Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, Genosis said:

So... quick question; has there been mention of an update to the in-game paint textures for A20?

 

My wife would be a more hyped if there has been a lot more texture options added, she's always complaining about them and I only have so many non-white hairs left to hear about it.

 

 

 

Some have been improved, but no new ones for A20 I think.  There are talks to deprecate some of the old ones that are not used often and replaced with new ones.  A good example is the old beer texture.

[Genosis]

11 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Some have been improved, but no new ones for A20 I think.  There are talks to deprecate some of the old ones that are not used often and replaced with new ones.  A good example is the old beer texture.

 

Well, any improvement is good. Such an odd technical limitation to have, I'm sure it's been explained to death to why it can't happen. I hope there is a way around it in the future, such a crippling loss of potential here. 

[meganoth]

17 minutes ago, BasicallyACat said:

Is there a place with a summary of the Dev streams and/or what's going to be in A20?

I'm having trouble finding that.

 

First post on page 1 of this dev diary has it all.

16 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Some have been improved, but no new ones for A20 I think.  There are talks to deprecate some of the old ones that are not used often and replaced with new ones.  A good example is the old beer texture.

 

Oh noees, the zombie beers in the beer den will be naked then 😁

 

[dcsobral]

32 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

 

Oh noees, the zombie beers in the beer den will be naked then 😁

 

It was replaced with a model including the texture. Blocks can be created with arbitrary textures (within reason, I suppose), but paintable textures are limited. Or, at least, that's what I gathered.

 

[BasicallyACat]

Honestly if they don't fix the Yucca Juice Smoothie to be 'heat resist' instead of 'cold resist', I'm going to lose my mind.

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

First post on page 1 of this dev diary has it all.

 

Oh noees, the zombie beers in the beer den will be naked then 😁

 

 

Speaking of the bear den, can't wait to see what people think of its face lift. 😄

[WaywardEko]

1 hour ago, Genosis said:

 

Well, any improvement is good. Such an odd technical limitation to have, I'm sure it's been explained to death to why it can't happen. I hope there is a way around it in the future, such a crippling loss of potential here. 

@Genosis - this came up in one of the dev streams.  I don't fully understand why, but there is a hard ceiling on the number of paint textures they can have -- so the only way to add new ones is to remove existing ones.

5 hours ago, faatal said:

We have a consultant graphics programmer who is doing benchmarks and has a second PC with low specs.

 

I dug up my 4th old dev PC (i7 860) and have it running now, but it only has 4 GB RAM and an AMD 1 GB VRAM GPU. It will run the game on lower settings, but is very slow for testing as it hits the hard drive a lot (paging) during loading and shutdown and I could not run Unity at the same time. My wife's old PC has 8 GB RAM, which should work in that motherboard, so planning on trying that RAM.

 

The problem with benchmarks is they tell you where you are at and maybe what is slow, but not how to fix it. Fixing is the hard part.

Fair point.  I guess I'm just trying to learn if we will see some tangible performance gains.  I've been doing readers digest versions of the dev streams and showing off all the new sexy stuff you all are doing and I get a lot of comments that says ... holy @%$# this looks amazing ... followed by ... OMG my potato of a computer can barely run A19.  So this is just me checking in to see what the performance plans are ... cause I want more people playing your awesome creation! 

Edited October 5, 2021 by WaywardEko
used the wrong word. (see edit history)

[Doomofman]

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

 

Speaking of the bear den, can't wait to see what people think of its face lift. 😄

Entire structure is now made of bears...

[dcsobral]

2 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

Speaking of the bear den, can't wait to see what people think of its face lift. 😄

Confirmed! Botox bears coming to alpha 20! 😂

[Guppycur]

3 hours ago, WaywardEko said:

@Genosis - this came up in one of the dev streams.  I don't fully understand why, but there is a hard ceiling on the number of paint textures they can have -- so the only way to add new ones is to remove existing ones.

 

...can't be that "hard" of a ceiling, there's an m word for that. 

[JayzenFreeze]

I am worried about performance. I keep having to turn mine lower and lower and my friend now plays at minimum settings with 20FPS

[Morloc]

5 hours ago, JayzenFreeze said:

I am worried about performance. I keep having to turn mine lower and lower and my friend now plays at minimum settings

 

Vitamin E and almonds can help.

