PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Ricowan]

Even if you were to add only 3 skins per zombie (skins being either different clothing or different colors for the same clothing or different hair styles or skin tones or genders, etc.), that triples the variety you see in the game.

This would also triple the amount of graphics memory required for each zombie.  Fatal has already stated that they're out of room, memory-wise, for the game on certain platforms/graphics cards.

From what I understand, each zombie currently just has one texture image that is mapped to the model.  Changing the color of a t-shirt means duplicating the entire zombie texture, then recoloring the shirt.  Changing to a different system with multiple textures would be a TON of work, and would still require more graphics memory to store all of the variations.

 

[saoron666]

We can ALWAYS add more zombies. Adding more zombies doesn't put a check mark on the many empty checkboxes we have on the gold list.

Most of the new outfits look the same on each sex.

Thank you for reading my post and your time.

means a lot that you care what fans want.

I know it doesn't put a checkmark on the "what to do list" but adding more zombies trust me it WILL make a difference!

it will turn the new POI's much more interesting to discover!

humans are fascinated in discovering new areas and beyond for a reason. we need to see and interact with new foes or NPC and see and hunt new preys.

if every girl or guy looked the same then when you walk on the street you wont look at anyone anymore!

i can walk with a redhead and see a Blonde girl pass by i will look at her, now the blonde girl comes in many shapes and form! so 1 blonde does not end there since 1000 blonde girl next to each other are still interesting to see since they all different from each other.

same goes for the redhead, shes your girlfriend for 10 years, but when you see another redhead, she is as new as day 1 cause shes different in form and shape and different clothes and colors..

all im saying is that new zombies is a MUST, it will Boost your A21 exponentially.

 

[Mumpfy]

that really depends on the implementation, one zed is actually composed by several texture maps combined into a material. now say there is the albedo or base color, then they use one combined map for secondary maps RMOE which contains one map on each channel of teh image, so on one image only you have roughness, metallic, ao, emition maps togheter, and then the normal map separated.

now depending on how you would implement this variations you could just need 1 more albedo map for variety but still use all the other maps for them all. so each variaton wouldnt add all the maps needed for the original zombie.

that said this would be about file size into the game, i have no clue how that translates to performance, and thats why the pimps cant do what modders do, because they need to concider much more stuff when adding something.

that said fo them to drop a new alpha with just zombie variants or new models would clearly be a win. because most poeple wants that. so there must be a reason they dont do it yet, and yes, we all hope is just a yet and eventually they add some.

 

[Matt115]

Something also to consider.  Some folks might be fine with different color clothes and such, but others may not.

Personally I love how each character is 100% different from each other.  Changing a shirt or color here and there may help "blur" the lines alittle bit but is a lower quality standard imo. 

Clone variants works in other games because you either can't seem them up close or the combat is so fast the player is never standing around long enough to care / notice.

If it was up to me, I would prefer the artists take the time to just make more unique zombies using the same approach as how the current HD set was made.

Ofc. New variants would be much diffrent but you know "more expensive! need more time to do" etc. so same folks with diffrent colour clothes is not perfect solution but... this at least something. don't expect 30 new zombie variants so this is the lesser evil - and improve quality not lower them - it's just like pepper for dish

 

[Riamus]

don't think I'm bragging, but I've made some simple models in my mod that use the same texture for everyone and randomly appear on zombies (so far it's only Zombie Bo) + 5 different colors = more or less a good variety (although they are still similar, of course). The main difficulty so far is only in setting the correct position relative to the body part.

View attachment 27721

I don't think different skins (i.e. color of skin+color of clothes) makes entirely new zombies. Our brain works wonders in identifying similarities. In other words two identical Marlenes with diffferent outfits will still register as largely the same person. Also randomly mixing skin colors and clothes colors often produces combinations that look weird. Or at least very unfashionable . My guess is that skin variation would work much better with nondescript featureless zombies than with the high quality recognizable zombies of this game. 

So in summary  I'd say without actually seeing that feature in the actual game we won't know what would be better, a few new zombies or a lot more skin variations.

