faatal
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Posts posted by faatal
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A20 is currently on Unity 2020.3.1. I'm currently on 2020.3.10 for testing. A20 will probably end up on a slightly newer version than that.
None of that means DX12 or Vulkan will be working great. Unity may have fixed issues, but there can easily be more. In the Unity editor, on the version I am testing, DX12 started to have a huge drop of 40 FPS, so I went back to DX11 and it was fine. There is a reason they still have DX12 marked as Experimental.
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9 hours ago, Kirill_226RUS said:
@faatal, sorry to bother you again with questions about UE. How would the game change if it was on UE5? And I'm not just talking about graphics, but for example about the speed and ease of use, other programming languages, other tools, and so on. How would this affect the content, gameplay, and release speed of new versions? ( And it's a pity that Epic didn't make MetaZombie😅 )
It might be better or not. UE5 would not just make the game magically better.
The code would probably be c++ and might run a bit faster, but c# compilers have been making good improvements, so probably about the same.
Release speed would be really slow, since we would have to learn a whole lot of new tech and redo a ton of work.
6 hours ago, Matt115 said:@faatal : Quick questions : 1. will be some new POI underground like mines , collapsed tunnel, new caves , buried body pits etc?
2. will be new "outbreak" props like: dead soldiers , skeletons on desert , road sights about evac , posters , metal barriers , "furniture" barricades ( for example bed with chairs and cabinet on stairs) , drawing on walls , broken military jeep , destroyed plane, concrete barricade on road etc?
1 Don't know what they are planning.
2 Sure, but I doubt it will be your list.
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44 minutes ago, dcsobral said:
I'm pretty sure he lied and the answer is "when it's done". Particularly when you realize he said it may be less than 3 months, more than three months, but not exactly three months.
Lol. Yous guys crack me up. Exactly 3 months from the day i said that would be really low odds. That leaves us with a 99.5% chance it is more or less than 3 months.
50 minutes ago, meilodasreh said:A-ha. And was he consciously lying or unconsciously serious about the "never pooped my pants" part?
Well, I was counting since adulthood.
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4 hours ago, Fanatical_Meat said:
Let’s get back to when A20 will be available.
whats your thought:
- in three months
- less than three months
- more than three months
- I pooped my pants (when it’s done)
1. Nope
2. Maybe
3. Possibly
4. Never
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26 minutes ago, khzmusik said:
Hey @faatal, since it looks like you're around, I was wondering if it's possible to elaborate on the ability to place "mini POI" prefabs inside of larger POIs. (Sorry I don't know the terminology.)
Are these prefabs treated as separate "POIs?" As an example, imagine a very large shopping mall POI. The individual shops inside them could be randomized, and designers could specify that one of them be a trader. The trader could offer quests to individual shops inside the shopping mall.
My guess is that they can't, and that they'll work more like the existing block placeholders - you can define a list of prefabs to choose from, but that's it. (I'm guessing that because block placeholders are already implemented, and that the new system is expanding upon that.)
Still, that's just a guess, so I'd like to make sure.
I recognize that this is all a WIP, and nobody has even guaranteed that this will be ready for A20. So I will assume any information is preliminary. But I'm still curious.
I don't know. It probably just picks one from choices or none and replaces the blocks in the area.
4 hours ago, playlessNamer said:@devs
Do you have any plans on a zombie randomizer? There was a mod some time ago for this.
You allready mentioned a clothsystem to give them random clothing and attachments but allready in this state of the game you couldt randomize walk- and attackanimations and probaly put some tinted or slightly modified version of every zed to the randompool.
Have you ever seen the fat police zombie with the spiderzombie runanimation? It looks awesome, like a fat gorilla running torwards you! Had this some alphas ago on my server selfmade. Normal walk animation but when triggered he runs like a gorilla.
Do you have something like that on the plan?
Not likely. Clothing would not change like you think. That is all one mesh and full textures. What might change is accessories being hidden, like a hat. provided the artists split them into separate objects.
