Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Roland]

6 hours ago, wolfbain5 said:

ok, slight topic change. In the editor, we can update imposter. for those who dont know I believe the imposter is what we see in the LOD. so we can destroy the building, but go far away and still see it. how resource intensive would it be for the game to upon reloading, update the imposters. not on a timer, just upon shut down or restart of the game server

 

This is already confirmed completed for A20. Player placed blocks as well as destroyed game generated blocks are updated and represented in distant terrain dynamically. Destroy a building and walk out of the chunk and it is still gone. Add enhancements to an existing POI and walk out of the chunk and they remain. Not a timer and not at shutdown or restart-- immediately.

 

IMO, One of the most significant awesome new features for A20

[KhaineGB]

5 hours ago, faatal said:

It is not about distance or rendering or scripts. All those GameObjects and their components are expensive to create, which means lag spikes. It need further analysis to find all the slow parts and find solutions for each.

Hm... good point. I know I had a bit of lag with about 500 gameobjects on a 2d game. Can't remenber how I fixed it.

[wolfbain5]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

This is already confirmed completed for A20. Player placed blocks as well as destroyed game generated blocks are updated and represented in distant terrain in runtime. Destroy a building and walk out of the chunk and it is still gone. Add enhancements to an existing POI and walk out of the chunk and they remain. Not a timer and not at shutdown or restart-- immediately.

 

IMO, One of the most significant awesome new features for A20

beautiful

[Kalex]

On 3/8/2021 at 2:51 PM, madmole said:

Eventually you'll drown when swimming and you run out of stamina. Hopefully we can put some creepy water logged zombies in there that pop up and scare the @%$# out of you or something, zombie catfish.

 

 

Pike or sturgeons would be a better choice than catfish. catfish are bottom feeders and not much of a threat. Pike on the other hand are predatory fish with nasty teeth. And sturgeons are also predatory and will swim near the surface and rear their head and "upper" body above the water (see various Nessie-type creature sightings that are actually thought to be sturgeon sightings).

[SwineDK]

On 3/9/2021 at 9:24 PM, faatal said:

It is not about distance or rendering or scripts. All those GameObjects and their components are expensive to create, which means lag spikes. It need further analysis to find all the slow parts and find solutions for each.

Yeah, instantiate is really expensive. I guess that you are pooling all kind of objects, not just zombies, to minimize instantiation while playing.

 

I've read that the Unity c# job system could allow for thousands of objects while having great performance - I have no real experience with huge games like 7 Days to die, so I couldn't say if it would work for this though..

 

I guess that it could of course also be a huge task to implement, especially since it won't give a huge economic gain 😀

[ZombieHorde]

Maybe don't keep instantiating the zombies then? Like never dispose of them in the first place. Just have them die/time out and turn invisible but the object is still there in the background, ai turned off, If there is a volume that needs more zombies then what are already instantiated then just create one or two, not the the full pack again and again.

 

Let me guess: not that simple in Unity?

[A Nice Cup of Tea]

On 3/8/2021 at 6:55 PM, madmole said:

The idea is more mods than there are slots so there is some choice.

Seems to me that is just a balance thing, and 20 is OCD if you as me, I have 2-3 max and build some large bases. They could simply smelt much faster so we don't need late game ones. We've talked about an industrial forge, but with some simplifications coming I don't see a need for it.

 

I'm hoping more for an advanced food cooker than an advanced forge. It always seems weird to me that even in late game you're still using a basic campfire to cook rather than any kind of oven or other cooking implement.

 

I'd love it if the campfire would only cook basic to intermediate foods and you could build an oven for the advanced recipes.

On 3/8/2021 at 7:51 PM, madmole said:

Eventually you'll drown when swimming and you run out of stamina. Hopefully we can put some creepy water logged zombies in there that pop up and scare the @%$# out of you or something, zombie catfish.

 

Gators would be good - they could come in both zombie and non-zombie versions like bears.

[faatal]

On 3/9/2021 at 3:44 PM, MechanicalLens said:

Will the Feral Sense slider apply to horde nights?

I would think not for horde zombies. If you ran into a POI on horde night, then POI zeds would follow sense rules? Be a while before this gets worked on.

