Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[The Gronk]

"Removing colliders from objects and making them static far from the player would have some odd consequences" Like how in Kerbal Space Program, another unity game, when you load your Mun base and see it jump 3m off the ground? Let's not bring that into 7DtD

 

That sounds like the same problem. The root cause of it is likely to do with the utterly crazy way modern processors deal with floating point numbers. In just about everything else in computing things are deterministic, not with floating point arithmetic. Some genius decided early on that modern processors should use a floating point instead of a fixed point, mainly for the gain in processing speed. This has been the chagrin of many developers of both hardware and software over the years... myself included. The upshot of this is that if you try to calculate the same number twice it's pretty unlikely that you'll receive the exact same result, the more calculations required to get the answer the less likely the answer is to correlate.

 

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results"

- Unknown

(usually attributed to Einstein but he's unlikely to have coined the phrase)

[Xeen]

 

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results"

- Unknown

 

The actual quote is:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”

This is an important distinction, I often do things a second time just to verify that I get the same result that I did the first time, it's part of the scientific method.

[dhlmaster]

The actual quote is:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”

This is an important distinction, I often do things a second time just to verify that I get the same result that I did the first time, it's part of the scientific method.

 

Should have seen me trying to start my mower last week. Tinkered with the engine all day, must have yanked that pull start 1,000 times. Nothing. Pulled it out yesterday to put a new carburetor on it, and it gave it one pull for ♥♥♥♥s and giggles before starting the work. What do you know, it started right up and I got my lawn mowed! I did something over and over again expecting different results. Maybe I'm insane, but it worked that one time.

[The Gronk]

The actual quote is:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”

This is an important distinction, I often do things a second time just to verify that I get the same result that I did the first time, it's part of the scientific method.

 

When will I learn to google _everything_ before posting instead of trying to rely on memory :-)

[Xeen]

Should have seen me trying to start my mower last week. Tinkered with the engine all day, must have yanked that pull start 1,000 times. Nothing. Pulled it out yesterday to put a new carburetor on it, and it gave it one pull for ♥♥♥♥s and giggles before starting the work. What do you know, it started right up and I got my lawn mowed! I did something over and over again expecting different results. Maybe I'm insane, but it worked that one time.

 

Lawn mower engines are unreliable at best I often have to pull it 5 times to get it to start but any more than that I buy a new mower. haha

Speaking of which I just replaced my mower for that very reason, hard starting.

I bought a Husqvarna with a Honda motor this time, the very definition of reliability, I don't expect to have to replace this one for a long time.

[SyKo]

I'm hoping this is the correct thread, but apologize if it's not.

 

I have a request, though I'm sure Joel is sick to death of hearing them by now. I've played this game for many years now, and up until the last year or so, haven't had any problems. I spend about $150/yr for the last 2-3 yrs hosting a dedicated server for myself and friends, shelled out $350 for a new GPU, and have purchased at least 6 copies, maybe more, of the game for myself, friends and family. I am invested in 7DTD, no doubt.

 

This is my request, Joel: Will you please add a feature to A17 to turn the distant terrain off. Completely off. I actually liked the mysteriousness of the fog, the not knowing which way to go, the danger of stumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time, and the awesomeness of finding something cool you didn't know was there. I liked the old fog past your render. That said, on top of just preferring it in general, it's very taxing on many players systems. I do not want to shell out another $1000 for a new board, new core, and new ram just to be able to play 7DTD the way I used to. The cache of my current cores just don't cut it with the current distant terrain as it is. It's barely playable in it's current state. I'm sure I probably need to upgrade to a more current, state-of-the-art Ryzen7 dual-1080 Ti monster with 64 gigs of ram, but alas, I just can't afford that right now.

 

So Joel, please, please add a toggle feature to the game in the PC version to turn the distant terrain off and the fog back on, and save a brother a grand. Thanks for my favorite game, man.

[Xeen]

I'm hoping this is the correct thread, but apologize if it's not.

 

I have a request, though I'm sure Joel is sick to death of hearing them by now. I've played this game for many years now, and up until the last year or so, haven't had any problems. I spend about $150/yr for the last 2-3 yrs hosting a dedicated server for myself and friends, shelled out $350 for a new GPU, and have purchased at least 6 copies, maybe more, of the game for myself, friends and family. I am invested in 7DTD, no doubt.

 

This is my request, Joel: Will you please add a feature to A17 to turn the distant terrain off. Completely off. I actually liked the mysteriousness of the fog, the not knowing which way to go, the danger of stumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time, and the awesomeness of finding something cool you didn't know was there. I liked the old fog past your render. That said, on top of just preferring it in general, it's very taxing on many players systems. I do not want to shell out another $1000 for a new board, new core, and new ram just to be able to play 7DTD the way I used to. The cache of my current cores just don't cut it with the current distant terrain as it is. It's barely playable in it's current state. I'm sure I probably need to upgrade to a more current, state-of-the-art Ryzen7 dual-1080 Ti monster with 64 gigs of ram, but alas, I just can't afford that right now.

