faatal
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Posts posted by faatal
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3 hours ago, Larry_Flynt said:
@faatal
Something i always thought would be nice to have/fun:
The possibility to carry chars over from one server to the next with the current gear (global variables). Would open the possibility to create own storylines within "smaller" maps and if you reach the goal for one map you will be moved (or can choose to proceed) to the next one.
Would need some kind of triggers and global variables to store in between transitions.Maybe someday or in a sequel. With the speed of RWG now, I can make a 4k map in like 10 seconds. Perfect for the "you were knocked out again and woke from your coma 6 months later!" event.
30 minutes ago, Roland said:That moment when a dev made 14 promises....
I had a feeling someone would hold that against me. "Remember 15 years ago when they said there would be land sharks?!?".
20 minutes ago, Adam the Waster said:Funny enough I dreamed that I opened 7dtd on console and they were selling dlc
They had the biker zombie skin and overlord armor.
Hint hint
That would match your profile picture, but I think you would look better as big mamma.
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8 hours ago, FramFramson said:
No, Unity completely backed down and also fired the CEO (which puts him 0 for 2 on his attempts to do things like this at various companies).
Kind of. Unity delayed the new terms to this year's not yet done version of Unity. You update, new terms. This update is supposed to have better gfx performance, so... hmm
4 hours ago, FranticDan said:Just a random question, does anyone on the dev team know for the next major update if the head hitbox for the tourist, cop and mama have been improved?
Currently, you have to hit these zombies above the nose for it to count as a headshot.
EDIT:
Additionally, in the current version and for quite some time now, for a few frames while a zombie is picking themselves up off the ground, their ENTIRE hitbox disappears. Has this been fixed in the next major update?Probably the same. Those colliders are actually the ragdoll bones, which could also use some work for physics reasons. I made a note, but may not get to it for 1.0.
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16 hours ago, Chaton Noir said:
I understand that multithreading is not worth waiting for? I understand that this is a huge job, but without it, the game is unlikely to ever work well. Of course, the game with multithreading will remain difficult for computers, because this is not some kind of miracle. But still, without this, we are unlikely to ever see normal performance in cities or with a large number of zombies.
By the way, could you tell us a little more about the work and the difficulties that need to be overcome to implement multithreading? Even if it never will be. It's just that in the view of many players, this simply requires changing a couple of lines of code that "lazy developers" can't get to in any way. Although this is not the case, because in that case you would have done it a long time ago. The same applies to bandits — few people realize that this is a very large amount of work, especially for a small team. Thank you for putting up with us)
Many features already use threads, like chunk updates, chunk collision mesh baking, audio, saving, pathing, networking and Unity itself on things like rendering and physics.
A lot of code that interacts with Unity has to be done on the main thread and Unity itself does a lot of work on the main thread, so that is often the bottleneck. There is still room for improvement and we will make improvements as we have the time.
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On 4/21/2024 at 9:25 PM, zztong said:
As a Tile and POI designer, can you provide any insight on what goes into this? Is it a matter of verts/tris above a certain threshold? Does it related to POIs on a single Tile or within a certain distance from each other?
For instance, I've been trying to keep POIs below 3.5M vertices since that's what the TFP skyscraper_01 has been. There's a newer TFP POI that's "heavier" than that, IIRC. I've had a custom downtown Tile that had poor performance and have since thinned it out. Your comment has me wondering what indicators of potential performance issues and/or guidance to designers you might pass along?
The algorithm has several parts, but basically you divide the vert count by 100,000 to get the score. sky01 is about 35. The current budget is 62. Each location looks at what POIs are around it, not tiles, and reduces the budget, while ignoring scores of 6 or below (my baseline) and then picks something within budget. Tiles can override the budget in rwgmixer, so modders can do big stuff if they want.
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On 4/21/2024 at 11:55 AM, Riamus said:
One of the things that makes no sense to me is that they aren't completing the UI overhaul before console is released. You'd think they'd want the new (assumingly improved) UI ready first so that console also gets it. I know console UI is going to be a bit different simply because of how console controls work but I would still have expected them to finish the UI first.
One of our console programmers has done a great job improving how the controller works with the UI and gameplay and that will carry over to a reskinned UI when we get to it.
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On 4/21/2024 at 9:36 AM, Matt115 said:
Oblivion had mods and still everyone was angry abour horse armor.
