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Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!


madmole

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!  

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  1. 1. Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

    • A18 Stable is Out!
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Does anyone know if optimizations will come to a18?

 

Game runs very poor going from 16 to 17. Main reason I stopped playing.

 

Code and settings get optimized on a regular basis, but most improvements only give a small FPS increase.

 

We did switch to Unity 2019.1 a few weeks ago and after testing their new incremental garbage collector (GC), I did enable it on Monday (for A18). GC does cause regular FPS drops, which incremental mostly hides by spreading the work over multiple frames.

 

Some of the recent A18 changes that help with performance:

 

Refactored LightLOD (optimized, added logging and profiling, removed NOLIGHT).

Added Bloom and SS Reflections graphics options and reordered.

Fixed SSAO graphics option, so not always on.

Added medium shadow distance option (closer than the old low) and reduced low to faster values.

Added Ultra graphics preset (similar to old High) and reduced Medium and High settings a little.

Fixed player placed lights not updating or disabling with distance from camera and added 60% range increase.

Improved player placed light shadow modes vs distance.

Changed lights to decrease range instead of intensity with distance.

 

In A17.3 you can also try typing in the console (F1 key):

gfx pp enable 0

That will disable all the newer post processing effects, which has been shown to greatly improve FPS on slower computers.

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Yeah and but you need a whetstone crafted at a workbench using materials only harvested with a steel pickaxe! Lets keep people in the pre stone age for weeks :)

 

I don't mind the stone age.. ^^ Been living that for the past ~7 years

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Yeah and but you need a whetstone crafted at a workbench using materials only harvested with a steel pickaxe! Lets keep people in the pre stone age for weeks :)

 

Why not actually implement something like that as a mod for the workbench? Want to improve the damage of your tool or melee weapon temporarily? Use a whetstone. I think it would be nice to have something like a temp buff mod that could be applied to items. It'd be something for early game especially since lvl 1 items are able to have a mod on them.

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Hi Faatal. Talking about optimisations, can voxels be combined? For example, in a cave collapse, it seems to calculate each and every voxel separately. My thoughts on the matter is, especially for sand or soil, combine the voxels of the same type and calculate it all at once. Or at least calculate 5 or 10 blocks at once.

 

I'm sure there are many different techniques that could be used for those calculations, but another programmer deals with that code.

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I think we need the zombie version of all the big animals and make them the most common to find.

Make them difficult to distinguish at a distance and which will force you to approach or kill them from a distance to check if they have usable meat.

Animals like the zombie deer would also spawn in the heat zone of the crops and thus we avoid that the cultivation areas become a meat factory.

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There is not much to the 'tech'. Find object enable/disable. That is the easy part. The problem is the content. All those zombies are mostly one skinned mesh. You can't turn cowboy hats off. The artists would need to edit each model to split the mesh up and that would take a while to do.

 

That's true, but we have a lot of items, like cowboy hats, for players to wear. Are those separate meshes? If we ignore for a moment that the artists may say they don't look good together, would it be easy to stick the player cowboy hat on a zombie that doesn't wear a hat?

 

Some of the recent A18 changes that help with performance:

 

Refactored LightLOD (optimized, added logging and profiling, removed NOLIGHT).

Added Bloom and SS Reflections graphics options and reordered.

Fixed SSAO graphics option, so not always on.

Added medium shadow distance option (closer than the old low) and reduced low to faster values.

Added Ultra graphics preset (similar to old High) and reduced Medium and High settings a little.

Fixed player placed lights not updating or disabling with distance from camera and added 60% range increase.

Improved player placed light shadow modes vs distance.

Changed lights to decrease range instead of intensity with distance.

 

In A17.3 you can also try typing in the console (F1 key):

gfx pp enable 0

That will disable all the newer post processing effects, which has been shown to greatly improve FPS on slower computers.

 

Can confirm about gfx pp enable 0, and gfx pp ssr 0 in particular.

 

Players are really going to appreciate an increased range on their lights! My understanding has been that, for a given volume to achieve a given level of illumination, a low number of long-range dynamic lights are more performant than a high number of short-range dynamic lights, because calculating multiple lights per vertex or face is intensive. In other words - and correct me if I'm wrong - players won't need to use as many lights, which is more convenient and better for frame rates. :high5:

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Code and settings get optimized on a regular basis, but most improvements only give a small FPS increase.

