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Alpha 21 Dev Diary


Roland

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18 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

It occured to me right now that I may have misunderstood the "wobbling" all the time discussing about it. I thought it was about the vehicle breaking out and driving sinuous or wiggly lines (words I got from a dictionary). I.e. in those cases I often have to stop the vehicle and it would come to halt in a totally different direction to where I had been driving.

 

The wobbling you and maybe all the others were talking about is just some unnutural quivering of the bike.  @FramFramson @Riamus@Kalex et.al.: Have I misinterpreted you here?

 

 

To be precise, I would say it is an overly-dramatic lateral lean/wobble (i.e. side to side, perpendicular to the direction of travel).

 

When you ride a motorbike or any two wheeled vehicle, you naturally lean when you turn as most of us know. But in 7D, you may perform a small change of direction, the sort which might have a tiny bit of lean or even no visible lean at all IRL, but your character first leans dramatically to the side, and then the physics model appears to overcorrect for this excess by flinging you over so you lean in the opposite direction. This gradually tapers off, as if you were riding some kind of weeble wobble or giant spring. And yet your wheels don't leave the ground! IRL if you leaned from side to side that dramatically not only would you wipe out, you should also be zig-zagging wildly. Kind of like someone doing a pylon obstacle race?

 

IMO some specific related physics setting in 7D has probably been mis-set at a wildly incorrect value for vehicles.

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34 minutes ago, FramFramson said:

IMO some specific related physics setting in 7D has probably been mis-set at a wildly incorrect value for vehicles.

If you file a bug report and put it in the confirmed bugs queue, with a detailed explanation, a picture, or maybe even a video to showcase the issue, then @faatal will have official time coverage to work on the matter, and can dedicate some time to see how to improve it.

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5 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

If you file a bug report and put it in the confirmed bugs queue, with a detailed explanation, a picture, or maybe even a video to showcase the issue, then @faatal will have official time coverage to work on the matter, and can dedicate some time to see how to improve it.

 

Haven't you all read Fataals reply above? He knows about the wobble, so no need for a bug report. As he reads this thread he knows that it disturbs your sense of right and wrong 😉. Me, I don't care about the wobble.

 

And as the head developer I am also sure he doesn't need a confirmed bug report to put time into anything. Instead you would need to convince him that his time would be well spend working on this

 

5 hours ago, FramFramson said:

IMO some specific related physics setting in 7D has probably been mis-set at a wildly incorrect value for vehicles.

 

To change the wobble he would probably need to experiment and find a better formula for the force that keeps you upright or completely change how it keeps you upright, not just change some setting.

 

Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
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30 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Haven't you all read Fataals reply above? He knows about the wobble, so no need for a bug report. As he reads this thread he knows that it disturbs your sense of right and wrong 😉. Me, I don't care about the wobble.

Well, a proper bug report, with attached video, would clarify better what those players are talking about and why it feels so wrong.

Looking at a video of the "issue" may very well convince faatal to rethink about changing something if those edge cases generate a weird vehicle behavior.

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@Jost Amman indeed! Part of my job irl is dealing with complaints concerning technical materials (electrical components) from our contractors (they recieve the materials they use from us).

And I can absolutely confirm that it is vital to be meticulously precise about how you describe the fault, especially when everybody involved already has heard about it and has a general idea, and therefore automatically starts to presume things.

It is soooo very easy to talk past each other...as can be seen here, meganoth also didn't get it right because he was presuming stuff.

So yes again to your point, absolutely necessary to get things straight.

...next thing is: will the QA guy who receives the ticket take a thorough look or just klick it away because he's presuming...😀

Edited by meilodasreh (see edit history)
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8 hours ago, meganoth said:

To change the wobble he would probably need to experiment and find a better formula for the force that keeps you upright or completely change how it keeps you upright, not just change some setting.

 

Eh, it could be a general vehicle property. I don't think TFP would have had cause to change Unity's basic physics engine settings too dramatically, unless maybe something about the voxel physics required it? It seems unlikely though I guess not impossible.

 

I mean, sure, you how never know how spaghetti someone's code is until you actually look at it, but I have no reason the think the 7D2D code is particularly bad in this regard. 7D2D bugs always seem to be mostly traceable cause-and-effect, not a bunch of wildly unrelated things breaking.

 

Anyway this is all just speculation.

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3 hours ago, FramFramson said:

 

Eh, it could be a general vehicle property. I don't think TFP would have had cause to change Unity's basic physics engine settings too dramatically, unless maybe something about the voxel physics required it? It seems unlikely though I guess not impossible.

