faatal
-
Posts
2,947 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
104
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Articles
A20 Bugs
A21 Bugs
Events
Posts posted by faatal
-
-
15 hours ago, BobbyLee298 said:
@faatal did working with unity devs help you fellas with anything also what version of unity is a20 running?
That has not happened yet. A20 is on 2019.4.17, but may get another update if any good fixes happen before we get to experimental.
1 -
On 1/5/2021 at 7:32 AM, Blake_ said:
Hi @faatal , happy new year. Can you throw some fish stick for us to chew? I have prepared a few blunt yet sensual and direct questions regarding a20, I hope you don't mind.
1. What are you working on at the moment ?
2. Are you allowed to talk about special infected ? Specifically stuff like : how many are in the works, how far ahead is the AI ... etc.
3. Any news about RWG ? Anything will do.
4. Any info about POI, models, weapons or general stuff that is curently being adressed by the programming team that you know of?
Thanks in advance.
1 This week: Fixing holes/overlaps in block meshes/colliders (added shape ModelOffset). Testing (using) Unity 2019.4. Changes to skin quality settings, so can change on a per entity/LOD basis. Fixed a playtest load bug. Improved shape loading. Improved chunk debug grid drawing. Improving chunk mesh generation.
2 That will probably be A21
3 Saw some new screenshots today. New POI placement system is looking cool.
4 Artists are working on new weapon, block and zed/animal content, but nothing that has needed programmers for, other that the skin change I made.
On 1/9/2021 at 9:25 AM, Crater Creator said:I've been doing more prefab building recently, and I had two questions on the future of textures.
I understand that you can't just go adding world textures whenever, because the texture atlas can't get too big. Given this constraint, and that you're expanding tinting to vehicles in A20, have you considered tinting for world textures?
I estimate you could free up space for about 20 more world textures, if you strategically converted the ones you could to a base texture plus a tint (e.g. "concrete white" + tint = "concrete purple"), and possibly more if you allowed decals (e.g. "storage crate" + explosive icon = "storage explosives").
With recent emphasis on beautifying character art and more, it feels like the time has come to give world textures some love. The freed up texture space could be used to provide some additional options I find lacking, such as an oriental rug, white or off-white carpet, and a map of Navezgane (arguably more usable than, say, Madmole's gravestone).
My second question is, what determines if a block is paintable? For example, it's cool that the old wooden chair is paintable, but the black wooden end table isn't. Would making the end table paintable be a simple matter of checking a couple flags in Unity? Or would an artist have to mess with the UVs and re-export the asset?
We could make texture changes using layers or whatever, but don't know that we have the time for that. My general goal is to optimize what we have and not add features, unless the feature is a good memory or performance win.
Block type and possibly xml settings may determine painting, but I've not looked much at how that works.
6 -
On 12/30/2020 at 1:56 PM, petruherro said:
@faatal Hello! Was the game upgraded to use the unity job system/burst compiler?
No. That would require a ton of code rewriting, which is not going to happen.
On 1/4/2021 at 3:34 AM, 4sheetzngeegles said:Faatal
I have a question regarding loot distribution and randomization. Actually it has to do with
randomization in all aspects of the game.Would it add undue amount of overhead to processing if, there was a database monitor added
for the acquired inventory of each player?That is not likely to happen. We have many other tasks that need our time.
0 -
23 hours ago, n2n1 said:
fatal, please pay attention to the random number generator algorithms.
Because of its "stuck", it often happens that events that depend on randomness are repeated.
(or a set of loot in the same types containers, if they are robbed in a row - is repeated).
A correct random number generator gives you random numbers. We use an industry standard random number generator, so it does work. Truly random does mean you could get the same thing many times in a row, which people often don't like and want something less random.
Now the seed used for the random generator could cause issues if not varied enough or reused/repeated.1 -
1 hour ago, jasonsaffle13 said:
Was looking and did not see any mention but I was wondering about weather. I miss the daytime/night time weather swings and early game not wanting to go out when it rains. The thunderstorms would scare the hell out of my wife.
