Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[HeLLKnight]

2 hours ago, Doomofman said:

Would FSR make much a difference in 7 Days? With it being more of a CPU heavy game, I feel like FSR won't help very much, but if it's easy to implement then I suppose it's an easy win?

 

It depends. At 4k 165hz like my monitor, almost all PCs are more gpu bound in almost all games, even in cpu heavy games like 7d2d. But yes, the bad named "DLSS3" frame generation would do wonders to 7d2d, maybe FSR FG will be out this year...

 

This new implementation looks fairly easy and quality wise far better than FSR1, so I will pray to be included with A21.1 🙏

 

 

[faatal]

On 5/10/2023 at 2:13 PM, Jost Amman said:

Someone on Steam (FT) who can't access the official forums asked me to relay this post here.

I think this would be interesting to know to @faatal for some A21.x patch (if it's not been solved already).

 

Please, don't make me create a bug report, since it's not even my find. Tks 

I got it to do the same thing. It is totally normal. Shadows are not cheap to render. Looking into the building, you have all manner of objects near you, rendering with all their shadows. We do not have a static world where we can precompute visibility, so there is a lot of overdraw in that situation. Also, the occlusion manager does not disable shadows, as it does not know where they will be projected to and shadows are draw calls.

On 5/12/2023 at 1:16 PM, RipClaw said:

You realize that the engine is updated with every major release ? A21 is based on Unity 2021 LTS as far as I know. And A22 will probably then be based on Unity 2022 LTS.
 

Yes. 2022 LTS should be out soon and I hope to have A22 using it.

[Jost Amman]

23 minutes ago, faatal said:

I got it to do the same thing. It is totally normal. Shadows are not cheap to render. Looking into the building, you have all manner of objects near you, rendering with all their shadows. We do not have a static world where we can precompute visibility, so there is a lot of overdraw in that situation. Also, the occlusion manager does not disable shadows, as it does not know where they will be projected to and shadows are draw calls.

Thanks faatal, I relayed this to the OP: I hope it didn't take too much of your time to check this.

But again, much appreciated. 

[faatal]

On 5/16/2023 at 8:50 AM, Adun0608 said:

There is no perfect world, no perfect life, and no perfect game. I don't understand why it's not possible to give a definite release time after publishing so much content? At least it should make me clear why? I think most people only ask for these things

A lot of game development does not work like that. Bugs are often their own unique tasks with many unknowns which makes time estimates vague. Many bugs are also not yet discovered, so how do you estimate time for something you don't know exists? Right now we know about x amount of bugs we want to fix, but each day testers may find zero or 5 more that are must fixes, which then takes of x amount of time each. One could be 10 minutes, another 3 days.

On 5/17/2023 at 12:24 AM, Aldranon said:

THIS! 

This is exactly how "Damage Control" should be handled if a release day (or month) is missed.  (An approximate percent complete would prevent the need for it)

Like the police quote: "Just the facts, Ma'am".

 

No need to troll or counter-troll people who are annoyed and disappointed and vent something less than helpful.

Except when we say 80% of bugs fixed and then the next day say 76% of bugs fixed as new ones are found. They will LOVE IT!

[faatal]

25 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Thanks faatal, I relayed this to the OP: I hope it didn't take too much of your time to check this.

But again, much appreciated. 

Eh, 10 minutes. I'm all for checking things.

On 5/18/2023 at 12:21 PM, Ryiah said:

I just found out that someone has an implementation of FSR 2.2 for the built-in pipeline.

 

https://github.com/ndepoel/FSR2Unity

I've been working will a developer of another FSR solution, but we have bad motion blur with animated plants that needs to be worked out, so it is on hold for A21.

I'll check than one out sometime...

 

Thanks for the info.

On 5/18/2023 at 4:03 PM, ParadiseLostUK said:

I think you are confused. Rick actually said they were hoping for a mid May release barring any issues.  You have clearly taken that as being 'committed' to mid May.  

Exactly. In no way, shape or form was the team committed to any date. We simply have guesses.

