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.