[2020] Alpha 20 Dev Diary

Welcome to the Alpha 20 Dev Diary. Here we will discuss upcoming features for Alpha 20.

Alpha 20 Dev Stream Videos

1) Alpha 20 First Look with Prime and Madmole October 28th, 2020

Alpha 20/21 Roadmap

1) Unity Update

Details Coming

2) Random Generation Update

Details Coming

3) Vehicle Mods

Details Coming

4) Shape Menu and Building Update

Details Coming

5) Dynamic Imposters

Changes to the world and player built forts will be represented in distant terrain

6) Micro Splat Improvements

Details Coming

7) Feral Sense Game Option

Set zombies to different states of awareness from dumb to feral

8.) Biome Difficulty

Snow and Desert will have gamestage boost creating tougher enemies and better loot


Wasteland will have a greater gamestage boost creating even tougher enemies and even better loot

9) Pipe Weapons for Primitive Tier

Pipe Rifle


Pipe Pistol


Pipe Baton


Pipe Shotgun

10) Trader to Trader progression

Details Coming

11) Water Overhaul

Details Coming

12) Loot Progression and Gamestaging Improvements

Details Coming

13) Character Overhaul

Replace UMA system with in-house custom system


Thematic outfits will work like books. Wear the complete outfit and get a completion perk


Foundation for Bandits

14) New POI's and Environment Art

New Gas Station

15) AI and Sleeper Improvements

Zombies can crawl through 1-meter holes


Wandering Sleepers

16) Dynamic Music and Ambient Audio Improvements

Details Coming

17) Animation Improvements

Details Coming

18) Digging Quest Improvements

Details Coming

19) Restore Power Quest

Lights go out when rally marker is activated


Find the generators and repair them

20) New Zombies/ Entities

Nurse


Drone


Screamer


Fat Cop

The Robotic Drone should be in A20. Some code work may start on bandits, but they won't be in a20.

They have been around forever. Screamer, fat cop, spider are all special. We have some new ones planned but are not sure when they will arrive. Tourist zombie will become a special infected once the code is in for him.

I'm not working on balance so I'm not looking at that data.

The first step is to replace everything, and get new HD player outfits working, which also opens the door to bandit models. If everything is running good yet there may be room for additional basic zombies.

No we don't really look at mods, we have a huge list of stuff we want to do and don't need ideas nor care what 1% of the player base might be doing to their game. I hope that doesn't sound arrogant, but reflects the fact that we have a clear roadmap and list of features we need to focus on. A larger inventory is something we would like to see though. The distant POI tech is coming from a modder though. So if something brilliant comes up usually we hear about it even though we aren't looking for things if that makes sense.

I did mention new AI like zeds crawling through 1 meter egress and windows, which will make horde nights a lot more challenging. Feral sense options. Game play is constantly evolving but will always be similar to A18. Progression is getting a complete rewrite from scratch.

OMG LOL.

Well think if everything has quality, and there's at least 10 sets of outfits how long it might take to actually find a full set. There is a cowboy hat, but it is part of a specific outfit. The skull cap is the lumberjack hat. A lot of the stuff we have now will sort of be there in some fashion, but everything has meaning to it now instead of everything useless except for steel or military armor. There might be a fair amount of choice deciding what outfit best works for your build, or strong desire to collect a full legendary miner outfit.

Everything is getting deleted and there will be new outfits you can find and craft. The lineup isn't complete so I cannot confirm what might resemble old content, but a lot of the nostalgic things are sticking around in some way or another. Like I mentioned the skull cap is now lumberjack cap.

I don't know what you mean, but you can wear anything you find.

No, that would be like getting the book set bonus for not actually collecting the whole series. You will have to wear the entire outfit to get the full set bonus.

What repair quest? That isn't in the roadmap.

It is never coming. Requires starting over completely and we're basically 95% done with weapons.

Turrets are ranged weapons. Hold and shoot.

