[2023] Alpha 22 Dev Diary

What happened to a quick A22 was what often happens to an alpha. A single large feature ends up taking a long time. The new player models, shaders, hair, animations and outfits was a big undertaking and has caused a lot of bugs. We have had two major programming issues and now the game play programming portions of it are left to Lathan and I to finish. I am currently fixing helmet lights that got screwed up by how equipment objects are built vs events being fired. Player hand/feet IK is broken on vehicles due to using a new Unity IK system, which I need to port our code over to. We have a ways to go.

Burnt forest was never removed. The biome was removed from RWG and adding it back only took a few hours and that includes code cleanup, so there is that benefit too.

Many, plus many console programmers, but we all have our areas we work in. We lost two successive programmers working on player body/outfits/equipment, leaving Lathan and I to finish it. We have a new graphics programmer doing skin/hair shaders and mesh work and other gfx tech, but that is a different area.

Less RAM has been the biggest issue, especially on XBox Series S. We have reduced memory usage of many different systems. Art is now getting optimization attention to use less memory.

This time around, the console version is sharing the same project files as PC/Mac/Linux, so it is all the same, except for occasional checks in code for required differences. A good example is file system access. PS5 and XBox each have different systems and rules to read/write files than PC/Mac/Linux.

The gyrocopter has a new model with a passenger seat that I will be replacing the old model with, when I get to it. It will still fly the same, as it is a gryocopter, not helicopter. If we add a helicopter some day, that would fly like a helicopter.

Vehicles physics may get minor tweaks, but they should not be getting any major changes. Sounds have not changed. No UI changes in 22.

Correct. Road carving is not tunneling. It is pushing terrain heights down and smoothing around it to make a more reasonably sloped road, so you can drive up it without the vehicle stopping.

1 No. I consider vehicle physics to be close to gold. There are a few issues like excess wobble to the sides on 2 wheelers, but that is a fix. Sounds may get an update, but they are fine to me other than a bug or two with how they play.

2 We already support DX12 and Vulkan. How well it works, mostly depends on Unity. Each year we update to the next Unity LTS and it seems to get better. A22 is on Unity 2022 LTS.

3 Not much from what I have seen but that could change in future Unity versions.

4 Not sure. Have not seen any yet.

5 It is possible, but not A22.

6 Not yet decided.

7 Sure!

Because that is complicated. You have to spawn in a tunnel POI along the road. The distances vary greatly, so length of POI would have to stretch or select from canned sizes and they can't be arbitrarily rotated like roads are. It could tunnel through the chunks, but chunks don't exist at the world generation level, so you would have to add them on world load or dynamically as those chunks load. Complicated...

We will keep dialing it in. The new 4x4 model plow mod reduces damage significantly and there is a book that will reduced it some for all vehicles.

It disappeared from RWG because we decided to remove it, so Robert stopped generating it, then later we decided to leave it in, so I added it back to RWG.

It could still happen someday, but it is not on a roadmap or anything.

1 The flicker is a limitation with settings due to issues with motion vectors in some of our shaders that needs research to fix.

2 Maybe someday. WIP

3 Maybe none. CPU use and main thread limitations is the main issue, not loading speed.

4 Hands use their own camera, which I would like to remove at some point, but then FOV issues.

5 All player anims have or will probably be changing.

6 Don't know

7 No plans

8 No plans

9 Don't know

10 Not likely

11 Unstable for some people

12 Don't know

13 FSR has motion vector issues as TAA does. DLSS has odd bugs making it unreliable and needs research. They don't just drop in and work.

14 No. DLSS looks good when it works.

15 Time

16 Vehicle wheel rotation speed clamping

No new biomes planned, but we have plenty of ideas for future projects.

7dtd.

Pretty much any large game has its own engine on top of whatever game engine is being used. In the case of 7dtd you have entities, voxels, occlusion, AI, audio, dynamic music, networking, mod support, file/object/data management and many other things that are engine systems on top of Unity and could be used in other games. Blood Moons uses much of that, so it is 7dtd at its core.

