Version 1.0 (Alpha 22) Dev Diary

[Riamus]

32 minutes ago, Chaton Noir said:

Does TFP have plans to expand the use of the POI parts system? Now it is used quite pointwise for the accidental appearance of poles, accidents on roads, chicken coops at locations, etc. But this system can be significantly expanded to entire POI segments.
For example, for one house, you can make several options for the second floor. Moreover, they can be exactly the same from the outside, but only the internal layout, the player's path, and the location of the main loot will change.
Or, for example, you can make several variations for the same building, which will differ only in the colors of the walls outside and other wallpapers inside.
With this, it would be possible to greatly diversify the existing locations, and in different ways. Somewhere to change the colors, somewhere - the internal layout, and somewhere in general it would be possible to add a burned—out attic instead of the whole, change the player's path in the building, hide the top loot in different places, change the location of groups of zombies.
I understand that level designers have a lot of work to do for this, but it will be very, very cool if this is ever implemented. Yes, it will not be possible to do this for all buildings at once, and it will have to be introduced gradually over several updates. But even the appearance of this for at least part of the buildings would bring the variety of POIs to a new level.
In the game now, POIs and cities look great, better than ever. I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who worked on this — you did an amazing job. But this system would make POI even better. There would be much more variety. Moreover, I have heard that you once discussed such a thing.

Although a great idea, I'm not sure that we'd see it.  Changing wall paint/wallpaper would probably be easy except that the choices available are so limited that you really can't do much change and still have it look okay.  For something like that to be worth it, they'd need to give us more paints.  That in itself would be amazing but they seem intent on that being limited due to memory usage instead of finding a way to increase it.

 

But layout variations inside buildings like you suggest isn't something that is going to get done randomly (AI isn't there yet).  That means it requires being done by hand and basically creating new POI for each variation.  If you do that, you can already get the variations by just having those as extra POI that might get placed.  No need for anything extra beyond the work to make variations of the POI.  I don't see them doing that -- after all, a completely new POI is more interesting than a variation in an existing POI's layout.  But it is something any POI designer could choose to do themselves as custom POI.  Again, though... it isn't as interesting as a new POI, so most probably wouldn't want to do that.

 

As far as loot, they can already place loot in different places.  Any object, including loot, can be done as a part, allowing it to be randomized.  The problem with loot is that they do a large loot room.  You don't want that to be somewhere you reach before getting to the end of the POI when following the intended path, so it needs to be at the end of whatever path you intend players to use.  It would make breaking through directly to the loot room difficult since it could be in different places but at that point, you're just trying to force people to play the way you want rather than really doing something to make the game better.  If loot was scattered instead of in a loot room, you could easily spread that out randomly.  But they like loot rooms and I think a lot of players do as well, so I don't think they'll move away from that other than perhaps making a POI now and then that doesn't use a loot room.

[Chaton Noir]

1 hour ago, Riamus said:

Although a great idea, I'm not sure that we'd see it.  Changing wall paint/wallpaper would probably be easy except that the choices available are so limited that you really can't do much change and still have it look okay.  For something like that to be worth it, they'd need to give us more paints.  That in itself would be amazing but they seem intent on that being limited due to memory usage instead of finding a way to increase it.

 

But layout variations inside buildings like you suggest isn't something that is going to get done randomly (AI isn't there yet).  That means it requires being done by hand and basically creating new POI for each variation.  If you do that, you can already get the variations by just having those as extra POI that might get placed.  No need for anything extra beyond the work to make variations of the POI.  I don't see them doing that -- after all, a completely new POI is more interesting than a variation in an existing POI's layout.  But it is something any POI designer could choose to do themselves as custom POI.  Again, though... it isn't as interesting as a new POI, so most probably wouldn't want to do that.

 

As far as loot, they can already place loot in different places.  Any object, including loot, can be done as a part, allowing it to be randomized.  The problem with loot is that they do a large loot room.  You don't want that to be somewhere you reach before getting to the end of the POI when following the intended path, so it needs to be at the end of whatever path you intend players to use.  It would make breaking through directly to the loot room difficult since it could be in different places but at that point, you're just trying to force people to play the way you want rather than really doing something to make the game better.  If loot was scattered instead of in a loot room, you could easily spread that out randomly.  But they like loot rooms and I think a lot of players do as well, so I don't think they'll move away from that other than perhaps making a POI now and then that doesn't use a loot room.

