faatal

According to ChatGPT we are released.
"...as of my knowledge cutoff of September 2021, 7 Days to Die is already a released game. The game was initially released in 2013 as an early access title and has since had several updates and full releases."

It may already be fixed in A21, because I made changes to the rain particle system physics settings to stop it going through roofs.

It is a game and the number one rule of professional games, is to make it fun, so people will buy it and play it enough to tell their friends and repeat the cycle or you won't be making games for long because you will go broke. Most games, including 7dtd, are far from a real simulation of anything, and I'm OK with that. Where we can make it more realistic, sure, we try, but if it takes too much dev time or ruins the fun, or is overly complicated where many players would be turned off, then we skip it.

That would require some serious engine changes, short of we just load the RWG map and drop you into it.

The processing I was referring to is our c# code converting data from say xml into bytes in memory, which a GPU is not going to help with. Reading of xml also causes a lot of secondary data to be read like loading of prefabs, which loads components, meshes, materials, shaders and textures. All of that being done by Unity.

Asking Unity for features generally have 6 months to years of lag time before you would see it in an LTS, which is the only versions we use these days.

Well I was optimistic too, but all it takes is one dev working on a core required feature who thinks they will be done in a month and then unforeseen problems or design changes happen and it becomes 4 or 6 months.

Those are only my bugs and not all of my bugs/tasks as I currently have 12 must fixes in various states of completion and across the team there are 67. That number does not mean a lot, as half of them do not need to be done for experimental and new ones get added regularly.

Then there are last minute tweaks, like today it came up that sleeper volumes spawn using the game stage of the player triggering the volume, so I am trying to test a change that adds in players nearby, similar to how blood moons spawning makes parties from nearby players for game stage calc.

Features not being as far along as we hoped. We don't primarily schedule features based on time, but functionality, so it takes as long as it does for that functionality to work. Many devs would cut features to hit a time slot. We take the time, within reason, to get the features we want.

Many interactions between game code and Unity have to be done on the main thread, so that often is the FPS bottleneck regardless of what the GPU is doing.

Zombie pathing is complex. There is shared data calculated around each player or group of players and then that shared data is used by each AI to find a path, but that step runs on one or more threads. A21 has changes to throttle the path request rates based on AI distance from players, but is buggy and not done.

Yes, it is currently 2 2 1 and I don't know which way it extends.

We won't be deciding things like that until the feature is in and we actually play and balance it.

No. I said previously that terrain diamonds can't fill a cube exactly.

Sure, each day is a day closer.

No. Different systems. A hand placed block on a road is not a decal mesh generated above a terrain block.

I don't remember, but I was and am working on the decal shader, which is not a systems change. Just a change to rendering the decals we have on roads.

AO draws shadows where inside edges are. It does not make things disappear. Those bugs are normally with the occlusion manager, which has some fixes in A21.

Last week we made some graphics improvements to fix two old issues. Ambient occlusion did not render on certain plants properly, so that was fixed by switching to a new mode. Unity's screen space reflections were disabled because they barely did anything, so we switched SSR systems, which now definitely shows reflections and has more features than Unity's and complements the reflection probe system.

I sure hope so!

Terrain voxels by themselves are diamonds, so they can't fill a block voxel, which is a cube. Terrain voxels only fill a cube when blending into adjacent terrain or multiple terrain voxels together blending into air blocks, but that shape is a spike in that direction. Adjacent terrain spikes merge together and then remove hidden faces. You can change an adjacent block voxel's density to blend terrain into it, but that is a spike, not a flat face.

Terrain uses the marching cubes algorithm, which makes a diamond shape that merges into their neighbors, so they stretch in each direction. They also stretch into air, so the density of the surrounding air also effects the shape and there are some density combinations that make a bad mesh, but normal terrain manipulation does not create those combinations.

It is a terrain collision mesh generation issue. Could be timing and/or a combination of density values or simply a code error. I've never seen someone fall through the world digging down.

No date yet. Streams would be x amount of time before we anticipate release as we don't want streams too early. Multiple people, including myself have tasks to finish with unknown durations. A good example is a hole in terrain bug I have when quest resetting some POIs. I've looked at it before and why it happens is unknown, which means it could take a day or a week or more. There is no way to know, only guess.

That one does not matter since the computer version of the game does not use IL2CPP as it would break code mods. Console is using IL2CPP. Console needed a fix in .17 for a PS5 occlusion bug and we currently try to keep versions in sync between computer and console dev, so the update from .16 to latest.

To be clear, this is more zombies on the server, spread across multiple players, while improvements like disabling jiggle is client side.

If you as a client had 100 zombies around you, the overhead of animating, colliding and rendering them is still expensive and you would probably have a low FPS.

Must Fixes was started a few months ago, but that is just a guide. Multiple systems are still being worked on, polished and tested, which are not often in MFs. There is some overlap, like my vehicle damage task is marked MF, yet it is a system improvement task, not a bug. That one is basically done, but I'm not closing it yet as the values are still open to tweaking and I would like to work on vehicles smoking when highly damaged, if I spend the time. That could also be done during experimental, so not a high priority to me.

The cap currently is the same. Different spawning systems can now scale the cap as they check the count. Blood moon is x1.9. Sleeper volumes x2.1.

Some news.

The basics of an entity activity throttling system have been added to A21 to allow servers to handle more zombies. Large AI counts would overload pathing causing all zombies to be delayed in moving, so this decreases the update rate based on distance from players while still allowing each player to always have some fully active zombies. With this change, max zombie counts for blood moons and sleeper volumes are allowed to be scaled around double what the the cap is set to. The system also disables jiggle components for clients with distance as these were getting expensive as more zombies have them. The system will continue to be improved to throttle other activities.

I noticed last week we had an old Terrain Tool that was not being used, as it did not work very well, so it has gotten some changes and bug fixes. It now grows terrain in all directions (was just upwards before) and you can select the fill block. Undo ...