PC A20 Developer Diary Discussions

[BFT2020]

it doesn't need % . you can agree that in 2021 at least 75% more of kids wear shoes outside  in USA that in 1900. have i any data? nope but you can hear about it from people. 

That is not how this works.  If you provide a specific number, you have to have data to prove it out.  If you are saying that more than 75% of kids wear shoes outside in 2021 compared to 1900, you need to have the total population of kids in 1900, the total population of kids in 2021, the number of kids wearing shoes in 1900 and 2021.  Hearing it from people does not make what you say as fact.

If I said that users with the numbers 115 in their username are all 3 feet tall, weigh 1 ton, and have green skin, just because I say I heard if from people does not make it true or factual.

Or say you are a politician and lost an election.  Then claim that 500k to 700k people illegally voted for the other guy in the city.  And you say this is true because they heard about it from people.  Does that make it true?  No, especially if the actual data for that city shows only 250k people voted in the election.

Any time you use statistics or absolute/relative comparisons, you have to have the data to back it up.  Otherwise, all you are stating are opinions based on what you believe, not on actual data out there.

 

[Roland]

Specific numbers aside, Matt's point is that definitively most of the people who will ever purchase this game already did and that future sales are unlikely to justify spending more resources into continually updating for another 2-3 years.

Now, Matt tried to bolster his claim by throwing out a 95% stat. Lets remove the 95% and consider whether most people who will ever purchase this game have already done so. 

In my opinion, that is not a foregone conclusion. First of all, there are many people who do not buy unfinished games in Early Access because they've been burned. There could be many who buy it once it releases as the finished gold edition. Secondly, when a game comes out of Early Access, it is a pretty big deal. Many people who bought it previously and stopped playing, reinstall and give it a go and that causes the game to spike in the public consciousness. It starts trending on Twitch, YouTube, and Steam.

Subnautica is a great example of this. 

The game could have run its course from a sales perspective or it could have a lot of bang still once the marketing power of coming out of Early Access hits the newsfeed. Consider this though-- The console version still sells and that version is over 3 years old and has zero support in the way of marketing or software updates. I think there is probably still quite a bit of scratch to be made off of this IP over the next 2-3 years.

 

[Matt115]

That is not how this works.  If you provide a specific number, you have to have data to prove it out.  If you are saying that more than 75% of kids wear shoes outside in 2021 compared to 1900, you need to have the total population of kids in 1900, the total population of kids in 2021, the number of kids wearing shoes in 1900 and 2021.  Hearing it from people does not make what you say as fact.

If I said that users with the numbers 115 in their username are all 3 feet tall, weigh 1 ton, and have green skin, just because I say I heard if from people does not make it true or factual.

Or say you are a politician and lost an election.  Then claim that 500k to 700k people illegally voted for the other guy in the city.  And you say this is true because they heard about it from people.  Does that make it true?  No, especially if the actual data for that city shows only 250k people voted in the election.

Any time you use statistics or absolute/relative comparisons, you have to have the data to back it up.  Otherwise, all you are stating are opinions based on what you believe, not on actual data out there.

and it this way he sue a election comittets : but this need time and independed courts ,  need money and time . i'm not ceo of steam so i can't check all date about selling games. but  leakers know few typical things : people buy most games after realese( 1 first month) and on sale -  we can assume that people who have a game don't buy it twice.  so i can presume there is a typicall patern working for most games -  example - in first month 1 000 000 people bought a game x, in next month 750 000 another 500 000 and in 4 month 750 000 (sales) and again 500 000 , next 250 etc and in the end game is still selling but maybe in 1-15 copies. well this is still cash but not enough to pay rent etc it was my point. ofc some games like coh2 have microtransations and are still profiable in meaning earn a enough money to let you stay on line.  ofc tfp is in good condition but my point is they could earn more if they put in gold and make a sequel

 

[Matt115]

Specific numbers aside, Matt's point is that definitively most of the people who will ever purchase this game already did and that future sales are unlikely to justify spending more resources into continually updating for another 2-3 years.