In general, I agree, but still it would be great to make variants of one POI, too, since there are a lot of POIs now, but they are the same. Of course, the new POIs are better, but variations for the old ones will also improve the variety. There will be much fewer cases when you walk into a room and realize that you already know it by heart. This could be especially useful for T5 buildings, since there are quite a little of them, and their creation is quite long and difficult. In addition, they simply have more space for different variations. And yes, I meant manually creating variations, not something random. And if you use a system of parts, then it will be one location, just randomly the game will be able to change different segments to others, if they are created. That is, it will be, for example, the same house, but with several options for the second floor, and one of them will be randomly selected during generation.

[Adam the Waster]

One thing im kibda sad we aren't getting is new colors for special zombies 

 

Like solders being dressed black and having SWAT written on it. Cops wearing tan or dark blue. 

 

At least not yet

[Riamus]

1 hour ago, Chaton Noir said:

In general, I agree, but still it would be great to make variants of one POI, too, since there are a lot of POIs now, but they are the same. Of course, the new POIs are better, but variations for the old ones will also improve the variety. There will be much fewer cases when you walk into a room and realize that you already know it by heart. This could be especially useful for T5 buildings, since there are quite a little of them, and their creation is quite long and difficult. In addition, they simply have more space for different variations. And yes, I meant manually creating variations, not something random. And if you use a system of parts, then it will be one location, just randomly the game will be able to change different segments to others, if they are created. That is, it will be, for example, the same house, but with several options for the second floor, and one of them will be randomly selected during generation.

The time to create a manual variation of a POI versus a new one really isn't a significant savings in time.  Yes, the basic structure is complete, but most of the time gets spent on the internal designs, so there's not a lot of savings.  And having the same building with just different floor layouts won't feel as unique as an entirely different building.  If it could be done automatically, then that would be great.  But for manually created stuff, new POI are going to be more interesting than variations of the same POI.  That said, better/more use of Parts in POI to randomize them would be a great improvement.

[faatal]

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

 

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

[User]

1 minute ago, faatal said:

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

 

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

Is purple the burnt forest? I'm so excited for its return.

43 minutes ago, Adam the Waster said:

One thing im kibda sad we aren't getting is new colors for special zombies 

 

Like solders being dressed black and having SWAT written on it. Cops wearing tan or dark blue. 

 

At least not yet

Thankfully, with the introduction of the albedo variants, I'd say its fairly likely we get this in future (?)

[Jost Amman]

3 minutes ago, faatal said:

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

 

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

Great job faatal! 

[Teck]

It might just be a result of taking some months away from the game to come in blind to new updates, but I was caught off guard by the 1.0 announcement.  Specifically, I think that the decision NOT to include a statement in the steam news post that 1.0 represented a naming convention change that aligned with alpha 22 was less useful to those like me who are already familiar with the game.  It might be beneficial to have a mention like that in the next news post that goes out.

[Doomofman]

17 minutes ago, faatal said:

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

 

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

 

Maybe I'm totally imagining it but I feel like these cities are much more random in terms of footprint shape than they used to be, which is great. Always felt like big cities previously were bigger North to South than East to West (like the west-most city in the wasteland in this map)

Edited May 6 by Doomofman (see edit history)

[faatal]

On 5/5/2024 at 10:01 AM, HeLLKnight said:

The lighting seen in gameplay trailer is fantastic! I love how that deep makes everything scarier, and the game suddenly feels at least 5 years newer than a21. Devs commented here back in january they added new contact shadows and ambient occlusion, so I think the huge improvement in 1.0 comes from there. 

 

@faatal can you comment a few more details about that new lighting and shadowing? Which AO technique has been possible to fit in old Unity built-in render pipeline, GTAO maybe? Any other gfx improvements coming like new antialiasing?

I don't know what they did to make the video other than they used the automove camera orbit mode I added.

