PC A20 Developer Diary Discussions

Gamida said:
took a quick look on steam and saw one bad review someone gave because the game was still in alpha after 8 years. I would think that would be a plus.
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Yep, I personally love the Early Access  model for stuff like this, Rimworld, Factorio etc. You play the game for a couple hundred hours, take a break for a few months and come back when the next batch of content comes out and play for another couple hundred hours and repeat. It's literally free expansion level DLC

 
Gamida said:
I took a quick look on steam and saw one bad review someone gave because the game was still in alpha after 8 years. I would think that would be a plus. It means that for 8 years there have been updates to the game making it better each time (ok not to all but to most :) ). They also don't realize that when they say it has been in alpha for 8 years that means that the devs worked (and still are working) on it for 8 year....they never suddenly vanished or gave up on the game and went on to do something else. They stuck to it. To me that says a lot about them.
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It does but you only know that because you are here, playing and seeing the progress.  

There are a few other games I have played in EA with where a few skins get updated in a year and they are basically milking the alpha tag as an excuse to not deal with the bugs or finish the game.

I would prefer this game to stay alpha forever, as long as it is there I can always go back and find a different game that was better than the last.  Does not work well for the devs though 😛

 
Blake_ said:
I'm partial to the idea of crafting Street lights as long as they are a late game electricity-consuming commodity that takes a lot of resources to build (forged steel, electrical parts, mechanical parts, plastic, headlight and pipes). It's fluff, but it would be nice to enjoy a nice late game base with cool props like that.
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Speaking of which, some people criticize that we can't power on the lights in POI's. With the Restore Power quests this might become somewhat of a thing...

 
Roland said:
Awesome! Thanks @Gazz

So just uncomment it and then duplicate it a few times changing the biome number so it applies to the other biomes and play around with the gamestage base-add value? Definitely going to play around with this. This adds to the player's gamestage so it will affect both enemies and loot, correct? This could give a rough approximation of what is coming without some of the "among other things" you mentioned.

so as a first stab at it like....

<!-- wasteland gamestage bonus-->
        <passive_effect name="GameStage" operation="base_add" value="100">
            <requirement name="InBiome" biome="8"/>
        </passive_effect>
        <!-- snow gamestage bonus-->
        <passive_effect name="GameStage" operation="base_add" value="80">
            <requirement name="InBiome" biome="1"/>
        <!-- desert gamestage bonus-->
        <passive_effect name="GameStage" operation="base_add" value="60">
            <requirement name="InBiome" biome="5"/>
        </passive_effect>
        <!-- burnt forest gamestage bonus-->
        <passive_effect name="GameStage" operation="base_add" value="40">
            <requirement name="InBiome" biome="9"/>
        </passive_effect>
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Interestingly, is it possible in this way to indicate the level of the game stage for each of the locations? For example, for a small house, the game stage is +0, for a skyscraper +10, and so on? If I did this, then it would be possible to turn off the Stone Age) Or am I not taking into account something?

 
If you combine enough of such bonuses like from POI and biomes then you are not in stone age any more. It's that simple.

The trick would be surviving it.

Don't expect the "harder" biomes to be such a walk in the park any more. 😃

 
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Gazz said:
If you combine enough of such bonuses like from POI and biomes then you are not in stone age any more. It's that simple.

The trick would be surviving it.

Don't expect the "harder" biomes to be such a walk in the park any more. 😃
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But if you make it so that the difficulty of the building is calculated as "biome difficulty" + "building difficulty", then even in the most difficult biome, high-level buildings will still represent a challenge in the later stages of the game and will give better bonuses 😉

This way, high-level buildings in complex biomes will not lose value as they do now.
Players will be more motivated to visit level 5 buildings in difficult biomes.

After all, when the game stage is high enough, you can find good loot in absolutely any building (exception: military boxes, which are only in high-level buildings) and it is logical that players in Alpha 20 will take only low-level tasks (the level can be selected from merchant), since neither the loot nor the reward for completing the task will pay off the spent ammunition and the time spent.

