Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[hiemfire]

Just now, Spiked_Coffee said:

What if anything are we to make of two workbenches? Did I miss something?

The one on the left is a functional workbench that the player can craft in, the one on the right is not and is just lootable/salvageable.

[faatal]

8 hours ago, beHypE said:

This might have been answered previously, but I remember that during November there was hope that A21 would get released before Christmas. That obviously didn't happen, but we're close to being in April now. 

 

Without going into the "when will you release the kraken" discussion, could you guys explain what lead to that big of a planning delay ?

Features not being as far along as we hoped. We don't primarily schedule features based on time, but functionality, so it takes as long as it does for that functionality to work. Many devs would cut features to hit a time slot. We take the time, within reason, to get the features we want.

[faatal]

2 hours ago, Abunai said:

From what I understand from your comment and previous reports @faatal, there are two serious bugs that need to be fixed for the release of A21:
This zombie AI error you mentioned and the random hole in the ground of POI when quest resetting. Please, can you share with us something about the status of this second bug? (sorry if that was answered previously)
Thank you and good work 

Those are only my bugs and not all of my bugs/tasks as I currently have 12 must fixes in various states of completion and across the team there are 67. That number does not mean a lot, as half of them do not need to be done for experimental and new ones get added regularly.

 

Then there are last minute tweaks, like today it came up that sleeper volumes spawn using the game stage of the player triggering the volume, so I am trying to test a change that adds in players nearby, similar to how blood moons spawning makes parties from nearby players for game stage calc.

[meilodasreh]

34 minutes ago, faatal said:

Then there are last minute tweaks, like today

A21 ETA confirmed: in one minute.

[Morloc]

1 hour ago, faatal said:

Features not being as far along as we hoped. We don't primarily schedule features based on time, but functionality, so it takes as long as it does for that functionality to work. Many devs would cut features to hit a time slot. We take the time, within reason, to get the features we want.

 

Have you tried asking ChatGPT for help?

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

[Old Crow]

6 hours ago, JamesKirk said:

There again the mysterious word "soon"(TM) appears

 

It's the Blizzard "Soon (TM)"

1 hour ago, faatal said:

Those are only my bugs and not all of my bugs/tasks as I currently have 12 must fixes in various states of completion and across the team there are 67. That number does not mean a lot, as half of them do not need to be done for experimental and new ones get added regularly.

 

Then there are last minute tweaks, like today it came up that sleeper volumes spawn using the game stage of the player triggering the volume, so I am trying to test a change that adds in players nearby, similar to how blood moons spawning makes parties from nearby players for game stage calc.

 

So probably going to be a while yet.

[Mr. Perfect]

On 3/22/2022 at 9:54 PM, faatal said:

 

Not likely. That would probably have to go through Unity and I have not seen Unity mention it.

 

More time seems to be spent processing data than loading it. I was just saying today, we need more improvements on processing data, because if we had infinite data read speeds, load times would probably still not be much faster.

 

Sorry to bring up old topics again, but the new DirectStorage 1.1 release might solve that processing speed issue for you. Anandtech did a great little article on the 1.1 version, but here's the bits that would probably interest you.

 

Quote

Under current game development paradigms, the CPU can be a bottlenecking factor in scaling up I/O rates to meet what SSDs can provide, as there are significant CPU costs both to tracking so many I/O operations and for decompressing game assets before passing them on to the GPU. DirectStorage 1.1, in turn, is designed to minimize both of these loads, and ultimately, try to remove the CPU as much as possible from game asset streaming.  

 

By allowing GPUs to do game asset decompression, that entire process is offloaded from the CPU. This not only frees the CPU up for other tasks, but it removes a potentially critical bottleneck in game asset streaming. Because modern SSDs are so fast – on the order of hundreds of thousands of IOPS and data transfer rates hitting 7GB/second – the CPU is the weakest link between speedy SSDs and massively parallel GPUs. So under DirectStorage, the CPU is getting cut out almost entirely.

