PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

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Hey Skippy,
No disrespect meant. I know not everyone reads every single post as they try to catch up on all the posts so I will break it down for you and everyone else who are wondering what happened.

In June Madmole said in a video that he was hopeful that they would be done with A17 by the end of July. He admitted that it was a guess but that it was his estimate on what he felt would be possible.

In early July the team made the choice to upgrade to Unity 2018.2 because at first glance it appeared that it would have some solid performance benefits and no major inconsistencies from the previous version. It was a risk but one they felt was worth it for the benefits. They were right about the benefits but they were wrong about inconsistencies. It turned out their shaders became incompatible and needed to be redone. This caused a delay much longer than they anticipated.

Towards the end of July, as people were submitting bug fixes and uploading new art assets from their local builds to the shared build the magnitude of new art assets overwhelmed the atlases that they use. This has caused another unforeseen delay as they have had to find an alternative solution to be able to include all the new art in the game. They have found a solution and are doing that conversion. The bad news is the delay it caused but the good news is that all the new content that will be included in A17 is awesome and will be able to be supported.

At the end of July when I knew that Madmole's guess was going to be wrong I changed the date to August which caused an eruption from a segment of the community who thought that "hope" and "guess" and "estimate" really meant "promise" and "vow" and "set in stone". Then when August 1st came and all the "It's August where is it?" posts started appearing I changed it to "August or....." so that people would know that even August was just an estimate. But people went ballistic and the dev diary went off the rails. I had to move over 150 posts out of this thread all because some people couldn't understand the difference between "Maybe" and "Definitely".

That is how "It's done when its done" came about. I realized that the immature segment would never understand the concept of "estimate" and if they were going to be mad no matter what then I didn't want to have to deal with constantly updating the date. I added the smilie because someone thought the phrase sounded petulant and passive aggressive and smilies always make forum posts better. Right?

But now....lol....we have people trying to assign special meaning to the smilie...

It will be done just as soon as the unforeseen issues are handled and the known bugs that are considered show-stoppers are squished. There aren't going to be any more Unity updates before A17 and they know the full extent of the massive amount of new content and have a framework that can support it all. They are not holding out on us and stringing us along. They will get it into our hands at the soonest possible moment they can.
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So what you are saying is that they thought it would be a good idea to upgrade the engine a month before you wanna release an big update. Cause what should go wrong. Best Idea ever.

 
Hmmm it's too bad that a single core Intel can still rip that thing a new one when it comes to gaming. your number of cores doesn't mean crap when games don't use them! Not to mention most things don't take advantage of 32 cores. so you're buying yourself a affordable transport and you don't have the license to drive it.
Not to mention your "affordable" processor is estimated to be about 1700 dollars. my 400 dollar intel processor will still out perform that monostrosity of a cpu in games.
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Might do a little reading. Even this game does and does not use All the cores.

 
The new unity c# job system can use as many cores as you have, assuming you set it up correctly to use them.
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Given the nature of how cores are utilised in a game environment, that'd be very messy wouldn't it? I assume 7DTD would only use 2.. one for sound, the other for everything else? :x

( Been a while.. ;d )

 
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Roland keeps making blank posts and people keep replying to them about how cool they are...

I've tried disabling everything in my browser that possibly could or even couldn't be interfering with them but they're still blank...

And it keeps happening and people keep talking about them...

I THENK IEM LOSING MAI MYYYYYNDD!

 
Given the nature of how cores are utilised in a game environment, that'd be very messy wouldn't it? I assume 7DTD would only use 2.. one for sound, the other for everything else? :x
( Been a while.. ;d )
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That's how it used to work to a large extent but recently unity has been changing their own internal system to use more threads. They've opened up this system to the public which allows them to multi-thread a lot of things in a way that would have been very difficult to do before. In certain circumstances, if set up correctly, the job system will simply count the number of cores available and automatically split the work between them.

Have you accidentally, or intentionally, blocked Rolands posts?

 
Might do a little reading. Even this game does and does not use All the cores.
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Since I have done a lot of reading, I may suggest you do the same :) It's technically using more than one core, but it's not assigning tasks to each. So yet, my intel still beats out the AMD multicores on 3dmark constantly, and i'ts over a year old now.

*Edited. But thanks to Unity, we may see that change, and that's exciting for games like these. Multithreaded game developing is no joke.

