Version 1.0 (Alpha 22) Dev Diary

It is not as simple as that. In tweaking rwgmixer.xml wilderness counts, I found there is a max count at which it stops successfully finding locations for for prefabs. Don't yet know what the limiting factor is. On a 10k I can get over 600 to spawn, so the Wilderness Many setting for that is now 750, up from 400. Many is now 450 on 8k. Reducing mountains also helps as that does limit some prefab locations.

Hopefully less often, but there is no guarantee some tech issue requires changing data formats in a way we can't make backwards compatible. Ideally we will load/convert what we can instead of nothing at all.

We do optimizations regularly, but that does not mean any of those optimizations will improve whatever feature or situation you are thinking about.

For example, I have some optimizations in the works for larger explosions that effect many blocks to stop them briefly using hundreds of megabytes, which can actually crash the game on consoles. This also improves FPS for the fraction of a second the explosion is initially happening, but otherwise that is not helping FPS.

Another example, RWG has a new building density limit calculation to keep complex buildings away from each other. This should help FPS in some cases, but depends on many factors.

Optimizations will continue, as that is one of my favorite things to do, but many of them will be small gains, in specific situations.

That is too bad. I can't wait to play it myself. All this work being wrapped up, so I finally get to enjoy playing it for real.

Yeah, alpha/beta/gold/whatever, early access and version numbers tend to be arbitrary these days. There is no industry standard. Games release in all manner of states and have a large variety of post launch development.

I actually like how No Man's Sky did their versioning with code names and 1.x, 2.x, ect. They may of had a rough start, but I certainly got my money's worth from that game with all the free content they have released over the years. I feel 7dtd dev is similar to theirs, except they never labeled it early access and simply chose to update the game several times a year for many years. I actually get turned off when I'm browsing new games and see "Early Access" as I never know what state it is in and tend not to buy them, so I'm glad we are removing that from 7dtd.

My memory might not be the greatest (ask my wife), but I certainly remember working on bandits. We definitely laughed when we saw them spawn out in the wild and fight a zombie or die and get eaten. Jumped when one was suddenly beating you with a club or shooting you. In the end, they needed a lot more work, so we put that on hold for higher priority tasks of which there are many. I look forward to resuming the work and then inevitably adding the settings to make them easier or turn them off after we get sick of being murdered by them.

I don't have all the details, but my initial desire for an event is a mini blood moon, that can happen any day, with some warning to get back to your base. They could also be bandits or a mega zombie. Vulture swarm. Bandits lobbing mortars at your base that you have to go out and stop. A tornado or earthquake would be cool, but you can't fight that :(. Land shark burrowing up into you base. Sand worms. Trader's wife taken hostage, so you have to get her back or pay ransom. Bandit duel where you each get one shot. Bandit drag race. Timed race to get somewhere. Bandits kidnap you and wake up in random location. I'm sure I can make some more up.

I don't think it was defined one way or the other. It works on console now as we have done a bunch of performance and memory optimizations on it, but console memory is so tight that our console programmers need to literally restart the game before you can play the map to ensure maximum free memory. Restarting/resuming is tricky and different between PS5 and Xbox and we don't want to delay more to ensure it works, so it should be in one of the early patches.

2017? No thanks, I much prefer the better version of the game we have now and the better version it will be in the future. For console it has improved so much that it might as well be a sequel.

The industry classically considers gold to be a done game that only gets bugs fixes and maybe balance adjustments. As the industry changed, expansions came along, then DLC for these gold games.

1.0 is none of that. It is the game simply not being in early access. Development continues.

One of our console programmers has done a great job improving how the controller works with the UI and gameplay and that will carry over to a reskinned UI when we get to it.

The algorithm has several parts, but basically you divide the vert count by 100,000 to get the score. sky01 is about 35. The current budget is 62. Each location looks at what POIs are around it, not tiles, and reduces the budget, while ignoring scores of 6 or below (my baseline) and then picks something within budget. Tiles can override the budget in rwgmixer, so modders can do big stuff if they want.

Many features already use threads, like chunk updates, chunk collision mesh baking, audio, saving, pathing, networking and Unity itself on things like rendering and physics.

