faatal

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are planning to release a .5.

Don't know.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Maybe. Depends on what you consider scantily.