V2.0 Storms Brewing Dev Diary

Yes, whether you control the servers or not makes a difference.

LOL. I knew those dates when I posted. It was 6-7 weeks out then, which I rounded up to a few months. Remember my post about using x2 or x3 time on programming task estimates? Same concept. I know how times slip.

The plan is two independent options for these.

It is more than just adding sounds. I fixed these various issues:

Fixed burnt zombie walk anim not triggering footstep sounds.
Fixed spider zombie walk and run anims not triggering footstep sounds.

Added animation triggered step sounds ignore low blend weight anims.
Added animation triggered step sounds can change step volume (float parameter. default of 0 plays at 100%).
Removed entity SoundFootstepModifier (SoundStepType replaces).
Enabled animal movement playing step sounds.

Set zombie walking footstep events to half volume (floatParameter .5).

Not really. In multiplayer you are getting info from the server over the maybe fast or slow internet. If movement was faster, it would pause your movement each time you were waiting for data, which would be annoying.

Bandits do not progress when I have a constant 10 things to do for 2.0 (and previously 1.0). And by constant, I mean every time something is done, there is something else added to the list. There is never enough time to do everything for a release, so the most important stuff wins. While I am doing that month after month, I don't do work on 3.0 or 4.0 features other than the occasion chat when someone says "hey a bandit could jump our of a bush and demand dukes" and we all dream for 10 or 20 minutes before we get back to current work.

Yes, I've spent days improving it and I am still not done.

They have a new crouch anim. They have new rules for when to crouch. Fixed a bug with the head collision offset being wrong.

I am planning on some spine bending for light ducking. Planning on path changes to allow for 1m pathing vs the current 2m tall logic they ALL use.

You can always enter any biome. It takes a few minutes for damage to start. There are ways to extend that time as well. You can also heal yourself...

Maybe. I passed your info to our sound dude.

Yes. We are not interested in a bunch of dumb zombies wandering in from all directions mindlessly beating on stuff. I consider that boring. A little known fact is, zombies actually have varying degrees of dumbness across the different types, which effects how interested they are in longer paths and block health. It is not hugely noticeable, but I find it ironic when one is beating on a wall instead of walking down to an opening, then someone on the team thinks it is a bug when they are just being dumb. So many players, so many wants.

Pathing systems are the same. Mine are system tweaks, not waste of time rewrites to already working systems.

Some of those anims are old legacy and I don't care for them. Someday be nice to remove or trigger better.

I have thought about is, but it is not currently a requirement.

That is intentional AI throttling based on distance for performance.

You can work on each biome's hazard challenges independently from each other, you just can't complete the challenge group to get the kit until you have the kit from the previous biome.

The kit is a single slot using video game magic. Picture it as whatever you want, but kit 4 protects from smoke, heat, cold, radiation, the IRS, Martians, etc.

Sure. The biome hazards are burnt forest smoke, desert heat, snow cold and wasteland radiation. Rain, snow and wind weather are only cosmetic and do nothing with hazards. The old temperature value does nothing.

If you turn it off, you will not get the debuffs from each biome. You will still have the cosmetic rain, snow and wind weather.

I don't know of any int weapon changes.

1 meter.

I don't know.

No plans I am aware of.

The old pathing system was replaced years ago and the new one does not make path points on walls, so no wall climbing. Anims could also be tricky to look right.

Zombies can attack upwards and I did fix a bug this week with them not attacking you if about 2m above them.

I did give it a thought and if done I would make it do some amount of damage, not drop you dead.

It is an item, it does have kit in the name, it only goes in the kit slot, you can't do anything else with it and it may auto equip by the time we are done with it.

No, it could contain some amount of colliders on edges and they would fit. It would also depend on the zombies character controller radius as they vary a bit.

No DX12 changes other than using a newer version of Unity. No DLSS support, but there is a chance someday.

FSR has been updated to a slightly newer version of 3.1. Based on some of the FSR setting confusion on this forum, I did get one of our programmers to add an upscaling setting to the video options, so is no longer in the AA settings.

