PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Kattla]

Melee seems to be horrible.
Sledge seems to have a half of a block range and its impossible to hit a zombie when its going up the stairs if you are above it, power attacks for whatever reason miss 3 out of 5 times, extended Zs range is good, but melee just feels so bad now, the glancing blows give no feedback and don't seem to work at all.

I've also suddenly got FPS drops from stable 60 to ~20 out of nowhere.

If you are above a zombie, jump ontop of its head, then look down and hit it. I think they'll fix that issue though, that standing on zombies head is safer then one would expect. Might as well have fun with it while it lasts.

I do however agree that melee seems to have taken a hit, but it could just be a personal adjustment issue to sort out how to best do melee in A18e. It happened quite a bit in older alphas that one needed to relearn how to melee , so i'm not going to yell out too much on that issue just yet.

 

[Wulf]

How does Anti Aliasing compare to Anisotropic Filtering?

Both should be "free" in this day and age.Historically speaking, Antialiasing was more taxing, since fillrate was an issue back then.

However, in this A18, it seems anisotropic filtering is very taxing. This is very possibly just a side effect of a more bigger problem though.

AA makes 0 impact for me FPS wise.

 

[Doctor3D]

@faatal: !THIS!
Reducing Anisotropic Filtering in Nvidia Control Panel from a manual setting of 16 to 4 gives me a huge framerate increase in the desert.

Having now stable 60 frames when watching distant desert terrain, before it was about 30 and less.

Yeah

Looks like, the game itself has 8 as internal setting? (compared "Application Controlled").

Thx for the idea!

My system:

I5 6400, 16GB, Nvidia 1060 6GB (exclusive fullscreen @1680x1050 + Nvidia adaptive VSYNC on)

Generally, AF isn't too costly. In this case, considering just how much total textures and VRAM are currently always loaded on the GPU. It could be any number of reasons or a combination of them..

1) The texel probes could be running over and over on the same textures causing it to bog down

2) They are using some form of compression within the container where it takes an extended period of frame time for the GPU to pull it out, do the sample, apply the filtering before drawing them

3) AF does take a little extra VRAM because it has to create and store multiple samples of the pixel edges of textures to create that sharp definition that you see - in cases where you're already starved for VRAM - adding AF is going to cause any problems to be exacerbated.

....or it could be one of of many other things that I could only guess or don't even know about. That's a peculiar one..

I do remember back in A16 or early A17- that AF simply did not work...and they had to do something to the textures in the array in order for them to be properly filtered..possibly whatever they did to make filtering actually work on the textures - is demanding - and when they upped the res of all the textures - it made it even more apparent. I think it was something to do with how PBR was implemented, and they are using a shader trick to get filtering to work...AF could be running on a post-processed texture or something which would be a lot of 'wait' time on each frame...I dunno anything for sure..just spitballing.

 

[Adam the Waster]

IF you right click on Windows 10 Start menu, then click on System, the mystery will be revealed
Oh, Device manager is better, you will like it and learn good stuff.

k cuz my knowledge about my PC is the same as a bird knowing what lives underwater!

 

[JaxTeller718]

Nope, next one should last til 1 or so. Day 35 2 or 3, after that pretty much all night. Of course it depends if you have guns and ammo, grenades and team mates, max alive etc. A lot of variables.

So I've given you a bit of ♥♥♥♥ the past few months, and there are some things i can sit here and nitpick (so much loot) BUT you have basically proven me wrong. You seemed to have steered the ship from 17 towards more fresher waters and the anchors are at the ready for a nice smooth landing.

Good work. As soon as these fps issues get all figured and sorted I would go so far as to say even though i miss my LBD dearly, the new systems you guys came up with are an adequate replacement. Enough for me to almost be ready to leave the memories of it behind and fully accept this new system. And for me thats big.

17 felt like such a chore to start up and play, with 18 I am waking up daily itching to get back on game. Thank you for making me a believer again.