Now, Matt tried to bolster his claim by throwing out a 95% stat. Lets remove the 95% and consider whether most people who will ever purchase this game have already done so. 

In my opinion, that is not a foregone conclusion. First of all, there are many people who do not buy unfinished games in Early Access because they've been burned. There could be many who buy it once it releases as the finished gold edition. Secondly, when a game comes out of Early Access, it is a pretty big deal. Many people who bought it previously and stopped playing, reinstall and give it a go and that causes the game to spike in the public consciousness. It starts trending on Twitch, YouTube, and Steam.

Subnautica is a great example of this. 

The game could have run its course from a sales perspective or it could have a lot of bang still once the marketing power of coming out of Early Access hits the newsfeed. Consider this though-- The console version still sells and that version is over 3 years old and has zero support in the way of marketing or software updates. I think there is probably still quite a bit of scratch to be made off of this IP over the next 2-3 years.

yeah i can agree with this in half.  there is limited time to return a game : so game can be bad but you can't return because you have this for too long . but after year it is repair and it's good game but don't make additional profit.  i bought 7dtd before achivments - it was like minecraft mod in early stage . but i didn't know about return system . well i though it was lose of money and it will die soon. only sometime i read i forum about updated but most of them was quiet disappoiting for me. so this game was for long time something like enemy front - play for while and forget. it change for good. well people are comapling about a small number of updates but they can't return a game. 

L4d2 game selling boom after the last stand because people remind about this game maybe some of them hear about this game first time ( well it is quiet old). so i my point is:  most people who know about this game and want to play ( ofc some people hate sandbox etc) except pirates  bought 7dtd already - ofc this not mean that if in theory there will be big update and they will add 50 zombies 150 pois 20 venicles  etc in one update . kotaku will wrote about this,  guys from twitter and yt too and sale will rocket. but it's mean too that a part of gamers comunity doesn't know about this game or hear not enough to be interested enough to buy it ( like - i like star wars but jedi academy was too old to bought it but if a rly big mod was putted i could consider to bought it). so in short - if 7dtd get gold and news about it media and then after year sequel in early access it could earn more that being develpment for 5 next years

small digression : i don't want to be put in gold yet  i  was looking on it from financal point

 

[KindaCringe]

I just objected to one of your claims. The other claim you made then was correct though IMO, there are expectations by (many) players that the time between alphas in EA is shorter.  Though there are no rules from Valve how EA is supposed to work, how long between alphas, how many alphas, ...

And here you are correct again, at least at the end: Yes, there is probably something going on in the back you might not know about. For example:

1) You probably don't know that at least the last three alphas took nearly a year. So what seems suddenly to you has been the norm for some time now

2) You probably didn't work as software developer, right? So here a few facts: The bigger a software project is the harder it gets adding features to it. Because inevitably there are a lot of cross dependancies all over the code base and adding one thing makes it neccesary to touch a lot of other places in the code. Changing old code makes it neccessary even for the writer of that code to first reread it to find out how it works in detail. Bug fixing gets more difficult for the same reasons.

3) Expanding the dev team is normal when a project increases in size. But it actually isn't a unproblematic fix, because any developer added needs someone to ease him into the code base so he is a liability at first. Then there are diminishing returns: Add one dev to a group and they spend 80% working and 20% coordinating among themselves. Add another dev and the group now spends 70% working and 30% coordinating (those are invented numbers, the principle is know in software development for decades). It is somewhat like the cores added to a CPU speed up the CPU less and less.

4) TFP added a lot of artists/designers to make more content like POIs or higher resolution graphics but good programmers seem to have been in shorter supply (according to TFP). Now designers can't help on the coding work or on the bug fixing, and bug fixing takes a long time now, each alpha now had ~2-3 months where we only heard about the number of critical bugs going down slowly.