I was not going to say anything until it was more done, but yes I started prototyping our existing storm weather being more dangerous looking and harmful to the player. That was approved yesterday and our particle artist has started doing better effects as I just did a cranked up version of snow for the snow biome. The timing was global, but is now per biome as harder biomes will probably have more frequent storms. There will be some new UI messaging telling you to take cover or get out of the biome if it is also hazardous to you as the hazard system runs in parallel with the storms, so both could be happening to you.

April 15 is a Tuesday, so that was an approximate date as we would not initially release a major new experimental on a Tuesday. An actual public release date would be a Monday, so maybe the 21st. I probably need 3 more days of work on it code/xml wise. I also have new zombie work to be finished, so it will be tight. On the other hand, we don't have to get everything perfect to start experimental, so some changes can happen during exp.

My general target is once a day with some days being skipped, but that is just a guess until the team plays it a while. They will not last anywhere near an hour of realtime.
No Man's Sky and Stalker both have similar concepts which I refer to as examples of how it could work.

Storms are in biomes.xml and per biome like this:

The buff does the damage, so that can be modded too.

I don't think so.

Yesterday I worked more on weather storms. It is happening in all biomes now, with increasing frequency/duration based on biome difficulty. Split rain and snow into light/heavy so we still have that variety which is separate from storms. Today back to finishing improvements to RWG wilderness road connections.

There is nothing weird about our rendering. Everything comes down to draw calls of which there are thousands. Many blocks use a merged mesh, meaning combined with others of the same category in their chunk to be draw in a single draw call. Combining does add overhead of making that mesh each time a block is added or removed. Many other blocks are props, which have their own renders, models, LODs and mats, which makes a draw call and because of instancing many of those of the same type can also be rendered in a single draw call. Those do not have the overhead of combining and get to use LODs to be culled at a customized distance based on their size. Everything is tradeoffs.

Turning off any type of draw calls would of course make FPS higher, but the whole point of the video in video games is to render things otherwise you would be staring at a black screen.

Sorry, no "true" fire zombie in the burnt forest. We already have the burnt zombie, but I believe there is more fire on him or her (hard to tell) 🔥.

This should be no surprise, but it will be pushed back at least a few weeks. Features not yet complete, some major bugs and heavy testing needed.

I was only stating facts as I know them and yes it should be no surprise to those who follow the game. Companies are not monolithic entities, but composed of individuals with different opinions, skills and goals. I do programming and am not an official spokesperson for the company and can not and do not make official posts, only giving out bits of info as I can. Anything I say, may or may not be correct and is generally only my opinion or what I observe.

Sure, someone could update the roadmap, but if I was making it, you would not see any dates on it as I know disclaimers are ignored by a large part of the player base.

True. Every day means more work gets done.

Yes, that was a basic estimate equivalent to saying "middle of the month" as initial experimental releases have been on Friday for streamers and the following Monday for many years now. Quiz: If I said early May or mid May or late May, could anyone guess a date?

Working on lightning right now for storms. Making it player specific for storms and not using the old weird global triggering that was averaging player positions and accidentally including non player entities. Many times when I make changes I end up rewriting parts of systems that were done years ago by programmers that no longer work here. Also trying some shader tweaks.

Next I have to get the Frostclaw temp model replaced and setup and finish his attack, which is a new type as he throws something at you.

It is pretty scary, but it does not need to damage you as you will already be taking damage from the storm.

That image is from the game. That is what the Frostclaw looks like and that screen effect is real. Andres, our particle artist, has added for each biome hazard, screen effects and screen particles. He is now doing the same for each storm type.

Basically. Storms are an extension of the weather system. They trigger based on very high precipitation amount. Precipitation, temperature, etc all ramp up and down, so you would see rain/snow before and after a storm. There will be some type of messaging, but that still needs to be done.

There are 2 levels of effects for biome hazards and the screen effect system stacks, so we can mix and match combinations.

I have the same thoughts and we have discussed it, but opinions vary. We will be doing polish changes as we wrap it all up and changes will be ongoing during experimental.

