Where is Madmole? Are TFP staying with Unity? Someone fill in a vet who hasn't been here in a while please.

[Roland]

Here’s an example of what I meant. Player animations are currently extremely indie-esque in the sense that for a lot of actions there is either no animation or just a basic nonrealistic animation. TFP could just leave it alone since the game is playable or they can take extra time and create a team to make the player animations look better. Thats just one area that has made the game appear more indie and less AAA. They may not ever fully go AAA in all areas (going up and down ladders for instance) but they are pushing their standards in the AAA direction more than they did in the past.  This desire to improve the quality of the technical parts of the game is what accounts for the longer development time. 
 

The last two years they have been focused on environmental art and POI design and a switch from repurposing existing blocks to jury-rig art assets to designing actual art assets that look a lot better. But they could have kept the Minecraft philosophy of using fence blocks to make chandeliers and that would have saved lots of time— but they decided they didn’t want that. 

[Maharin]

If they're going to hire anyone from the forums it will be me.  I'm the most qualified for...

 

I'll think of something.

[Koishi]

8 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

You would have to explain that. There have been games released in all kinds of states. As there is no legally enforcable right for correctness of a software a company only has to provide all the features it advertises. So how is it **literally impossible** ?

 

I'm ashamed of myself for getting easily frustrated but this is a seemingly honest question.  To answer I could say the code architecture itself, which i guess you could call it the design of the code base in general, it's just unmaintainable to the point adding new features is too painful to actually meet a lot of the design goals.  It's one of those things where the more things get piled on the harder it gets to fix and maintain anything.  This style of design I totally use for game jams but for projects lasting more than 2 months it gets exceedingly painful and adding more people on doesn't really make pumping out features actually much faster least not over the span of years.  It's the game design coupled with the architecture to be more specific.  They don't mix.  A lot of hyped past wanted features and goals literally can't be done as a result of this.  Now this doesn't need to be acknowledged directly but an extremely powerful first step would be to pull things out of Entity.tick and EntityAlive.tick and gradually move it over to what we'd call a game system or game manager.  It's an abstraction where you're doing exactly one piece of logic over a buffer of work (this case Entities with X criteria), this buffer should be maintained and added to and removed before this system is ran to make it easier to do things like batching and threading far as runtime but the real meat of doing this is that it'd actually pull things out of that virtual tick method and actually make it easier to see what's going on.

Or i guess to say this simply though I hate using this expression.  It's impossible to maintain spaghetti.  And I mean no shame by this but the code is spaghetti and past it's limit.  If anyone has understanding of software at all go look at Entity.cs or EntityAlive.cs and actually try to make sense of it.  There's too much nested complexity and weird mixes of state checking that make it hard to figure out when something should ever be called or even what it's job is.  Code comments would never fix this.  I've had a hell of a time trying to wrangle this when helping someone make an optimization mod back in A20.  He managed to get the game in an insanely runtime efficient state relatively but the tricks he had to do even if he was on the team wouldn't really be maintainable sadly (without architectural changes).  Hundreds of zeds on 40 man servers with 80FPS though yeah it had it's problems.  He's more qualified (for the moment at least) to work on the project than whoever's the lead engineer and he's not even a dev but a modder.  It's not because he's a genius it's just because he actually put in effort to learn how to do things better and got a gentle push in the right direction.

To reeeeeally sum this up as to why at it's more root cause.  There's a guy in the world of software with the handle "uncle bob" whom put out a book called clean code.  He's been pushing insanely fanatical OOP is the end all be all kind of concepts on all of the software industry and it's the backbone of why unity uses the CS pattern in the first place, it's why indie devs and devs in mid sized studios have an extremely difficult time making projects like this.  It's not exactly their intelligence it's just they don't know any better and are following convention too much.  A better engineer knows a multitude of patterns and tries to pick the best one based on the task at hand and isn't afraid to refactor.  The code here sadly doesn't have any evidence of that.  It just takes one guy whom is interested in walking down this path, that person alone would be more productive than 10+ typical programmers and it's just mostly because of a difference in attitude and exposure to specific topics.  A lot of modders over the years seem to perhaps mistakenly think that the engineers themselves aren't interested but i've come to think it's probably that it's not their fault but that they are entirely outside our reach to the point none of us can actually give advice when we see issues.  That's a damn shame.  At the least the engineers should be hanging around software communities to exchange ideas, and should be reading articles to learn new techniques probably about at least once every two months ish or something akin.  The code reflects that they are just too isolated and unexposed.  Well that or someone doesn't have the balls to say no to bad direction.  One of the two.