[faatal]

13 hours ago, Doomofman said:

Would FSR make much a difference in 7 Days? With it being more of a CPU heavy game, I feel like FSR won't help very much, but if it's easy to implement then I suppose it's an easy win?

It depends. We are often main thread CPU bottlenecked.

I think FSR would most benefit heavy rendering situations, like running at higher resolutions with higher settings on weaker GPUs.

[CyberHellKen]

Do you devs still maintain an MF list of bugs? If so, how's the count going, if you can share, of course.

 

I'm kinda hoping for a release after Memorial Day weekend, since I'll be out of town and not able to really enjoy a streamer weekend nor a Monday release. All vegetables thrown at me will be donated to Rekt's farm. 😛

[faatal]

3 hours ago, CyberHellKen said:

Do you devs still maintain an MF list of bugs? If so, how's the count going, if you can share, of course.

 

I'm kinda hoping for a release after Memorial Day weekend, since I'll be out of town and not able to really enjoy a streamer weekend nor a Monday release. All vegetables thrown at me will be donated to Rekt's farm. 😛

We have the list of must fixes every alpha. It has been trending down. Currently at 30 tickets across 15 different people, but that is not 2 per person as some people, like programmers, tend to get more of the bugs. I have 7, of which 3 appear to be the same issue, but that is a non trivial issue with stray floating terrain possibly caused by a terrain corruption bug fix I did last week.

[msilenus]

This is maybe a weird ask, but is there going to be a new gameplay trailer for A21?

[Aerial]

Hey survivors!

 

Here's a list of, not exactly bugs, but things I hope have been improved in A21.  They're all minor so I haven't seen anything about them in official releases or streams, but I'm hoping someone here may have information.

 

1.  Repetitive quest lists.  It feels like I get the same pool of 6 - 8 clear/fetch-clear/fetch quests for a given trader and tier list, regardless of how many eligible POIs are in the adjacent town.   In a small town I can see that being due to there only being so many POIs of that tier available, but in the big cities there ought to be enough to avoid repeats, I would think.  Especially for the lower tiers. 

 

2.  Every vending machine is seeded with the same items.  The first time I visit each vending machine in a RWG world it has nearly or completely identical lists of items (I can't swear to completely identical because I don't pay much attention to most of the candy types, but canned goods for sure.) 

 

3.  Weather lighting not the same for non-hosts in a LAN game.  TFP did mention fixing weather not being the same for all players on a server so this may have been addressed, but the issue we experience isn't that the weather doesn't synch up.  If it's raining on the host game, I get rain, too.  But my game remains full-sun bright regardless of rain, snow or fog.  I do get the biome darkness of the wasteland, just not weather-related darkening.

 

Am I crazy?  Has anyone else experienced these?

 

Thanks!

Aerial

[JoeCavallo]

I'm sorry if it was asked or talked about it before, but could it be done that jumping in the game is always the same, and if you put points into Parkour perks that you need to press space ( jump key) twice because sometimes you need to jump just a bit to squeeze in some tight areas like jump on the garage door, or in attics and if you jump too high you get bumped into the roof and it slides you away from your wanted spot. 

[Laz Man]

The quest list has undergone some improvements.  I believe you shouldn't get the same POI in your list as often after completing one there previously.

[Blake_]

@Hated do you know if the translation for a21 has been improved? Not only words per se, but some areas, like the UI "TIME" and "DAY" were translated (poorly) but are not brought forward to the txt, so we can't even mod them. 

An easier-to-read file would also be appreciated.

[Lostyouthkhat]

Do you know by chance how many more Pois have been added to navesgane in alpha 21? (In terms of total numbers not swapped with older pois)

 

 

[Laz Man]

Dear Diary,

 

The QA team has spent the last few days trying to nail down a solid reproduction on 2 very nasty bugs.

 

Both bugs cause a red error spam in the console that forces the player to have to terminate their game to recover.

 

One happens when visiting a trader (not everytime) while the other happens anywhere.

 

After many grueling hours, the QA team was able to isolate the issues and the programmers were able to get fixes in that "appear" to have resolved the issues.

