PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[spud42]

i have just cleared a level 4 poi quest. player level 26. i have 3 points into shadows and hidden strike. i have made a lvl4 compound crossbow but a normal bow was ok too.  the only time the zeds woke up was when i made too much noise near a wall and the zed was on the other side of the wall. i have had 4 zeds in a row in a corridor and stealth killed all 4. the second last was even catapulted over the last zeds head and it didn't wake up. you can stealth if you are patient enough and take your time clearing the poi. 

 

[JCrook1028]

you have to wear this specific outfit that you might not like in order to boost harvest percentage or be able to harvest crops effectively. You said in your post that the new system would fix armor clipping through clothing. Well it really doesn't.

Um.........do you even realize that the new clothing system is not even IN the game? So wth are you even complaining about when you have not and cannot even use the system to test it?

 

[Jost Amman]

Um.........do you even realize that the new clothing system is not even IN the game? So wth are you even complaining about when you have not and cannot even use the system to test it?

Yeah, some people attack preemptively because they don't like how something sounds.  :laugh:

I say we should at least wait the second/third draft of the new system. There's plenty of time and TFP may change it a million times if they think it works better another way.

 

[Code6]

A20 is severely restricting my ability to use a junk turret.  It frequently falls down through the block it is on. If I am up high it will fall to a lower floor. At ground level I have had it melt into solid concrete, forcing me to dig it out.
This used to happen occasionally in A19, but now it is crazily frequent.  This is especially frustrating during blood moons because I have an Intellect build and my junkie is my main defense.
 

I hope this is on the TFP radar.  I love this game and this is a killer bug for me.

 

[Gazz]

I can second this, one kill with the crossbow and everyone wakes up!

Yes, everything makes noise. That includes shooting or reloading a crossbow.

You can literally see when an action causes a ping on your stealth meter.

With FS on zombie senses are greatly improved so they are a lot more likely to pick up on small noises like that.

 

[mle_ii]

I fixed it today. Fix will be in 20.1.

Awesome, is there an experimental build I can test?  Or do I need to wait for it to make it to the main public build?  Would love to help out testing things now and then.  Have a experience in software testing and want to help where I can as I really enjoy this game.

 

[LastTugBoat243]

Um.........do you even realize that the new clothing system is not even IN the game? So wth are you even complaining about when you have not and cannot even use the system to test it?

Because it's inevitable that the system will be added. They have given us plenty enough description of what the system is. It will replace the current 8 slot clothing/armor system . The armor we will be given is armor that will be tailored to specific tasks and skillsets no room for customization unless you want to be an all round character that isn't good at anything in particular. We will probably not see clothing return just the "Hybrid Armor". The only reason I'm against the system is because I like to customize my character's outfit with what I find lying around like in the zombie apocalypse. 

 

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

Um.........do you even realize that the new clothing system is not even IN the game? So wth are you even complaining about when you have not and cannot even use the system to test it?

It doesn't need to be in the game in order for any player to oppose such ideas even in the concept stage.

If he or she turns out to be wrong, then so be it. But until that time you also cannot say whether or not they are and so they may have a great point which is legit.

 

[shorgan]

Perhaps we can change the look of clothing items with mods like the helm mod that makes it look like a baseball cap?

 

[LastTugBoat243]

Perhaps we can change the look of clothing items with mods like the helm mod that makes it look like a baseball cap?

It's a solution. But why can't we wear cloths and armor? 

 

[Scythe-Messiah]

A20 is severely restricting my ability to use a junk turret.  It frequently falls down through the block it is on. If I am up high it will fall to a lower floor. At ground level I have had it melt into solid concrete, forcing me to dig it out.
This used to happen occasionally in A19, but now it is crazily frequent.  This is especially frustrating during blood moons because I have an Intellect build and my junkie is my main defense.
 

I hope this is on the TFP radar.  I love this game and this is a killer bug for me.

