[2023] Alpha 21 Dev Diary

Water is making good progress, so there is a good chance it will be in A21.

Well, the only feature I can confirm about a21 right now is, we won't release it until it has some new features.

I would like to have more vehicle choices. I saw a picture of a sweet new police car model today that made me want to drive it, but I'm currently not allotting time to it for a21. In the end it could happen if I find some time and the art is setup for it.

1 Depends on performance. Currently water is not infinite, so it would drain the higher portion.

2 I'd would guess they will add some as they improve POIs.

3 There is always a chance.

4 Not that I know

5 Should be wandering and inside POIs

I don't know what the average POI designer typically does for rooms, but they should already be able to include the wall inside the volume. Now volumes are not meant to include the full 1m wall thickness plus all of where you can stand beyond them (just a little) as we don't usually want you beating on walls and waking up the volume.

Not likely. That would probably have to go through Unity and I have not seen Unity mention it.

More time seems to be spent processing data than loading it. I was just saying today, we need more improvements on processing data, because if we had infinite data read speeds, load times would probably still not be much faster.

It is a model an artist is working on, so finalish.

There should be melee and ranged bandits. Some may do both. Melee are the first ones I'm working on.

They will be hostile. Possibly later there could be neutral or friendly ones belonging to a faction. They will not loot stuff or destroy things unless they are in their way just like the AI currently does.

They are zombies with weapons, but with different behavior. Like they will hide in cover and wait to ambush you.

Bandits of the same faction will have some type of coordination.

Bandits kill squads could be as simple as a blood moon, but instead with a set group of bandits at whatever time it decided to spawn.

We will have to wait and see.

Probably. Should be higher as bandits will be more rare.

Optimizations are not really in progress. They just happen occasionally as I or someone else sees something to optimize. It happens throughout the development process.

Min specs should not be changing from what they are now, but we just recently increased the CPU core/frequency specs. Min spec means you can run the game, but not necessarily every feature or mod well or at all. Dynamic mesh is a good example. I would not be using it at min spec, but it is not something we enforce.

Nav is 6k.

Thanks for playing.

Not decided. Will depend on how it impacts game play.

EAI has been optimized over the years I've been working on it and UAI being dead, I have not touched it. I do plan to remove it at some point, but hopefully the bandit framework will be adequate to extend from for modders.

Good bandit performance and numbers is a goal, so they will run adequately on all systems.

It is still in the works. There were some issues with platform changes and then there was a bad merge of some of my changes that they backed out and may end up having to hand merge.

The number of bandits that are spawned at any one time. Say a bandit takes x2 the performance of a zombie, then I would not want more that half of them in the world compared to the number of zombies a computer can manage and still have a reasonable FPS. Now that does not mean the world will have bandits everywhere. That depends on game play goals. I would like bandits to be rare, because this is a zombie game and 99% of the population is dead or a zombie.

I'm not against decision trees for any reason other than I don't need them for what I want to do. What we have now could be called decision lists, which are lists of tasks that get checked in order. Bandits will probably have more task types added to support new behaviors.

The key thing I'm doing now is a full cleanup of the zombie controller parameters, states and transitions and their avatar controller code, to get ready to be copied for the bandits, as I don't want the bandits starting from some legacy mess.

Sure, I've looked at it, but it works about as well as Vulkan in Unity. Unity is supposedly making a push to improve DX12 support. I saw it on their roadmap. Maybe next year.

They should be able to just like zombies can fight animals.

I don't know.

Still a thing. We have a programmer working on it full time.

No. Bandits have their own specific clothes for each bandit type and tier.

1 Yes

2 No. The plan is they will crouch and/or find cover

3 No

4 Yes

5 No talk, but they might use the new system the zombies have, but it is not trivial to set up on each model

6 Nothing to show right now. Still cleaning up zombie systems for bandit use and other bugs like ragdoll problems

Maybe. Depends on what you consider scantily.

When a zombie goes to destroy a block for destroy area mode, it would attack it because the block was in the way. On a partial block they would enter it and not attack it because it was not an actual obstacle. Now they know to attack those blocks when there are near them and not just walk inside it.

It means zombie will hit blocks that are supporting buildings that they would not hit before. Say you build a bunch of poles and a platform above and stand on it. They will now hit the poles and not just wander around.

