faatal
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Posts posted by faatal
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8 hours ago, Jost Amman said:
That's great news! Thanks for the reply!
So, the water programmer is aiming for a "flawless" release...
He submitted a fix, so hopefully it is fixed in testing.
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22 hours ago, Jost Amman said:
Things are looking pretty good at this point bug wise. Most of the current must fixes can be done during experimental. We only have one major bug that needs to be fixed before experimental, which causes the server to hang from what appears to be POI resets triggering water updates. The water sim programmer is working on that one. Granted we may find other nasty bugs as the testers continue testing.
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On 5/29/2023 at 12:12 PM, Old Crow said:
Still curious to know how big of a chance vehicles will have to explode after hitting negative hit points. I know it's supposedly not likely to happen, but all it takes is one string of really bad luck and BOOM you lose your 4x4 and anything you had inside it.
It feels like a very player-hostile change, much like A20's farming changes, so I'm hoping it gets tweaked fairly quickly, like farming did (though farming is still pretty worthless unless you spec all the way through Living off the Land (and even then, a string of bad luck can still screw you over on getting a reasonable amount of seeds back).
That is not new to A21. A20 has the same chance (I don't remember the exact numbers), although it is a lot easier to get your vehicle to the destroyed state in A21.
The solution is not to trash your vehicle, and if you do, then repair it. Like lots of things in the game, it will be open to tweaking based on long term play and not knee jerk reactions.
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3 hours ago, CyberHellKen said:
Do you devs still maintain an MF list of bugs? If so, how's the count going, if you can share, of course.
I'm kinda hoping for a release after Memorial Day weekend, since I'll be out of town and not able to really enjoy a streamer weekend nor a Monday release. All vegetables thrown at me will be donated to Rekt's farm. 😛
We have the list of must fixes every alpha. It has been trending down. Currently at 30 tickets across 15 different people, but that is not 2 per person as some people, like programmers, tend to get more of the bugs. I have 7, of which 3 appear to be the same issue, but that is a non trivial issue with stray floating terrain possibly caused by a terrain corruption bug fix I did last week.
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13 hours ago, Doomofman said:
Would FSR make much a difference in 7 Days? With it being more of a CPU heavy game, I feel like FSR won't help very much, but if it's easy to implement then I suppose it's an easy win?
It depends. We are often main thread CPU bottlenecked.
I think FSR would most benefit heavy rendering situations, like running at higher resolutions with higher settings on weaker GPUs.
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25 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:
Thanks faatal, I relayed this to the OP: I hope it didn't take too much of your time to check this.
But again, much appreciated.
Eh, 10 minutes. I'm all for checking things.
On 5/18/2023 at 12:21 PM, Ryiah said:I just found out that someone has an implementation of FSR 2.2 for the built-in pipeline.
I've been working will a developer of another FSR solution, but we have bad motion blur with animated plants that needs to be worked out, so it is on hold for A21.
I'll check than one out sometime...
Thanks for the info.
On 5/18/2023 at 4:03 PM, ParadiseLostUK said:I think you are confused. Rick actually said they were hoping for a mid May release barring any issues. You have clearly taken that as being 'committed' to mid May.
Exactly. In no way, shape or form was the team committed to any date. We simply have guesses.
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On 5/16/2023 at 8:50 AM, Adun0608 said:
There is no perfect world, no perfect life, and no perfect game. I don't understand why it's not possible to give a definite release time after publishing so much content? At least it should make me clear why? I think most people only ask for these things
A lot of game development does not work like that. Bugs are often their own unique tasks with many unknowns which makes time estimates vague. Many bugs are also not yet discovered, so how do you estimate time for something you don't know exists? Right now we know about x amount of bugs we want to fix, but each day testers may find zero or 5 more that are must fixes, which then takes of x amount of time each. One could be 10 minutes, another 3 days.
On 5/17/2023 at 12:24 AM, Aldranon said:THIS!
This is exactly how "Damage Control" should be handled if a release day (or month) is missed. (An approximate percent complete would prevent the need for it)
Like the police quote: "Just the facts, Ma'am".
No need to troll or counter-troll people who are annoyed and disappointed and vent something less than helpful.
Except when we say 80% of bugs fixed and then the next day say 76% of bugs fixed as new ones are found. They will LOVE IT!