Man, I feel you. My friend and I have experienced this bug as well, it's been especially brutal since I'm an INT main. He's had it as the host and I've had it happen as the client connected to his game. When he's reported his turret as having fallen, I was still seeing it still where he placed it, but inactive even while he was "standing next" to it.

We've had it drop through POIs and player made horde bases. I'm not completely certain why/when since it happens infrequently, but it's often enough it puts a damper on fun. It feels like it happens more often when zombies charge, I drop it, and it falls through floors leaving me scrambling. It was awful early game without auger/miner 69er when it sunk through POI floors to ground level. Sometimes if lucky, it only drops 10-15 blocks down and lands on a lower floor. It seems like it occurrs with busier POIs, chunk loading, and lower framerate situations -- skyscrapers, sleepers waking up, hordenight, players in different parts of the map, heavy zombie pathing, or leaving and returning to chunks where the turrets were previously deployed. I haven't been able to witness a connection between this bug and vehicles teleporting though. On hour hordebase, I have seen zombies fall, ragdoll, and then get knocked below blocks collision and get stuck in crawling animations in blocks below the top level. Not sure if that's directly related to turrets dropping or not though. 

 

[faatal]

With all due respect, that's not true and not a good profiling test. I'll explain. Shadows are a task that is extremely hard not only on the GPU but on the CPU too. So it does impact CPU, therefore your profiling is not accurate. My guess: You might also using a ryzen 3900x (or a good CPU) which runs shadows like a breeze in a granullated way as it is a background task for which many CPUs rely on raw processing power to do. Your RTX2070 is  obviously good enough for every shadow task if you don't go crazy with the graphics (though I believe it could run ULTRA in the right circunstances, HIGH is preferred for GPU-related settings for that card at 1080p). So your system is stable and drinking a Mojito while running shadows. Use an old CPU and you will start to see the difference right away (Vsync Off is a must).

Zd shadows are not as impactful as tree shadows, as shadow area (size of the shadow in pixels) seems to matter the most. But shadows off do  increase entity fps in a noticeable way in crappy systems when entities are on you, so I believe a simple crappy circle shadow is worth researching, but just a thought. Tree shadows do hit fps A LOT. Tree animations do hit fps up to quite a bit too, but they need quantity (as I said,up to 60% performance hit on a quad core 2.7-3.2ghz cpu when 100 41m oaks are in front of you /no shadows) ,. Maybe increasing player-placed tree distance from each other by 1 or 2 blocks might help, like 1 planted tree every 4 or 5 blocks?

Recap:

Zd shadows increase fps when off and they even reduce the overhead when entities are hitting blocks, which makes the overall experience from  better (all the situations except "extreme block hitting" by many entities) to slightly better (specifically when extreme block hitting by many entities). Performance impact seems to be in the low 5-10% (edit: actually, minimum fps and fps drops went way up, so it's a 50% more in some cases) but way more stable and with lesser freezes and lag when facing screamers/horde with lesser CPUs.

The suggested methods for increasing performance based on my tests are:

-An option for having simpler shadows for trees and entities, like a simple circle or shape below the base (right below) of the model/entity,  or a simpler/light shadow processing, as that is the most effective way of maintaining some hint of a shadow and realist in the lowest settings while still having some shadows. So, below the NEAR option we could have SIMPLE, which would make Zds, trees and (I hope) other assets have simpler shadow processing, a lighter one like in those games of old,  one that does not result in moving squares like the current downsizing of shadow quality does (ugly). Downside is that it might have to be coded in. Not difficult nor a huge time hog though.

-An option for choosing simpler animations, not the expensive default ones that they have now. Like: Animations: OFF-SIMPLE-NORMAL.

-Reducing shadow area even further for trees , as it can be done without affecting quality of the game, and will improve fps to various degrees in all systems. I believe a 20% lesser shadow area can be done for trees like the biggest oak and some others.

