PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

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faatal said:
I can't give you exact answers, since PC specs vary so much. It should have similar performance. The worse case currently is in the downtown of the new RWG cities, but they are working on a point system to help keep too many high resource POIs from being together.

The game will use around 6 cores, but cores are not used equally because there are many different workloads being run. Many tasks have to be done on the main thread in Unity, which consistently takes the most amount of time per frame. The same with the graphics thread. Beyond that, other threaded tasks like mesh creation, collision mesh baking and AI pathing are on demand as needed. I have a 12 core CPU, but it certainly does not need or use all of those cores. Extra cores are nice to have, since the OS and other programs can run without using cores the game is using.
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@faatal - As we approach experimental, are there any plans to do benchmark testing on maybe a low/mid/high end rig to see how the game performs from a CPU/GPU as well as FPS perspective? I'm sure it's part of your standard dev cycle, but was curious if you would release any hard numbers. 

Super excited for A20 and have been cranking out content around the release and one of the biggest comments I get from folks is that they are afraid that their potato of a computer won't be able to run the new version.  I'm hoping to see some significant performance gains as it would really increase the number of folks who could play!

 
KhaineGB said:
Unfortunately I don't think it does.

Prime MIGHT be able to do something like... make it work with a bot that the player needs to run, which then pushes commands to the game to do the same thing. But that'd probably be a lot of work.
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Yeah - I was chatting w/ Prime on twitch tonight and he said as much also.  Basically YT needs to get their act together and provide better APIs/hooks for game integration.  

 
JamesKirk said:
Will we get automatic reload for X-bows? On the normal Bow the next arrow is put on the string after shooting. On Crossbows you need to press reload.
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Since x-bow had automatic reload and they changed it to this I think the chances are low.

Kinyajuu said:
Yes, but you can add as many new stamps as you want. It will also blend them together, so you might see some things that look kind of familiar but when you're on the ground it doesn't look at all the same and I've ran many many many seeds. Also, modders can add to the terrain stamps using png files, there is a base height level (r:32 g:32 b:32) and anything darker will dig down, anything higher will build up. Once I go over how to use our r16 format you'll even be able to define lakes at certain heights IN a stamp. It's really nifty. a20 (gold) RWG has a LOT more content driven design than any iteration before it. I'm very confident people will be happy with how it generates and modders will be thrilled at having a fairly easy way to build customized random maps. (looking at you, total conversion modders ;))

Anyway, I'm trying to avoid talking about the details too much on here. I'm super excited to show off / talk about everything and have a whole list of stuff that I'll be going over on the dev stream on October 13th (this week is the other programmers).
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Though for rivers there would be some "linking list" needed, i.e. to the left side of this stamp the following list of stamps can be placed. Is that planned for A21?

 
WaywardEko said:
@faatal - As we approach experimental, are there any plans to do benchmark testing on maybe a low/mid/high end rig to see how the game performs from a CPU/GPU as well as FPS perspective? I'm sure it's part of your standard dev cycle, but was curious if you would release any hard numbers. 

Super excited for A20 and have been cranking out content around the release and one of the biggest comments I get from folks is that they are afraid that their potato of a computer won't be able to run the new version.  I'm hoping to see some significant performance gains as it would really increase the number of folks who could play!
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We have a consultant graphics programmer who is doing benchmarks and has a second PC with low specs.

I dug up my 4th old dev PC (i7 860) and have it running now, but it only has 4 GB RAM and an AMD 1 GB VRAM GPU. It will run the game on lower settings, but is very slow for testing as it hits the hard drive a lot (paging) during loading and shutdown and I could not run Unity at the same time. My wife's old PC has 8 GB RAM, which should work in that motherboard, so planning on trying that RAM.

The problem with benchmarks is they tell you where you are at and maybe what is slow, but not how to fix it. Fixing is the hard part.

 
So... quick question; has there been mention of an update to the in-game paint textures for A20?

My wife would be a more hyped if there has been a lot more texture options added, she's always complaining about them and I only have so many non-white hairs left to hear about it. :D

 
Genosis said:
So... quick question; has there been mention of an update to the in-game paint textures for A20?

