[2020] Alpha 19 Dev Diary

That is why we have testers and I have not heard of any of them having issues. Dropped in on a lot of streamers this weekend and have not seen any of them having load delays either.

Bags normally drop and get unloaded (destroyed), because you respawn some distance away, so those chunks unload, then they reload as you get near the chunk. The reloading is where I think the bug is.

That would not buy you much. Passive sleeping zombies are already low overhead.

Yes and no. It is from load on demand, but mostly from block entities. I've already made block entities preload again. Looking at other ways to reduce texture memory use. Unity streaming is not working as well as I'd like. What a surprise.... 🙄

Spawn 'randomness' is from the name you chose for the world. Pick another name or add some numbers to it.

Sorry, I have other features to work on.

1 Is not the fix I'd want, since the message should not happen period.

2 There are many console messages that are in the game for the devs, not for you. Those messages should never happen and are supposed to be in our face, so we fix them. The values in the error are very close, so it could be a floating point precision issue and just needs a bit of tolerance.

Thx for the info.

If only it were that simple. Water runs fast for me normally. I've been around and under water during testing a lot in the last several months. It has never acted like it did during the stream.

Bugs that rarely happen on your own computer are often very hard fix.

Like I found a way that backpacks can be lost and can reproduce it fairly well now, but I needed to add code to move the backpack constantly to make it happen regularly. The reason the bug was so hard to find is it requires the backpack to move between chunks as the chunks unload and chunks save. That stuff is complicated with 2 different threads and after debugging all day, I still am not sure what is going on other than the chunk the backpack is in does not always save. Hopefully get that one fixed Monday.

I checked the randomness of loot containers a few weeks ago. Was working fine. 75% of 1 means you have a 75% chance to get 1 and a 25% chance to get 0. That also applies to any partial amount. 5 items on 50% loot means 2.5 items, so a 50% chance to get 2 or 3.

There was this change: "Change "Boss Volume" to "Quest Exclude" on sleeper volumes", which repurposed the boss volume flag we never used to allow designers to exclude volumes from a quests requirements. Like a garage outside a house could have sleepers in it but not be required to fulfill a clear quest.

b169 did not load block entities up front, so less VRAM use, but added lot of loading lag, so that change was reverted in b173. One of our artists lowered texture sizes on many textures last Friday, so texture memory use will be somewhat less in the next release.
It is probably a memory issue on that GPU. How much VRAM does it have? Wiki says 2 GB or 4 GB. If yours is 2 GB, then that not much and you would need to put all texture quality settings to the lower choices.

Console messages are not as bad as you make them sound. For years the game has logged plenty of console messages as you play. It takes dozens/hundreds in a short time period to start lagging unless you have some weird issue with it writing to the file.

Now the code that is logging the message might be running slow, but that is not from the message itself.

If they don't take any damage then it is probably a bug, but I would not want them taking much damage even if we fix it, because people would make low resources corridors full of campfires to kill zombies. Yes we should fix it, but it would be way down the list of things we need to worry about.

A19 has a variety of rendering changes. Many textures got larger and more objects with textures were added, so there are probably more textures running out of system RAM for you. The next release will have 100+ textures that Justin shrunk down, so it might be better.

Load order, current VRAM use and then where the OS decided to put textures would make it somewhat random what is in VRAM vs system RAM.

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Hopefully the disappearing backpack bug is now fixed. That was not easy to track down.

There was about a 5% chance, depending on when random chunk saves happen, that a newly dropped item would be lost when you teleported away, because its chunk might not save.

I have a bug ticket for it. Some of the fat zombies do it to. I don't know why anyone would want such a feature, so yes, it is a bug, probably from some of the colliders changing.

Games always have lists of lowest priority ideas and they never get done, because you run out of time. You want something actually done, you don't make it the lowest priority.

What do ghosts use instead of a food/drink bar? Ectoplasm?

I'm left-handed.

Correct. The right hand has a chainsaw attached.

You guys do realise that this is getting into the territory of weird and hard to enforce rules, right?

There is no need for a solution because there is no problem.

What some people like to gloss over is that while the number of recipes has gone down, the number of craftable blocks has gone up more than ever.

There are a bunch of variant blocks that fold out into a lot of things.

In Minecraft you can't have everything without ever leaving your house and the attached mine.