Edited October 17, 2023 by Koishi (see edit history)

[meganoth]

10 hours ago, Koishi said:

I'm ashamed of myself for getting easily frustrated but this is a seemingly honest question.  To answer I could say the code architecture itself, which i guess you could call it the design of the code base in general, it's just unmaintainable to the point adding new features is too painful to actually meet a lot of the design goals.  It's one of those things where the more things get piled on the harder it gets to fix and maintain anything.

 

So far you are just describing the state probably half of all commercial software is in. Where programmers have to waste 80% of their time for getting around old code.  It still gets released and then sold for years.

 

And the thing is, 7D2D is nearly finished and apart from a few armor sets and bandits whose feature set is already in the code due to the zombie cop there is nothing more to come. Even if they would need 3 times as much time to add these features it probably is less at this point in time than to refactor the code because someone on the internet told them to.

 

I don't see anything here that would prevent 7D2D from releasing. You as software engineer might get nausea looking at the code but the customers, the players don't look at the code. They see the result and while it surely isn't bug-free it already has been a game many people would buy as a finished game outside of EA.

 

10 hours ago, Koishi said:

This style of design I totally use for game jams but for projects lasting more than 2 months it gets exceedingly painful and adding more people on doesn't really make pumping out features actually much faster least not over the span of years.  It's the game design coupled with the architecture to be more specific.  They don't mix.  A lot of hyped past wanted features and goals literally can't be done as a result of this. 

 

That may be the case, but as of now those features are just optional stuff on a drawing board. It may be that you think one or more of those features are needed for 7D2D to shine, but TFP seems to have a different opinion there.

 

The only sure thing we will see in 7D2D at release will be bandits and the new armor, AFAIK.

 

10 hours ago, Koishi said:

Now this doesn't need to be acknowledged directly but an extremely powerful first step would be to pull things out of Entity.tick and EntityAlive.tick and gradually move it over to what we'd call a game system or game manager.  It's an abstraction where you're doing exactly one piece of logic over a buffer of work (this case Entities with X criteria), this buffer should be maintained and added to and removed before this system is ran to make it easier to do things like batching and threading far as runtime but the real meat of doing this is that it'd actually pull things out of that virtual tick method and actually make it easier to see what's going on.

Or i guess to say this simply though I hate using this expression.  It's impossible to maintain spaghetti.  And I mean no shame by this but the code is spaghetti and past it's limit.  If anyone has understanding of software at all go look at Entity.cs or EntityAlive.cs and actually try to make sense of it.  There's too much nested complexity and weird mixes of state checking that make it hard to figure out when something should ever be called or even what it's job is.  Code comments would never fix this.  I've had a hell of a time trying to wrangle this when helping someone make an optimization mod back in A20.  He managed to get the game in an insanely runtime efficient state relatively but the tricks he had to do even if he was on the team wouldn't really be maintainable sadly (without architectural changes).  Hundreds of zeds on 40 man servers with 80FPS though yeah it had it's problems.  He's more qualified (for the moment at least) to work on the project than whoever's the lead engineer and he's not even a dev but a modder.  It's not because he's a genius it's just because he actually put in effort to learn how to do things better and got a gentle push in the right direction.

To reeeeeally sum this up as to why at it's more root cause.  There's a guy in the world of software with the handle "uncle bob" whom put out a book called clean code.  He's been pushing insanely fanatical OOP is the end all be all kind of concepts on all of the software industry and it's the backbone of why unity uses the CS pattern in the first place, it's why indie devs and devs in mid sized studios have an extremely difficult time making projects like this.  It's not exactly their intelligence it's just they don't know any better and are following convention too much.

 

Yeah, I read about Uncle Bob. He essentially promotes refactoring to death to produce easily readable code snippets. I am not aware that he promotes just one design pattern, but more like using them at all instead of none. So I don't really understand why he would be the cause of indie devs being stuck into only one design pattern or not using them. I also could not find any reference to a CS pattern.

 

Now one thing I am sure of: if TFPs developers are fans of Uncle bobs design philosophy, it surely won't suffice if a random guy from the internet tells them in a phone call or a forum that that philosophy is borked and they should use option B. And certainly they won't do it when they think (rightly or wrongly) that release of the software is say less than a year away. And even if they know that some part is unmaintainable they won't change it now as long as it works as intended, warts and all.

 

So, I don't want to stop you, please continue as long as you like, but I think you are too late and too noname, even if you were right. Write a book, get a movement going, maybe that's the way to make yourself heard

 

10 hours ago, Koishi said:

A better engineer knows a multitude of patterns and tries to pick the best one based on the task at hand and isn't afraid to refactor.

