Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[HeLLKnight]

On 9/23/2020 at 4:55 AM, faatal said:

Do you know that this is a team with many different skill sets, like pretty much every game team? Most people on the team can't fix FPS issues, so they do spent their time working on their "stupid" stuff.

 

FPS issues don't have an "I Win" button you can press to make it all better. It takes lots of time to analyze performance and find bottlenecks, which then often have no easy fix, but to rewrite and retest something, which often results in minimal gains. Features have maximum limits at which they can be optimized to run.

 

I've actually been spending half my time the last few weeks doing that and cleaning up the project of old/unused files. For example, I found an old unneeded water depth camera, that was rendering nothing each frame. After time spend researching it, removing and testing, I saw a 3% FPS gain. Not much. Path grid updates have also been optimized, which is not something increasing overall FPS, but reduces frame spikes. Terrain shader has been updated for good gains. Tree batching/instancing is being analyzed and tweaked. To get large gains, you have to do that over and over on many systems. Today I started moving many of those improvements to 19.2 for testing, so the next exp will have them.

Thank you very much Faatal, now that you're working optimizing terrain shader please take a look at this thread, there is a massive 40% fps drop from low to med terrain quality setting:

 

 

 

[n2n1]

On 9/23/2020 at 5:55 AM, faatal said:

Do you know that this is a team with many different skill sets, like pretty much every game team? Most people on the team can't fix FPS issues, so they do spent their time working on their "stupid" stuff.

 

FPS issues don't have an "I Win" button you can press to make it all better. It takes lots of time to analyze performance and find bottlenecks, which then often have no easy fix, but to rewrite and retest something, which often results in minimal gains. Features have maximum limits at which they can be optimized to run.

 

I've actually been spending half my time the last few weeks doing that and cleaning up the project of old/unused files. For example, I found an old unneeded water depth camera, that was rendering nothing each frame. After time spend researching it, removing and testing, I saw a 3% FPS gain. Not much. Path grid updates have also been optimized, which is not something increasing overall FPS, but reduces frame spikes. Terrain shader has been updated for good gains. Tree batching/instancing is being analyzed and tweaked. To get large gains, you have to do that over and over on many systems. Today I started moving many of those improvements to 19.2 for testing, so the next exp will have them.

@faatal

Thank You for telling us all this. I think it really calms some people (including me ) more than just generalized promises.

This is how i always imagined real communication with game developers.

[n2n1]

It would be logical to have this block shape in the current set (corner of block):

 

[Blake_]

Hello again @faatal . Another a19.1 b8 performance test :

 

This time around I detected a problem with the AIDirector . AIDirector aka the "wandering horde troll" knows that spawning entities all at once results in a freeze of 5-15 seconds to an already taxed cpu (that hurt). 

The freeze was the hardest I've ever seen. 4 entities at the same second. My 2.7ghz 4C/8T said nope for quite a while there.

 

Here's the screenshot, check that 19:52:26 timestamp :

Spoiler

 

I don't know if it's an easy fix. The solution would be to force the AIDirector to spawn each entity every 2 seconds. Ideally each one on readjusted coordinates from each other (to account for entities moving) provided that they still aren't noticed by the player. But the main problem is not the conga line, but the performance hit of simultaneous spawning.

 

Happens with different POI simultaneous sleeper volumes too. That one you already know  and I'll be testing it further in 19.2 // 19.3

 

 

[Gazz]

You should post that in the bug forum. This is the Dev Diary.

[xfejiou5]

On 8/20/2020 at 11:17 AM, xfejiou5 said:

Do you know if this is planned for A20 or will it be in a later release?

Can any of the devs please answer this question with regards to fixing melee range?

[Roland]

8 hours ago, Gazz said:

You should post that in the bug forum. This is the Dev Diary.

Normally I would agree and once the A20 dev diary starts obviously there will be zero tolerance for anyone posting A19 bug reports in the A20 thread. But this A19 thread is a somewhat lame duck thread and Blake and @faatal seem to have a dialogue going that faatal hasn't seen fit to discourage. Obviously we can't have everyone start flooding this thread with bug reports but so far it hasn't really happened and if it does then we will have to enforce that rule. Personally, I have enjoyed reading faatal's solutions to the issues Blake has brought up so until it becomes a problem I am inclined to let it continue until the A19 thread closes or until faatal wants it to stop.