 
MechanicalLens said:
I wonder if this image takes place in Navezgane or RWG?
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on twitter they also said that 
"Hey Survivors, Here is a work in progress teaser screen shot showing off a new primitive pistol, a new Fat cop, a ton of updated and new environment art and a brand-new Random World Generation Algorithm. Great work by the entire TFP Team coming to Alpha 20 Stay tuned!"

https://twitter.com/7DaystoDie/status/1386734092734111750

but its too good to be RWG

 
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Also i still find it funny that in this world.

every car pre-war that civilians drive are Sudan's

(not counting army trucks, work vans, and Wee woo buses)

no trucks, Jeeps, Creepy vans, SUV, Golf carts, Motorcycles or anything 

Just S U D A N

Laz Man said:
Its not April 1st so ...... 😎
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Oh you made it to QA, congrats :D

 
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Kalex said:
IF they ever switched to the Unreal engine, that would be the last I played of the game. I can't stand the client tethering to the host in co-op that unreal pushes
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What do you mean by that? I couldn't find anything special about Unreals client server model in the net. Also nothing in this official doc about the client-server model:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/InteractiveExperiences/Networking/Server/index.html

MechanicalLens said:
My money is it's Navezgane.
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The twitter text specifically says it is showing off RWG.

 
bdubyah said:
Those trees ever gonna get any love? The 2 in front the the Crack A Book sign look....not that good. Are they dead? Snowy? I can't tell.

That said, the rest of it looks great. Like, really great. Hoping this isn't just a cherry picked image and it is a common thing. :)
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I asked a while ago and yes, trees are going to get love. Just maybe not in a20. There's a lot of problems with trees at the moment, not just uglyness but also weird texturing, displaced shadows, too much wiggling, etc.

 
MechanicalLens said:
While I have faith in TFP, I'll believe it when I see it.
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...

Nothing particularly special about that street corner.  No reason the RWG Cannot spawn a 4 way when 2 roads intersect at the correct angle.   

The street lights do look rather good though lol.  Nice addition.

 
FA_Q2 said:
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Nothing particularly special about that street corner.  No reason the RWG Cannot spawn a 4 way when 2 roads intersect at the correct angle.   

The street lights do look rather good though lol.  Nice addition.
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Actually I think it represents a magnificent improvement.  Yes, the intersection can be a pseudo-POI that's placed where roads intersect.  We've seen the beginnings of that already, with the occasional procedural bridge over gaps.  But note the lane markers going all the way down the road, and the cars that are distributed at random spots but positioned and rotated to align with the lanes.

That's huge.  It means that when RWG is fleshing out the roads now, it's no longer just painting asphalt blocks and haphazardly sprinkling individual decoration blocks on top.  If you can do those lane markers and aligned cars, it means you have the tech to do procedural guard rails along the road, shoulders along the road, ditches, culverts, fences, sidewalks, curbs, median strips, road signs, telephone poles, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc. etc.  They've had the art for many of these things for ages - now we could see them in RWG.  Fully leveraged, it'd make the RWG roads we have now look like childish doodles.

As someone who loves the potential of procedural generation, it's very exciting to see.  :thumb:

P.S. It's worth mentioning that not all roads should have all this stuff.  It should be thoughtfully distributed on a spectrum from downtown/urban to rural/country, with the former having a lot of these procedural additions and the latter having very few.

 
Crater Creator said:
Actually I think it represents a magnificent improvement.  Yes, the intersection can be a pseudo-POI that's placed where roads intersect.  We've seen the beginnings of that already, with the occasional procedural bridge over gaps.  But note the lane markers going all the way down the road, and the cars that are distributed at random spots but positioned and rotated to align with the lanes.

That's huge.  It means that when RWG is fleshing out the roads now, it's no longer just painting asphalt blocks and haphazardly sprinkling individual decoration blocks on top.  If you can do those lane markers and aligned cars, it means you have the tech to do procedural guard rails along the road, shoulders along the road, ditches, culverts, fences, sidewalks, curbs, median strips, road signs, telephone poles, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc. etc.  They've had the art for many of these things for ages - now we could see them in RWG.  Fully leveraged, it'd make the RWG roads we have now look like childish doodles.