 

So Joel, please, please add a toggle feature to the game in the PC version to turn the distant terrain off and the fog back on, and save a brother a grand. Thanks for my favorite game, man.

 

One thing you can do to increase chunk loading and over all game performance if you have 16GB of system memory or more is buy a performance class Solid State Drive (SSD) or Samsung 960 Evo m.2 NVMe Drive and put your OS and 7DTD on it then disable your Disk Cache (set to 0MB) on ALL drives and you will see a big increase in performance.

[archergod]

So, I woke up from hibernating since January. What I miss?

 

Avengers Movie, better than your Justice League

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

...

 

So Joel, please, please add a toggle feature to the game in ....

 

FunPimps, add a Toggle feature for everything you add, and give 4-5 option for everything. like you can toggle if a gun fires or not, or if it fires, will it kills or not, if it kills, zombie leave corpse or not.. I love lot of Toggle buttons really. I do.

[unholyjoe]

I'm hoping this is the correct thread, but apologize if it's not.

 

I have a request, though I'm sure Joel is sick to death of hearing them by now. I've played this game for many years now, and up until the last year or so, haven't had any problems. I spend about $150/yr for the last 2-3 yrs hosting a dedicated server for myself and friends, shelled out $350 for a new GPU, and have purchased at least 6 copies, maybe more, of the game for myself, friends and family. I am invested in 7DTD, no doubt.

 

This is my request, Joel: Will you please add a feature to A17 to turn the distant terrain off. Completely off. I actually liked the mysteriousness of the fog, the not knowing which way to go, the danger of stumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time, and the awesomeness of finding something cool you didn't know was there. I liked the old fog past your render. That said, on top of just preferring it in general, it's very taxing on many players systems. I do not want to shell out another $1000 for a new board, new core, and new ram just to be able to play 7DTD the way I used to. The cache of my current cores just don't cut it with the current distant terrain as it is. It's barely playable in it's current state. I'm sure I probably need to upgrade to a more current, state-of-the-art Ryzen7 dual-1080 Ti monster with 64 gigs of ram, but alas, I just can't afford that right now.

 

So Joel, please, please add a toggle feature to the game in the PC version to turn the distant terrain off and the fog back on, and save a brother a grand. Thanks for my favorite game, man.

unless i misunderstand your issue, there is an option... it's the View Distance setting that can only be changed out of game first and each player will or should adjust their own settings. That is why that slider option was added.

 

https://imgur.com/a/H6Abr1p

 

hope this helps

[SyKo]

One thing you can do to increase chunk loading and over all game performance if you have 16GB of system memory or more is buy a performance class Solid State Drive (SSD) or Samsung 960 Evo m.2 NVMe Drive and put your OS and 7DTD on it then disable your Disk Cache (set to 0MB) on ALL drives and you will see a big increase in performance.

 

Thx for the tip, Xeen. I will try that out in the meantime. Much appreciated.

 

Avengers Movie, better than your Justice League

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

 

 

FunPimps, add a Toggle feature for everything you add, and give 4-5 option for everything. like you can toggle if a gun fires or not, or if it fires, will it kills or not, if it kills, zombie leave corpse or not.. I love lot of Toggle buttons really. I do.

 

I only asked because it's a legitimate request, and a it's feature that would make the game accessible to more people, many of whom have played the game for a long time now. If I'm not mistaken, the PS4 and Xbox versions of the game already have the toggle for distant terrain. My apologies if this request for a single setting to be able to be toggled on and off somehow bothered you.

[The Gronk]

FunPimps, add a Toggle feature for everything you add, and give 4-5 option for everything. like you can toggle if a gun fires or not, or if it fires, will it kills or not, if it kills, zombie leave corpse or not.. I love lot of Toggle buttons really. I do.

 

That would require a lot of work... a LOT of work.

 

You'd first have to make sure that switching off one feature doesn't break all of the other features in the game, then make sure that turning off two features doesn't break the other features of the game... and so on. You'd then have to redesign the settings screen in such a way that non-techies can use it and those who don't like scrolling through a million options aren't intimidated by it.

 

There are many more problems that would occur but with just those two you're looking at an extra month or two of dev time on an alpha which is already drawing flak for taking too long. A lot of features can be altered or removed by digging through the xml's but most people are unwilling or incapable of doing it that way.

[SyKo]

unless i misunderstand your issue, there is an option... it's the View Distance setting that can only be changed out of game first and each player will or should adjust their own settings. That is why that slider option was added.