 

I hope everyone is noticing the pattern of post removal. What stays is predominately direct questions to the developers and direct comments and reactions to what the developers say. As soon as you start commenting on other people's comments then that is a discussion that is tangential to the direct interactions with the developers. So those are what I am shifting over to discussions.

 

I am not giving infractions for it because it is natural to comment and react to what others post. I am just informing everyone that those posts will get moved out so they do not clog and overwhelm the direct questions that people are hoping the developers will answer. I mean, I am sure people are on the edge of their seat to find out what YOU think about their question but they probably also want to hear from the developer they were asking and sometimes their questions get lost in all the debate and discussion that ensues.

[MechanicalLens]

@madmole One of my several critiques with the crafting of steroids, and I feel this one is the most important, is that you need to have Intellect at 8/10 and Physician at 3/4 in order to craft them. Once you get a bicycle, steroids are obsolete, so any player wouldn't have any trouble acquiring some mode of transportation long before they reach this point in the Intellect tree, and even if not so, they could use those points to unlock the bicycle and the workbench and still have points left over. Considering that testosterone extract is a key crafting ingredient already - a rare and dangerous resource to collect from its host - and that steroids are, to my knowledge, only useful for so long, perhaps removing any crafting gate would be beneficial. The road is a long and situational one already - I don't see locking them behind a metaphorical steel cage serves any meaningful purpose, if people would craft them anyway. Just my thoughts.

[Phoenixshade35]

@madmole i was curious about possible corner blocks rounded like what im using on the top of my horde base, and @MechanicalLensis curious about rounded bars, im interested in those as well, for corners to kinda look better, what do u think?  I have looked but can only find the point ones and they don't look good at all on it.

[Sal]

Because I'm an idiot and posted in wrong thread.  This a suggestion of mine.

 

Not sure if this has been suggested or not, but I think it would be a good idea to add a separate 'blood moon range' option that let's blood moons occur 1-3 days before OR after the 7th day instead of only 1-4 days after. 

 

This way, you are still keeping the '7 days to die' concept intact while also giving players the option to add more randomness to the game, if they so choose.

 

Give the player a choice of setting it to 1, 2, or 3 days. (No more than that because then weeks would overlap.)

 

So for example; 

1. Setting it to 1 day means a blood moon can happen at any time between day 6 - day 8. The next BM, day 13-15 and so on....
2. Setting it to 2 days means a blood moon can happen at any time between day 5 - day 9. The next BM, day 12-16.
3. Setting it to 3 days means a blood moon can happen at any time between day 4 - day 10. The next BM, day 11-17.

3 days also means there's a chance you could have 2 blood moons in a row at any given time. 

 

 

This would be a great option to include. 

 

 

 

[MechanicalLens]

2 hours ago, Phoenixshade35 said:

@madmole i was curious about possible corner blocks rounded like what im using on the top of my horde base, and @MechanicalLensis curious about rounded bars, im interested in those as well, for corners to kinda look better, what do u think?  I have looked but can only find the point ones and they don't look good at all on it.

 

@madmole Phoenixshade35 slightly twisted my words which is fine, I was asking for corner wooden and iron bars, not rounded.  It's been something I've been wanting since A17, but hey, if they're not added, it's not something I'll lose my sleep over.

 

Edit: I'm too exhausted to provide the image at the time of me posting this, however we already have corner railings in the game. Now translate that shape over to bars.

[wolfbain5]

would it be possible to get static books as a block? like at the hospital prefab, find patients notes that we could read.not in a container, but actually lying around. we could then have police reports at the station, military notes about the outbreak, newspapers to help with the narrative? similar to the signs that we can edit, but a smaller block that when clicked on gave a screen the size of a quest accept that we can scroll through or turn the pages on?

[Ezed]

Since today's theme is added blocks...

 

I wouldn't mind the ability to craft the noise making trash piles / broken glass we find in POI's as a poor man's 'alarm' for early game.