Someone literally said they want to be in their bunker and sit out horde night and the beauty of that is: You absolutely can!

Turn off horde nights and you can even play the game during that time and feel all smug about having outsmarted all those zombie fools with your superior game option skills! =P

I'm already done with those performance changes.

gfx st x are streaming commands and forceload is a Unity debug option that just makes streaming textures load, which would not help if a texture was slow because it is in system RAM.

Friday I actually disabled streaming when texture quality is less than Full, since both features are doing a similar reduction in textures and due to what seems to be a Unity bug were not working correctly with each other leading to blurrier streamed textures.

Testers found that some FPS drops were actually biome particles, so today I fixed that:

Fixed Particles in snow and desert cause major FPS drops (balanced sand, smoke and snow particle rates to a reduced max count of 150).
Changed "Water Particles" video quality option to "Particles", which now also decreases world particle count.

Not easy. Chunks are many pieces of data distributed across different arrays in a type of compression and it is not simple. Then you have tons of code that says give me the block at xyz or set the block and now it is multiple blocks? Some hybrid? To be sane, it would need to remain a primary block at a location, but possibly a secondary block could be added for visuals, but I would not be doing separate heath and collision resolving for it or it just gets more complicated and slower.

Inside vs outside is a very vague concept in a voxel world made out of all kinds of odd shapes. Not easy to determine and not fast.

And then the screen fades to black as they suffocate....aha, oxygen tank to the rescue....land shark then swallows them whole.

Banana rocket jumping. Just to keep people guessing where to find bananas.

Even if you say "Romero zombies" then those zombies are clever enough to ride a horse or fire a gun. All seen in Romero movies...

Placing a block about your head does not make you 'inside'. Imagine standing in a field in snow with a block above you. How are you inside?

I have thought about doing brute force raycasts, but raycasts are not free and you would have to do hundreds or thousands of them and may still miss holes or things just out of range. If you built a big 10x10x10 or 20x20x20 room, but left off a wall are you inside? It would block some wind or rain, but you would still freeze if it was not fully enclosed. Say you built walls of center poles, columns or other partial block shapes, they would probably be seen as solid, yet they are full of holes and not really make you inside.

Vertical blocks should matter, since an opening is letting in cold air. Temperature would matter as much as rain in a survival situation where we determine if you are freezing or burning up.

It is not as simple as can the block above me stop rain, because blocks can be rotated. A plate or half block can or can't fill a vertical or horizontal hole depending on the rotation.

We will probably fix heat/cold survival before gold, which would include checking if enclosed, but not until A21+.

The real problem there is that there are so many worn mod slots total.

Up to 4 on a weapon but up to 22 or so worn.

Fewer/merged armor locations would have a whole bunch of advantages for gameplay and other areas but that's for another game...

I don't know the details of what works or not currently. Just guessing. I have not touched that code and the creator is probably one of the programmers no longer with TFP. Like many features, it needs to be tested and reevaluated someday when someone has time.

Today I fixed some issues with electrocution, so it may be better.

Normal entities don't load up front like they used to and hundreds of oversized textures were reduced, so the game does not need more VRAM. VRAM use can also be misleading since Unity's texture streaming does not free unused textures until it needs some space to load a new one.

Technically a chunk is 16x256x16 and has 16 layers each 16 tall, but people and myself often call a chunk 16x16x16 even though code calls it a chunk layer.

That's wrong instead of obvious.

Adding a new POI to random gen is 1 entry in the list of POI and it can be included on the next regen.

You can mod that in if you want. A bigger timed charge with the explosive properties of dynamite.

It being sticky makes it better at destroying structures.

Or you use the dynamite that you already have.

@Aldranon

I think what you mean is: We value your feedback and will continue to work with the community to improve your gaming experience.

I'm not sure how I feel about a stone axe that talks smack and judges my performance.

All you need for disabling item repair is to take out the RepairTools but for vehicles you'd have to take out the repair kits.

Sounds like a rusty chain. 😃

I mean... did that really look trustworthy to you?

Well, just skip to the next post when LBD comes up.

Yes, between killing your accomplishments and inventory tetris of swapping mods I can't see it as anything but adding more grind to slow people down. There is nothing wrong with reaching end game. The hordes grow in numbers/difficulty and players have enough stuff to worry about late game, time is precious.