I don't think the zombies should look entirely different if we're just using skins.  We want to know who we are fighting.  We don't want to see a someone in work clothes who suddenly shoots green goo at you like the cop because we are left not know who we are fighting and what strategies we want to use.  But having variety means when you look at a wall of zombies, they don't look exactly alike.  I've had 7 or 8 of the same zombie attack me in a POI at once and it just looks bad.  If it was the same zombie with variations in clothes/colors, then it would look better.  As shown in the shot above, different clothes makes a huge difference.  If you look at the same image with all 5 of them looking just like the first (default) zombie, then you lose a lot of variance.  Sure, you say the faces need work, but you don't have to change the faces if you don't want to.  Just that change in clothes is huge.  But even changing just colors- lumberjack with red plaid, green plaid, blue plaid; office guy with black suit, tan suit, brown suit; etc. - would look much better.  It is okay to easily recognize who we are fighting and know they are the same zombie.  But having variance makes a huge difference.

Yes, more unique zombies are great!!  However, you're only going to get a small number of unique zombies added where this provides for far more zombies variations.  Having a combination of both new zombies and zombie skins is the best option by far.  If they will add 50 new zombies (not including the tier variations), then we don't need skins.  But they won't.  Maybe we'll see half a dozen more if we're lucky.  I doubt more than that.  Sure, that's great.  And the bandits will help a lot.  But it's still very quickly duplicated when you start blood moon or POIs.

 

[madmole]

You'd be wrong.  Seeing the same zombies with different skins definitely adds variation. And you stop seeing the glaring similarities.

Madmole's logic is also wrong.  Minecraft works because it's ONE zombie skin, which our brain begins to discard.  Seeing 15 zeds and 9 are alike is more distracting than seeing 15 of the same.

He is right that they have better things to do tho.

Having code change the tint of a shirt material on spawn also wouldn't add any real overhead btw.

Been there, done it, just saying. 

Fight me.

I'd be ok with tint variations.

It's not that we also wouldn't want to see more zombies, it's a matter of it would delay gold even further and we're focusing on going gold.

It's one of those things that would not move the needle on sales even .01% too. New customers don't care if we add more zombies. I'm not that interested in more zombies without new behaviors. I wrote up a bunch of great zombie designs with behaviors but coders don't have time so more zombies or variations is just meh, and doesn't get us closer to gold or more sales so selling the idea is impossible, as well as we have to make room in the memory footprint for all these new bandits yet.

At best we could add a few and put them into specific biomes so that memory can handle it, and it would still be the same problem, repetitive in each biome.

Maybe we can leverage the character system to add a new zombie head to a player outfit and make some survivor zombies easily using the already in memory character outfits for some tougher armored zombies. These are more draw calls than the current zombies though and bigger textures etc and wouldn't be the best use of resources. Ideally we could start the next game from scratch using the system. I think the skeleton is different too though so animations become a problem. It's complex and like I said, it isn't moving the needle at all on sales, it just makes you veterans happy.

Maybe we can use it for the next game if planned from the beginning.

 

[Petrol_Forever]

Just popping in to say I can't wait for the A21, the changes look promising so far! Keep it up TFP, I love ya guys!

 

[Matt115]

I'd be ok with tint variations.

It's not that we also wouldn't want to see more zombies, it's a matter of it would delay gold even further and we're focusing on going gold.

It's one of those things that would not move the needle on sales even .01% too. New customers don't care if we add more zombies. I'm not that interested in more zombies without new behaviors. I wrote up a bunch of great zombie designs with behaviors but coders don't have time so more zombies or variations is just meh, and doesn't get us closer to gold or more sales so selling the idea is impossible, as well as we have to make room in the memory footprint for all these new bandits yet.

At best we could add a few and put them into specific biomes so that memory can handle it, and it would still be the same problem, repetitive in each biome.