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On 5/10/2023 at 2:13 PM, Jost Amman said:
Someone on Steam (FT) who can't access the official forums asked me to relay this post here.
I think this would be interesting to know to @faatal for some A21.x patch (if it's not been solved already).
Please, don't make me create a bug report, since it's not even my find. Tks
I got it to do the same thing. It is totally normal. Shadows are not cheap to render. Looking into the building, you have all manner of objects near you, rendering with all their shadows. We do not have a static world where we can precompute visibility, so there is a lot of overdraw in that situation. Also, the occlusion manager does not disable shadows, as it does not know where they will be projected to and shadows are draw calls.
On 5/12/2023 at 1:16 PM, RipClaw said:You realize that the engine is updated with every major release ? A21 is based on Unity 2021 LTS as far as I know. And A22 will probably then be based on Unity 2022 LTS.
Yes. 2022 LTS should be out soon and I hope to have A22 using it.
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8 hours ago, Naz said:
Are radiation mechanics still planned for any future alphas? like needing a rad suit to go to the wasteland for example. I think it's been talked about before but i haven't heard anything about it in quite some time, just wondering if its still in the cards.
Probably. Planned are more biome progression type mechanics.
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2 hours ago, BFT2020 said:
Isn't that the whole point of the wasteland biome? To be more difficult than the other biomes?
Yes. Wasteland is death. You should only be going there if you are well prepared.
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13 hours ago, MichaelL. said:
It's my understanding that there has been a lot of optimization of the lighting in-game - which helps a lot with FPS. I'm curious if we will still be able to light obects/blocks "internally " (from the inside-out) by turning off the light's shadow setting in order to create special effects?
There have been some changes to lighting. I would not use the word "lot". FPS is better somewhat. PC hardware, your settings and what the game is doing and rendering vary greatly, so it all comes down to what your current bottleneck is.
Changing a Unity light's settings is exactly the same.
10 hours ago, mstdv inc said:@faatal please confirm or deny that the game uses hitscan for firearms and projectile for bow and crossbow?
Yes.
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17 hours ago, zztong said:
I'm cool with seeing how the vehicles play, but I do hope:
(1) Running into a shopping cart does not continue to be like running into a block of granite, and
(2) That if the vehicle has spikes and a ram plate that running into a fleshy zombie doesn't hurt [the vehicle] too much. Otherwise, could I please take off the spikes and ram plate so that getting around in the wilderness was easier?
1 Is the same. Shopping carts are blocks. Blocks don't move. Would need to be a prop and with lower health or special hit rules....
2 At some point vehicles are supposed to get separate parts to represent mods, so they can be turned on/off, but we did not have the time in A21.
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22 hours ago, Survager said:
When something is created in the workbench and at this time the light of the lamp burns brighter, this is clearly visible and logical. 👍
In regards to the forge, wouldn't it make more sense for the bellows to be animated to compress and decompress when something is being created there? 😇
I understand that this is more difficult to do than changing the intensity of the glow, but if you guys decide to do this, do not forget about the concrete mixer, it would also like to spin when they mix the concrete 😉And the campfire could just sound a little different when something is being cooked there. For example, it could be the sounds of frying or gurgling 🙂
Sure, it could be better, but most of us have like 5 things we are working on and we have little time left for when we would like to release. Different methods take different amounts of time to do and often require different combinations of people to work on them.
New cement mixer model is not done. Bellows were not made to animate.
The new campfire with the 3 parts turning off/on is in, but art is being adjusted. It does glow brighter during crafting and looks fine.
19 hours ago, Survager said:On the last stream, we were shown that zombies will eat the corpses of animals. Do you have plan's that zombie-vulture/bears/wolves/coyotes also make it with deer's/rabbit's/chicken's corpse?
Sure, I can dream about a thousand features, but we shall see what we have time for.
18 hours ago, Gamida said:Wait. I never even noticed that. Do you mean we can kill zoms again by hitting with vehicle if we don't mind the trade off of it doing damage?
Don't mind that at all.
Yes. Vehicles do a lot more damage to zombies and you take it as well.
