faatal

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!

Terrain voxels by themselves are diamonds, so they can't fill a block voxel, which is a cube. Terrain voxels only fill a cube when blending into adjacent terrain or multiple terrain voxels together blending into air blocks, but that shape is a spike in that direction. Adjacent terrain spikes merge together and then remove hidden faces. You can change an adjacent block voxel's density to blend terrain into it, but that is a spike, not a flat face.

Terrain uses the marching cubes algorithm, which makes a diamond shape that merges into their neighbors, so they stretch in each direction. They also stretch into air, so the density of the surrounding air also effects the shape and there are some density combinations that make a bad mesh, but normal terrain manipulation does not create those combinations.

It is a terrain collision mesh generation issue. Could be timing and/or a combination of density values or simply a code error. I've never seen someone fall through the world digging down.

No date yet. Streams would be x amount of time before we anticipate release as we don't want streams too early. Multiple people, including myself have tasks to finish with unknown durations. A good example is a hole in terrain bug I have when quest resetting some POIs. I've looked at it before and why it happens is unknown, which means it could take a day or a week or more. There is no way to know, only guess.

That one does not matter since the computer version of the game does not use IL2CPP as it would break code mods. Console is using IL2CPP. Console needed a fix in .17 for a PS5 occlusion bug and we currently try to keep versions in sync between computer and console dev, so the update from .16 to latest.

To be clear, this is more zombies on the server, spread across multiple players, while improvements like disabling jiggle is client side. If you as a client had 100 zombies around you, the overhead of animating, colliding and rendering them is still expensive and you would probably have a low FPS. Must Fixes was started a few months ago, but that is just a guide. Multiple systems are still being worked on, polished and tested, which are not often in MFs. There is some overlap, like my vehicle damage task is marked MF, yet it is a system improvement task, not a bug. That one is basically done, but I'm not closing it yet as the values are still open to tweaking and I would like to work on vehicles smoking when highly damaged, if I spend the time. That could also be done during experimental, so not a high priority to me.

The cap currently is the same. Different spawning systems can now scale the cap as they check the count. Blood moon is x1.9. Sleeper volumes x2.1.

Some news. The basics of an entity activity throttling system have been added to A21 to allow servers to handle more zombies. Large AI counts would overload pathing causing all zombies to be delayed in moving, so this decreases the update rate based on distance from players while still allowing each player to always have some fully active zombies. With this change, max zombie counts for blood moons and sleeper volumes are allowed to be scaled around double what the the cap is set to. The system also disables jiggle components for clients with distance as these were getting expensive as more zombies have them. The system will continue to be improved to throttle other activities. I noticed last week we had an old Terrain Tool that was not being used, as it did not work very well, so it has gotten some changes and bug fixes. It now grows terrain in all directions (was just upwards before) and you can select the fill block. Undo also works. This will allow POI designers to make easier and faster terrain instead of the old add/paste/cut blocks and modify density using the cursor keys. Other improvements are planned. Grass like plants now have shadows, which were removed years ago for performance reasons. Based on tests enabling shadows for grass near the player, I saw no reason we can't have these shadows and it looks nicer. Enabling and distance is controlled by shadow and grass quality settings. We are also finishing the process of doing one more Unity update to 2021.3.19.

Maybe, but that does not make it look better all by itself. Players like myself still want to point in any direction while on the ladder, so you will see what exactly? My gun pointed away from the ladder with my torso twisted backwards? Zombies need to be able to attack in any direction yet still be hanging on the ladder somehow. There is no good solution for the direction issue, which is why some games lock feet/hands/camera while climbing, which always feels like garbage, just so it looks nice.

I'm not sure. I would like to see the quests restricted somewhat and pushed out farther but I am not a big quester and others on the team have their own opinions.

I'm using .18 for testing now and our console devs need a fix in .17 for an occlusion bug and since they are parallel developing, we try to stay on the same version, hence the stop at .18 or .19 if that drops soon. Release wise it will come down to how fast bugs get fixed, which depends on when we stop finding major bugs.

The constant stream of DLC makes me not want to buy the game. Maybe someday if they package everything together for 20 bucks, they can have my money. On the other hand, I find I never play the extra gameplay type DLCs in most gold editions of games I buy, as I am sick of the game by the time I finish...if I even make it to the end.

It is a large amount of changes, in line with any other big alpha. We have more programmers than ever working on it, and there are a lot of system level updates going on or planning to happen, which are not necessarily flashy features to players, but help the game run better. Much of that will be needed to get all the PC features running on the new gen of consoles, as they may be better than the last, but are still limited in some ways compared to a mid tier gaming PC. Thanks Flying dogs with no collision will work perfectly.

Last year a few of our consultant programmers analyzed our net traffic and greatly reduced the amount of data sent. Then one of them reworked delays and frequency of entity updates, so I expect it to feel better.

The only changes are us using never versions of Unity in which they sometimes fix issues. We recently updated to 2021.3.16, but may end up on .18 or .19 for A21. Yes, from the few hours here and there I have played a new game to get the feel of it, that feel was great. The UI for it is a bit confusing at first, but I adapted.

It is not as I looked at it last week and the mixer is a single mesh, so you can't rotate the drum. I was thinking at least it should have a particle effect, but the code for that type of object did not support it and ten seconds later I was distracted by something else and several other things since then. That does not really matter yet, as several systems have changes in the works and bugs are being found daily in them, then back around to fixing. Should be closer together. Not in A21.

It may seem like that, but A17 took 1.5 years and A20 was about 1.4 years. Thoughts of going gold with various dates have happened many times before. No one knows when that will happen. A21 gets closer every day. No bandits in A21, as Steve and I are the ones working on bandits from the programming side, and we are working on bugs and other improvements until A21 is stable.

Sorry, but I don't know of any plans to change it.