POis were a joke too. 3 seconds to loot one house, next. How was that engaging? Anything deemed too easy or an inferior experience gets worked on. No offense but your arguments are emotionally driven and have no logic.

Legendary will be sort of like finding another tier, or be how a pink stone axe is compared to a brown iron pick. You might see a yellow legendary Iron pick that is arguably better than a pink steel pick. A choice!

There are no bolts or hardware in a couch, its just wood with fabric really.

TFP's aim is to close any super cheesy loop holes on survival. Stun locked bears, driving safely from hordes with zero effort are good examples where we need to resolve it. You can't expect a player to use self restraint.

This is pretty much how I feel about it.
It is our job to decide what is too easy and what seems like a reasonable tactic to survive. Everything has a time/material/item cost to it.

It is fine to further self impose/role play restrictions beyond vanilla, or mod it, or mess with settings but the stock vanilla game should be an increasing challenge to survive each 7 days. Of course we give tools and loot and perks to keep up with or exceed that challenge and a variety of ways to do it. What methods you use are up to your play style and there will always be debates about which are most effective, what feel cheesy, etc.

I'm sure we will fine tune that.

Why bother building a fort if a bicycle was all you needed to survive the apocalypse? We want players to build a fort. The vulture swarm might be temporary, once vehicle crits are in perhaps hitting a few zombies and your vehicle breaks down, then you are out in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to run, etc. That is the same thing but on top of dying you have to walk to your vehicle after the horde and repair it. Which one seems better? I kind of like the latter because with some skill you might evade them, but it wouldn't be nearly impossible like it is now. At the end of the day it is just a few pre A19 players complaining about it. Had you just picked up the game you'd just accept the fact that vehicles are not a good idea on horde night.

Seems to me that 7th book in the set is always the rare one.

Not without risk of getting a critical on your vehicle. It might be similar to the current system, where you can take a few hits but multiple in a row will lead to catastrophe.

I'm not sure what you are talking about, crafting to me is always way more rewarding than looting. I haven't seen a single game where I looted a blue T3 gun before I crafted one. So crafting gets you to near top tier way before looting can.
Also you can craft all but the best stuff with common mats, iron tools are made from very basics, but they are pretty good. So yes you can sit in your base for the most part and craft quite a lot.

That's why the loot perk was changed. This would only be a second loot bonus candy that you use after a POI is cleared.

I highly doubt there will ever be NPC's living in your base doing stuff for you. Mainly because 8 players on a server, if each had 5 npcs the zombie counts would be non existent, and also it has never been a stretch goal or roadmap item.

There is a bit of that in the game. You make corn bread, then you can make chili dogs.

You can set that flag in a mod but then players wouldn't use mods in items until they had QL 6 ones or could craft infinite mods.

This is a known issue. We are planning on enabling the helper that leads you to the next volume of zombies before you are at 90% or whatever, because I've had that same thing happen to me a dozen times, and 2 hours of real time into a T5 and get ripped off out of your reward because you can't find a few remaining monster closet sucks.

That's already in experimental.

As for the whole item degradation topic:

A lot of the suggestions are way too complex and fiddly or worse - introduce a whole bunch of junk items that you are supposed to carry around.

I'm not convinced it's a good idea to begin with but what is doable:
- Only allowed to repair at a workbench. Easily circumvented by keeping a workbench in your vehicle.

What would be modable:

- No item repairs ever. It really is pointless to want item degradation... but not.

- Book series to add +1 crafting quality.

Then the guy must be skipping tons of volumes and not following the path to have it not kick on and show the remaining few zed volumes.

You can't take broad stroke philosophies and apply it to ever meta in the game. Only under certain circumstances does crafting allow you better gear than loot and that is if you prioritize specializing in what you want to craft, probably specializing in blacksmith, and then you still need parts (obtained by looting/purchasing) to craft anything game changing.
I'd say in general that both have their purpose. I would not want to wait for looting to get me some decent tools, but that is my play style, so I typically dump points into miner and blacksmith so I can get blue tools ASAP. Early game crafting gets you what you need, but later game looting gets you what you want. Crafting holds a pretty strong place yet because you just can't always find a blue whatever, but you can craft one if you invest so I think it is fine this way.

