PC v1.x Developer Diary

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HammerDano said:
I am Sorry, but, what I'd really like is the forth option not offered: I would like for them to continue to move forward on the content already announced and anticipated, get that out on time or close to it, and THEN add new content. I just want them to stop moving the goalposts. I have said this before, "giving" me things I didn't ask for is not a substitute for the content that was promised. I know that content is still going to take time, at least as long as the roadmap, probably a little longer...so relax...I am not making demands to finish the whole thing right now. Just asking that they stop delaying progress thru their own actions. 
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This may be already true. Not in previous alphas, but since release of the roadmap they did not add any serious features which were not on the roadmap. What they still did were bugfixes, balancing fixes, and minor graphics stuff that is probably not delaying anything because programming has always been the bottleneck. We also haven't heard anything about new 2.0 features that were not on the roadmap, though that is no guarantee. 

So why the delays? I don't know, in programming projects there are always unexpected delays. I would "blame" the porting to console as the biggest road block. For one they didn't have any experience yet in console porting so their estimates about the porting work would have a large error interval. Secondly they probably didn't expect how much they would have to change so the console would perform well (CPU and GPU are generally ok on consoles, but then it was RAM that was the biggest bottleneck and that may have got them by surprise).

 
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i really like the approach they are taking this time around, focusing on bugs and optimazations is the best thing they could have done. Honestly, i hope they dont add anything or proceed towards the roadmap untill some of the fixs and optimizations are in and yes bottleneck is the majority of the issue when adding new stuff such as bandits. 

 
meganoth said:
This may be already true. Not in previous alphas, but since release of the roadmap they did not add any serious features which were not on the roadmap. What they still did were bugfixes, balancing fixes, and minor graphics stuff that is probably not delaying anything because programming has always been the bottleneck. We also haven't heard anything about new 2.0 features that were not on the roadmap, though that is no guarantee. 

So why the delays? I don't know, in programming projects there are always unexpected delays. I would "blame" the porting to console as the biggest road block. For one they didn't have any experience yet in console porting so their estimates about the porting work would have a large error interval. Secondly they probably didn't expect how much they would have to change so the console would perform well (CPU and GPU are generally ok on consoles, but then it was RAM that was the biggest bottleneck and that may have got them by surprise).
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meganoth said:
This may be already true. Not in previous alphas, but since release of the roadmap they did not add any serious features which were not on the roadmap. What they still did were bugfixes, balancing fixes, and minor graphics stuff that is probably not delaying anything because programming has always been the bottleneck. We also haven't heard anything about new 2.0 features that were not on the roadmap, though that is no guarantee. 

So why the delays? I don't know, in programming projects there are always unexpected delays. I would "blame" the porting to console as the biggest road block. For one they didn't have any experience yet in console porting so their estimates about the porting work would have a large error interval. Secondly they probably didn't expect how much they would have to change so the console would perform well (CPU and GPU are generally ok on consoles, but then it was RAM that was the biggest bottleneck and that may have got them by surprise).
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Forgive my skepticism. I know you are trying to be encouraging. I read "may be already true" and think that is worrying. Communication has been lacking for a long time, and these guys are known for losing focus, and chasing shiny objects...and As you know, there are people on here daily, trying to sidetrack TFP into adding this or that. 

it would be nice to get some kind of update about the state of 2.0

 
Grandpa Minion said:
i really like the approach they are taking this time around, focusing on bugs and optimazations is the best thing they could have done. Honestly, i hope they dont add anything or proceed towards the roadmap untill some of the fixs and optimizations are in and yes bottleneck is the majority of the issue when adding new stuff such as bandits. 
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Well, if you are right, they would have to solve the bottleneck first anyways. I appreciate it when bugs are fixed, but, they are supposed to be...that's part of what we pay for. I suppose they don't have to be done, but, who would want another game from a company that doesn't fix their product?

 
@faatal

1. How were the shadows significantly improved (primarily at long distances in cities) in A21? SSS?
2. What are you currently working on? How is the work on 2.0 progressing?
3. What will be the most significant performance improvement in 2.0?

 
HammerDano said:
Well, if you are right, they would have to solve the bottleneck first anyways.
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one big bottleneck ive been told by coders is flowing water, the cpu has to calculate all those water blocks before moving forward with other caclculations. Im not a coder so wouldnt even to begin to understand it but what i do know flowing water alone can cause a cpu to throttle and bottleneck causing evey other calculation to be put on hold including zombies, vehicles, anything else that requires an update tick at that current time. Think about drop mining, blocks fall straight to the ground vs water which flows in all directions. It wouldnt take much water to freeze a cpu, especially if someone was building a base in the ocean or something triggering all those water blocks.

