faatal
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Posts posted by faatal
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16 hours ago, khzmusik said:
That's a pity. I know lots of people are looking forward to NPCs being in the game.
Out of curiosity, is the in-progress bandit code going to be shipped with the alpha, just disabled/unused? Or is all the work in a feature branch that won't even get merged into the A21 branch?
I'm asking on behalf of modders who may or may not be myself.
Me too.
Disabled. Some data removed.
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On 11/2/2022 at 3:01 PM, Syphon583 said:
- One of those QoL changes (again, sounded like it is coming for A21, but I could be wrong) is an update to the UI. Rick mentioned a graphic designer wsa working on that (as a side note, I hope by graphic designer, he meant UX designer. Two very different things. Whoever it is, hopefully they have experience in UX) Regardless, I think most players would agree this is an area that needs some love.
- Lastly, their comments regarding performance improvements make complete sense from a development standpoint. While we as players sometimes gripe about the poor performance in some cases, focusing on performance enhancements just does not make sense when systems and assets are still being finalized. That would likely result in wasted dev time and resources.
A21 does not have any big UI changes. There are a few smaller changes here and there.
The game has many optimizations already in it or it would be running at something like 5 FPS. A complex game with no optimizations would be unplayable. The goal is to continue adding optimizations to what has already been done.
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On 10/31/2022 at 6:40 AM, Annihilatorza said:
Hi @faatal
What are you working on currently?
You mentioned that water won't flow into other blocks like Minecraft does, is that for performance reasons or just a limitation of the engine?
Would flowing water be a goal for the future?
Lots of things, mostly bugs. Currently POI imposter flickering between road paint vs the block below it, which probably started from the console guys reducing many vertex positions from 32 to 16 bits to save memory. The blocks below don't even need to be there, so fixing it is also an optimization. Console has tight memory constraints, so they are working hard to bring that down, which will also bring PC mem use down too.
On 10/29/2022 at 6:37 PM, Matt115 said:Chances about bandits in A21 are... pretty low😔
Basically 0% chance at this point. I'm putting my efforts towards must-fixes, before we even start the MF list. Also various features that are not quite done, and code changes to support balancing changes as people who are play testing discover issues.
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11 hours ago, meganoth said:
Faatal said 1) water is finite and 2) "It flows into neighbor blocks that are marked to allow it, like into air blocks" and 3) "Water can fall"
Water will not drain to bedrock because full blocks like earth blocks will not be marked to allow water to flow into it.
As water is finite and flows into neighbor blocks it will only leave the block it was in if there are no partly filled blocks available. Water would just be defined by one bit and essentially a block would be fully water filled or not.
But I would guess that water is at least 2 or 3 bits and therefore would have 3 or even 7 water levels so you can have water flowing naturally and with less blockiness into neighboring blocks.
I think that would be a good question to @faatal : How many bits in a block are reserved for water level or is it only 1 bit (on/off) ?
It does in 7D2D as well (in principle), but very slowly and often with blocks not getting updated. Just like the SI of buildings where often blocks stay floating
The water voxel is 16 bits. It is a mass value. Water and blocks can both be in a voxel. Water looks at blocks to see if it can flow through. Rotation/shape of blocks is not a consideration as it would be complex and possibly very slow.
On 10/30/2022 at 8:30 AM, Games'n'Grumble said:Do I understand correctly that you can enable this function in SP, and it will work almost like a loot update function, but for chunks? Does this mean that the updated chunks will be unloaded from the system memory and will be generated anew (trees, nests, stones, etc., except POI) when the player comes there, facilitating the computer's work?
This will remove the chunk's data and when you visit it again, it is recreated as it was before. Some parts may randomize, like grass, but parts like POIs should come back the same. This will reduce save game sizes, which is actually needed for console, as our worlds can get huge and max out your save space.
This feature will be off by default in all cases. Safer than having players getting areas reset for no apparent reason.