 

I mean, sure, you how never know how spaghetti someone's code is until you actually look at it, but I have no reason the think the 7D2D code is particularly bad in this regard. 7D2D bugs always seem to be mostly traceable cause-and-effect, not a bunch of wildly unrelated things breaking.

 

Anyway this is all just speculation.

 

 

I interpreted Faatals message above that Unity's code is basically not handling the physics of 2 wheel driving at all. As he said, the vehicle would simply fall if the application programmer did not add code to handle the situation:

 

On 9/21/2023 at 1:19 AM, faatal said:

Two wheeled Unity vehicles fall right over as soon as you turn

 

So Faatal must have added code and this code probably uses a feedback system where for example the stronger you lean to one side (when driving straight) the stronger an opposing force pushes back. Such systems tend to generate oscillation such as we see in the game.

 

Now you can make the formula which calculates the opposing force (from some variables lile leaning, speed and turn radius) arbitrarily complicated. You could even make a complete physics simulation but that would probably cost too many cpu cycles for just the driving. So you need to find a simpler formula that still works well. And that searching and testing those formulas probably takes a lot of time.

 

This is not about cleaning sphagetti code.

 

Edited by meganoth (see edit history)
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12 hours ago, meganoth said:

To change the wobble he would probably need to experiment and find a better formula for the force that keeps you upright or completely change how it keeps you upright, not just change some setting.

Although true that he'd probably need to experiment to find a suitable amount to change it to, I'm pretty sure we are taking about a math equation to calculate something like lateral g-force and then another calculation for compensation (counterbalance).  These may be complicated equations (maybe), but they should be easy to change and test different amounts of change to find a good balance.  Of course, we don't know the code and so it is a guess but managing forces like that is pretty common in games with any form of physics, so it shouldn't be hard to figure out.

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1 hour ago, Riamus said:

Although true that he'd probably need to experiment to find a suitable amount to change it to, I'm pretty sure we are taking about a math equation to calculate something like lateral g-force and then another calculation for compensation (counterbalance).  These may be complicated equations (maybe), but they should be easy to change and test different amounts of change to find a good balance.  Of course, we don't know the code and so it is a guess but managing forces like that is pretty common in games with any form of physics, so it shouldn't be hard to figure out.

 

Whoever programmed the math equation to control the current motorbike was either satisfied with the current way or did not find a perfect formula after some easy tests.

 

 

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1 hour ago, meganoth said:

Whoever programmed the math equation to control the current motorbike was either satisfied with the current way or did not find a perfect formula after some easy tests.

Of course.  That doesn't mean it can't be looked at and improved upon.  There are obviously going to be ways to change this behavior.  Maybe it will be too resource-heavy to do so.  That's a possibility.  But it can be looked into.

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5 hours ago, Roland said:

Every day I try to get 130 students to look into math equations and every day they try to avoid it at all costs...

Give them more homework. 

 

5 hours ago, mstdv inc said:

@faatal 
1. What are you working on now?
2. Do you often encounter problems in the development of solutions that require a creative approach?
thx

2. Us, the forum members :D 

Edited by beerfly (see edit history)
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11 hours ago, Roland said:

Every day I try to get 130 students to look into math equations and every day they try to avoid it at all costs...

 

Did you try any of these threats...?

 

A. Knuckle rubs.

2. Take away their water bottles.

C. Have Snowdog subsitute teach for a day.

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so I have a question about chunk reset..I have the setting on and I put a landclaim block down by my hordebase and thought I had activated it and my hordebase was protected, but I come  back there 10 days or so later and my hordebase is entirely gone and the chunk has reset. 

I thought you could have up to three active land claims blocks so why did this chunk reset?

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2 hours ago, POCKET951 said:

I thought you could have up to three active land claims blocks

Right now I'm not quite sure how that's handled (somewhat lost interest since A21),

but there should be an option in the main game menu where you can choose how many active LCBs you can have.

Don't know what the default is (maybe even just one?), but whenever you put the first LCB that exceeds the chosen number, the first one you set gets disabled/inactive.

Probably that's what happened in your case?

 

Another thing that could have happened is that the exact location where you put the LCB was right at the border of one chunk, and your base - even if it was just a few blocks away - happened to be in another chunk.

Don't know exactly how big a chunk is and how one could check that.

 

Anyone knows how to make the chunks/their borders visible maybe in debug mode? Does this exist?

Edited by meilodasreh (see edit history)
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