 

We got lucky with one as it involved a particular zombie being submerged in water....😅

 

On the level design front, a couple of us are working on roadside POIs.  I just checked in the roadside checkpoint POI I was working on so QA can do their thing and provide feedback.  It is a new T4 that supports all quest types.

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, Oros said:

Apologies for butting in. I remember seeing it previously, but what is the current plan for A21 release? I think I remember seeing that it wasn't going to be this weekend, is that correct?

 

No streamer weekend this week.  Things are being assessed week to week.  Hopefully will know more by Tuesday/Wednesday next week.

[Old Crow]

Still curious to know how big of a chance vehicles will have to explode after hitting negative hit points. I know it's supposedly not likely to happen, but all it takes is one string of really bad luck and BOOM you lose your 4x4 and anything you had inside it.

 

It feels like a very player-hostile change, much like A20's farming changes, so I'm hoping it gets tweaked fairly quickly, like farming did (though farming is still pretty worthless unless you spec all the way through Living off the Land (and even then, a string of bad luck can still screw you over on getting a reasonable amount of seeds back).

[Jost Amman]

Any progress update? @faatal @Laz Man anyone?

Tks 

[Teure]

Hey Everyone.

@faatal and @Roland, any updates on bug counting?

 

I've been following the discussion since Alpha 19, but wish to join the thread. Been playing SP since 2018 and, honestly, A20 has been the nicest update since I started playing (A15, if I'm not mistaken).

 

Continuing the thread, I've been playing nomad since forever so LotL never gave me any difference with standard settings. Bacon and Eggs always seemed to work fine for me.

 

Cheers chat.

[outhous]

Welcome to the forums, hope you enjoy your visit.

[x3eemguy]

Finally started watching the A21 dev streams. I'm on the first video. I love most of what I see. However, things I don't agree with are:

 

1. Getting rid of glass jars as you drink from them. Where does the glass jars go after you drink from them? In a survival situation, would you just throw away good and useful things after 1 use? Instead I believe it should be a good chance for it to break or damage beyond using condition after some use or getting damage or broken when combating zombies or just moving/running around. After all they are glass.

 

2. Garbage go poof. Really, ever heard of the saying one man's trash is another man's gold. I sell those in early game for money at the traders. Why not do it like the big trash that shows wheather it was looted with a different looking pile, like scattered vs intact? If intact, we can still loot and  if it's scattered then we can still chop it for scrap materials to sell or use. What I'm saying is clear distinction so we can decide to run past or stop and loot, however, not poof away.

 

3. Cannot throw spear, lol! One should be able to throw almost any thing in defense in a survival situation! You should be able to throw ur bottle or axe if u have to so you survive an encounter with a zombie or pig or whatever. If you throw something, you should also understand that there is a possibility of loosing them in many different ways. That's just life.

 

This just my opinion wheather you agree or not. Hopefully I can get to dec stream video 2 soon.

 

Edited May 31, 2023 by x3eemguy (see edit history)

[RipClaw]

10 minutes ago, x3eemguy said:

Where does the glass jars go after you drink from them?

It gets beamed into a dew collector and filled with clean water  Or it ends up in a tree stomp filled with honey.

Edited May 31, 2023 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[unholyjoe]

17 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

It gets beamed into a dew collector and filled with clean water  Or it ends up in a tree stomp filled with honey.

also appears randomly with murky water that needs to be boiled.

[Mister Forgash]

20 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Or it ends up in a tree stomp filled with honey.

There we go. That is my favorite explanation of where the jars went.

[Teure]

Does anyone know if the CPU usage improve with A21 update?

 

I have an octacore CPU with lower frequencies and it always bottlenecks me on larger cities. 

 

I've ~700h on PC and it always happened, since my athlon 5 years ago (of course it would) up to my current 5800h... and the FPS drop from stable 60 to 25~30 is a big let down. RWG is even worse because has a more intense voxel calculation all around...

 

Is there any improvement in that regard planned or discussed for A21?

 

Thanks!