-Increasing the separation between player-planted trees, like 1 or 2 blocks more would slightly improve performance even more in crowded servers

Turning the occluder off when outdoors in not a hack, but a good optimization move, in my opinion. Should it be ON outside though? Do you really believe a CPU-intensive task increases performance in a CPU-intensive area like a city ? The easiness on the Graphics Card load isn't worth it, and it's actually not a problem anymore (GPU options are plenty and well optimized). A voxel game burns CPU. newer and not-that-newer Graphic Cards run 7dtd graphics while drinking a capirinha on a beach at a summer party, unless you go for 2k or 4k right off the bat.

Sure, it was not a good test of a low end system, because it is not a low end system, but that is all I had the time to test.

We know tree high detail LOD complexity is an issue with gfx and shadow fill rate, but artists don't want ugly trees. We have a very capable programmer looking at trees and we shall see what he finds.

Yes, I've noticed that player trees could use more space between them.

I have no interest in spending time making old school circle shadows. Would rather people just turn shadows off on low end systems.

There is no clear cut indoor vs outdoor. Occlusion outdoors often hides objects behind buildings, which applies more so in cities, so I'm not spending time trying to guess which is better. Low end CPUs could have it default to off, but that needs research, which I am not spending time on that now.

Yes, I agree that AI should react to any combination of blocks, but surely bandits should be smarter than zombies? I mean, when a player makes noise in a large location, zombies coming from outside usually just hit the walls under the player because they don't see a way to get to the player. And what will the bandits do? Or because of their small number (you won't have to design a horde of bandits from 64 units, right?) will the area of their path search be significantly wider?

Zombies have varying degrees of dumbness in their pathing based on a settings in xml which also covers a random range. They tend to abort long paths, put less value in block health differences and can't open doors. Bandits will try long paths, fully consider block health and open doors. They will also spawn in smaller numbers.

 

[doughphunghus]

Zombies have varying degrees of dumbness in their pathing based on a settings in xml which also covers a random range. They tend to abort long paths, put less value in bloc!k health differences and can't open doors. Bandits will try long paths, fully consider block health and open doors. They will also spawn in smaller numbers.

(squee!)

 

[faatal]

Finally one of the last (but by no means least)  annoyances - the previously implemented zombie digging. This was a large amount of effort which added very little while taking a lot away, the ability to hide away from a horde night at the tradeoff cost of no kills or loot (though there are exceptions in design) - a system which is useless, since hordes are completely avoidable in certain POI's or bespoke player built bases anyway.

It was not a large amount of work. I was the only one who worked on it and I probably just spent a few days on it. I work on a lot of different stuff, so it gets hazy over the years. Digging is also not just for horde nights. It is useful to the AI in POIs when you get below them and down would be the best path.

We don't spawn hordes so they can do nothing. The intent is for them to reasonably try to get to you and you to reasonably try to defend against it. If you don't want to interact with hordes, then turn them off, which is why the setting is there. One of our devs was even playing a game with them off recently, since he was trying something different.

I'm playing on survivalist with feral sense on day and night. No skill points into stealth or anything related. Like I have said, whenever I kill a Z with my crossbow completely SILENTLY the whole room wakes up. No matter how many other guys saying "this is not true", it definitely is. Yesterday I have cleared the T5 hospital and in every room it was the same, one free kill with the crossbow and the whole gang woke up instantly. If my bolts miss though Zs don't wake up, only if I hit (which always ends in an instant kill).

In A19 on same settings (except feral sense of course) and no skill points into stealth neither that was a whole different experience. Clearing a room silently with a bunch of Zs with a crossbow only was possible.

Edit:

Not saying it is bad. Sneaking around with a bow (without any skill points in stealth) and being able to kill lots of Zs always felt a bit too powerful anyway to me. Either this has changed with A20 or it does not work anymore due to feral sense ON. Or it requires a few skill points which would make sense.

Shooting a crossbow is quiet, not silent. Feral sense makes it 2.5x as loud to zombies (dog and zed bear are slightly different multipliers), so your quiet is not that quiet.

