PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

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1 hour ago, Old Crow said:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1640858606357606402
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That is definitely a pain.  It's tricky, but you can get most of it as it is now, but not all.  It can be a waste of paint if you're not painting an entire surface the same as under/behind a workbench, but since paint is easy to make, I'll just use Fill to paint the entire floor or wall and then make whatever changes to the floor and wall that aren't covered by the workbench if needed.  I'm not really expecting them to change how that works.

 
Thug Hunter said:
@faatal

Could you explain this to me? One thing I noticed about 7 Days is the fact that turning the graphics down usually doesn't have an impact on performance on high loads such as lots of zombies or uniquely place bocks placed by the player or removed. Matter of fact, my GPU would be more utilized by the game under less stress (less blocks and zombies) which would yield more frames despite the graphical setting I was at. So what I assume is the rendering loop is the same as the game loop for calculations? So the game won't render until its done calculating all the blocks and zombies? Cause it doesn't matter how much I turn down the graphics or how low resolution I make the game. After reaching 40 zombies or destroying and placing lots of blocks. I would get a performance decrease despite the graphics settings being high or low. Or it would be very minimal that it would not make a difference. Also the game seems to do fine with 30 zombies, but anymore zombies give exponentially less performance in frames, and some zombies would not respond to the player as if there is a hard limit. So is all the zombie pathing calculated separately or together? And if all these cases previously shown has something to do with how the game was initially made, how hard would it be to rework how pathing is calculated and how the game loop works. I don't know how your games works fully and I could be wrong, I don't know much about unity or use unity. So take this with salt because the point I'm trying to get is the less hardware your game needs to run, the more people can play it, but that also includes the ability for the game to utilize all of the processing power of the hardware.
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Many interactions between game code and Unity have to be done on the main thread, so that often is the FPS bottleneck regardless of what the GPU is doing.

Zombie pathing is complex. There is shared data calculated around each player or group of players and then that shared data is used by each AI to find a path, but that step runs on one or more threads. A21 has changes to throttle the path request rates based on AI distance from players, but is buggy and not done.

 
Good day everyone!) I don't know if this question has been asked before... I wonder if there will be new crates and vaults that the player can make? or can the type of existing ones be changed?

 
This might have been answered previously, but I remember that during November there was hope that A21 would get released before Christmas. That obviously didn't happen, but we're close to being in April now. 

Without going into the "when will you release the kraken" discussion, could you guys explain what lead to that big of a planning delay ?

 
beHypE said:
This might have been answered previously, but I remember that during November there was hope that A21 would get released before Christmas. That obviously didn't happen, but we're close to being in April now.
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Well the hope that the game will be released before Christmas is still there. It's just Christmas 2023.

 
I might have mentioned this a while back but it'd be cool if there was like a Harpoon Rope weapon mod that let you throw spears for the power attack again while just having it automatically return to the player after it lands. Would still be a trade off because of it being slower than power stabbing but having options for different situations would be nice.

 
faatal said:
Many interactions between game code and Unity have to be done on the main thread, so that often is the FPS bottleneck regardless of what the GPU is doing.

Zombie pathing is complex. There is shared data calculated around each player or group of players and then that shared data is used by each AI to find a path, but that step runs on one or more threads. A21 has changes to throttle the path request rates based on AI distance from players, but is buggy and not done.
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From what I understand from your comment and previous reports @faatal, there are two serious bugs that need to be fixed for the release of A21:
This zombie AI error you mentioned and the random hole in the ground of POI when quest resetting. Please, can you share with us something about the status of this second bug? (sorry if that was answered previously)
Thank you and good work 

 
beHypE said:
This might have been answered previously, but I remember that during November there was hope that A21 would get released before Christmas. That obviously didn't happen, but we're close to being in April now. 

Without going into the "when will you release the kraken" discussion, could you guys explain what lead to that big of a planning delay ?
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I think the hope of release by Christmas was a community hope and not in any way promoted by TFP, so there isn't a "planning delay".  They have always said "when it's done", so there no one telling us any expected release dates.  As they have mentioned here, they are working on critical bugs and there won't be a release until those are fixed.  The fact that we are seeing more screenshots suggests it may be getting closer, but they'll likely still do the normal streams and stuff before release, so even if they were ready now, we'd still be a month or so off (not sure the normal timeframe for those lead-ups to release).  Of course, they may be showing more screenshots just to calm people down and it may not have anything to do with being close to release. :)

Btw, people always assume "by Christmas" for a game that is near release (even just a new alpha in this case) because they expect companies to get things out for the Steam sale.  But TFP doesn't seem to be concerned about trying to jump through the Steam sale hoops, which is a good thing because companies that do are often ones that release games with game-breaking bugs that weren't fixed because they ran out of time before the deadline to be in the sale.

 
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beHypE said:
This might have been answered previously, but I remember that during November there was hope that A21 would get released before Christmas. That obviously didn't happen, but we're close to being in April now. 

Without going into the "when will you release the kraken" discussion, could you guys explain what lead to that big of a planning delay ?
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Features not being as far along as we hoped. We don't primarily schedule features based on time, but functionality, so it takes as long as it does for that functionality to work. Many devs would cut features to hit a time slot. We take the time, within reason, to get the features we want.

 
Abunai said:
From what I understand from your comment and previous reports @faatal, there are two serious bugs that need to be fixed for the release of A21:
This zombie AI error you mentioned and the random hole in the ground of POI when quest resetting. Please, can you share with us something about the status of this second bug? (sorry if that was answered previously)
Thank you and good work 
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Those are only my bugs and not all of my bugs/tasks as I currently have 12 must fixes in various states of completion and across the team there are 67. That number does not mean a lot, as half of them do not need to be done for experimental and new ones get added regularly.

Then there are last minute tweaks, like today it came up that sleeper volumes spawn using the game stage of the player triggering the volume, so I am trying to test a change that adds in players nearby, similar to how blood moons spawning makes parties from nearby players for game stage calc.

 
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