7dtd now - microtransations
bloodmoon? microtransations
They can restrict workshop after all
ehh i realy wish that 7dtd was finished in 2017. i think it would be the best for everyone xd
2017? No thanks, I much prefer the better version of the game we have now and the better version it will be in the future. For console it has improved so much that it might as well be a sequel.
On 4/21/2024 at 9:57 AM, User said:I feel like the problem just boils down to how they did this. The announcement was completely random, and it contradicts things they've stated in the past, like how they said previously they didn't want to rubber stamp the game gold
They also said in the faq "However, new users should see the value the game offers reflected in the cost, and we hope that continued support might fund future endeavors in expanding the 7 Days to Die game even further – DLCs, Expansions, and continued free updates (including everything listed in the Road Map)!"
I personally really dislike stuff like this. On top of a price hike, they plan to implement paid dlcs and expansions. They are already going to make bank off of the console release, so I see no need to do this kind of stuff. Is there going to be poi expansions? 10 bucks for some pois that should have been included in the game's price perhaps? I think I saw a couple posts by laz a while back that sort of hinted at that kind of stuff.
"Unfortunately, to do a proper airport with our current standards we would need more than just one airplane model. Maybe for DLC or next game. "
I really hope they don't start selling poi packs on console or pc 💀
I really hate any form of microtransaction, espescially in games that you already pay full price for. I just hope they listen a bit to some of our concerns about this stuff.
The industry classically considers gold to be a done game that only gets bugs fixes and maybe balance adjustments. As the industry changed, expansions came along, then DLC for these gold games.
1.0 is none of that. It is the game simply not being in early access. Development continues.
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On 4/21/2024 at 8:43 AM, User said:
Was the console version initially shown to not come with rwg? I don't remember. Seems like a pretty big thing to be missing, I'm not a console player, though.
I don't think it was defined one way or the other. It works on console now as we have done a bunch of performance and memory optimizations on it, but console memory is so tight that our console programmers need to literally restart the game before you can play the map to ensure maximum free memory. Restarting/resuming is tricky and different between PS5 and Xbox and we don't want to delay more to ensure it works, so it should be in one of the early patches.
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On 4/21/2024 at 8:11 AM, Teezer said:
What do you mean about "event"?
Like Radiated zone to avoid? Massive zombie groups in cities? Attack/raid of zombified wildlife/bandits?
How will it be displayed? What are TFP's thoughts here?
It's pretty interesting to have more info cuz it looks like a major improvement for the late game
I don't have all the details, but my initial desire for an event is a mini blood moon, that can happen any day, with some warning to get back to your base. They could also be bandits or a mega zombie. Vulture swarm. Bandits lobbing mortars at your base that you have to go out and stop. A tornado or earthquake would be cool, but you can't fight that :(. Land shark burrowing up into you base. Sand worms. Trader's wife taken hostage, so you have to get her back or pay ransom. Bandit duel where you each get one shot. Bandit drag race. Timed race to get somewhere. Bandits kidnap you and wake up in random location. I'm sure I can make some more up.
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On 4/20/2024 at 7:32 PM, FramFramson said:
I suppose. It's just I'm used to game devs playing fast and loose with terms like alpha, beta, and live, that I don't put much faith in game versioning. Of course in other sectors there are clearer requirements for versioning software, especially enterprise software, but there's too much salesmanship and too many semi-amateurs in the games sector, and no outside body or customers with fixed expectations. Some players would have been happy to see A16 called 1.0, others like yourself feel it's not done yet, and neither opinion is wrong per se.
I just focus on the content and functionality. Does the game work as advertised? How likely are promised future updates? What's the studio's track record, etc. Versioning doesn't reliably correspond with any of that from game studio to game studio, at least not in my experience.
Yeah, alpha/beta/gold/whatever, early access and version numbers tend to be arbitrary these days. There is no industry standard. Games release in all manner of states and have a large variety of post launch development.
I actually like how No Man's Sky did their versioning with code names and 1.x, 2.x, ect. They may of had a rough start, but I certainly got my money's worth from that game with all the free content they have released over the years. I feel 7dtd dev is similar to theirs, except they never labeled it early access and simply chose to update the game several times a year for many years. I actually get turned off when I'm browsing new games and see "Early Access" as I never know what state it is in and tend not to buy them, so I'm glad we are removing that from 7dtd.
