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%
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Odd you would quote me on that. I have said to friends of my community that A18 has a potential release date of July 1st. Due to July 1st being the end of the first half of 2019
Here is what the very first page says on this thread via Madmole

Madmole "Also, Alpha 18 waits for noone or no feature. If a feature isn't ready it gets disabled. I can't give a release date but I can assure you its in the first half of 2019."
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I'll never be making these kind of insane assumptions again. While we're in there, we should do this and that, and we did. I'm not saying we won't make June 30th or July 1st, but its not that simple disabling stuff that isn't done at this point. We did way more work than anticipated though when I wrote that, and I'm really happy we did this much work with a lot of the team focused on 17 bugs and performance for a large portion of this build.

 
Most of us know that a vid-dump happens shortly before a release. I think some are using it as a roundabout way of asking "is it nearly done yet?".
Have you just mentioned a date? You know that always go well :-)
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I already did ages ago on the first post.

 
I don't get it. We have zombie's zombie birds, traders and all sorts of animals. Each with there own programs and behaviors. You all boast about improving performance and graphics at the same time and do it well.
Every time an Alpha drops peoples jaws hit the floor and amazed of all the improvements you all make.

Yet at the same time it seems that you undersell yourselves. Why?

I can find the ground work for friendly NPC's. that have been tucked away in the game for years. Heck even modders have used them to a limited degree in making there own friendly NPC's.

I could understand pets being off the table but not NPC's.

They could make the game so much cooler and it would not take the graphics anymore than a zombie moving around and farting.

So why not finish it and see how it plays out? :)
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Nobody cares if a bandit gets stuck in your winding mine shaft, but your trusty NPC you leveled up? Also seeing his feet not IK to the stairs and probably skate about a bit over your rough mines. Bandits will be in a more controlled setting, in their POI or maybe out in the terrain and are shooting at you or melee clubbing in a frantic situation. It doesn't have to be perfect in those situations. But if we allow you observe the AI and animations up close and personal, its going to do more against us than for us.

And then everyone on the server wants their own AI, and they log off and others join, but their NPCs stay logged on. Think of the lag and all the processing. They might need to eat and have calories burning. Its just outside of the scope of what we need to do, and probably better suited for a sequel where we can build off of the shoulders of this game.

It could happen, but lately I'm trying to be realistic. And the thing is, a modder can easily do it after our bandits are in and working pretty good and then its fine because PC gamer isn't giving us a bad review because their NPC didn't meet their expectations.

At the end of the day it adds a ton of scope to the game, performance issues and would have us shipping probably 6-12 months later than we could. I'd rather do bandits pretty good, than bandits and follower NPCs very poorly.

 
Oh, god as long you don't go Todd Howard, don't go there. -shudders- 7 Days to Die Remastered now available on Windows 6000! I have nothing again Skyrim Special Edtion.
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Why not? Lets just say that if we worked on the engine on another game and massive advancements were made, 3-4 years later you could get it and it supports raytraced graphics, and a bunch of other cool stuff why not? By then a new console would be out we could make it available to them. I have no problem with ports and legendary or special editions. Don't want it? Don't buy it. I think its more about bringing it to new customers than hosing old ones.

 
Have you tried Enderal yet? I did because they redid skills/talents just like you guys did. (And I wanted to experience another game that did away with LBD to try to have a more informed opinion.). It does feel different at first, but then you get used to it and just play the game.
I am waiting for a couple more mod updates/fixes and plan to retry it (Skyrim) in VR. (Unless TFP and/or Guppy come out with a VR enhancement to 7D2D - cuz then the rest of my life is all set...)
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No I'm not big on total conversions or super huge mods. I thought it was a new game at first lol, but I saw a lot of things that looked like Skyrim then I realized it was a mod for Skyrim.

Skyrim VR is a trip, but it takes basically a full screen for each eye, so it has to be run at very low resolution. Controls are weird. Its fun as hell to walk around and see skyrim in 3d though. Something like a barrel is life size when you walk up to it. Dragons Reach is so impressive in VR. I tried it on a PS3 and it was vanilla, so once you get used to your favorite mods and hd textures its impossible to go back.

To me mods are like being a game designer, or having crazy advanced options, you build the game you want to play.

 
Are there plans to give the demolisher zombie special AI that reflects it's demolition expertise in a past life?
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He'll probably get some custom AI and properties so he bull dozes traps and explodes at the right time.

 
It will probably be tweaked for what it needs to do.
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He'll probably get some custom AI and properties so he bull dozes traps and explodes at the right time.
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Zombies with laser beam eyes - COMFIRMED for A18!!!

Now, is Faatal and MM saying the Nuclear Bomb Zombie IS the Demolisher or is that an A18.1 thing?