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19 minutes ago, mstdv inc said:
Maybe them shouldn't repeat the mistake of last year and try to release a new alpha by some date?You won't stop loving this game if we don't see exp this year, will you?And I won't stop.I'd rather just wait.Let it come out when it's done.
Releasing a build by a date can be done many ways. We are not doing a toss it out at some date regardless of how it works. We are doing what features can be done by a date (month/season, not an exact date) and then polish and bug fix THOSE features. If those features are not ready, then the date will slip until they are.
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3 hours ago, Howlune said:
In regards to the new engineer(s) brought on board earlier this year to possibly improve netcode, I would love any insider knowledge there might be or to know if any updates exist on this subject since this post was made:
I realize changes to such things would likely be reserved to that of a full number update rather than a decimal one, so is there any hope in A21 carrying a treat for us who enjoy larger servers? The landscape is dire right now and much of the servers got killed off from 20.4.
Those changes have been done for months. Our test servers are running fine with the normal number of players we test with. The changes mainly reduced the amount and frequency of network data sent and improved entity movement interpolation. As to how that would effect high player count servers, it might be better or the bottlenecks could be elsewhere.
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1 hour ago, Doomofman said:
Why short on time for A21? What's the reasoning (if you can say) for not waiting to release A21 until bandits are ready?
There are other reasons to want a release. Many people, myself included, have worked on other features. They want their work out there too and we also want feedback on those changes. Waiting on features often leads to a feedback loop of, while other devs waited, they did stuff, so you now need to wait for that to be done, so others do stuff and you wait. Where does it end??? I'd rather make dates and get new things out on some regular basis. If not done, then feature skips to next release.
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6 hours ago, Laz Man said:
Okay, I will take a stab. There was a recent NRE that would occur when using one of the ingame dev tools within the prefab editor.
I suspect it was caused by a recent commit due to the nature of the NRE mentioned in the unity error log.
I wrote up a ticket and passed it along to our QA lead asap as it was slowing down several teammates work.
Shawn comes to the rescue the very next day and fixes the bug almost immediately. Rejoice!!!!
It truly was edge of your seat stuff. The bugs, the raid, the splatter, the cleanup. High fives all around.
As I was saying.......
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11 hours ago, Blake_ said:
Does that mean that they are confirmed for a21 as basic "wandering" ones for now? Please do tell. I gather it's a tricky question as their full surrounding behaviour isn't yet finished, but can we get a yes? lol.
Nothing with bandits is confirmed. They need to reach a certain functionality and quality level before initial release and we are short on time for A21.
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On 10/16/2022 at 2:56 AM, Blake_ said:
@faatal, good day to you sir ! I have a couple of questions :
1- Any news about bandits? Specifically, do you know if they are in and working at some level?
2- What are you working on at the moment?
3- Can you give us a cool a21 screenshot? It would ignite the hype train and give us something to talk about.
Thanks in advance!
1 I have done AI, anim controller and weapon work for them, and have them spawning as wandering bandits, but there is a lot more work to be done.
2 General bugs.
3 Fixing bugs does not make for cool screenshots.
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55 minutes ago, bdubyah said:
Are wandering sleeper volumes still on the radar at all?
Yes, since we will want bandits doing some idle movements, but it will probably be confined to their volume or part of the volume. Zombies would just use it too.
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3 minutes ago, Riamus said:
I was wondering how this works. How is it that you determine if you are attacking through a door versus attacking the door? Just if there is a zombie behind it? Or do only tools break down doors now? Curious to how it will work.
Newer doors are using mesh colliders, so colliders do not cover the holes in the door. Meaning you can shoot or hit through.
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I ported the penetration code from ranged to melee, so in certain cases the spear can...
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On 10/9/2022 at 12:56 PM, Ryiah said:
Here's an implementation of FSR 1.0 for Unity's built-in render pipeline.
Thanks for the info. I looked at that today and in testing, it both looked worse and had lower FPS than just switching to a lower resolution. FSR 2 is probably much better, but it appears a lot more complicated to integrate.