 

This sounds to me as if it could have been the "clean code" manifesto. No really, clean code promotes refactoring and using patterns. So what is the difference here?

 

10 hours ago, Koishi said:

The code here sadly doesn't have any evidence of that.  It just takes one guy whom is interested in walking down this path, that person alone would be more productive than 10+ typical programmers and it's just mostly because of a difference in attitude and exposure to specific topics.  A lot of modders over the years seem to perhaps mistakenly think that the engineers themselves aren't interested but i've come to think it's probably that it's not their fault but that they are entirely outside our reach to the point none of us can actually give advice when we see issues.  That's a damn shame.  At the least the engineers should be hanging around software communities to exchange ideas, and should be reading articles to learn new techniques probably about at least once every two months ish or something akin.  The code reflects that they are just too isolated and unexposed.  Well that or someone doesn't have the balls to say no to bad direction.  One of the two.

 

Possibly. Though are you sure the software community at large is already past Clean Code? I mean, you might know for yourself that it is wrong, but thousands of developers probably think as fervently that it is right. Hanging around software communities who usually happily argue about which agile method is the best one would not fix that.

 

 

Edited October 17, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Koishi]

6 hours ago, meganoth said:

This sounds to me as if it could have been the "clean code" manifesto. No really, clean code promotes refactoring and using patterns. So what is the difference here?

I actually really love your response despite disagreeing.  It really feels human somehow.  It wasn't right of me to drop all of this in an unrelated forum thread.  I've been acting on years of pent up frustration as it's been exceedingly difficult for modders to actually coexist and help fix things but the past is the past especialy if this is to be dropped in a year.  That's my fault as well for not keeping up with that I assumed this would be another ten years.  Maybe if this was five years ago and I had the skill then I do now maybe it'd have been different.  Understanding more context and taking a step back now yeah I deserved the responses I got.

But to tackle this one specifically.  So personally his lectures while I might not entirely agree with I do actually appreciate.  There's also been past drama with people trying to cancel the guy which wasn't a fun situation.  Now refactoring itself isn't a bad thing.  There's some good points he makes.  But he does have a strong obsession with OOP and expects it be used in basically all contexts and has been giving a lot of bad examples and constraints in that book and in general that's been polarizing people to never look at ideas such as batch processing.  If I may I'd like to share some links to better explain this.  So first link is by gingerbill whom has made the odin language so he is a bit personally biased towards more DOD practices but even he's at least seemingly trying to find a respectful middle ground on things as far as i see which is a bit jarring since usually people get into DOD as a sort of traumatic response to realizing obsessive OOP practices cripple a lot of code.  And I was one of those people whom had to gradually come away from that and try to see the bigger picture.  Also apologies by saying CS.  By that i mean "component systems".  I'll post a second link that explains the actor pattern and CS pattern in relation to ECS and their historical significance.  Mostly because it nit picks various issues with the former patterns and i'm not saying any of them are entirely superior in all contexts.  The former two patterns fall within the OOP domain, ECS is generally considered to be more leaning towards DOD and can be a nice contrast.  I do think it's a nice thing to actually learn in depth even if it's not used since it at least promotes thinking on different ways to solve problems.  (huh these aren't posted in the order i expected my bad the videos are in reverse order)

Honestly we do need exposure.  Bad exposure is one thing but it's not right when we entirely close ourselves off.  To put things right a larger forum of sorts has to be created rather than this situation where we end up too divided and unable to bridge build.  Now I don't mean it's always a good idea to say join larger discord servers, there's usually too much social density in those places if they are too active, it ends up leading to pathology, i find a good approach so far is looking for a mix of grassroots ones and ones spirited similar to the bigger ones but trying to get away from the pathology and encourage actual discussion rather than the usual plzbro attitudes you'd see otherwise, maybe not always ideal.  But I never would've gotten where I am entirely on my own it's the social experience i've had with others and the lucky articles i've come across from different perspectives that really opened opportunities for learning.

Also in hind sight if this isn't really the place to be doing this am sorry for that.

[mr.devolver]

On 10/5/2023 at 8:50 AM, Roland said:

The next TFP project FOREVER ALPHA uses Unreal engine and beyond that we simply don't know what they plan to do.

 

[theFlu]

18 hours ago, mr.devolver said:

The next TFP project FOREVER ALPHA

Hey, if it's 10 bucks and provides entertainment for 4k hours (and counting), I'm kinda fine with a FOREVER game ..

[mr.devolver]

On 10/23/2023 at 4:04 PM, theFlu said:

Hey, if it's 10 bucks and provides entertainment for 4k hours (and counting), I'm kinda fine with a FOREVER game ..

