PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Total voters
    3
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Lots of optimizations have been done. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of easy low hanging fruit. Its a bunch of work to save .01% cpu or something. But its adding up the game seems to be running pretty good in the editor lately which is a good sign. I can't promise any specific increases but hopefully it will become playable again for most people who quit for this reason.
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Sounds like at one time you were hanging your performance hat on occlusion culling. Is this still being worked on or was it decided that its not gonna work?

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Hopefully we will get to see a DP severity option in A18 for those of us who want a more punishing DP.
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I LOVE DP ;) .... i want more punishing DP...

 
Well I might have said we'll never have diamond pickaxes, but this is as close as it gets :)
+Added: Diamond blade tip modification that doubles tool durability that can be crafted when reading one of the Art of Mining books.
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???but what happened?....

As if you come up with a feature based only on the capabilities that have provided for you, and not based on the needs of game mechanics...? what's next?

OK, question....the vomiting vulture will remain so or it will be presented as something different?

You're out there talking about the quality of the content, in contrast to the fact that the modders do.

 
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Getting a garden going is pretty well balanced in my opinion. It's not super simple but can be done given a little time and intent. The problem is that once you've done that, you never have to worry about food again. It's not the getting of the garden people are trying to offer solutions to. It's the infinite food source for no effort that results after you establish a garden.
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It is the purpose of a garden to produce food and to enable self-sufficiency.

I have no problem with it if the garden needs care. That would even be realistic. In A16 you had to invest time after every harvest by sowing new plants. And to increase the yield you had to fertilize the field. The fertilizer had to be distributed only once but the production took a long time.

In A17 there is no more fertilizer and the seeds remain in the soil. This saves you having to sow again and the yield is increased by a perk.

 
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The garden situation could always be made ark style. Plant beds with seeds and a slot for fertilizer as fuel to speed up the process. Fertilizer could be made with nitrate, plant fibers and rotten flesh. Seeds all grow at the same time but require the fertilizer to grow. Yield could just be a base of 3 crops from each seed. Only issue then would be the perks for gardening...maybe change them to unlocking a green house and a compost bin to make fertilizer from plant fibers and decaying flesh?

 
Tower defense is awesome. Every blood moon I sit on my fort walls and listen to the thunder cracking, I wonder what the might do, what direction they are coming, and if I did enough to stop them. Its great every time.
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I had a bit of an arguement with our other main player on our server. He wanted only 1 approach, and I wanted 4 approaches so the Z's didn't tear up the walls too much. We're doing it his way for now, because he's fully invested in making the concrete, while I prefer to loot. I still want to make a base with 4 approaches to see how well / poorly it works.

 
Man, out of context, it's so weird.Took me a moment to match DP with Death Penalty. :)
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I LOVE DP ;) .... i want more punishing DP...
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Yeah, you can't even feel the DP right now, it's not very impactful. A proper DP with S&M (spoilage & management) would make this a true survival experience.

 
Most people tend to be like a friend of mine - rather excitable. When I introduced 7DTD to him, we often argued about our server settings. One example was me wanting low loot settings and him wanting high ones. It was a fact that he enjoyed high loot settings in the short-term, but very quickly got bored at every single of our playthroughs. After I was finally able to convince him to play on low loot settings (which he would never do by himself), it dawned on him that, even if he didn't enjoy struggling to get something, his overall experience improved tenfold and his interest didn't die out. It was then that "he decided to like" the game and it's that kind of player who will spread the word and leave a positive review on Steam in the end, not the ephemerally excitable player with the knee-jerk reaction to change who complains without understanding what he complains about.
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This is why we hold our ground most designs, people really don't want what they are asking for. You have to understand the psychology of it to know better.
 
Optimizations are coming along. Yesterday I optimized the LightLOD code, which was a mess, but that mostly helped performance in the editor. The game would only see a tiny boost. We just have to keep hacking away at dozens of things that all add up to lower performance.
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Every little bit helps! Thanks for the hard work!