A lot of code that interacts with Unity has to be done on the main thread and Unity itself does a lot of work on the main thread, so that is often the bottleneck. There is still room for improvement and we will make improvements as we have the time.

Kind of. Unity delayed the new terms to this year's not yet done version of Unity. You update, new terms. This update is supposed to have better gfx performance, so... hmm

Probably the same. Those colliders are actually the ragdoll bones, which could also use some work for physics reasons. I made a note, but may not get to it for 1.0.

Maybe someday or in a sequel. With the speed of RWG now, I can make a 4k map in like 10 seconds. Perfect for the "you were knocked out again and woke from your coma 6 months later!" event.

I had a feeling someone would hold that against me. "Remember 15 years ago when they said there would be land sharks?!?".

That would match your profile picture, but I think you would look better as big mamma.

We will be trying to avoid that as much as technically possible. Hopefully a save will at least partially load by converting the data we can.

Should be a mix of medium and high. It does render lower and upsample like many console games do.

I did get FSR 3 rendering working a few days ago on PC and looks good other than a few minor blur issues, but it has not been tested on Mac/Linux or console yet.

Possibly. Event Types: None, Basic, Advanced, Insane, You Will Regret This.

In 1.0, RWG will more successfully make cities/towns, so there are more of the bigger ones.

This FSR 3 port to Unity I used is 3.0 and it does not have frame generation ported. It basically works, but there is blurring on certain types of renderer objects like particles using cutout. I may not have much time left to make changes to it, so it may be off in all the presets, but manually enabled using the AA setting.

Nav gets occasional updates by Will to fix things or add POIs, so it will be somewhat different in 1.0.

We should have pregen maps on console and they will be made using the improved RWG.

None.

Yes. 1.0. No longer early access. Not gold. Not done. Continued full development exactly as if we had called it A22 and started on A23, then A24...
Many games leave early access and the devs then continue to improve them. There is nothing weird about this.

Yes, they would have been alpha 23, 24, but now something like 1.5 or 2.0.

It would be nice to break nothing, but I don't know if that is practical. Code will change to make it better or add features, so if a mod is changing code it may need updating. xml formats may continue to change as needed. Save data mostly has version numbers for the various types of data and we try to be backwards compatible reading older versions.

The term gold does not mean much anymore. When is it done? Many games release, get a few bug fixes, then no more updates, so I guess it is done. There are other games that just keep getting bugs fixes, balance changes, new features, at whatever rate the devs feeling like doing, so they don't ever seem done to me. Avorion, Grim Dawn, No Man's Sky, Empyrion, Everspace 2, Space Engineers, Rust. I play or have played all of these and look forward to some of their updates. Some were early access titles and while so, it actually encouraged me to play them less. Leaving early access tells me it is more stable, more complete and I will have a better experience.

I bought Necesse many months ago on a recommendation. On sale. Got that early access price as most games go up in price substantially when they leave early access. Played for 7 hours and stopped because I want more features. I want a more in depth experience and don't want to get burned out on the features they do have now, so I wait.

I don't feel that way about 7dtd. It has plenty of solid features for a long term experience and does not need to be called early access anymore. Like me, the early access label discourages some people from playing the game. I think it is time to be called 1.0 and follow the model of those previously mentioned games and keep making it better.

7dtd with the current feature set and assets will not run on PS4 and Xbox One. Not even close. The computer version of the game has moved beyond that hardware and it was a challenge to get it running reliably on current gen console hardware.

Every alpha we get ready for launch. 1.0 is the same getting ready for launch plus a few extra things.

We are not the Borg. We are a group of individuals. I care that it is still labeled EA.

You can literally say anything and not everyone will "buy" it. Even the greatest game in the world (whatever that is), will have 2% negative reviews. There is no pleasing everyone. If I could give everyone in the world a million dollars, I would have people complaining it was not enough or they don't want it or don't know what to do with it or I was up to no good.

We are doing a bunch of balancing and play testing right now, beta or not. We have bandits partially done, but for my part, I have tons of higher priority tasks to do before I get back to their AI. The primary programmer for RWG died, so more on my plate and we have actually made many improvements to it in the last 6 months that I am excited about.

You can't support Series X, but not run on S. You would not get approved. You can reduce settings to make it work, which we did. I think over 50% of Series market is S, so that is a lot of players.