 

We did switch to Unity 2019.1 a few weeks ago and after testing their new incremental garbage collector (GC), I did enable it on Monday (for A18). GC does cause regular FPS drops, which incremental mostly hides by spreading the work over multiple frames.

 

Some of the recent A18 changes that help with performance:

 

Refactored LightLOD (optimized, added logging and profiling, removed NOLIGHT).

Added Bloom and SS Reflections graphics options and reordered.

Fixed SSAO graphics option, so not always on.

Added medium shadow distance option (closer than the old low) and reduced low to faster values.

Added Ultra graphics preset (similar to old High) and reduced Medium and High settings a little.

Fixed player placed lights not updating or disabling with distance from camera and added 60% range increase.

Improved player placed light shadow modes vs distance.

Changed lights to decrease range instead of intensity with distance.

 

In A17.3 you can also try typing in the console (F1 key):

gfx pp enable 0

That will disable all the newer post processing effects, which has been shown to greatly improve FPS on slower computers.

 

gfx pp enable 0 works only in 17.3? I was trying that in 17.2 and the command was unknown.

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I think we need the zombie version of all the big animals and make them the most common to find.

Make them difficult to distinguish at a distance and which will force you to approach or kill them from a distance to check if they have usable meat.

Animals like the zombie deer would also spawn in the heat zone of the crops and thus we avoid that the cultivation areas become a meat factory.

 

We already have meat factories. There are POIs where you can find boars and they repawn every 5 days.

The biggest meat factory is called

"Carl's Corn & Bob's Boars". If you find this POI, you won't have any problems getting meat. Inside there are about 10 boars and a big mutated pig named Grace who gives as much meat as a bear.

 

 

I have a whole box full of meat and at times I even sold it to the traders. That's why I don't understand why there is so much picking on the farmers. Farmers invest points, time and effort in building a garden and should be rewarded with a reliable source of food and not be punished constantly because someone thinks that starving would be quite fun.

 

Starvation should be a stumbling block at the beginning and one should be able to overcome it and then turn to more important things. It makes no sense to starve as much on day 300 as on day 1.

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Re the new spear... It's on the right hand side, but shown in a left hand.

 

I can understand the reasoning - it's held by both hands for a jabbing action. I just think it would look more natural if it was toted along in the right hand (potentially the right hand isn't seen unless attacking), with the left hand zipping on to hold the upper half of the spear for a jab attack.

 

The alternative would be to hold the spear across the body (in both hands), with the tip showing on the players left.

 

Edit: It also would obstruct looting if both hands were perpetually holding the spear, so IMHO a free left hand posture is more appropriate when not attacking.

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Hi Faatal. Talking about optimisations, can voxels be combined? For example, in a cave collapse, it seems to calculate each and every voxel separately. My thoughts on the matter is, especially for sand or soil, combine the voxels of the same type and calculate it all at once. Or at least calculate 5 or 10 blocks at once.

 

It's certainly possible but it's debatable if it would be any faster.

 

You'd still have to calculate the neighbours of each block to determine whether they both fall which is about the same amount of calculations as you would need to check both individually, you're then adding extra calculations to essentially make a free-floating voxel group*. About the only thing you're saving is a few temporary cubic physics objects and potentially having them replaced with single (computationally expensive) convex mesh which will likely have to be recalculated as a part of it hits an obstruction.

 

With the coroutines used in the calculation of building collapses you'll likely end up with a "Wile E. Coyote" scenario collapsing a large structure. Blow away the ground floor** and you'll have to wait while the entire building is checked for linked voxels before the collapse starts. This would be quite funny to watch but not particularly realistic.

 

* Voxel groups would be a great addition but I doubt TFP will implement them at this stage.

** First floor for the Americans :-)

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Wait... are we Americans supposed to think ground floor means something other than first floor?

 

The British and Americans generally have a off-by-one error when counting building floors, by now it's force of habit to specify which I'm using :-)

 

British........American

 

Ground.........First

First..........Second

Second.......Third

etc...

 

"Counting the mezzanine!"

Board member : The Hudsucker Proxy

 

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

ground zero seems to pop into my mind.

where did that come from...

 

A question asked by the first people to be standing at ground-zero :-)

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ground zero seems to pop into my mind.

where did that come from...

 

It could have come from the total IQ of the five men who volunteered to stand under a nuclear airburst detonation...

 

Most of them died from cancer. Was it a surprise to them? I've wondered.

