faatal
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Posts posted by faatal
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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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3 hours ago, Laran Mithras said:
Great work on making our characters finally look human and real.
Over on Reddit, they're triggered by the "fact" that all development has completely stopped on the game to push these new art features.
What a horrible, toxic environment over there. Gawd...
Hey, FUNPIMPS: Thank you. Nice art work. My wife might finally play again.
LOL
Yes, because the dozen programmers working on 7dtd are all needed to help artists get new content into the game. Some people...
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On 4/3/2024 at 10:49 AM, Fifthgame2022 said:
Hi, just a question for the first bit of this answer. You say the limit would be 4 players like the current telltale version but will there be dedicated servers because one of the current issues with playing online with telltale version is if the host logs out, everyone playing also gets removed, I understand it may take longer for cross-play etc to be available but will that issue be resolved?
Console play is peer to peer without cross-play. Once cross-play is released then you could log on to a dedicated server running on a PC/Linux OS. I am not working on any of that, but I believe that is how it will be.
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On 4/3/2024 at 4:14 AM, Arez said:
For those who like modding (and I'm personally talking about adding custom zombies, which I have just learned how to do) how much change is going to be needed to make A21 zombie mods work in A22?
Also, how can I make the bloody wounds on my zombies look wet and glistening like you guys do?
I don't think modding zombies will be all that different, but it is hard to remember a years worth of changes.
Textures? Artists make those.
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Split screen is a memory issue and a performance issue.
A typical gaming PC will have 16+8 GB RAM.
Xbox series X has 16 GB of total RAM, but only around 13.5 GB available for the game. PS5 is similar. That is not great.
Series S has 10 GB total RAM, so even worse. We use half res textures and medium quality settings on S, which manages to fit into RAM while allowing for some memory growth as you play the game for hours. This was only achieved with a lot of memory optimizations to the point we have basically run out of big things to optimize. We can squeeze a bit more, here and there, but diminishing returns.
Performance wise, you have to have a render a different part of the world, which uses a lot more CPU and GPU.
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9 hours ago, khzmusik said:
RE: zombie looting, my understanding is that looting would require the bodies be around longer, which degrades performance immensely.
RE: interior/exterior lighting. Is there any way to make this easily moddable? Perhaps not through XML, but at least through defining some variables in C# that modders could easily change through a simple Harmony patch or something?
I ask because, frankly, the way A21 handles interior lighting is exactly backwards from how our eyes actually work.
If your eyes are adjusted to exterior (brighter) ambient light, then the interior (darker) places should look darker than normal. When crossing into those spaces, the spaces initially look nearly pitch-black, but as your eyes adjust the interior spaces look brighter than normal. (And the exterior spaces look very bright, almost washed-out.)
But in game, when standing outside, dark interior spaces look like they're brightly lit. When transitioning into those spaces, they lose their lighting and look darker. Even worse: if you find a brightly-lit spot in that space and stand in it, the entire space suddenly becomes brightly lit. I find it incredibly annoying, and I have heard others express the same opinion.
Of course, you can make your game's lighting work however you like, I'm just asking for the ability of players or modders to override it.
EDIT: For example - my guess is there's probably some variable that controls how much darker it gets when you are in a dark space vs. a bright space. Simply allowing this value to be set via XML would mean we could just enter a negative number rather than a positive one, and that would solve most of the problems.
Yes, any entity being drawn in the world decreases performance whether dead or alive, so removing them is also good.
Inside/outside ambient light scaling is already in worldglobal.xml since it was implemented. It is not meant as a simulation of eyes. It was simply to make outside bright and inside dark as ambient light is a global value, so you can't use it to make part of a mesh dark and other part bright. Block ambient occlusion does allow different parts of the mesh at different brightness values, but the implementation had problems and was not fast. The improved version works better.
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8 hours ago, User said:
...Still no zombie body looting, looks like it won't be returning, sadly (I'm probably the only person who cares about this, but I think it'd be nice.
