PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

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RWG was pregenned before yes. but in less compacted data causing run time distance calculations for say, road asphault.
Now this is being precalculated and added to an image map that contains the roads. The height part of them is stored in the world height map.

The way the old RWG generated vs the new way is a bit too large of a topic to cover in passive discussion. I put pregenerated in quotes because it's simply outputting the same biome map, terrain map, etc. like navezgane has. Generation takes about as long as it did before but once it's done all will be output to maps for quicker loading. Since so much was done with the data loader for the navezgane format and much more is being done for distant trees and terrain it only made sense to match it up to that.

We are NOT generating all the chunks. That's just not going to be doable for reasons others have already stated, takes too long. But outputting it in the same dtm, biome map, prefabs.xml etc. only stands to gain speed and also gets all the features without me having to do special coding specifically for RWG.

Feel free to think over pros and cons but I'm 100% certain of what I'm doing. Just sit back and relax. :)
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No one will ever understand the power of

"QUOTES "

MTFGA

 
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... :)
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Thank you for the Update and i will happily wait for the next details :)

 
RWG was pregenned before yes. but in less compacted data causing run time distance calculations for say, road asphault.
Now this is being precalculated and added to an image map that contains the roads. The height part of them is stored in the world height map.

The way the old RWG generated vs the new way is a bit too large of a topic to cover in passive discussion. I put pregenerated in quotes because it's simply outputting the same biome map, terrain map, etc. like navezgane has. Generation takes about as long as it did before but once it's done all will be output to maps for quicker loading. Since so much was done with the data loader for the navezgane format and much more is being done for distant trees and terrain it only made sense to match it up to that.

We are NOT generating all the chunks. That's just not going to be doable for reasons others have already stated, takes too long. But outputting it in the same dtm, biome map, prefabs.xml etc. only stands to gain speed and also gets all the features without me having to do special coding specifically for RWG.

Feel free to think over pros and cons but I'm 100% certain of what I'm doing. Just sit back and relax. :)
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Awesome stuff, you are actually getting me excited for A17, and that's not easy to do - just ask Roland :) . I know this is a long shot.. but is there any chance that in A17 distant trees and POI's will update or appear/disappear as changes are made or things are built or destroyed?

 
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... :)
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Oh, that's nice. :)

How about on generation caching? (Module :

Cache)

 
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... :)
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I am intersted, Its nice to see one of my fave parts of the game randomgen getting some much needed TLC. Maybe you released that extra info already, maybe not, i'll check the back posts from where this appears.

 
You hosting a co-op game? Every time I host a co-op game and the game has been running for a number of hours, I get the perma-fog bug where I will have severe fog on my system but my husband has no fog on his system even when his character is standing right beside mine. They only way to get rid of the fog is to shutdown the host client and reload.
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No, it was just a single player game, but I might try that close game and reopen thing see if it clears it up.

 
I'm not sure "fixing water" is being looked at in a fair way overall. I think TFP want's a more permanent fix that looks great in real time. I don't think I've seen a game yet that handles terrain manipulation and water great in real time. I think a simpler fix to just get things working and to avoid scenarios where there's simply an empty water block sitting around, is to just throttling, heavily, the water fill mechanics. Let the system move through the fill slowly. As for rivers (start, end), pools/springs, elevation changes, etc, short term just do what you're doing now. I thought there were mechanics in place that let a block know if it was placed or affected by world gen or by user. If so, then only load fill on user impacted blocks.
I dunno. Just seems like the whole water topic has been an all or nothing topic. But really, some minor improvements would go a long way. And for Modders, maybe fixing water blocks to better handle buoyancy. Seems like a nice to have to me, but would make for some cool water vehicles to add to TFP's collection. Who doesn't want a swamp runner? :-D
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Terraria does water very well, but thats in 2d so its probally alot easier to do than in something like 7 days to die.

