faatal

faatal



19 May

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

A lot of game development does not work like that. Bugs are often their own unique tasks with many unknowns which makes time estimates vague. Many bugs are also not yet discovered, so how do you estimate time for something you don't know exists? Right now we know about x amount of bugs we want to fix, but each day testers may find zero or 5 more that are must fixes, which then takes of x amount of time each. One could be 10 minutes, another 3 days.

Except when we say 80% of bugs fixed and then the next day say 76% of bugs fixed as new ones are found. They will LOVE IT!

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

I got it to do the same thing. It is totally normal. Shadows are not cheap to render. Looking into the building, you have all manner of objects near you, rendering with all their shadows. We do not have a static world where we can precompute visibility, so there is a lot of overdraw in that situation. Also, the occlusion manager does not disable shadows, as it does not know where they will be projected to and shadows are draw calls.

Yes. 2022 LTS should be out soon and I hope to have A22 using it.


10 May

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Probably. Planned are more biome progression type mechanics.


09 May

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Yes. Wasteland is death. You should only be going there if you are well prepared.


06 May

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

There have been some changes to lighting. I would not use the word "lot". FPS is better somewhat. PC hardware, your settings and what the game is doing and rendering vary greatly, so it all comes down to what your current bottleneck is.


Changing a Unity light's settings is exactly the same.

Yes.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

1 Is the same. Shopping carts are blocks. Blocks don't move. Would need to be a prop and with lower health or special hit rules....

2 At some point vehicles are supposed to get separate parts to represent mods, so they can be turned on/off, but we did not have the time in A21.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Sure, it could be better, but most of us have like 5 things we are working on and we have little time left for when we would like to release. Different methods take different amounts of time to do and often require different combinations of people to work on them.


New cement mixer model is not done. Bellows were not made to animate.


The new campfire with the 3 parts turning off/on is in, but art is being adjusted. It does glow brighter during crafting and looks fine.

Sure, I can dream about a thousand features, but we shall see what we have time for.

Yes. Vehicles do a lot more damage to zombies and you take it as well.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

1 Hit damage is scaled by angle of impact, so glancing blows do much less. There is also a minimum impact amount, below which there is no damage.

2 I, not Steve talked about that. Chain on bike is the only disappearing part. Moving very slow without gas or at 0 health is the same as A20. No one seems to know that as they never got their vehicles to 0 health!

3 Probably, but I don't know when that will get added.

Damage numbers were not changed. That is how they currently are. The damage scaling is easy change by us and like many things, we will adjust it as necessary to achieve the balance we want.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Possibly, but there is other enemy related optimizations that need to be looked at as the throttling is pretty specific with what it is doing currently.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

A20 vehicles explode the same way. I don't think zombie damage to vehicles has changed either.


You damaging your vehicle by hitting things is what has been increased.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Sure. The system was set up to use particles. Anything else would be additional work and I have other things to work on now.


04 May

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Oh, it will blow up, it just does not do it at 0 health. There is extra negative health and after that it becomes a random chance on each hit.


03 May

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Dev Stream 4 will be Robert, Steve, Me and Lathan in that order.


Robert plans on showing a lot of RWG.

Maybe, but we are a ways off from making that determination. In any case, mods could remove them from spawning.

We could make the story work in RWG by simply spawning what we need at various places.


30 Apr

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

It increases the spawn counts and game stage. It also enables extra spawn locations if present in the volumes.

No news.

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    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

No, the AI is far from being done. There are no new bandits animations yet. They are using a combination of player and zombie anims, but player anims don't have root motion, so movement was hacked together and not great which leaves plenty of anim work to do.

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    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

We have talked about death penalties, but there are no changes in A21. I'd prefer a simple you are 1% infected on res.


27 Apr

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

A21 actually uses less RAM from optimizations, which was needed for console and those changes are ongoing. We have also been using more props for items and those can stream their textures, so potentially better on VRAM or at least more flexible use of VRAM.
I would go for higher clocks, but both would improve performance.


22 Apr

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

You can't make too many assumptions about random art that was shown for a future alpha, because that does not mean it will turn out that way. We have a lot of different developers, with a variety of opinions, skills and goals and they show what they think is meaningful or interesting or cool or happens to be done.

Grass has a different shader than trees and use different techniques in the shader for their animation. Trees are 2 different versions of speedtree, which have a bunch of rules and limitations for how they work, some of which we don't like. To go back in time, we would probably do them differently.

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    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

Maybe. I have not seen or heard anyone at the company talk about disappearing trees in months. Trees are in large groups with a single occludee that has to take into account the largest edge tree, which may also be moving from animation, so the bounds is an approximation. Too small, disappearing. Too big, inefficient.


There was an odd case, maybe a year ago where it looked like occludees were swapped, but was never reproduced.

Comment
    faatal on Forums - Thread - Direct

There are many players on PC/Mac/Linux with worse hardware than the current gen consoles, but they can still play the game because they can turn the game settings way down. The goal for current gen consoles is to have high quality settings, with good FPS and still fit in memory, which is not an easy combination.


Many operations in Unity have to be done on the main thread, but it does get a bit less restrictive with each year's changes. Their newer tech works much better with threads, but is generally more buggy or not done and requires gutting a lot of code and rewriting how you do things, which we don't have time to do.