PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Louie04k]

Please add windowed fullscreen! Something us duel monitor guys really need

 

[madmole]

Wow that's looking pretty amazing. Is there more work being done for RWG A18? (Hopefully at least the road pathing)

Its a whole new system using a node based editor that combines stamps (images) to create the terrain. It will hopefully go to A17, but if not then A18. We're planning for the A18 to switch to splat maps and to switch to unity terrain for distant terrain, this will allow us to have higher resolution distant terrain that also batches and can stream and some stuff.

In laymans terms splat maps will never have ugly texturing and look much better and allow you to have much better texturing control, and the terrain won't look like melted ice scream.

Road and town generation is getting improved in parallel to the generation improvements. Its much faster and we should be able to support 16k maps maybe bigger, not sure though on that.

No more noisey biome borders too, they are nice and clean now, which means your spectrum won't fade in and out.

We're adding invisible walls with a belt message saying "You can't go that way" to the border instead of killing the player with invisible radiation thats hard to get out of if you stumble in at night or lose your bearings. That might give players more real estate too.

Its hands down the best looking RWG we've ever had and its not even done. I'm really excited to see the finished product.

 

[madmole]

Are things like these being looked into?
View attachment 27927

That seam has always been there, its the near water/vs far water. I'm sure we'll get to it some day, we were without a graphics/shader guy for a while but we have an amazing guy now who can fix all our graphical stuff. I can't wait for UV fixes on stairs.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

That seam has always been there, its the near water/vs far water. I'm sure we'll get to it some day, we were without a graphics/shader guy for a while but we have an amazing guy now who can fix all our graphical stuff. I can't wait for UV fixes on stairs.

Sounds good. I always thought it had something to do with lighting, but that makes sense. Other than those, graphically speaking, the other things that drive me crazy are the LOD models for those branchy shrubs / dead tree things. Not the tiny ones, but the taller ones you see everywhere in the forest. Once I start seeing it, I can't stop.

 

[Tin]

Originally Posted by unholyjoe once upon a day (a long long time ago).... we used to have animals and zombies trash our gardens if we didnt have them fenced in.

but some complaints were launched and it is now a fond memory.

(would love to see the threat back again)

The ONLY reason we changed it was the server would lag when animals zeds ran through the big corn fields. Performance kills all cool ideas lol.

How long ago has it been since that feature got removed? Just saying, a lot has changed since then.

Yeah I know.. Nothing overly time consuming is going in anymore.

Make it part of a DLC then

 

[khzmusik]

Sounds good. I always thought it had something to do with lighting, but that makes sense. Other than those, graphically speaking, the other things that drive me crazy are the LOD models for those branchy shrubs / dead tree things. Not the tiny ones, but the taller ones you see everywhere in the forest. Once I start seeing it, I can't stop.

I dislike those too, but I personally would put a higher priority into making the plants like cotton or chrysanthemum look better. They are just a texture in an X shape now. Not all of them look like this so it must be possible.

...But don't stop working on RWG for that.

 

[Thecolours]

Its a mad dream that is getting some traction. The hard part is communicating to the player what your crafting ability is and why. It might need another menu showing your skills and where all the contributing factors are coming from, which could be some work.
The easier way is to just move each craft to its governing perk, so with rank 5 of shotgun messiah your crafting blue shotguns, like now with INT.

EDIT: Nice guess.

What if...the first quest you got from the trader was to give you a tutorial on how the crafting system works?

 

[HerrKingsley]

My current favorite design is:Create crafting groups: shotguns, pistols, rifles, automatic weapons, tools, knives, etc. Why? Because I don't want to grind through crafting brown gyrocopters, so a vehicle group needs to exist.

Crafting items in these categories gives XP and raises the skill level for that crafting group.

Items have a crafting difficulty such as 0 (stone), -1 (iron) -3 (steel)

Specific perks like shotgun messiah can give you +1,+2 depending on rank to shotgun crafting skill.

Intellect attribute can give global bonuses like 5 = +1, = 7 = +2, etc

Examples: You could be at skill level 4 on tools, and be crafting green stone axes. But iron tools are -1, so you could only craft yellow iron tools, and steel is -2 so you could craft orange.