I'd like to drive it, but it will not be driveable due to how it was modeled. Opaque windows, no interior and 2 piece attached wheels. It is more efficient that way, but not usable for me.

Bandits counts would scale like zombie counts at a simple ratio of how much overhead they are vs a zombie.

A lot of progress has been made on it, but it has months of work to go.

Zombies are random within their sleeper volumes as far as which sleeper blocks they pick and the count of zombies, but it is up to the designers to set. If they put 3 sleeper blocks in a room and set it to spawn 2-3 then there is not many variations available to the spawning code.

Wandering zombies has been discussed and we will probably do some of that, but we have many higher priority tasks to work on currently.

There is actually a bug passed to me today about reset POI helper blocks not being random, so it could be effecting zombie spawns too.

Skyscraper windows are expensive and need to be improved. I actually have a meeting tomorrow to discuss with art/design devs.

If we ever add a helicopter, it will fly like a helicopter and be able to hover. A gyrocopter flies like an airplane.

We can't have it in the Mods folder for installing from the Microsoft store or Game Pass, because MS does not want users changing files in the install location.

We already allow you to specify a location on the command line for data files, which you could specify in the launcher. You can then place a Mods folder there.

-UserDataFolder=x:\7DTDData

It can also be set in the serverconfig.xml file.

We are planning to release a .5.

Don't know.

Yes. A shortcut is how I tested it.

It went fine. Skyscraper windows are block models, so they are each a draw call and it uses a sub mesh for trim and glass, so they are actually two draw calls each. They need to be changed to a standard block. We spent more of the time talking about making normal blocks that have opaque and transparent sections and decided we could support that if our mesh naming system handled marking meshes transparent, so that those would end up in the transparent chunk mesh. I have a prototype working of an arch with glass inside the arch. Still thinking on if I like this solution.

A .5 is planned. Beyond that, none are planned other than if we need to fix major bugs.

We don't know how many more alphas there will be before gold. Way too many variables.

There should be a Beta, but the labels don't really matter. A beta would just be a stable Axx relabeled to B1, then bug fixes for weeks/months and then is gold.

I don't know about the status of VR. I think if we did it, it would be basic.

I don't remember seeing Play as Zombie in the Kickstarter and I've not heard it seriously mentioned.

I would guess PVP will be more refined at some point, but I don't think anyone wants to tweak it until features and values are near completion.

We would like a return of horde mode. I have heard about the old version, but not played it.

I put the extra a in there as "fatal" tends to be already used. I started doing that for my WoW characters.

Yes, I've seen an artist making changes to other zombies.

Hi all!
We're very busy on Alpha 21 but I thought I would share the new crafting system and looting changes with you.
There are now tons of new skills that govern unlocking and the quality of items in the game.
A few examples of crafting skills are shotguns, pistols, cooking, armorer, medical, etc.
Perks no longer unlock recipes or govern crafting skills. Many perks are being reworked to add value where before the main value was a recipe unlock.
Books no longer unlock recipes. The ones that did unlock items are being reworked to do something else.

Crafting skill is improved by finding magazines in the game. Mailboxes, file cabinets, book shelves etc can all contain various magazines that improve your skill.
Perking into shotguns for example, increases the odds of finding shotgun magazines, shotgun parts, and shotguns in loot. This makes early specialization work, and you are no longer at the will of the random numbers to find what you are looking for. There is still a chance to find other stuff, but you won't be level 100 and still using a brown double barrel because of random drops. Everything is weighted that you perk into. Once you find all 100 shotgun magazines, you will stop finding shotgun magazines so stuff that is still valuable to you will be found instead.