...Not sure if interior lighting has been improved. Some shots make it look like it has, hopefully the sudden darkness in rooms with open windows or massive holes in the walls goes away, or at least gets improved.
No plans to add back zombie looting. I find it tedious.
Block ambient occlusion has returned, so interiors are darker separate from ambient light. We still change the ambient light for indoor/outdoor, but subtle.
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5 hours ago, FramFramson said:
I'm assuming they were simply given the same property as grass where placing any block on top will remove them.
That seems a bit more intuitive and easier to implement than a system where two voxel objects can actually sharing one voxel space.
Yes. Works like grass.
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1 hour ago, BFT2020 said:
Stable A22 is based on TFP's schedule, but they want to push it to be release as either before Console release or same day as. Console release I believe is more of a set timeline because they are working with an independent publisher for it so that is probably a set in stone drop.
There are no hard dates. Console delays would typically be from failing submission, having to make changes, resubmit and waiting on approval. Almost all console games fail certification the first few times as there are tons of requirements to pass.
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Pretty much any large game has its own engine on top of whatever game engine is being used. In the case of 7dtd you have entities, voxels, occlusion, AI, audio, dynamic music, networking, mod support, file/object/data management and many other things that are engine systems on top of Unity and could be used in other games. Blood Moons uses much of that, so it is 7dtd at its core.
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5 minutes ago, Arez said:
What engine are they using for Blood Moons?
7dtd.
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8 hours ago, Chaton Noir said:
Hello @faatal!
1. Can we see an improvement in TAA in the future? For example, the ability to select the smoothing quality. He's having trouble flickering at a distance right now. With the help of mods, this can be improved at the cost of some deterioration in the clarity of the appearance of ghosting. Why not give the opportunity to choose what is more important — the clarity of the picture and the absence of artifacts, or better smoothing, but at the cost of less clarity (you can fix it with sharpness) and the appearance of some ghosting?
2. It would also be good to see the name of the types of smoothing in the appropriate setting, and not just "high" or "medium".
3. How much could DirectStorage improve performance if implemented? I think it would be very useful in big cities and big buildings, and in general it would be more effective in 7 DTD than in other games.
4. Will hand lighting appear in A22 or ever again? It is not very pleasant to look at your hands, as well as weapons and tools in them, when, for example, you are underground, and the lighting of your hands does not differ from the lighting on the surface. There is a mod that corrects this situation. It has some problems, but it still looks much better. In addition, in the A22, you will see what you are wearing on your hands, and without normal lighting it may not look very good.
5. Will there ever be new first-person animations, or will they be updated only for the third person?
6. Will there ever be animations for eating and drinking?
7. Will transport-related animations appear? The 4x4 was shown with the doors open and closed. Or was it done just to demonstrate the model?
8. Can we ever see a first-person view in transport?
9. Will the dropped objects ever be displayed as their models, and not as bags?10. How about in the updated interface, when configuring graphics, the player would see an image for each setting that clearly shows what a particular setting affects and how it affects it. This would be very useful when setting up graphics, especially for those who are not well versed in this.
11. Is it ever worth waiting for the return of Graphics Jobs?
12. Is it possible that Work Graphs will appear with DX 12 in the future?
13. FSR 2/DLSS is not in the game yet, but is FSR1 in the plans then? It works worse, but it would certainly be better than the current scaling, which would help people with very weak computers until FSR 2/3 appears, if it eventually will be at all.
14. Is it worth waiting for DLAA if DLSS appears in the game?
15. Why not add a wandering horde spawn near the air drop site? Or at least make sure that the zombies next to the cargo start walking towards it, so that the player cannot pick up the air drop so easily.
16. What are you working on now?1 The flicker is a limitation with settings due to issues with motion vectors in some of our shaders that needs research to fix.
2 Maybe someday. WIP
3 Maybe none. CPU use and main thread limitations is the main issue, not loading speed.
4 Hands use their own camera, which I would like to remove at some point, but then FOV issues.
5 All player anims have or will probably be changing.
6 Don't know
7 No plans
8 No plans
9 Don't know
10 Not likely
11 Unstable for some people
12 Don't know
13 FSR has motion vector issues as TAA does. DLSS has odd bugs making it unreliable and needs research. They don't just drop in and work.