 
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No it's something to do with the last few posts with the pics from MM's tweets. I see all the text posts. I assume it's something with my firefox add-ons but even when I disable everything they're still blank. I just went back now and checked and it's still not working. Maybe you fixed my permissions with other pictures that I sometimes can't see full-size though. :)

I remember on another website twitter links started giving me some sort of message about disabling adblock stuff recently, but it displays as a link I can follow. But like I said, even turning all that off isn't working here. I get some funny quirks with my browser now and then, some things just don't work.

No big deal I suppose, and I followed the links other people posted to see the pictures that way. It's just really funny seeing a post that is just a blank box, and then a whole bunch of people quote it and it's just a blank box inside a quote lol.

 
Having multiple threads CAN entice the OS to run them on separate cores, but not necessarily. I cant think how you would force each thread to run on a separate core.

 
[Detailed explanation about how development works and moving targets]
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I guess it would be fairly safe to say that it will probably be done this year :)

I actually don't mind (I still am looking forward to A17), as I know how you can realize that you can do something a lot better and guess it won't take a long time to change, then end up taking a lot longer, realizing there is something else you can change...

But in the end it's worth it, and that is what counts :)

 
No it's something to do with the last few posts with the pics from MM's tweets. I see all the text posts. I assume it's something with my firefox add-ons but even when I disable everything they're still blank. I just went back now and checked and it's still not working. Maybe you fixed my permissions with other pictures that I sometimes can't see full-size though. :)
I remember on another website twitter links started giving me some sort of message about disabling adblock stuff recently, but it displays as a link I can follow. But like I said, even turning all that off isn't working here. I get some funny quirks with my browser now and then, some things just don't work.

No big deal I suppose, and I followed the links other people posted to see the pictures that way. It's just really funny seeing a post that is just a blank box, and then a whole bunch of people quote it and it's just a blank box inside a quote lol.
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test to see if addons by... (this is temp and wont change any settings)

clicking on Help at top of FF Browser

click on Restart with add-ons disabled

you will receive 2 dialogue boxes - confirm both as they are letting you know that addons are disabled

it will resume on the page you left off at. see if that helps, if not restart browser to turn back on.

i have FF Quantum 61.0.2 (64 bit) and no issues.

 
Hi Guys, I just wanted open up discussion of Alpha 17. Sorry we have been tight lipped about it, but I wanted to try something different this time where we talk about finished or work in progress features rather than stuff we simply planned. This leads to less frustration because usually once something is started we finish it, where its easy to plan a bunch of stuff and have it slip through the cracks, which is disappointing for all of us.
I will say we're ramping up the team, we've hired two new senior programmers, a concept artist, an environment artist, a designer, and we have about 5 new full time world builders. I'll begin showing stuff on youtube real soon. I have two keyboards hooked up at the same time now so I can annoy people if I want, or use the quiet keyboard if I want :)

NOTE: No release date will be estimated. There have been some unforeseen delays. It will be done when the issues are solved and the known bugs have been fixed.

A17 News: Use these links to skip to the parts of the A17 thread where developers appear!
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Fair enough You guys, stuff the delays. Its ready when its ready. I've seen this grow from the start and its amazing what developed since you began. Hats off to you Madmole & TFP

 
Having multiple threads CAN entice the OS to run them on separate cores, but not necessarily. I cant think how you would force each thread to run on a separate core.
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Simply fill the thread so it's only possible to use a new core. Before you mention this is a c++ answer it should be noted that the unity job system is also c++.

"make 4 infinite loops and run them in 4 different threads. You will see 4 CPUs being used."

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38962563/how-can-i-run-4-threads-each-on-a-different-coreparallelism

 
So what you are saying is that they thought it would be a good idea to upgrade the engine a month before you wanna release an big update. Cause what should go wrong. Best Idea ever.
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A better quality release?

 
Don't be surprised if you find a severed horse head in your bed. It's exactly this kind of smartass reply that lead to unpleasant situations... :nono:

Edit:

Damn, 47 new pages since my last comment. I am too slow for this thread.
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That wasn’t smartass. That was answering your question under the table using a pop culture reference. At least one person responded showing that they “got it”.

 
test to see if addons by... (this is temp and wont change any settings)
clicking on Help at top of FF Browser

click on Restart with add-ons disabled

you will receive 2 dialogue boxes - confirm both as they are letting you know that addons are disabled

it will resume on the page you left off at. see if that helps, if not restart browser to turn back on.

i have FF Quantum 61.0.2 (64 bit) and no issues.
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Yep, that fixes it and confirms it's one of my add-ons. Now I can try completely disabling them one at a time to try to figure out which one is causing it... but I'll probably turn it back on anyway once I figure out the culprit because I'll like what it does more than I like embedded pictures. :)

Thanks for the suggestion.

 
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