Skill ranges represent their unlocks. Some skills go to 100, others stop at 50, so they require less magazines read to max out.
All crafting ranges now do not overlap. For example with shotguns, skill 0 to 20 allows you to craft a brown to a blue pipe shotgun. Skill level 21-40 unlocks brown to blue double barrels. Skill level 41-75 unlocks brown to blue pump shotguns. 76-100 unlocks brown to blue auto shotguns. These numbers are just examples, I don't know the actual ranges, but now you don't just craft blue everything.
There is a new skill menu that has a few pages of skills that tracks what skill level you are at and shows what the skill unlocks.
How does it play?
Everyone on the team loves it. The search for technology is fun and you are always finding magazines and unlocking stuff every day. The magazines are useful for a very long time too, where before once you read a single schematic finding another was a disappointment. Now you always find useful magazines.
I found myself crafting nearly every range of pipe shotgun, stone axes etc. Even iron I would craft through most of the range. I would find some stuff and skip crafting for a bit, then when my skill superseded my item, I'd be crafting again. I've never crafted so much stuff in years and it felt really great. You can no longer just sit around in your cave mining and level up and be crafting the best mining tools. You'll need to get out of the cave and search. However teams can still cooperate and share magazines with a dedicated crafter.
Traders sell magazines and offer magazines as rewards. I find myself taking those rewards quite often because it feels very rewarding to unlock things and level up your crafting skills.
Personally I love the new system. I've never seen a crafting system quite like this before, nor an intelligent loot system with deterministic random. It is playing very nice, and I'm really enjoying a long game. I like it because it feels realistic to read something and learn from it and the player can move through all the ranges of crafting and be making that choice... should I use my parts and craft a new gun, or wait another level? Personally I've always had enough parts to craft what I want because I find the parts for what I'm looking for instead of spear parts or whatever. So the new system weights the loot to what the player needs and it feels very rewarding and enjoyable to me and the testers.

I don't know what that is.

Yes you move through the pipe shotgun skill pretty quickly. Each tier takes more magazines to move through.
We're removing any overlap. There is still the concept that a purple stone axe has 4 mod slots so it would arguably be better in that regard.

Yes. Sharp sticks magazine improves your spear skill.

Forge Ahead is back in the game too, with new art

Learn by looting not LBD.

Right now there seems to be some unity between the three, so I can't tell which is the best. Like it's random enough you never know the best way to get the best weapon, just keep playing, looting and looking at traders, and craft when you can craft something better than what you found. The harder biomes have better loot so go to the wasteland for the best possible loot, if you dare.

Oh and I forgot to mention, but you can find the type of magazines you are after also by looting an appropriate type of crate. For example gun crates have gun magazines, pop n pills crates have medical magazines, mo power has tech mags, etc.

We can consider it. Now that it requires great effort to reach the top skill level crafting Q6 doesn't feel so bad.

It does not. Only the chance to find that magazine returns to the normal default percent. I looked at how they did the percents today and it seems fine to me. Good stuff.

1 No new mods, but showing the mods on the vehicle. Don't know if it will make A21.

2 Not yet.

3 No changes there.

4 Probably not.

5 I've been working on AI director clean up, some block rendering cleanup, bug fixes and improvements for our new opaque+glass blocks (downgrade, upgrade, drops).

6 I don't make videos, but the day may come when I feel so inclined.

Yes. I've been developing A21 using 2021 LTS. Currently on 2021.3.3 with plans for the rest of the team to switch in a few weeks.

Nothing in particular. A few editor improvements. Performance seems a bit better.

Yes, I added block tech that allows some mesh "sides" to be opaque and others transparent, so a window block can have a frame and glass with each being in the chunk's combines meshes, instead of each window being a separate prop, which did make for a lot of draw calls. Allan has made many window blocks using this tech for the POIs.

I still have a few tasks with drops from and how upgrades work with those blocks, but nothing major.

It is just a tractor model used by a tractor block and not a vehicle. You can't drive it.

The water simulation is completely new code. It flows into neighbor blocks that are marked to allow it, like into air blocks. Water is no longer a block. It is a water voxel, which means the water voxel can be in the same place as a block, so you could have water flowing into and past grass, a fence or a pole block.

The game is not a real water simulator. The new water sim is designed to be performant and work in a basic fashion that makes sense for our game play.

Voxels are just cubes of data with the world being full of those cubes. Blocks are voxels, but we call them blocks. Water is no longer a block, it is separate data, so it is no longer a block voxel, but a water voxel.

1 It does not flow constantly like a river. Water can fall, but it does not really work for waterfalls as the water would just drain and no more falling.