That is just role playing. The actual mechanics of the quest are what matters. Our game isn't going to be a heavy RPG, it is how it is with expanded variety of quests we can get a lot of miles out of. As much as I'd like to do one off quests with flavor, special items, etc I don't think we have the manpower or the code ready to fly on something that ambitious, but completing 7 days would be a good step to get more ambitious on the next game when we have time and budget to tackle more immersive stuff. But since it is a MP game, and resources are tight, we can't just spawn NPC survivors at a POI doing chores just for immersion sake. Once you leave the area it might get reset for another player to do the same quest, so I don't think we can do what you are asking without compromising the experience for everyone in MP.

The game is exactly as we described it on the kickstarter 7 years ago, but your interpretation of what those features might look like and play like is different than ours. Magical food? Dude food is magic IRL. You can cure diseases with the proper food, coffee gives you buffs in real life, etc. Ours is gamey so it makes sense to players. What is candy is really drugs, or drugs packaged in candy bags. Future drugs, set in a future game. It isn't that hard to believe.
UMA will be gone and no UMA code will work. If you want to add new zombies you model and texture them just like we do.

Probably.

How they react to volume triggers will depend on what the designers want.

Bandits have not been proven to be anything, since no code work has been done on them yet. It is a scheduling issue, since we have many other things we would rather work on before them.

I think the artists have done some work on their part and they will handle it just fine.

That's a minmaxer creating problems for himself.

Most players don't need to reach 100% in every conceivable stat in order to play the game.

Of course... once radiation is part of the gameplay.

We're not going to remove bedrock which is the vast majority of indestructible blocks in the game.

Traders make up less than 0.5% of the map.

Oh, I know. =P

It's just neither broken nor a gameplay problem so kinda low priority.

Yes, obviously.

The proposed bonuses seem... really good... but that's just the first pitch. AFAIK no balancing has yet been done in the greater context of all the perks and assorted buffs.

We certainly don't want to get back to the Barbie Dressing Game of earlier alphas.

Could also have something like a set bonus cooldown.

Sure, you can switch gear anytime but any gear switch disables all these bonuses for 10-15 minutes. Constant switching would not be beneficial.

Not sure bud.

Now that you clarified, I can answer. The lights you turn on by fixing the generator will stay on, but if you are expecting some kind of sim where settlers move in that is not this game. Everyone knows the game is starved for resources and farm animals, simulation stuff like settlers moving in would eat our lunch and we'd be back to 8 zombie hordes or even less to accommodate fluff that doesn't actually do anything once you walk down the road, but continues to bog down CPU.
I'm all for immersion but most of the time these requests are not wise roadmap additions.
Remember the POI needs to be reused by the next player.

Yes of course.

I'm pretty sure we will support dyes. There are way less slots but no clipping, and no ugly. It will be less customizable, but look AA at a minimum instead of 95 indy quality. The perks and full set bonuses will make up for any lost fluff. Characters and animations are the biggest thing holding us back from becoming a massive success. You can mix and match pieces as you want, and there is a badass ranger outfit that looks like what you are doing there, but 100x cooler.

The generator for these won't be the same kind that you can hook power up to, so no you can't hijack free power. You can enjoy the existing lighting the POI has just like now though, but you can't tap into the power.

Nope otherwise the outside will be too dark and the inside will be too bright. This is the only way to have semi decent lighting indoors and outdoors with a dynamic world you can fully destroy.

You won't find a legendary full set until 500 hours into a game so I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal that compel people to change outfits all the time. The non l

Did you miss the stream? I mentioned we hired Unity to help optimize and coach us on best practices. We have full source code too so if anything they did is holding us back we can change it.

I imagine we'll make a new ghillie suit for the sniper since its pretty easy to model. Unless that became a mod override thing. We intend to make an outfit for about every major play style, or at least 1 per attribute but maybe two.

He's a badass in a duster, cowboy hat, boots, etc.

What do you mean?

Right now he gets a bonus with all ranged weapons and knives, but that could change for balance reasons.

Hopefully.

Pipe shotgun will replace the blunderbuss. Ammo will be in POIs and scale in quantity, so no need for super primitive ammo.

They are incredible, but we needed to save some content for future streams.

CPU yes. 1% here. 2% there. Over and over...................