 

Like you said, Unity would have to do the work of adding DirectStorage to the engine, but it sounds like something 7 Days would benefit from. Maybe give your Unity rep a nudge?

[falloutcloud]

6 hours ago, Riamus said:

I think the hope of release by Christmas was a community hope and not in any way promoted by TFP, so there isn't a "planning delay".  They have always said "when it's done", so there no one telling us any expected release dates.  As they have mentioned here, they are working on critical bugs and there won't be a release until those are fixed.  The fact that we are seeing more screenshots suggests it may be getting closer, but they'll likely still do the normal streams and stuff before release, so even if they were ready now, we'd still be a month or so off (not sure the normal timeframe for those lead-ups to release).  Of course, they may be showing more screenshots just to calm people down and it may not have anything to do with being close to release.

 

Btw, people always assume "by Christmas" for a game that is near release (even just a new alpha in this case) because they expect companies to get things out for the Steam sale.  But TFP doesn't seem to be concerned about trying to jump through the Steam sale hoops, which is a good thing because companies that do are often ones that release games with game-breaking bugs that weren't fixed because they ran out of time before the deadline to be in the sale.

I think the reason many of us had hoped it would release by Christmas is that Rick sounded optimistic that it could happen. We all pretty much knew that it was just a guess but I don't think that we thought he'd be off by 4 months.

[Roland]

2 minutes ago, falloutcloud said:

I think the reason many of us had hoped it would release by Christmas is that Rick sounded optimistic that it could happen. We all pretty much knew that it was just a guess but I don't think that we thought he'd be off by 4 months.

 

Yeah, he needs a knuckle rub!

[Old Crow]

2 hours ago, falloutcloud said:

I think the reason many of us had hoped it would release by Christmas is that Rick sounded optimistic that it could happen. We all pretty much knew that it was just a guess but I don't think that we thought he'd be off by 4 months.

 

I've noticed they kind of tend to say things in regards to releases that end up being very generous. It almost seems like they're out of touch with what the dev team is actually doing.

[DocRussel]

Roads look straighter, more like a grid.

[Laz Man]

2 hours ago, DocRussel said:

Roads look straighter, more like a grid.

 

That's a custom tile set in Navezgane for Perishton which got some nice updates this Alpha.

[bdubyah]

49 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

That's a custom tile set in Navezgane for Perishton which got some nice updates this Alpha.

Any tiles like that with the median in the road for RWG, or is that stuff Nav only? I think having a boat load of available tiles for use in cities and towns would help break up the repetitiveness. Is there any new tiles in A21, aka more of a pool for RWG to choose from, or is it similar to A20?

[dwallorde]

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

 

That's a custom tile set in Navezgane for Perishton which got some nice updates this Alpha.

I thought it was as I saw that farewell sign that I have only seen in Navezgane 

[beHypE]

8 hours ago, Roland said:

 

Yeah, he needs a knuckle rub!

 

If i'm being honest the person I remember that gave me hope was you, knucklerubber! 😄

 

As a player i'm obviously disappointed by the answer, because indeed it seems it's - at least - a couple months away yet. But as a developer I can only praise the mentality of your company, I wish all my projects were driven by quality metrics and not time metrics !

 

Time to disappear in the cloud for some weeks again. 😅

[Doomofman]

4 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

That's a custom tile set in Navezgane for Perishton which got some nice updates this Alpha.

 

Does that mean the tile set won't be in RWG maps?

[Cr0wst0rm]

14 hours ago, faatal said:

Features not being as far along as we hoped. We don't primarily schedule features based on time, but functionality, so it takes as long as it does for that functionality to work. Many devs would cut features to hit a time slot. We take the time, within reason, to get the features we want.

I think I can definitely agree with this. That is what programming is for me about, rather take time on that framework, so it is scalable and can be reused multiple times (and you can build on top of it), instead of coding it 50 times in random places and delivering it somewhat faster, while having to manage all the bugs....

