Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

[Jost Amman]

8 hours ago, Callum123456789 said:

Who knows maybe we are upon the era of the clotheless humans? Maybe wearing clothes will be offensive in the next 50 years.

I'm sure, even then, fat and ugly people won't be "offensive" when wearing clothes... 

 

2 hours ago, meganoth said:

Crator Creator now is the super moderator

Who is Crator Creator?  /jk

 

Edited April 25, 2023 by Jost Amman (see edit history)

[meganoth]

4 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

I'm sure, even then, fat and ugly people won't be "offensive" when wearing clothes... 

 

Who is Crator Creator?  /jk

 

The evil mastermind behind this forum. He makes the rules you live by. When you see a glimpse of him it means you are doomed. But even if you never see him you are doomed. Net result, you ARE doomed.

 

 

[Jost Amman]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

The evil mastermind behind this forum. He makes the rules you live by. When you see a glimpse of him it means you are doomed. But even if you never see him you are doomed. Net result, you ARE doomed.

Spoiler

 

 

[Roland]

8 hours ago, khzmusik said:

Obviously I should have directed my criticisms to Roland and not TFP.

 

I thought you did...repeatedly and even after my mea culpa. Just let me know how many times you're going to bring it up in the future so I can prepare myself now...

[khzmusik]

13 hours ago, Roland said:

 

I thought you did...repeatedly and even after my mea culpa. Just let me know how many times you're going to bring it up in the future so I can prepare myself now...

 

I do want to make something clear. What I was trying to criticize was your arguments. I was not trying to criticize you, personally. I do not think you're intentionally defending sexism.

 

Also - I was mainly replying because, for most of my time on these forums, you have functioned as the public face of TFP. If you are dismissive of valid criticism, it seems like it is TFP themselves who are being dismissive.

 

But if you are now just some dude, who neither represents TFP nor holds any sway with them, then arguing with you in public is not productive. (It probably wasn't productive anyway, but this puts the nail in the coffin).

[Aldranon]

Oh dear, the woman looks like Raquel Welch and people have "Woke"ed all over it.  I'm sure she would (if she could) disagree with the "Woked" as she had is the past. 

 

Looking at it tactically, the few second pause a woman could get in the wastelands looking stunning, could give her a life and death advantage.  

On that line, I'm hoping one of the Duke's main enforcers is a woman that looks like that.  The player would never see it until it was too late! (Maybe its TRADER JEN!!!)

 

Of course, I'm sure we will eventually see the whole spectrum of players and NPC's skins that don't look "stunning" just like we've seen in some of the male traders.  I recommend the update cost be around $0.99. 

Edited April 26, 2023 by Aldranon (see edit history)

[Apocalipservice]

15 hours ago, Aldranon said:

Oh dear, the woman looks like Raquel Welch and people have "Woke"ed all over it.  I'm sure she would (if she could) disagree with the "Woked" as she had is the past. 

 

Looking at it tactically, the few second pause a woman could get in the wastelands looking stunning, could give her a life and death advantage.  

 

*cough cough Incel cough cough* 

[Aldranon]

7 hours ago, Apocalipservice said:

*cough cough Incel cough cough* 

 

Being Incel will soon be an ability trait for the player.  You heard it here first.

[Melange]

On 4/27/2023 at 12:42 PM, Aldranon said:

 

Being Incel will soon be an ability trait for the player.  You heard it here first.

As if one needs an other reason to shoot at anything that moves.  Seriously? I fail to see the humor. Then again you might just be serious. Good thing there's the internet between us...

[Morloc]

On 4/22/2023 at 4:44 PM, Roland said:

Maybe the fact that she is covered from head to toe showing almost no skin made her so bland in the minds of the viewers that nobody remembers her. 

 

Cripes, now you're making me feel bad.

I'd throw her a poke!

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

[Grandpa Minion]

On 4/20/2023 at 2:39 PM, Obsessive Compulsive said:

Thanks for the details. That definitely makes more sense.

The 0.01 is the unity update tick rate? Unless I am mistaken. The tick rate of the update phase coming out of the engine is 0.01.

Oh you update physics at a different pace. Interesting. Maybe this changed for a21 or a later version? That is great to hear. Fixed update and update phase should definitely be utilized just as you mentioned. I must have misread the code. Currently I am updating it all at one time as that seemed to be how entities were handled. I do not run updates on entities every frame though, I do however run the gmUpdate method every frame and a faster rate.

I will have to take another look. It looked like the positions, physics, animations and stats were updating every tick for entities and triggered from the 0.01 unity update phase tick. This update tick triggers the gmUpdate method. Something else may have paced that down to 0.05 as you said. It was a little confusing how it was approached. Some sort of split list approach with entity in particular threw me off.