 
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Grandpa Minion said:
one big bottleneck ive been told by coders is flowing water, the cpu has to calculate all those water blocks before moving forward with other caclculations. Im not a coder so wouldnt even to begin to understand it but what i do know flowing water alone can cause a cpu to throttle and bottleneck causing evey other calculation to be put on hold including zombies, vehicles, anything else that requires an update tick at that current time. Think about drop mining, blocks fall straight to the ground vs water which flows in all directions. It wouldnt take much water to freeze a cpu, especially if someone was building a base in the ocean or something triggering all those water blocks.
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You can validate this as well if you can get one of the previous, I think it was alpha 12 patches. There was one patch where they had made a change to water, and it's ability to flow. Ended up being quite a disaster and was quickly patched out. Similar to the gore blocks not despawning during bloodmoon which caused them to fill us the fight base, and made it impossible to finish the bloodmoon both from a performance standpoint, and a gameplay standpoint.  That was also an Alpha 12 release if I recall correctly.

Water might have been Alpha 13, but I'm sure you can find some YouTube videos on it.  It was really crazy making water towers to build bases on and such.

 
faatal said:
1 Programming is not working on bandits until 2.0 is out as those of us who will be doing the work are fully working on 2.0 features, bug fixes and optimizations.
2 Getting back to the work
3 Yes, the bandit code I worked on previously has wandering bandits like wandering zombies spawn. For POIs they would switch zombies to bandits and maybe both.

4 No, but we will refine them after 3.0 like we do with a lot of features.
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More Nevermore said:
@faatal

1. How were the shadows significantly improved (primarily at long distances in cities) in A21? SSS?
2. What are you currently working on? How is the work on 2.0 progressing?
3. What will be the most significant performance improvement in 2.0?
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I quoted a recent answer from faatal since some of your questions are similar to what I asked.

 
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what would be cook with the bandits idea, is for them to have little encampments scattered a distance apart from eachother & if you get too close to them and they spot you, they'll attempt to rush you... but in the meantime, they can be sitting, conversating rubbish with eachother; perhaps even in an unknown language so it could be repeated over the span of time mixed in with other topics so it looks like a real conversation but you just can't understand it.  If they spot you, they stand up and point at you and gesture their hands to follow them to attach you... some realism compared to the brainless zombies; some human aspect to it.  Maybe the bandits will have low powered guns for small injuries to take into account perhaps newer players. perhaps a Tier level weapons depending on what level character triggers them, but not too crazy to kill player fast cause that would just get crazy and quite annoying.  The bandits can be sitting at a campfire the burns throughout the night so you can see them clearly at night as they sit around it..

 
firewalker101 said:
what would be cook with the bandits idea, is for them to have little encampments scattered a distance apart from eachother & if you get too close to them and they spot you, they'll attempt to rush you... but in the meantime, they can be sitting, conversating rubbish with eachother; perhaps even in an unknown language so it could be repeated over the span of time mixed in with other topics so it looks like a real conversation but you just can't understand it.  If they spot you, they stand up and point at you and gesture their hands to follow them to attach you... some realism compared to the brainless zombies; some human aspect to it.  Maybe the bandits will have low powered guns for small injuries to take into account perhaps newer players. perhaps a Tier level weapons depending on what level character triggers them, but not too crazy to kill player fast cause that would just get crazy and quite annoying.  The bandits can be sitting at a campfire the burns throughout the night so you can see them clearly at night as they sit around it..
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Things like this are why it is worthwhile to have NPC bandits rather than just leaving it alll to PVP and saying the best bandits are other players.  What players would be willing to sit around a campfire talking all for the purpose of creating a scenario for other players to try to sneak past them or kill them or accomplish some other task with them involved?  NPC bandits follow their directives to create fun scenarios for the players to experience that actual players wouldn’t do because at best it wouldn’t be an efficient use of their time and at worst they’d just be setting themselves up to be killed.  

 
Bandits are not even possible to add right now even if they even wanted to, people need to focus on what actually can be done and fixed.

but yeah other pvp players are the best and only option for bandits at this time..

Thinking bandits could be added in 2.0 is wishfull thinking, first the game has to get optomized to support bandits

 
Nobody thinks bandits will be added in 2.0 since they are scheduled for 3.0. 
 

