Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Fanatical_Meat]

@faatal thank you for posting. The overall silence has been irritating.

Thank you for the knowledge bombs dropped today.

[meilodasreh]

7 minutes ago, Riamus said:

2 hours ago, faatal said:

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.

This would be nice to have fixed. I've encountered it a few times myself.  Hard to get out of if you fall into it.

Just a thought:

Might this be related to the cases where the quest marker is generated a few meters undergound, so you have to dig it up?

 

Some weird "ground level offset error" when generating/setting a poi?

 

How is that done anyways? I mean how is it determined at which height a POI is set to, in relation to the surrounding area?

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

[Riamus]

2 hours ago, meilodasreh said:

Just a thought:

Might this be related to the cases where the quest marker is generated a few meters undergound, so you have to dig it up?

 

Some weird "ground level offset error" when generating/setting a poi?

 

How is that done anyways? I mean how is it determined at which height a POI is set to, in relation to the surrounding area?

Not knowing the code, I can't be certain, but they are different enough that they are probably separate issues.  I could be wrong, though.

 

As for how the POI is determined, it is a value set in the POIs XML file (yoffset).  The designer adjusts the position based on how they make it.  In some cases, with an underground section in a POI, the entire thing will be made above ground and then the offset is used to drop it all down to the right height.  It is also common to have the entire POI one block above the actual ground level during design as it makes it easier to work with the ground and so many POI have a -1 offset even if they don't have an underground area.  You can easily edit this value if you feel a specific POI is set up incorrectly.  Vanilla POI are fine, but it is possible a custom POI could be set incorrectly.

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

On 3/1/2023 at 7:50 PM, 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.

 

 

Suggestion: Crowd fund a migration to a new engine - even if that were to be handled by other people while you work on the next game.

 

I think plenty people would appreciate that - and unlocking more potential for this would ensure more unrestricted updates and development instead of having your game as a symbolic anachronism in a few more years, frozen in an outdated and restricted capacity.

Edited March 3, 2023 by Roland
removed moderation discussion (see edit history)

[Aldranon]

10 hours ago, faatal said:

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.

 

Are the POI's large in some way that cause a hole?  I know there is something odd with finding the last zombie sometimes in large POI's. 

If it's not related, forget everything I just said.   Not a MF. 

[gunner1912]

On 3/1/2023 at 9:50 PM, 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.

appreciate the update even little things like this are nice to see when you are waiting for release. it gives a little peek through the window for everyone who doesn't know what all goes into development

[Aldranon]

14 hours ago, faatal said:

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.

 

With the hole appearing when a POI is reset MF bug:  (This is just spit-balling but might help somehow) Can you do an area wide function that is similar to when a person is digging a hole and the system will keep the player from falling through the world by making ground under their feet?

 

The bug might be when a POI is on two or more chunks and not all the chunks get updated.

Or the player digs around the POI (for whatever reason) and that throws off the POI reset?

[Laran Mithras]

DEVS:

 

So the new models are being worked on for A22. They look great.

 

Question: are the new female models being animated from a live female model?

Many games cut corners by having a single live model. Unfortunately, the female iterations based on male models walk like dudes.

 

Can you give us a teaser on the new models? Are the new females going to walk like a female and not like a dude? 

[faatal]

8 hours ago, Aldranon said:

With the hole appearing when a POI is reset MF bug:  (This is just spit-balling but might help somehow) Can you do an area wide function that is similar to when a person is digging a hole and the system will keep the player from falling through the world by making ground under their feet?

 

The bug might be when a POI is on two or more chunks and not all the chunks get updated.

Or the player digs around the POI (for whatever reason) and that throws off the POI reset?

It is a terrain collision mesh generation issue. Could be timing and/or a combination of density values or simply a code error. I've never seen someone fall through the world digging down.

[Aldranon]

16 minutes ago, faatal said:

It is a terrain collision mesh generation issue. Could be timing and/or a combination of density values or simply a code error. I've never seen someone fall through the world digging down.