As someone who loves the potential of procedural generation, it's very exciting to see.  :thumb:

P.S. It's worth mentioning that not all roads should have all this stuff.  It should be thoughtfully distributed on a spectrum from downtown/urban to rural/country, with the former having a lot of these procedural additions and the latter having very few.
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Point taken.  Roads would be a pretty big improvement as what we have now are not really roads 😛

 
Crater Creator said:
Actually I think it represents a magnificent improvement.  Yes, the intersection can be a pseudo-POI that's placed where roads intersect.  We've seen the beginnings of that already, with the occasional procedural bridge over gaps.  But note the lane markers going all the way down the road, and the cars that are distributed at random spots but positioned and rotated to align with the lanes.

That's huge.  It means that when RWG is fleshing out the roads now, it's no longer just painting asphalt blocks and haphazardly sprinkling individual decoration blocks on top.  If you can do those lane markers and aligned cars, it means you have the tech to do procedural guard rails along the road, shoulders along the road, ditches, culverts, fences, sidewalks, curbs, median strips, road signs, telephone poles, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc. etc.  They've had the art for many of these things for ages - now we could see them in RWG.  Fully leveraged, it'd make the RWG roads we have now look like childish doodles.

As someone who loves the potential of procedural generation, it's very exciting to see.  :thumb:

P.S. It's worth mentioning that not all roads should have all this stuff.  It should be thoughtfully distributed on a spectrum from downtown/urban to rural/country, with the former having a lot of these procedural additions and the latter having very few.
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As far as I know, roads were and are a separate generation layer with certain rules, that includes road decals, decorations, vehicles and were to generate and not to . What is extremely exciting is that Kyansdjkfhadfgju (Robert) said that [everything that is on the screenshot] will be in A20, including a mountainous/flat option to make the flat map of your dreams, all the way up to City density control option, and all of that in addition to these roads, sidewalks. Street lights, rivers, etc. 

Expect weird elevations and placement on a few places in (default non-flat elevation) big RWG maps though. It takes A LOT of time to perfect an algorithm the size of this one. It will eventually be perfect after all the POI, props and features are in. In the meantime, it ,might just be 98% believable. Right now I would say for a bunch of generated 4kx4k maps I encountered from 2 to 8 weird places in each one, usually related to road elevation or POI elevation (too high or too deep or bad intersection elevation).

 
meganoth said:
What do you mean by that? I couldn't find anything special about Unreals client server model in the net. Also nothing in this official doc about the client-server model:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/InteractiveExperiences/Networking/Server/index.html
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 The tethering I am talking about is when you are running a client-host game (LAN) if the client tries to go too far from the host's character, it will rubberband them back into range of the host because of the way the game engine loads sectors based on x distance from the host only and not by x distance from each player on the server. Dedicated servers do not have this problem only the peer-to-peer games.

 
Kalex said:
 The tethering I am talking about is when you are running a client-host game (LAN) if the client tries to go too far from the host's character, it will rubberband them back into range of the host because of the way the game engine loads sectors based on x distance from the host only and not by x distance from each player on the server. Dedicated servers do not have this problem only the peer-to-peer games.
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That seems like a per-game issue.
I haven't used Unreal, but pretty much any chunk loading system, independant of game engine, is usually developed by the game developers themselves.. I could be wrong about Unreal having a built-in system, but It would be weird if they had it build-in by default and set it up to center around the host instead of the local player, which would be the easier task.. at least in my mind, having built a couple of them..

Edit: for multiplayer games, it would not be a big issue for the clients to request a chunk far away from the host, that the host is managing physics and state for. It's pretty much just a bunch of numbers and some math calculations here and there.

The biggest issue as I see it, are the floating point calculations, since the farther away from 0 you get with floating points, the more imprecise they get. But that can be fixed by some virtual movements of chunks.

 
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