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On 9/28/2022 at 4:39 AM, Games'n'Grumble said:
Hello, @faatal! You have already answered that DLSS and FSR are unlikely to be included in 7DTD, but what do you think about XeSS, a new technology being developed by Intel? Are the same principles used there?
And also please tell us what you have been working on lately and what are you working on now?
If it is not a new technology being developed by Unity using the built in render pipeline (old, so they won't), then it would be a no. Or some driver level feature that works outside the game.
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On 9/14/2022 at 10:25 PM, Outlaw_187 said:
Hey faatal. You gave us a "bug count" before alpha 20 dropped.
Is it too early to start this kind of countdown or can we get a hint of how many major/minor bugs you guys are working on for A21?
Thanks for everything Fun Pimps team. Can't wait to dive back into some zombie slaying....& possibly some bandit slaying 😁
It is too early. We have not started the A21 list yet.
There are many bugs to be fixed and no doubt many more to be found, but there is a good amount of play testing going on, so it is certainly playable now.On 9/15/2022 at 2:35 AM, gizmomelb said:hi - game mechanics aside, I was wondering if / when TFP were going to update the engine to a newer version of UNITY and hopefully it will be a version which supports FSR upscaling? This would help a lot of players as it would improve fps. Thank you.
A21 should be on Unity 2021.3.x, which is a year newer version than A20 uses.
We are not planning on switching 7dtd to HDRP, which means newer graphics features like that are not available to us.
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1 hour ago, mstdv inc said:
There are 4 topics that I would like to discuss:
1. Some time ago (in A19) I noticed a discrepancy between the game time and the real one.For example, with a standard day of 60 minutes on a 45 game day, I got 48.8 hours of real time on this save.The discrepancy is almost 4 hours.I also noticed that this discrepancy appears mainly during the horde, when the game timer slows down in direct proportion to the fps drop.I can't confirm 100%, I haven't done detailed tests, but there is a feeling that at 30 fps the game timer is 2 times slower.Can there be any comments from the developers on this? @fataal There's nothing wrong with that, but I wonder why this is happening.(my pc 6/12 3.2Ghz,16gb ddr4 3200,rx550 4gb,SSD)
2. Continuation of the previous topic.I'm honestly already tired of looking at complaints about FPS during the horde.People shout that they have a top computer and the game should give out so much fps.But not really.She shouldn't.And I understand why.But they don't want to listen to any explanations.Most likely, this will be an extremely unpopular offer, but maybe it's worth doing some kind of verification of the characteristics of the PC and the number of players who play together, in order to limit automatically limit the possible number of zombies in the horde?Not to give a choice of 24 or more zombies for a potato pc?Or forced dynamic resolution in skyscrapers and the horde?I don't know.I already feel bad from these eternal complaints about fps.
3. Again, the question is most likely to faatal. Is the DX 12 still in the plans?I remember the rules.No questions "when"
4. Full load of more than 6 cpu threads?Is it possible to further parallelize the game processes to use more threads?
Thanks1 The game timer should work fine down to 20 FPS as that is the tick rate. A consultant did find a problem with the tick timing, but I think that was just dedi.
2 Lots of computations equals slower FPS. Cause and effect.
3 I would like DX12 to work as well as DX11, but that generally depends on Unity.
4 It is possible, but that takes a lot of programmer time. I'd rather have something on the main thread run faster, which benefits everyone, than try to use extra cores that only some PCs will have.
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On 9/6/2022 at 12:30 AM, Blake_ said:
@faatal, I've got two gentle yet compeling questions to ask:
1-Can you tell us some news about bandits?
2-What are you working on at the moment?
1 The advance/retreat to cover is coming along. Steve is working on that.
2 Player swimming motion rework, which turned into handling move states in our code (mostly), not UFPS. That lead to some bugs which prompted cleanup of multiple pieces of code doing various checks for in water (in water, swimming, head in water). Camera and head in water were treated the same, which they are not when you consider 3rd person camera, like driving.
