PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

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JamesKirk said:
There again the mysterious word "soon"(TM) appears
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It's the Blizzard "Soon (TM)"

faatal said:
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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So probably going to be a while yet.

 
faatal said:
Not likely. That would probably have to go through Unity and I have not seen Unity mention it.

More time seems to be spent processing data than loading it. I was just saying today, we need more improvements on processing data, because if we had infinite data read speeds, load times would probably still not be much faster.
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Sorry to bring up old topics again, but the new DirectStorage 1.1 release might solve that processing speed issue for you. Anandtech did a great little article on the 1.1 version, but here's the bits that would probably interest you.

Under current game development paradigms, the CPU can be a bottlenecking factor in scaling up I/O rates to meet what SSDs can provide, as there are significant CPU costs both to tracking so many I/O operations and for decompressing game assets before passing them on to the GPU. DirectStorage 1.1, in turn, is designed to minimize both of these loads, and ultimately, try to remove the CPU as much as possible from game asset streaming.  

By allowing GPUs to do game asset decompression, that entire process is offloaded from the CPU. This not only frees the CPU up for other tasks, but it removes a potentially critical bottleneck in game asset streaming. Because modern SSDs are so fast – on the order of hundreds of thousands of IOPS and data transfer rates hitting 7GB/second – the CPU is the weakest link between speedy SSDs and massively parallel GPUs. So under DirectStorage, the CPU is getting cut out almost entirely.
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Like you said, Unity would have to do the work of adding DirectStorage to the engine, but it sounds like something 7 Days would benefit from. Maybe give your Unity rep a nudge?

 
Riamus said:
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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I think the reason many of us had hoped it would release by Christmas is that Rick sounded optimistic that it could happen. We all pretty much knew that it was just a guess but I don't think that we thought he'd be off by 4 months.

 
falloutcloud said:
I think the reason many of us had hoped it would release by Christmas is that Rick sounded optimistic that it could happen. We all pretty much knew that it was just a guess but I don't think that we thought he'd be off by 4 months.
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I've noticed they kind of tend to say things in regards to releases that end up being very generous. It almost seems like they're out of touch with what the dev team is actually doing.

 
Laz Man said:
That's a custom tile set in Navezgane for Perishton which got some nice updates this Alpha.
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Any tiles like that with the median in the road for RWG, or is that stuff Nav only? I think having a boat load of available tiles for use in cities and towns would help break up the repetitiveness. Is there any new tiles in A21, aka more of a pool for RWG to choose from, or is it similar to A20?

 
Roland said:
Yeah, he needs a knuckle rub!
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If i'm being honest the person I remember that gave me hope was you, knucklerubber! 😄

As a player i'm obviously disappointed by the answer, because indeed it seems it's - at least - a couple months away yet. But as a developer I can only praise the mentality of your company, I wish all my projects were driven by quality metrics and not time metrics !

Time to disappear in the cloud for some weeks again. 😅

 
I'm hoping with the increase in posts on Twitter that we're drawing closer to at least an announcement of the Exp date. 

Watch them announce it on April 1st now

 
Doomofman said:
I'm hoping with the increase in posts on Twitter that we're drawing closer to at least an announcement of the Exp date. 

Watch them announce it on April 1st now
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Previously, they wrote that the one who posts content on Twitter has nothing to do with the development. so maybe he does it just to not get bored. teases

 
I wanted to convey to you, one interesting thought!
It seems to me that your concept of developing equipment, workbenches, furnaces, weapons is, in principle, not true!
The fact is that even I can’t make the machine itself on my knee. To do this, you need at least 2 machines, turning and milling. Nobody! No one can make these machines! No one can make an automatic machine, repair it, yes, make it from scratch, no.
Therefore, it is necessary not to do all this, especially after the apocalypse, there will be so much of this goodness ....
It is necessary that the player finds, machines, furnaces and so on. He brought all this to the shelter and repaired it, restored it. You can somehow learn this, do it from scratch - NEVER!
By the way, this applies to cartridges, no one can make them. Yes, according to the recipe in the game, they will be made, but they will not shoot!
And why???

 
adny said:
I wanted to convey to you, one interesting thought!
It seems to me that your concept of developing equipment, workbenches, furnaces, weapons is, in principle, not true!
The fact is that even I can’t make the machine itself on my knee. To do this, you need at least 2 machines, turning and milling. Nobody! No one can make these machines! No one can make an automatic machine, repair it, yes, make it from scratch, no.
Therefore, it is necessary not to do all this, especially after the apocalypse, there will be so much of this goodness ....
It is necessary that the player finds, machines, furnaces and so on. He brought all this to the shelter and repaired it, restored it. You can somehow learn this, do it from scratch - NEVER!
By the way, this applies to cartridges, no one can make them. Yes, according to the recipe in the game, they will be made, but they will not shoot!
And why???
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7D2D ist not a simulation. It does not try to be 100% realistic.

 
adny said:
I wanted to convey to you, one interesting thought!
It seems to me that your concept of developing equipment, workbenches, furnaces, weapons is, in principle, not true!
The fact is that even I can’t make the machine itself on my knee. To do this, you need at least 2 machines, turning and milling. Nobody! No one can make these machines! No one can make an automatic machine, repair it, yes, make it from scratch, no.
Therefore, it is necessary not to do all this, especially after the apocalypse, there will be so much of this goodness ....
It is necessary that the player finds, machines, furnaces and so on. He brought all this to the shelter and repaired it, restored it. You can somehow learn this, do it from scratch - NEVER!
By the way, this applies to cartridges, no one can make them. Yes, according to the recipe in the game, they will be made, but they will not shoot!
And why???
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Nobody can make dead bodies come back to life! NEVER! ... Well, at least not in the last 2K years  :heh:

It's just a game, but I get your point. It could be fun if the only way to have workstations would be to find them and repair them.

But it's probably a good idea, more for a mod than vanilla.

 
It would be really cool if when you cross the map boundaries of Navezgane, it goes into RWG. That way you can enjoy the best of both worlds. Also have an option to enable and disable that feature. 

 
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