 
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Why not? Lets just say that if we worked on the engine on another game and massive advancements were made, 3-4 years later you could get it and it supports raytraced graphics, and a bunch of other cool stuff why not? By then a new console would be out we could make it available to them. I have no problem with ports and legendary or special editions. Don't want it? Don't buy it. I think its more about bringing it to new customers than hosing old ones.
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As long as we get more NPC's in the future games! lol

 
We'll keep optimizing and see where that lands, then we can think about some kind of underground cave networks. We took them out because we had no occlusion framework and chunk generation / rendering speeds were unacceptable.
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I have some questions about this performance issue because I have been making a ton of modular underground POIs. I've tried asking in the mods section, but nobody seems to have an answer for me. I would really like to use them all at some point, but I am afraid that it's going to cause problems, as mentioned above and several other times when caves were discussed in this thread. If a dev could chime in and explain the cause of cave performance issues, it would be great.

Firstly, is there any difference between an underground POI and simply a hole in the ground with no roof? If I made a roof over a hole in the hole in the ground, does it suddenly fall into a performance issue? If not, then I am not seeing the difference between a cave and building.

Is there anything I can do to help with performance when building underground POIs?

If I set "ExcludePOICulling" to FALSE, this means it will not render at a distance and it will be culled, right?

If I set "ExcludeDistantPOIMesh" to TRUE, does this mean it will not use the simple mesh and will continue to use the main mesh at a distance, or does this mean nothing will be rendered at all?

What is the best combination of these two settings to optimize underground POIs and avoid these performance issues as much as possible?

 
hey madmole and the rest of yoos pimps

spent some time this week playing 17.3

balance of stamina feels much better than before. cant go hard out non stop running mining or wrenching but a bit of a rest and can still keep going without the rage that was there before. to my mind it it close to where it should be.

seem to be more zds in the world. is that just me or has something changed?

often fighting or avoiding the z bears. and dogs. nice to be challenged :-)

big thumbs up bro. this iteration rocks!

died 4 times tonight. the brats crack up at that... now they are doing the dishes.

 
Why does grain alcohol have a lower economic value (48) than Beer (100)? Grain alcohol is stronger and especially given that it is actually useful for first aid kits, it seems like it should be worth a lot more.

 
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He'll probably get some custom AI and properties so he bull dozes traps and explodes at the right time.
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I may be nitpicking here and a zombie rigged with explosives will be interesting gameplay-wise anyway, but wouldn't it be a little awkward if these things just spawned in the wild? Perhaps in the future you can pair them with bandits which would make more sense. I think that when it comes to wild zombies something like the suicider from dead island (with something extra to make destroying blocks more believable) would make a more gory and "natural" zombie.

 
All this talk about explosives and zombies and I seem to remember there being talk of a new system in the works for bandits where the dress up can be more dynamic?

So...maybe the odd soldier zombie could have a grenade belt over the chest with a chance to blow it up when shot/hit?

 
Is there anything I can do to help with performance when building underground POIs?If I set "ExcludePOICulling" to FALSE, this means it will not render at a distance and it will be culled, right?

If I set "ExcludeDistantPOIMesh" to TRUE, does this mean it will not use the simple mesh and will continue to use the main mesh at a distance, or does this mean nothing will be rendered at all?
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For an underground POI you do not need a distant POI mesh at all. You can not see it at a distance.

ExcludeDistantPOIMesh=TRUE would be sensible.

"Real" POI do not exist at a distance at all. The chunks are not loaded so no blocks exist there period. That's the whole point of the simplified meshes.

 
For an underground POI you do not need a distant POI mesh at all. You can not see it at a distance.ExcludeDistantPOIMesh=TRUE would be sensible.

"Real" POI do not exist at a distance at all. The chunks are not loaded so no blocks exist there period. That's the whole point of the simplified meshes.
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What's the state of play on distant terrain being updated as the player alters the landscape? I'm not one for massive earthworks but the last time I checked the changes didn't show up.

 
It could update the terrain when a certain % of a chunk has been changed.

For distant POI meshes changing: the problem would be that there needs to be then more low poly distant meshes than POIs.

Currently its enough to have one low resolution mesh per POI-type.

 
Ok none of those are motion captured, and typically aren't, those are always key frame hand animated. Brian will blow your mind he's amazing.
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Nice, can't wait to see some great fluid animations! I'll be sitting here waiting.

 
It could update the terrain when a certain % of a chunk has been changed.
For distant POI meshes changing: the problem would be that there needs to be then more low poly distant meshes than POIs.

Currently its enough to have one low resolution mesh per POI-type.
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As far as I know the distant mesh for prefabs is generated from the blueprint during loading. The system to generate distant meshes is already there but the trick will be re-generating the distant mesh at runtime without crippling the frame-rate.

 
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