improving immersiveness 1

Akuman

New member
The developers are great that they started taking steps towards immersion (weather). They can also add wind, which will slow down and speed up the character's movement in a certain direction (with sound).

*The wind in the game will change the direction of rain if it is present, and will also be indicated by an arrow in the effects indicating the direction of the wind. Fuel consumption and varies greatly depending on wind direction (sound too). That is, not only the wind, but also windy weather all day long, long snow and sand storms, like fog, greatly impair visibility and movement in the direction of the wind. (Don't forget about increased loot in difficult locations).

The ability to repair weapons only if you know how to make the same with the same quality will simplify and improve the loot system, add more weapons to the loot, as well as weapon drops from police and military*

It looks like the last update worked a little with the density of tree planting. I will say that it changed little (I’ll leave the screenshots in the gallery in discord and sign them: “Pimp_Dreams911”).
There is no “forest” in the game. There are only “summer cottages” and their surroundings. *Just look at the forum cover. Is that the case?* Add locations of real dense forest to the game. You can also add swampy terrain with the sound of frogs, add small lakes, and not just huge and / or hand-made ones, add waterfalls so that in random generation rivers originating in the mountains do not look strange, add bushes (damn it!), young trees and fallen trees. 

I will add that the plain and the ennobled summer cottages are different things. In the ennobled areas there are almost no young trees and bushes. Just like in the game now. But the plain is a place without trees with tall grass (in my opinion).

Also hills. In Navezgane there are large hills that you need to climb up and down. In the "random new world" the hills are hummocks that you can only stumble over, and the mountains are normal.

As for optimization. In other games, as far as I can see, objects in the distance lose their clarity instead of disappearing. Why not do the same (square wheels, all that stuff...)? Grass that disappears fifty meters away from the player really kills immersion. Make the grass the lowest quality and put it behind the detailed one. Let the grass, trees and generally all objects in the game lose image resolution with distance. Add footprints in the snow!

As for weather conditions. If a person is overheated, you can add darkening in the eyes (black screen. The same with hunger and dehydration). Add constant sounds of freezing or overheating (shortness of breath, teeth chattering). Add drops and streams of sweat on the screen in the desert. I also suggest adding the loss of weapons from hands (trembling limbs) when switching the tool belt if the character is very cold (notify with a scream of the character). Increase the time to change the item on the belt when overheating. Also (if radiation appeared in the game, I have not looked yet) disfigure the character's skin, add a random filter on the view and wheezing sounds, as well as death from severe radiation contamination and during self-arson too. In case of overheating, fatigue, hunger, thirst, with severe freezing, add a wobble of the camera - the person takes each step with effort (with a small amount of HP too), he staggers.

Add jamming to heavily worn firearms: just a chance of clicking with a random amount of ammo, after which the weapon must be reloaded.

This is probably not the latest version of the post, it may be edited. I will mark it with an asterisk *.

 
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Just imagine how the updated repair will change the gameplay! People will have to carefully monitor their skills, as well as calculate the plan for robbing buildings with loot, so that the durability of the available weapons is enough to complete the mission. People will hunt for weapons, as it really would be in the post-apocalypse. In a multiplayer game, you can even provide repairs for money. Worn weapons can be found with the police, the military, in police stations. Hunting rifles on the balconies of houses, pistols in safes. But unworn weapons can only be obtained from safes or military bases. Currently, the game has looting without passing the location. With the new system, it will be more like a robbery in GTA 5. 

 
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The developers have already added fog in the "forest" biome, so that the snow and sand storms in the biomes are different, I will suggest the need for a respirator in the desert, so as not to suffocate. Also, because of the sand, the likelihood of weapon jamming increases. As for the snow biome, let freezing accumulate there over time during a storm, ignoring warm clothes. In the wasteland, let a separate set of armor against radiation with a reduced physical protection indicator be necessary. Let there be radiation pockets in the wasteland, where radiation will leak through the suit and drugs will be needed. Well, let a person get used to the weather conditions of each biome. The longer he lives there, the less weather conditions affect him (up to half). For people in the wasteland, you can make glowing eyes, heh.

 
Remove the tree growth function by adding the condition of using fertilizers. This way, a forest consisting of dwarf trees, bushes, mature trees and young trees will always look diverse. During a storm, with the condition of a sufficiently large number of trees on the site, let a falling tree spawn out of the player's view with a characteristic sound and a lying animation afterwards. If there are a lot of trees on the site, the player will not be able to remember which tree fell. 

Developers, if they like this idea, can let the "falling tree" event occur near the player during a storm with a five percent chance per minute. This is a roughly 50% of chance of one tree falling over 15 minutes of real time of storm. The more often the chance is calculated, the more alive the forest will feel.

 
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In the wasteland, the player will be able to cure radiation with the help of drugs. Protection from radiation will be provided by a special one-piece suit with weak physical protection and modifications (not installed on the suit). The suit will completely protect the character from regular radiation, but will let radiation through in areas of strong radiation contamination. Modifications to the armor will let through a small level of regular radiation. Drugs will only cure radiation. The level of radiation contamination reduces the maximum number of hit points of the character.
A character resistant to radiation 50% - can not be afraid of areas of strong contamination in the suit and regular radiation with modifications.
A character resistant to radiation 100% - receives suit resistance and additional restoration of stamina points in the wasteland. Not afraid of any radiation with modifications.
Also, resistance to radiation gives an increasing debuff on stamina and the number of maximum hit points in locations without radiation (heals over time). The strength of the debuff depends on the degree of resistance to radiation.

As for other biomes, when you move to another biome, the adaptation to the past will disappear over time. I don't see anything against allowing the adaptation to the desert and winter climate to exist simultaneously.

 
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Unfortunately, I don't have time to read all of this.  However, a few notes from quickly skimming it...

