7 Days To Die Dev Tracker

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 anywa...

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 i...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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