2 It depends on the block. A solid block would remove the water. Other blocks would sit in the water.

3 No changes have yet to be done to water rendering, just the simulation. Rendering will probably not be that different.

4 Not that I know of.

5 We have talked about sharks, but not really seriously.

6 Hard to compare, as the old water sim was heavily throttled, so it did not really work well and some of the bugs it had may be from that. The new water will actually do stuff, so you could say performance will be worse than broken gimped water. In any event, it is being designed to not be a resource hog and work within reasonable limits.

The water simulation changes how water data is represented and how it flows. The player checking if in water and moving is the same end result with old or new water. The poor movement of the player in water is just a bug as far as I'm concerned with the player code and not water's fault.

Depends who you ask. There is no one date. Just it would be cool by x, but could be y. x and y being very different, like this year vs next year dates. I definitely want x, even if it means delaying features to later alphas, but if a feature is not quite done, but devs want it in, then you slip to get it done.

Yes, it should get fixed before gold. A while ago, I spent a limited amount of time looking for the slowness, but could not tell what was going on.

No. Lots of zombie will still need similar CPU/GPU resources.

They are not linked. You can delete farming all day long and it does nothing to help me or any other programmer with working on anything to do with vehicles or most other things for that matter.

Yes, that is the plan, but it may be a while before we do it.

I thought it would be cool to have a driveable police car, but it is not setup for that.

The blimp was a joke vehicle I did years ago.

Don't know what art is planning for crops.

1 Not bad.

2 Recently I made bandits hold and use a club melee weapon, which mostly works. I then worked on some dismemberment bugs. Worked on explosions being able to dismember multiple parts and dismember corpses.

3 Not just now.

4 Maybe, but our schedule is full right now.

As of now, yes, but it is a gimped copy of the normal club so basic bandits don't just wreck you. Bandits will probably get a game staged strength bonus, so tough ones will hit harder with the same club. The final version may have them using the player weapons, but with the strength mod added.

Not decided.

1 Maybe. Not decided on what their damage will be.

2 Yes.

3 Not that exciting yet. They do talk too much.

4 Like 5 (that is more a heavy group, could be 2 or 3).

6 Only to the extent artists add the content and I don't know if design/art is wanting to do that.

Unloaded chunks and weather don't mix, so there is no current way to make it work with rain.

There are ways to make it work, but they would require a good amount of work, which we do not have the time for in a21.

Weather does not have a history. It could, but it would need to track many days worth and for every biome.

We would not track weather on a container. It would be of the world and not per player. My point was, I'm not spending time tracking weather on anything.

The idea is to have balanced systems. Not have useless parts of the game. Balance takes time and is subjective.

It already does that. Block models are Unity prefabs. Most have LODGroup components in them which determines the render height at which each LOD is shown and when it is culled. Getting them consistent with each other is a challenge as there are many heights and differing amounts of LODs. You also want more trivial models to disappear sooner.

The Video>Quality>Object Quality setting determines how quickly distance causes it to step through those LODs, but it gets expensive using the higher settings. Is actually one of the more expensive graphics settings.

1 Not planning on them looting anything. If time permits, they may get some fun bonus abilities, but that is a big if.

2 They move like zombies, so jump/crouch and any future modes of movement.

3 Not decided.

4 Both. Lite ones fast and heavies less fast. Stamina use is not planned.

5 Don't know if art has plans for that.

6 Feet.

7 No. If they could loot your corpse, they would take your dukes, but as it said....bonus.

Yes. Chunk distance is quite far. That final LOD culling is important to performance, else you are paying for a lot of draw calls, even if it was just a billboard.

I've been doing some overall play testing lately. My current game (8k RWG and default settings) is starting day 4. The water struggle is real. I've had to drink about 5 bottles of murky water so far and managed to not get dysentery. I can boil water now and make 2 kinds of tea. I've never been so excited to loot a red tea. Tea is +4 water over boiled, so definitely making tea. Got my water back up to 90%, but the only drink I currently have is one golden rod tea. Trader so far has had no water. I know how to make the dew collector, but don't have the filter. Hopefully I can find a filter at a trader.

They should, but I have yet to find a working machine.

You collect "Water". It is shown as water in a jar. When you use it, it adds water to the player and disappears.

1 In A21. I think most have been replaced at this point.

2 TAA needs the flicker or it does not work.

3 It probably needs HDRP.

Bandits use player animations (and some zombie anims) and player animations are going through a lot of changes, so it will be different.