On 4/20/2024 at 9:18 PM, Roland said:faatal also posted on this forum over a year ago some of the AI work specifically for bandits he was working on such as retreating, taking cover, and flanking.
In addition, perceptive people will see how the outfits and 3rd person view animations for characters are also groundwork for adding bandits.
We’ve also seen bandit models posted on social media.
it’s pretty silly to claim that they haven’t been working on bandits or that they are only going to start work after 1.0.
Exactly.
My memory might not be the greatest (ask my wife), but I certainly remember working on bandits. We definitely laughed when we saw them spawn out in the wild and fight a zombie or die and get eaten. Jumped when one was suddenly beating you with a club or shooting you. In the end, they needed a lot more work, so we put that on hold for higher priority tasks of which there are many. I look forward to resuming the work and then inevitably adding the settings to make them easier or turn them off after we get sick of being murdered by them.
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On 4/20/2024 at 5:52 PM, Riamus said:
All my interest in A22 just evaporated. Not feeling any interest right now in the next release.
That is too bad. I can't wait to play it myself. All this work being wrapped up, so I finally get to enjoy playing it for real.
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On 4/20/2024 at 2:54 PM, Code6 said:
Does the impending release of 1.0 this mean that TFP has worked out the optimization challenges?
I love this game, but performance has always been something that we excused as being something that would be addressed when it was time to leave alpha.We do optimizations regularly, but that does not mean any of those optimizations will improve whatever feature or situation you are thinking about.
For example, I have some optimizations in the works for larger explosions that effect many blocks to stop them briefly using hundreds of megabytes, which can actually crash the game on consoles. This also improves FPS for the fraction of a second the explosion is initially happening, but otherwise that is not helping FPS.
Another example, RWG has a new building density limit calculation to keep complex buildings away from each other. This should help FPS in some cases, but depends on many factors.
Optimizations will continue, as that is one of my favorite things to do, but many of them will be small gains, in specific situations.
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On 4/20/2024 at 2:00 AM, FranticDan said:
@faatal Question regarding RWG, is there or could there be an option to determine the min/max distance that wilderness POI's can spawn apart from each other?
Reason I ask is I'd like a way through xml to have wilderness POI's spawn about 200m-250m apart from each other, as well as the potential to have close to 1000 wilderness POI's in an 8k map, and even more if people dare to generate a 16k map.
(Think of it like a nomadic playstyle, constantly moving around the map)It is not as simple as that. In tweaking rwgmixer.xml wilderness counts, I found there is a max count at which it stops successfully finding locations for for prefabs. Don't yet know what the limiting factor is. On a 10k I can get over 600 to spawn, so the Wilderness Many setting for that is now 750, up from 400. Many is now 450 on 8k. Reducing mountains also helps as that does limit some prefab locations.
On 4/20/2024 at 2:26 PM, Kam R. said:Whoop whoop! New game version numbers! :]
Does this mean no more map wipes though...?
Hopefully less often, but there is no guarantee some tech issue requires changing data formats in a way we can't make backwards compatible. Ideally we will load/convert what we can instead of nothing at all.
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16 hours ago, Doomofman said:
@faatal You mentioned trader biome restrictions in a previous post and it maybe being tied to story progression in the future. But what exactly is happening in A22?
Are specific traders only going to appear in specific biomes for every map? (Example: Jen always in wasteland)
or is it more random like for each map you generate it decides which traders go in which biomes. I hope that makes some sort of sense (Example: One map Jen might only be in wasteland but another map Jen will only be in the desert etc)
Yes, specific traders appear in specific biomes in A22, but this could change as we test and iterate on the design.
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18 hours ago, Laran Mithras said:
Some towns follow the flow of the land: built on the flat as it meanders a short distance through hills.
Would be interesting to see in-game.
I wonder if town/city tiles could be designed to only be placed on flat terrain, non-clumped? String-fashion rather than blobbed. I believe the game now selects a flat area for town/city tiles and even flattens an area if too many hills and mountains are packed into the map. That might satisfy players wanting no towns: they simply then select all hills and mountains.
Towns flatten terrain, except for mountains. Terrain is generated first, so the more mountains, the less success towns have in generating and you would get less. I reduced mountain max scale a bit and may reduce the default mountain percent. I recently removed mountains from wasteland to allow bigger cities there, but their success rate is not as good as I hoped, so needs more work to figure out why.
