Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[meilodasreh]

Yes I also think that heavy armor design is a good bit too overexaggerated. The helmet alone would weigh too much to bear for anybody. And then you're suddenly encumbered because you pick up one feather that uses an additional inventory slot 😅

Cool design overall, really brutal/archaic look...guy who made that may just have been taken away a little with it. Tune it down some and it's perfect imho.

 

To that "everybody will look the same":

Doesn't bother me too much. There should be enough possibilities to make it unique, just by coloring options.

In the end this is no MMO with a whole lot of people running around at the same place.

[Fanatical_Meat]

1 hour ago, meilodasreh said:

Yes I also think that heavy armor design is a good bit too overexaggerated. The helmet alone would weigh too much to bear for anybody. And then you're suddenly encumbered because you pick up one feather that uses an additional inventory slot 😅

Cool design overall, really brutal/archaic look...guy who made that may just have been taken away a little with it. Tune it down some and it's perfect imho.

 

To that "everybody will look the same":

Doesn't bother me too much. There should be enough possibilities to make it unique, just by coloring options.

In the end this is no MMO with a whole lot of people running around at the same place.

Yeah, I exclusively play multiplayer and I have a group of 3-6 I play with regularly. Looking different is probably more important to me than it really needs to be.

[Saardek]

6 hours ago, Adam the Waster said:

BTW what kinda of bird skull is this! a argentavis? a condor! 

 

Thing is so big! Giggity

KEVIN the Giant Snipe... 

 

[HB_H4wk]

What about making the zombies looking crisp after you set them on fire with a Molotov?

 

[meilodasreh]

1 hour ago, Saardek said:

KEVIN the Giant Snipe... 

HA! perfect! 🤣

Yep, it's him. Kevin.

Will never be able to unsee it now, and always name my bike Kevin from now on, regardless of the design actually makes it into the game like that or not.

Made my day!😀

[Riamus]

On 11/4/2023 at 11:17 PM, Adam the Waster said:

The zombie dog does have new animations.  I hope we get it on the wolfs and coyotes. Maybe feral dogs??? 

 

But the game could uses difficultly in terms of wildlife again. Cuz they made it to easy in A21. As of yet I have not found 1 bear in the forest! I need some danger! Add a mountain lion or 2 or something!

They decided to make the forest the noob zone.  Lol.  Unfortunately, I like the forest aesthetically.  I never really liked the wasteland and the desert is "meh".  Snow is okay but nothing special.

Edited November 8, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[Adam the Waster]

29 minutes ago, Riamus said:

They decided to make the first the noob zone.  Lol.  Unfortunately, I like the forest aesthetically.  I never really liked the wasteland and the desert is "meh".  Snow is okay but nothing special.

Agreed it's way to easy 

[Roland]

9 hours ago, meilodasreh said:

The helmet alone would weigh too much to bear for anybody. And then you're suddenly encumbered because you pick up one feather that uses an additional inventory slot 😅

THIS is where you draw the line?!?!

[meilodasreh]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

THIS is where you draw the line?!?!

Got taken away a little when I was expressing my thoughts about the looks of the armor, the thickness of the metal is just really over the top.

Wasn't my intention to start over the whole "why can I carry thousands of tons of solid steel blocks but only..." logic thingy, sorry.

 

Spoiler

THE line was drawn for me when empty jars were removed btw...😛

 

[beerfly]

4 hours ago, meilodasreh said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

THE line was drawn for me when empty jars were removed btw...😛

 

"Erasing the line with my sleeve behind you back"

 

What line ? 

[Morloc]

On 11/6/2023 at 8:22 AM, Adam the Waster said:

Wild vulture In the desert?? 

 

I guess that would explain why they mauled me. But I also had to fight a rattlesnake

 

Stuff like that. Happens ALL the time....

 

Texas woman injured after hawk drops snake on her - BBC News

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

[HB_H4wk]

4 hours ago, Morloc said:

 

Stuff like that. Happens ALL the time....

 

Texas woman injured after hawk drops snake on her - BBC News

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

I did not drop that snake on her on purpose.

[BFT2020]

20 hours ago, Riamus said:

They decided to make the forest the noob zone.  Lol.  Unfortunately, I like the forest aesthetically.  I never really liked the wasteland and the desert is "meh".  Snow is okay but nothing special.

 

shhh. keep this on the downlow, but.....