Maybe we can leverage the character system to add a new zombie head to a player outfit and make some survivor zombies easily using the already in memory character outfits for some tougher armored zombies. These are more draw calls than the current zombies though and bigger textures etc and wouldn't be the best use of resources. Ideally we could start the next game from scratch using the system. I think the skeleton is different too though so animations become a problem. It's complex and like I said, it isn't moving the needle at all on sales, it just makes you veterans happy.

Maybe we can use it for the next game if planned from the beginning.

Em you guys wrote that next game won't be 7dtd 2 for sure. 

But if there will be 7dtd 2 - similiar system to l4d2 would be the option to be honest.

If you want to add paid DLC - make veterans happy is more important that focus on new players - because they will came for while and give shortly after so this mean they won't buy DLC

BTW. @madmole

Combat – Encounter over 50 unique zombie archetypes including special infected with unique behaviors and attacks

is this still information actual or outdated?  If still actual - this mean adding more zombies will make you closer to gold

 

[Laz Man]

Well that's an unpopular opinion. I would be ok with zd variation, as long as every variation uses textures or partial textures already in the game, in order to avoid any memory increase. New clothing tints and models with the same reutilized texture would also help a lot. 

Sure, unique zds are cool. But they get old fast. And not as late as Madmole said, but 10-20 hours in you can already feel the heavy hit of repetition, as unique as they might be.

Zd with posts, barbed wires, caps, glasses, parts of player armor... all of that wouldn't generate any extra memory and would make the game way better than it is.

Everyone has their level of immersion / standards.  For me, If I saw 5 boe's with different clothing on running at me, at first it would feel like different zombies until you eventually realize its the same zombie and makes you wish for different faces.....then different body sizes......then.....different zombies all together.  

So instead of wasting time with half measures, go all in with 100% unique zombies with awesome characteristics. 

 

[Matt115]

Everyone has their level of immersion / standards.  For me, If I saw 5 boe's with different clothing on running at me, at first it would feel like different zombies until you eventually realize its the same zombie and makes you wish for different faces.....then different body sizes......then.....different zombies all together.  

That's why just diffrent colour is like spice. not main dish - in l4d2 if you check models you will see that number of faces is pretty low - but diffrent clothes, dirt, blood etc. solve that problem

Well that's an unpopular opinion. I would be ok with zd variation, as long as every variation uses textures or partial textures already in the game, in order to avoid any memory increase. New clothing tints and models with the same reutilized texture would also help a lot. 

Sure, unique zds are cool. But they get old fast. And not as late as Madmole said, but 10-20 hours in you can already feel the heavy hit of repetition, as unique as they might be.

Zd with posts, barbed wires, caps, glasses, parts of player armor... all of that wouldn't generate any extra memory and would make the game way better than it is.

more and more people have 16 GB of ram. So this allow for much more.

Guys it's not 2013 anymore 

 

[Blake_]

more and more people have 16 GB of ram. So this allow for much more.

Guys it's not 2013 anymore 

That's not the only issue. 7dtd will run ok with 16 dual channel ram, the problem are draw calls, you need a powerful CPU and fast communication between RAM and CPU to be able to handle these things. GPUs are already there, heck with a rtx 3070 you will be ok on ultra, but CPUs are not yet good enough in their main core to handle 7dtd without -30/-60fps moments. You can try and buy the 13900ks with a RTX 4090ti and it will still drop 100 fps the moment you get into a heavy entity/shadow situation. Sure, optimizations help, but it will take at least a couple of years and 8000mhz ddr5 ram+ 6ghz CPUs to make the game resilient enough to not notice drops as much. This is how much ahead of its time is this technology.

So a simple zd variation system will do for now.

 

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

I'd be ok with tint variations.

It's not that we also wouldn't want to see more zombies, it's a matter of it would delay gold even further and we're focusing on going gold.

It's one of those things that would not move the needle on sales even .01% too. New customers don't care if we add more zombies. I'm not that interested in more zombies without new behaviors. I wrote up a bunch of great zombie designs with behaviors but coders don't have time so more zombies or variations is just meh, and doesn't get us closer to gold or more sales so selling the idea is impossible, as well as we have to make room in the memory footprint for all these new bandits yet.