Generally no.

Opaque windows give a mild performance boost as it hides what is behind, which allows the occlusion manager to not render some of what is behind. Chunks layers are 16x16x16m and occluded as a whole, so depending on where the window lies in chunk space, it will still be drawing closer things behind the window as they are in the same chunk with the window.

AO is not a performance boost. It it a shadowing technique that darkens ambient light in angles/corners to mimic how they tend to look.

Yes. We will try.

We are regularly cleaning things up, but it takes time and time is short. Sometimes we don't even know if something is used because the original programmer may no longer be around, so then you have to track the data use.

Many things are in the works. 😁

Should be the box, but I have not swapped it out yet.

I suppose that is when we will get to it. XeSS is not even on my radar, so that would make it not planned. These gfx features don't just drop in. They tend to cause a lot of issues.

I improved night vision months ago. White phosphorus.

I think they already made some changes to the mountain lion anims since then.

More changes for RWG coming in 1.0:

RWG highway generation uses a new algorithm.
RWG highway generation allows double connections between towns.
Added RWG big cities can have two gateways per side.
Added RWG big cities generate a highway bypass ring.

This is a 10k, many towns with 30% wasteland. Generated in 1 minute, 12 seconds. Has 4 of the new big cities.

I don't know what they did to make the video other than they used the automove camera orbit mode I added.

It is the same block vertex color AO we had years ago, we just turned it back on and tweaked it a bit. Ambient indoor/outdoor was then adjusted to compensate for indoors being darker from AO. Our screen space AO was change to a different system. Contact shadows were added as a postprocessing effect. It seems to mainly fill in light leaks we would have before and make shadows closer to the surface. Our gfx programmer did most of this work, so I don't know all the details.

I did add FSR3, but it is in an experimental state as there are some blurring issues and does not seem to work on OpenGL, so it will not be enabled by default.

I don't think I have mentioned this change before, but city cores are now square with the remaining tiles growing out from that, which makes them less likely to be weird shapes that fail to fit in their biome.

No plans for SSAA. Hopefully the CPU main thread load will continue to come down as we make more optimizations.

Cities/towns seem flat. Maybe someday we can improve that, but doubt I will have the time for 1.0.

Stamps also need improvement and more variety.

It is in 1.0. The core vomit projectile(s) are the same. You are seeing artistic improvement.

Gray - downtown

Blue - commercial

Yellow - industrial

Green - residential

Cyan - rural

Darker of those colors if remnant.

FSR AA looks much better. Like TAA, FSR AA uses camera jitter, so it is not quite the same effect in a picture or when standing still.

Is a mod. Here you can see it enabled in the background.

I have no idea. I am one of those people that turn off all game music, so not on my radar.

1 They call it FSR native. I call it FSR Ultra in the AA choices. It is FSR 3 with no upscaling and it is added.

2 DLSS is not added as I could not get the plugin I used for Unity to be stable.

3 Head mods are currently not shown.

4 Yes. The top mod slot would get toggled by F. The radial menu would allow you to toggle each.

5 Don't think so. I believe Unity needs to be set to one on launch.

6 Don't know.

7 Yes.

Even a 4k monitor has visible aliasing. I have one. When the camera or objects move you will get a shift of what a pixel renders on light/dark edges, which will cause it to pulsate. Camera jitter with multiple frame blending averages that out and certainly looks better to me.

Maybe someday, but probably not for 1.0.

Sure, I remember it. Not senile yet. Coming whenever I get to it.

RWG road pathing changes is a different system than decorations, so no plans for deco changes like that.

1. It works for us, so might work for release.

2. I don't know

3. Weight? Like install size? I don't know as each platform builds differently. Maybe 20 to 40 GBs.

We have dirt/gravel roads.

Tasks are coming along, but multiple features are still in development and quite a few bugs to fix.

Console date was defined as July when 1.0 was announced.

In any release, features are often still in development right up to experimental. Even some feature changes during experimental.

I started adding the new minibike model yesterday. That is a feature change as it shows mods added to it, but was not a high priority to me compared to many other tasks, so it has waited until now.

Features being worked on right up to an experimental is the norm.

Experimental was shooting for end of May and earlier dates before that.