It was OP, so you should have to put points in stealth and use appropriate gear to be effective.

A20 is severely restricting my ability to use a junk turret.  It frequently falls down through the block it is on. If I am up high it will fall to a lower floor. At ground level I have had it melt into solid concrete, forcing me to dig it out.
This used to happen occasionally in A19, but now it is crazily frequent.  This is especially frustrating during blood moons because I have an Intellect build and my junkie is my main defense.
 

I hope this is on the TFP radar.  I love this game and this is a killer bug for me.

It is. Things falling through world and stability issues (half fixed) are my top two bugs.

 

[faatal]

Awesome, is there an experimental build I can test?  Or do I need to wait for it to make it to the main public build?  Would love to help out testing things now and then.  Have a experience in software testing and want to help where I can as I really enjoy this game.

The main issue is fixed, but testers found some secondary recalc issues, so I'm going to look at it again.

There will be an experimental, but not until a collection of issues are fixed. It will be announced in the forums when released.

 

[doughphunghus]

It feels like the game is changing and not all the changes are good. There have been weird removals of items such as Grain alcohol , Hoe's for land tilling , smell mechanic , cave systems , blunderbuss , Hub City , snowberry , separate animal meat , moldy bread , wood cutting bench , zombie looting ,  log spike traps , sliding jail doors , barbed wire , and the simplification of building tiers used to be Wood --> Reinforced Wood --> Iron Reinforced Wood --> Flagstone --> Cobblestone --> Concrete --> Reinforced Concrete --> Steel --> Stainless Steel This was a great upgrade path it wasn't that complex and it was rewarding upgrade slowly towards stainless steel in the end it was replaced by the current path Wood --> Cobblestone -- Concrete --> Steel. even farming has been simplified before you could till the land with a Hoe to plant crops and you could create fertilizer to speed up the process. Now you just use a farm plot. Another thing the new clothing system we have to wear limiting outfits to increase stats and completely toss out character customization. Sorry dude you can't look the way you want to anymore because you have to wear this specific outfit that you might not like in order to boost harvest percentage or be able to harvest crops effectively. You said in your post that the new system would fix armor clipping through clothing. Well it really doesn't. Removing clothing all together isn't really a fix, its a removal. NOT A FIX a removal you didn't wanna take the time to fix it. So you you removed the system entirely removing diversity in character customization. You could probably just add additional armor sets for mining farming etc and try to fix the clipping issue. But instead your removing all of them POOF and substituting it with this limited armor system. I love this game and want to be a fun like in previous alpha's.

If you do decide to remove all clothing do you think there's a way you could keep the clothing models for the Modding community. There are people who will want make mod's to bring them back. 

Sorry if a lot of this didn't make sense.

as I understand it (these are all my opinions, having read the forums for awhile)

- Cave systems: caused issues with "stability" as they could be under stuff and you not know it (even in POIs').  I don't know why but I find that a feature and not an issue . I'm hoping they come back, or are an option to turn on as I loved finding (falling/driving into) and exploring caves, even when they were empty.

- Zombie looting: People felt it as tedious, and I guess the corpse blocks/timers? ate up processing power or something.  Maybe it was the "swapping out" of corpses into corpse blocks?  anyway, the corpses stick around for awhile in game... it feels a little weird to not be able to chop/loot them for anything.

- Barbed wire: I heard it was too powerful, as in "too easy to craft as a trap" or maybe it had some weird cheese mechanic. Couldn't the damage be lowered then...?

- All other "removals": I personally love unique items, but its probably just a philosophy to not have "duplicate stuff" in the game... I hope its just during development to make testing/changing things easier so the "core" game is solid... but I do wish at some point a lot of "basic" items are put back for crafting looting, even if they are just a different icon and a few special recipes.  The snowberry is an example of "isn't really needed", but its nice to have special plants in a specific biome.

