Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Ryiah]

15 hours ago, khzmusik said:

 

The engine is updated, but they don't (and can't) update to the newest features of the game engine. For instance, 7D2D will almost certainly never update its Unity render pipeline, because it would mean a huge chunk of the code would have to be rewritten.

 

I've worked with both of the new render pipelines and have updated test projects from the old pipeline to both URP and HDRP. You have to rewrite all of your custom shaders to use it, and you have to update the materials that use them, but that's about all that changes to "code".

 

Custom shaders aside the universal pipeline only takes a few minutes to upgrade to but it's also missing all of the fun toys that people would want with a new render pipeline like raytracing and advanced upscalers. If they wanted all of that they would have to go into HD which has a very different lighting model. Textures would require a little rework too.

 

Regardless of what they choose though the best path forward is to finish the game first. After that if they decide they want to have better graphics they can just pass it to a third party to do the work for them.

Edited May 13, 2023 by Ryiah (see edit history)

[Robbing Zombie]

On 5/12/2023 at 6:07 PM, Laz Man said:

I'm sure faatal has some ideas to make the wasteland harder.  For example make all zombies there demos....😅

Demo-vultures! 🤓

[Old Crow]

39 minutes ago, Robbing Zombie said:

Demo-vultures! 🤓

 

NO THANK YOU

[n2n1]

Some advice for weapon animators:

 

Spoiler

 

 

[beerfly]

5 hours ago, Robbing Zombie said:

Demo-vultures! 🤓

And feral ducks

[Old Crow]

1 hour ago, beerfly said:

And feral ducks

 

And chickens with guns

[beerfly]

6 minutes ago, Old Crow said:

 

And chickens with guns

And the one in the back with the stun baton is the captain. 

 

 

[hiemfire]

1 hour ago, Old Crow said:

 

And chickens with guns

 

58 minutes ago, beerfly said:

And the one in the back with the stun baton is the captain. 

 

 

They don't need a ranged attack or a commander. Just cross them with piranha and increase their metabolism. Ever seen chickens chase a beetle? Now imagine 10 to 50 of them chasing you with serrated beaks.  

Edited May 14, 2023 by hiemfire (see edit history)

[beerfly]

15 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

 

They don't need a ranged attack or a commander. Just cross them with piranha and increase their metabolism. Ever seen chickens chase a beetle? Now imagine 10 to 50 of them chasing you with serrated beaks.  

Rule #1: Cardio 

Edited May 14, 2023 by beerfly
Also, twinkies :) (see edit history)

[hiemfire]

1 minute ago, beerfly said:

Rule #1: Cardio 

Allows you to run longer, chickens are still faster iirc. 😈

[beerfly]

6 minutes ago, hiemfire said:

Allows you to run longer, chickens are still faster iirc. 😈

That`s where the fun begins, focusing on your own survival. 

 

 

[Aldranon]

1 hour ago, beerfly said:

That`s where the fun begins, focusing on your own survival. 

 

 

My survival would start with me kiting the evil chickens through a vat of marinara sauce and then into the BBQ pit... er the fire trap where I would climb to safety!

 

 

[beerfly]

4 hours ago, Aldranon said:

 

My survival would start with me kiting the evil chickens through a vat of marinara sauce and then into the BBQ pit... er the fire trap where I would climb to safety!

 

 

Go on. I`ll bring the beer ! 

[renacava]

On 5/13/2023 at 6:36 AM, RipClaw said:

This is because a newer engine or different engine does not automatically solve all problems.

 

Games with a lot of enemies always have a static map. In 7 Days to Die, however, we have a completely destructible world. This means that an enemy must constantly recalculate its path.

 

In A21, the more distant enemies will recalculate their path less frequently. This should improve performance.
 

i think the biggest problem is that the 7dtd project's been worked on for about a decade now. every coding project grows in complexity the longer you work on it, unless you're super strict and aggressive about keeping it clean.

the engine itself isn't really a bottleneck so much as the architecture of the game, i'm sure. when you're developing a game with an audience that expects featureful, frequent updates, then it's a lot harder to go slow and keep the code clean, to ensure the architecture's flexible, and when you go for a decade like this then the whole project can become extremely brittle.

they may have, ages ago, implemented inefficient or inflexible ways of doing a lot of features because they were on a deadline of sorts. now, after years of building upon that inflexible underlying code, changing things becomes very difficult without breaking the entire system.