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc

[JayzenFreeze]

No more of a stamina issue. 5 min and I need a nap.

[Doomofman]

In terms of the dismemberment shown off, I'd really rather not see it in the game if it doesn't affect the zombies attack range (and don't tell me zombies can bit you from an entire meter away). It was pretty jarring to see a zombie with no arms still be able to swing his invisible arms and still hit you from a meter away

[v3tro]

8 minutes ago, Doomofman said:

In terms of the dismemberment shown off, I'd really rather not see it in the game if it doesn't affect the zombies attack range (and don't tell me zombies can bit you from an entire meter away). It was pretty jarring to see a zombie with no arms still be able to swing his invisible arms and still hit you from a meter away

 

This already exist in current version. I like the new system, looks good and cant wait for more polished version.

[Doomofman]

1 minute ago, v3tro said:

 

This already exist in current version. I like the new system, looks good and cant wait for more polished version.

Does it? I don't remember ever seeing a no-armed zombie doing that clap animation and hitting me. Maybe it was just seeing it out of context on the stream that made it seem odd but I feel like no arms should reduce reach or just disable certain attack animations

[meganoth]

30 minutes ago, Doomofman said:

Does it? I don't remember ever seeing a no-armed zombie doing that clap animation and hitting me. Maybe it was just seeing it out of context on the stream that made it seem odd but I feel like no arms should reduce reach or just disable certain attack animations

 

In the current game most hits do not cut off limbs, there is just a chance that it will happen (at least I remember it happening on occasion with legs). And I assume that it is the same chance to cut off the head with a headshot. Consequently you seldom see a zombie with both arms cut off because he will often be dead before random chance allows both arms to be gone. Players can't depend on it or use it as a strategy because it is not happening often enough

 

Now if they increased the chance for cutting limbs off (though I haven't heard of such a change) then the chance to get armless zombies would increase as well. In that case I would hope that they also change it so zombies dish out less damage (not 0 because they can still bite) when their arms are off, because players will use it as a tactic and expect it to work

 

Edited October 7, 2021 by meganoth (see edit history)

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

In the current game most hits do not cut off limbs, there is just a chance that it will happen (at least I remember it happening on occasion with legs). And I assume that it is the same chance to cut off the head with a headshot. Consequently you seldom see a zombie with both arms cut off because he will often be dead before random chance allows both arms to be gone. Players can't depend on it or use it as a strategy because it is not happening often enough

 

Now if they increased the chance for cutting limbs off (though I haven't heard of such a change) then the chance to get armless zombies would increase as well. In that case I would hope that they also change it so zombies dish out less damage (not 0 because they can still bite) when their arms are off, because players will use it as a tactic and expect it to work

 

I think they did something to increase the chance of dismemberment during the stream just for the purpose of showing it off, but I might be wrong. If I'm right then all that is changing is that you get some animation and art instead of the limb just disappearing. If I'm wrong then dismemberment might getting more common.

 

[jorbascrumps]

20 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

I think they did something to increase the chance of dismemberment during the stream just for the purpose of showing it off, but I might be wrong. If I'm right then all that is changing is that you get some animation and art instead of the limb just disappearing. If I'm wrong then dismemberment might getting more common.

 

 

I'm guessing they fudged the probabilities for the demo. Dismemberment should be a semi-special event when it happens.

 

Wasn't dismemberment super common when they first introduced it and then got toned down later with an added perk to increase the chance? New systems like this tend to go through balance passes. Anyone remember when broken legs were first introduced? 😅

[Laz Man]

I didn't get to watch the stream last night.  I know there is a special dev mod you can put on any melee weapon that allows you to test dismemberment.  Looks like a candy cane.  Should be in A19 already.

[Blake_]

My feedback on last night's dev stream:

 

New quests are cool and well done. Lathan is a cheap "mustard" and didn't show all of it under crap allegations of spoilers and the like which we might forgive when a20 is out  . Very nice work though, quests are a lot of work. Twitch integration is a bit "meh" for people who doesn't use it. It's just like "McDonalds" integration: nice and fun to code but ultimately "meh". I would've liked to see more non-npc quests for this (like: "bring me 4 pimp hats and clear". "retrieve the note but don't read it", "clear and bring me 50 cloth and fetch the satchel contents", "blew up X block in a location", "discover what happened at -location- bia reading or whatever" ....etc) and NOT that "meh" feature that is Twitch integration for non-Twitch users.  