At best we could add a few and put them into specific biomes so that memory can handle it, and it would still be the same problem, repetitive in each biome.

Maybe we can leverage the character system to add a new zombie head to a player outfit and make some survivor zombies easily using the already in memory character outfits for some tougher armored zombies. These are more draw calls than the current zombies though and bigger textures etc and wouldn't be the best use of resources. Ideally we could start the next game from scratch using the system. I think the skeleton is different too though so animations become a problem. It's complex and like I said, it isn't moving the needle at all on sales, it just makes you veterans happy.

Maybe we can use it for the next game if planned from the beginning.

Your reasoning is bad, your assessment is presumptuous, and that attitude is terrible

 

[Matt115]

That's not the only issue. 7dtd will run ok with 16 dual channel ram, the problem are draw calls, you need a powerful CPU and fast communication between RAM and CPU to be able to handle these things. GPUs are already there, heck with a rtx 3070 you will be ok on ultra, but CPUs are not yet good enough in their main core to handle 7dtd without -30/-60fps moments. You can try and buy the 13900ks with a RTX 4090ti and it will still drop 100 fps the moment you get into a heavy entity/shadow situation. Sure, optimizations help, but it will take at least a couple of years and 8000mhz ddr5 ram+ 6ghz CPUs to make the game resilient enough to not notice drops as much. This is how much ahead of its time is this technology.

So a simple zd variation system will do for now.

Depend how many FPS you want to have - if you want stable 30 FPS - 3060 will be good enough. So lose 100 FPS on 4090 while you have normaly 200 FPS - is not a big problem.  it's still far from good enough 30

 

[meganoth]

That's why just diffrent colour is like spice. not main dish - in l4d2 if you check models you will see that number of faces is pretty low - but diffrent clothes, dirt, blood etc. solve that problem

more and more people have 16 GB of ram. So this allow for much more.

Guys it's not 2013 anymore 

"More and more people" does not matter when TFP needs or wants to support old hardware, and now also consoles where time practically stands still for years.

 

[saoron666]

I'd be ok with tint variations.

It's not that we also wouldn't want to see more zombies, it's a matter of it would delay gold even further and we're focusing on going gold.

It's one of those things that would not move the needle on sales even .01% too. New customers don't care if we add more zombies. I'm not that interested in more zombies without new behaviors. I wrote up a bunch of great zombie designs with behaviors but coders don't have time so more zombies or variations is just meh, and doesn't get us closer to gold or more sales so selling the idea is impossible, as well as we have to make room in the memory footprint for all these new bandits yet.

At best we could add a few and put them into specific biomes so that memory can handle it, and it would still be the same problem, repetitive in each biome.

Maybe we can leverage the character system to add a new zombie head to a player outfit and make some survivor zombies easily using the already in memory character outfits for some tougher armored zombies. These are more draw calls than the current zombies though and bigger textures etc and wouldn't be the best use of resources. Ideally we could start the next game from scratch using the system. I think the skeleton is different too though so animations become a problem. It's complex and like I said, it isn't moving the needle at all on sales, it just makes you veterans happy.

Maybe we can use it for the next game if planned from the beginning.

sales are important to keep the game rolling, Yes.

in that case, i promise you, you make a new version of this game with new and much more zombies and behaviors in separate areas and maybe toss a few hardcore foes with tons of HP and rare loot and put that game for sale as an addon or however you think best!

All your veterans will be more than happy to pay for it. that 0.1% needle will turn into Gold! 

i personally would pay for it with heart! if a fan as over 500 hrs of gameplay dont you think he wouldn't spend 10$,20$ etc. to get that ?

he will 100%.

they sell the same iphone over and over year after year and each phone is good for years right?

do you see apple stop there? no, they design new headphones, new chargers, new accessories etc.. and people pay top price for it!

test it and see for yourself.

me and my brother have a manufacture in Canada, and we seeling the same product for 20 years, but each year we come  up with something new as well.

and trust me people buy them for no reason or because they loe the first product.

if as a fan we are on your forum and still playing this game, it is because we will also support you and the company. nobody will go broke for an extra 20-30$ after how much you guys been giving for over 10 years! so you get new commers and your existing players to buy a copy.

its time. use it now before you also lose the existing players for the future.