14 No. DLSS looks good when it works.
15 Time
16 Vehicle wheel rotation speed clamping
4 hours ago, GoldenFox said:@faatal speaking of things that may happen some day, please please please, consider adding a proper swamp biome for this game, or maybe your next game, it would be awesome!
No new biomes planned, but we have plenty of ideas for future projects.
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4 hours ago, Jost Amman said:
@faatal I remember the so called "Events Director" (IIRC) was mentioned in several past dev streams.
They told us it would leverage stuff from the Twitch integration developed by Prime to create unique encounters and events in general.
Has the idea been scrapped or is someone working on it?
It would be great to have at least a prototype of the ED in A22.
Thanks
It could still happen someday, but it is not on a roadmap or anything.
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On 3/13/2024 at 10:30 PM, n2n1 said:
For what reason does the Burnt Forest periodically disappear from the game?
It disappeared from RWG because we decided to remove it, so Robert stopped generating it, then later we decided to leave it in, so I added it back to RWG.
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On 3/4/2024 at 6:29 AM, Chaton Noir said:
1. Physics and sounds of transport. You were referring specifically to alpha 22, right? (Sorry, I just didn't quite understand and would like to clarify.)
2. What are the chances after updating the engine to get DX 12 and full Vulkan support in A22 or in future versions? After all, there are probably still some problems in this regard.
3. What is the expected performance gain from the new APIs if they are implemented? Maybe there have already been some tests on the new version of the engine?
4. Will all new animal models get new animations in Alpha 22?
5. What about adding not only the shadow range setting, but also their quality? For example, using mods, you can reduce the number of shadow cascades to 2, so that ultra+ shadows are not much worse than high shadows in performance, but the drawing range is significantly longer. At the same time, the quality of the shadows does not drop too much. Yes, it may not look very good, but I think it's better than tall shadows that lack drawing range. Ultra and ultra+ shadows strongly affect performance, at least on not the most powerful systems, which makes playing with such settings uncomfortable until the number of cascades is reduced to 2. It seems to me that this is a good intermediate option so that everyone can choose what is more important to them — range or quality, and choose the best option for their preferences and their performance.
6. I would also like to hope that the contact shadows will be a separate setting and that it can be adjusted regardless of the other settings.
7. I would just like to thank you very much for your work and your answers and forum posts. It's really nice that you always keep in touch with the community, answer questions from the players, give some news and details. Good luck to you and the whole team!1 No. I consider vehicle physics to be close to gold. There are a few issues like excess wobble to the sides on 2 wheelers, but that is a fix. Sounds may get an update, but they are fine to me other than a bug or two with how they play.
2 We already support DX12 and Vulkan. How well it works, mostly depends on Unity. Each year we update to the next Unity LTS and it seems to get better. A22 is on Unity 2022 LTS.
3 Not much from what I have seen but that could change in future Unity versions.
4 Not sure. Have not seen any yet.
5 It is possible, but not A22.
6 Not yet decided.
7 Sure!
1 minute ago, Cr0wst0rm said:Why no tunnels?
Because that is complicated. You have to spawn in a tunnel POI along the road. The distances vary greatly, so length of POI would have to stretch or select from canned sizes and they can't be arbitrarily rotated like roads are. It could tunnel through the chunks, but chunks don't exist at the world generation level, so you would have to add them on world load or dynamically as those chunks load. Complicated...
22 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:Any change to the damage model? You guys went from 0-100 in one update again. It´s actually annoying to drive a vehicle right now. Beeing able to kill zombies again with them is literally useless.
There is mods to reset back to the A20 damage model, but i would much prefer a middle ground.
We will keep dialing it in. The new 4x4 model plow mod reduces damage significantly and there is a book that will reduced it some for all vehicles.
