PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[beerfly]

Video footage of the pre-alpha of 7 Days to Die III has been leaked.
[video=youtube_share;Jmr9Var-12M]

If something similar gets ingame I would love to make a pool above enemy`s underground base and watch how all electrics fail when I release the water and its base soaks up the water. Hehe.

 

[Blight]

...Over the next couple of days I will give a bit more detail on what else these changes to RWG mean for the average player, modders, and server owners. I think most will be very happy.
More to come...

If you are finish, add something like this:

:chuncky: :chuncky: :chuncky:

 

[kamer1337]

any optimizations regarding collapsing big chunks to not lag whole server?

 

[The Gronk]

IMO the only way this is happening is if Unity adds DIRECT water mechanics support for voxels to their engine. :-|
We all know that calculations made by the underlying engine of a game are waaay faster than those made by the game itself.

We do? That's... interesting news.

Not all of unity's stuff is lightning quick and great. Their terrain system hasn't been updated in far too long and there are several other alternatives which are far faster. One of which being the terrain system in 7dtd which is custom.

Wait until the 2018 update hits and everyone goes mental because their entire project has turned pink. The new shader system they've introduced is incompatible with the shader system people have been using for years now. The only solution is to rebuild all of your shaders in the new system using a pretty little graph layout which should annoy the most hardened shader coders.

 

[meganoth]

We all know that calculations made by the underlying engine of a game are waaay faster than those made by the game itself.

You probably meant to say that calculations made by the GPU in parallel are waaay faster than those made by a single CPU.

Games programmers can use the GPU as well (if they don't mind the additional coding effort) and they could generate code that is very specific to their problem while an engine usually has a one-size-fits-them-all solution for any problem.

 

[meganoth]

To put this in 7dtd terms? Unity 2018.1 has a great big fat red hp bar for enemies that TFP will mod out the day they update to it....
;-)

As it looks like TFP are going extremely fast to get things done, then what ever state it is right now is the state it will be for A17.

Also, TFP can not start second guessing themselves. What is fun to them, HAS to be what they go with. I'm sure they will let you mod it out.

Is this Moderator Aldranon putting a forum user in his place for posting a Doom and Gloom message? :smile-new:

 

[playlessNamer]

Have you planned to look over the caves and mines in next alpha?

I remember the mining in around A12. I build that mine with love, tunnels, stairs, catwalks, signs, restrooms, storages, and it growed slowly over time. This mine was part of my base and it provides me over 100 hours ressources minimum.

In actual state the mine dont exist anymore. Its just a spamgrabbing tons of ressources as fast as possible. To think about build a nice mine is ridiculous. Its way to fast to gather it, its just a spamtunneling and spamcollecting and the veins of ore have no nice direction or sense anymore.

Also i miss the nice caves to find in the world to explore. In a older version of the game there are such epic caves to find and now they are gone.

pls give us back the good old mining. Mining is slow progress, a mine has to grow slowly and go deeper and deeper over long time.

Actual its just 2mates, 2 augers and make a 100x100 hole in 20 minutes.

I really tried to not do it this way but you have no chance to build a nice mine anymore. The hole grows so fast, it looses any reason and sense in minutes.

1 big problem is the ton of gravel around ores, it creates useless holes everywhere. Gravel is a very bad indicator for ores for the gameplay.

Ore is everywhere.


In vanilla, some biomes will have zero of certain ores, though. Keep digging. =)

This post from Gazz 3 years ago shows a very good state of tunnels and mining. You can follow the direction of the ore vein and you will end up in relativly nice tunnels.

pls give the underground some love for all the miners here! thx

 

[Xrt]

I think caves and mines has been re-done for A17, think I read that somewhere.

Or at least improved upon. Though I could be wrong on both accounts 0/2

 

[sillls]

Or in other terms....go log into minecraft...place a big ball of 500+ TNT blocks and blow it up...oh the wonderful lag as you destroy the world...

I like the way you think.

 

[uowaep]

Not the same feature, I don’t think. Sticky arrows means attaching the arrow model to an arbitrary position on the actor’s surface. Bullet and knife wounds would mean changing the texture (or in severe cases the model) on part of the actor itself. The most you could do with sticky arrow tech is see the knife or bullet lodged in the actor’s body.

You could also stick a wound model to said model like they do in hollywood.

 

[sillls]

That's exactly the problem.There is no good way to look at one or a few blocks and change only those.