If that same player had intellect 5 +1 to quality he would craft blue stone axes, green iron tools and yellow steel tools.

If that same character had miner 69r it could give him +1 to tool crafting, so he would craft blue stone axes, (blue is max craftable), blue iron, and green steel.

Pink is legendary & uncraftable, loot only.

Sounds interesting. And since im playing with perks only obtainable through books. Im climbing up your hill now!

 

[ParaSyt]

Road and town generation is getting improved in parallel to the generation improvements. Its much faster and we should be able to support 16k maps maybe bigger, not sure though on that.

I was just bothered at how uneven the roads were in A17. Earlier RWG builds had some weird roads too but A17s have been pretty unrealistic and for the Alpha you introduce all the new vehicles it made it even more painful.

No more noisey biome borders too, they are nice and clean now, which means your spectrum won't fade in and out.

What do you mean by "nice and clean"? I hear that and think how it is now where I see a straight clean lines dividing the snow biome from the desert? Will the biomes blend more? Ideally I would like to see different grades of snow, grass, burnt stuff, etc. fading into the next ground texture but I realize that would mean there would have to be a different texture for each. Is there another way to do that?

Also why aren't the biomes at different elevations? Snow on top, desert at the bottom, green in between.

Its hands down the best looking RWG we've ever had and its not even done. I'm really excited to see the finished product.

Me too. Keep it up!

 

[Russiandood]

So the desert biome is definitely starting to look more like the Adrar Plateau then a typical desert, which is awesome btw! I completely understand that the biome is named desert for simplicity, but I think it would be a fantastic idea to incorporate a little more for the said biome.

The main suggestion would be to change the under layer terrain from the "hard sand", that has little to no structural integrity, to something a bit harder. Maybe not as hard and strong as regular stone, but something that can hold up when you spend time digging below the surface. Heck, even sand stone would work .

I would like to believe it shouldn't be to difficult to incorporate the change either, changing the already hard sand layer that is generated and replacing it with sandstone or something else. Maybe even a slight re-texture? But I cannot say this as I wouldn't know the repercussions of the change.

Take this suggestion with a grain of sand, heh I used sand instead of salt , and either ignore it or not

I would like to hear everyone else's thought on this as well!

Excited to see what else TFP bring out to for World gen ;P

 

[Frekton]

I'll bring it up again, seeing as I've never read a real response. will there be a way for us to turn off digging zombies? Either by setting or mod?

 

[FA_Q2]

Sure, if you don't duck tape two shotguns together with duck tape... Probably a couple more things...
But if you could make it work, Mmm-mmm!

Quad shotguns duck taped together! Just a thought.

Totally doable

 

[FA_Q2]

On a side note since we were covering textures - why are the storage limits for containers you produce so varied. I really like to use the bookcases, gun safes etc when setting up my base. It has a good final look to it. However, it seems that you are discouraging this because the storage space on cosmetic items is abysmal. Most of the cool containers that I can get are simply untenable because simple locked containers offer so much more (and very much needed) capacity.

Can the storage capacity for the cool decor be opened up to match the capacity of the locked chest or storage box?

 

[Guppycur]

Its a whole new system using a node based editor that combines stamps (images) to create the terrain. It will hopefully go to A17, but if not then A18. We're planning for the A18 to switch to splat maps and to switch to unity terrain for distant terrain, this will allow us to have higher resolution distant terrain that also batches and can stream and some stuff.
In laymans terms splat maps will never have ugly texturing and look much better and allow you to have much better texturing control, and the terrain won't look like melted ice scream.

Road and town generation is getting improved in parallel to the generation improvements. Its much faster and we should be able to support 16k maps maybe bigger, not sure though on that.

No more noisey biome borders too, they are nice and clean now, which means your spectrum won't fade in and out.

We're adding invisible walls with a belt message saying "You can't go that way" to the border instead of killing the player with invisible radiation thats hard to get out of if you stumble in at night or lose your bearings. That might give players more real estate too.