Naturally TFP could have decreased the feature size of later alphas to make it appear as if each alpha took the same time as the previous one. But they apparently have a few habits that are not easy to break or a feature list with many big features not easily broken up. And releasing an alpha to the players is partly extra work that would interrupt the work on the big features. So they might not be so happy to change their routine.

i do work as a software developer, websites and small sized software tho, no games. I understand what you are telling me. I do have close friends who work in game dev, one of them worked on the newly released F1 2021 so what i've heard from him, while he also plays the game, is that TFP are indeed slow and a bit too detached from the community (incase of roadmaps, announcements, etc, especially for an early acces), but to be fair they do put out great work when it eventually arrives. I love this game, so that's why im a bit upset with the slow evolvement of it.

Im unironically thankful for this reply of yours, very civil and you clearly know what you are talking about. I've had other discussions with an unnamed moderator who answered very salty and without any counter arguments, prob cuz he doesn't have the same knowledge. Sorry if my previous reply seemed a bit salty itself, was my bad.

Thx again for taking your time to answer my comment and providing me with new insights.

 

[Laz Man]

New hiker zombie confirmed for A20

Yeah. Its the new HD skate boarder.  This was him before he turned...

 

[BFT2020]

and it this way he sue a election comittets : but this need time and independed courts ,  need money and time .

Don’t get me wrong, your opinions on how much gas this game will have after final release (along with Roland’s) are good and thought provoking.  I just have an issue when people start throwing out numbers with no data behind to back it up.  Even if your conclusions and assumptions are solid, numbers without data leaves you open for others to poke holes in your stance.  It’s the engineer in me.  Same thing about people calling themselves experts, but can’t tell the difference between Minnesota and Michigan, or make up non-existing places as proof.

 

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

Well, it also means at least one of your next games (probably 7D2D 2) will be a Unity game, which will disappoint Unreal engine worshippers who think that other engine is the holy grail

It isn't a holy grail, but it is decades beyond Unity. Quake 1 has features Unity does not have yet, for that matter. Hello, 1990's calling. I'd like to be able to select my refresh rate in-game, not by setting my desktop to some crazy high refresh rate. Poly counts are higher, the worlds are ten times larger, there's no strange glitching when you get farther out in the world (easily seen in Subnautica by enabling god mode and jumping into the abyss and watching your UI and you go deeper), SLI support (why does Unity not do AFR yet?), and more. It doesn't mean UE is the Holy Grail, it means it is modern, and Unity is lagging behind several decades. That in turn doesn't mean fun games cannot be made with Unity. 7 Days is a shining example among many others.

I just tested with my 2080 Ti. I run in 1440p, so I cannot comment on 4K or 1K. I peak at almost 144fps when my desktop refresh is set to 144Hz so Unity will use it. However, around cities and large bases like mine, it drops to between 88 and 96fps. During this time My GPU is not peaking out, nor is my CPU. In fact my CPU only showed a single core with any activity. Locking my CPU to one core resulted in about 35fps. Two cores gave me a hair above 50fps. Three got me back to 90fps. All ten cores? 90fps. Again, only one core shows much usage no matter how many are selected, even if I select all 20 logical CPUs. Very odd.

 

[Matt115]

Don’t get me wrong, your opinions on how much gas this game will have after final release (along with Roland’s) are good and thought provoking.  I just have an issue when people start throwing out numbers with no data behind to back it up.  Even if your conclusions and assumptions are solid, numbers without data leaves you open for others to poke holes in your stance.  It’s the engineer in me.  Same thing about people calling themselves experts, but can’t tell the difference between Minnesota and Michigan, or make up non-existing places as proof.

now i undestand what your mean , maybe this specific thing in my region like - if you can't find any precise data about something like arsons , but you know how much fires was in your city you can pressume that 1/3 was arsons because it was more that in typical city etc  so here precise numbers are not so important so occurence about something

 

[meganoth]

i do work as a software developer, websites and small sized software tho, no games. I understand what you are telling me. I do have close friends who work in game dev, one of them worked on the newly released F1 2021 so what i've heard from him, while he also plays the game, is that TFP are indeed slow and a bit too detached from the community (incase of roadmaps, announcements, etc, especially for an early acces), but to be fair they do put out great work when it eventually arrives. I love this game, so that's why im a bit upset with the slow evolvement of it.