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8 hours ago, Matt115 said:
@faatal who made this bus stop? because i want to this person that he/she done a good job
Don't know.
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Today's work. New tech that should stop loot containers from floating by attaching them to what is below. We had that happening in the new sewers, so needed a fix.
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17 minutes ago, Adam the Waster said:
i don't get the pic but if there is alot then COOL!
2001: A Space Odyssey. The dawn of something new.
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4 minutes ago, dcsobral said:
2001 shapes confirmed on alpha 20!
Maybe not that high, but there are a lot!
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14 hours ago, ricp said:
Don't see the need for wandering sleepers, tbh. They will only impact on performance while providing very little in return. IMO, anyway.
If you don't have collision on, does that mean you can go into a house, build a set of new walls and have the zombies walking through them? Disabling the collision is sensible in terms of reducing the amount of processing they need to do but, on the flip side, to me it seems to be introducing more possible problems in regard to not much game play return (again, IMO).
Obvs, I have absolutely no insight into how the logic is working so perhaps it's an easier and less impactful addition than I am imagining it might be.
I did mention bandits.
There are actually multiple types of collision. The collision that would be disabled is the character controller collision checks. If something entered/changed the volume then collision mode would change. We do know how to make this stuff work and if it didn't, I'd have 5 testers telling me in 1.2 seconds.
Ironically, they would possibly be cheaper that the current sleepers, which do have their character controllers on while sitting there.
5 hours ago, Jost Amman said:Not on my radar. I probably have 20 or 40 things to do before that, so likely time will run out.
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1 hour ago, AtomicUs5000 said:
Will they still be tied to the POI sleeper volumes?
What gap is this idea filling? Is it for when you might look inside a POI window just to visually stir things up, or is it more about adding some difficulty for players trying to be stealthy, or something else?Yes since spawns in POIs are controlled by sleeper volumes.
So enemies can wander around. Like bandits would move about.
1 hour ago, Adam the Waster said:Why is their a Shark model! the base game is set in Arizona. AKA a place with no ocean! a Gator would make sense but why is the shark not being uses?
Because someone added it to the project many years ago. I can find all kinds of models and anims on the internet and slap them in, but artists generally like to do high quality specific case assets for their games.
1 hour ago, Blake_ said:Interesting [spanish accent]. Btw, what are you working on at the moment, I mean aside from optimizations?
Besides some bugs, trying to get client side block stability to be calculated to work with changes to block placement visuals.
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52 minutes ago, Orville Tootenbacher said:
Is it possible to have some zombies not care at all about getting to player height and are in destroy area mode by default? It just seems like when they have that path up to you (usually by design) the conga line starts and everything else is ignored making it super easy to game the AI and to get them to go exactly where you want. Predicable zombies are just not very realistic😬
That is not as simple as it sounds. Is that a hill or a staircase or a bunch of blocks placed like a stair case or a combination of all of it. Should the AI beat the side of the hill because you are 5m up it? No. It would not make sense. So you have to looks at all those blocks, which is slow and try to figure out what the 3d cube of blocks around and between the zombie and you mean. Tons of edge cases for nonsensical behavior.
10 hours ago, AtomicUs5000 said:Could someone summarize what the "Wandering Sleepers" are (as listed in the A20/21 roadmap)?
... or direct me to where it was talked about, please.
I must have missed discussion about it, and I tried searching but couldn't find mention of it.
They are sleepers that move about in a small area. The will cause more overhead, but hopefully that can be balanced by optimizations that allow them to say, follow a rarely generated path with world collisions disabled.
4 hours ago, Adam the Waster said:iv been digging from in art station and found the person who dose the 7dyd zombies
and i found a few cool things some are not done but. oh well!
I also found a shark but.... i don't think thats real LMAOWe have several artists that do zombies.
There is a shark model and animations in the project, but not being used.
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1 minute ago, khzmusik said:
Oh, that sucks. Is it still on the roadmap for A21? Or is it one of those things that is just too impractical to do properly? (Sorry if I missed that conversation, it's a big thread.)