Yeah I think it feels pretty great in general. I'd like to see a few polish points but overall it is in good shape.

We are just not willing to push new stuff in when large sectors of the game are completely unpolished and need optimized and improved.
There is character R&D going on right now for new player outfits that replaces UMA. It just *MIGHT* work for bandits too so once players are overhauled then we can decide if bandits are skinned meshes like zombies, or assembled parts via pieces after the new player clothing/armor system is completed we can do some stress tests and see and make the right calls. Then bandits can sort of fall out of the character system instead of a separate effort.

I already fixed that message showing with the values in your picture.

It now does otherHeight <= -.001f. If you still are seeing it, then I need the new # it is showing.

I told the programmer who works on music what you noticed.

You can turn music off. I play almost all games with music off, so have not noticed it in 7dtd.

That was probably from the streaming bug reducing texture mipmaps one extra level, which is why streaming is off now when texture quality is not Full.

Mining needs calories, sledgehammers need calories. Strength needs a way to recover HP.... fortitude doesn't use any calories and he heals instantly without bandages.

Careful buddy my fridge throwing days are back.

None of the above.

I'll just move cooking to whatever attribute I'm playing each month just to piss everyone off

Take a close look at the pathing of any 4 legged animal in the game inside houses. We can't compete with dogmeat, they mocapped dogs and spent probably 2 million just developing animal turning / mocap. We can do a drone though.
So basically we don't want to ship something that looks like crap and will take 2 years dev time and still might not pass.

Not happening for A19. We are giving each weapon their own mod models built into the original mesh though, so eventually as we rework stuff they will not only align, but look custom built for each weapon.

LOL no. You get pipe guns and we're done. 4 tiers of firearms is insane IMO. We'll have legendary versions on top of it all yet at some point.

They don't have ladders, just stairs and ramps, and teleport doors.

Yes.

Is this on A19, though?

I've never understood it when people say it takes a day or two to fix their base. I'm usually done by 8am. The longest it ever took was until noon or so and that was a fancy base that had stuff for looks and not purely functional. R concrete and steel just don't break that often. All you do is run around with the nailgun clicking, and very few block replacements for me, but I'm killing a lot. Most of the damage is self inflicted from my grenades I drop that damage a lot of blocks a tiny amount.

You can just back off the % of music allowed per day in general for now.

I'm glad you had some nail biting times, hopefully many more to come. It isn't even game staged yet, so once we get the game stage modifier, radiation the wasteland should be a serious challenge.

We're not doing new features that only work in single player. Delete all on death and you'll have a more interesting challenge replacing your gear, and that lost day will be nothing in comparison.

Zombies move around. He snuck in there to take a nap.

Pistols are tier 1 weapons, magnums tier 2, desert vulture tier 3, so finding a purple pistol at that point seems reasonable.

I'd have to see the base before and after horde night shots, and know what your settings are on before I could ever believe what you are saying. Maybe if its some dumb ramp cheese trap base design that is a house of cards or something, but not a proper normal "tower defense" base.

How do you know it is damaged if it is on the inside?

No, I think the majority of players want to get their butt kicked some, so that they can learn from their mistakes and overcome the challenge, that is rewarding IMO. There needs to be some wiggle room downward to even easier IMO if default is too much.

Oh well that seems pretty OCD. I'd think that explosions wouldn't touch them tbh, but if you have multiple walls deep I wouldn't worry about it anyway if your outer and inner blocks are pristine. If one of those gets broke, repair the stuff behind... or use the arrow slot blocks, etc.

You'll probably need to max secret stash to find one at a trader. They are leveled and don't drop early game in loot also.

I have one and I can't even craft a forge lol. I found it in loot in a tool box.

SMG is t3. Not sure if that is even planned. When we go to polish them up for gold we might try it out and see.

I think there is an improvement ticket on making the side path zombies not part of the objective requirement.

The apartment is cake. I've never done Higashi it never spawns for me. It seems to me I get shotgun messiah, shamway, and apartments. Nothing else ever spawns.

Yeah 32 alive was affecting my ability to play on ultra so I settle for 24. I can see with those settings and very late GS a fort taking a pounding. But I kind of feel like you put that on yourself and that all that time repairing is on you because of your extreme differences from default.

I run 2560x1440 with everything maxed.