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On 5/4/2023 at 10:45 PM, vergilsparda said:
- With the new vehicle damage system, has anything been changed or put into place to prevent vehicles from taking damage when going up and over overpasses in towns and cities (or in general). I find that often when going up that ramp bit, because it's not smooth, the vehicle hit noise plays—mostly everything but the 4x4 (as in the stream the 4x4 went over the bridge/small overpass very easily) does this. And judging by the fact that any hit seems to cause vehicle damage, doing that would cause damage; unless it doesn't anymore. I've explained that poorly but I hope I explained it somewhat well enough that I made sense here lol
- It was a little unclear in the stream as Lathan was still somewhat driving, but when vehicles are completely broken, will they be unable to be driven? Steve's explanation of certain visual items disappearing (the bike chain on the bike) and others creating sparks (the crank shaft) made it seem like when a vehicle hits 0% it will just stop working entirely.
- And third, will armor plating mods, or perhaps a new type of plating mod, be added to vehicle mods in order to lower the amount of damage any given vehicle takes (perhaps a new mod, a vehicle armor plating mod of some kind, or some sort of actual plow mod that will take no damage from zombies lol)?
1 Hit damage is scaled by angle of impact, so glancing blows do much less. There is also a minimum impact amount, below which there is no damage.
2 I, not Steve talked about that. Chain on bike is the only disappearing part. Moving very slow without gas or at 0 health is the same as A20. No one seems to know that as they never got their vehicles to 0 health!
3 Probably, but I don't know when that will get added.
22 hours ago, RipClaw said:I generally try to avoid hitting objects, but when driving through the desert or wasteland you will inevitably hit objects. I have no problem repairing my vehicle.
My question was whether the damage values you see in the stream are the final balancing for the Experimental or if they were raised to show what a badly damaged vehicle looks like in the stream without having to drive against walls for 5 minutes.
Damage numbers were not changed. That is how they currently are. The damage scaling is easy change by us and like many things, we will adjust it as necessary to achieve the balance we want.
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On 5/4/2023 at 4:26 PM, Blake_ said:
One of the things I wanted to ask.... now that you have AI throttling, will you increase the blood moon entity limit for a21? 64 is nice, I don't know if you guys talked about it. I believe CPUs can handle a bit more in the very close future though. Current top of the line rigs are doing 200+ screamer battles without much of a slideshow.
Possibly, but there is other enemy related optimizations that need to be looked at as the throttling is pretty specific with what it is doing currently.
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On 5/4/2023 at 2:53 PM, Riamus said:
If that is the case, then this has changed from maybe something to mod out to something that must be modded out for me. It will be the only thing that I feel the need to change. I don't feel there is any value to destroying something that is expensive to make and potentially has a ton of loot in it. It is nothing more than an annoyance that will generate anger when it happens and that isn't why I play games.
A20 vehicles explode the same way. I don't think zombie damage to vehicles has changed either.
You damaging your vehicle by hitting things is what has been increased.
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On 5/4/2023 at 11:40 AM, Naz said:
There are more believable with minimal dev time ways to communicate to the player the bike has broken. You could use sound effects like a tire popping or gears jamming, you could make the wheel animations hitch to make it look like somthing has broken/bent/warped preventing them spinning smoothly.
Simply copy pasting the fx for the other vehicles on to a bicycle is a very "it's 16:59 on Friday" solution 🤣
Sure. The system was set up to use particles. Anything else would be additional work and I have other things to work on now.
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1 hour ago, Riamus said:
It doesn't blow up. You can't really do anything with it once it's at 0%. It'll act just like it does when out of gas. It will barely move. But other than the lack of movement and the burning animation, it will just sit there at 0% until you repair it.
Oh, it will blow up, it just does not do it at 0 health. There is extra negative health and after that it becomes a random chance on each hit.
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18 hours ago, beerfly said:
Will @Kinyajuu be in the stream tonight, btw ? Love his work on Random World Generation and can`t wait if he could share more about what and how he is doing 🍿
Dev Stream 4 will be Robert, Steve, Me and Lathan in that order.
Robert plans on showing a lot of RWG.
3 hours ago, Riamus said:I know we're still looking towards A21 and bandits are not in there but I was wondering if there is any talk of having bandits optional as a setting when creating a new game or when creating a new map? I am very interested in seeing the bandits in the game but the game, for me, is a zombie game and I enjoy the game because of that being the focus. Once you are fighting regular people, then it starts to become too much like other games. I have a feeling I'll want to play the game without bandits at least once in a while and would rather not have to install an older version to do so. I'm not saying adding bandits is bad; I'm only saying that I think I'll enjoy playing without them in the game sometimes.