It is the same block vertex color AO we had years ago, we just turned it back on and tweaked it a bit. Ambient indoor/outdoor was then adjusted to compensate for indoors being darker from AO. Our screen space AO was change to a different system. Contact shadows were added as a postprocessing effect. It seems to mainly fill in light leaks we would have before and make shadows closer to the surface. Our gfx programmer did most of this work, so I don't know all the details.

 

I did add FSR3, but it is in an experimental state as there are some blurring issues and does not seem to work on OpenGL, so it will not be enabled by default.

1 minute ago, Doomofman said:

Maybe I'm totally imagining it but I feel like these cities are much more random in terms of footprint shape than they used to be. Always felt like big cities previously were bigger North to South than East to West (like the west-most city in the wasteland in this map)

I don't think I have mentioned this change before, but city cores are now square with the remaining tiles growing out from that, which makes them less likely to be weird shapes that fail to fit in their biome.

[GoldenFox]

23 minutes ago, faatal said:

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

 

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

 

is the green portion of the map the new swamp biome?

[FramFramson]

25 minutes ago, faatal said:

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

 

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

 

Holy crap this is a huge upgrade! Way better than I expected for city and road generation!

[faatal]

22 hours ago, Chaton Noir said:

@faatal , are you planning to add SSAA or another option to increase the resolution of the render? I have an RTX 4060, and since the game depends on the processor, the GPU often has a small load. I think it would be possible to get the GPU to render the game at 1440p without any problems. This would be especially true for owners of even more powerful GPUs. Moreover, the anti aliasing in the game does not work too well.

I tried to increase the resolution using the console command, as well as DSR and DLDSR, but nothing worked. Therefore, I would like to have such a setting in the game.

No plans for SSAA. Hopefully the CPU main thread load will continue to come down as we make more optimizations.

[Cr0wst0rm]

29 minutes ago, faatal said:

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

 

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

I guess the most time is spent on creating the cities? I am sorry, but the heightmap looks rather simplistic. The hills have a nice grainy detail, yes, but would it be possible for the cities to be more randomly elevated? (not meaning individual buildings but x height offset / city). I remember alpha 16 had more interesting sculptures thanks to this, but now it generally feels like you are in playing Netherlands... Which kinda sucks..

[Riamus]

39 minutes ago, User said:

Is purple the burnt forest? I'm so excited for its return.

Yes, purple is burnt forest. 

 

Great improvements for the towns and roads.  Having multiple gateways and bypass roads are great!

 

7 minutes ago, Cr0wst0rm said:

I guess the most time is spent on creating the cities? I am sorry, but the heightmap looks rather simplistic. The hills have a nice grainy detail, yes, but would it be possible for the cities to be more randomly elevated? (not meaning individual buildings but x height offset / city). I remember alpha 16 had more interesting sculptures thanks to this, but now it generally feels like you are in playing Netherlands... Which kinda sucks..

I'd imagine they did low hills/mountains for that example so they could show more towns and roads.  But probably not any change to elevation of towns.

[maxousara]

In the trailer when the cop vomit its more realistic and its fly a little bit everywhere is it in 1.0 and are they cause damage ?

[faatal]

14 minutes ago, Cr0wst0rm said:

I guess the most time is spent on creating the cities? I am sorry, but the heightmap looks rather simplistic. The hills have a nice grainy detail, yes, but would it be possible for the cities to be more randomly elevated? (not meaning individual buildings but x height offset / city). I remember alpha 16 had more interesting sculptures thanks to this, but now it generally feels like you are in playing Netherlands... Which kinda sucks..

Cities/towns seem flat. Maybe someday we can improve that, but doubt I will have the time for 1.0.

 

Stamps also need improvement and more variety.

2 minutes ago, maxousara said:

In the trailer when the cop vomit its more realistic and its fly a little bit everywhere is it in 1.0 and are they cause damage ?

It is in 1.0. The core vomit projectile(s) are the same. You are seeing artistic improvement.

[lord_ahriman]

Will older versions still be available after 1.0 release? Or should I save a copy those I have interest to play in the future?

[SylenThunder]

37 minutes ago, lord_ahriman said:

Will older versions still be available after 1.0 release? Or should I save a copy those I have interest to play in the future?