Im unironically thankful for this reply of yours, very civil and you clearly know what you are talking about. I've had other discussions with an unnamed moderator who answered very salty and without any counter arguments, prob cuz he doesn't have the same knowledge. Sorry if my previous reply seemed a bit salty itself, was my bad.

Thx again for taking your time to answer my comment and providing me with new insights.

Well, with an actual game dev as consultant you are probably better informed than me.

My horizon on the Early Access front is somewhat limited to relatively few titles and I don't have much experience with AAA community work. Did your friend find TFP wanting compared to Codemasters/Electronic Arts or to other indie Early Access games?

In the first case: AAA developers usually don't use Early Access and it is hard to beat the hands-on experience you get from playing the actual game. And the infos that get out are usually guarded and channeled by Marketing. How can that be more accessible? About speed of development I have no doubt Codemasters is faster, but what ratio did your friend assume to account for the different size of the dev companies?

In the latter case: He is in the same position like me looking from the outside at dev companies, but his practical knowledge of development speed with 3D games should still come in handy. I know very few other EA titles well enough to estimate development speed and they don't seem any faster than TFP. What are the examples you both know about that seem much faster and how many coders do they have (if known)? 

About detachment/roadmap reveals etc.: There I have an example myself, Wube is far ahead in information policy compared to TFP, their FFFs are a vast source of information. Others seem to be much more closed up but usually I did not frequent their forums well enough to judge.

 

[Matt115]

small offtop but guys how do you think about how many types and variants of zombie will be enough? ofc  there is no chance for 200 variants but 50 more is possible

 

[BFT2020]

small offtop but guys how do you think about how many types and variants of zombie will be enough? ofc  there is no chance for 200 variants but 50 more is possible

If you are going to want more zombie variation, it will probably have to be through mods.  Check out enZombies by @ErrorNull and A19/A18 CreaturePacks by @xyth.  Also a few others (for example - Snufkin's Custom server Side Zombies by @arramus).  However, not all mods are compatible with each other so read up on the description page.

MM stated that they are removing some variants (like the cheerleader and football player) and reworking existing zombie models, but never indicated that they were looking at adding 50 more zombies like you been asking for awhile.  Maybe more special type zombies (The Hawaiian tourist is being worked on to do a gas attack - sorry @MaxTunnerX you will probably have to exclude more variants in your casual mod down the road) are being worked on, but the majority of new character models will be bandits (things can change, but this seems to be the current roadmap based on Development streams I have watched).

 

[MaxTunnerX]

MM stated that they are removing some variants (like the cheerleader and football player) and reworking existing zombie models, but never indicated that they were looking at adding 50 more zombies like you been asking for awhile.  Maybe more special type zombies (The Hawaiian tourist is being worked on to do a gas attack - sorry @MaxTunnerX you will probably have to exclude more variants in your casual mod down the road) are being worked on, but the majority of new character models will be bandits (things can change, but this seems to be the current roadmap based on Development streams I have watched).

Well if the devs go smart about it, then it won't make life any more difficult for me. Just put all special zombies in one category and then I can keep one mod forever where I just disable special zombies and I'm done. If they keep adding them one by one without grouping them up, then yeah, that will be a big pain in the ass.

 

[meganoth]

It isn't a holy grail, but it is decades beyond Unity. Quake 1 has features Unity does not have yet, for that matter. Hello, 1990's calling. I'd like to be able to select my refresh rate in-game, not by setting my desktop to some crazy high refresh rate. Poly counts are higher, the worlds are ten times larger, there's no strange glitching when you get farther out in the world (easily seen in Subnautica by enabling god mode and jumping into the abyss and watching your UI and you go deeper), SLI support (why does Unity not do AFR yet?), and more. It doesn't mean UE is the Holy Grail, it means it is modern, and Unity is lagging behind several decades. That in turn doesn't mean fun games cannot be made with Unity. 7 Days is a shining example among many others.