Sometimes we also go back and play old Alphas just to get the gore blocks. I know they were either loved or hated but we liked the way horde bodies could pile up until they could get over a wall but I understand they were a big performance hit.
Weather changes were not planned for a20, but after noticing the state of the code, that it was not gold quality, I ended up spending a lot of December overhauling it. The overhaul is basically done, but the simulation parameters are still being tweaked and needs testing/feedback. Now the players reaction to the weather is completely separate, so this does not change what happens to the player being hot/cold/wet/etc.
On 12/20/2020 at 5:27 PM, 4sheetzngeegles said:This is going to seem like I'm trying to be funny, but I'm not. I would like to know
would it be possible to add an if\then parameter to the general xml files.
Abstract Example: If player vector3 property name="lightsource" >20 then wake entity Sightrange=Sightrange+20.
So if you have a flashlight on it instantly increases the sight awareness of zombies farther away.
It is very simliar to Cvar and passive_effect but would possibly extend the range of customization, it can be used with
an absolute value, a <=>, or a min max to adjust anything from AI response under certain conditions, to weather shifts,
depending on vector3 location.
The amount of logic we already run from xml adds a good amount of overhead to the game. It could be added, but it would be slow, so not likely.
3 -
5 hours ago, petruherro said:
When will we get more info about the water overhaul?
Next year. We have been working on other things.
2 -
3 hours ago, Xeen said:
@faatal
I noticed with some dismay that on game stage 238 on Warrior difficulty I went an entire night with no zombies attacking my base so I made some burning barrels and put 4 of them outside my base one at each corner and still nothing. Keep in mind this is not unusual as I routinely get zero zombies at night.I can't imagine this is a bug, is there something that can be done about this?
I also noticed that random zombie hordes hardly ever happen anymore.
I need some Zombluv, help a brother out!
P.S. Thank you for making the zombies smart, you da man!
Wandering hordes randomly skim along the edge of where a player is, so maybe you just got (un)lucky and they have not been noticing you?
That would be an interesting thing to bring in closer as their target's GS increases.
5 -
On 12/11/2020 at 7:21 AM, Blake_ said:
Multiquestion attack !
1.Can you clarify ?
2.What does that mean for weather survival ?
3.What is the intended result/end goal of the weather system ? like : Weather-specific Zombies? Streamlined weather survival/heat-cold management ? or is it just "To look better than before" for now ?
1 Yes!
2 Nothing much atm other than the weather should change at a consistent rate.
3 The goal of these changes is to make it run faster, look better and not get stuck on ugly conditions. Rain comes and goes in a clean fashion. Snow looks pretty sweet now.
3 -
On 12/11/2020 at 2:55 AM, 4sheetzngeegles said:
Faatal
I have a few questions relating to one subject.
Since TFP has access to all of their archived\older versions Do you
or any of the team ever go to them for any inspiration or do you start
from scratch with each iteration\alpha?Will or is it possible to do a similar configuration, regarding the weather,
as it was in alpha 15. I am referring to the altitude temperature manager.
Example: Lower altitudes had a hotter climate, as you went higher the temperature
declined. Imagery: Wasteland, if painted to the lowest altitude has the most brutal
heat, then burnt forest, desert, Pine forest, snow in the mountains.If a single day\night lighting gradient is used for all then it would have less abrupt
visual lighting changes as you move between biomes. The only difference would be the
atmospheric effects, Fog, clouds, LUT, Particle emission.
Gradient ref: sun,moon,fog,fog fade etc. For me its like an atmospheric LUT adjustment.Biome distribution was also more 3d. It would go along x,y, and z.
With the manager that you are working on, if the above reference is applied could the manager
also be applied to a singular governor for the atmospheric effects? I mean not only the temperature
but as you change altitude, then say you have the existing particle storms, but they would
progressively decline, as you approach the median height, and progress as you approach the
extreme upper and lower distances. Imagery: Pine forest is middle of the height and has ChunkMargin 20,
as you descend\ascend the chunk margin decreases creating a smoother transition visually.Is the prior code used, Copyright protected or TFP intellectual property, as TFP team mates
change?You don't rewrite all your game code for each new release/update. That would be crazy. 95%+ is the same code.