I remember. We have the new challenge system which should have some similar stuff.

I can't say I know.

Yes, that could be improved, but not for 1.0 as time is being spent elsewhere. I don't know when we would get to those type of changes.

1. 3 10 86 18 1 = 118. From highest to lowest priority. As usual, not all of those will addressed for experimental or even stable and more will get added.

2. I don't know. Most of us are not gun purists and probably don't even look at the iron sights. I put the + on the target and shoot. I do realize it annoys some people and could be better.

3. It is FSR. It adds some ghosting on certain types of motion. It will probably not change for 1.0 and the older AA methods are available for those who don't like it.

4. Currently 2022.3.29, but could get a bump if we need another bug fix.

5. Falling tree improvements for old ugly I noticed yesterday.

It can make clean water with filter. It has mod slots.

It is a purist thing as in caring how real guns work vs video games. If you don't look at the iron sights, and treat it like a video game, then it works fine. Aiming by putting the + on the target and clicking a button to hopefully hit the target is pretty important. It works when used in that way, but no, it is not setup like aiming a real gun with iron sights. It would be nice to make the iron sights line up and remove the strafing gun sway as I don't like that either and maybe someday we will do that.

I actually don't care for iron sights IRL or games as they obscure part of the target. Rather have a red dot or scope so I see the whole target.

Yep, dyes work.

There is an older bug ticket for it, but it was never a MF as does not happen that often and does not break games. We have much worse things to fix.

Sorry, not planning to add bees or other insects. Bandits are planned, but while we are not doing followers, there could be friendly NPCs that attack bandits.

We will not be doing kids.

Thanks for playing!

Boss ideas are not discarded. Those are simply things we are not thinking about right now. Bandits need to be in a good place before I concern myself with special ones.

Highest and High are 3, 26, which are the ones we are trying to fix before experimental. Those numbers generally go up at first as it usually takes less time to find bugs, than fix them.

In some cases you fix a bug, but then it comes back to you. Like I fixed the mountain lions rear end jittering when turning, but then they found a case where it does it when sliding around cars, so have to figure that one out. Cue funny remarks...

Probably not for experimental. Maybe for stable or post stable.

Edit: Allan just tested and shows in green.

I don't know. Too many variables.

No happening. We are still working on a lot of bugs and tweaks. Hopefully the 24th.

Sounds like something for a sequel.

Some. Updated vehicles have less drag, so they coast more, but gravity then makes them roll downhill faster. I have a ticket for it. I will be increasing drag, when no driver.

16 high priority MFs now, so not bad.

The floating armor is from being ragdolled. Unity's rig constraints are doing something dumb that needs to be refreshed. I have that bug.

Maybe someday.

Wheel rotation looks fine for the driver as the physics are local to the driver. It is the network syncing that needs improvement.

Lathan has an RTX 3080 and was using 4k res with ultra preset and streaming. Not a combination for a great FPS, but they wanted highest quality, not FPS. Opaque glass is also not going opaque right now, so no occlusion for objects behind it, which loses some FPS.

I use a 3070ti with high preset and find it works best at 1440 with the new FSR Ultra setting. Better FPS and quality than at 4k with FSR High, but people will have to experiment for what works best for them.

New wolf is in game. Bear is waiting for me to recreate the prefab with the new mesh and adjust the colliders and ragdoll bones and test, which has to wait until I am not loaded down with bugs. Allan knows the process now, so he may get to it before me, but also is slammed with work.

I don't know the state of the art for chicken/snake/vulture as I have my priorities on the game running well.

I also forgot the rigging an artist does, which is often a different artist than who made the mesh. Also anims are different if they changed the bones or just want to do new ones, which is often another artist.

Fixed.

AI has had little changes in the last year.

Maybe. It is being looked at right now.

I don't know if that is an area we would want to focus on. The roadmap is full. End of year of coming fast.

Sleeper volumes now have a basic scripting system called Min Script. It is just a list of commands. There are commands to spawn, wait x amount of seconds or wait for a zed count and play a sound. At some point i would like to add looping with a count and reuse of sleeper spawn points.

Probably. On Windows, settings are in registry under the game name and the game name is the same.