 

and i doubt they have unit tests, i'm not sure unit tests were even supported in Unity when the foundations of 7dtd were layed down.

so now there's probably just this giant web of interconnected systems, making seemingly unrelated parts of the game break when you change/remove/add to other parts of the game, and the devs probably can't even tell when something breaks because there probably aren't unit tests. i can't imagine what a nightmare it must be for them to debug.

I think this is also a big reason why updates have been slowing down, and focusing more on content (textures, meshes, poi's, etc) than systems, and probably also why bandits are such a big mission to implement. i'm willing to bet its because it wasn't an anticipated feature when npc's for 7dtd were first setup, but then years of development upon that npc system meant they coded themselves into a corner when they realised they needed to change that system to allow for bandits.

 

also pathfinding in an open world isn't necessarily much more expensive than a static one, you'll only need to recalculate nav data when the terrain changes, and that's pretty rare in the grand scheme of the game.

but the zombies also use a breadcrumb system iirc, like old games figured out decades ago, to base npc movement in a map off of player movement in that map.

and since that system was used in games from decades ago, i'm sure it's cheap enough for 2023 hardware.

[Burrfly]

Hey does anyone know a mod that re-adds rebar frames and old materials? Yeah I know I mentioned "rebar frames" for the 7000th time now, I'm just pretty upset about it. Thnx 4 reading

6 minutes ago, Burrfly said:

Hey does anyone know a mod that re-adds rebar frames and old materials? Yeah I know I mentioned "rebar frames" for the 7000th time now, I'm just pretty upset about it. Thnx 4 reading

Btw I actually think I have some light form of autism (no joke), and I just cannot stand change in a way that REMOVES stuff that was just great to have and I "bonded" with

Edited May 14, 2023 by Burrfly (see edit history)

[meganoth]

2 hours ago, renacava said:

i think the biggest problem is that the 7dtd project's been worked on for about a decade now. every coding project grows in complexity the longer you work on it, unless you're super strict and aggressive about keeping it clean.

the engine itself isn't really a bottleneck so much as the architecture of the game, i'm sure. when you're developing a game with an audience that expects featureful, frequent updates, then it's a lot harder to go slow and keep the code clean, to ensure the architecture's flexible, and when you go for a decade like this then the whole project can become extremely brittle.

they may have, ages ago, implemented inefficient or inflexible ways of doing a lot of features because they were on a deadline of sorts. now, after years of building upon that inflexible underlying code, changing things becomes very difficult without breaking the entire system.

 

and i doubt they have unit tests, i'm not sure unit tests were even supported in Unity when the foundations of 7dtd were layed down.

so now there's probably just this giant web of interconnected systems, making seemingly unrelated parts of the game break when you change/remove/add to other parts of the game, and the devs probably can't even tell when something breaks because there probably aren't unit tests. i can't imagine what a nightmare it must be for them to debug.

I think this is also a big reason why updates have been slowing down, and focusing more on content (textures, meshes, poi's, etc) than systems, and probably also why bandits are such a big mission to implement. i'm willing to bet its because it wasn't an anticipated feature when npc's for 7dtd were first setup, but then years of development upon that npc system meant they coded themselves into a corner when they realised they needed to change that system to allow for bandits.

 

also pathfinding in an open world isn't necessarily much more expensive than a static one, you'll only need to recalculate nav data when the terrain changes, and that's pretty rare in the grand scheme of the game.

but the zombies also use a breadcrumb system iirc, like old games figured out decades ago, to base npc movement in a map off of player movement in that map.

and since that system was used in games from decades ago, i'm sure it's cheap enough for 2023 hardware.

 

I agree with your first half. But I don't think bandits were an afterthought, they were planned to be in the game from the start. But a lot of code (for example the first AI) was merely a placeholder because they needed one asap. Effectively (AFAIK) they started implementing the AI from the ground up at the start of A17 development, And when I say "they" I really mean one person that had a few other tasks to do in parallel.

 

Terrain change can be done by simply shooting with a shotgun. You can have 8 guys on a horde night, changing terrian 8 times a second 😁 . Plus up to 64 zombies doing some terrain changing as well

 

 

Edited May 14, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[OgreSlayeR]

It doesn't appear it will be fixed in A21, but I hope in A22 they polish the combat and gun play. The biggest issue I have is with the combat is how it feels with aiming with the crosshair and aiming down sights especially with misaligned sights. I also think the melee animations could be much better and it would be nice it had some different animations like 3 a hit combination for holding left click and a more visceral right click power attack. I would like if it feels like a game like Rust (at least with the guns) eventually and they remove the crosshair to make it more immersive.