Yes, we would like to improve it. I've already spent time changing how water data is stored, but that is disabled for A20 and I don't like wasting my time, so I do plan on finishing it. There are water simulation changes we would like to make, but another programmer will probably be doing that.
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38 minutes ago, ErikH5027 said:
NPCs
More zombie varieties.
more items/special items
weapons
a story of some sort
more workstations
better immersion purpose additions
more pois.
more vehicles.
basically more options to customize their experience
I know there are plenty more
(anyone please feel free to add to this)
Can any of this be confirmed or denied as far as coming to A20/A21 or ever?
I know this is also a cliche question, but when can we expect anything new? Are we getting closer to a release of A20. 1 week, 2 months, 6 months, a year?
We have many programmers, many artists and many designers working on all different parts of the game. I concern myself with programming, so can't say much in other areas.
Most of what you listed is not coming to A20. What is on the first page is most of what is coming, but there are some changes like optimizations or block placement visuals that are not listed.
We don't give release dates months or even weeks in advance, but I can say A20 is months away and as a player of the game, I'm looking forward to it.
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30 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:
Might want to update the first page then since it states that such a feature is "most likely not shipping in A20".
Sure. Now it says Not...
22 minutes ago, ErikH5027 said:So what exactly is coming to A20? Almost half of everything on the list claims that it will not ship in A20...
There are 20 items on list and 2 say not coming in A20.
Edit: Changed water to say not in A20.
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16 minutes ago, Adam the Waster said:
I have a few questions @faatal
How will the Zombies can crawl through 1-meter hole Work? like if the wall has one block can they crawl through it? what half blocks?Don't know, since no work has been done on it and it is not coming to A20.
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2 minutes ago, mstdv inc said:
Unfortunately, I do not know all the team members,so I only thanked you.
Lathan and all testers also give respect and a big thanks!
Lathan AKA Prime did the twitch integration. He is a streamer and loves that stuff.
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2 hours ago, mstdv inc said:
I would like to express my respect to @faatal for the optimization upgrade in 19.5.
avg indicators increased by 20-25%, and 1% and 0.1% became from 2 to 5 times better.I am very happy!)My PC is very happy, thank you!
Who noticed in A19.5 b1-b50
50?50 builds!!AmazingA large amount of my optimizations targeted worse case performance. As in reducing frame spikes for smoother game play. I don't care much for peak FPS. Who cares if sometimes you get 120 FPS, when most of the time you get 40 FPS and then randomly dropping to 10 FPS. I'll take 60 FPS most of the time.
Lathan did a lot of iteration and testers a lot of testing to get to 50 builds.
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6 hours ago, meganoth said:
Not only thought of, TFP already has that implemented. This variation is in the game since A18, a certain percentage of the zombies on horde night go into destroy aka rage mode and just attack a random block even if they have a path to you.
The only small problem with this "rage mode" is that it often attacks random blocks in the area that might have no useful function at all. The AI should probably prioritize blocks near the player to be a bit more effective.
I'm not sure if the AI wasn't that way in A17 (i.e. the priorization), because at that time lots of complains by users about zombies with an engineering degree came up in the forum. It may have been toned down. But probably it was just the effect of A17 zombies having a bigger buff to group damage which made them destroy buildings quite fast if you let them.
It is not a percent. Destroy area mode is when they can't reach you, but it can also happen when they fall. The blocks chosen are not totally random. It looks for supports and it is randomly between the player and zed, but supports are often not near the player, so it looks in a 10x10x10 area. That is already fairly slow trying to make a quick decision on what to destroy.
Zombies types have random weighting for how much they care about block health. It creates some path variation, not radically different paths like some people want. That would require some very different rules.
4 hours ago, Matt115 said:Yeah this is a big problem : i can understand why dogs do holes in dirt under a walls but zombies attacking everything is rly stupid. It Should work like : First destroing doors, If they can't ( doors are blocked) they try to destoy the player putted hard blocks first - stone , iron walls , etc just change their piority because they sometime just fall into lakes ( they easy could go away from it but nope) and their just destroyed a lot of dirt . Well i hope they will fix problems with they AI soon
Door are already weighted so zombies prefer them over walls with equal health.
