PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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The highlight of the stream, everybody. ;)

 
By this, do you mean the ability for zombies to crawl through 1.5-meter holes?

When I first saw it, I was thinking it related to that whole discussion about NPCs using cover. Probably because I still can't get Bert the Turtle out of my head. It would be awesome if it was about that.
Yes. Zombies ducking down so they don't hit their head and get stuck on blocks.

 
Hello @faatal ! I would like to ask a few questions:
1. what are you currently working on? What was the most interesting thing this week? :)
2. do you already know what your developer stream will be about? Can you briefly outline a set of topics?
3. many people ask if the "stone age" will be regulated in the settings? Will there be a switch for the "stone age", as for the "feral sense", so that you can turn it off? Although I like this mechanic, but many people want to speed it up/slow it down/disable it. And Mr. Madmole previously said that such a switch may appear in the menu.
3. There already is the XP setting to speed up stone age (can be changed at any time in the game) and the creative mode giveselfxp to skip over it.

 
Quick question : only head will be "appear" after being cutted or another limbs too? On stream we can see only head after cutting,  arm or leg are just disappearing

 
Just watched the VOD of the stream. All the stuff they showed looked pretty cool. I did kind of expect that they'd show us the zombies live in the editor or something so that was a little disappointing

Quick question : only head will be "appear" after being cutted or another limbs too? On stream we can see only head after cutting,  arm or leg are just disappearing
They answered that in the Q&A and the answer was "Yes, it just wasn't implemented at the time the video was recorded"

 
Just watched the VOD of the stream. All the stuff they showed looked pretty cool. I did kind of expect that they'd show us the zombies live in the editor or something so that was a little disappointing

They answered that in the Q&A and the answer was "Yes, it just wasn't implemented at the time the video was recorded"


Correct, it is work in process tech.  Assuming no issues, it will be a gradual process per zombie going into A21+

 
One thing about yesterday's stream: that team has had their work displayed on twitter all year long, and by all appearances they have moved on to alpha 21. So on one hand we saw mostly things we had seen already and the other hand they couldn't talk about their current work. On the gripping hand, mandatory Mote in God's Eye reference.

 
Nice stream. I loved everything in it, and I have some takes on the subject, if the team doesn't mind reading them.

The gore bits from the dismemberment were a bit off (leg stump too big, brain and eyes-tongue too comical, etc). but the feeling will be awesome once polished. It would be cool to have some randomness to it (3 types of squashed brain and not the whole thing like if we were surgeons, some replacing with one eye for one-eyed Zds, some with both, etc). Gore+"jiggling gore" would be awesome.

The Vulture has the feathers too symetrical and well placed, easily solved when animated if some are jiggling parts. It's all about the jiggling. 

The clothing for the soldier Zd moves a bit too much, but that was a tech demo, I believe it will be tunned down a bit like the hip of the Lab girl Zd was for a better feeling.

The textures this time around are waaaay better. Byington shines when tasked with it. A lot of attention to detail. The rest of the team are also amazing at tech+rig+animation stuff. The Disney guy is such a nerd and so good with everything that I won't say anything to feed his ego, lol, BUT yeah, there are things like Arlene's hair (ponytail girl) that are a bit off. Some time ago her hair was perfect, now it's a tiny bit disarranged which is better, but I would put more dirt or blood or detail in it, plus/and/or a jiggling ponytail and some jiggling hairs (they are big lumps, they can be modeled and not treated in alpha-layers) . The guys are obviously in love with the game, like we are, and that shows.




Looking forward to the next stream!

 
Just watched the VOD of the stream. All the stuff they showed looked pretty cool. I did kind of expect that they'd show us the zombies live in the editor or something so that was a little disappointing

They answered that in the Q&A and the answer was "Yes, it just wasn't implemented at the time the video was recorded"


Correct, it is work in process tech.  Assuming no issues, it will be a gradual process per zombie going into A21+
AWWW CUTE ^^ THX GUYS!!!

 
Nice stream. I loved everything in it, and I have some takes on the subject, if the team doesn't mind reading them.

The gore bits from the dismemberment were a bit off (leg stump too big, brain and eyes-tongue too comical, etc). but the feeling will be awesome once polished. It would be cool to have some randomness to it (3 types of squashed brain and not the whole thing like if we were surgeons, some replacing with one eye for one-eyed Zds, some with both, etc). Gore+"jiggling gore" would be awesome.

