7 Days To Die Dev Tracker

No, the AI is far from being done. There are no new bandits animations yet. They are using a combination of player and zombie anims, but player anims don't have root motion, so movement was hacked together and not great which leaves plenty of anim work to do.

We have talked about death penalties, but there are no changes in A21. I'd prefer a simple you are 1% infected on res.

A21 actually uses less RAM from optimizations, which was needed for console and those changes are ongoing. We have also been using more props for items and those can stream their textures, so potentially better on VRAM or at least more flexible use of VRAM.
I would go for higher clocks, but both would improve performance.

I build different bases for different builds. I got rekt on day 7 relying on my walls to keep them out until morning, I couldn't believe how fast they got in without me killing them non stop like usual. But to me getting rekt gives me motivation to try harder so I added a melee room up front this time and a few doors they will have to get through this time (in theory).

We will support dyes on the new outfit. All POIs including REKT got updated because there is now full art support to decorate them as envisioned in the concepts.

You can't make too many assumptions about random art that was shown for a future alpha, because that does not mean it will turn out that way. We have a lot of different developers, with a variety of opinions, skills and goals and they show what they think is meaningful or interesting or cool or happens to be done.

Grass has a different shader than trees and use different techniques in the shader for their animation. Trees are 2 different versions of speedtree, which have a bunch of rules and limitations for how they work, some of which we don't like. To go back in time, we would probably do them differently.

Maybe. I have not seen or heard anyone at the company talk about disappearing trees in months. Trees are in large groups with a single occludee that has to take into account the largest edge tree, which may also be moving from animation, so the bounds is an approximation. Too small, disappearing. Too big, inefficient.

There was an odd case, maybe a year ago where it looked like occludees were swapped, but was never reproduced.

There are many players on PC/Mac/Linux with worse hardware than the current gen consoles, but they can still play the game because they can turn the game settings way down. The goal for current gen consoles is to have high quality settings, with good FPS and still fit in memory, which is not an easy combination.

Many operations in Unity have to be done on the main thread, but it does get a bit less restrictive with each year's changes. Their newer tech works much better with threads, but is generally more buggy or not done and requires gutting a lot of code and rewriting how you do things, which we don't have time to do.

Probably already have well over 50... there are 3 variants of each one already, standard, feral and radiated.

I'd be ok with tint variations.
It's not that we also wouldn't want to see more zombies, it's a matter of it would delay gold even further and we're focusing on going gold.
It's one of those things that would not move the needle on sales even .01% too. New customers don't care if we add more zombies. I'm not that interested in more zombies without new behaviors. I wrote up a bunch of great zombie designs with behaviors but coders don't have time so more zombies or variations is just meh, and doesn't get us closer to gold or more sales so selling the idea is impossible, as well as we have to make room in the memory footprint for all these new bandits yet.
At best we could add a few and put them into specific biomes so that memory can handle it, and it would still be the same problem, repetitive in each biome.
Maybe we can leverage the character system to add a new zombie head to a player outfit and make some survivor zombies easily using the already in...

After how many hours has the clone army put you and your friends off? Hundreds or even thousands? Our job isn't to infinitely entertain old customers, it's to make a great game. By the time the zombies get old you would have to have a ton of hours. Minecraft has one zombie, a skeleton and a creeper, spider a blob and a few dozen other rare spawn enemies and made billions, it hasn't hurt their sales to have just one zombie skin.
I don't think there are any plans for any new zombies, but I have designs for them. There's tons of bandits coming, that will freshen up the encounters plenty. I have been asking for mud covered rotting skeleton type zombies like the later seasons of the walking dead for a while now, but again, we have enough to go gold with. We can always add more post gold or for DLCs and stuff.

We made a conscious decision 10 years ago not to do this because A, it would have been hard to look good with Voxels, and B, the game is set in Arizon...

We can ALWAYS add more zombies. Adding more zombies doesn't put a check mark on the many empty checkboxes we have on the gold list.

Most of the new outfits look the same on each sex.

LOL. That is certainly a possibility.

That is nice that modders can do that, but we need to make sure that vanilla is going to work on many years worth of PCs, Mac, Linux, consoles and lot of different GPUs. Currently, the game barely fits in Xbox Series S memory and quickly runs out as you try to play it, so memory is a great concern and we are doing a lot of work to reduce usage of. Streaming/unloading will help, but that is not a Unity strength, so some programming time is going to trying to improve that, without lag spikes loading data.

That would require a clothing mask texture being made for each zombie for the tint areas or additional textures made. Either approach would push up memory use, so that would need to be evaluated too. The artists are busy working on all the previously mentioned art.

Completely different people. The various water changes were done by three different programmers, who can not do zombie art.

The game tick rate is .05 ms, so that might be what your were seeing. Don't know where you got .01 from as most code runs at frame rate, physics fixed update rate .02 ms, or the previously mentioned tick rate.

We are trying to finish A21, so certainly not wanting to make large engine changes now.

I didn't get some of the other things you were saying, but thanks for info.

Well, the goal would be to give you reasons to not want to be in the water. 🌊

Definitely. Games with many features grow massively as they are developed, because at the start they don't have all those features and often when features are added they are basic and then grow over time.

The water simulation changes don't really effect the raft. It could have worked with the old water as well as the new. Large bodies of water are just idle voxels in the new simulation. Holes would cause the raft to hit a bump, but large bodies in the old sim rarely had holes in them.

The raft model has been in the project for years and the plan was to eventually do something with it. I made the vehicle system generic enough to support vehicles floating on water. I always have dozens of tasks I could work on, but some days you just want to have fun with something new, so back in September I spent a day setting up the prefab and xml to make it work and it does.

I showed it to the team and we had a laugh about what we could do with it someday, but it needs many more days to polish it up, so it was not deemed to be something we would do for A21. That work is not wasted, but simply set aside until in can be properly finished and combined with other water related features like say a shark and better shapes and quantities of water in the world, so you would actually want to make a raft to get around. I'd love to have a water map full of islands.

Game development often has creative rabbit trails where y...

Well....there is that raft prototype I did last year. Works, but with a few bugs. That may become a feature at some point.

Hello Survivors!

With the Experimental phase of A21 coming soon, we want to patch an issue we found during testing.
This patch only addresses a benign save game compatibility error users would encounter when returning to A20 after a session in A21 Exp.
This patch does not contain any content you may have seen in an A20.7 Twitch build, those features will roll out with A21.

Stay alert for developer stream announcements to catch the latest news about A21!

Please remember A20 save games will not work with A21 for Steam or Microsoft users, you will have to start a new game.

You will be able to catch dev streams on fubar_prime's channel.

Alternatively you find them uploaded on YouTube a short time after.