I just tested with my 2080 Ti. I run in 1440p, so I cannot comment on 4K or 1K. I peak at almost 144fps when my desktop refresh is set to 144Hz so Unity will use it. However, around cities and large bases like mine, it drops to between 88 and 96fps. During this time My GPU is not peaking out, nor is my CPU. In fact my CPU only showed a single core with any activity. Locking my CPU to one core resulted in about 35fps. Two cores gave me a hair above 50fps. Three got me back to 90fps. All ten cores? 90fps. Again, only one core shows much usage no matter how many are selected, even if I select all 20 logical CPUs. Very odd.

There is more than CPU and GPU in a PC that can be a bottleneck. My guess is (without any proof though) that some data path being maxed out or simply overrun caches being the culprit in many of the slowdowns. And I also suspect much of that to be the result of this being a voxel game and that it would be happening in 7d2d/UE as well, maybe to a lesser extent.

 

[The_Great_Sephiroth]

For sure, but I thought Unity could use four cores, period. The system has 128GB of DDR4 in quad-channel and the game resides on an M.2 2280 NVME stick with around 3500-3600MB/s read and 3300-3500MB/s write. Perhaps we are saturating the PCI-E bus. Either way my CPU is not being stressed, nor is my GPU. Not sure how to monitor PCI-E bandwidth.

 

[Matt115]

If you are going to want more zombie variation, it will probably have to be through mods.  Check out enZombies by @ErrorNull and A19/A18 CreaturePacks by @xyth.  Also a few others (for example - Snufkin's Custom server Side Zombies by @arramus).  However, not all mods are compatible with each other so read up on the description page.

MM stated that they are removing some variants (like the cheerleader and football player) and reworking existing zombie models, but never indicated that they were looking at adding 50 more zombies like you been asking for awhile.  Maybe more special type zombies (The Hawaiian tourist is being worked on to do a gas attack - sorry @MaxTunnerX you will probably have to exclude more variants in your casual mod down the road) are being worked on, but the majority of new character models will be bandits (things can change, but this seems to be the current roadmap based on Development streams I have watched).

i know this mode and in my opinion they are quiet disapointing.  why? okay pressume there is two types of mods : realistic ( or lore suitable) like   

 Vehicle Madness Mod             or extended zombie mod to l4d2 or immersive creature to skyrim   and crazy mods  like side zombies , or minecraft zombies to l4d2 or thomas the train as dragon to skyrim.  So i looking for  mods  from 1 group:  zombies in realistic variants - yoga girl , special force zombies, guy from gas station - you know what i mean. but honestly most of this mods t 7dtd gives : big green ogre, vertigo , guy with chooper blades instead head etc honestly i can't do models so i'm doing what i can - try to set this topic and maybe - A. tfp will add few more types of zombie B inspire someone who can making mods to make realistic variants. 

why i always write about it? because i'm rly dissapointed because in zombie game is lack of zombies. honestly even change  colours of clothes  can do a lot and eliminted clone wars syndrome.  i had this problem in cod in outbreak- i just can't play in this because i had a syndrome that i do nothing  , in mauer der toten you have a lot of variants this in firebaze z. dying light a lot of variants, nza too l4d2 . so honestly i prefere get 10 new zombies and 8 bandits that 18 bandits

 

[JCrook1028]

we can assume that people who have a game don't buy it twice.

Yes you can assume, but again you'd be wrong. I've bought it 3 times, one for me, one for my daughter and one for her friend so they can play together. Stop assuming and making things up.

 

[MechanicalLens]

I can't find the option to download 19.5 stable. Do I have to do something drastic like uninstall the game and reinstall it?

 

[katarynna]

I know you have been around for a long time, so forgive the answer if you are just joking.

Opt out of all betas to play the stable branch. The list under properties is for all versions EXCEPT the current stable.

 

[MechanicalLens]

I know you have been around for a long time, so forgive the answer if you are just joking.

Opt out of all betas to play the stable branch. The list under properties is for all versions EXCEPT the current stable.

I'll have to look into it, perhaps Steam changed the wording around because it used to be "play latest experimental".

(Worded roughly there.)

@katarynna All I'm seeing are all the stable versions from alpha 8.8 up until alpha 19.4. There is a "None" version at the top, is that how I gain access to 19.5? Because I'm being serious, A19.5 isn't in the list and it never has been for me.