When it's done. That is certainly possible but nobody has a crystal ball.

I added a new round arch shape today

Until the zombie larva come squirming out!

Probably not.

People make a lot of guesses as to why the AI does something and it is often wrong. I see people test their designs with a bunch of the same zombie thinking the other types will do the same thing, which is sometimes not true.

Blood moon spawner does attack your base from multiple directions, but not all at once, it changes over time, because that is more efficient for pathing. The typical dumb zombie will not go very far to find a weak spot or opening, often preferring to beat on a wall near it instead of walking a bit to go through an opening. Yesterday I was just looking at that issue of being too dumb and beating the walls around a cemetery POI instead of using the opening, but really that is correct, since those are set to be that dumb. Thick walls would change that behavior, just like many things can change their behavior.

No zombie auto targets you except for blood moon spawns and POI volumes set to attack.

I was referring to it spawning from a sleeper volume. There is no coordination across sleeper volumes. I added that to my todo list, but it will probably not be in A19.

Not likely to change much. Way too expensive checking line of sight to all the potential blocks you could see.

It tends to be the character controller colliding with the world, not pathing that uses a lot of CPU.

Resolution makes a large impact on 7dtd. Often people say I have blah blah specs, but fail to mention details like the resolution they are running the game at. If things feel laggy/choppy/bad, I'd be dropping the game to 1920x1080 and compare.

Yes, it was balanced for the bigger POI.

Previously you only got the guidance for the last missing zombie room.

On a T5 POI it now shows you the last three. Unless you make it a point to tunnel through walls or skip entire floors that should work every time now.

If it is a problem then it is very likely a self-made one.

Don't take me wrong - feel free to tunnel all throughout the building. Just go all the way and hit every room while doing so. That works, too.

Yes, it essentially is.

The biggest POI have a bit over 30 zombie groups. 3 of those is 10% when it was 3.3% before.

When I read thisI felt like I heard a drum roll while I'm waiting to see snowdog's response to your comment

Actually volumes can be grouped, which would cause them to act as a whole. That was something I added back in March 2019, but designers have a ton of POIs and thousands of volumes, so they can't just easily go through through them all and know what could be improved.

You can check the log file. It should show why a player died.

Looks like:

Entity name 830 killed by animalDireWolf 1561

Wandering hordes wander by you, randomly off to a side, but they have an investigate target in the distance, which probably causes them to be alert, so you can't sneak attack them.

I'd call that a bug. Added to TODO.

If it was a bug then I would not stop your perma death play through.
Did the dirt fall on her and kill her?

Yeah I made the outside corner, but noticed the lack of an inside stair corner, it would be great for sunken living rooms, etc.

I don't do doors and its not really possible since the door would eat into the voxel space above it.

When you see an alpha 19 thread go up, we will add stuff to it.
All I can say is most likely pipe weapons, POI work and more HD zombie replacements, possibly some new / old special infected.

Knives really suck early game though. If anything I'd buff the hunting knife so it is right in the middle of bone knife and machete.

A modder could hack it together easily.. just make the door a 2 meter multi block but it would be 2.5 meters high to the peak of collision. Then it would work fine, but the issue is if you put any block other than an arch up there, it clips, looks wrong and would get us a bug ticket so we can't really do it properly without some kind of new tech that had the arched block paintable and achored above the door. Way too much engineering when you can just put a plate or something behind it and just use a square door.
I'm not really picturing your use case needed an arch corner?

They already have specialization.

"Feral sense at night" would be a decent option. You couldn't go anywhere at night without eveything coming out of the woodwork to get you. It would be pretty scary tbh and add cheap legs to the game.

I put that feral sense at night idea on the roadmap. Don't say we never listen to you guys Obviously I'll need to get everyone on board and make sure its pretty easy to do, but I can see that being a great feature to make the game more challenging and scary.

So while they are on a sideways garage door you activate it and they fall in the pit?

I was thinking all zombies would have that sense, not just ferals. Might as well make it hardcore since not that many ferals spawn at night anyway except in the wasteland. I'd want ALL zombies to have the ability if I turned it on.

That is genius lol. Doesn't seem like a glitch, but maybe when they can hang onto bars and hatch lids and jump/crawl/climb through 1 meter holes... it might not be so...easy.