 

The camera man however, did not volunteer, a Mr. Yo♥♥♥♥ake… I cant make this stuff up. So many fails.

 

That's just great, censor a Japanese name.

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The camera man however, did not volunteer, a Mr. Yo♥♥♥♥ake… I cant make this stuff up. So many fails.

 

That's just great, censor a Japanese name.

 

To be fair, there are plenty of western names that get censored.

 

♥♥♥♥ Van Dyke

♥♥♥♥ Cheney

♥♥♥♥ Grayson

 

Let's see how many of these British surnames get through, these are real btw. Shuttlecock, Lillycrap, Cockburn :-)

 

Updated: Damn, I love American censorship algorithms.

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The point is that to some the part that we like most about the game is its potential for survival game. I only fully enjoy the game the first two or three days, when your survival matters.

Agriculture right now is not necessary, and if we make it anyway anyway once you have the farm running, you do not need any maintenance and you just have to sit and wait and see how everything multiplies.

I like to have unforeseen things happen, just like when they infect you, you need to urgently look for medicines regardless of day 1 or day 300. If you do not have medicine, you will die.

With the food should be the same, the crops should be spoiled in certain circumstances, the hunting should be scarce and should not be able to accumulate unlimited food is completely stupid.

It forces players like me to make decisions, between going to POIs to try to get food cans or desperately looking for an animal to get food while it is ready for the next harvest.

Food easy to get and infinite is boring for someone like me.

I would like to take care of the food was something important and useful and that my colleagues need me for it while they enjoy killing zombies. I would sincerely like there was a place for a guy like me in this game.

Some of us bought the game because it was a survival game in the voxel world, the zombies, tower defense and others are secondary to us. Those people who only want to kill zombies already have their game.

Put an option for others so no one complains. The options are good, right Madmole? :)

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@Madmole

 

Telltale Shutting down will not impact 7 Days PC in the slightest. Alpha 17 is still coming. It's the biggest most awesome build, bigger than any DLC and 75% of a sequel that is why it's taking so long. IT will be worth the wait though and we will go gold in 2019.

 

 

 

 

 

we will go gold in 2019.

 

 

 

Is this still true? Are we actually going to see the end of Alphas, Betas, Charlies, Deltas, Etc... With the launch of what The Fun Pimps deem as "Gold release"?

 

Because going gold can mean two things off the top of my head. Selling enough copies to reach a certain milestone. As well as releasing a practically finished product. I truly hope you weren't just excited to share with us your sale's milestone as awesome as that would be for you guys.

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@Madmole

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

we will go gold in 2019.

 

 

 

Is this still true? Are we actually going to see the end of Alphas, Betas, Charlies, Deltas, Etc... With the launch of what The Fun Pimps deem as "Gold release"?

 

Because going gold can mean two things off the top of my head. Selling enough copies to reach a certain milestone. As well as releasing a practically finished product. I truly hope you weren't just excited to share with us your sale's milestone as awesome as that would be for you guys.

 

They estimate it at that time, but then lot of issues arise and they are looking to launch a18 in few months. If all goes good even then GOLD in 2019 not seems possible. But you can say 95% to gold might be achieved by end of 2019

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Na, just don't cook everything. Pretend there is spoilage or role play it. Cook what you need and have ample space for, otherwise keep loads of ingredients. We won't nerf ingredient stacks, only health related food items and bandage stacks.

 

If stack sizes are too small, we're just gonna mod them back anyway. Already do for some things.

(or make much much bigger storage spaces)

 

Some cooked foods could do with smaller stacks yes. Stews etc.

Of course, I'd like to see canning of the cooked stuff ala some of the mods.

You lose some of the benefits, but, increased stack size and portability.

(so no hot soup warming buff if you can it. Want the buff while out and about, make a campfire and heat the food)

 

 

Make the stews (stack to say 5), grab a bunch, head to the WORKBENCH, and can'em.

Take the cans out with you.

 

Actually, pretty much all the prepared stuff should get canned, jerked, whatever, except cornbread.

That could be converted to something like hardtack. (nasty, I know)

Long term storage vs short term.

 

All it takes is a few more recipies. (modders already do this btw)

 

 

Bandages though, no. First Aid kits? mebbe. (5?)

It's already too damned easy to get sliced and the bleed effect, so 10 bandages is a not bad size.

Smaller just makes it more annoying. (ok, I stop and make a few more out of the stack of cloth scraps)

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