Its hands down the best looking RWG we've ever had and its not even done. I'm really excited to see the finished product.

I've been playing with Gaia a lot making custom worlds so am familiar with the stamp process; are y'all going to be generating the stamps or pulling from a folder like Gaia does?

Super excited about this methodology... Even with pre determined stamps, the sliders in Gaia produce some very random cool stuff.

 

[Bubo]

Are things like these being looked into?

 

[stasis78]

Pretty much this. I modded Doom II, Quake, Oblivion, Skyrim. You just have to tinker and try stuff. Me and another modder prototyped the first custom animation in Oblivion which led to animation in Skyrim etc. Basically some other game that used gamebryo released some tools that created animation files but they didn't work out of the box. I fiddled with export settings and a programmer wrote a file conversion utility and we made it happen. It changed history for the modding community. Pretty soon 3dsmax plugins were developed and all kinds of other tools.
You just have to get your hands dirty and start a project that people are interested in, and the rest will come. I always just did stuff and people would like to talk about it and share info. I'd post questions and usually someone would answer half the time with code I could practically copy paste. That is what is cool about the modding community everyone does it for the passion of it.

Thats really not the issue. Tinkering with stuff until it works isn't what I was referring to. I would like to see TFP have official modding threads. That was all.

I added my first unity asset to the game after 30 minutes of never using unity. That type of stuff isn't what I'm talking about.

 

[NukemDed]

lmao!

best yet bubo

 

[Weazelsun]

@madmole, would it possible to do a re-think on what gamestage encountering ferals and radiated occur? Right now for me as a "casual" and "inefficient" player, it's not fun anymore going into a POI at a player level of 50 or so and only having a compound bow and a few arrows and having to deal with several ferals and at least one radiated at a gamestage of around 100 isn't fun. I understand that dying is always solely going to be on me, but it feels like the game rewards a person for being more efficient and having better knowledge in tactics.

 

[Aldranon]

My current favorite design is:Create crafting groups: shotguns, pistols, rifles, automatic weapons, tools, knives, etc. Why? Because I don't want to grind through crafting brown gyrocopters, so a vehicle group needs to exist.

Crafting items in these categories gives XP and raises the skill level for that crafting group.

Items have a crafting difficulty such as 0 (stone), -1 (iron) -3 (steel)

Specific perks like shotgun messiah can give you +1,+2 depending on rank to shotgun crafting skill.

Intellect attribute can give global bonuses like 5 = +1, = 7 = +2, etc

Examples: You could be at skill level 4 on tools, and be crafting green stone axes. But iron tools are -1, so you could only craft yellow iron tools, and steel is -2 so you could craft orange.

If that same player had intellect 5 +1 to quality he would craft blue stone axes, green iron tools and yellow steel tools.

If that same character had miner 69r it could give him +1 to tool crafting, so he would craft blue stone axes, (blue is max craftable), blue iron, and green steel.

Pink is legendary & uncraftable, loot only.

That sir, are some great ideas!

 

[Odetta]

Its a whole new system using a node based editor that combines stamps (images) to create the terrain. It will hopefully go to A17, but if not then A18. We're planning for the A18 to switch to splat maps and to switch to unity terrain for distant terrain, this will allow us to have higher resolution distant terrain that also batches and can stream and some stuff.
In laymans terms splat maps will never have ugly texturing and look much better and allow you to have much better texturing control, and the terrain won't look like melted ice scream.

Road and town generation is getting improved in parallel to the generation improvements. Its much faster and we should be able to support 16k maps maybe bigger, not sure though on that.

No more noisey biome borders too, they are nice and clean now, which means your spectrum won't fade in and out.

We're adding invisible walls with a belt message saying "You can't go that way" to the border instead of killing the player with invisible radiation thats hard to get out of if you stumble in at night or lose your bearings. That might give players more real estate too.

Its hands down the best looking RWG we've ever had and its not even done. I'm really excited to see the finished product.

Just a little request if possible. Please make the roads wider, right now they feel claustrophobic and spaghetti-ish. RWG is starting to look real good btw.