[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

On 4/26/2021 at 7:32 PM, Adam the Waster said:

*Cowboy joke i can't think of*

New makeshift pistol Looking good. ill uses this at end game! 

 

I see road markings.  All kinds of road markings.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

@Devs is there any news about "dynamic prefabs" and about the water rework that is mentioned in A20... What does those things bring us and what do they do?

 

Other questions: 
1. Will you ever offload S.I to the GPU (it is the perfect problem space match) and will you ever use all CPU cores for A.I ?  

2. I only have a #1.  Sorry.  

 

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

16 hours ago, meganoth said:

No. What you should try is get evidence that there is really something wrong. At the moment we just have a rumor that could as well be coincidence.

 

7 days has a long backlog of confirmed and unconfirmed bugs. I don't think devs or testers will go on a witch hunt for a bug that a few people seem to think they may have sensed on the ghost radar while meditating on which base to build 😉

 

 

I'm definitely NOT going to open a bug report for this - rather let have work on performance and stuff like that that are real issues.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

19 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

That doesn't seem a problem to me. It's not that the random's not working, it's that the random stuff was generated beforehand.

What you should try is to loot a POI, then generate the same world seed again and then loot the same POI again and see what happens I guess...

 

It doesn't bother me enough and I would rather have TFP spend their resources on things that actually does.  And it wasn't reported by me.

 

EDIT - it doesn't seem to be generated beforehand because if it was the order in which the containers was searched would not matter.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

11 hours ago, faatal said:

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.

 

The problem is this:  If you make a copy of your save before you loot a house, and then loot it, then restore the saved game and loot it again in the exact same order, you get the exact same loot.  So it isn't very random.

 

FWIW I only know about this because it was reported in the Bugs report section by someone.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

9 hours ago, Sidney said:

I'm curious why you believe that.  Do you guys want to be like EA?  Release games that are visually pretty, but fundamentally garbage?  If so please reconsider because almost nothing that AAA publishers @%$# out is worth the time, let alone money, to play.

 

This is just like, my opinion man, but the things that are holding you back are:

• The lack of variety as well as the hard tiering of weapons and armor.  For example the sniper rifle is strictly better than the marksman rifle, and there are only 3 rifles total.
• Bugs, especially the gamebreaking ones like vehicle duping, item loss in vehicles, vehicle loss, crippling FPS hitching during weapon fire, zombies' attacks clipping through walls, jerky zombie movement (the micro rubberbanding not the pathing that attempts to juke the player, that's cool), the game deciding that you don't have a bedroll or that your bedroll is actually someone else's, etc.
• Things that perhaps aren't bugs, but are super irritating like the almost random autosort order, inconsistent reload and draw with bows, camera position not staying the same when exiting a vehicle so you are always disoriented, inability to consistently pick up a thrown spear, respawning "near your bed" can place you on the roof of a nearby POI (like a Shamway), the cancerous amount of I-beam debris in the wasteland making the 4x4 unusable there, gaining zero exp from cooking food or from zombies dying to traps/bleeding/fire.
• Lack of special zombies.  Only the demo, and to a lesser extent the vultures, present a threat.  Everything else is a bullet sponge to one degree or another.
• Game progression, especially loot not being better in harder POIs and harder biomes.  I understand you're working on this one, so this may not be valid for long.
• Low worth/Worthless game content like stealth, gillie suits, knives, spears, batons, buried treasure perks, etc.
• Terrible FPS, especially during BMs, even with the graphics turned way down.  My PC isn't a potato, but I never saw my frames break 30 on a BM after night 14.
• Lack of features common in other FPS games such as different mouse sensitivity settings for different zoom levels, autorun, configs stored in a universal and portable .ini/.cfg file instead of the damn windows registry (really guys?), and changeable crosshairs.
• Not enough "knobs and dials" to customize the game without mods.  For example you can't turn off the death penalty, nor can you remove the noobie weather protection.  There are a LOT of settings that should be configurable when creating a new world that aren't there.

These are the things keeping you from greatness, not how pretty your models are.

 

I mostly disagree with point #1 above.  I assume you mean lack of variety in weapons, not lack of variety in this game.

 

Ignoring that I really agree with the above as a general "the game is not finished and needs a lot of polish".