13 hours ago, Riamus said:There was something in A21 where they said they were adding hills and mountains after towns to fill in gaps. Not sure if they do it both before and after and not sure the exact details. I just remember seeing that. But if they place towns first, that explains the towns not being a variety of shapes as it meanders around hold and mountains.
I don't think anything is adding them after. Cities/towns use up the space pretty well now.
On 4/17/2024 at 12:25 PM, Chaton Noir said:Hello, @faatal! Will the new Grace model have a jiggle physics for the bloody... drool hanging from the mouth, fur on the back and hanging intestines?
Maybe. Artists add those, not me.
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On 4/17/2024 at 6:30 PM, zztong said:
Perhaps a diversion, Kinyajuu added code to support this...
<township name="city"> <property name="outskirt_district" value="rural,residential"/> </township>
... that is, where a township would pick between rural or residential to wrap around a city. I assume that is still a feature.
What I was curious about was if it might become a Tile by Tile randomization when wrapping rather than a one-time type of district randomization? In this way, the edge of a city might become a mix of both rural and residential tiles.
Is the same. I have not looked at that code. It may or may not change.
On 4/17/2024 at 7:01 PM, vergilsparda said:Got a couple clarification questions about these (because I am stupid), but more is just a general "do you mind/have the time to go a little more in-depth with what these do?"
Town planning: I assume that this means that the further you go from the center of a town, the more rural the area becomes (like what seems to be implemented in A21, but more refined). Does this also include making sure that tiles don't repeat too often? And in terms of tiles themselves, has there been any improvement to the fact that in some generated towns, there will be tiles that completely block off one half of a town from another? That's happened a few times... I generate a lot of maps lol
Township counts and sizes: What's a township in the context of the generator (sorry if that's been asked before) and does this mean we will see more varied towns than what we have?
Balanced Lakes/river, etc: Not quite a question about the balancing, but are there any plans now or in the future to add more stamps for the aformentioned items? Right now, it seems as if there's only one river stamp (at least only one that I end up getting!), two or three lake stamps, and maybe one or two craters and canyons. It's more difficult to tell that they repeat when you're in game and on the ground, but sometimes when you're flying in a Gyro or looking at the map previewer, it's very obvious.
Obviously these are a lot of questions so I don't expect you to answer them all, but if you can answer any of them (or anyone else can!) I would be very grateful! I know you are busy with finalizing A22 and such. Thanks, if you do end up answering even one!
Town planning changes involve more successfully making towns on the map. It failed a lot before due to excessive randomness and retrying the whole process instead of specific sections. The town tiles are the same layouts.
A township is a city, town, countrytown, oldwest or roadside type of location made up of a random range of tiles and these change based on world size.
Yes, we want better and more stamp variety, but there is no timeline for when that might happen.
On 4/17/2024 at 8:33 PM, FramFramson said:What about having the default shape for towns something circular rather than rectangular?
Towns don't have a shape. I think they just grow in random directions, but I have not looked at that code, but plan to as I improve the systems.
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11 hours ago, bdubyah said:
This is great news.
I'm not sure if it's your part of RWG or not, but do you know if there have been any new stamps added for things like rivers and stuff? What we have now is super limited and repetitive. Judging by your pic it seems to still be the same squiggly line for rivers, unfortunately. Any chance of them becoming procedural instead of using stamps?
No new stamps. Artists would typically make those. We could use more. Not planning on making it procedural.
3 hours ago, MichaelL. said:Does this mean we will be able to do this with regular custom POI's as well? (please say yes, please say yes.....)
Yes. Any POI could be listed with any combination of biomes.
49 minutes ago, LordMiG said:Hi @faatal! Is there any chance that we'll have the option to generate larger RWG maps than 10K in A22? Maybe for singleplayer only? Back when the KingGen map generator was available, I always enjoyed playing on 16K maps, and they ran smoothly on my PC with 32 gigs of RAM. Could we possibly see this feature implemented? Pretty please! 🙃
The engine should be able to handle 16K maps. I play my singleplayer games without any traders, no loot respawn and 25% loot therefore loot gets really scarce after day 80. It would be nice to have a bigger map with more T5 buildings to loot. 😅
It could do more than 10k, but no plans for it. We would have to test to see what memory is needed and if we need to, then disable it on some hardware.
