern. And like maybe that'll be sufficient if they don't plan on supporting 10+ playercount servers and more than a few hundred zeds. You'd ditch this entirely and go data oriented if you were reaching for the multi thousands of zed like NPCs like I am. Eventually they'll need to rip away from Entity.tick() anyway though and put more and more things in their own game system like a proper product would, it's not just runtime, this is an architectural change which for genres of games like this makes it vastly easier to maintain. CS/Actor in their more conventional forms where you're not batching such as this game, only really works for very small projects or game jams or such. It has a very quick time to prototype, with a downward trend in maintainability and thus not just time to add new features or bug fix, but runtime as a whole is a consequence, and adding more features typically harms runtime indirectly sadly. If you properly batch and take it data oriented least for this genre mix though, there's theoretically an unlimited number of new things you can add without these problems or if there is a limit it's vastly outside the scope of anything any game's ever tried.