faatal
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Posts posted by faatal
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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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22 minutes ago, Cr0wst0rm said:
Just out of curiosity, was the flickering tree bug fixed? If yes was this caused by negative scaling? Incorrect bounds for culling algorithm?
Maybe. I have not seen or heard anyone at the company talk about disappearing trees in months. Trees are in large groups with a single occludee that has to take into account the largest edge tree, which may also be moving from animation, so the bounds is an approximation. Too small, disappearing. Too big, inefficient.
There was an odd case, maybe a year ago where it looked like occludees were swapped, but was never reproduced.
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On 4/21/2023 at 12:01 PM, mstdv inc said:
Does this mean that because of consoles, the main version of the game on the PC will be cut?Why the problem of insufficient console memory does not remain a console problem.The way the game is cut there, not on the PC.
Or does Unity not work well with threading?6 cores of 12 threads have long been the norm, but the game does not fully use the processor.Most people will not have processors with good performance per core because i7/i9 and R7/R9 have it, while most use i3/i5 and R3/R5 where there are 8 or more threads.We have CPU performance, but the game doesn't use it.
There are many players on PC/Mac/Linux with worse hardware than the current gen consoles, but they can still play the game because they can turn the game settings way down. The goal for current gen consoles is to have high quality settings, with good FPS and still fit in memory, which is not an easy combination.
Many operations in Unity have to be done on the main thread, but it does get a bit less restrictive with each year's changes. Their newer tech works much better with threads, but is generally more buggy or not done and requires gutting a lot of code and rewriting how you do things, which we don't have time to do.
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1 minute ago, HB_H4wk said:
@faatal Is there any possibility of a Yuka Battle Thong for male characters that wish to live in the desert biome?
LOL. That is certainly a possibility.
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17 minutes ago, MajorMunchy said:
but take one look at any modders. single man/women, adds many things with little to no performance loss. I can take Undead legacy for example. that man is a legend at this game and its 1 person creating content of a 10+ person team.
That is nice that modders can do that, but we need to make sure that vanilla is going to work on many years worth of PCs, Mac, Linux, consoles and lot of different GPUs. Currently, the game barely fits in Xbox Series S memory and quickly runs out as you try to play it, so memory is a great concern and we are doing a lot of work to reduce usage of. Streaming/unloading will help, but that is not a Unity strength, so some programming time is going to trying to improve that, without lag spikes loading data.
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2 hours ago, saoron666 said:
But how much does it take to change the colors at least? shirt color, pants color.. simple things without changing the models so it looks a bit different and not repetitive?
That would require a clothing mask texture being made for each zombie for the tint areas or additional textures made. Either approach would push up memory use, so that would need to be evaluated too. The artists are busy working on all the previously mentioned art.
2 hours ago, saoron666 said:in that case, i wish they had attacked the zombie remodeling and not the water.. since the water doesn't have any benefits for the gameplay itself rather than looks better..
Completely different people. The various water changes were done by three different programmers, who can not do zombie art.
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On 4/18/2023 at 6:26 PM, Obsessive Compulsive said:
Ohhh? What I noticed was your animation rate versus physics updates and transforms are all done OOP...
The game tick rate is .05 ms, so that might be what your were seeing. Don't know where you got .01 from as most code runs at frame rate, physics fixed update rate .02 ms, or the previously mentioned tick rate.
We are trying to finish A21, so certainly not wanting to make large engine changes now.
I didn't get some of the other things you were saying, but thanks for info.0 -
4 hours ago, Guppycur said:
Boats are definitely doable (we have boat mods) and it really does add an element, but I honestly wouldn't consider it game changing unless there was a good *reason* to boat.
Like fishing or diving. And fishing mods require the block item swap property to work with the method we use, and I'm super curious if the new water will support that.
All in all, as much as I like boats, they'd be wasted imo, without a reason for them.
I hate arguing against new features.
Well, the goal would be to give you reasons to not want to be in the water. 🌊
4 hours ago, Crypted said:I have a question about game development faatal, is it true that the further you progress with a game the more complicated it becomes. I heard something like this from some people and just wanted to know if any of this is true or not? Sorry if I'm completely wrong.
Definitely. Games with many features grow massively as they are developed, because at the start they don't have all those features and often when features are added they are basic and then grow over time.
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12 hours ago, spud42 said:
If i remember correctly the raft was put on hold until they got around to fixing the water. how can you raft when the water surface had holes in it? you would also leave a track in the water surface behind you as the water blocks were destroyed.
i remember building a castle in water quite a few alphas ago. every zombie thay came into the water and was killed destroyed the water blocks on the bottom of the lake when they despawned leaving unsightly holes ... plus i think i remember a gurgling water sound too.. we have been asking for water to be fixed fo 4 or 5 alphas at least.
The water simulation changes don't really effect the raft. It could have worked with the old water as well as the new. Large bodies of water are just idle voxels in the new simulation. Holes would cause the raft to hit a bump, but large bodies in the old sim rarely had holes in them.
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12 hours ago, Philipp said:
I got a general question about these "did a Prototype, Stopped working on it stuff"
How does it comes like that? Is it like, you get the job to program a raft, because someone thinks it's a great idea, and then, when testing, someone decides it's not as fun as its supposed to be as Feature, so it's cancelled? Because, at some point, someone has to had the idea, that the game needs a raft, am I right? I just try to understand how it works since im not working in a gamecompany, neither am I a Programmer.
Just need clarification, because every stuff thats gonna be programmed an then canceled is lost time in game development or not? Hope you get my point since my english is not flawless at all.
Thanks ✌🏼
The raft model has been in the project for years and the plan was to eventually do something with it. I made the vehicle system generic enough to support vehicles floating on water. I always have dozens of tasks I could work on, but some days you just want to have fun with something new, so back in September I spent a day setting up the prefab and xml to make it work and it does.
I showed it to the team and we had a laugh about what we could do with it someday, but it needs many more days to polish it up, so it was not deemed to be something we would do for A21. That work is not wasted, but simply set aside until in can be properly finished and combined with other water related features like say a shark and better shapes and quantities of water in the world, so you would actually want to make a raft to get around. I'd love to have a water map full of islands.
Game development often has creative rabbit trails where you try some idea and see what happens. People also work harder when given some freedom to try new things or work in areas that interest them. We are not an assembly line of robots.
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1 hour ago, Riamus said:
My understanding is that they aren't looking to add new vehicles. However, there has been a little talk (not from the devs as far as I know) that a raft could possibly be considered. But there is a good chance something like that will not be added until after gold, if at all. But that is just my take on it after reading a lot of stuff on the forums and I could be entirely wrong. 😁
When they add fast travel for traders, they could consider the possibility of a dock/boat combo POI that allows fast travel between them. But I doubt they would want to go that route.
It sounds like most will remain the same (mostly). However, they are removing any that relate to crafting recipes and will need to rebalance the skills to compensate. We can see in the dev stream that they added a new skill perk to each tree. Being that, it is hard to say.
Well....there is that raft prototype I did last year. Works, but with a few bugs. That may become a feature at some point.
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Alpha 21 Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted
Yes. Wasteland is death. You should only be going there if you are well prepared.