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) 🔥.