Now you might rewrite a system, but that is often overkill too. I am updating the Weather Manager, not rewriting it. Maybe 40% of the code has been touched.
We are not planning on doing altitude changes for any of it.
All creations by a person/company are automatically the copyright owner by default (in the USA anyway), unless stated otherwise.
2 -
I've been working on weather manager cleanup and now starting on the simulation, so hopefully less gloomy days.
11 -
On 12/4/2020 at 3:33 AM, Blake_ said:
@faatal , I've been testing A19.3 performance. I hope to have unearthed something useful in the output logs. Be aware, the issues posted below are universal to all sizes (4k and 8k) though in 8k they might be proportional.
I can look at that at some point, but busy with other things now.
On 12/5/2020 at 7:26 PM, sillls said:I wanted to ask. How were you able to get the game to load all that data? I know some people who are trying to make a game and it takes forever to the game to load and it doesn't have nearly as much detail as this game.
A lot of complicated code. For all the people who complain about lack of optimizations, if there were none it would be unplayable.
5 -
3 hours ago, Blake_ said:
@faatal , since Robert isn't here to answer, do you know if the RWG has a target RAM consumption for a20 ? The news are that you guys are ditching the 4k maps. I have mixed feelings for various reasons:
In 4k maps, the RAM RSS feed currently stands at 3800 Mb to ... 6000-6200 MB !! after around 5 (quest days/build nights) hour sessions SINGLE PLAYER. That means multiplayer can easily double after just 4-5 hours resulting in 12000+MB memory RSS feed and square and texture artifacts everywhere at virtually any time (artifacts start to happen when the dedicated memory is filled and system RAM juggles too much).
My concern is that if we are going to get 6k maps minimum, how is that going to fare for us lads with peanut butter Pcs? At the moment I'm standing in the "just ok" rope with 4k maps consuming said 3,8 gigs to 6,2gigs after 5 or 6 hours.
Do you have any insight on this subject ? Are 6k maps gonna have a stable 4 gigs of RSS most of the time or are they expectedly going to hit the 8 gig mark as Navezgane is currently doing ? Senior programmers have a throne in Westeros from where they can overlook such things, right? I'm sure of it.
Salutations.
Not hard to reproduce. When dedicated memory is filled and RAM is also topping or juggling too much, it happens 100% of the time. Moving fast through the map (no need to God mode) also results in that, but again, memory HAS to be filled.
None of that should be set in stone yet. Once RWG changes are further along, we can see where memory use is at and fix what needs to be fixed.
Edit: Robert says 4k is still possible, so we will probably have that too.4 -
On 11/20/2020 at 2:09 PM, Jost Amman said:
I thought zombies were supposed to dig in A19, but I built a "trap base" near bedrock with a long ramp going down to me, and they didn't show up on BM.
I guess there's a limit on how far pathing can reach out?
@faatal : could you check this for A20 and see if it's possible to have them path to you from 60-100 blocks away? (at least during the Blood Moon!)
The pathing distance limit is horizontal. They can only path about 40m out. Farther and they just go in a straight line to the edge of the path grid.
I dug to bedrock in Navezgane and BM day 7 spawns came above me and started digging down. They do a lot of moving and stumbling in addition to digging, so it can take them a while if you don't have a ton of zombies.On 11/20/2020 at 10:50 AM, beerfly said:Fixed for you
Btw, @faatal, or you Gazz, are you going to improve the point of view transition, of when we change vehicle steering mode between mouse to keyboard and vice versa, with the left mouse button.
Sometimes it changes a bit of the angle and is comfortable to continue, but sometimes it is like I am looking from a selfie stick point of view instantly, and a world class of slalom happens. Not a big deal, just wonder about it.
Great job so far boys, keep kicking butts.
That is code, so would be me, but doubt it will change anytime soon. I tend to forget that is even a feature.
5 -
On 11/19/2020 at 11:29 PM, sillls said:
Wow! Alpha-20 looks good so far. I'm looking forward to seeing all the coming details.
😀
First day back to the forum.
I was reading where crawlers can now crawl thought one meter holes. I hope that means that players once again have the ability to go through one meter openings.
