Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[hiemfire]

1 hour ago, HB_H4wk said:

Taller grass for better stealth out in the wild and the shock of a hiding zombies. Azaleas are meh..

 

I don't think grass, or the leaves and branches of trees, blocks line of sight for the zombies.

[Trankitas]

Is this the most waited Alpha to this date right? I wonder what is making it take so long... Me and my buddies are pretty much agonizing to be honest.

 

Dinosaurs, probably, if you're wondering.

[Blake_]

4 hours ago, Cr0wst0rm said:

They literally laugh at their own players for buying the game. After 10 years of waiting. OK

It can be interpreted that way, yes. Knowing the devs over the years from their words and videos I can say for sure that you are absolutely wrong and the truth is that they are just a goofy bunch of imperfectly beautiful people that go on tumbling about the videogame industry the boomer way: inefficiently slow, but steadily amazing. I'm grateful that the cofounders have the strenght of character to ignore some hurtful comments from  time to time (mine included) regarding stuff like what you just said and console, which are product of a few unforeseen mistakes and I'm also grateful that they have the wisdom to improve upon them. 

Edited February 28, 2023 by Blake_ (see edit history)

[Gronal]

24 minutes ago, IzPrebuilt said:

Humor is when you don't update your community with any news on an early access game for over a month and then to add insult to injury you break the silence with a guy making brrrrr noises and show us a microsoft paint danger indicator apparently.

TFP needs to learn to read the room, no infact TFP needs to actually try being in the bloody room.
 

Was anyone meant to be excited by the danger meter feature? I'm so hyped they teased it. (/s)

They could have accidentally shown so many more exciting things in that silly little video.

[meilodasreh]

btw the new hi-res textures are absolutely mindblowing 😅

 

 

[hiemfire]

15 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

I'm going to miss the old two stroke put-put. Had a good rhythm to it. The new engine sound is sweet though.

[Slasher]

I don't care about any of that as long as I can see it from a distance.

 

[Fanatical_Meat]

Being honest the sound test post was not funny and board line trolling of customers. 
I have said it frequently. Pimps need to relent on the when it’s done crap. There should be some kind of a roadmap, that roadmap should be regularly updated and it would be nice if we got simple short video of what is being worked on one or two times per month, keep them short and on point or a little fun. The lack of information causes stress.

Pimps should be happy they have so many people anxiously waiting their next alpha and what is being developed.

 

I know doing the above will come with some people complaining about some sort of change but that’s a basic business reality that needs to be managed and it certainly can be managed.

Edited March 1, 2023 by Fanatical_Meat (see edit history)

[Riamus]

Ignoring all the complaining, I just wanted to comment on the video. Sure, it is meant as funny and pretty much falls flat in that regard, but oh well.  About the video itself, I am definitely not a fan of the danger meter thing.  If it was the size of the clock and placed directly under that, I'd be fine with it.  I would hate seeing that huge thing pop up every time I go past a POI.  Especially when I regularly drive between POI and it would keep flashing across the middle of my screen.  A large location display like that works okay in a game where you only go to a new area where it would be displayed once in a while, not in a game where you are constantly going to a new place where it would display.  I hope this is optional or I'll have to use a mod to remove or resize and relocate it, which I'd rather not have to bother with.

 

Beyond that, I also like the overall art improvements even though we barely saw any.  I wish there was more shown, but it is still something.

[faatal]

Some news.

 

The basics of an entity activity throttling system have been added to A21 to allow servers to handle more zombies. Large AI counts would overload pathing causing all zombies to be delayed in moving, so this decreases the update rate based on distance from players while still allowing each player to always have some fully active zombies. With this change, max zombie counts for blood moons and sleeper volumes are allowed to be scaled around double what the the cap is set to. The system also disables jiggle components for clients with distance as these were getting expensive as more zombies have them. The system will continue to be improved to throttle other activities.

I noticed last week we had an old Terrain Tool that was not being used, as it did not work very well, so it has gotten some changes and bug fixes. It now grows terrain in all directions (was just upwards before) and you can select the fill block. Undo also works. This will allow POI designers to make easier and faster terrain instead of the old add/paste/cut blocks and modify density using the cursor keys. Other improvements are planned.

 

Grass like plants now have shadows, which were removed years ago for performance reasons. Based on tests enabling shadows for grass near the player, I saw no reason we can't have these shadows and it looks nicer. Enabling and distance is controlled by shadow and grass quality settings.

 

We are also finishing the process of doing one more Unity update to 2021.3.19.

Edited March 2, 2023 by faatal (see edit history)

[bdubyah]

@faatal All that sounds awesome. The more zombies the better. The terrain tool improvements sound good if they will work how I think. I never saw much use for that tool as is due to it being too destructive either way. Giving it a smoothing ability would be pretty sweet if that is possible. Battlecraft 1942 had some good terrain abilities back in the day for BF42. Something like that would be perfect.

 

Have you guys started the MF counter for A21 yet? Soon, maybe?