 

[Mister Forgash]

First I want to say Thank you Madmole for your presence on the forum. Though we hear you're watching here, to see your input makes it real.

I understand that the point of making the game better is to drive sales and there is diminishing returns putting money into things that are not likely to make that money back.

You've already said more on the topic that I ever expected to see, and that's awesome. I agree that more zombie variation isn't a priority- I just want to pose the argument- especially as more attention is put into the other aspects of the game, the rather limited amount of variation, at least to me, doesn't feel finished. Yes, I trust bandits will change that dramatically, but even so, It just feels not-good when you have many exact replica zombies on the screen at once. [Businessman in towers, anyone?] As a know-nothing moron on everything more technical than, 'Oh, this is fun!', having a few extra outfits sounds like it wouldn't be a terrible waste of manhours chasing a goal that will always end in: We want more..  .. All this said, just the hope that this may be revisited before gold leaves me more optimistic.

every POI needs its own foes.

every mission should have as well their own foes.

every biom should have their own foes.

i dont know how the T5 missions for nests will work but that as well will need different foes.

.. Now this sounds like a ludicrous amount of work! Biomes.. yeah, I can see why you'ld see different zombs in a desert as compared to out in the snow- but every mission, every POI? Woah!- That sounds nutty! How much time would go into POI/mission specific zombies when there are literally hundreds of POIs?

Look what I did: -Snip-

That is freakin' awesome, and further gives me faith that if you can accomplish 4 additional outfits for a zombie type, the art/zombie team could produce 2-3 outfits across the spectrum.

Oh how I dream.

 

[Jost Amman]

I see a lot of people here focusing on one topic at a time and then hammering it to death.

Last time it was the "unacceptable" water change. Before that it was Bandits not coming in A21.

Now it's the low amount of zombie variations.

All this bantering is from the player perspective, so most people don't understand that @madmole is trying to make us understand that their decisions are not as straightforward as we think, and that each choice is made taking into account many levels of interest and weighing them up. Also, I'd suggest to everyone to take a step back and look at all this in perspective. We will get a great game in the end, I'm sure of it, and I can tell because, all in all, 7D2D is already a great game in alpha.  :cool2:

 

[mstdv inc]

This would also triple the amount of graphics memory required for each zombie. Fatal has already stated that they're out of room, memory-wise, for the game on certain platforms/graphics cards.

Does this mean that because of consoles, the main version of the game on the PC will be cut?Why the problem of insufficient console memory does not remain a console problem.The way the game is cut there, not on the PC.

but CPUs are not yet good enough in their main core

Or does Unity not work well with threading?6 cores of 12 threads have long been the norm, but the game does not fully use the processor.Most people will not have processors with good performance per core because i7/i9 and R7/R9 have it, while most use i3/i5 and R3/R5 where there are 8 or more threads.We have CPU performance, but the game doesn't use it.

 

[HB_H4wk]

The Fun Pimps don't want players with good taste, they want players that taste good.

 

[mstdv inc]

This game belongs to TFP, and it's up to them to decide how it will work.If they say there won't be any more kinds of zombies, I won't be too upset because zombies - not the only thing that attracts in this game.In addition to zombies, we have a completely destructible world, research, construction, crafting, quests, communication with the merchant.We are waiting for a storyline and bandits.After the bandits appear, the value of zombies for me will become even lower.From the main enemy, they will turn into one of the enemies.Despite the fact that the game is called 7 days to die, this implies a horde meeting every 7 days.But I'm glad that the game has become much more than just fighting hordes of zombies.
Ignoring the opinions of evil "veterans" of the game is a good tactic.If I get tired of this game, I'll just stop playing it.I'm not going to come to the forum and ask to do as I want, because I've already played enough and I'm bored.This game is not only made for me, I understand that.