 

hope this helps

 

Thx for the advice, but render distance isn't my issue. It's more the fact of the game trying to draw a preview image of all surrounding terrain for miles on end. Changing view distance doesn't seem to have any affect on the distant terrain (e.g. how tents you chop down are still there, seeing cities miles away, lakes and mountain in the distance, etc.) This used to be a foggy situation where the view faded away into the fog. A14 and earlier, but thank you very much for your response. Much appreciated.

 

A friend of mine that's more tech savy than myself told me this has to do with L2 and L3 cache on last generation cores being less than what it is on current gen cores? It never affected us until after the A15 patch added distant terrain. Not sure, but it's apparently something about all the distant preview image causing it to drop cache, thus causing it to bottleneck at the core? something.. lol. Sorry. He could explain it much better than myself. Apparently being able to turn this feature off in game would stop the overflow? Damn, i wish I could remember the exact words he used. My bad.

 

Maybe Joel will see my post and consider it. All I can hope.

[SyKo]

That would require a lot of work... a LOT of work.

 

You'd first have to make sure that switching off one feature doesn't break all of the other features in the game, then make sure that turning off two features doesn't break the other features of the game... and so on. You'd then have to redesign the settings screen in such a way that non-techies can use it and those who don't like scrolling through a million options aren't intimidated by it.

 

There are many more problems that would occur but with just those two you're looking at an extra month or two of dev time on an alpha which is already drawing flak for taking too long. A lot of features can be altered or removed by digging through the xml's but most people are unwilling or incapable of doing it that way.

 

Ignore him, Gronk. He's being a smartass towards me for asking for a single toggle for one setting, (one that I believe already exists on the PS4 and Xbox versions of the game).

 

If you do know of a way in the .xml files to turn distant terrain off, please let me know. That would rock, man. Would be so awesome..

[The Gronk]

Ignore him, Gronk. He's being a smartass towards me for asking for a single toggle for one setting, (one that I believe already exists on the PS4 and Xbox versions of the game).

 

If you do know of a way in the .xml files to turn distant terrain off, please let me know. That would rock, man. Would be so awesome..

 

Apologies, I can't think of a way to do it. Even the SDX modding tool only allows you to extend classes, not replace them. Otherwise it's quite likely that commenting out a few lines of code would do it.

 

This really should be added for those playing on a potato, I know many would give up distant terrain to gain frame-rate.

 

Hmmmm.... maybe recompiling the binary with the code changed, it would make EAC cry but if you're only playing SP who cares.

[bishopsbourne]

Does anyone know if there are plans for using timed explosives or plunger devices for demolition of POI?

[Odetta]

Apologies, I can't think of a way to do it. Even the SDX modding tool only allows you to extend classes, not replace them. Otherwise it's quite likely that commenting out a few lines of code would do it.

 

This really should be added for those playing on a potato, I know many would give up distant terrain to gain frame-rate.

 

Hmmmm.... maybe recompiling the binary with the code changed, it would make EAC cry but if you're only playing SP who cares.

 

What if you make it rain 24/7 doesn't that essentially make it pre distant terrain? With the fog and all or does it still render and you just can't see it? Might be a janky workaround.

[The Gronk]

What if you make it rain 24/7 doesn't that essentially make it pre distant terrain? With the fog and all or does it still render and you just can't see it? Might be a janky workaround.

 

The distant terrain should still be rendering although you can't see it. You'll probably make the problem worse, adding rain takes up valuable system resources. I doubt the occlusion culling system would realize that it shouldn't be rendering the distant terrain behind the rain.

 

Yep, the only way I can think of so far is hacking the binary with the tool I shall not name here. It's a horrible workaround but it should work.

[Gnomaana]

That bug is quite likely to happen during the initial changeover, bandit shoots you and then runs across to bite your face off using the standard animation of a zombie scoring a kill :-)

 

Fair point though, should a bandit be able to steal your backpack if they kill you?

 

Yes, they absolutely should steal your stuff. Why would they not take your gear in an apocalypse? A bandit that left perfectly good gear to rot on the ground would NOT survive long.

[Tin]

The distant terrain should still be rendering although you can't see it. You'll probably make the problem worse, adding rain takes up valuable system resources. I doubt the occlusion culling system would realize that it shouldn't be rendering the distant terrain behind the rain.

 

Yep, the only way I can think of so far is hacking the binary with the tool I shall not name here. It's a horrible workaround but it should work.

 

Turn down the biome particle effect/Lower the amount of grass/ thin out the biome decorations. Instead of needing to turn down the distant terrain gen, lower other resources heavy things.