[Aldranon]

Faatal how much improvement did they make on this one?

Any improvement is good news If I'm understanding it correctly. 

 

• IL2CPP: Improved performance of awaiting async operations on Windows. (UUM-20917)

•  

Edited March 3, 2023 by Crater Creator
hard-to-read text color (see edit history)

[Xeen]

2 hours ago, faatal said:

Some news.

 

The basics of an entity activity throttling system have been added to A21 to allow servers to handle more zombies. Large AI counts would overload pathing causing all zombies to be delayed in moving, so this decreases the update rate based on distance from players while still allowing each player to always have some fully active zombies. With this change, max zombie counts for blood moons and sleeper volumes are allowed to be scaled around double what the the cap is set to. The system also disables jiggle components for clients with distance as these were getting expensive as more zombies have them. The system will continue to be improved to throttle other activities.

I noticed last week we had an old Terrain Tool that was not being used, as it did not work very well, so it has gotten some changes and bug fixes. It now grows terrain in all directions (was just upwards before) and you can select the fill block. Undo also works. This will allow POI designers to make easier and faster terrain instead of the old add/paste/cut blocks and modify density using the cursor keys. Other improvements are planned.

 

Grass like plants now have shadows, which were removed years ago for performance reasons. Based on tests enabling shadows for grass near the player, I saw no reason we can't have these shadows and it looks nicer. Enabling and distance is controlled by shadow and grass quality settings.

 

We are also finishing the process of doing one more Unity update to 2021.3.19.

❤️

[Laz Man]

May need to start calling Faatal the Xtreme Optimization Cowboy with how efficient he is at cleaning and improving the code.  😎  Since Faatal shared about the recent terrain tool improvements, here is a small sample of some terrain sculpting I did quickly with it in the prefab editor.  Sculpting something like this previously would take me much longer.  

 

[Blake_]

4 hours ago, faatal said:

Some news.

 

The basics of an entity activity throttling system have been added to A21 to allow servers to handle more zombies. Large AI counts would overload pathing causing all zombies to be delayed in moving, so this decreases the update rate based on distance from players while still allowing each player to always have some fully active zombies. With this change, max zombie counts for blood moons and sleeper volumes are allowed to be scaled around double what the the cap is set to. The system also disables jiggle components for clients with distance as these were getting expensive as more zombies have them. The system will continue to be improved to throttle other activities.

I noticed last week we had an old Terrain Tool that was not being used, as it did not work very well, so it has gotten some changes and bug fixes. It now grows terrain in all directions (was just upwards before) and you can select the fill block. Undo also works. This will allow POI designers to make easier and faster terrain instead of the old add/paste/cut blocks and modify density using the cursor keys. Other improvements are planned.

 

Grass like plants now have shadows, which were removed years ago for performance reasons. Based on tests enabling shadows for grass near the player, I saw no reason we can't have these shadows and it looks nicer. Enabling and distance is controlled by shadow and grass quality settings.

 

We are also finishing the process of doing one more Unity update to 2021.3.19.

Now Sir, you are treading on dangerous waters here. How do you sleep at night?

 

 

Jokes aside, I love those changes. I have a question about the Zd count: does that mean that you guys will set the max Zd count on the new map/continue map menu to 128 or something like that? Please do tell !

[DuHast_Play]

5 hours ago, faatal said:

Some news.

 

The basics of an entity activity throttling system have been added to A21 to allow servers to handle more zombies. Large AI counts would overload pathing causing all zombies to be delayed in moving, so this decreases the update rate based on distance from players while still allowing each player to always have some fully active zombies. With this change, max zombie counts for blood moons and sleeper volumes are allowed to be scaled around double what the the cap is set to. The system also disables jiggle components for clients with distance as these were getting expensive as more zombies have them. The system will continue to be improved to throttle other activities.

I noticed last week we had an old Terrain Tool that was not being used, as it did not work very well, so it has gotten some changes and bug fixes. It now grows terrain in all directions (was just upwards before) and you can select the fill block. Undo also works. This will allow POI designers to make easier and faster terrain instead of the old add/paste/cut blocks and modify density using the cursor keys. Other improvements are planned.

 

Grass like plants now have shadows, which were removed years ago for performance reasons. Based on tests enabling shadows for grass near the player, I saw no reason we can't have these shadows and it looks nicer. Enabling and distance is controlled by shadow and grass quality settings.

 

We are also finishing the process of doing one more Unity update to 2021.3.19.

I'm glad that there was news directly from the team) I'm glad to see them with my own eyes) I would like to ask if there is an approximate date for at least the first streams of the new alpha? just an approximate date according to your plans and expectations)

[Matt115]

9 hours ago, faatal said:

Some news.

 

The basics of an entity activity throttling system have been added to A21 to allow servers to handle more zombies. Large AI counts would overload pathing causing all zombies to be delayed in moving, so this decreases the update rate based on distance from players while still allowing each player to always have some fully active zombies. With this change, max zombie counts for blood moons and sleeper volumes are allowed to be scaled around double what the the cap is set to. The system also disables jiggle components for clients with distance as these were getting expensive as more zombies have them. The system will continue to be improved to throttle other activities.