 

Nether have I.  I didn't know what to call that system function that does that, so I described it. 

 

Although I did have a cop spit up through two concrete blocks and damage my base.  My theory was the cops head was temporarily stuck inside the lower block and then it was a clear shot to try and spit at me.  

[Ouch Quit It]

QUESTION.............Im not a programmer/coder,  but......how come we cant have the ground snap to a block when placed. I dont know if anyone has ever played ECO...but when you dig a hole and place a block, the ground snaps to the block and closes up any gaps....making for a MUCH cleaner look...Anyone Anyone Beuller???

 

 

 

Oh yeah...

Coughs * Airport POI * Coughs

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Laran Mithras said:

DEVS:

 

So the new models are being worked on for A22. They look great.

 

Question: are the new female models being animated from a live female model?

Many games cut corners by having a single live model. Unfortunately, the female iterations based on male models walk like dudes.

 

Can you give us a teaser on the new models? Are the new females going to walk like a female and not like a dude? 

They might be Hershey chocolate models.....just saying

 

Edited March 3, 2023 by Ouch Quit It (see edit history)

[ltbrunt]

Looking forward to the bandits. I hope they have good A.I and are able to work together.  I hope the bandits are Over Powered making you fear coming across them in game. Bandits should always be at a higher level than you. 

 

I hope water gets fixed. Maybe add swimming motions, Put a shark and squid in the water to make the water areas dangerous.

[NekoPawtato]

On 3/1/2023 at 10:50 PM, faatal said:

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

Does this mean zombies far away will take longer to get to the player? Or they don't recalculate/change paths as frequently when further away?

[Syphon583]

3 hours ago, Ouch Quit It said:

QUESTION.............Im not a programmer/coder,  but......how come we cant have the ground snap to a block when placed. I dont know if anyone has ever played ECO...but when you dig a hole and place a block, the ground snaps to the block and closes up any gaps....making for a MUCH cleaner look...Anyone Anyone Beuller???

I'm not a programmer either (but work with them closely) so take this with a grain of salt, but it would surprise me that something like that isn't possible. It should just be a manner of coding which block types that terrain blocks would snap flat to. It's likely a bit more complicated than that, but it should be possible.

 

EDIT: Seems like Roland has an answer as to why it likely isn't possible. Again, not a programmer 😆

Edited March 3, 2023 by Syphon583 (see edit history)

[Roland]

3 hours ago, Ouch Quit It said:

QUESTION.............Im not a programmer/coder,  but......how come we cant have the ground snap to a block when placed. I dont know if anyone has ever played ECO...but when you dig a hole and place a block, the ground snaps to the block and closes up any gaps....making for a MUCH cleaner look...Anyone Anyone Beuller???

 

Terrain blocks are not cubes like player placed blocks are. They are octahedrons I believe. The terrain used to be cubes in the earliest alphas but they changed them from cubes and actually experimented with a few different polyhedra before settling on what we still have currently. I'm pretty sure most if not all other voxel games base blocks on the same cube shapes whether they are crafted or terrain-- so they fit together perfectly. 

[Guppycur]

6 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

Terrain blocks are not cubes like player placed blocks are. They are octahedrons I believe. The terrain used to be cubes in the earliest alphas but they changed them from cubes and actually experimented with a few different polyhedra before settling on what we still have currently. I'm pretty sure most if not all other voxel games base blocks on the same cube shapes whether they are crafted or terrain-- so they fit together perfectly. 

Yeah but that doesn't really address the issue.  Since you can manually adjust the density of the block to have it "snap" and remove the gap, doesn't it stand to reason it can be done programmatically?

 

...if adjacent to non terrain block, set density to x?

 

Also, didn't you retire? 

[Roland]

3 hours ago, Guppycur said:

Yeah but that doesn't really address the issue.  Since you can manually adjust the density of the block to have it "snap" and remove the gap, doesn't it stand to reason it can be done programmatically?

 

...if adjacent to non terrain block, set density to x?

 

Also, didn't you retire? 