Simple. Time. Steve and I did work on them early A21, but on the schedule for A21 and then 1.0, there was no time to get them to the quality level desired, so delayed.

It defaults to DX11. DX12 is not useful in our limited testing. The mention of DX12 should not even be in the notes.

Oh, we have watched plenty of streamers. Answer the occasional questions.

My daughter and I played about 3 hours last night. The plan was to go to the burnt forest based on my vague recollection of the RWG map. Not gotten there yet. Did the dig quest at Rekt and hit the road. Total nomads. No chests. Carry the basics and make the hard choices on what to keep. Made wasteland be the middle.

We did the tier 4 Aranea Caverns, which was a lot of fun having to be careful and outwit the zombies (nice job Earl). My usual agility build and she strength. We will make a base in either burnt forest or maybe move on through to desert. First horde will be on the roof of some building.

Trader quests progress from lower difficulty biome to highest. If the next biome is missing, you will have no destination. You will also not have the type of trader that goes with that biome. You can always wander around and find traders yourself. My daughter and I are are playing together and we only did the dig quest at Rekt, then just left the forest for the burnt forest, as I wanted something different, and just searched around until we found the big town and Jen. I had a basic memory of how RWG laid out the map. We did not even place a storage chest until day 5.

Play the game how you want, but as we add more biome progression (hazards/weather), story and end game content, it will require playing in a way where those features can chain together if you want that content to fully work.

There is no way to activate it. The image generated often freaks out and is a mess, so it is NOT usable.

I have considered that, but have had no time for it. I actually have more bug tickets now, than before experimental and they keep coming in. There is always more ideas than time, so not everything can be done.

1. I don't know. Books is Allan.

2. Correct. I did not add it as the model was done in 2 separate pieces, which code does not support and I think bicycles with armor is weird.

3. Punted to the future as no time for coding that.

Technically a bug from changes to the new player models/anims. There were actually many jumping bugs and it finally got to the state it is in now. It may be changed at some point, but I just adjusted to pressing the space bar and quickly letting go.

FSR Ultra is native. I use that, but drop screen res from 4k to 1440 as it looks better and get higher FPS than 4k with FSR high.

Sharpness does work with FSR, but 100% for FSR just does not do that much sharpening and that is as high as it allows.

Shadow quality high is using contact shadows, which is not cheap, but fixes light leaks on players and through blocks.

SSAO is now using 3rd party code and I don't know if it can run faster, but still look fine.

Gfx jobs crashed on some people's computers the last time we enabled it, so we are not yet supporting it.

I don't work on stats/perks on armor or items. That is mostly Allan. Balance is ongoing as we continue testing.

The order is currently by sorting the biome percents, so if you change the default percents to not be forest low to wasteland high, you will get a different order. The sorting may be removed in the future.

Fun.

1 Years ago...make small bear because I can, but ragdoll broken by scaling, so commented out.

2 I fixed ragdoll scaling for 1.0.

3 Allan says "why do we have small bear?". I say "because why not". Allan enables because it now works.

4 You see in game.

Fixing all the bugs in RWG is not simple.

Wasteland is the city biome. It is the nasty end game place where lots of people used to live (for now, unless it gets changed).

RWG mostly does not generate content across biomes. Biomes are each their own place.

Loot % added to todo.

A enemy health slider is not out of the question. Todo.

1 Exact percents would not actually matter as there is limited granularity in how the code/data works.

2 Dynamic caves is something I would like to do someday.

Gazz no longer works on the game. Allan does numbers for loot, items, armor and lots of other stuff.

Yes, TAA sucks and the settings were lowered because of heavy blurring on animated plants. The blurring was considered unacceptable. TAA settings were increased in 1.0 as we now have motion vectors for plants, but TAA is still not great, which is why I use FSR. FSR does have some artifacts of its own, but better than TAA.

There are ideas. Stamps are meh and need replacing/editing/adding. We have talked a bit about running water like roads, but would be problems with roads and having to do bridges, so may never happen.

Yes. The circle order will probably be changed to always be the same regardless of biome size. It may also need to seed each biome near the center, so they are near each other and would grow outwards to their percents.

When you have a big team, there are always a lot of moving parts and differences of opinion or available time.