Example:Biomes.xml

 

<weather>
<Temperature min="-80" max="-70" prob="1"/>
<Fog min="0" max="0" prob=".9"/>
<Fog min="100" max="100" prob=".1"/>
<CloudThickness min="0" max="100" prob=".5"/>
<CloudThickness min="95" max="100" prob=".5"/>
<Precipitation min="0" max="0" prob=".0"/> <!-- it has to be at least 70% cloudy before it can rain -->
<Precipitation min="50" max="100" prob=".75"/>
<Wind min="20" max="40" prob="0.9"/>
<Wind min="40" max="100" prob="0.1"/>
     <ParticleEffect prefab="ParticleEffects/p_snowstorm1" ChunkMargin="7"/> [color="#FFFF00"]<- increase the chunk margin to thin it out.[/color]
</weather>

 

 

<decorations>
<decoration type="prefab" name="rock_form02" prob=".001" rotatemax="7"/>
<decoration type="prefab" name="rock_form01" prob=".01" rotatemax="7"/>
<decoration type="prefab" name="resource_coal_pile" prob=".0007" rotatemax="7"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="lootForestHelper" prob="0.00025"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="rock05" prob =".005" />
<decoration type="block" blockname="rock06" prob =".005" />
<decoration type="block" blockname="rock07" prob =".005" />
<decoration type="block" blockname="rockResource" prob =".0005" rotatemax="3"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="rockResource02" prob =".0005" rotatemax="3"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="cntBirdnest" prob ="0.0007" />
<decoration type="block" blockname="treeWinterEverGreen" prob="0.003" rotatemax="7"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="treeWinterPine01" prob="0.003" rotatemax="7"/> 
<decoration type="block" blockname="treeWinterPine02" prob="0.003" rotatemax="7"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="treeWinterPine03" prob="0.003" rotatemax="7"/> [color="#FFFF00"]<-- lower the prob "0.0015"[/color]
<decoration type="block" blockname="cntTreeStump" prob="0.0005" rotatemax="7"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="treeSnowyDeadBush" prob ="0.005" rotatemax="7"/>
<decoration type="block" blockname="treeSnowyGrassDiagonal" prob =".1" /> [color="#FFFF00"]<-- lower the prob "0.001"[/color]
</decorations>

 

Doing those things help with the performance.

Especially thinning out the tall trees like 16m or above. You can even increase the amount of smaller tree by like amount (in total) and still get a decent gain on performance.

 

You can also lower the probabilities of having the larger hubs from forming. Reducing the Excessive amounts of the larger hubs can give you a pretty big performance gain.

 

Lots of things ppl can do to increase performance. Those are but a few easy quick "To Do's" without needing to go deeper than you need.

[Lonestarcanuck]

How will Quest work in multiplayer? if I have a quest and my buddy does not will only I see the quest markers and content? I am wondering if its like world of Warcraft where you only see what is relevant to your storyline.

 

also if I complete a quest will it reset for the next person?

 

I guess an understanding of how quest will work would be great!

[Lonestarcanuck]

So a Woman gamer on my server was asking "Hey how come we don't have female Traders?" I thought that was a great question! So what's the deal?

[The Gronk]

So a Woman gamer on my server was asking "Hey how come we don't have female Traders?" I thought that was a great question! So what's the deal?

 

This is alpha and voice actors cost money. There's a female trader in the actual prefabs but unless you want to hear MadMole trying to do a high-pitched female voice it's better they didn't put it in.

 

The traders personalities are still very much work in progress, they're supposed to change their attitude to you depending on how much they like you. Since it's a first iteration it was decided not to hire voice actors for work that was likely to end up on the cutting room floor.

[qprophet]

This is alpha and voice actors cost money. There's a female trader in the actual prefabs but unless you want to hear MadMole trying to do a high-pitched female voice it's better they didn't put it in.

 

The traders personalities are still very much work in progress, they're supposed to change their attitude to you depending on how much they like you. Since it's a first iteration it was decided not to hire voice actors for work that was likely to end up on the cutting room floor.

 

Not gonna lie, I would actually like to hear MM doing the voice acting for a female trader. That or just put in a female trader model and use the current voice for trader Rekt.

 

The look of utter confusion on someones face after witnessing that would be priceless.

[themirror]

This is alpha and voice actors cost money. There's a female trader in the actual prefabs but unless you want to hear MadMole trying to do a high-pitched female voice it's better they didn't put it in.

 

The traders personalities are still very much work in progress, they're supposed to change their attitude to you depending on how much they like you. Since it's a first iteration it was decided not to hire voice actors for work that was likely to end up on the cutting room floor.

 

just record MM wife voice

[Roland]

This is alpha and voice actors cost money. There's a female trader in the actual prefabs but unless you want to hear MadMole trying to do a high-pitched female voice it's better they didn't put it in.

 

They also have lots of female voice files they haven't used. They have done at least two huge VO sessions and have plenty of material to use for both genders and for a range of emotional states and attitudes toward the player. Your statement about them deciding not to hire voice actors until later is something I haven't heard but I don't remember everything. You have a source on that?