PC v1.x Developer Diary

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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?
Seeing as there hasn't been an answer given to whether the lighting in the trailer is going to be the same as in the game is kinda telling me that it won't, and that cinematic vibe was done specific for the trailer. 

If the lighting was to look like that I think they would've been quick to confirm it. 

I could be wrong, and I would be more than happy if that's the case.

And it's not that big of a deal to me at least. I'm a big fan of how the lighting looks now anyway.

 
It could be that the current internal build for 1.0 might fail such an experiment but nobody knows that.
Well, The Fun Pimps do. 

I don't understand all this bickering over the teaser video... the new version is either like that, or not.

@faatal: could you please confirm if we can expect (at least) a similar video quality in 1.0 or not?

If it's all done in post-processing in a video editor, that's fine. It's just silly to keep arguing over something you can easily clarify, isn't it? 

Cheers  :yo:

 
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I'll hold my hands up and admit I'm wrong if 1.0 delivers visuals (at usable framerates) and zombie counts as shown in the 1.0 trailer

But I'd genuinely be shocked if that much progress has been made from A21 to 1.0


That's fair and it's healthy to be skeptical.  I wish I could be definitive for you but my hardware isn't good enough to run such a test. My game will never look like the trailer until the next time I upgrade my system.  My monitor isn't even good enough to play the trailer video in its full resolution....😰

 
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Seeing as there hasn't been an answer given to whether the lighting in the trailer is going to be the same as in the game is kinda telling me that it won't, and that cinematic vibe was done specific for the trailer. 

If the lighting was to look like that I think they would've been quick to confirm it. 

I could be wrong, and I would be more than happy if that's the case.

And it's not that big of a deal to me at least. I'm a big fan of how the lighting looks now anyway.


It's the weekend. What do you expect?

 
@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.

 
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It's the weekend. What do you expect?
That's understandable, but other questions have been answered since people have been asking about the lighting. 

Again, I don't really care that much about it. I'm just curious. It would be nice if the lighting was more cinematic but I would be more than fine if it stays the way it is now. 

That's fair and it's healthy to be skeptical.  I wish I could be definitive for you but my hardware isn't good enough to run such a test. 
My hardware can handle it. Just send me a copy of the 1.0, and I'll let you know.

 
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Ohh and Last thing.... We're is the plasma baton. Gotta have my nerd set grind 🤓 🤓 🤓 
yah i'm curious about that because awhile back when i was watching videos about potential updates or additions someone mentioned that there was a reference to a plasma baton in the game's code or something. dunno the validity of that but honestly i'm very curious as to why batons don't have three tiers like all the other melee weapons

 
Again, I don't really care that much about it. I'm just curious. It would be nice if the lighting was more cinematic but I would be more than fine if it stays the way it is now. 


The lighting can be way way better, I really don't like the actual one, lot of designs are getting improved drastically but are kinda "bottlenecked" by the render of the actual lighting and it breaks immersion imo (this + the HUD).

 
The trailer itself is quite nice though.

Of course, it's not at all what's in the game itself, but it's a nice fantasy!

Putting 'Gameplay' in the title doesn't make it so..

Well, The Fun Pimps do. 

I don't understand all this bickering over the teaser video... the new version is either like that, or not.

@faatal: could you please confirm if we can expect (at least) a similar video quality in 1.0 or not?

If it's all done in post-processing in a video editor, that's fine. It's just silly to keep arguing over something you can easily clarify, isn't it? 

Cheers  :yo:
You can't claim something to be 'gameplay', if it's not in-game.
They could've just called it 'trailer', or something like that.

I mean, I wouldn't really go so far as to call it false advertisement, but it's on par with fastfood restaurants showing their burgers in commercials.

 
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Wait, you guys just renamed A22 to 1.0? Also, basically every update coming to 1.0 and beyond is ... art or graphics? 🤨

I'm grateful for the game being maintained for so long, but can't help feel a bit of a sour taste in my mouth how it ended. Cheers anyway, good luck for whatever comes next.

 
I mean, I wouldn't really go so far as to call it false advertisement.


Yeah, it would be false advertisement, no half-measures. 

If the graphics or the amount of zombies were fake in a gameplay trailer.... Maybe in this forum where we are all big fans it could be moderately forgotten. But in other communities like Steam the lack of honesty could be extremely damaging to The Fun Pimps reputation in the future. Fortunately it seems that most developers have learned and nowadays you see few cases of downgrade.
 

Personally I think the gameplay trailer is real. I play 7D2D with Reshade to add some post-processing gfx in real-time, and just adding better AO and temporal AA the improvement vs vanilla is HUGE with the cost of just a few FPS. Not to mention fake global illumination techniques like CompleteRT or the free Alucard's DH_UBER_RT, once you do some fine-tuning the result is mind-blowing.

 
Wait, you guys just renamed A22 to 1.0? Also, basically every update coming to 1.0 and beyond is ... art or graphics? 🤨

I'm grateful for the game being maintained for so long, but can't help feel a bit of a sour taste in my mouth how it ended. Cheers anyway, good luck for whatever comes next.
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

 
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.

 
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.

 
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