9 hours ago, SwineDK said:

Yeah, instantiate is really expensive. I guess that you are pooling all kind of objects, not just zombies, to minimize instantiation while playing.

 

I've read that the Unity c# job system could allow for thousands of objects while having great performance - I have no real experience with huge games like 7 Days to die, so I couldn't say if it would work for this though..

 

I guess that it could of course also be a huge task to implement, especially since it won't give a huge economic gain 😀

We pool a lot of stuff, but you often get spikes anyway. Even changing parent from the pool to another owner can cause spikes.

 

Instantiating after the first time is typically cheaper, since Unity keeps resources around, so instantiate is often not that bad.

 

Unity 2020.3 LTS released today and in testing so far has been working great and in general, due to optimizing, the game is running quite well now.

[meganoth]

12 minutes ago, faatal said:

I would think not for horde zombies. If you ran into a POI on horde night, then POI zeds would follow sense rules? Be a while before this gets worked on.

We pool a lot of stuff, but you often get spikes anyway. Even changing parent from the pool to another owner can cause spikes.

 

Instantiating after the first time is typically cheaper, since Unity keeps resources around, so instantiate is often not that bad.

 

Unity 2020.3 LTS released today and in testing so far has been working great and in general, due to optimizing, the game is running quite well now.

In Unity we trust  😁

 

[SwineDK]

32 minutes ago, faatal said:

We pool a lot of stuff, but you often get spikes anyway. Even changing parent from the pool to another owner can cause spikes.

 

Instantiating after the first time is typically cheaper, since Unity keeps resources around, so instantiate is often not that bad.

 

Unity 2020.3 LTS released today and in testing so far has been working great and in general, due to optimizing, the game is running quite well now.

Yeah, it can be quite tricky with Unity to get great performance. 

We will be looking forward to help testing the game, when the Unity 2020.3 LTS is implemented. I read previously that you didn't have to do a lot of recoding for it, so I guess we can expect it for A20?

We are a lot of eager beavers for that update 🤪

Do inform us if you need us to test something before the EXP build, hehe..

[MechanicalLens]

41 minutes ago, faatal said:

I would think not for horde zombies. If you ran into a POI on horde night, then POI zeds would follow sense rules? Be a while before this gets worked on.

 

No worries. I was hoping for a slider for horde night zombies (to be able to modify them from incredibly intelligent to downright dumb), but if not, then that's alright. I'm still greatly looking forward to A20.

[Blake_]

4 hours ago, faatal said:

Yo !! Goodstuff's a blast boiiiz and you get 500 Zds PER MINUTE in a20.

Understood. Thx !

[faatal]

5 hours ago, SwineDK said:

Yeah, it can be quite tricky with Unity to get great performance. 

We will be looking forward to help testing the game, when the Unity 2020.3 LTS is implemented. I read previously that you didn't have to do a lot of recoding for it, so I guess we can expect it for A20?

We are a lot of eager beavers for that update 🤪

Do inform us if you need us to test something before the EXP build, hehe..

I'd give it a 95% a20 will be on U2020 LTS.

[Roland]

1 hour ago, faatal said:

I'd give it a 95% a20 will be on U2020 LTS.

So really... only a roll of a natural 1 on a d20 could foul things up for a20. 

 

Come on Unity....make your check!!!

[Jost Amman]

5 hours ago, faatal said:

I'd give it a 95% a20 will be on U2020 LTS.

What does LTS mean? 

[SwineDK]

42 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

What does LTS mean? 

Long Term Support

With LTS versions, Unity promises to supply support and regular updates for a longer period than non LTS versions, i believe it's 2 years.

[Chanster111]

Will we get bullet counted Reloads? As in we shoot 5 rounds in the pump shotgun we reload 5 rounds and so on.

[madmole]

On 3/9/2021 at 3:44 PM, MechanicalLens said:

Will the Feral Sense slider apply to horde nights?

I think we punted on that, there are too many other unfinished tasks to start on it.