Rendering probably not much, but that is not the bottleneck anyway.

Different games do set boni differently.

Sometimes there is only one bonus for completion, sometimes every piece you add increments the set bonus amount/type.

A new tinting shader is already done and all vehicles now have a tint mask, which allows the dye color in the cosmetic slot to tint specific areas of the vehicles.

There was old code the put lighting into blocks, but did not work very well and added overhead, so was disabled.

Maybe someday we can find a better way.

We're looking at spring which always leads to more like summer. We'll see though, we're making good progress.

No the armor will provide standalone perks and not interact with other objects, other than itself for a full set bonus.

I don't think so, but we might add alternate versions of specific sets at a store you can buy. Like if you found a miner outfit and purchased miner outfit variant, you could set the skin to the variant. I believe Rust does this too. I'm not saying we won't but it kind of doesn't make sense and in PVP might be misleading as to what you are up against seeing a soft ball cap on a guy actually wearing a steel helmet.

I do believe we will support tinting and it will be better then ever, i.e. using a tint mask. I doubt we will support cosmetic swapping, but we might. It hasn't been discussed and there is so much to do it feels like a can we will kick down the road at the moment.

Not happening for A20. Vehicle mods are but the whole vehicle crit system has to wait because Faatal is swamped with other features.

We have flashlights and gun lights and helmet lights. Do we really need more lights?

No, lockpicking is shippable as is. Sure a minigame might be better but we're a small team and we can do more quest types or redo features that are shippable already.

That is already done.

Not yet.

That would require some kind of concept of what is inside and what is out. Hard to do in a fully destroyable game.

Goggles occupy the entire head slot.

You are always wrong bro.

Why not use what you have instead of asking for things you don't need. We have lanterns and torches you can place. Generators you can hook up and place spot lights. The drone has a headlight mod. Flares can be modded in IMO, it is a waste of vanilla resources and dev time when there are 50 things that do the same thing. It seems about as valuable as adding pinto beans, black beans, northern beans, red beans etc... who cares we have corn.

It could be used for it, but masks have to be made and hooked up, which takes time.

I did a test speed up. I think it made the official list. It is nowhere near x2 speed. The speeds are limited due to worst case chunk load speeds, else vehicles freeze while chunks load.

I don't know as that is not stuff I have worked on. Don't think there have been any code changes yet for it.

Well, was off last two days on a trip to Michigan.

Been working on event system optimizations.

19.3 exp is getting close.

Specifically, I've been profiling the game and our MinEvent system, which has to do with processing all the rules in our xml files, like progression.xml, continues to take a good amount of CPU.

A good example is every 2 seconds an action tries to remove fire particles off the player, which was slow and made some garbage because it checked all the player transforms (200+). Now entities have a list of active particle effects, so basically takes zero time. The transform find function is also faster now and makes no garbage.

A19.3 has some optimizations, but these changes a

Yes, but the pipe weapons reload clunky and slow like the blunderbuss did.

They are being redone, like everything else, and do not look the same. Some have changed more than others.

No plans to bring back Trader Jimmy.

The art dept is still doing R&D on hair.
My own hair is progressing well, I'm successfully reversing my hair loss and am on the journey of growing it long again. It's still pretty short but longer than it's been in ages. I'm sure you can stay updated on my instagram and twitter

MM replied: No, lockpicking is shippable as is. Sure a minigame might be better but we're a small team and we can do more quest types or redo features that are shippable already.

SphereII and I coded and released a lockpicking minigame mod which your welcome to use as a startin

I don't like 2d games. I'm playing Read Dead Redemption 2, excellent game.

Clothing is armor and armor is clothing. There will be a wide range of stats balanced to how good the perks are, and if it is light or heavy armor. There is a wasteland assassin outfit designed for killing and stealth. Plant fiber and cloth armor are now merged to "primitive outfit". Then there is leather and commando. For heavy it's scrap, iron and steel, cool words pending. Even the scrap iron set makes iron man's first suit look weak, these are really cool outfits.