1 The advance/retreat to cover is coming along. Steve is working on that.

2 Player swimming motion rework, which turned into handling move states in our code (mostly), not UFPS. That lead to some bugs which prompted cleanup of multiple pieces of code doing various checks for in water (in water, swimming, head in water). Camera and head in water were treated the same, which they are not when you consider 3rd person camera, like driving.

1 The game timer should work fine down to 20 FPS as that is the tick rate. A consultant did find a problem with the tick timing, but I think that was just dedi.

2 Lots of computations equals slower FPS. Cause and effect.

3 I would like DX12 to work as well as DX11, but that generally depends on Unity.

4 It is possible, but that takes a lot of programmer time. I'd rather have something on the main thread run faster, which benefits everyone, than try to use extra cores that only some PCs will have.

It is too early. We have not started the A21 list yet.
There are many bugs to be fixed and no doubt many more to be found, but there is a good amount of play testing going on, so it is certainly playable now.

A21 should be on Unity 2021.3.x, which is a year newer version than A20 uses.

We are not planning on switching 7dtd to HDRP, which means newer graphics features like that are not available to us.

If it is not a new technology being developed by Unity using the built in render pipeline (old, so they won't), then it would be a no. Or some driver level feature that works outside the game.

Thanks for the info. I looked at that today and in testing, it both looked worse and had lower FPS than just switching to a lower resolution. FSR 2 is probably much better, but it appears a lot more complicated to integrate.

I ported the penetration code from ranged to melee, so in certain cases the spear can...

Newer doors are using mesh colliders, so colliders do not cover the holes in the door. Meaning you can shoot or hit through.

Yes, since we will want bandits doing some idle movements, but it will probably be confined to their volume or part of the volume. Zombies would just use it too.

1 I have done AI, anim controller and weapon work for them, and have them spawning as wandering bandits, but there is a lot more work to be done.

2 General bugs.

3 Fixing bugs does not make for cool screenshots.

Nothing with bandits is confirmed. They need to reach a certain functionality and quality level before initial release and we are short on time for A21.

It truly was edge of your seat stuff. The bugs, the raid, the splatter, the cleanup. High fives all around.

As I was saying.......

There are other reasons to want a release. Many people, myself included, have worked on other features. They want their work out there too and we also want feedback on those changes. Waiting on features often leads to a feedback loop of, while other devs waited, they did stuff, so you now need to wait for that to be done, so others do stuff and you wait. Where does it end??? I'd rather make dates and get new things out on some regular basis. If not done, then feature skips to next release.

Those changes have been done for months. Our test servers are running fine with the normal number of players we test with. The changes mainly reduced the amount and frequency of network data sent and improved entity movement interpolation. As to how that would effect high player count servers, it might be better or the bottlenecks could be elsewhere.

Releasing a build by a date can be done many ways. We are not doing a toss it out at some date regardless of how it works. We are doing what features can be done by a date (month/season, not an exact date) and then polish and bug fix THOSE features. If those features are not ready, then the date will slip until they are.

The water voxel is 16 bits. It is a mass value. Water and blocks can both be in a voxel. Water looks at blocks to see if it can flow through. Rotation/shape of blocks is not a consideration as it would be complex and possibly very slow.

This will remove the chunk's data and when you visit it again, it is recreated as it was before. Some parts may randomize, like grass, but parts like POIs should come back the same. This will reduce save game sizes, which is actually needed for console, as our worlds can get huge and max out your save space.

This feature will be off by default in all cases. Safer than having players getting areas reset for no apparent reason.

Lots of things, mostly bugs. Currently POI imposter flickering between road paint vs the block below it, which probably started from the console guys reducing many vertex positions from 32 to 16 bits to save memory. The blocks below don't even need to be there, so fixing it is also an optimization. Console has tight memory constraints, so they are working hard to bring that down, which will also bring PC mem use down too.

Basically 0% chance at this point. I'm putting my efforts towards must-fixes, before we even start the MF list. Also various features that are not quite done, and code changes to support balancing changes as people who are play testing discover issues.

A21 does not have any big UI changes. There are a few smaller changes here and there.

The game has many optimizations already in it or it would be running at something like 5 FPS. A complex game with no optimizations would be unplayable. The goal is to continue adding optimizations to what has already been done.

