PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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Finished my first tier 5 in A20, permadeath. Strength is too powerful in my opinion. I don't have any int and never built a workbench. I think they should change sex rex to tools only and have weapon skills affect weapon stamina alone instead of sex rex. It was really fun and there were a few scary times but overall it wasn't really that hard. I am playing with 300% ai block damage as well with run during day and nightmare at night. Overall I think sex rex is too good. Great job designing these maps though, I'll play a few more tier 5 before calling it quits for A20.

First tier 5 took me about an hour to clear and looked like a Crack a Book corporate office.

 
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faatal said:
There is a bug ticket for it. I will get to it at some point, but am currently working on ground collision bugs (player/zeds falling into, vehicles falling into and getting moved. Turrets falling into may also be related).
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Likely already part of the bug ticket, but just in case it's not.  I've found a scenario where building down, even to ground has a little bit of a different SI issue.  I posted this in our discord where folks were running into SI issues and I took a bit of a look to see if there was a workaround.  The one issue I saw reported elsewhere is replacing the lowest blocks.  This other scenario was around building down rather than up and SI not being recalculated correctly.
 

The top image here shows 3 groups of builds. The one in the middle I built all 3 pillars first and then built the connecting structure.

The middle image shows what happens when I build in the pillars. The on the far left was building the middle pillar down, the on on the right is building the pillar up. You'll notice the on on the far left does improve stability some, but not as much as the one on the far right did where I built the pillar up.

The bottom image shows what happens when I upgrade the very bottom frames on the ground to wood. The one where I built the pillar down didn't improve the structural stability any. The one on the far right updated the SI for the blocks above it since I built the pillar up from the ground and it also updated the pillars supported by that one on both sides.
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This image shows what I mean by upgrading the bottom block/frame.
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Let me know if that doesn't make sense and you need more clarification.

 
mle_ii said:
Likely already part of the bug ticket, but just in case it's not.  I've found a scenario where building down, even to ground has a little bit of a different SI issue.  I posted this in our discord where folks were running into SI issues and I took a bit of a look to see if there was a workaround.  The one issue I saw reported elsewhere is replacing the lowest blocks.  This other scenario was around building down rather than up and SI not being recalculated correctly.
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At the top of this page is a post referring to an earlier post about Structural Integrity not being recalculated.  (And with instructions on how to fix.)

 
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Blake_ said:
Yes. Dynamic meshes.  After further testing, I believe I might be wrong about disk writting. I found out that dynamic meshes generate lots of freezes and frame drops due to bloated garbage collection handling, bottlenecking CPU,  so it actually decreases performance on most systems, it being more significant with few CPU cores and 3ghz or lower (bad news). Better systems just see occasional abnormal drops in fps and micro stutters, common in a20.

About trees: Further testing revealed that shadow size and minimum quality are the real culprits for performance drops. 

Zds also have shadows of significant quality even on lowest (near) setting.

How big of an impact do shadows make? Turn them off and you will see. You can even plant 100 zds and they are stable without sudden drops.

Zds and trees (in lower settings) should have a simpler shadow. Like a simple small circular one at their feet, or a slightly deformed circle. Same for trees, they need simple shadows, light processing ones either bia option or by default. In higher settings, shadow LOD could also do good stuff for fps.

Big oak trees and some others should have their ridiculously ginormous shadow reduced like 10 to 30%, in any option. Eye aberration will make their shadows look ok, as we can't really appreciate the whole area of the tree from most angles anyway.

These shadow hacks should in theory increase performace by around 20% in worse systems, as I'm seing a 50% boost when turning shadows off from just "near" (every other shadow option off) in any part of the world.

A lighter way to process shadows for blocks would be amazing too, but I don't know if that's possible, and simpler hack circles wouldn't work, nor a pregenerated shadow texture due to the voxel nature of the game.
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Awesome analysis Blake_! I've just confirmed how 100 zeds stop eating fps after disabling shadows (in a plain without trees or buildings), vs shadows lowest quality.

Hope they find a way to create simpler shadows for zeds and trees, at least in low and medium quality shadows settings. It's sad how I saw a +3000h big 7d2d streamer with a beefy PC prefered to completely disable shadows to keep performance, showing people a terrible ugly version of the game.

Did you analyzed other settings like object quality? I did a little testing here: 










 
faatal said:
Game options on Windows are stored in the registry.

I have not seen the overlaps you had in your picture.

Disappearing trees is a bug with occlusion. The tree is there, but it looks like trees can get in the wrong occlusion group or multiple groups.
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Here are the 3 screenshots I uploaded earlier.

The first 2 are showing the popping in and out of different PIO's.

The 3rd shows a part of a PIO that stays in the same place.

In both cases you can walk trough the wrong parts.