On 3/9/2021 at 5:03 PM, MechanicalLens said:

Will trader sell prices be adjusted in A20? If so, I would recommend cobblestone. A stack of cobblestone is, at its base price, approximately 350-400 dukes (I don't have the exact number on me), which is dirt cheap; the traders are almost throwing it away. Maybe doubling the price would be a worthy piece of feedback to consider?

 

Beakers almost fall into this same pit; 500-ish dukes for a beaker is an absolute steal. Again, doubling the price of the item in question might create better balance, although this is just one person's take.

I adjusted the beaker and chem station a bit. Yeah I agree that in the grand scheme of things opening up the chem station is game changing so it needs to have a cost.

[madmole]

2 hours ago, KingSlayerGM said:

Im very curious about this. How is the new shape menu different from what we have now?

It's entirely different. All the shapes are in categories now, and unified no matter what material you are building with. So if I want wedge 60, it's always in the exact same category and same position regardless of if I'm building with wood/stone/concrete/steel/cloth etc. All shapes now exist in every material and are in the exact same menu location when using a different material helper.

You can build steel tables if you want or cloth tables, we don't care. Having a powerful build system you can get creative with is better than using realism to determine what you can and can't make.

The cool thing is once you memorize the layout of where each shape is you'll never have any trouble finding it, and the categories are pretty good so even if you don't know where something is, you have a good idea on where to look.

On top of that all icons are now grey, shaded and rendered like art, similar to sketchup art. So they are very easy to read and tell what the shape is. The background of the icon has the material in it so you can tell what helper it is in your belt.

Finally you can just build with wood, stone, concrete and steel. All the upgrades in between have been deleted, and wet concrete is gone too so less clicking and just build with steel if you want. Nothing downgrades to anything either, when the hit bar is gone the block goes poof. A fairly big change, but now each tier is meaningful and it won't be 1000 clicks to go from wood to steel now.

[Lffayen]

I don't suppose there'd be any chance of adding the wet concrete look to the paint brush. That texture is amazing, even if it's only temporary while we still have it.

[Roland]

22 minutes ago, madmole said:

You can build steel tables if you want or cloth tables

 

Insane, always Nightmare speed, 10 minute days, 25% loot, no respawn, build your base only out of cloth is the new ultimate difficulty!

[mdf25]

What does this mean for POIs built with brick or corrugated metal parts? I've made a few custom ones so do i need to update brick ones to say, cobblestone, and repaint? Or are tbose other materials still being kept?

 

Also does this mean glass is getting all the shapes?

[madmole]

13 minutes ago, Lffayen said:

I don't suppose there'd be any chance of adding the wet concrete look to the paint brush. That texture is amazing, even if it's only temporary while we still have it.

No but be assured we'll use that texture space for something useful.

Just now, mdf25 said:

What does this mean for POIs built with brick or corrugated metal parts? I've made a few custom ones so do i need to update brick ones to say, cobblestone, and repaint? Or are tbose other materials still being kept?

 

Also does this mean glass is getting all the shapes?

Brick can probably be just textured stone AFAIK. Corrugated is still there. I don't think we've deprecated any blocks just yet but we'll do a conversion and probably release a conversion utility.

[Morloc]

27 minutes ago, madmole said:

Having a powerful build system you can get creative with is better than using realism to determine what you can and can't make.

 

 

Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind

 

 

-Morloc

[Blake_]

41 minutes ago, madmole said:

It's entirely different. All the shapes are in categories now, and unified no matter what material you are building with. So if I want wedge 60, it's always in the exact same category and same position regardless of if I'm building with wood/stone/concrete/steel/cloth etc. All shapes now exist in every material and are in the exact same menu location when using a different material helper.
Finally you can just build with wood, stone, concrete and steel. All the upgrades in between have been deleted, and wet concrete is gone too so less clicking and just build with steel if you want. Nothing downgrades to anything either, when the hit bar is gone the block goes poof. A fairly big change, but now each tier is meaningful and it won't be 1000 clicks to go from wood to steel now.

I don't completely understand, do you mean that upgrading is still there but you got rid of redundant ones like the frame to wood to nailed wood one and so on leaving only wood which upgrades to stone which upgrades to concrete which upgrades to steel AND if the block is destroyed at any stage it goes poof instead of downgrading?