Typo FFS. I suppose a sale is good, but for games that smash it (this one does) f it, buy it today. I didn't finish GTA 5

Not by me. Just optimizing it.

Sorry. Don't know. I have never looked at our rumble code.

We could, but probably better to wait for world events to get developed and have options for that.

Cool. Thanks for the feedback!

It could go either way. Probably depends if we find any major issues.

I don't know yet. There is a good chance doors will retain zero SI.

This is not an exact science, since Unity does a lot of things in the background that we don't have control over.

1 Depends on the asset, but everything uses some CPU and many assets use system RAM or VRAM or both. Unloading also tends to be delayed because many resources are not specifically tracked by the game and flushed by Unity by UnloadUnusedAssets, which is slow, so not called very often.

2 Only the gfx driver and Windows really know how much VRAM is in use and VRAM use is often padded to a higher amount that what it actually needs. Microsoft is working on tech t

The vehicles in 7D do count as water transport.

None of that has been done yet, so it remains to be seen how it will work.

The pathing distance limit is horizontal. They can only path about 40m out. Farther and they just go in a straight line to the edge of the path grid.
I dug to bedrock in Navezgane and BM day 7 spawns came above me and started digging down. They do a lot of moving and stumbling in addition to digging, so it can take them a while if you don't have a ton of zombies.

That is code, so would be me, but doubt it will change anytime soon. I tend to forget that is even a feature.

None of that should be set in stone yet. Once RWG changes are further along, we can see where memory use is at and fix what needs to be fixed.
Edit: Robert says 4k is still possible, so we will probably have that too.

I can look at that at some point, but busy with other things now.

A lot of complicated code. For all the people who complain about lack of optimizations, if there were none it would be unplayable.

I've been working on weather manager cleanup and now starting on the simulation, so hopefully less gloomy days.

You don't rewrite all your game code for each new release/update. That would be crazy. 95%+ is the same code.

Now you might rewrite a system, but that is often overkill too. I am updating the Weather Manager, not rewriting it. Maybe 40% of the code has been touched.

We are not planning on doing altitude changes for any of it.

All creations by a person/company are automatically the copyright owner by default (in the USA anyway), unless stated otherwise.

1 Yes!

2 Nothing much atm other than the weather should change at a consistent rate.

3 The goal of these changes is to make it run faster, look better and not get stuck on ugly conditions. Rain comes and goes in a clean fashion. Snow looks pretty sweet now.

Yes because eye wear will probably be a part of the helmet/hat.

You will choose a head for your appearance. We aren't allowing ugly character customization any more.

New character stuff is being pushed to Alpha 21, there is too much stuff to change out. TBD on your question.

Yes, one pocket mod to rule them all. There is no concept of clothing any more or armor, just outfits with various stats and mod slots.

Yeah I think an entry level one is a good idea just to teach ppl they can get some relief on day one if they work for it, but if you want the good stuff you need perks/books/crafting gates.

Wandering hordes randomly skim along the edge of where a player is, so maybe you just got (un)lucky and they have not been noticing you?

That would be an interesting thing to bring in closer as their target's GS increases.

Nope, but legendary armors might pave the way for legendary guns, how I designed that could work, meaning the legendary bonus is double of what the blue bonus is, or could be a random range from 11-20%. I have a more advanced design I did a while back but it's so good/big I think it should just be saved for 7 Days 2.

Once there are enough mods though you might want to save that mod slot for something better than carry capacity, making the perk still viable.

There is no plans for that, as it could really impact the frame rate, so something like that is best suited as a mod IMO.

How does crappy sliders that don't really change much compete with a decent amount of properly modeled/textured heads to choose from? We might let you change hair/eye/skin color none of that is even started on yet, but the main thing is proper pbr faces that are professional looking and performant. Uma is ugly and slow, and wastes a giant texture on each player in the game, his armor etc is all baked to a single unique sheet. The new system can share textures and stream them.

The higher your FOV, the more fish eyed it gets. Decreasing FOV should help, but you will see less.

I looked into that a while back and there isn't an easy way to speed it up, other than to change the weights and rebalance everything.