None of that has been done yet, so it remains to be seen how it will work.
0 -
10 hours ago, Blake_ said:
@faatal I've been further testing a19.3 and I have a few questions.
1-Does the loading-unloading of assets in the memory uses just VRAM and/or some CPU ?
2-Does the process involve more dedicated memory usage than expected surpassing the total budget and using general purpose RAM ? How much VRAM does the game use on a minimum specs setting ?
3-Is the RSS RAM feed in the dev console the actual total amount of memory used by the game due to garbage collection and other factors?
4-If so, can it be cleared/emptied/reset in game ?
5-Wouldn't it be cool to have a CPU and VRAM and RAM tool (like a very limited version of FRAPS) available through console commands ?
I believe the speed of the Graphics card processing is at play here, though it shouldn't really amount to less than the necessary memory needed to the loading and unloading of resources.
The thing is, I have microstutters when the yellow warnings pop up (symptom). They are of various levels of severity depending on just how much stuff is being processed and I wonder about just how much do they tax the system in that short amount of time. They look like RAM microstutters, so I was just surprised given that my map is 720p and according to the console consumes just about RSS 3800 Mb of memory (with the other two feeds below 1200MB) , so I guess I'm either mistaken and they do use some CPU or they are indeed too taxing for a minimum GPU to handle and systematically surpass the budget every time. ((EDIT: Interesting, RSS feed DOES go from 3800MB to 4300MB in just 1 hour of gameplay in 720p half size textures, a bit too much if you ask me; and it never empties to avoid that surpassing within that timeframe))
Maybe a more spreaded (lighter) loading and unloading would solve the issue, yet Is that even possible at this point ?
Wandering hordes still give bumbs (lesser bumbs), but I believe that it's the spawner itself that might be causing problems. Apparently it's just too heavy to activate a spawn with a bit of complex logic.
Unity 2020.1 and 2020.2 might hold some answers for stability in these cases, though I don't believe in night and day situations this far into the dev cycle.
A penny for your thoughts. Thanks in advance.
This is not an exact science, since Unity does a lot of things in the background that we don't have control over.
1 Depends on the asset, but everything uses some CPU and many assets use system RAM or VRAM or both. Unloading also tends to be delayed because many resources are not specifically tracked by the game and flushed by Unity by UnloadUnusedAssets, which is slow, so not called very often.
2 Only the gfx driver and Windows really know how much VRAM is in use and VRAM use is often padded to a higher amount that what it actually needs. Microsoft is working on tech to report more info back, but then Unity has to support it to, so maybe in a few years.
3 Not sure. There are various pools of memory in use, which grow and shrink.
4 Using the mem console command does call UnloadUnusedAssets, but it won't clear memory being used by resources, since many resources are loaded once and they would never come back. Also the Mono mem heap can never shrink, short of restarting the game.
5 We have the Unity Profiler. For you, FPS is a good indicator of CPU use. Use console command "gfx g fps 200" to graph it.
Our micro stutter is generally from CPU use spiking on a single frame. I've been working to find spikes and spread work across frames. Some of those changes have already been done for A20, but more can still be done.
We are moving to Unity LTS releases, so A20 should be on 2019.4. We won't try 2020 LTS until after A20.x in second half of next year.
7 -
4 hours ago, Blake_ said:
@faatal here's a question with a prologue:
In a19.3 doors do not structurally support other doors. That is ok to avoid exploits I guess. I noticed that said band aid resulted in less creativity overall, with less cool multi stacked doors on some designs, so now I'm "unsure" if the change is intended to stay or if it's just temporary while the new doors are implemented.
-Will the NEW doors be (physic-induced) blocks and also stackable on top of each other so entities can damage them and/or is the structural integrity between doors going to remain the same as this recent a19.3 change with/without the new door changes ?
Expected Result: That doors are cool and destroyable like in the Arlene test video, but also the entity logic is tweaked to think of doors as if they were just normal material blocks and therefore the structural integrity wouldn't need to be set to 0 for door on door, allowing the pre a19.3 freedom.
It's absolutely no great deal either way, but I think it's worth a thought.