- Block upgrade changes: I sort of like the simplification effort, and I actually like the "no degrade" on block break (the more I play it), but I really do miss some of the ?challenge? in the longer upgrade path, especially the "reinforcing" of the wood and "concrete drying" mechanics. Having the extra steps made block types "special" and a little bit more work to upgrade/build with vs direct crafting of blocks... like "I don't want to put down wood as it takes so much time upgrading time, I'll burn the time forging brick blocks instead") but you could also do that for some things.  And it could make you base look a little more like patchwork when repairing (harder to keep nice looking)

- Farming: i heard it was am issue with performance or similar, so it was decided to "condense" the farming into a special block, maybe to target its specialness to that block type.  I do wish the farm plot could be "upgraded" like other blocks to nicer looking farm plot blocks by using the old hoe/fertilizer mechanic.  At least then you could put them in the ground and it would act mostly the same. And make farming a bit more "work" vs "perk"

- Clothing: oh please yes do NOT remove the existing clothes.  I'm all for having "sets" and set bonuses for special clothes.... but why not make the mods you put into the clothing determine the set bonus?  meaning: you can wear any shirt... add a special "farming" specific clothing mod to it (errrr... I can not come up with one for a shirt at the moment). The point is: if you put a single farming mod into all your clothing pieces, you get the set bonus, regardless of what you look like.  And you can only add 1 farming mod to each piece, and it blocks all other "perk like' mods from being added. Alternatively: maybe some clothing does not have the slot (like a  plain t-shirt/shoes, low level stuff) but higher tiers of the same stuff does. So you either "use the perfect farming jeans" that at level 1 allow the mod, or you have to get the tier 5-6 level shirt to be able to get the mod perk.  and it then makes you choose "do I add the farming mods, or the nerd mods?  It will burn a slot to add them...). Then the player can add the mods to whatever clothes they want, and store them as sets in chests if they want to swap out. Additionally: if you remove the clothing, a lot of the special mods for zombies die and get pushed to people who have time/knowledge to hook up the special models.

 

[LastTugBoat243]

as I understand it (these are all my opinions, having read the forums for awhile)

- Cave systems: caused issues with "stability" as they could be under stuff and you not know it (even in POIs').  I don't know why but I find that a feature and not an issue . I'm hoping they come back, or are an option to turn on as I loved finding (falling/driving into) and exploring caves, even when they were empty.

- Zombie looting: People felt it as tedious, and I guess the corpse blocks/timers? ate up processing power or something.  Maybe it was the "swapping out" of corpses into corpse blocks?  anyway, the corpses stick around for awhile in game... it feels a little weird to not be able to chop/loot them for anything.

- Barbed wire: I heard it was too powerful, as in "too easy to craft as a trap" or maybe it had some weird cheese mechanic. Couldn't the damage be lowered then...?

- All other "removals": I personally love unique items, but its probably just a philosophy to not have "duplicate stuff" in the game... I hope its just during development to make testing/changing things easier so the "core" game is solid... but I do wish at some point a lot of "basic" items are put back for crafting looting, even if they are just a different icon and a few special recipes.  The snowberry is an example of "isn't really needed", but its nice to have special plants in a specific biome.

- Block upgrade changes: I sort of like the simplification effort, and I actually like the "no degrade" on block break (the more I play it), but I really do miss some of the ?challenge? in the longer upgrade path, especially the "reinforcing" of the wood and "concrete drying" mechanics. Having the extra steps made block types "special" and a little bit more work to upgrade/build with vs direct crafting of blocks... like "I don't want to put down wood as it takes so much time upgrading time, I'll burn the time forging brick blocks instead") but you could also do that for some things.  And it could make you base look a little more like patchwork when repairing (harder to keep nice looking)

- Farming: i heard it was am issue with performance or similar, so it was decided to "condense" the farming into a special block, maybe to target its specialness to that block type.  I do wish the farm plot could be "upgraded" like other blocks to nicer looking farm plot blocks by using the old hoe/fertilizer mechanic.  At least then you could put them in the ground and it would act mostly the same. And make farming a bit more "work" vs "perk"