 
Just thinking through the pros and cons here... Will it take longer when first starting a new RWG world? When people pregenerate the whole map now with visitmap, they report it takes around 30 hours. Obviously it won’t be that bad or you wouldn’t do it. But it’d take a thousand-fold optimization to stay as fast as in A16 where you’re not pregenerating.
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I think thats because they have to be sitting in game loaded in the map to do that, which means the system is already using most of the games resources to show the graphics and such. If it pre-gens it, this will be done before you even load into the world, so it should be MUCH faster. My guess is once you get in the world, it'll keep pregening and saving it in the background as you play, so you can get in faster.

 
Terraria does water very well, but thats in 2d so its probally alot easier to do than in something like 7 days to die.
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Terraria style water in 3d would be great :-)

It would probably be slow as hell and I'm not really sure how river mechanics would work but it's an idea worth exploring.

 
Terraria style water in 3d would be great :-)
It would probably be slow as hell and I'm not really sure how river mechanics would work but it's an idea worth exploring.
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I don't think it'd work to well in 7dtd with it being a 3d space, the processing power to get it to move like terraria's would be pretty high especally with voxels. I still say making it like minecraft water would be best as a for now. Each water block is a source, but it can't go higher than what it is to prevent overflows and only flows out so many blocks. Its hard to figure out. I used to remember being able to make a moat in 7dtd with 1 bucket with water with some smart wood frame placements.

 
I don't think it'd work to well in 7dtd with it being a 3d space, the processing power to get it to move like terraria's would be pretty high especally with voxels. I still say making it like minecraft water would be best as a for now. Each water block is a source, but it can't go higher than what it is to prevent overflows and only flows out so many blocks. Its hard to figure out. I used to remember being able to make a moat in 7dtd with 1 bucket with water with some smart wood frame placements.
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Terraria style would be a good solution to the griefing problem, the only way to flood someones base is to build some sort of canal system to divert a lake. At that point it stops being griefing and goes into the realms of a legitimate pvp strategy.

 
Terraria style water in 3d would be great :-).
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= Portal Knights

However Portal Knights breaks its world into small floating chunks so there is much less processing power required. The water physics are amazing though. Terraria water in 3d sums it up perfectly.

 
= Portal Knights
However Portal Knights breaks its world into small floating chunks so there is much less processing power required. The water physics are amazing though. Terraria water in 3d sums it up perfectly.
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There may be less strain on system resources than you think, as far as I know terraria optimizes lakes by having static bodies of water behave essentially as a single object with only its surface blocks changing depth. That would remove _a lot_ of the water blocks from the calculations.

It could be an option, any movement of water large enough to strain a Portal Knights style system is going to strain a minecraft style system.

 
There may be less strain on system resources than you think, as far as I know terraria optimizes lakes by having static bodies of water behave essentially as a single object with only its surface blocks changing depth. That would remove _a lot_ of the water blocks from the calculations.
It could be an option, any movement of water large enough to strain a Portal Knights style system is going to strain a minecraft style system.
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I also think that water falling in PK is also just a visual effect much like the smoke from the supply drop crates rather than actual voxels falling. As a higher up basin empties and fills up a lower basin the visual waterfall effect is “on” and when the higher basin is empty the effect turns off. I think something like that could be a must just based on everyone’s favorite “waterfall” just south of the bridge near the gas station in the Navezgane desert. Disturb that sucker and it is slideshow time for several minutes while all the voxels fall and resettle.

 
Yeah if they could do it like Portal Knights , I would take that as much better water...but who knows what issues on performance...

Anyways...MOAR infos and stuffz on A17!

I am more excited by the AI changes faatal has mentioned then the other features so far...

 
I also think that water falling in PK is also just a visual effect much like the smoke from the supply drop crates rather than actual voxels falling. As a higher up basin empties and fills up a lower basin the visual waterfall effect is “on” and when the higher basin is empty the effect turns off. I think something like that could be a must just based on everyone’s favorite “waterfall” just south of the bridge near the gas station in the Navezgane desert. Disturb that sucker and it is slideshow time for several minutes while all the voxels fall and resettle.
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With luck the pimps will have upgraded to the latest version of unity by then and can use the c# job system. Any water system would benefit from it, you can just stick the water system in a separate thread so it barely touches the frame-rate at all... once you've converted the essential calculations into a struct-based system of course.

Looks like unity are missing their deadline for an April release and still no sign of a struct based math library yet :-)

 
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