I just finished testing SMAA and for FSR I turned it off as it is somewhat better with less flicker and blurriness. For TAA I left it on as TAA flickers more and has more jagged edges which SMAA reduces.

I also increased the sharpening defaults and divide them by 5 for TAA as TAA's sharpening is about 5 times stronger that FSR's.

It is subtle blurriness. It looks even better now. I also use FSR ultra.

No one said it was unsolvable. We have lots of bugs to look at, many of which seem more important to me as we have been playing the game just fine with jumping the way it is.

Edit: And ironically, some of us even like the auto jumping. Go figure.

We are taking 2 days off for 4th of July. Thx!

It is from motion vectors with Temporal AA or FSR. One of our console programmers is looking into it and he thinks it is from one of Unity's built in shaders which we can override to remove an offset they have in there.

1. Block AO is calculated and set on a block's vertex colors.

2. It is possible, but not likely as the time and potential overhead is not worth it to me.

3. No changes planned for that. We do have sky box images, it is just done through a shader on a dome.

4. Should be the same. We will have major releases with experimental, then stable and minor bug/feature releases between.

5. Time. I was just saying I could spend a solid month on nothing but RWG trying to fix issues and make improvements, but Q4 is coming fast and still have many tasks for pre and post 1.0.

A question for Allan. That is about design of game content. I deal with programming.

Allan fixed it.

Because I have not looked at it, since the last time I tried to fix it.

It is from these changes I made back in May (should be in the notes):

Added AI active sleepers will sometimes be awake and wander (1 in 10).
Added AI wandering sleepers use spawn position as center of wander.
Added sleeper volume trigger type Wander.

Debugging stuff I added. No more detail than that as it would spam the console.

I plan on adding more RWG options when I find the time.

It has been fixed a few times, but seems to keep coming back. Those old buildings are sure leaky.

Seems like a job for Lathan.

It could possibly just be a tint to darken it, but we have soooo much other stuff we are working on.

I don't understand what you are asking, but we are not planning on doing any kind of volumetric 3d textures.

1. I don't know what art the artists still plan to change.

2. Pretty sure that boulder is done. It will not be changing.

Probably, but I don't know the status of that art.

There would be a minor performance hit, the more wandering, but not the reason. 1 in 10 because it is a new feature that needs feedback on how it effects the game. I don't believe in making large changes and just hoping for the best. Incremental is better than yo-yoing around.

We use a professional localization company, but we also have a full time tester who is Japanese, so those get more immediate fixes.

We made some AI sound improvements last week. One of them was to play their random sounds twice as often. Another was their alert sound is deferred until closer if they are far away.

Eric did the hazmat sounds.

It tries to spawn 2 to 4 traders per biome and it would always be the same trader types per biome. Currently there is no guarantee of a trader in a biome. Traders need gateways to spawn. The smaller the world/biome, the less towns, so the less gateways, and the straight gateway conflicts as it does not have space for a trader. Yesterday I reduced the weight bonus on the 3 straights and limited them each to 1 per world, which should help. When we get full biome progression in and/or story it will need some way to force a trader in each biome.

Allan does shapes.

When screamers scream has not been changed, but there can be two of them, so maybe the other one screamed?

When a chunk is not loaded, blocks in it can't be changed and if a zombie was there, it would fall off the world.

It means nothing.

If you set the volume to Wander mode.

Small towns in RWG now have some rural tiles added as we noticed a lack of POI types in forest as some only spawn in rural. I added a rural percent value, which allows us to scale down the full ring of rurals around smaller towns.

Time is very short for 1.0, so there may not be any additional options added to RWG now. Maybe later.

I don't work on the server browser. I think we use Epic Online Services for the list and I recall it has limits on filters and the data it returns. When our console devs continue work on cross play, the functionality may change.

The story should work on random maps unless we find a technical reason to only do Nav.

I did not want worse performance, so they operate under similar rules to sleepers and it was a quick feature, so I did not spend much time on it.

The zombies would need space to wander and they don't break blocks in that mode, so they can't make space.

Regardless of story, we may be moving toward biomes being even more distinct from each other, but the design is not yet done. It will continue to change.

That is old stuff I have never seen. Probably predates me working on the game.

There was a bug where the count could be 0, which was fixed in V1.