Storms will damage you, survival kits do not count as protection and being indoors will be safe.

The normal HUD is still there.

If you have a survival kit that covers the snow biome, then going out in the snow biome during regular weather you would see no screen effects. They are shown to tell you something bad is happening.

There is no clothing. Wetness does not matter. There are specific drinks for each biome's hazards. The only protection from storms is to go indoors. We have talked about a future item that gives more time before the storm damage starts.

No protection in vehicles. That could change, but the only enclosed vehicle is the 4x4 anyway. Being underground is being inside. Rain and snow particles inside has to do with particle collision issues and nothing to do with the player detecting if inside.

There is code to check areas of blocks to determine if any location is an interior. It is not perfect, but it works well enough and is tolerant of holes in walls or even entire walls missing as you mainly need to have an area above you being solid.

We have no plans for seasons. Biomes will remain distinct.

Frostclaw is primarily a snow biome spawned zombie. Allan may have him in other spawn groups, but I don't know.

Enclosure size matters. I did a test a few weeks ago with 1 small wall and a fairly large roof. It stopped damage once the roof was big enough and I stood next to the wall.

It is basically the same, but is sequenced differently, so has new/changed code.

You would need to enter the biome and it would fade in.

Storms have some randomness to their duration, but are basically 2-4 game hours with the harder biomes being on the upper end, but none of that is final.

The mutated zombie is the wasteland zombie.

Don't know.

That might change.

I don't remember any alternate shoulder anim. What was it used for?

I don't recall it ever being mentioned and not planning on it.

I take that as a joke as I know of no one actually working on new weapons. We need to get the current features done and bugs fixed, not add more stuff.

No plans. I prefer free looking and building/attacking in all directions without ladder restrictions.

Our gfx programmer Daniel did that and I don't want to change it right now.

Yesterday I added the storm frequency option. 0, 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500 percents. 100 being the default.

Very busy. Have about 5 different things in flux. Mostly storm stuff, but one is RWG smoothing changes around wilderness POIs. It was doing a large radius like city tiles do, which now causes heavy overlaps between POIs as wilderness POIs don't have the empty tile padding around them anymore. The smoothing is much tighter now, which looks better as surrounding terrain elevations are retained.

Nope, I almost never look at mods. We are booked from now until stable, so not wanting to change things other that what we need to ship.

Maybe. I don't really care about what that looks like as all I want is to be able to look and shoot in any direction while on a ladder.

That is a bug. I don't know if it has changed. We do have a very old climbing anim, that looks ugly and should be deleted, that possibly someone was hoping to use back then.

You may have a big old two handed weapon in your hands that you are wanting to aim/shoot or you just plain turned your back to the ladder. In either case your hands are not on a ladder and your feet may be backwards or you broke the poor saps spine twisting it 180. Ladders + freedom are hard, which is why games like Enshrouded lock you to the wall as you climb and you can't do anything except move left/right/up/down or jump off.

Yes. I actually have spent a few days now redoing weather simulation data updating, what is sent to clients and how clients store and use it. A lot of code changes and testing. Might be done today.

I also have lot of different tasks to do, like yesterday I make a few adjustments to the Plague Spitter attack due to an anim update and hooked up two new attack sounds. That enemy seems done, but the Frostclaw stills needs a few days of work.

There is nothing illogical about it. Desert next to snow happens in the real world.
Search for "picture of desert next to snow".

Except when someone sees a grenade or rocket pop out of your back as you are nicely attached to that ladder.

Not going to happen for game play reasons. We are not adding mixed biomes and they need to be next to each other for progression.

Now....elevation changes might be fun if we could get snow higher without it turning into a giant hill.

I don't know, but I hope it does not look like that!

LOL. Sure, sure...if someone wants a game to follow their hundreds of exacting specifications of what it should be, they are probably not going to find it in any existing game and need to go make it themselves.

Biome Progression and Storm Frequency are two different settings with separate code/data, so are completely independent of each other.

Biome Skills (or whatever we end up calling them) do not help with storms.