Also your theory that they are impossible right now because of threads is almost certainly bogus. I played internal builds with the new bandits before they were set aside in favor of the current roadmap and they worked fine. Their AI was still rudimentary but there is no reason they can’t be implemented other than that the devs are focused on 2.0 priorities right now. 
 

Once 2.0 is out they will be putting all their focus on bandits for the 3.0 release later this year. 
 

 
..and talking of threads.... there's many overhaul mods with bandits and all manner of other stuff, and they work perfectly fine performance-wise on my lowly Dell i7-6700 cheap tower PC and equally lowly, cheapy HD1650 graphics card..

Gosh i can even go into the desert biome on any version of 7 days/any combo of mods and have sufficient FPS for the game to play...

 
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Yeah…bandits are just another entity functionally no different than animals, zombies, players, and traders. Not sure why there is a belief that something dramatic must be changed in the code for bandits to exist. Maybe @faatal can confirm or correct me on this. 

 
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Roland said:
Yeah…bandits are just another entity functionally no different than animals, zombies, players, and traders. Not sure why there is a belief that something dramatic must be changed in the code for bandits to exist. 
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 surely that is an over simplification... it was a big deal when faatal told you they figured out how to make them use cover...now they are simple?

 
meganoth said:
"even if its just simple kill a boss like 'activate quest, spawn demolisher, kill demolisher' ". You propose to add a quest that is even less "questy" than anything we have now. We had such quests already, as quests found in loot. I don't remember those quests as really adding to the game, but that is just my personal observation. Did others like them? They are also basically a kill quest just like the clear quests, just outside a poi instead of inside.

'protect a supply drop from dogs". By the same token you put restore power in with fetch/clear you should categorize that quest as a variant of the dig quest, where you are protecting your dig site.

A basic quest patterns that is not yet in 7d2d is the escort quest, but in a voxel based game this is especially difficult to implement, even non-voxel games have lots of problems with those. This is why TFP already said it it not likely they will add one.

Does anyone see another truly different quest pattern not yet implemented? (Please don't say "repair trader compound", this is just another collect 100 things-quest we have as achievements already). If not, even the new quests they will implement will look just like variants (or combinations) of existing quests to you.

By the way, as I often play a stealth AGI character I like the Restore Power quests and do them regularily.
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I don't want to kill generic zombies I want to kill bosses or special enemies in the open world. The demolisher is the closest thing to a boss we have. Killing a demo as a tier 1 quest would be fun and very challenging imo and if they add stronger boss type enemies then it will be much better. Add the Behemoth and some more mutants and we're set.

I'm pretty sure that escort quest are not very popular in the gaming community. I see them getting a lot of hate. The worst type of escort quest is when you have to follow someone and they move slightly slower than your top speed, forcing you to slow down then speed up over and over. I remember WoW escort quests where the NPC would randomly run off and attack something while walking slower than the player walk command lol

Some ideas for quests:

-Multi-stage quest similar to the starter challenge but more complex.

-High tier fetch quest with multiple objectives like 5 courier satchels or something.

-Quest to protect an airdrop from zombie attacks, the zombs go for the airdrop not the player

-Quest to go to a location and activate a wandering horde and kill them all with a specific weapon giving by the trader.

-Quest to have the player build something to attract zombies to a specific location and then survive multiple wave of attacks, you have some time to build a small structure to protect yourself. Sort of like inducing a mini-blood moon for a quest.

 
HammerDano said:
 surely that is an over simplification... it was a big deal when faatal told you they figured out how to make them use cover...now they are simple?
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I’m not saying it’s simple in that way. I’m refuting the idea that bandits are impossible to add until the game uses more threads based on Grandpa Minion having redacted conversations with mystery coders. 
 

I think bandits being able to use cover is a big deal because it’s exciting since it’s more than just “zombies with guns” AND  I also think that it doesn’t require any major overhauls of the coding to put it into the game since as I said it has already been tested internally with the existing infrastructure. 

 
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Roland said:
also think that it doesn’t require any major overhauls of the coding to put it into the game since as I said it has already been tested internally with the existing infrastructure. 
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last i checked today there are still hundreds of things they are trying to work through, not just bandits but other things that bottleneck the cpu to. Adding bandits simply isn't possible and would compound the issues dramatically if they tried. Like i said earlier to the guy who has been waiting 4+ years for bandits i feel his pain for sure but the truth is untill alot of this stuff gets fixed bandits are off the table. https://community.7daystodie.com/v1-bugs/?show=categories

 
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