Edited May 14, 2023 by OgreSlayeR (see edit history)

[Burrfly]

No hate, but these are just parts of a lot of reviews I found of players who have the same concerns as me. I maybe will get hate due to this, heck, I may even get banned.

(Each seperate image is from a seperate review)

[RipClaw]

6 minutes ago, Burrfly said:

No hate, but these are just parts of a lot of reviews I found of players who have the same concerns as me. I maybe will get hate due to this, heck, I may even get banned.

In my experience, you will not be banned in this forum if you remain polite and factual.
 

Regarding the statements in the postings I must say that I can understand these points of view. There are changes that have had a negative impact on certain play styles. Mine was also affected and probably will be in A21. How much I can adapt my playstyle without losing the fun of the game remains to be seen.
 

[Laz Man]

48 minutes ago, Burrfly said:

No hate, but these are just parts of a lot of reviews I found of players who have the same concerns as me. I maybe will get hate due to this, heck, I may even get banned.

(Each seperate image is from a seperate review)

 

Alot of those comments sound like people who fell in love with a particular iteration in development that got upset when a particular mechanic / feature changed.  I can empathize with the disappointment given how long the game has been in development.  One guy was upset with how long it takes to generate a RWG map.  Hopefully he comes back in A21, since map generation time has been significantly improved.   Thankfully, most people think positively of the game and its development (at least based on steam reviews).

 

With that said, the team is super focused on adding the remaining promised features (e.g. bandits, story, etc.) and polishing and optimizing to gold.

 

 

Edit: I would like to add that anyone who has been on these forums long enough knows that the forum moderation team here is very fair.  The only time I would see a poster get moderated and/or banned is when they couldn't accept when other forum members not agreeing with their opinions and then would start to break forum rules left and right...

Edited May 14, 2023 by Laz Man (see edit history)

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Burrfly said:

No hate, but these are just parts of a lot of reviews I found of players who have the same concerns as me. I maybe will get hate due to this, heck, I may even get banned.

 

You're fine. I'm just glad you were able to find your people.

 

[Burrfly]

49 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Alot of those comments sound like people who fell in love with a particular iteration in development that got upset when a particular mechanic / feature changed.  I can empathize with the disappointment given how long the game has been in development.  One guy was upset with how long it takes to generate a RWG map.  Hopefully he comes back in A21, since map generation time has been significantly improved.   Thankfully, most people think positively of the game and its development (at least based on steam reviews).

 

With that said, the team is super focused on adding the remaining promised features (e.g. bandits, story, etc.) and polishing and optimizing to gold.

 

 

Edit: I would like to add that anyone who has been on these forums long enough knows that the forum moderation team here is very fair.  The only time I would see a poster get moderated and/or banned is when they couldn't accept when other forum members not agreeing with their opinions and then would start to break forum rules left and right...

Yes, the user reviews are still very positive, but the newer reviews do include players that have not known this game as it was earlier. So, if I were to play 7 days to die knowing only 4 building materials, I wouldn't notice and I would give a positive review. It is however a difference if people were used to the 11 building materials (including different levels) which now have been reduced to 4. And again, not to hate, but comparitively speaking, jan2022-jan2023 has more negative reviews than jan2020-dec2021 (somewhere ~jan2022 alpha 20 released).

[Jost Amman]

8 minutes ago, Burrfly said:

Yes, the user reviews are still very positive, but the newer reviews do include players that have not known this game as it was earlier. So, if I were to play 7 days to die knowing only 4 building materials, I wouldn't notice and I would give a positive review. It is however a difference if people were used to the 11 building materials (including different levels) which now have been reduced to 4. And again, not to hate, but comparitively speaking, jan2022-jan2023 has more negative reviews than jan2020-dec2021 (somewhere ~jan2022 alpha 20 released).

Most of those complaints can be resolved with mods, which TFP have fully supported from day 1.

So, what's the prob? 

 

Edited May 14, 2023 by Jost Amman (see edit history)

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, Burrfly said:

Yes, the user reviews are still very positive, but the newer reviews do include players that have not known this game as it was earlier. So, if I were to play 7 days to die knowing only 4 building materials, I wouldn't notice and I would give a positive review. It is however a difference if people were used to the 11 building materials (including different levels) which now have been reduced to 4. And again, not to hate, but comparitively speaking, jan2022-jan2023 has more negative reviews than jan2020-dec2021 (somewhere ~jan2022 alpha 20 released).

 

I would argue building is the best it has ever been.  I'd take 2000+ shapes to build with versus 11 building materials in a heartbeat... 😎

[Doomofman]

The extra blocks are the only change to building in A21, right?