The game does not know if a block is player placed. Each block only uses 8 bytes of data. With the amount of blocks in the world, it quickly adds up. I have thought about adding a bit to tell of any player placed/changed the block, but I don't even think any of those 64 bits in the 8 bytes are free. Adding a another byte means it gets slower for code to pass around because it is now bigger than the magic size of 64 bits that our processors like.
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6 hours ago, Kirill_226RUS said:
There should be no 19.6. A20 will be soon enough we hope.
Unity says they made a fix for one of the DX12 or Vulkan issues I reported, but it takes weeks/months to filter down through their testing and into a release. I do hope to update Unity once more before A20 is done, so it should have that fix.
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14 minutes ago, bachgaman said:
But is this in the plans? I read something like this from some developer
Apparently you do not understand what I mean. Or deliberately distorted. I did not write that you simplify the game for streams. I said you do the integration for streamers. And they will lead a Twitch audience of 16-24 y.o. who needs to be retained
Also, I did not write that the flying robot is a simplification (although it may be so), but I mentioned wow content for the aforementioned audience.
It was a plan that some of us liked, but that does not mean it is going to happen. It will take a good amount of time.
Deliberately distorted would be lying and I don't lie unless I'm making a joke. It was not a joke. We are not changing normal game play for anything to do with streamers. We make changes because we think it will make the game better and to fit into release timelines.
Twitch has a wide demographic. Over half are 25+. Granted they don't show <16, so there are probably quite a few of those.
"According to GlobalWebIndex in Q2 2019, this is an approximation of the age demographic on Twitch, ranging in age from 16-64 years in age:- 16 to 24 year olds: 41%
- 25 to 34 year olds: 32%
- 35 to 44 year olds: 17%
- 45 to 54 year olds: 7%
- 55 to 64 year olds: 3%"
The drone was added because some of us thought is was cool. Not to appeal to certain people.
Game devs frequently do things because they think it is cool or fun or different and not some master plan to suck people in. Business/Marketing people, well that is often a different story.
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Clothing and armor slots are not changing for A20. Streamers stream all types of games, simple or complex. The Robotic Drone is not simplifying anything, since it is an addition to the game.
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7 minutes ago, bachgaman said:
I understand that streams make the game more popular, but the quality and depth of the game also makes it more popular. But the mechanics you voiced are interesting, I didn't think about it. Apparently the task is to create a casual game to attract the audience, I didn't think so before. Flying robots and streamers😁
Watching someone else play a game is about as casual as it gets. Now they can get a bit less casual by interacting with it.
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2 hours ago, Blake_ said:
@faatal , any words about special infected behaviour or if some of them will make it to a20 ? There seems to be a lot of work and time put in a facewash for the old 3d models, I was just wondering if Mr Spider & Co are getting any weirder AI-wise.
I don't plan on doing any changes for AI in A20 other than bug fixes.
Well, besides feral sense.
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Server Reboot Purgatory
in General Discussion
Posted
See these changes in 19.5 release notes.
Voxel mesh pooling
Distant terrain decreases mesh detail when farther
FindTagInChilds does not make garbage
Distant POIs to use a shared material
Improved chunk LOD update
Optimized chunk object handling and frame timings
Optimized terrain mesh generation
Optimized terrain control textures to not update with every mesh update
Optimized distant terrain tile size
Optimized VoxelMesh AddMesh
Optimized distant terrain render order
Block preview for normal blocks leaking a mesh on each update
ItemClassBlock CreateMesh having to destroy unneeded colliders
Empty voxel meshes were being created
Distant POI mesh and material leaks
Distant POIs could load and leak extra invisible objects
This game is not done. Pretty much all games go through an optimization and bug fix period for the last x months of development. Being early access, this game goes through a small version of that with each alpha.