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4 hours ago, ShadeyJK said:
I'm a little disappointed that bandits are seemingly going to be delayed once again, but I *really* like just about everything that's actually confirmed for A22. I'm especially looking forward to the improved gore, and I'm excited to see how it is in effect with the different texture/clothes variants for zombies. Also, the new player models look awesome! Curious too to see how the roads carving through mountains are going to look. I doubt it'll be tunnels, but maybe something more akin to man-made canyons carved specifically for roads like one might see irl?
Correct. Road carving is not tunneling. It is pushing terrain heights down and smoothing around it to make a more reasonably sloped road, so you can drive up it without the vehicle stopping.
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On 2/28/2024 at 8:49 AM, Chaton Noir said:
Hello, @faatal! Will we ever get new physics and new sounds for transport? The new models look much better, but it will be unpleasant to see the old physics and old sounds. And is there a chance that A22 will have a new UI, or is it worth waiting in A23?
Vehicles physics may get minor tweaks, but they should not be getting any major changes. Sounds have not changed. No UI changes in 22.
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7 hours ago, cmills said:
Been kinda curious lately,
What has been a bigger struggle when it comes to porting 7DTD to console, different API's, software etc, or lower processing resources available on console that keep it from running smoothly?
Or is it just a general mix of both?
Less RAM has been the biggest issue, especially on XBox Series S. We have reduced memory usage of many different systems. Art is now getting optimization attention to use less memory.
6 hours ago, Crypted said:How many POI's would the devs working on the new console version have to build in order for the console version to be in sync with the PC version in terms of POI's.
This time around, the console version is sharing the same project files as PC/Mac/Linux, so it is all the same, except for occasional checks in code for required differences. A good example is file system access. PS5 and XBox each have different systems and rules to read/write files than PC/Mac/Linux.
31 minutes ago, Sarakatunga said:I hope they change that horrible gyrocopter and make a passenger one, for example a Bell 206, or another model but not the gyrocopter. I remember that in alpha 20 I made a helicopter and several vehicles for my server but I was never able to publish it since in 21 they destroyed my mod like some modders.The gyrocopter has a new model with a passenger seat that I will be replacing the old model with, when I get to it. It will still fly the same, as it is a gryocopter, not helicopter. If we add a helicopter some day, that would fly like a helicopter.
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16 hours ago, Tete1805 said:
Can you tell us how many programmers are still working on 7 Days?
Many, plus many console programmers, but we all have our areas we work in. We lost two successive programmers working on player body/outfits/equipment, leaving Lathan and I to finish it. We have a new graphics programmer doing skin/hair shaders and mesh work and other gfx tech, but that is a different area.
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37 minutes ago, Annihilatorza said:
With that said I am extremely disappointed that we still won't be getting them this year, it's nearly March and we don't have A22 and it was promised to be a quick update but as usual massive scope creep again.
Like the decision to remove burnt forest and now a whole bunch of hours are been burnt to reintroduce it and get it up to scratch again.
What happened to a quick A22 was what often happens to an alpha. A single large feature ends up taking a long time. The new player models, shaders, hair, animations and outfits was a big undertaking and has caused a lot of bugs. We have had two major programming issues and now the game play programming portions of it are left to Lathan and I to finish. I am currently fixing helmet lights that got screwed up by how equipment objects are built vs events being fired. Player hand/feet IK is broken on vehicles due to using a new Unity IK system, which I need to port our code over to. We have a ways to go.
Burnt forest was never removed. The biome was removed from RWG and adding it back only took a few hours and that includes code cleanup, so there is that benefit too.
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1 hour ago, FranticDan said:
Any chance of the Plains biome coming back?
And what about brand new biomes, like a Swamp/Marsh?Maybe someday, but not for A22.
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2 hours ago, khzmusik said:
Since we're talking about RWG, are there any plans to specify that a specific POI has to spawn in specific biomes (or conversely, can't spawn in certain biomes)? That was in the game a couple alphas ago, and there were hints of bringing it back, but it hasn't made it in thus far.
That would be nice. We talked about it the other day, but I have not looked at it yet. The spawn percents also need testing for accuracy/correctness.
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Alpha 22 Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted
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.