There are no hard dates. Console delays would typically be from failing submission, having to make changes, resubmit and waiting on approval. Almost all console games fail certification the first few times as there are tons of requirements to pass.

Yes. Works like grass.

No plans to add back zombie looting. I find it tedious.

Block ambient occlusion has returned, so interiors are darker separate from ambient light. We still change the ambient light for indoor/outdoor, but subtle.

Yes, any entity being drawn in the world decreases performance whether dead or alive, so removing them is also good.

Inside/outside ambient light scaling is already in worldglobal.xml since it was implemented. It is not meant as a simulation of eyes. It was simply to make outside bright and inside dark as ambient light is a global value, so you can't use it to make part of a mesh dark and other part bright. Block ambient occlusion does allow different parts of the mesh at different brightness values, but the implementation had problems and was not fast. The improved version works better.

I don't think modding zombies will be all that different, but it is hard to remember a years worth of changes.

Textures? Artists make those.

Console play is peer to peer without cross-play. Once cross-play is released then you could log on to a dedicated server running on a PC/Linux OS. I am not working on any of that, but I believe that is how it will be.

LOL

Yes, because the dozen programmers working on 7dtd are all needed to help artists get new content into the game. Some people...

Yes, except the increase in players is not guaranteed. More players uses more memory in some cases, so additional memory optimizations may need to be found for it to run reliably.

8k RWG maps is the current limit. Also due to memory limits.

There are about the same of each type.

That has yet to be determined.

Each zombie adds rendering, animation, collision and character controller overhead. You can turn off AI and watch the FPS drop as you spawn more and more.

That is why many of the games that have clothing/armor with bonuses also have cosmetic slots to allow them to look different for the players that care about cosmetics.

Cosmetics is something we may do after a22. At this point most devs have their plates full for a22 and we are not doing additional features unless critical.

More RWG changes coming to A22:

Improved player spawn locations.

Added rwgmixer biomeTags which limits to one or more biomes (requires partial_name).
Added trader types are each in their own biome (with a min of 2).

Improved town planning quality.
Adjusted township counts and sizes.
Added biome township count logging and trader logging.
Balanced lakes, rivers, craters, canyons, township and wilderness settings.

Added POI spawning limits based on surrounding density in world.
Improved POI spawning fallback to use a smaller size but ignore name restriction.

Added preview coloring for districts (3 brightness levels each) and traders.
Improved preview POI descriptions and added score.

This is the current default 8k map:

Well, if I added a colon as it would appear in our change log, it would be more clear:

Added: Trader types are each in their own biome (with a min of 2).

I don't think there will be more traders, but could happen in a DLC or sequel in a galaxy far far away.

Yes. Future biome progression/survival/story will probably tie into specific traders, but that is all subject to change.

You can change it by modding rwgmixer.xml:

No new stamps. Artists would typically make those. We could use more. Not planning on making it procedural.

Yes. Any POI could be listed with any combination of biomes.

It could do more than 10k, but no plans for it. We would have to test to see what memory is needed and if we need to, then disable it on some hardware.

You should get more buildings now anyway with the recent changes as cities/towns generate more successfully and even more so if you increase Towns to Many.

Is the same. I have not looked at that code. It may or may not change.

Town planning changes involve more successfully making towns on the map. It failed a lot before due to excessive randomness and retrying the whole process instead of specific sections. The town tiles are the same layouts.

A township is a city, town, countrytown, oldwest or roadside type of location made up of a random range of tiles and these change based on world size.

Yes, we want better and more stamp variety, but there is no timeline for when that might happen.

Towns don't have a shape. I think they just grow in random directions, but I have not looked at that code, but plan to as I improve the systems.

Towns flatten terrain, except for mountains. Terrain is generated first, so the more mountains, the less success towns have in generating and you would get less. I reduced mountain max scale a bit and may reduce the default mountain percent. I recently removed mountains from wasteland to allow bigger cities there, but their success rate is not as good as I hoped, so needs more work to figure out why.

I don't think anything is adding them after. Cities/towns use up the space pretty well now.

Maybe. Artists add those, not me.

Yes, specific traders appear in specific biomes in A22, but this could change as we test and iterate on the design.