[Jost Amman]

@faatal / @madmole

Hi! Just wanted to ask you devs if you've started working on the bandits' AI or anything related.

 

There's still confusion in the 7D2D community as to what the current A19 zombie AI is:

1) A prototype for the bandits AI that after bandits are implemented will be dialed back to "dumb" zombies

-OR-

2) The intended AI for zombies and the bandits AI will have its own way of doing things.

Thanks!

[MechanicalLens]

There is a current exploit that's been around since A18 (possibly earlier) where if you put a mod into a piece of gear like armor, a tool, or a weapon, it increases the sell price of said piece of gear for more than the original sell price of the piece of gear and the mod combined, and by a pretty hefty amount at that. Will this be patched out in A19 or A20+?

[faatal]

10 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

@faatal / @madmole

Hi! Just wanted to ask you devs if you've started working on the bandits' AI or anything related.

 

There's still confusion in the 7D2D community as to what the current A19 zombie AI is:

1) A prototype for the bandits AI that after bandits are implemented will be dialed back to "dumb" zombies

-OR-

2) The intended AI for zombies and the bandits AI will have its own way of doing things.

Thanks!

No specific work yet.

Probably both. Special infected will likely cover a range of behaviors allowing common zombies as the more stupid ones, but the whole range can't really be balanced across the entire game until there is an entire range to balance.

[faatal]

On 9/25/2020 at 6:58 AM, HeLLKnight said:

Thank you very much Faatal, now that you're working optimizing terrain shader please take a look at this thread, there is a massive 40% fps drop from low to med terrain quality setting:

 

 

 

That post is basically backwards. There is a huge increase going to low, which is the point of low, to disable terrain visual features so it runs faster. The difference is bigger on lower end hardware that has trouble with those features. The recent changes to the terrain shaders make those features run faster, so what they want is already done.

[Jost Amman]

2 hours ago, faatal said:

No specific work yet.

Probably both. Special infected will likely cover a range of behaviors allowing common zombies as the more stupid ones, but the whole range can't really be balanced across the entire game until there is an entire range to balance.

Thanks for the reply, I can see how this approach could be optimal (also to save precious dev time!) but what I'm worried about is that most players will see that as an inconsistency in zombie behavior rather than a plus (like I do).

 

I've already read on Steam people complaining about the current (A19) AI because they expect zombies to ALL behave the same way... so when they see 3/4 of them out of 20 going their way doing different things (e.g.: rage mode) they'll just rant about not being able to reliably build a blood moon base because they can't predict where the zombies will go.

 

As always in life (and game development) it's "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

Now that the AI is (IMO) better and more varied people start complaining exactly about that (facepalm).

[wolfbain5]

will we be seeing a new experimental branch soon? or is this it for a19?

[faatal]

Sooner than you might guess.

[q123]

16 minutes ago, faatal said:

Sooner than you might guess.

 ok, so let me guess - is 19.2b3 ready for release today/ tonight? 😁

[hiemfire]

@madmole Forgive me if this has already be brought up and answered, but are the wood 1/4th corner blocks and others in the wood frame shape menu that aren't upgradeable going to be able to be upgraded?

[HeLLKnight]

On 9/29/2020 at 11:03 PM, faatal said:

That post is basically backwards. There is a huge increase going to low, which is the point of low, to disable terrain visual features so it runs faster. The difference is bigger on lower end hardware that has trouble with those features. The recent changes to the terrain shaders make those features run faster, so what they want is already done.

 

Yes I get your point but I needed to use low with a high-end PC to get 1440p on high.

 

Just did a quick test to 19.2 b3 and I can notice a very noticeable performance improvement with terrain quality on high compared with 19.1, huge kudos to TFP!

 

[Yoshino]

Could you please do more paint and textures. 

[Space4Ace]

Hi Faatal,

 

Quick question: Does Alpha 19 currently support 32:9 aspect ratio monitors (5120 x 1440 res.)?

I'm looking at the new Samsung G9 with the 1000R screen curvature; looks amazing!

Madmole once told me that some of the devs use large screens, so maybe?