I'd love a full character customization setup like Bethesda has but we're a small team and have to pick our battles or never ship. The head system is expandable and we might get a little face customization in, we'll see yet. After a few hours though everyone has a full helmet on and you never see your face anyway so I don't see the argument.

Cool, maybe I missed it, but a smiley face to indicate humor with text is a must have usually

I agree, and I myself have spent hours making new characters for certain role plays in other games, but 7 Days was never that game for me. The custom

Could just find/harvest scrap brass and ditch the trophies, knobs, etc.

Next year. We have been working on other things.

All you have to do is change the stack sizes of the things you want to carry less of.

Console sold great with ugly UMA presets and zero customization. If we have a similar amount of heads it should be just fine. The CPU savings deleting all those bones/morphs/bloat data wouldn't hurt either. Anyhow this is months out as we've pushed new characters to A21 so even I don't have an answer as to what we're actually doing.

I haven't heard anything but the rwg new rivers look promising. I wouldn't expect much from water only that it won't be buggy af anymore and will be optimized. There won't be awesome waterfalls or anything too fancy.

No because it's fine how it is and t

I'd like to once we get bandits in, so that somewhere along the way they try to intercept the package.

Weather changes were not planned for a20, but after noticing the state of the code, that it was not gold quality, I ended up spending a lot of December overhauling it. The overhaul is basically done, but the simulation parameters are still being tweaked and needs testing/feedback. Now the players reaction to the weather is completely separate, so this does not change what happens to the player being hot/cold/wet/etc.

The amount of logic we already run from xml adds a good amount of overhead to the game. It could be added, but it would be slow, so not likely.

A correct random number generator gives you random numbers. We use an industry standard random number generator, so it does work. Truly random does mean you could get the same thing many times in a row, which people often don't like and want something less random.
Now the seed used for the random generator could cause issues if not varied enough or reused/repeated.

It won't happen. Decent melee and ranged bandits needs done yet and that itself is more than a handful.

We don't want to go further, mining is shippable.

Pretty much no to every "any chance for" question. We're adding bandits and some quests and polishing old content and going gold. Lots of great ideas to push to 7 Days 2 once we ship 7 Days.

Bandits with guns will be hard and we have some special infected designed if we get time could be a nice later game challenge.

No 7 days has 5000 more features than Left 4 Dead, so we need to polish what we have instead of adding e

That was never promised.

No. That would require a ton of code rewriting, which is not going to happen.

That is not likely to happen. We have many other tasks that need our time.

1 This week: Fixing holes/overlaps in block meshes/colliders (added shape ModelOffset). Testing (using) Unity 2019.4. Changes to skin quality settings, so can change on a per entity/LOD basis. Fixed a playtest load bug. Improved shape loading. Improved chunk debug grid drawing. Improving chunk mesh generation.

2 That will probably be A21

3 Saw some new screenshots today. New POI placement system is looking cool.

4 Artists are working on new weapon, block and zed/animal content, but nothing that has needed programmers for, other that the skin change I made.

That has not happened yet. A20 is on 2019.4.17, but may get another update if any good fixes happen before we get to experimental.

I'd like to have that, not sure when we can get it in though.

I think the plan is to get rid of the burnt forest as it's own biome, and make the wasteland have burnt forest areas, but I could be wrong and it might stay. The wasteland hasn't had any love yet that we plan to do.

I'm not sure what is planned yet, but I'm sure we will continue them soon or when we feel like there is enough new content to warrant a showing.

We've recently completed concept art of upcoming bandits, which will come in weak, medium and strong versions for variety and game staging, and they look reall

This is in afaik, and will allow for distant chunks to show changes, like player bases, or building and terrain blown up. It still needs tested and verified, and might get disabled if its too slow or buggy, but hopefully launches in A20 as I think it will be a nice touch and seeing your base in the distance will be awesome.

Probably not. If you profile the game, it shows neither one of those things as issues. We plan on continuing to optimize the slower parts of the game, not parts that already run fast enough.

Before gold? I've got a never ending list of things I'm working on, so hard to say when it percolates to the top.