If you dig out a huge hole, like one of those open air bedrock bases and connect it to an infinite supply body of water, what happens?

Does water flow in there, which "Terraria water" would do? (which is one helluvalot cheaper in 2D, BTW, and Terraria has tiny bodies of water in comparison)

Does the water that flows inside become infinite supply water as well? At which point does it do that?

Because if it doesn't it remains "flowing" water and keeps costing CPU time.

Either way, water "flowing into" a huge hole is probably the worst case scenario here, akin to having a skyscraper or other large structure collapse.

There simply is no cheap way to do it and here you have to take into account that chunks can get unloaded anytime so "water filling a hole" would be suspended while no one is watching or only one half of a giant hole gets filled resulting in a huge vertical wall of water or such craziness.

Sure, it may "get better". Eventually.

But I'm certain that it will take a lot of brain sweat and work and not someone's bright idea for a quick fix. =P

Ok. So when it's flowing then it can be infinite water supply but only until the hole fills up. Then it stops flowing.

There would need to be a (water line) in which water does not flow over. Otherwise the water floods the world.

Any water above the water line would can be infinite but would not flow. So the player can (take) water from it but it wont go down.

Since all water seems to be at the same height in the game (not counting wells), that can be the water line. As for all the wells that dot the RG map, those could be preset to a specific were they are infinite but does not flow. So the player can take water from it and never drain but will never flood the world.

Osiris New Dawn has this feature when your digging up sand. You could dig all day and it won't change the shape of the ground.

So basically all water could be set to infinite but only flow if below the waterline.

OR you could just set water to infinite and not flow (or flood).

 

[uowaep]

That's exactly the problem.There is no good way to look at one or a few blocks and change only those.

If you dig out a huge hole, like one of those open air bedrock bases and connect it to an infinite supply body of water, what happens?

Does water flow in there, which "Terraria water" would do? (which is one helluvalot cheaper in 2D, BTW, and Terraria has tiny bodies of water in comparison)

Does the water that flows inside become infinite supply water as well? At which point does it do that?

Because if it doesn't it remains "flowing" water and keeps costing CPU time.

Either way, water "flowing into" a huge hole is probably the worst case scenario here, akin to having a skyscraper or other large structure collapse.

There simply is no cheap way to do it and here you have to take into account that chunks can get unloaded anytime so "water filling a hole" would be suspended while no one is watching or only one half of a giant hole gets filled resulting in a huge vertical wall of water or such craziness.

Sure, it may "get better". Eventually.

But I'm certain that it will take a lot of brain sweat and work and not someone's bright idea for a quick fix. =P

One way to handle big operations like this is to limit the game to how many iterations it can make per frame toward this calculation. The result may be very slow moving water, but at least it would be able to calculate correctly without stealing overhead from the rest of the game. The issue with unloading chunks in large cases could be handled by not unloading chunks with water until flowing has stopped, and if flowing into an unloaded area, load that chunk temporarily, or at least a small portion of it. You don't really need to keep everything in the chunks loaded, only the parts relative to water flow.

- - - Updated - - -

IMO the only way this is happening is if Unity adds DIRECT water mechanics support for voxels to their engine. :-|
We all know that calculations made by the underlying engine of a game are waaay faster than those made by the game itself.

That's not entirely true. There is some truth, but it's not as huge of an impact as you think.

 

[Anabella]

On RWG in a17:Random worlds in a17 onward will be fully "pregenerated". This means that the world generator will output the same data structure as navezgane but in a save folder. This means that any rwg world will load just as fast as navezgane going forward.

After fixing the vehicles and adding new ones it was determined that RWG's runtime code was just waaaay too slow. So now it instead gets all the data set up and exports it in a common format which allows for quicker chunk loading.

With the change to pregeneration and using the socket(tile) system over the entire world there will be some other changes as well. For the better. Over the next couple of days I will give a bit more detail on what else these changes to RWG mean for the average player, modders, and server owners. I think most will be very happy.

More to come...

That is awesome Kinyajuu. Looking forwarding to hearing all about the goodness coming from your work on this. And I am hoping that might mean we can get those lovely cave systems back that RWG use to have or something close. I am sure roads are going to get a ton of RWG love. Thanks so much for all the work and time.

- - - Updated - - -

Yep.

On the road again. Just can't wait to get back on the road again. lol

I was thinking it was more like "On a long and dusty highway".