My wife would be a more hyped if there has been a lot more texture options added, she's always complaining about them and I only have so many non-white hairs left to hear about it. :D
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It seems there is one new texture, replacing the old beer sign texture. This isn't going to change -- AFAIK it is just not possible to increase the number of paint textures within the current architecture and that is not changing. 

 
faatal said:
We have a consultant graphics programmer who is doing benchmarks and has a second PC with low specs.

I dug up my 4th old dev PC (i7 860) and have it running now, but it only has 4 GB RAM and an AMD 1 GB VRAM GPU. It will run the game on lower settings, but is very slow for testing as it hits the hard drive a lot (paging) during loading and shutdown and I could not run Unity at the same time. My wife's old PC has 8 GB RAM, which should work in that motherboard, so planning on trying that RAM.

The problem with benchmarks is they tell you where you are at and maybe what is slow, but not how to fix it. Fixing is the hard part.
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I think I got a spare 8GB stick of DDR3 somewhere if you want it sending over

 
Genosis said:
So... quick question; has there been mention of an update to the in-game paint textures for A20?

My wife would be a more hyped if there has been a lot more texture options added, she's always complaining about them and I only have so many non-white hairs left to hear about it. :D
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Some have been improved, but no new ones for A20 I think.  There are talks to deprecate some of the old ones that are not used often and replaced with new ones.  A good example is the old beer texture.

 
Laz Man said:
Some have been improved, but no new ones for A20 I think.  There are talks to deprecate some of the old ones that are not used often and replaced with new ones.  A good example is the old beer texture.
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Well, any improvement is good. Such an odd technical limitation to have, I'm sure it's been explained to death to why it can't happen. I hope there is a way around it in the future, such a crippling loss of potential here. 

 
BasicallyACat said:
Is there a place with a summary of the Dev streams and/or what's going to be in A20?

I'm having trouble finding that.
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First post on page 1 of this dev diary has it all.

Laz Man said:
Some have been improved, but no new ones for A20 I think.  There are talks to deprecate some of the old ones that are not used often and replaced with new ones.  A good example is the old beer texture.
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Oh noees, the zombie beers in the beer den will be naked then 😁

 
meganoth said:
Oh noees, the zombie beers in the beer den will be naked then 😁
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It was replaced with a model including the texture. Blocks can be created with arbitrary textures (within reason, I suppose), but paintable textures are limited. Or, at least, that's what I gathered.

 
Genosis said:
Well, any improvement is good. Such an odd technical limitation to have, I'm sure it's been explained to death to why it can't happen. I hope there is a way around it in the future, such a crippling loss of potential here. 
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@Genosis - this came up in one of the dev streams.  I don't fully understand why, but there is a hard ceiling on the number of paint textures they can have -- so the only way to add new ones is to remove existing ones.

faatal said:
We have a consultant graphics programmer who is doing benchmarks and has a second PC with low specs.

I dug up my 4th old dev PC (i7 860) and have it running now, but it only has 4 GB RAM and an AMD 1 GB VRAM GPU. It will run the game on lower settings, but is very slow for testing as it hits the hard drive a lot (paging) during loading and shutdown and I could not run Unity at the same time. My wife's old PC has 8 GB RAM, which should work in that motherboard, so planning on trying that RAM.

The problem with benchmarks is they tell you where you are at and maybe what is slow, but not how to fix it. Fixing is the hard part.
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Fair point.  I guess I'm just trying to learn if we will see some tangible performance gains.  I've been doing readers digest versions of the dev streams and showing off all the new sexy stuff you all are doing and I get a lot of comments that says ... holy @%$# this looks amazing ... followed by ... OMG my potato of a computer can barely run A19.  So this is just me checking in to see what the performance plans are ... cause I want more people playing your awesome creation! 

 
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WaywardEko said:
@Genosis - this came up in one of the dev streams.  I don't fully understand why, but there is a hard ceiling on the number of paint textures they can have -- so the only way to add new ones is to remove existing ones.
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...can't be that "hard" of a ceiling, there's an m word for that. 

 
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