faatal

Friday, I started on the forge mesh showing/hiding each tool and it seems to be working. This will probably make it into A21. Code supports all workstation types, so will be simple enough to do the rest as new models/features are added.

It should be no surprise to anyone that we discuss fast travel as many games have it, hence the helipads. The vehicle teleport is one of my main issues. We think the vehicle should go with you without it being annoying. I'm thinking it teleports to an open parking like area and finding a free spot. I'd prefer it be a very limited system, but it could end up as whatever makes sense or not doing it at all. It could easily not be in A22, yet show up later.

Zombie pathing is already cheap and runs off the main thread. I did fix a bug last week with only 1 path per frame being sent to the threading system and since it typically only takes 1 frame to make a path, it was a bottleneck for say 100 zeds making paths each second. A fairly simple change now has it requesting up to 8 paths per frame of which the threading system can provide about 6. This tested well with around 150 zeds on a server spread across 6 players.

1 It is just a reset time in days. It works at the POI/chunk/region level. The engine does not track player made blocks. 2 Hard to say. So many things change that you can't just load an old world and stare in the same direction and see if it is x FPS faster, because that world won't load and if it did, POIs have changed or new blocks and some blocks converted to props. A lot of it is situational with where you are, what you are doing, your hardware and your options. The simple answer is it runs a bit faster and RAM use is a fair bit less.

Yes. I started at TFP at the beginning of A17 and later in that alpha, took over AI and made large changes to how AI for zombies and animals worked. Until A21, there were dozens of big things and hundreds of smaller things for me that were higher priority than bandit AI. The new bandit work, which started during A21, is based on the current state of the AI systems, not prototype code/data from 6-7 years ago.

Interesting. I'll keep an eye on that thread. If it works well, then we may support it. Thanks for the info.

I made an 8k map the other day and it took 3.5 mins. Granted, this is on my new PC, which is a AMD 7950x.

No. That is the water surfaces level in a voxel, not how many voxels deep. We have bodies of water of a variety of depths. The water mesh is only created for the top, otherwise you would have layers upon layers of meshes, leading to visual issues and slow rendering.

They showed the worse use case. The current water is meant to be contained, not dumped on flat ground. Neither RWG or POIs have water dumped on flat ground. The water mesh generator is the old mesh code with some cleanup and the programmer working on it is still making changes. The mesh generator makes meshes at a fixed height, which does not tapper off currently. 1 - A20.7 has a few minor changes to reading the world file header. It will not effect existing A20 saves. It will simply show A21 saves in the list without throwing errors. 2 - A20.7 saves are the same as 20.6 saves. A21 will not read those saves due to many changes that are not compatible.

A20.7 has a few minor changes to reading the world file header. It will not effect existing saves. As I said a few times in the stream's chat, it will be x amount of weeks. Rick gave a more specific guess, but really it could be 3 weeks or 5 weeks or more and comes down to fixing any bugs that we do not want in even an experimental release once we finish features and polish we are doing right now. There are 63 must fix tasks right now, of which maybe half need to be done to release experimental and more will be added as we go.

LOL. Not working herd dued!

Me too, but considering it has been in testing for months and fine, I'm not too working.

It is the same. The limit is it renders into a texture and the texture is a fixed size to not use too much memory. I did change zoom a while back in Unity editor, so I can teleport around better or zoom in very close to check the art, but it is not for release as the texture no longer fills the window, so you would see the edges. No plans to change. Never looked at how it saves/loads the explored area. Every 3d game engine uses culling by the camera's view. Our occlusion manager goes beyond that and culls based on areas being hidden behind rendered objects. Yes, A21 has many changes that would break an A20 world.

According to ChatGPT we are released. "...as of my knowledge cutoff of September 2021, 7 Days to Die is already a released game. The game was initially released in 2013 as an early access title and has since had several updates and full releases."

It may already be fixed in A21, because I made changes to the rain particle system physics settings to stop it going through roofs.

It is a game and the number one rule of professional games, is to make it fun, so people will buy it and play it enough to tell their friends and repeat the cycle or you won't be making games for long because you will go broke. Most games, including 7dtd, are far from a real simulation of anything, and I'm OK with that. Where we can make it more realistic, sure, we try, but if it takes too much dev time or ruins the fun, or is overly complicated where many players would be turned off, then we skip it. That would require some serious engine changes, short of we just load the RWG map and drop you into it.

The processing I was referring to is our c# code converting data from say xml into bytes in memory, which a GPU is not going to help with. Reading of xml also causes a lot of secondary data to be read like loading of prefabs, which loads components, meshes, materials, shaders and textures. All of that being done by Unity. Asking Unity for features generally have 6 months to years of lag time before you would see it in an LTS, which is the only versions we use these days. Well I was optimistic too, but all it takes is one dev working on a core required feature who thinks they will be done in a month and then unforeseen problems or design changes happen and it becomes 4 or 6 months.

Those are only my bugs and not all of my bugs/tasks as I currently have 12 must fixes in various states of completion and across the team there are 67. That number does not mean a lot, as half of them do not need to be done for experimental and new ones get added regularly. Then there are last minute tweaks, like today it came up that sleeper volumes spawn using the game stage of the player triggering the volume, so I am trying to test a change that adds in players nearby, similar to how blood moons spawning makes parties from nearby players for game stage calc.

Features not being as far along as we hoped. We don't primarily schedule features based on time, but functionality, so it takes as long as it does for that functionality to work. Many devs would cut features to hit a time slot. We take the time, within reason, to get the features we want.

Many interactions between game code and Unity have to be done on the main thread, so that often is the FPS bottleneck regardless of what the GPU is doing. Zombie pathing is complex. There is shared data calculated around each player or group of players and then that shared data is used by each AI to find a path, but that step runs on one or more threads. A21 has changes to throttle the path request rates based on AI distance from players, but is buggy and not done.

Yes, it is currently 2 2 1 and I don't know which way it extends.

We won't be deciding things like that until the feature is in and we actually play and balance it. No. I said previously that terrain diamonds can't fill a cube exactly. Sure, each day is a day closer. No. Different systems. A hand placed block on a road is not a decal mesh generated above a terrain block.

I don't remember, but I was and am working on the decal shader, which is not a systems change. Just a change to rendering the decals we have on roads. AO draws shadows where inside edges are. It does not make things disappear. Those bugs are normally with the occlusion manager, which has some fixes in A21.

Last week we made some graphics improvements to fix two old issues. Ambient occlusion did not render on certain plants properly, so that was fixed by switching to a new mode. Unity's screen space reflections were disabled because they barely did anything, so we switched SSR systems, which now definitely shows reflections and has more features than Unity's and complements the reflection probe system.

I sure hope so!