 

[Anabella]

This is getting awkward...

hi Dagzambie <3.

That better?

- - - Updated - - -

Eep! *Runs to safe place!

LOL you are reminding me of the roadrunner mob in a game I am playing. It makes all this noise like it wants to be found then when you find it it goes running off all scared.

 

[Aldranon]

Is this Moderator Aldranon putting a forum user in his place for posting a Doom and Gloom message? :smile-new:

LOL

I've turned into Roland? Well there are worse things to turn into, I would imagine. Stale pizza comes to mind.

Oh yes, if I suddenly stop posting... Roland killed me, you will find my internet corpse where he buried the Raptor.

 

[Red Eagle LXIX]

Unless you get the water ski upgrade for it.

No, but there is ARRRRR which governs seamanship.

Water Ski Vehicle Mods confirmed for A17. Go-Go. Who needs boats when you can have a Jetski Jeep that goes true all terrain. j/k

And I'm caught up with the thread again.

Faster RWG, cool beans.

Water, I'm with others, even infinite filling water would be better than the water sinkholes until a solution could be done (I'd probably mind less if they were at least silent and did not have a drag effect beyond normal placid water instead of the effect they do have.).

 

[Jost Amman]

We do? That's... interesting news.
Not all of unity's stuff is lightning quick and great. Their terrain system hasn't been updated in far too long and there are several other alternatives which are far faster. One of which being the terrain system in 7dtd which is custom.

Wait until the 2018 update hits and everyone goes mental because their entire project has turned pink. The new shader system they've introduced is incompatible with the shader system people have been using for years now. The only solution is to rebuild all of your shaders in the new system using a pretty little graph layout which should annoy the most hardened shader coders.

I'm not talking about generic stuff, I'm talking about how water works now in 7DTD.

As far as I know 7DTD water is already a custom coded part of the game... and look at the results.

However if Unity does add voxel water physics to the engine, assuming they care to do that in an optimized and efficient way, it would be a win-win. Unity will have a nice new feature to offer to their clients while TFP will have a native voxel mechanics they will be able to use in game that will be updated and improved by Unity devs on each new release. :-]

I understand what you're saying is right on a more general level but I think that regarding the water physics we would be better off with the current custom-made code.

 

[Jost Amman]

You probably meant to say that calculations made by the GPU in parallel are waaay faster than those made by a single CPU.
Games programmers can use the GPU as well (if they don't mind the additional coding effort) and they could generate code that is very specific to their problem while an engine usually has a one-size-fits-them-all solution for any problem.

Well, common sense would suggest that a game engine company will try to code this kind of new mechanics in the most efficient and performing way they can, unless they want to damage their sales or worsen their reputation (even more). :-]

 

[The Gronk]

Well, common sense would suggest that a game engine company will try to code this kind of new mechanics in the most efficient and performing way they can, unless they want to damage their sales or worsen their reputation (even more). :-]

You're forgetting the prime motivator... money.

Unity's terrain system was bad when they first implemented it and it's been largely ignored for years now. This swiftly led to the development of a lot of free and paid alternatives, most of which were better than unity's ham-fisted attempt. Unity now makes a lot of money from these extensions without having to lift a finger, free dlc revenue for them.

What's more likely to happen is that unity will buy an existing terrain system and incorporate it into the main engine, in the same way that the "pro-builder" extension will be available in the new package manager for the 2018 build. It would save them a lot of work and they'll have an already popular system added to the engine.

 

[Roland]

Is this Moderator Aldranon putting a forum user in his place for posting a Doom and Gloom message? :smile-new:

lol...Doom and Gloom? Never. There is nothing more hopeful and exciting than having the option to mod something in or out of a game you don’t like. I give TFP full marks for giving us that ability.

I get snarky about the HP bar because I’ll never play a serious game using it. Either they will remove it once their balance testing is done because it is completely contrary to the survival aspect of the game or they’ll leave it in as an ode to classic RPG nonsense in which case I’ll wait till the HP bar removal mod is incorporated into Sphereii’s amazing and spectacular mod launcher.

Heck, for my serious play through of A17, I’ll be removing the entire HUD anyway.* It is the pinnacle of immersive and cinematic gameplay for me.

Whatever you decide to do TFP I appreciate you for allowing us to customize the experience!

*What I really mean is that I’ll be hoping the invisible HUD mod gets updated for A17 because that kind of modding is way beyond my meager skills.