 
@MM With the optimizations being done for A18 can we expect the micro stutter to finally disappear completely?
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We added unity's incremental garbage collector, so we'll see. Hopefully. We're also editing the low settings to be more stripped out so hopefully some people get some speed back or its playable for people who couldn't.

 
If its so trivial, how come everyone was crying about it when we release A17? It wasn't trivial when you first started playing either. Its something you learn. We can't balance the game around your 2000 hours experience archtypes.
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People were crying about starving in a17?

I don't think they were... Food has always kinda been a joke.

Maybe it was hard for the very very new people that first day when pois were filled with sleepers and cooking eggs was gated behind level perks?

That cooking issue has long been fixed, so yeh, food is not a difficulty at all.

Never has been. :)

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We added unity's incremental garbage collector, so we'll see. Hopefully. We're also editing the low settings to be more stripped out so hopefully some people get some speed back or its playable for people who couldn't.
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Fuggem. I hope y'all don't cater to potatoes on your next venture.

 
Hopefully we will get to see a DP severity option in A18 for those of us who want a more punishing DP.
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Eventually I'd like to do dead is dead, and a version with lives. Maybe lives are bought with perks. So you waste perk points buying a spare life but its costing you valuable progression to have a spare life or two sitting there. Dead is Dead is pretty hardcore, I'd like some way to keep going but pay a steep price for it. 50k dukes, or lose 10 levels, etc.

Maybe at some point, we are tying hit points to your level now, so the death penalty might need some work.

 
Sounds like at one time you were hanging your performance hat on occlusion culling. Is this still being worked on or was it decided that its not gonna work?
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I LOVE DP ;) .... i want more punishing DP...
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We tried two things, GPU occlusion that had some popping that was really ugly. Trying to solve that took a bunch of work an extra checks that ended up negating the gains we had initially. We wrote a chunk filling occlusion system that fills the blocks up with black blocks until you get close, but all the constant chunk filling and unfilling when players are near or away was taxing to the CPU.

Neither are off the table, but have some problems to solve.

 
???but what happened?....

As if you come up with a feature based only on the capabilities that have provided for you, and not based on the needs of game mechanics...? what's next?

OK, question....the vomiting vulture will remain so or it will be presented as something different?

You're out there talking about the quality of the content, in contrast to the fact that the modders do.
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I'm having a hard time understanding your English.

 
Yeah, you can't even feel the DP right now, it's not very impactful. A proper DP with S&M (spoilage & management) would make this a true survival experience.
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Me too. My original wellness took you down to 30 HP if you got in a death loop. After dying 4 times one day I realized my backpack could rot in hell and wasn't worth it :)

Maybe we can add some options. This game is almost a simulation so everyone wants it to do something different than the next guy.

 
People were crying about starving in a17?
I don't think they were... Food has always kinda been a joke.

Maybe it was hard for the very very new people that first day when pois were filled with sleepers and cooking eggs was gated behind level perks?

That cooking issue has long been fixed, so yeh, food is not a difficulty at all.

Never has been. :)

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Fuggem. I hope y'all don't cater to potatoes on your next venture.
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Nobody knew how long it would take to make "the walking dead meets fallout in a fully destroyable voxel world like minecraft" so the system requirements are really way too low. We were targeting 2016 average computers or something at the time.

 
A bit late about bringing this up, but I noticed we are getting a music system for the game in the first post, awesome! I'm wondering however if we have any samples of the music we are going to hear? Or can you provide us with some?

 
Limiting poi with growing crops like limiting gas availability is a good balance idea, IMHO. If you come across 6 filled farms you pretty much have all you need for to start your own farm, and then ignore them the rest of the game.

Each farm could only have 4 or 5 farmable plants. That would encourage going out exploring for more until your farm is fleshed out. Just like gas, farms full of harvestable crops are just way too plentiful.

 
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