Maybe, but we are a ways off from making that determination. In any case, mods could remove them from spawning.
2 hours ago, Riamus said:Yeah, but I also have a strong suspicion that the story will only be in pregen maps and not random maps because unless they are forcing certain things to appear in random maps to make the story progress, then you don't really know what will be there and where it will be located and so a story may not work well. Besides, I'm sure that any story will not make any sense in an overhaul mod. And any story will only really be interesting the first or second time through and afterwards will most likely be ignored by people, so having an option to not do "story mode" would be valuable, imo.
We could make the story work in RWG by simply spawning what we need at various places.
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On 4/28/2023 at 8:36 AM, Neminsis said:
Not really and here's why, adding extra Z's to a small space isn't just a linear increase in difficulty, it's multiplicative e.g. 6 Zs in a small space is a lot more difficult than 3. If you screw up you can juggle 3 easily but 6 in a small space is more than you have stamina for early game and if you go loud then who knows how many you're going to call in. If they've done like I suspect that they have, and just allowed sleeper volumes to fully populate, that's a lot more potential Zs than you might think.
It increases the spawn counts and game stage. It also enables extra spawn locations if present in the volumes.
12 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:@faatal : speaking of animations... there's currently a bugged animation (or glitch) where sometimes zombies do a sudden crouch, without any movement between the standing and crouched positions. That's pretty annoying because sometimes makes it very difficult to aim. Is there any news on this in A21? Thanks
No news.
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On 4/28/2023 at 3:58 AM, Old Crow said:
Pretty sure they said they had animations and AI done, but not how they wanted them, hence why they got pushed back. Almost there though!
No, the AI is far from being done. There are no new bandits animations yet. They are using a combination of player and zombie anims, but player anims don't have root motion, so movement was hacked together and not great which leaves plenty of anim work to do.
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On 4/27/2023 at 12:33 AM, Blake_ said:
@faatal , now that we are approaching the programmer stream, I would like to ask if there are plans of making a few simplistic options for "player death" when creating a rwg or any map for that matter:
The thing is, the current death mechanic is a bit lenient on the food and water side, and while I'm not asking for rocket science, just more options with values like
SUSTENANCE PENALTY: "default no penalty/ 50% food&water/ 25% food&water /0%food&water" or something like that,
......coupled with another for diseases, like:
DISEASE PENALTY: "default no penalty/ maintain all diseases (but a bit reduced to allow for some time to heal)/ maintain all diseases with a lot of reduction,in the earliest of stages"
and another for XP, for example:
XP PENALTY: 25%/50%/75%/99%
While they are simple, they could work in avoiding the "I'm infected, let's die to cure my infection, abrassion, head injury and broken arms and legs, because it's too much work to find all the items to heal", Or even "I'm hungry and losing hp and thirsty and can't do things properly, let's eat glass to replenish, I'm only level 3 !!".
We have talked about death penalties, but there are no changes in A21. I'd prefer a simple you are 1% infected on res.
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On 4/25/2023 at 2:20 PM, cmills said:
I know that since this is a vowel game it is very cpu intensive. With all of the high res textures of a21 and memory requirements, that come with it, would the game benefit more from a processor with higher clock speeds or a greater amount of cache?
A21 actually uses less RAM from optimizations, which was needed for console and those changes are ongoing. We have also been using more props for items and those can stream their textures, so potentially better on VRAM or at least more flexible use of VRAM.
I would go for higher clocks, but both would improve performance.11 -
You can't make too many assumptions about random art that was shown for a future alpha, because that does not mean it will turn out that way. We have a lot of different developers, with a variety of opinions, skills and goals and they show what they think is meaningful or interesting or cool or happens to be done.
1 hour ago, Jost Amman said:Can I ask you a question on the matter? ... I really liked when you introduced the grass moving under the wind's pressure.
Is it possible to make even trees bend under a strong wind? I would be excited to see more "extreme" weather in the game at some point!
Grass has a different shader than trees and use different techniques in the shader for their animation. Trees are 2 different versions of speedtree, which have a bunch of rules and limitations for how they work, some of which we don't like. To go back in time, we would probably do them differently.
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Alpha 21 Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted
Yeah, well they already got the server to hang. Not sure if it is another issue with water, something else or the world being a bit old and abused. Testing continues...