 

For me it's the game mods that are providing that much fun, the base game doesn't. Also, it's "FOREVER Alpha", not "FOREVER game", that's different considering the amount of features it's still missing to meet the definition, but hey if you see a real life Flintstone's car and decide to call it a "car" just because it has 4 wheels that's your choice, but personally I'd rather pay more than "10 bucks" as you call it and have an actual "one in a life time" game experience than pay just "10 bucks" and have something that tries hard to act like a game yet stays in Alpha development stage forever.

Edited October 31, 2023 by mr.devolver (see edit history)

[theFlu]

1 hour ago, mr.devolver said:

For me it's the game mods that are providing that much fun, the base game doesn't. Also, it's "FOREVER Alpha", not "FOREVER game",

Well, first, you took the liberty of FTFY, I did as well; it's a game with features still being developed in the background, sure, but a fully playable game nonetheless, the "alpha" means absolutely nothing to me. Then again, I did grow up playing minesweeper, doesn't take much for me to call a thing a game.

 

Second, just out of potential curiosity; I don't mod, not even QoL stuff - I keep my game ready for bug reporting. Thus, my 4k hours have indeed been provided by the 10 buck TFP game. Your experience differs, but you have done nothing to convince me from still being kinda fine with another forever game.

 

Are you really that keen on bandits that you can't call it a game without them?

[Koishi]

6 hours ago, theFlu said:

Well, first, you took the liberty of FTFY, I did as well; it's a game with features still being developed in the background, sure, but a fully playable game nonetheless, the "alpha" means absolutely nothing to me. Then again, I did grow up playing minesweeper, doesn't take much for me to call a thing a game.

 

Second, just out of potential curiosity; I don't mod, not even QoL stuff - I keep my game ready for bug reporting. Thus, my 4k hours have indeed been provided by the 10 buck TFP game. Your experience differs, but you have done nothing to convince me from still being kinda fine with another forever game.

 

Are you really that keen on bandits that you can't call it a game without them?

It's been what ten years now?  I have to admit for PVE A8 is a personal favorite but really the best balance between pve/pvp i've seen in any alpha has to be around A16 ish.  The new stuff just pulls further and further away from the spirit of being a survival horror or even much a tower defense game.  The zombies are really more of a challenge if you keep their pathing more dumb ish like how it was, maybe some spiders again, the zeds that used to climb walls.  Cops used to be really painful to deal with but this was before armor was so effective and before guns were neither cheap to fire/maintain nor OP.  The modern armor rating honestly feels too high a percentage considering nothing really seems to hit you with some kind of DOT nor seems to have any AP potential for later game to help even the odds.  The design doesn't have direction.  I legit miss being two shotable and having to use mostly crossbolts to headshot most things till the time came to actually whip out the firepower.  Level grinding for gear levels strictly from looting main stashes off quests entirely kills the fun in scavenging every corner and being concerned with any measure of economy.  At least you used to be able to combine gear into lvl600 eventually, I really miss that.  I miss when PVP used to be about economical/territorial wars for example planting traps and steel doors on POIs, prepping for a week or two to finally collect the stuff to build a raid base outside their base, spend hours going to town online and trying to get favorable bag trades (like rust).  I miss the DOTs being actually strong against players when the tick timer for DOTs seem to be shorter yet DPS was higher.  Made PVP more fair and interesting against lower geared players that didn't have 95%+ armor rating yet you're just starting out.  I miss having to work for my base materials instead of looting for it in crates.  I miss there being a meaning to having a base in PVP and PVE.  I miss zeds being a constant casual threat, they used to roam everywhere you went even out in the open.  They used to be scary.  Anyone remember when vultures or even dogs used to chase you down to no end in destroyed bioms and likely one/two shot you?  Even if they didn't kill you the bleed likely did.  You got caught off guard a lot for being careless.  You usually didn't go loud since that attracted hell from around you.  Bandits aren't a big deal to me hell we were told they'd be adding in ally base builders NPCs forever ago.  But these recent alphas aside the visuals seem mostly a downgrade to me from the perspective of having a design that actually retained it's spirit.  And I don't blame them that's the natural outcome to something this old when more hands get involved maybe.  The god knows how many hours i put into this game was in the hopes that i'd actually see improvement over time but that just doesn't seem to be the case.  Hell anymore remember the smell mechanic?  How having food on you made you have a smell radius where zeds within that radius would start hovering closer to the player almost subconsciously and kinda slowly.  But in a way that would potentially spank you if you were too careless as you might accidentally alert too many at once.  Just while roaming in the woods.  You rarely felt safe.  Without even needing to activate feral.

[theFlu]

@Koishi, dunno why I was quoted, none of that relates to my post (?)