 

Zack's stuff sounds good. Or not. It depends on if you have a bed and 2 children or if you are standing on one leg and hopping into the sunset. Then it might sound better. Those things happen everytime, he just took the short straw this time. Nevertheless I love his work and the Blood Moon music was awesome.

 

Everything that Shawn did was whole, good, meaningful and amazing as always. Vehicle mods, grass, wind, weather, Zd's duck behaviour, high impact optimizations, etc. I know he is married, but still my favourite, lol.

 

The drone was impressive. It is a HUGE system with lots and lots of niche cases and even then he fixed and shipped them ALL (except maybe the sneaking-sound behaviour for the drone). I didn't expect it to be so polished and well done, it definitely was the right choice to wait for it to cook properly AND with mods. There's always bugs, but it was one of my favourites. Well done Steven! 

[Renlar]

Can we get an option or an override to enable all footsteps? I understand you guys want sleepers to be scary, but this setting is infuriating for a lot of us. It is especially disorienting when you are staring at a zombie walking towards you and it is completely silent.

I've tried multiple times to try and edit it myself in the settings with no luck.

[dcsobral]

42 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

My feedback on last night's dev stream:

 

New quests are cool and well done. Lathan is a cheap "mustard" and didn't show all of it under crap allegations of spoilers and the like which we might forgive when a20 is out  . Very nice work though, quests are a lot of work. Twitch integration is a bit "meh" for people who doesn't use it. It's just like "McDonalds" integration: nice and fun to code but ultimately "meh". I would've liked to see more non-npc quests for this (like: "bring me 4 pimp hats and clear". "retrieve the note but don't read it", "clear and bring me 50 cloth and fetch the satchel contents", "blew up X block in a location", "discover what happened at -location- bia reading or whatever" ....etc) and NOT that "meh" feature that is Twitch integration for non-Twitch users.  

 

Zack's stuff sounds good. Or not. It depends on if you have a bed and 2 children or if you are standing on one leg and hopping into the sunset. Then it might sound better. Those things happen everytime, he just took the short straw this time. Nevertheless I love his work and the Blood Moon music was awesome.

 

Everything that Shawn did was whole, good, meaningful and amazing as always. Vehicle mods, grass, wind, weather, Zd's duck behaviour, high impact optimizations, etc. I know he is married, but still my favourite, lol.

 

The drone was impressive. It is a HUGE system with lots and lots of niche cases and even then he fixed and shipped them ALL (except maybe the sneaking-sound behaviour for the drone). I didn't expect it to be so polished and well done, it definitely was the right choice to wait for it to cook properly AND with mods. There's always bugs, but it was one of my favourites. Well done Steven! 

The grass shown yesterday was amazing. That sounds silly on the face of it, but there you go. Big kudos to Shawn and to the artists involved in it! But then you add the weather effects and it went to a whole other level! Awesome!

 

[crazywildfire]

56 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

I didn't get to watch the stream last night.  I know there is a special dev mod you can put on any melee weapon that allows you to test dismemberment.  Looks like a candy cane.  Should be in A19 already.

 

Naw they didn't use nothing special as far as items. Just a normal club and machete. But he did tell him to put in something in the console commands. I forget what it was but that is why it was happening.

[Blake_]

43 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

The grass shown yesterday was amazing. That sounds silly on the face of it, but there you go. Big kudos to Shawn and to the artists involved in it! But then you add the weather effects and it went to a whole other level! Awesome!

 

True that. Grass wasn't "made" by faatal, along with all the assets and POIs and the drone wasn't "made" by Steven along with the visual mods in it, but the code and the bugs, -even though less apparent at first sight- are always miles above a 30-day 3d model. Programming takes months. A whole 3d model, no matter how detailed, can be made in little less than a month, month and a half counting animations and bugs. Still waaay less than AI behaviour (both single and multiplayer), which takes 10+ months to get in top shape.