 

If I know anything about software development (and I do) I would bet that many of the performance issues relates to just how broad this games is in terms of features.  Sure it can be optimised but the number of concepts here is actually mind boggling.  You have distributed state management in a game with RPG and Tower of defence and FPS rolled into one.  Then you have concepts like time management, resource management, and S.I.  Those things are each worth a book and people just take them for granted.  Fully destructable world.  Check.  Zombie AI and pathing through a fully destructable world.... NOW things get serious.  Just for fun we also have 3d spacial stuff - lighting, reflections, weather.  But wait, there's more.  Because everything is moddable and controlled via XML config.  Enough?  Nope.  We have buffs and status effects and bonusses.  Lets not forget about effect types - explosions affect blocks differently to say a melee attack.  And then we still need to get to entities, vehicles, and other things that are not part of the environment.

 

There is nothing else even remotely as ambitious as this.

 

Oh and that little "distributed state management" thing I glossed over... Whoever coded that needs a medal.

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

6 hours ago, madmole said:

Re: I was wrong...

You are always wrong bro.

Love this.  Agree with this.
 

 

 

5 hours ago, Adam the Waster said:

The torch is not as bright but can be used a A emergency weapon, (helped me a hell of alot early game)

Plus you can throw it on a wall and pick it back up!  Love the torch early game, and the lighting from it has a nicer atmosphere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[A20 Developer Diary Discussions]

15 hours ago, Yoghira said:

Hi,

may i ask your audio guy in your developer team if you plan to insert spatialized audio / sound to Alpha 20 or a later version?

 

Ok it is only a thing when you play with headphones but it should be an option to activate. It will create much better immersion because

you know exactly where to look if you hear a noise. Above / under , left or right, behind or in front of you - you can say where they are (zombies, animals), ... with closed eyes.

 

I installed Unity just to play with that and it is very easy. I tried:

Unity´s spatializer,

Resonance Audio,

Oculus Spatializer Plugin

Steam Audio Spatializer.

You don´t need soundreflections or ambisonics or things like that, just the spatializer.

And then to make it "perfekt" bind the footsteps to the foots, the "Grrrrrrrr" to the head, the "swooshes and "swings" to the arm or hand

and the "gibs" or hits to the collision coordinates - done. 😀

 

 

And a second thing i recognized is that u use "Linear Rolloff" instead of "Logarithmic Rolloff" in most of

your "3D Sound Settings" for the creature sounds.

That cause the unnatural sense of distance to the sound source.

Please use "Logarithmic Rolloff" wether you go spatialized or not.

 

How do you as community and as developer think about these?

 

Regards

Yoghira

There is more amiss with the sound system than just linear fall-off.  It seems that only the horizontal element of distance is considered.  Vertical distance doesn't matter - so sounds 200m above you while in a mine at bedrock is just as loud as sound right next to you at the surface.

 

But yes.  +100 to this from me.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

Is the vehicle collision system that was mentioned for A19 still a thing?

[A19e Nitrogen - UNSTABLE]

I have a wish-list item for NitroGen!  I don't know if there is a better place to post this...

 

I don't know what exact options but perhaps something like this:

 

Main option:

Tree spread: Default / Random / Clustered

 

If selecting Clustered then the following options applies:

1. Size of clearing between clusters: Small, medium, large, Varied

2. Small clusters: None, one, few, some, many, lots

3. Medium clusters: None, one, few, some, many, lots

4. Large clusters: None, one, few, many, lots

5. Very large clusters: None, one, few, many, lots

6. Cluster Tree Density: None, Sparse, Dense, Thick, Varied

7. Tree density in space between clusters: None, sparse, dense, thick, varied

 

[THIS is the Wedge Tip Replacement in A19!]

I want Zeds that jump over holes, but sometimes miss and fall down.

I want zeds the climb up walls, but sometimes falls back down.

 

I want zeds that makes it across a wedge, but only 80% of the time.

 

I want zeds that selects a path to the player that is sometimes not the cheapest path, with most of them takeing that path.  And if they fall then they have a high chance of avoiding any path that involves that spot they fell the last time!

 

 

[Padded armor is best armor. Change my mind.]

1 hour ago, madmole said:

[snip...], then wear an athletic jacket you will be just as fast as a naked, possibly faster. [...snip]

Jacket and running shoes! Wheeeee!!!!!

[(A21) bdubyah's modlets]

Wow,I've never played anymods but this makes me want to use mods!

[Current high demand Pimp Dreams (Constant W.I.P)]

Separate generators gives you redundancy.