The Vulture has the feathers too symetrical and well placed, easily solved when animated if some are jiggling parts. It's all about the jiggling. 

The clothing for the soldier Zd moves a bit too much, but that was a tech demo, I believe it will be tunned down a bit like the hip of the Lab girl Zd was for a better feeling.

The textures this time around are waaaay better. Byington shines when tasked with it. A lot of attention to detail. The rest of the team are also amazing at tech+rig+animation stuff. The Disney guy is such a nerd and so good with everything that I won't say anything to feed his ego, lol, BUT yeah, there are things like Arlene's hair (ponytail girl) that are a bit off. Some time ago her hair was perfect, now it's a tiny bit disarranged which is better, but I would put more dirt or blood or detail in it, plus/and/or a jiggling ponytail and some jiggling hairs (they are big lumps, they can be modeled and not treated in alpha-layers) . The guys are obviously in love with the game, like we are, and that shows.




Looking forward to the next stream!
One thing to consider regarding dismemberment is that we were seeing close ups of it on a steady camera in a loop. In game you'll be moving and probably not staying that close to the zombie and it will happen pretty fast. A non-exaggerated animation might just go unnoticed. I know most of the details they have shown on things already in alpha 19 are things I have never noticed in-game because of how subtle they are.

It's sort of like Hollywood sound effects. They are utterly unrealistic because they are meant to be noticed. This is what "artistic license" truly means.

It reminds me of a story I heard from a Civilization dev. People thought the computer was cheating and they were right but not in the way they thought: the game actually cheated in favor of the player because, otherwise, player's felt they were cheated to be point of outrage. So they had the game cheat in favor of the players just to make them feel a semblance of fairness. It's not about what things actually are, it is about players perceive them in-game.

 
@faatal

...I was told I could tag you and ask this here. :)

The replacematerial XML property no longer works correctly we think due to a simple arrangement of children on *some* of the zombies...

...I know you told me last night something I can't remember, and basically I know you guys aren't using that property anymore, but it's great for reskinning zombies.

As an example, the method works on Arlene, but does not on Darlene.  These are a19 of course, no clue if y'all did everything from scratch for a20 versions and this question is moot.

Anyway it appears not to work for Darlene because the targeted child is further down the hierarchy than on Arlene, which indicates inconsistency in the models.

Arlene, boe, crawler, moe and yo works, the others do not.

Can we get that property fixed so that consistently, 0,1, and 2 point to body, hair and eyes?

...even when it did work, those numbers weren't consistent, but at least it was doable. 

Thanks for any consideration on this.

...really, it'd be fantastic if you could let us target the replacematerial by child name... :)

I know you guys are working on bigger stuff but I'm hopeful you see the potential in including this type of behavior earlier rather than later.  Heck, you guys could easily have your random color variances using this method... 

 
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@faatal

...I was told I could tag you and ask this here. :)

The replacematerial XML property no longer works correctly due to a simple arrangement of children on *some* of the zombies, are there plans for uniformity in bone set up so things like the old system for radiating a zed will still work?

...I know you told me last night something I can't remember, and basically I know you guys aren't using that property anymore, but it's great for reskinning zombies.

As an example, the method works on Arlene, but does not on Darlene.  These are a19 of course, no clue if y'all did everything from scratch for a20 versions and this question is moot.

Anyway it appears not to work for Darlene because the targeted child is further down the hierarchy than on Arlene, which indicates inconsistency in the models.

Arlene, boe, crawler, moe and yo works, the others do not.

Can we get that property fixed so that consistently, 0,1, and 2 point to body, hair and eyes?

...even when it did work, those numbers weren't consistent, but at least it was doable.
Why not use names instead of index? The names may not be that consistent either.
Maybe tags? (Actually I added a E_BP_EYE tag on those last week).

What about LODs? They have multiple GameObjects for those, so if 0 they would be 0,1,2 or 0,1,2,3, since LODs vary in count.

 
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Why not use names instead of index? The names may not be that consistent either.
Maybe tags?
The property looks for indexes, if you would change it to work for names then I'd kiss you. 

Don't care if the names are inconsistent, we can rip them and get those. :)

 
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