I noticed last week we had an old Terrain Tool that was not being used, as it did not work very well, so it has gotten some changes and bug fixes. It now grows terrain in all directions (was just upwards before) and you can select the fill block. Undo also works. This will allow POI designers to make easier and faster terrain instead of the old add/paste/cut blocks and modify density using the cursor keys. Other improvements are planned.

 

Grass like plants now have shadows, which were removed years ago for performance reasons. Based on tests enabling shadows for grass near the player, I saw no reason we can't have these shadows and it looks nicer. Enabling and distance is controlled by shadow and grass quality settings.

 

We are also finishing the process of doing one more Unity update to 2021.3.19.

So this mean in short - more zombie during blood moon or totaly more zombies?

15 hours ago, HB_H4wk said:

All drama aside now ...What about Zombie Cows or Zombies teens/children?

 

I wanted convice them for zombie teens like in No more room in hell or Dead space 2 but they doesn't wanted because it would cause 7dtd would be banned in few countries so some people would lose access to this game

[zztong]

5 hours ago, Laz Man said:

May need to start calling Faatal the Xtreme Optimization Cowboy with how efficient he is at cleaning and improving the code.  😎  Since Faatal shared about the recent terrain tool improvements, here is a small sample of some terrain sculpting I did quickly with it in the prefab editor.  Sculpting something like this previously would take me much longer.

 

I was confused by Faatal's description. Is this sculpting things block by block manually, some noise function applied to a bunch of blocks in a selection, or something else?

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, zztong said:

 

I was confused by Faatal's description. Is this sculpting things block by block manually, some noise function applied to a bunch of blocks in a selection, or something else?

 

There is a sphere type terrain tool in the creative / dev menu that has been there for many Alphas but has mostly been underutilized because how it functioned.

 

His new tool will update / replace the old one.  

[Morloc]

11 hours ago, faatal said:

also disables jiggle components for clients

 

Meh?

 

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

[faatal]

8 hours ago, Blake_ said:

Now Sir, you are treading on dangerous waters here. How do you sleep at night?

 

 

Jokes aside, I love those changes. I have a question about the Zd count: does that mean that you guys will set the max Zd count on the new map/continue map menu to 128 or something like that? Please do tell !

The cap currently is the same. Different spawning systems can now scale the cap as they check the count. Blood moon is x1.9. Sleeper volumes x2.1.

[faatal]

11 hours ago, bdubyah said:

@faatal All that sounds awesome. The more zombies the better. The terrain tool improvements sound good if they will work how I think. I never saw much use for that tool as is due to it being too destructive either way. Giving it a smoothing ability would be pretty sweet if that is possible. Battlecraft 1942 had some good terrain abilities back in the day for BF42. Something like that would be perfect.

 

Have you guys started the MF counter for A21 yet? Soon, maybe?

To be clear, this is more zombies on the server, spread across multiple players, while improvements like disabling jiggle is client side.

If you as a client had 100 zombies around you, the overhead of animating, colliding and rendering them is still expensive and you would probably have a low FPS.

 

Must Fixes was started a few months ago, but that is just a guide. Multiple systems are still being worked on, polished and tested, which are not often in MFs. There is some overlap, like my vehicle damage task is marked MF, yet it is a system improvement task, not a bug. That one is basically done, but I'm not closing it yet as the values are still open to tweaking and I would like to work on vehicles smoking when highly damaged, if I spend the time. That could also be done during experimental, so not a high priority to me.

[Vintorez]

NGL every time I see terrain updates mentioned my first thought/hope is finally being able to square terrain blocks to be flush against structures we build in game.

 

Some day~

[faatal]

On 3/1/2023 at 11:36 PM, Aldranon said:

Faatal how much improvement did they make on this one?

Any improvement is good news If I'm understanding it correctly. 

 

• IL2CPP: Improved performance of awaiting async operations on Windows. (UUM-20917)

•  

That one does not matter since the computer version of the game does not use IL2CPP as it would break code mods. Console is using IL2CPP. Console needed a fix in .17 for a PS5 occlusion bug and we currently try to keep versions in sync between computer and console dev, so the update from .16 to latest.

Edited March 3, 2023 by Crater Creator
hard-to-read text color (see edit history)

[faatal]

8 hours ago, DuHast_Play said:

I'm glad that there was news directly from the team) I'm glad to see them with my own eyes) I would like to ask if there is an approximate date for at least the first streams of the new alpha? just an approximate date according to your plans and expectations)

No date yet. Streams would be x amount of time before we anticipate release as we don't want streams too early. Multiple people, including myself have tasks to finish with unknown durations. A good example is a hole in terrain bug I have when quest resetting some POIs. I've looked at it before and why it happens is unknown, which means it could take a day or a week or more. There is no way to know, only guess.