Spoiler

 

<set xpath="//biome[@name='pine_forest']/spawn[@entitygroup='ZombiesAll']/@entitygroup">ZombiesWasteland</set>

<set xpath="//biome[@name='pine_forest']/spawn[@entitygroup='ZombiesNight']/@entitygroup">ZombiesWastelandNight</set>

<set xpath="//biome[@name='pine_forest']/spawn[@entitygroup='ZombiesForestDowntown']/@entitygroup">ZombiesWastelandDowntown</set>

<set xpath="//biome[@name='pine_forest']/spawn[@entitygroup='ZombiesForestDowntownNight']/@entitygroup">ZombiesWastelandDowntown</set>

 

That should up the difficulty a bit, but allow you to stay in the pine forest  😉

[meilodasreh]

Away with you, evil sorcerer:

Spoiler

<set xpath="//biome[@name='alpha-21-dev-diary']/despawn[@entity='BFT2020']</set>

 

Edited November 8, 2023 by meilodasreh (see edit history)

[BFT2020]

3 hours ago, meilodasreh said:

Away with you, evil sorcerer:

  Hide contents

<set xpath="//biome[@name='alpha-21-dev-diary']/despawn[@entity='BFT2020']</set>

 

 

Um, its remove not set.  I demand accuracy when you mock me, accuracy!

[meilodasreh]

ah, sorry, my bad. 

I only excel in mocking, not in coding.

[Blake_]

A polite question to the devs:

 

Why is it that 7dtd has everything renewed, like in assets, POI structures and design, items, weapons, animations, animals, textures, roads, RWG, zds, trees, grass, flowers!, every prop,  shadows, postpro effects, complex LODs and LOD tunning, heavy optimized area loading, memory and CPU optimization to make the Pentagon cry in awe, a skyline to die for and npcs on the way with Skynet-like intelligence and WE STILL HAVE ROAD DECALS (blood, newspapers,cardboard) FROM ALPHA FREAKING ONE?!! (is he shouting? he IS shouting, what an unpolite forum user, good heavens ! -sips tea-).

[Javabean867]

2 hours ago, Blake_ said:

A polite question to the devs:

 

Why is it that 7dtd has everything renewed, like in assets, POI structures and design, items, weapons, animations, animals, textures, roads, RWG, zds, trees, grass, flowers!, every prop,  shadows, postpro effects, complex LODs and LOD tunning, heavy optimized area loading, memory and CPU optimization to make the Pentagon cry in awe, a skyline to die for and npcs on the way with Skynet-like intelligence and WE STILL HAVE ROAD DECALS (blood, newspapers,cardboard) FROM ALPHA FREAKING ONE?!! (is he shouting? he IS shouting, what an unpolite forum user, good heavens ! -sips tea-).

If they ever get rid of those, it will make me sad lol

[faatal]

On 11/1/2023 at 4:21 AM, Obsessive Compulsive said:

If I had a few suggestion for the code monkeys on the team, would posting it here take any notice? Is there a better place to mention some stuff about Unity.
Not trying to tell you guys what to do, that is your call. Just some suggestions if someone wants to look at it.

I will post it anyways and if there is a better home for the post, maybe a mod can shift it or direct me to whom I should speak with?

I have been looking through the Assembly-CSharp.dll file for the game and noticed someone has written FindObjectsOfType() in various classes
This is known to be very slow for Unity to run. There is an alternative that is faster. GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag()

My suggestion would be to only use this during game initialization. Avoid it at all costs or use the alternative if you have to.

An entity object pool can be setup for the Transforms to handle the spawn and unloading of players, falling trees, falling blocks, items and all other world based entity such as the zombies. I setup one in tests for an optimizer I am working on. You can set limits on the pool size and unity has a built in pool system. UnityEngine.Pools can be referenced inside a class for use. I made my own with a queue and use the entity type as a way to sort the game objects. The one stage of the entity spawn with instantiation went from 0.04 down to 0.004 with the use of the pool so the impact on bloodmoon spawns, sleepers and players joining a server should all benefit tremendously. Falling blocks, falling trees also benefit from it. Even if you dont implement it for all of them, a transform object pool for falling blocks or zombies would make a big difference. It is already done for chunk allocations. This also has the benefit of reduced garbage collection.

The last one is a little bit weird. Order of operations. If you have to multiply a few things such as a vector and some floats, placing the floats first in the equation is almost twice as fast. Unity recommends this.

Happy Halloween

We don't use FindObjectsOfType in any code requiring performance, but yes there are some tools and init code that use it.