The latest info from faatal is that the weather update is more about biome progression and less about actual weather.  This is unfortunate, but isn't unexpected.  He mentioned stuff like coughing in the burnt forest and radiation in the wasteland.  So I wouldn't expect to see any real weather unless things change between now and 2.0.

Things already are viewed at a distance using imposters (less detailed blocks). If things are too far away, they will disappear. That distance can be changed.  Remember that because this is a voxel game, things are going to be done differently than a game where everything is built as complete objects.  It takes a lot more to process thousands of individual blocks than a building that is a single object.

Trees can reduce performance if you have too many of them, depending on your computer.  They aren't likely to increase density.  However, they are replacing the tree models in 2.0, so maybe that will improve things enough that they may increase density a little.  If you are on PC, there are mods that increase density and even add new trees.

 
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Вещи уже видны на расстоянии с помощью импостеров (менее детализированных блоков). Если вещи находятся слишком далеко, они исчезнут. Это расстояние можно изменить. Помните, что поскольку это воксельная игра, все будет сделано иначе, чем в игре, где все построено как законченные объекты. Требуется гораздо больше времени для обработки тысяч отдельных блоков, чем для здания, которое является одним объектом.
Я не вижу смысла в обработке объектов из блоков на расстоянии, если можно заменить их простой моделью. 

Последняя информация от Faatal заключается в том, что обновление погоды больше касается развития биома, а не фактической погоды.
Конечно, я не ожидаю всего и сразу, но надеюсь, что мои предложения будут учтены.

Деревья могут снизить производительность, если их слишком много, в зависимости от вашего компьютера. Они вряд ли увеличат плотность. Однако они заменяют модели деревьев в 2.0, так что, возможно, это улучшит ситуацию настолько, что они немного увеличат плотность. Если вы играете на ПК, есть моды, которые увеличивают плотность и даже добавляют новые деревья.
Надеюсь, разработчики найдут способ сделать нормальный лес, как на скриншотах в дискорде, которые я оставил.

By the way, as far as I understand, the changes regarding the weather that I described do not affect the visual component, i.e. they should be implemented quite simply...?
Is it difficult to make a dense red and white fog with directional particles, like rain, for a snowy and desert biome?

 
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I don't see the point in processing objects from blocks at a distance if you can replace them with a simple model. 
That is just how voxel games work.  They are a lot of individual shapes, not a single object. 

By the way, as far as I understand, the changes regarding the weather that I described do not affect the visual component, i.e. they should be implemented quite simply...?

Is it difficult to make a dense red and white fog with directional particles, like rain, for a snowy and desert biome?


I was just explaining what they gave said regarding the weather update.  What could be done or how easy or difficult it is, that is what they have said about it.  Maybe it will change.  We will see.

I'm not saying you shouldn't give suggestions.  I'm just letting you know what the devs had said their plans are.

 
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The game applies 3 or 4 levels of detail (LOD) to things. You're not noticing it, but when you're farther away from things, the models are extremely low poly, as in they look like they're from an N64 game. Round wheels do become squares, and you don't have to be that far away to see it.

So they're using a combination of quality degradation and having them disappear.

It's hard to compare 7 Days to how most other games work. Most other games do not allow the player to have nearly full control to manipulate every part of the world. 

So without any legit knowledge of game development it has to be assumed that most of the things you're wanting in the game would come with a heavy cost to performance.

 
It's hard to compare 7 Days to how most other games work. Most other games do not allow the player to have nearly full control to manipulate every part of the world. 
So I would remove the destructibility of objects at a large distance (more than a hundred meters) and stop processing everything that is after the block surface. I.e. I would leave only the shell. Will this solve the performance problem?

 
So I would remove the destructibility of objects at a large distance (more than a hundred meters) and stop processing everything that is after the block surface. I.e. I would leave only the shell. Will this solve the performance problem?
I'm not a developer, but from what basic knowledge I have, I don't think that wouldn't really do anything. The destructive nature of blocks isn't something that the computer has to constantly compute. It only computes when stability has changed, i.e. the stability of a block is recalculated when you destroy surrounding blocks.

Now there is something in the game already called dynamic mesh that draws changes made to POIs at further distances. Before this was introduced, if you leveled a building in the world, it wouldn't draw those changes until you were practically right next to the POI. Now players have the option to have the game draw those a lot further, but that comes at a performance cost. If you are having serious performance issues, I would check whether you have dynamic mesh enabled and how high it is set.

 
So I would remove the destructibility of objects at a large distance (more than a hundred meters) and stop processing everything that is after the block surface. I.e. I would leave only the shell. Will this solve the performance problem?
No, that wouldn't change anything.  The game is still drawing blocks individually.  Destruction doesn't really mean anything as far as that part goes.  The game can't draw a bunch of blocks as a single object to reduce processing power because they aren't a single object.  To draw them as a single object would require more processing power to spend combining stuff into one object.  This is not going to be the same as 99% of other games out there.  This is a voxel game, meaning everything is individual blocks and so are going to be treated that way.  This does mean a lot more CPU requirements than other games.  Most games require GPU more than CPU, but that won't be the case with a voxel game like this.

Meshes help to draw things at once, but come at a significant performance cost.  Normally, you only have meshes set to cover your base (where your land claim is) so that you can see your base at a distance, but you wouldn't want to use it anywhere else because it would severely drop your performance.

 
Added screenshots from a visually similar game to show how bushes can change the feel of the game.  Gallery in discord: Pimp_Dreams911

 
So I would remove the destructibility of objects at a large distance (more than a hundred meters) and stop processing everything that is after the block surface. I.e. I would leave only the shell. Will this solve the performance problem?
They've already done it. Take down a mountain. From a distance it will still be a mountain, but as you get closer it will disappear.

 
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