I took over gmUpdate using harmony and isolated the entity update section that triggers from it. I do not run the entity slice and split entity update the way you had it since I was able to utilize that 0.01 unity tick rate more efficiently and it looked like it was more or less to catch up on missed entities due to running too long during the update process. Since I am aiming to keep the tick runtime under 0.01, I can run multiple updates of the entire gmUpdate method within the same time frame of 0.05 that you are currently using. When I allowed the entity to update on every single tick at the 0.01 rate, things were moving around at super sonic speeds. The animations surprisingly keep up until it runs out of ai pathing, then gets stuck running in place. This might be one reason things are getting stuck in game at rare times. High lag and the server failing to keep the path up to date, might get them stuck in place as their animations out pace it. Something out paces the data available for sure, so they run in place at that point.

By using a combination of multi thread during certain phases for the player update, I can keep their runtime under 0.01 even with larger player counts.

As you stated, you are targeting a 0.05-0.06 time frame window. Since I am aiming for 0.01 as a max runtime per tick, I can split the work across that 0.05 time frame and update specific entities or do specific tasks within each tick, so long as I aim to keep them below that 0.01 runtime which, at least in testing seems to match the update tick from unity that triggers the gmUpdate.

In testing, I found I was able to run ten ticks at 0.01 and keep the animation flow to match your current game state, ai was more in tune to player movements and pathing around them, network is updated more frequent so you get less bottlenecking with packet dumps. You have multiple ticks to work with so you can focus on chunk sync to unity which is part of that gmUpdate method and gets a bit heavy with high player counts, but this keeps chunks loading really smooth around players.

When I say I run a tick, that means running the gmUpdate method fully, however I am isolating the entity update section of gmUpdate. I run ten ticks at 0.01, total equaling 0.1 time frame approx. Only players update on tick 1 and 6. They update completely, entire list both times. That utilizes multi threading as I phased certain sections like the physics which is mostly in the EntityAlive.OnUpdateLive sections of EntityAlive types. I do this with players to keep a better consistency of the movement that other players see. PvP is dramatically improved but so are the general hitbox responses due to keeping closer in sync. I hope the netcode improvements from a21 will really boost that for us. Exciting!

The physics for non alive types are mostly in the Entity.OnUpdate. I update non players single threaded but I divide the work across four ticks so tick 2 3 4 5 are for non players. If there were 100 entity to update, 25 are updated in each tick. Spreading the ai burden. This is why I am thrilled about your updates with AI since the combination with what I am trying out, equals a lot of zombies. I don't see why 400 zombies would not be possible with 100 updated across the four ticks. That should fit inside the runtimes. Tick 7 8 9 10 are for the chunk syncs to unity.

When I made it run 12 ticks, I was able to see a momentary stutter in the animation flow of the characters vs the network updates. This was very similar to when high lag and large entity counts will stutter the updates of entity normally. You also start to see a lag in the ai response while moving around the zombies. 10 ticks seems to be the limit which is 0.1 overall so long as I keep my runtimes below 0.01 for each tick. Currently the game runtime is often going well above 0.1 when large player counts or high entity numbers exist, which not only misses your 0.05 runtime rate but starts to bottleneck the netcode with multiple events getting updating at one time on the player side. It starts to look like warping.

One other trick I attempted was sector work. Splitting the map to five sectors. Update each sector with a different core handling all the entity of that sector single threaded but simultaneous to each other running their own sectors. Then run the last sector on the main which would be the middle grounds between the sectors. This would avoid physics collisions and overlaps while spreading the work. Only issue there is it does not address bottlenecking within a single sector. It would penalize all of them and so the advantages would be reduced, but typically one core was trying to update all of them, so it has to benefit in some manner.

There are two sections if isolated to avoid overlaps, they can be multi threaded. By that I mean running just the Entity.OnUpdate as its own phase and the OnUpdateLive sections as its own phase. It is tricky due to the overrides and how it is coded into the rest of the entity update process, but it can be done. It breaks the OOP pattern though so I know what you mean. You are not going to change the code now and I wouldn't dare suggest you need to. In general, this is not something I would expect you guys to ever do from the whims of some random forum post guy haha. This is your baby, I am just letting you know what I have found in testing so far.

If you multi thread these as phases you just need to be cautious of anything spawning, despawning, unloading chunks which in turn unload the entity. Of course double check for race conditions from static lists or anything you might modify while another thread is using the data. You do not want to be running your physics/collision checks and have something change position or despawn. It will crash the engine as I have experienced a lot of. To avoid this while I am updating multi threaded, I make sure the UnloadEntities method from the World class is run inside of the main thread task queue from your thread manager class. I am also running the main thread tasks twice inside of the gmUpdate method that I took over. Once in the original spot you have it placed but another right after the entity update section so that anything I toss at the main thread queue will stay inside the frame time.

You guys have a ton of awesome tools and systems that work really well together. A+. Would love to see the job system in action. I am still learning how it functions.

