7 Days To Die Dev Tracker

1 No. I consider vehicle physics to be close to gold. There are a few issues like excess wobble to the sides on 2 wheelers, but that is a fix. Sounds may get an update, but they are fine to me other than a bug or two with how they play.

2 We already support DX12 and Vulkan. How well it works, mostly depends on Unity. Each year we update to the next Unity LTS and it seems to get better. A22 is on Unity 2022 LTS.

3 Not much from what I have seen but that could change in future Unity versions.

4 Not sure. Have not seen any yet.

5 It is possible, but not A22.

6 Not yet decided.

7 Sure!

Because that is complicated. You have to spawn in a tunnel POI along the road. The distances vary greatly, so length of POI would have to stretch or select from canned sizes and they can't be arbitrarily rotated like roads are. It could tunnel through the chunks, but chunks don't exist at...

Correct. Road carving is not tunneling. It is pushing terrain heights down and smoothing around it to make a more reasonably sloped road, so you can drive up it without the vehicle stopping.

Vehicles physics may get minor tweaks, but they should not be getting any major changes. Sounds have not changed. No UI changes in 22.

Less RAM has been the biggest issue, especially on XBox Series S. We have reduced memory usage of many different systems. Art is now getting optimization attention to use less memory.

This time around, the console version is sharing the same project files as PC/Mac/Linux, so it is all the same, except for occasional checks in code for required differences. A good example is file system access. PS5 and XBox each have different systems and rules to read/write files than PC/Mac/Linux.

The gyrocopter has a new model with a passenger seat that I will be replacing the old model with, when I get to it. It will still fly the same, as it is a gryocopter, not helicopter. If we add a helicopter some day, that would fly like a helicopter.

Many, plus many console programmers, but we all have our areas we work in. We lost two successive programmers working on player body/outfits/equipment, leaving Lathan and I to finish it. We have a new graphics programmer doing skin/hair shaders and mesh work and other gfx tech, but that is a different area.

What happened to a quick A22 was what often happens to an alpha. A single large feature ends up taking a long time. The new player models, shaders, hair, animations and outfits was a big undertaking and has caused a lot of bugs. We have had two major programming issues and now the game play programming portions of it are left to Lathan and I to finish. I am currently fixing helmet lights that got screwed up by how equipment objects are built vs events being fired. Player hand/feet IK is broken on vehicles due to using a new Unity IK system, which I need to port our code over to. We have a ways to go.

Burnt forest was never removed. The biome was removed from RWG and adding it back only took a few hours and that includes code cleanup, so there is that benefit too.

Maybe someday, but not for A22.

That would be nice. We talked about it the other day, but I have not looked at it yet. The spawn percents also need testing for accuracy/correctness.

Someone suggested it and it can work with progression. I could do forest in the center with a few changes and that would work for progression too. It could end up as an option.

Because some of us like it and as it was never removed from xml and still in Navezgane it was decided to just keep it and if we keep it, then RWG should use it.

Don't think plains are happening.

I've not heard mention of that.

My goal is good clean random worlds from any seed that meet our long term biome progression goals and generate fast.

Bug fixing and polish is primarily what it needs. A few new features may sneak in.

RWG uses tiles for many things. Biome tiles were 1024 squares. Now 256.

I added the burnt forest back to RWG today. Seems to be generating correctly now after a few bug fixes.

Not planned for A22, but would be nice someday. I did remake the biome filler stamp today to go with the new biome gen algorithm.

These are my recent RWG changes:

Added RWG preview camera moves 10x speed with shift key and clamps near ground.
Changed RWG preview camera move up/down to camera relative and C key also moves down.
Added RWG preview left click resets camera.
Fixed RWG preview camera jittering when looking past down and move rate varying with FPS.
Improved RWG Creation UI layout.

Added RWG highways can path across and carve into mountains (steep slope check often made no road!).
Added RWG country road corner smoothing (50% of highway).
Improved RWG road smoothing, blending and processing speed.
Fixed RWG road pixel precision (was offset and dirt edges not consistent).
Fixed RWG road line segments adjusting the same and/or missing pixels (starting point circles now in line...

They are doing preset parts, so you would pick a head and body and then vary some aspects like hair.

Roads are not planned to be changed unless we stumble on something or need to fix a bug. I did speed up road gen speeds about 3x, so I can now make an 8k world with default settings in <50 seconds. I do have a fast PC.

Looking better, but running worse is often how it goes. In this case it may cost a few FPS, but it is not a final tweaked feature yet. The lower quality shadow settings may have contact shadows disabled.

I have not posted in a while, so here is some info for January:

RWG is getting some improvements for A22. Alloc and I have reduced memory use a huge amount. I have also been working on performance with stamping now many times faster. I plan on looking at road generation speed next as is the slowest system now. Better messaging. Some fixes for seeds not being consistent and possibly other bugs like biomes not matching percents.

I started prototyping sleeper volumes having a simple embedded scripting system for more control over spawning.

Our gfx programmer is adding new hair shaders, contact shadows and ambient occlusion.

The player profile editor has been updated for the new player models.

Console features are getting more functional and refined each week.

Hello Survivors!

We have a small hotfix patch for you all that solves an issue for Microsoft Store users being unable to start the game and some other small adjustments making life easier for our modders.

There should not be any impact on your savegame or currently used mods.

Changelog for A21.2 b37

Changes:

Allow descendants for fetch quest objectives to not require the quest code as meta value on the item


Log messages for executed/denied commands from clients

Fixes:

Inconsistency in XUi stamina reporting


Game launcher having issues creating data directories on Windows Store version

No one currently. May not be changed much for A22.

Development is not slower. Releasing information is slower as it is not wise saying X is coming at the beginning of an alpha, only to find months in that there was some big problem delaying the release. As we get closer to release, then features should firm up to where we can say here is a list of X, Y, Z that should be in A22.

A good example is DLSS support. I have it kind of working for Windows, BUT it has a variety of problems working with our multiple cameras and postprocessing steps, so there is a lot of trial and error getting it finished. As I don't know if this will be shippable with A22 or ever, I would not want it on any list of coming features yet.

That appears to be terrain, if so, then that is a core issue with how terrain works, so it may not be something that changes.

I have seen that and have some prototype shader changes I tried many months ago, but Unity was being a punk and it was just...

Nice to hear.

There are still more coming. A recent one I did, is block entities (props) spawning from a chunk can now happen over multiple frames which helps with tall buildings trying to spawn many hundreds of them in one frame leading to a big FPS frame spike.