faatal

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

No news.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

LOL. That is certainly a possibility.

That is nice that modders can do that, but we need to make sure that vanilla is going to work on many years worth of PCs, Mac, Linux, consoles and lot of different GPUs. Currently, the game barely fits in Xbox Series S memory and quickly runs out as you try to play it, so memory is a great concern and we are doing a lot of work to reduce usage of. Streaming/unloading will help, but that is not a Unity strength, so some programming time is going to trying to improve that, without lag spikes loading data.

That would require a clothing mask texture being made for each zombie for the tint areas or additional textures made. Either approach would push up memory use, so that would need to be evaluated too. The artists are busy working on all the previously mentioned art.

Completely different people. The various water changes were done by three different programmers, who can not do zombie art.

The game tick rate is .05 ms, so that might be what your were seeing. Don't know where you got .01 from as most code runs at frame rate, physics fixed update rate .02 ms, or the previously mentioned tick rate.

We are trying to finish A21, so certainly not wanting to make large engine changes now.

I didn't get some of the other things you were saying, but thanks for info.

Well, the goal would be to give you reasons to not want to be in the water. 🌊

Definitely. Games with many features grow massively as they are developed, because at the start they don't have all those features and often when features are added they are basic and then grow over time.

The water simulation changes don't really effect the raft. It could have worked with the old water as well as the new. Large bodies of water are just idle voxels in the new simulation. Holes would cause the raft to hit a bump, but large bodies in the old sim rarely had holes in them.

The raft model has been in the project for years and the plan was to eventually do something with it. I made the vehicle system generic enough to support vehicles floating on water. I always have dozens of tasks I could work on, but some days you just want to have fun with something new, so back in September I spent a day setting up the prefab and xml to make it work and it does.

I showed it to the team and we had a laugh about what we could do with it someday, but it needs many more days to polish it up, so it was not deemed to be something we would do for A21. That work is not wasted, but simply set aside until in can be properly finished and combined with other water related features like say a shark and better shapes and quantities of water in the world, so you would actually want to make a raft to get around. I'd love to have a water map full of islands.

Game development often has creative rabbit trails where y...