 

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just explaining why in this game compared to other voxel games the gap exists in the first place. Other voxel games have universally consistent voxel shapes throughout their game-- not that the shapes are the same but their orientation is based off of the same basic shape.

 

I know the team has discussed the gap over the years and they know about changing the volumes but I seem to remember there being an issue about it. But one of the programmers would have to explain it.

 

I did retire....meaning I only do as much as I want when I want and its all free. I traded my company pants for a kilt and I'm feeling the breeze.

Edited March 3, 2023 by Roland (see edit history)

[AH64_Jimbo]

4 hours ago, Ouch Quit It said:

Oh yeah...

Coughs * Airport POI * Coughs

 

No doubt! That's why I made my own Airport

 

BUT It would be great to have this integrated into the base game . . . 

 

Sooooo . . . Coughs * Airport * Coughs

[Laz Man]

10 hours ago, Guppycur said:

Yeah but that doesn't really address the issue.  Since you can manually adjust the density of the block to have it "snap" and remove the gap, doesn't it stand to reason it can be done programmatically?

 

...if adjacent to non terrain block, set density to x?

 

Also, didn't you retire? 

 

Coincidently, I asked faatal about this today and it was a complicated discussion.  Essentially, we may be able to make terrain blocks look like their snapped to cubes using density manipulation when in reality they are actually bleeding through them.

 

With that said, I have seen density values cause all sorts of havoc with terrain (e.g. holes in the world), so understand why it's not a simple thing.

 

[RipClaw]

1 hour ago, Laz Man said:

With that said, I have seen density values cause all sorts of havoc with terrain (e.g. holes in the world), so understand why it's not a simple thing.

Happens to me a lot when I am mining resources. I don't think I've ever fell through it, but it's a little irritating when you suddenly have a hole like that to look through the map with.
 

[Tinyhugeproblem]

So, I made an account just to ask this question as it's been bothering me for a little while now. So without further delay I guess it's my time to ask. Also I apologize if this question has been asked before, but:

What will become of the Master Chef perk? As stated in the future changes for A21, "Perks no longer unlock recipes or govern crafting at all". So what does this mean for Master Chef? As I'm sure you're well aware that Master Chef is a purely recipe based perk tree. Will it be removed entirely or just overhauled to fit the new crafting system?

[unholyjoe]

1 hour ago, Tinyhugeproblem said:

So, I made an account just to ask this question as it's been bothering me for a little while now. So without further delay I guess it's my time to ask. Also I apologize if this question has been asked before, but:

What will become of the Master Chef perk? As stated in the future changes for A21, "Perks no longer unlock recipes or govern crafting at all". So what does this mean for Master Chef? As I'm sure you're well aware that Master Chef is a purely recipe based perk tree. Will it be removed entirely or just overhauled to fit the new crafting system?

the master chef perks will affect the cooking times and amounts of resources used when cooking. each of the 3 perks will get better as you perk up.

 

reading the cooking magazines will unlock different recipes as you read them.

[Tinyhugeproblem]

59 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:

the master chef perks will affect the cooking times and amounts of resources used when cooking. each of the 3 perks will get better as you perk up.

 

reading the cooking magazines will unlock different recipes as you read them.

Ah, I see. Thank you

[Old Crow]

3 hours ago, unholyjoe said:

the master chef perks will affect the cooking times and amounts of resources used when cooking. each of the 3 perks will get better as you perk up.

 

reading the cooking magazines will unlock different recipes as you read them.

 

Would I be correct in guessing it will be similar for other perks that formerly unlocked recipes/schematics? ie higher levels of various perks (deep cuts, miner 69er, etc, shortening crafting times and reducing materials used?

[unholyjoe]

10 minutes ago, Old Crow said:

 

Would I be correct in guessing it will be similar for other perks that formerly unlocked recipes/schematics? ie higher levels of various perks (deep cuts, miner 69er, etc, shortening crafting times and reducing materials used?

more or less yes... as both i and roland have given lots of hints towards that.