[Laz Man]

4 hours ago, Doomofman said:

 

Does that mean the tile set won't be in RWG maps?

 

Correct.  It is a custom tile for Navezgane. 

[Trankitas]

26 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Correct.  It is a custom tile for Navezgane. 

Laz please release A21, you'll be the hero we need

[Doomofman]

I'm hoping with the increase in posts on Twitter that we're drawing closer to at least an announcement of the Exp date. 

 

Watch them announce it on April 1st now

[unholyjoe]

10 minutes ago, Doomofman said:

I'm hoping with the increase in posts on Twitter that we're drawing closer to at least an announcement of the Exp date. 

 

Watch them announce it on April 1st now

April Fools!

but dont forget dev streams and then the streamer weekend.

 

Spoiler

i had to say it before anyone else did or does.

 

[DuHast_Play]

23 minutes ago, Doomofman said:

I'm hoping with the increase in posts on Twitter that we're drawing closer to at least an announcement of the Exp date. 

 

Watch them announce it on April 1st now

Previously, they wrote that the one who posts content on Twitter has nothing to do with the development. so maybe he does it just to not get bored. teases

[adny]

21 hours ago, faatal said:

I wanted to convey to you, one interesting thought!
It seems to me that your concept of developing equipment, workbenches, furnaces, weapons is, in principle, not true!
The fact is that even I can’t make the machine itself on my knee. To do this, you need at least 2 machines, turning and milling. Nobody! No one can make these machines! No one can make an automatic machine, repair it, yes, make it from scratch, no.
Therefore, it is necessary not to do all this, especially after the apocalypse, there will be so much of this goodness ....
It is necessary that the player finds, machines, furnaces and so on. He brought all this to the shelter and repaired it, restored it. You can somehow learn this, do it from scratch - NEVER!
By the way, this applies to cartridges, no one can make them. Yes, according to the recipe in the game, they will be made, but they will not shoot!
And why???

[meganoth]

25 minutes ago, adny said:

I wanted to convey to you, one interesting thought!
It seems to me that your concept of developing equipment, workbenches, furnaces, weapons is, in principle, not true!
The fact is that even I can’t make the machine itself on my knee. To do this, you need at least 2 machines, turning and milling. Nobody! No one can make these machines! No one can make an automatic machine, repair it, yes, make it from scratch, no.
Therefore, it is necessary not to do all this, especially after the apocalypse, there will be so much of this goodness ....
It is necessary that the player finds, machines, furnaces and so on. He brought all this to the shelter and repaired it, restored it. You can somehow learn this, do it from scratch - NEVER!
By the way, this applies to cartridges, no one can make them. Yes, according to the recipe in the game, they will be made, but they will not shoot!
And why???

 

7D2D ist not a simulation. It does not try to be 100% realistic.

 

[Jost Amman]

37 minutes ago, adny said:

I wanted to convey to you, one interesting thought!
It seems to me that your concept of developing equipment, workbenches, furnaces, weapons is, in principle, not true!
The fact is that even I can’t make the machine itself on my knee. To do this, you need at least 2 machines, turning and milling. Nobody! No one can make these machines! No one can make an automatic machine, repair it, yes, make it from scratch, no.
Therefore, it is necessary not to do all this, especially after the apocalypse, there will be so much of this goodness ....
It is necessary that the player finds, machines, furnaces and so on. He brought all this to the shelter and repaired it, restored it. You can somehow learn this, do it from scratch - NEVER!
By the way, this applies to cartridges, no one can make them. Yes, according to the recipe in the game, they will be made, but they will not shoot!
And why???

Nobody can make dead bodies come back to life! NEVER! ... Well, at least not in the last 2K years 

It's just a game, but I get your point. It could be fun if the only way to have workstations would be to find them and repair them.

 

But it's probably a good idea, more for a mod than vanilla.