- Clothing: oh please yes do NOT remove the existing clothes.  I'm all for having "sets" and set bonuses for special clothes.... but why not make the mods you put into the clothing determine the set bonus?  meaning: you can wear any shirt... add a special "farming" specific clothing mod to it (errrr... I can not come up with one for a shirt at the moment). The point is: if you put a single farming mod into all your clothing pieces, you get the set bonus, regardless of what you look like.  And you can only add 1 farming mod to each piece, and it blocks all other "perk like' mods from being added. Alternatively: maybe some clothing does not have the slot (like a  plain t-shirt/shoes, low level stuff) but higher tiers of the same stuff does. So you either "use the perfect farming jeans" that at level 1 allow the mod, or you have to get the tier 5-6 level shirt to be able to get the mod perk.  and it then makes you choose "do I add the farming mods, or the nerd mods?  It will burn a slot to add them...). Then the player can add the mods to whatever clothes they want, and store them as sets in chests if they want to swap out. Additionally: if you remove the clothing, a lot of the special mods for zombies die and get pushed to people who have time/knowledge to hook up the special models.

Thank you for taking the time to read my Comment. I feel as though if I or anyone questions the actions made by the Dev's we get attacked for it and It's nice to have a person just read through my message and reply.

 

[pregnable]

Hey, do you guys have any plans on nerfing the blocks that are larger than 1 voxel? 

They are kinda OP, but not really that big of an issue.  Mostly just really efficient for building large bases or fences. 

I just figured I would ask before I start using them a lot.  They are fine as they are, but if you do nerf them, it should probably only be to make them 2, or maybe 3 times more costly.  Otherwise they would probably be kinda useless, heh. 

 

[Doomofman]

It is. Things falling through world and stability issues (half fixed) are my top two bugs.

Good to hear the stability fix is coming along.

Do you know if any progress has been made on the teleporting/disappearing vehicles issue? Had my furthest teleport today when I started my game. My bike was almost 700m away from where I left it when I quit previously

 

[Blake_]

Sure, it was not a good test of a low end system, because it is not a low end system, but that is all I had the time to test.

We know tree high detail LOD complexity is an issue with gfx and shadow fill rate, but artists don't want ugly trees. We have a very capable programmer looking at trees and we shall see what he finds.

Yes, I've noticed that player trees could use more space between them.

I have no interest in spending time making old school circle shadows. Would rather people just turn shadows off on low end systems.

There is no clear cut indoor vs outdoor. Occlusion outdoors often hides objects behind buildings, which applies more so in cities, so I'm not spending time trying to guess which is better. Low end CPUs could have it default to off, but that needs research, which I am not spending time on that now.

Zombies have varying degrees of dumbness in their pathing based on a settings in xml which also covers a random range. They tend to abort long paths, put less value in block health differences and can't open doors. Bandits will try long paths, fully consider block health and open doors. They will also spawn in smaller numbers.

Thank you very much for the answer ! I understand the time hog of such changes vs smaller gains, and the most important ones that affect every system (trees) are really being worked on, so in this case going forward is better than pleasing backwards, as you said.

I'm not sure about the Occluder for higher-end systems, but I do indeed recommend it to be off (even by default)  in lower-end CPUs (when detecting a CPU that doesn't go above 3.6ghz). My system runs more stable when turning it off (and specially cities) and the world doesn't have the tree glitch nor the same "vanishing glitch" happening in some assets/interiors . I'm not even at the minimum requirementes (2.7-3.2 ghz 4 cores 8 threads, mostly all cores at 3.2 all the time).  When occluder is on, it does improve GPU usage by quite a bit, but at the cost of huge CPU freezes, bumps, and stutter magic. CPU is important for 7dtd gameplay . Also, a point to consider is that without CPU there's no way to put in more gameplay content or entities, assets or even block density without constant unstability. Only exploration and sights. 

That should conclude my tests for now. I'm looking forward to those tree optimizations ! Again, thank you for listening.