 

We already do object and data pooling. Our object pool is more advanced than Unity's.

 

Vector math is even faster if you change the individual variables directly (x y z), which is what we do in our higher frequency code.

 

Thanks

[faatal]

On 11/2/2023 at 6:47 AM, Alpacko said:

not anymore.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/dlss-upscaling-for-unity-262761

That looks interesting, but their FSR 2 asset had issues in 7dtd with motion blur that require rendering/shader changes that we have not yet tried to do.

 

We have more important rendering issues we are working on now. Enabling our old block AO for A22 required me to write a light update manager and change how we apply AO as it was slow with the much larger amount of props we have in the world now.

On 11/3/2023 at 4:03 AM, HeLLKnight said:

Guys, are you aware of Enshrouded, a new voxel-based game that was in beta demo a few weeks ago on Steam? I tried it out with some friends.

 

All the rocks and terrain surfaces looked much smoother and much more detailed than 7 days to die thanks to a tessellation shader, with a performance cost is only 2-3 fps. By disabling this option in the menu you can see a huge change and how low poly that hole in the ground is. I think this could work wonders for 7 days, as although it is improving a lot in its modeling and textures, the ultra low poly of the terrain is one of the things that keeps breaking immersion.

 

@faatal theoretically this would be feasible in 7D2D? I have seen that it is possible also in the old built-in render pipeline.

Sure, it might be possible, but we are working more on improving our general performance, not finding ways to slow it down

 

Excluding the new character outfit and animal redesigns as that is art requirements to get those up to the standards of zombies.

[faatal]

11 hours ago, Blake_ said:

A polite question to the devs:

 

Why is it that 7dtd has everything renewed, like in assets, POI structures and design, items, weapons, animations, animals, textures, roads, RWG, zds, trees, grass, flowers!, every prop,  shadows, postpro effects, complex LODs and LOD tunning, heavy optimized area loading, memory and CPU optimization to make the Pentagon cry in awe, a skyline to die for and npcs on the way with Skynet-like intelligence and WE STILL HAVE ROAD DECALS (blood, newspapers,cardboard) FROM ALPHA FREAKING ONE?!! (is he shouting? he IS shouting, what an unpolite forum user, good heavens ! -sips tea-).

Something has to be at the bottom of the list.

[Adam the Waster]

I got a question @faatal

 

What made you guys want to bring back the pig? Or are we getting both hogs and pigs

[Crater Creator]

13 hours ago, Blake_ said:

A polite question to the devs:

 

Why is it that 7dtd has everything renewed, like in assets, POI structures and design, items, weapons, animations, animals, textures, roads, RWG, zds, trees, grass, flowers!, every prop,  shadows, postpro effects, complex LODs and LOD tunning, heavy optimized area loading, memory and CPU optimization to make the Pentagon cry in awe, a skyline to die for and npcs on the way with Skynet-like intelligence and WE STILL HAVE ROAD DECALS (blood, newspapers,cardboard) FROM ALPHA FREAKING ONE?!! (is he shouting? he IS shouting, what an unpolite forum user, good heavens ! -sips tea-).

The artists haven’t forgotten about the road decals. It’s just as well that they’ve waited to address them. Now there are other considerations, namely the lane markers and other painted markings, that could hopefully all be accommodated in an improved decal system.

 

So long as the game is in alpha, we’re going to see imbalances like this, where some things are noticeably more finished than others.

[Laz Man]

13 hours ago, Blake_ said:

A polite question to the devs:

 

Why is it that 7dtd has everything renewed, like in assets, POI structures and design, items, weapons, animations, animals, textures, roads, RWG, zds, trees, grass, flowers!, every prop,  shadows, postpro effects, complex LODs and LOD tunning, heavy optimized area loading, memory and CPU optimization to make the Pentagon cry in awe, a skyline to die for and npcs on the way with Skynet-like intelligence and WE STILL HAVE ROAD DECALS (blood, newspapers,cardboard) FROM ALPHA FREAKING ONE?!! (is he shouting? he IS shouting, what an unpolite forum user, good heavens ! -sips tea-).

 

Last Alpha several early Alpha art assets were finally replaced.  Those will get addressed eventually.  Patience young Padawan...  😎

[Roland]

Just now, Laz Man said:

 

Last Alpha several early Alpha art assets were finally replaced.  Those will get addressed eventually.  Patience young Padawan...  😎

 

I'm ready for the trials now, Master! The council agrees. I've trained for 10 years. I'm ready.