Me too.

Disabled. Some data removed.

Yes, it would be possible.

There was an issue with one of the weather values not syncing across the network, which was fixed several months ago (a21).

A21 weather should be the same. It was just a bug fix so it looks the same on server and clients.

No work is planned for that in A21.

1 Nope

2 Not something I work on, so I don't know.

Bonus Info: I've been helping out on RWG, doing optimizations, and it is running about 4x faster.

Random World Generation is about 4 times faster. Meaning it generates faster. I thought what I said was pretty obvious.

This is also helpful to the developers and testers as we can test RWG changes more quickly.

Yes, there are changes to how RWG generates. One change that I know of is road generation is different. Robert is currently working on that.

Correct. Not happening in December.

We make builds almost every weekday evening. Our internal and external testers play those every day. They are no different than what we would release to the public. It is just a matter of, are the features working the way we want and the nasty bugs fixed for release to the public?

Content lock has not happened as there are things we are adding that are still in progress. We don't really do a 100% content lock anyway. Something could be added a month or week before experimental if it fit in with our plans.

We have a few big vehicle changes coming in A21. Killing the weaker zombies and animals or smashing through weaker blocks in one hit is now possible, but your vehicle will take significant damage and each repair kit will only restore a portion of the vehicle health. The higher health a vehicle has, the more kits you would need.

I enjoy working on particle effects and just today made the blood splatter and got it hooked into the hit velocity, so it flies around. Satisfying seeing blood on the street or wall after you nailed a zombie. Is a variation of the corpse eating blood splatter effect I added several months ago to make that look more like they are actually tearing into the corpse. Zombies be hungry.

Added: Vehicles are repaired a fixed amount by repair kits and each level of Grease Monkey adds 10% (of max vehicle health)

Changed: Increased vehicle block, terrain and entity damage given and received by various amounts

Changed: Greatly increased vehicle block damage and self damage

Changed: Improved vehicle block collision damage calculations

Changed: Increased bicycle, gryo and 4x4 health

Added: Vehicle sparks on bigger self damage hits

Added: Vehicle blood splatter when doing high damage collisions with entities

Vehicles would take the same damage as a20. Those blocks have a damage multiplier that increases it for the block, but not the vehicle.

No, but I may change that tomorrow.

It is possible, but the particle alignment looks best on horizontal surfaces. There is currently an issue with particles sometimes colliding with moving colliders and stopping in the air.

Yes, they were fine. The changes were to make the number of repair kits needed to be different and reasonable for each type of vehicle.

It could be changed, but we would have to spend time to look at the issue involves with flipping it back and where you appear coming out and if we even like it that way.

At 1 it stays there and each time it takes damage, there is a chance it explodes and goes to 0 health. Since it takes more damage now, you might actually get to see one explode.

No change, but it could probably be fixed by having the projectile continue to raycast after hit and if collider gone, then it falls.

The particle issue is a different system, so fixing one does nothing for the other.

I've heard it mentioned, but was never seriously planned, so not on my radar.

More vehicle improvements for A21:
Ragdolls from death have a short time they can still collide with vehicles (was boring before as they slid through vehicles).
Improved vehicle hit forces on ragdolls (accurate body hits for more realistic tossing/spinning and those hits are a higher percent of damage, so more blood).
Vehicle hits can cause dismemberment.

No shooting.
The 4x4 has more than one. Driver and passenger and with seat mod, you get 2 more in the back.

No plans for touching that.

Vehicles exploding was added in 2018. As I was trying to point out, you might get to see it explode now, because you can actually get enough vehicle damage in typical game play to get it to the point where it can explode.

I don't know any of us that have played DF.

Not that I know of.

It is not a new system, just an improvement of the current system.

I would like to see some indicator of high damage. Might just start with particle smoke coming off them.

Not sure. I would guess the new player outfit models would change how the arms look, but don't know if that includes the hands.

Feral sense is an extension of a feature. Seeing and hearing. No smelling involved.

1 Yes, they have a view angle, distance and it uses ray casts to check for obstacles.

2 Smell is different code, that looked at distance and inventory items. It is disabled, but some of the code is still in there. Heat map is different as it tracks general activity in an area and then spawns a scout/screamer.