The main functional change is biome weather parameters are in groups now, so something like a storm can change all parameters to ranges a storm should have.

Biome temperatures are in absolutes now and global temp is just a random +/-5.

Grace period is same.

There probably won't be many more changes (for a20) beyond that.

You are blaming SI, when I don't think that is the main overhead. Profiling clearly shows chunk mesh and collider updates as the big overhead, which is primarily internal to Unity with data copying and PhysX updates. There are multiple chunk layers and their mesh and colliders update in the same frame, so hopefully I can slice that over multiple frames to reduces spikes. Have not tried changing it yet, since I tend to bounce between features, optimizations and bugs. There are some other mesh settings to try, plus some of our mesh building code could be faster. Our mesh building is on a separat

Well that is your typical problem with having standard vertical character controller cylinders with something that is drawn mostly horizontally (like many animals). Basically it needs to be offset back, so the head is more towards the center, but is probably not a trivial change. It should get "better" at some point.

There is nothing natural about those vultures. They are Undead.

I have not, but it would make sense if heat was a worse effect, that you would want things to counter it.

It will be a big can of worms, but no work has been done on it yet, so can't say what w

No plans, but it could happen months from now.

Correct. That list of features is just a list of what we plan to do. It may be months before someone works on it and often features will get pushed back, because it can't be done in time or at all due to unforeseen circumstances. As the alpha progresses, the list tends to get updated to reflect where we are at, but is no guarantee of anything.

We have bug tickets for such things, so eventually they should get looked at.

Basically yes. There are and may still be some global parts, but it is all WIP.

Not planned.

Clouds/sky/weather are legacy systems. They work how previous devs made them and then we refactor them to better meet the final design of the game. The why of designs is often lost and in the end I don't care, we just need to make it work to meet the goals of shipping the game. I've been cleaning up and rewriting those systems as time permits, but it is a big WIP.

Some of what you describe are just side effects of a combination of things and it may change by the time we go gold.

Test features are usually for debugging and generally don't become normal features. I'm not sure w

I would guess yes. Not sure new game would matter. A bandit POI could just not spawn them if the option was turned off in an existing game.

I have several months of work left for A20 exp, so it is not soon.

I think many of the settings could use more choices, so I could see more being added, but possibly after a20.

You can buy stainless steel bras and we don't know what she is wearing.

(Do we want to?)

How their weapons will work has not be determined.

Not yet, but we do have some stuff in the works.

I've been doing a lot of cleanup in the chunk system, so some moderate gains there and fixed some mesh/material leaks, but there is plenty more to do. Today I worked on improving the chunk mesh LOD update (really just hides meshes). Chunk decals/models now dither out, so I can reduce the ranges they get hidden at while having no popping.

Yesterday I added the xml for the burnt feral zombie, which has the flames. He is tougher and faster than the normal one.

Steve. He says it is mostly done, but probably a few bugs lurking as is typical in new stuff, but I've not looked at it recently. He actually has a new task improving dismemberment features that one of our artists asked for.

That has not been worked on yet. The details of how it will work and what zombies has not been decided.

Crawlers currently path on 2m heights just like all the rest of the AI.

An airport does not have to be huge. It could be whatever size you wanted to make it. Like a small airport with one to two (parallel) 100m runways.

I found the code. Added as a zombie kill. Thx

The counter is probably correct, since the AwardKill func was calling AddScoreServer with 1 zombie for a vulture. It was the QuestEventManager that ignored vultures.

Exp will have another update, so I just merged it to 19.4.

It will raise your game stage by a certain amount so you get harder enemies there.

There isn't any new special infected coming any time soon.

Sometimes other stuff takes longer and things get pushed back or deleted. I updated the roadmap on a couple topics I don't think will make it.

No because it works, and we are planning a client side interaction with Noah from the White River when you first spawn.

There is a new feral version that is on fire and glows more that will light you on fire. This one will be hard to see and probably sneak up on you but easier to kill and do less damage etc.

If we're not doing frequent dev streams, then there is no release in sight.

I doubt it. It would make more sense to get rid of stone crossbow bolts, it's a much more advanced weapon IMO.