v1.x Developer Diary

Yes, bandits are just smarter zombies. Same entity and AI systems. Animals are the same. Bandits will just have more behaviors, like find cover or heal self.

Our AI is not that expensive. AI does not constantly think. There are delays built in. The most expensive part is typically the pathing, which already runs on multiple threads.

Finding cover is a good amount of processing, but that is ray casting, which is fairly cheap and could be threaded, and pathing which is already threaded.

One bandit will probably have the overall overhead of 2 or 3 zombies, so if we can run 30 zombies coming at you then 10 bandits will be fine.

Also, these features could be split up differently as well. For example, "Crossplay/Random Gen for console" was released in December as 1.2, while the reset of 2.0 is delayed and actually has some unplanned improvements in it like better RWG wilderness generation.

It is intentional to make their pathing efficient. Voxel world maps naturally to a pathing grid.

Wilderness POI tile padding has been removed, as it could typically not reach the counts requested, so 4 times the amount of possible POIs locations. Their random positioning inside their tile is actually random now.

Wilderness roads connect in a more sensible order and can connect in the middle of each other, fixing some parallel cases. Have some optimizations I am finishing with paths, so I can add more checks for even better connections.

I am not currently looking at heights, but we have discussed it.

Kinyajuu was Nov 2023, so over a year now and the other was 2019, so over 5 years. Time flies.

LOL. I would not worry about that. I skim right over walls of argument text. If it is not constructive and to the point, then I am not wasting my time.

Not yet, but there are ticket(s) for such bugs.

Yes. Forest trees are now in clusters based on the new unified noise function with a new growth ring around them, more bushes and added small tree/bush clusters. This technique will be done to other biomes. Wasteland ground is more natural, with new grass blocks mixed in and the old slope rule removed and different decorations.

I am referring to the 150 square tiles. It had empty tiles all around wilderness POIs, which is a waste of space.

That would need HDRP, which is not planned for 7dtd, but we are doing that for our next game using 7dtd engine, so it could be back ported some day, like years from now.

Tiles are a RWG data structure. They have nothing to do with actual in game terrain drawing from block values.

I don't know, but I passed it on to the console programmers.

Not Blood Moons or I would have mentioned it by name as that game is public info. Blood Moons uses the current 7dtd engine, which is not HDRP, but does have a variety of changes.

Using Unreal would not be the same engine, so the HDRP game is not the Unreal game.

Sorry, I can't. I will be busy for the next few weeks hand crafting YOUTOOZ of grass.

Correct, I spent all the time I could afford to spend on it and bailed as the plugin I was using did not work reliably. On the other hand, FSR worked and works on ALL of our platforms.

Yeah, we should get that started.

Well, you can enter biomes you can't survive in. It is not a 100% lockout.

Pockets are not planned.

All biomes other than forest have a biome hazard, as we are calling it now, which will start killing you after a few minutes in the biome. I have been calling it biome survival or progression as biome weather is confusing as it is not clouds/wind/rain/snow.

Learning to survive the hazards requires multiple steps for each biome that take a reasonable amount of time to complete. Completion rewards you with an immunity item you equip. Biomes must be completed in order of difficultly. Some of this may change and balance is ongoing. There is also a game option to turn it off.

It is quite simple. There is a new slot for the survival kit. Kits go from biome 1 to 4. 4 being wasteland (the best) and protects from every biome's hazard.

Yes. That was something I pushed for, as it makes sense that you should experience the biome to learn how to survive there. It uses the challenge system, so kit is your reward per biome. You can't make them for others for them to simply bypass it. That is why there is an option to disable as some groups of players may not like that play style.

On or Off. Per biome not planned, but features can change.

Probably a few months yet for experimental. We have a general date we would like to hit, but we have a lot of stuff we still want to do, so it could slip more.
We have a variety of changes coming in this update beyond what people may be expecting. For one, AI changes I am currently working on may lead to people changing up their base designs, but hard to tell until testers start doing blood moons.

No, this is driven by them wanting AI handling new types of POI spawn locations.

Picture a dark hole in a wall. Now picture a zombie.

Our console team is another company and they even help us work on general features, optimizations and bugs besides console, so hiring them to do console actually speed up PC dev. Our TFP programmers work 99% on PC, many of them never touch console. We do not plan features based on console. We tell the console guys to make it work and if it does not, we don't go removing it from PC. Examples of console limits - world sizes, max player counts, mods, dedi servers, save game total size.

Over half the stuff on the internet guessing how we do development is wrong, because they don't work here and/or have no clue about game development.

If it were up to me I would never give a date for anything. Approximations are ok, but even those are often misread as some guarantee.

Most people don't understand that game dev has a lot of magic like research to it that no one can say how long it will take. A fresh example is I started on something last Friday that I thought would be a few hours improving idle<>walk<>run anim blending rates as the existing lerp on top of a lerp looked like a bad way to do it and caused a still moving bug when we turn off AI while testing. A few hours later I did not like how the new linear rate change looked. Saturday, I think I can get this done in a few hours and 9 hours later I still don't like it after trying many techniques. Today after most of the day I was mostly happy and decided it was good enough. Estimating coding time on new or rewritten features is like going to a casino. My advice these days to programmers is just say x2 or x3 of whatever you think it will take. In the case of that change it was x7.

I would not leave the forums over some user, it would be the other way around.

It is working and we are trying to get it approved by MS and Sony. You can probably guess what they do if they don't like how you did something. No approval for you. Try again, maybe we will like it next time. Dedicated servers have security considerations on console that they do not take lightly.

Console optimizations are mostly good for PC, but occasionally a console optimization will save memory at the expense of performance. We have the console devs leave those off for PC.

People also don't understand game optimization. All complex games are optimized or they would run at 1 or 5 FPS, be a stuttery mess and be unplayable. That is why you never wait until a game ships to optimize it or you or your testers could not even test it! I see game reviews all the time with "they didn't optimize the game" or "optimize your game dude!". What they really want is additional optimizations. Those last half, diminishing return optimizations that are harder and harder to get or take more and more time, which is why there is always a cutoff point of good enough.

Sure, it takes about 2% of my time reviewing console dev changes and giving feedback and half of those changes are for general bugs that also effect PC anyway. Our console devs are skilled programmers. They help a lot.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response? Creepy!

We are working on a new doc of 2.0 features as I generally only like to hint at spoilers for my own stuff and not other dev's. Hopefully that gets posted *soon and we start our 2.0 dev diary.

*soon does not indicate or guarantee any actual amount of time. Use with caution and plan accordingly. Have a nice day!

Towns POIs, wilderness POIs and roads are already on a full world grid. There is random variations so wilderness POIs don't look grid like and roads have smoothing.

I did not say that. Why would we spent time working on a feature we knew would not get approved?

Nothing in life is guaranteed. Anything the company or I say about ANYTHING could NOT happen.

A warning was issued, so that trolling should be over. Calling staff liars is not acceptable. We are not perfect, but I strive to keep the company and myself honest.