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On 7/29/2022 at 2:32 PM, NekoPawtato said:
Any plans in A21 to add transition animation between zombies standing and crouching/crawling?
Will bandits have smooth transition when going between standing/crouching or be the same as the zombies today where it's pretty instant with no transition animation?
Bandits use player animations (and some zombie anims) and player animations are going through a lot of changes, so it will be different.
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1 hour ago, Kirill_226RUS said:
Good day, @faatal. I have a few questions for you.
1. Will the problematic windows that degrade performance in large cities and skyscrapers be replaced in A21, or already in A20.X?
2. Is it possible in the future to eliminate flickering on the edges of some objects when using TAA smoothing? Or is it a feature of TAA in Unity?
3. Is it possible in the future to add FidelityFX CAS to (or instead of) the existing sharpening filter for TAA? Or is it completely unnecessary? (Or, like FSR 1.0, not implementable without HDRP?)
1 In A21. I think most have been replaced at this point.
2 TAA needs the flicker or it does not work.
3 It probably needs HDRP.
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59 minutes ago, Jugom said:
I'm liking the water changes... except for not being able to fill jars.. it feels weirds...
about the dew collectors @Roland, how do you loot the collected water? does it spawn in a jar? are the jars free then if there are no more empty jars in game?
You collect "Water". It is shown as water in a jar. When you use it, it adds water to the player and disappears.
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16 hours ago, POCKET951 said:
do vending machines have Beverages in A21?
They should, but I have yet to find a working machine.
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I've been doing some overall play testing lately. My current game (8k RWG and default settings) is starting day 4. The water struggle is real. I've had to drink about 5 bottles of murky water so far and managed to not get dysentery. I can boil water now and make 2 kinds of tea. I've never been so excited to loot a red tea. Tea is +4 water over boiled, so definitely making tea. Got my water back up to 90%, but the only drink I currently have is one golden rod tea. Trader so far has had no water. I know how to make the dew collector, but don't have the filter. Hopefully I can find a filter at a trader.
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19 hours ago, Blake_ said:
@faatal I have a few questions regarding bandits.
1. Will bandits be able to loot tailored containers for something specific for them or pick up dropped weapons?
2. Will bandits be able to jump obstacles and crouch as well as the player ? In those lines, do you plan on giving them also 1m 'egression' like future zds?
3. Do you plan on giving bandits sneaky behaviour towards us? Meaning silent night assaults with surrounding and stalking and the like, or even just passive camouflage at any given time (there's a costume already in for hidden sniping I believe).
4. How will bandit speed work?
Will they be faster or slower than the player? More or less stamina? Will they actually spend it?
5. Will bandits be capable of facial expressions? Blinks, eye movement, grins, ect.
6. Have you guys planned any means of transportation for hostile npcs going forward? (Pun intended?)
7. Will we be able to talk our way out from a dangerous situation regarding bandits? Like giving them X amount of dukes and then they let us go on for a few days?
Thank you very much for the patience.
1 Not planning on them looting anything. If time permits, they may get some fun bonus abilities, but that is a big if.
2 They move like zombies, so jump/crouch and any future modes of movement.
3 Not decided.
4 Both. Lite ones fast and heavies less fast. Stamina use is not planned.
5 Don't know if art has plans for that.
6 Feet.
7 No. If they could loot your corpse, they would take your dukes, but as it said....bonus.
9 hours ago, Naz said:definitely object quality is one of the only expensive options i try to keep as high as possible to stop blocks getting culled as often in sight. That's great news to hear it already does it, if i'm understanding correctly the object setting controls how far away objects will go through their lods before getting culled? and after a certain distance the object the object will stop switching out lods and get completely culled? i assume then it's too expensive to maintain the lowest quality lod at the same distance as a players view distance?
Yes. Chunk distance is quite far. That final LOD culling is important to performance, else you are paying for a lot of draw calls, even if it was just a billboard.
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Alpha 21 Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted
Yes, it would be possible.