You should get more buildings now anyway with the recent changes as cities/towns generate more successfully and even more so if you increase Towns to Many.
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2 minutes ago, Vaeliorin said:
Does this mean that traders are restricted to certain biomes? I usually make maps without Wasteland (I never go there, so there's no point in it being on the map) and I'll likely make maps without Burnt Forest as well. Would this mean I would lose access to certain traders, or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?
Yes. Future biome progression/survival/story will probably tie into specific traders, but that is all subject to change.
You can change it by modding rwgmixer.xml:
<prefab_spawn_adjust partial_name="trader_rekt" biomeTags="forest" bias="20" min_count="2"/>
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8 minutes ago, FramFramson said:
When you said added trader types for a second I thought you meant we'd finally get some new traders, till I re-read what you said.
(but maybe 1-2 more traders in future... mayyyybeeee????)
Well, if I added a colon as it would appear in our change log, it would be more clear:
Added: Trader types are each in their own biome (with a min of 2).
I don't think there will be more traders, but could happen in a DLC or sequel in a galaxy far far away.
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More RWG changes coming to A22:
Improved player spawn locations.
Added rwgmixer <prefab_spawn_adjust> biomeTags which limits to one or more biomes (requires partial_name).
Added trader types are each in their own biome (with a min of 2).
Improved town planning quality.
Adjusted township counts and sizes.
Added biome township count logging and trader logging.
Balanced lakes, rivers, craters, canyons, township and wilderness settings.
Added POI spawning limits based on surrounding density in world.
Improved POI spawning fallback to use a smaller size but ignore name restriction.
Added preview coloring for districts (3 brightness levels each) and traders.
Improved preview POI descriptions and added score.This is the current default 8k map:
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4 hours ago, vom said:
Acquire and wear the complete set for a bonus
This is bad game mechanics - you shouldn't be penalized because you don't like to wear a straw hat or blue coveralls.
That is why many of the games that have clothing/armor with bonuses also have cosmetic slots to allow them to look different for the players that care about cosmetics.
Cosmetics is something we may do after a22. At this point most devs have their plates full for a22 and we are not doing additional features unless critical.
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On 4/13/2024 at 11:57 AM, bdubyah said:
As we were talking about before, that isn't the problem. The game only has a handful of zombie types. There is barely any more stress having 10 of one zombie on screen versus 100 as far as graphics go, other than maybe the jiggle physics stuff they added. The AI is mostly what drags the game down when the zombie counts get high. They had mentioned making a simpler AI to use on horde nights but not sure if that is still the plan or not. They also said the smarter AI they gave zombies around A17 or so was testing it for when bandits came in, which made me think once they did add bandits, that zombies would go back to a simpler AI.
I wouldn't mind zombies staying smart during the day, or maybe just having sleepers spawn with the better AI so they can navigate buildings better, but horde night AI should be simpler. As it is, zombies try to get to your height first, then try to get close. They should reverse that and make them try to take a straight path to get close first, then worry about the height. That would make them more dangerous again as they wouldn't be as easy to cheese with pathing.
Each zombie adds rendering, animation, collision and character controller overhead. You can turn off AI and watch the FPS drop as you spawn more and more.
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10 hours ago, maxousara said:
Hi faatal, do you know what is the max zombies count during horde on ps5, on pc its 64 i'm curious to know because the console have limitations. Thanks
That has yet to be determined.
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2 hours ago, Old Crow said:
Question - Why are there so few programmers compared to the number of artists?
There are about the same of each type.
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10 hours ago, SylenThunder said:
From what I have been able to gather, the consoles will be peer-to-peer 4-player caps when it releases on the console. At a later date cross-play will be enabled, and the player cap on consoles will be increased to 8. The consoles will also be able to join any PC-hosted dedicated server.
I have also heard that the available RWG map sizes on the consoles may be smaller than the PC. Which makes a lot of sense when you consider the memory limitations the consoles have.
Yes, except the increase in players is not guaranteed. More players uses more memory in some cases, so additional memory optimizations may need to be found for it to run reliably.
8k RWG maps is the current limit. Also due to memory limits.
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Version 1.0 (Alpha 22) Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted
We will be trying to avoid that as much as technically possible. Hopefully a save will at least partially load by converting the data we can.