 

The answer was already provided in the FAQ you apparently didn't read. I don't understand why it is so hard for people to look before asking.

 

Quote

Q: Will I still be able to access older alphas of the game?
A: Yes we will continue to support this on Steam as the Steam policies permit. This will not be a feature in other platforms.

 

[Adam the Waster]

I can't read

 

 

But good job faatal it looks so much more natural 

[lord_ahriman]

15 minutes ago, SylenThunder said:

 

The answer was already provided in the FAQ you apparently didn't read. I don't understand why it is so hard for people to look before asking.

 

 

 

Really unnecessary this kind of answer, because it wasn't an offensive question. The real shame in here is a moderator responding normal questions this way.

[JVOSS18]

11 hours ago, SylenThunder said:

You might want to actually read the news about the 1.0 release instead of making baseless assumptions.

Alpha Exodus: Leaving Early Access | 7 Days to Die

The few will believe this!! But, thanks AGAIN for a voice of reason! @SylenThunder And an apology to @meganoth my bad. Excited for the new,, version, alpha,1.0, modified, interpreted, altered, was a thing and now a different thing, etc, etc, etc...

[falloutcloud]

50 minutes ago, SylenThunder said:

 

The answer was already provided in the FAQ you apparently didn't read. I don't understand why it is so hard for people to look before asking.

 

 

 

I cannot understand how someone asking a question would frustrate you that you felt you needed to respond this way. You could have chosen to simply not answer or answer in kind and remind everyone that there is an FAQ where these are found. As a moderator you lead by example. If this is the way you handle questions, then it is only a matter of time till others feel they can respond the same.

[bdubyah]

5 hours ago, faatal said:

Stamps also need improvement and more variety.

Especially those river stamps. Er, I mean stamp.

 

Cities and stuff look good, but two things stick out to me: the wilderness POIs seem to be perfectly spaced apart from one another. And the roads look...a bit odd.

[zztong]

9 hours ago, Chaton Noir said:

But this system can be significantly expanded to entire POI segments.
For example, for one house, you can make several options for the second floor. Moreover, they can be exactly the same from the outside, but only the internal layout, the player's path, and the location of the main loot will change.

 

I love Parts. I use lots of Parts. What you say is entirely true if you want to make variant floors with some copy/paste. Something more intricate, such as alternative rooms within a floor, can take a lot of planning. Your parts have to be cubic, so you can't have a complex shape to the Part. You probably have to be careful with your sleeper volumes to keep them contained to the Part for your own sanity, then be careful not to have any other volumes overlap the Part -- more easily done with a "floors as Parts" approach; not easy with a more intricate layout.

 

I too wish TFP used more Parts, especially on Tiles. They can reduce the "Flintstone Effect" when driving around Rural outskirt Tiles. Maybe that Tile with the dogleg in the road and the pond could get a half-dozen Parts for that spot.

 

I don't think I'd run back through all the established POIs and make variants for all of them. Maybe a couple of them every release and I'd probably confine the approach mostly to higher tier POIs to try to keep the "end game" players engaged a little. Humans are pretty good at remembering layouts though, so 4 variant Basements for the Crack of Books POI are going to be learned pretty quickly.

 

I'd have to check, but it used to be that Part randomization was being done by RWG, where as it would be nice if POIs would randomize their Parts each time a Quest was started.

 

9 hours ago, Riamus said:

As far as loot, they can already place loot in different places.  Any object, including loot, can be done as a part, allowing it to be randomized.

 

Yeh, I've dabbled with randomizing loot and then I took it all out. The trouble is to make sure the POI will have any loot you have to have a default location where there will be loot for sure if none of the randomization hits -AND- you have to be willing to have a POI give out either too much loot or no loot at all. There's no way to say "make sure at least one Part named 'Loot' spawns."

 

9 hours ago, Riamus said:

The problem with loot is that they do a large loot room.

 

Yeh, moving the loot around probably works against TFP's "dungeon path" approach unless you replace an entire floor then you've got a shot at having an alternative dungeon path. As I'm not usually a "dungeon path" designer, I like to scatter the loot about the place.