1.png

2.png

3.png

 
I've seen what Aero posted above as well. Driving down the street of a city and there's a random phantom wall in the middle of the street that you can just drive through

 
Quantum Blue said:
At the top of this page is a post referring to an earlier post about Structural Integrity not being recalculated.  (And with instructions on how to fix.)
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Cool, thank you. I'm more reporting the other scenario where SI is not being calculated correctly to make sure it's fixed as well.  I've only read folks talking about replacing the lowest block not updating the SI and want to make sure the devs catch and fix this permutation.   Plus it gives them an easy repro to test their fix with.  The other easy repro is a Y type shape that you convert to an H shape.

Luckily most folks who are server maintainers and/or playing single player already knew about how to fix it as it shows it right in the UI that you use to look at SI.  Well at least it was obvious to me.  LOL  But great you were able to share the fix with those who didn't realize how to do so.

Also your fix will only work for folks who have access to do so, those who play on servers may not have that luxury, so until then if they upgrade the lowest supporting block it'll update the SI above it for that pillar. 

 
Aero said:
Here are the 3 screenshots I uploaded earlier.

The first 2 are showing the popping in and out of different PIO's.

The 3rd shows a part of a PIO that stays in the same place.

In both cases you can walk trough the wrong parts.
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Does it happen with Dynamic Mesh off?

 
Weazelsun said:
Same, I have dynamic mesh off. However. there are times where I have to wonder if it's a game issue or a server issue - I'm on a multiplayer server.

View attachment 22617
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its more than likely a server issue in a20 i havent seen that yet i saw something similar in a18 and a19 where there where these random black blocks in pois that made it literally unbearable to see inside the poi

Matt115 said:
Quick question : can we expect A21 road map in this month? 😁
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i would say give it a month or 2 

 
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KhaineGB said:
Counterpoint. If it's worked since A19 without issues, it should continue to do so.
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You're kidding right? Code that is commented out and not intended to be used should also be guaranteed to work with a new version? That makes absolutely zero sense.

Now having said that, I will never again play without the lockable slots mod installed because without it the quick sort feature is totally useless.

 
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Question for @Kinyajuu . Looking at the mixer I saw some tags whose use wasn't clear to me: diagonal, nodiagonal and culdesac. I found where they are configured in the prefab editor, but there are two things unclear to me.

First, what is the intended use of diagonal and nodiagonal? I looked at rwg_tile_countrytown_intersection and the tags were the opposite of what I expected.

Second, what characteristics should a POI have to qualify for these tags? Like, what makes a POI fit for culdesac, diagonal or nodiagonal?

By the way, phenomenal work. The bar for randomly generated worlds on games is now so high that I don't see any game surpassing it for a long time.

 
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madmole said:
This was a great read!
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Hey Mr Madmole, first time actually speaking to you directly so I hope you see this message! I've been a huge fan since the beginning days [im an original backer] and promoted the game trailer upon release too. Anyhow, I was wondering if you had some feedback on an existing ?bug? regarding stability, and could give some information regarding it, please? Information below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/7daystodie/comments/rn5fe3/replacing_blocks_permanently_decreases_base/

 
dcsobral said:
Question for @Kinyajuu . Looking at the mixer I saw some tags whose use wasn't clear to me: diagonal, nodiagonal and culdesac. I found where they are configured in the prefab editor, but there are two things unclear to me.

First, what is the intended use of diagonal and nodiagonal? I looked at rwg_tile_countrytown_intersection and the tags were the opposite of what I expected.

Second, what characteristics should a POI have to qualify for these tags? Like, what makes a POI fit for culdesac, diagonal or nodiagonal?

By the way, phenomenal work. The bar for randomly generated worlds on games is now so high that I don't see any game surpassing it for a long time.
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It's specifically for POIs in the country town tiles where there is a driveway and part within or greater than 5 meters of the POI edge.

This ensures the tile sidewalks align well with the given POI driveway parts.

 
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faatal said:
We don't really do anything to support Vulkan other than enable it. Unity does what it does. The only way we improve our Vulkan support, is update Unity, which we only do when we feel a Unity version is at a stable point for us to upgrade and then lock into some bug fix version of that before we release. I've been looking at our next Unity update, with their next LTS probably in 3-4 months, but I can try 2021.2 sooner as the next LTS is just a version of it with bugs fixed.
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Thanks for looking into it, hopefully that will fix the issues. i think it greatly improves graphic's in my opinion.

Aero said:
Here are the 3 screenshots I uploaded earlier.

The first 2 are showing the popping in and out of different PIO's.

The 3rd shows a part of a PIO that stays in the same place.

In both cases you can walk trough the wrong parts.
Click to expand...


faatal said:
Does it happen with Dynamic Mesh off?
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i have been seeing this in game as well, but for some reason it has seem to have started out of the blue a couple of days ago. Probably around day 50 or so, never been online so its in single player. When i see this happen i cant get as close to the ghost structure as in Aero's pics, they usually disappear before i get that close, dynamic mesh is off for me as well. it is also some of the same structures as pictured in that post.

 
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