Gentle Hugs.
I don't know yet. There is a good chance doors will retain zero SI.
1 -
On 11/14/2020 at 3:22 PM, Jacoviz said:
@faatal Are you going to improve the controller rumble feedback? It would be cool to have the rumble on every melee hit and also when you fire with the guns. Also on vehicles would be cool to have a really low rumble when you are driving. Is there a way to mod this in?
Sorry. Don't know. I have never looked at our rumble code.
On 11/13/2020 at 10:05 PM, Picklefart said:Would it be possible to add an option to adjust roaming horde size/frequency, similar to horde night variations?
We could, but probably better to wait for world events to get developed and have options for that.
On 11/13/2020 at 9:48 PM, Blake_ said:@faatal here's a quick take on a19.3 after a couple of hours of testing :
Cool. Thanks for the feedback!
On 11/13/2020 at 7:53 PM, khzmusik said:And is now here...
Just so we know - are there going to be more A19 patches, or is this it until A20? Asking for a friend who is me.
EDIT: Not asking for a timeline or release dates or anything, just want to know what to expect. Personally, I just want to know if I can start a new game and reach level 100 before A20 exp drops.
It could go either way. Probably depends if we find any major issues.
8 -
22 hours ago, TSBX said:
Any new hook-ups in the MinEvent system? Not sure how up to date the bottom of buffs.xml is, but there are quite a few goodies commented as not hooked up.
Not by me. Just optimizing it.
0 -
52 minutes ago, SnowDog1942 said:
What exactly is an event system?
Specifically, I've been profiling the game and our MinEvent system, which has to do with processing all the rules in our xml files, like progression.xml, continues to take a good amount of CPU.
A good example is every 2 seconds an action tries to remove fire particles off the player, which was slow and made some garbage because it checked all the player transforms (200+). Now entities have a list of active particle effects, so basically takes zero time. The transform find function is also faster now and makes no garbage.
A19.3 has some optimizations, but these changes are for a20.
6 -
Well, was off last two days on a trip to Michigan.
Been working on event system optimizations.
19.3 exp is getting close.
6 -
On 11/5/2020 at 11:11 AM, Guppycur said:
So player characters... and this may be more of a faatal question... Will there just be like 8 models to choose from and then add clothing to or will be still be able to change the looks?
If the former, please allow for modability so we can include our own character and clothing assets.
If the latter, carry on, and about time.
I don't know as that is not stuff I have worked on. Don't think there have been any code changes yet for it.
1 -
20 hours ago, Scyris said:
Will Vehicle mods include one that increases speed? A mod I play Darkness Falls, has a mod that doubles vehicle speed when installed, makes a minibike go from 10 m/s to 20 m/s. Motorcycle goes from 14 m/s to 28 m/s. Its a game changer.
I did a test speed up. I think it made the official list. It is nowhere near x2 speed. The speeds are limited due to worst case chunk load speeds, else vehicles freeze while chunks load.
8 -
3 hours ago, khzmusik said:
This sounds really nice. I asked about something similar a long while back, but thought nothing came of it.
I'm guessing the new tinting shader will also be applied to weapons and tools? That was the big improvement I was hoping for.
It could be used for it, but masks have to be made and hooked up, which takes time.
0 -
On 10/31/2020 at 8:48 PM, Zayah136 said:
Make sure to allow dyeing vehicles when you get to vehicle mods, it's really hard to tell who's bycicle is who's sometimes. That and I would loooove a purple bike.
A new tinting shader is already done and all vehicles now have a tint mask, which allows the dye color in the cosmetic slot to tint specific areas of the vehicles.
On 11/1/2020 at 1:51 AM, toores said:Ok, I see.
Then, is there any way to make the inside of a building that is darker also appear darker form outside? (...so it wouldn't change when stepping in)
There was old code the put lighting into blocks, but did not work very well and added overhead, so was disabled.
Maybe someday we can find a better way.
3
Alpha 20 Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted
Probably not. If you profile the game, it shows neither one of those things as issues. We plan on continuing to optimize the slower parts of the game, not parts that already run fast enough.