Sorry for the long post. I thought it would be best to give better explanations this time

The newest version of the optimizer is running fantastic! I recommend holding off untill at least a21 before you release it to the public. With your optimizer and what the pimps have tweaked im hoping sometime a21 to have a 100 man server on a 10-12k map. Honestly, i never thought it would be possible that anyone would ever be able to figure out how to optimize multicore for this game but you sure have done it. The great thing is that your mod doesn't effect EAC so servers can still leave that on. I also think once the public gets their hands on it they are going feel the same way.. GREAT JOB!! CHEERS

Edited May 5, 2023 by Grandpa Minion (see edit history)

[zztong]

Just curious, in A21, if you ramp a 100% healthy motorcycle off of skyscraper_01, what state is the motorcycle and rider after they land?

 

In A20, the bike loses ~3% and the rider loses ~14 health.

 

Launch:

 

In Flight:

 

Landing:

[Morloc]

Will A21 be compatible with Combat Extended?

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

[Old Crow]

On 5/5/2023 at 1:00 PM, Morloc said:

Will A21 be compatible with Combat Extended?

 

 

-Arch Necromancer Morloc 💀

 

I'm assuming Combat Extended is an external mod. It going to be up to the mod creator to update the mod to be compatible with the new alpha.

[Riamus]

On 5/5/2023 at 3:27 PM, zztong said:

Just curious, in A21, if you ramp a 100% healthy motorcycle off of skyscraper_01, what state is the motorcycle and rider after they land?

 

In A20, the bike loses ~3% and the rider loses ~14 health.

 

Launch:

 

In Flight:

 

Landing:

Ohh... I have got to try this! 😁

 

I always jump off one I have parkour but never tried this.  I did try shooting a zombie that was in the ground as I was falling last night but missed. Need more practice shooting while airborne. 😁

Edited May 12, 2023 by Riamus (see edit history)

[zztong]

1 hour ago, Riamus said:

Ohh... I have got to try this!

 

I did it again recently. This time I took about 70 points of damage and the motorcycle lost I think around 30-40%. I think the difference was in the first attempt I landed on a table out front of the POI across the street. The second time I landed on the street.

[TWORDY]

 

Hello. Just a small idea for Workbench upgrades except for the obvious Saw and Hammer. 

[Old Crow]

2 hours ago, TWORDY said:

 

Hello. Just a small idea for Workbench upgrades except for the obvious Saw and Hammer. 

 

 

See, I was definitely thinking of a tool set (speeds up crafting time), and reloading tools (allows for crafting of box ammo).

[7daysOfFun]

coud we make a % scale on the top of the webside (under the 7days logo) " release status alpha 21"?

or when 21 is out to 22 ? 

like a 20cm long and 1cm high colour field

-only a nightly idea

[Riamus]

1 hour ago, 7daysOfFun said:

coud we make a % scale on the top of the webside (under the 7days logo) " release status alpha 21"?

or when 21 is out to 22 ? 

like a 20cm long and 1cm high colour field

-only a nightly idea

With all the complaints that they haven't released it yet after suggesting mid-May as a goal, I doubt they'd want something like that.  It would likely cause many more complaints.  It is also not really the easiest thing to try and estimate an actual percent finished as you can't really know how long certain things (especially bugs) will take to complete or fix.

[mstdv inc]

1 hour ago, 7daysOfFun said:

coud we make a % scale on the top of the webside (under the 7days logo) " release status alpha 21"?

or when 21 is out to 22 ?

like a 20cm long and 1cm high colour field

-only a nightly idea

Given that it can take from an hour to a week to fix one error, it is not possible to name the exact release date.

[TheRealKrash]

LMAO!! It used to say a21 release date: May

Now it says May-June

So next month it will be June-July?

Then what? July-August?

Edited May 18, 2023 by TheRealKrash (see edit history)

[Syrex]

Rather them take the time to get it right (as best as possible) the first time and personally have to wait, than for TFP to release a hot mess and have to wait for hotfix after hotfix. It has always been worth the wait with this team. Doesn't make the wait suck any less, never does. They'll release the Kraken soon enough

[ParadiseLostUK]

Look, I get it, I'm looking forward to A21 too, but in the meantime I've got a whole library of other games to keep me busy.  In a couple of weeks I'll have Diablo 4 taking up 90% of my gaming focus so as far as I'm concerned take your time to get it right otherwise all the cries of 'why isn't it ready yet?!' will turn to 'OMG, how could they release this horrible buggy mess?!'

 

* Dammit Syrex, that was my point 🤣

Edited May 18, 2023 by ParadiseLostUK (see edit history)

[Roland]

3 hours ago, TheRealKrash said:

LMAO!! It used to say a21 release date: May

Now it says May-June

So next month it will be June-July?

Then what? July-August?

Right…and if we had kept it as May all the way to the 30th and then changed it to June you would’ve LYAO that we kept it saying May when we knew it would probably slip to June. 
 

Don’t you want communication?  It’s looking like June is as likely or more likely as May at this point so we updated the information to reflect reality.