faatal

faatal



22 Dec

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Which is probably a server data issue. Deleting data locally won't fix it if the server turns around and sends you junk data again. All A19 worlds should to be deleted off the server because it is possible an A20 game could be started using an A19 world.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Different issue. Collision mesh baking thread is new. AFAIK teleporting is fixed. What appears to be happening now is vehicles being thrown by physics due to some delayed or broken mesh colliders. I already tried to fix it and abuse it, but you think it is fixed and a tester turns around and says it happened, but then I can't repro.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Not heard of that from the test team. Could be an old data issue. Is this a new A20 game using an A20 world without mods?

Wiping all old save data is advisable from one major alpha to the next (18 to 19 to 20).

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Could be chunks not loading/generating fast enough. Could be the Unity decides to make a semi functional collider issue, which requires a regen of collider and we don't know until the vehicle is trying to drive over it.


SP or MP?

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Once an alpha is stable, we won't break saves for that alpha unless it is some major issue we can't work around.


Our goal was to get it out before Christmas and it was close. January should see a 20.1 addressing bugs and other issues.

In the future, keys or some such mechanism will address that.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

When I wrote those words, I figured I would be hearing from you. 🎄


21 Dec

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Many things don't feel good but are not fixable in practical terms. Sometimes things can be changed, but they are not worth the investment. Redoing resource management would be nice, but would take months of time and then may only get little to no gain.


There is a fixed cost, since it has to scan all loaded resources, so doing it say every minute would be more annoying to only save .1 secs. Games typically hide this stuff with loading screens between levels/stages/whatever, which we don't have. Maybe someday Unity will have an incremental way of doing that.


Being Unity (or really any engine), there are often uncontrollable things we have to live with. Code can only be improved so much before you hit a performance wall.


I have 32GB, so maybe, but I've never heard of Unity doing anything different with 64GB.

F1 key opens the console.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

I changed the default to land claim only. Full seems to be a noticeable drain on some computers.


Performance demands vary greatly in the game from in a forest looking up at the sky (a good best case test) to in a dense city surrounded by buildings and zombies (a good worse case test), blood moons even more extreme. Since we spawn you in a forest, people may think that is the typical FPS they will be getting for the options they chose, which is not the average or worse cases.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

They spawn as you get near the volume. Size does not matter. Distance to an edge is what it uses. Vertical is much closer than horizontal. Grouped volumes should spawn them together and trigger together.


Edit:
And network latency is important. You move, server receives, server spawns, server tells you, you spawn, then it gets rendered. That is 2x your latency plus the instantiate and rendering delays.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

It may be a bug, but I actually like it. A reason to get out of the forest and go some place. I'd probably also like it if the forest burned down on day 21 and you had to leave or die.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Never seen. Does it happen again on game restart?

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

There have been no changes to spawn in distances. Sleeper volume positions/sizes and sleeper locations do vary by POI and are up to each designer to place. Vertical separation is strict to keep performance up, so climbing into a ceiling combined with nowhere to hide the spawn may be what you saw in that case.

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    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

My 3900 takes about .5 to 1 seconds. Worse case maybe 2 seconds. Don't know how you manage that long with that CPU. Never seen an hourglass while it happened. 3 other devs just told be the same thing. Not that long and never an hourglass.


Are you using any mods?

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Not happening in this game. Would require switching the rendering pipeline to HDRP, which would require a rewrite of our gfx system and that would take a lot of time.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

No change from A19.


20 Dec

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

That is a unload unused resources call. It is on a timer and has to happen sometime or memory use would keep climbing. Slower computers take longer.

Same call using same rules as A19.

Basically yes, but is the unload. Garbage collection is incremental (multiple frames) and runs every few minutes and is rarely noticed.


19 Dec

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Any pole health reduction should be balanced with a reduced zed damage buf, but I actually forgot that code was even in there until I saw in forum discussion. Things are a bit hectic around here with a lot of back and forth on a variety of bugs and balance issues.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

No. Profiling requires Unity editor to attach to game. Game has to be a dev build, which makes it run quite a bit slower, so you don't want to be playing a dev build.


Profiling is also not as great as it sounds. Knowing something is slow is easy, I see lots of that whenever I profile. Trying to make it faster is the hard part.


Cities are going to be slower by their very nature. More objects/blocks/zombies. More is going to render slower. To handle more, you turn down settings to reach a reasonable FPS vs quality tradeoff.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Music loading will need a rewrite to use another method to improve performance issues, which is not happening now. Months away.


Mesh baking moving off the main thread should not make it worse, since the main thread is the most loaded thread.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Already changed that today. Upgrade, repair and harvesting all scale.


We are still testing and thinking about these changes like many parts of the game. I'm currently leaning towards two buckets. 25% (or 33%) and 100%. The 25 being the obviously flimsy/weak/small blocks that should not be stopping anything from breaking through and anyone should be able to look at and say that is not going to protect me.


Bars were intentionally excluded because they are primary window and elevated defenses. Plates would probably move back into the 100%, but we are still discussing. Changing stuff to see what happens is what game development is about and some major changes can and do happen during experimental.