 

[madmole]

Landmines grant no exp? How does the junk turret give exp but a land mine doesn't? So much for going a Demo Build, which is more of a group and ambush type build. Laying traps, luring into a tight space and such. Man this dampens the spirits a bit.
I could have swore Madmole said he was gonna add exp for mines in the past. :dispirited:

We'd have to convert them to model entities instead of blocks.

 

[Adam the Waster]

also what happened to scrap blocks?

did they remove them???

 

[madmole]

Maybe I am... tools are tools. Just being passionate.
On another topic,

Don't get me started on mountains lol.You guys managed to improve indoors performance by a LOT in this alpha (sometimes up to 30%).

But Mountains... they eat fps like crazy on lower rigs. I'm talking 30-90% fps drop .

Maybe expand the Occluder video options so it only works inside buildings? The Occluder checks outdoors are killing potato rigs. That's a bit of work but it will help to get outside performance back and better.

Also, the game is currently rendering terrain textures that are not visible to the player. Just go to god mode and go below the terrain.

Texture streaming helps a solid 10-15% outdoors (tested) so as soon as the occluder thing gets tweaked the game will run better everywhere.

Did you disable occlusion and get better fps outdoors?

 

[fragtzack]

Regarding the repair talk: I like the new repair kit being used on everything. As mentioned though, might be a bit intimidating for a new player. Maybe better documentation/tutorial on all the steps required to make a repair kit.

 

[Adam the Waster]

Did you disable occlusion and get better fps outdoors?

ill have to try that!

 

[Wulf]

Roland,

My original point was simply that having very carefully prepared this launch (which it is, considering the streamer attention and the twitter attention) and talking about Must Fixes bug numbers everyday it seems weird to have such an obvious issue spoil all the fun.

Joel himself stated he and team really wanted to have this be a soft landing and he even specifically talked about steam reviews and public opinion and how first impressions matter. It seemed to me that this was a lesson they learned (possibly from A17).

Fast forward to now, and it just pains me to see a really great and overall much more polished release (compared to previous experimentals and even stable releases!) be blemished by this major performance issue.

It just seems like something to could have been prevented, since it's almost impossible to not have someone on the internal testers not be affected by it. Unless it's a very small group. Which lead to me point out that maybe a bigger internal tester group might be helpful.

 

[meganoth]

i have no idea what you are talking about!

There is a fixed amount of shaders in any graphics card. He is saying those shaders are used so heavyly that freeing some of them by turning down anisotropic filtering has a massive effect on his machine. (At least that is my interpretation)

 

[madmole]

I thought that too at first, however, the repair kits are relatively cheap to make now so it means any tools or weapons you find are reusable even early in the game. It now makes perfect sense to me.

Yes this is the intent. Its still a huge quest to make a repair kit if you are on day 1 and don't know the game yet, unless you are lucky enough to buy forged iron and duct tape from a trader.

 

[madmole]

I am not sure about the early game fist weapon. I was using it and it takes so many punches and wears out so fast that I was out of leather in no time and throwing spears again lel.

I never used it because it didn't exist when I tested my fist build, so it might be crap. I went straight to brass knuckles.

 

[Adam the Waster]

Regarding the repair talk: I like the new repair kit being used on everything. As mentioned though, might be a bit intimidating for a new player. Maybe better documentation/tutorial on all the steps required to make a repair kit.

i think that there too easy to make

i think it IMO that it would cost a bit more iron! like 3 or 4

but aside form that i still love A18

 

[Quantum Blue]

i think that there too easy to make
i think it IMO that it would cost a bit more iron! like 3 or 4

but aside form that i still love A18

I don't quite understand. You love A18 more when in asid form or not in asid form?

(Whoops - too fast. You see you corrected asid...) ; - )

(I suspect you mean 'from' instead of 'form' as well...)

 

[madmole]

why get rid of "ground", like forest ground, blocks? hard to find level spots and those blocks help make that happen, I know there's other ways to, but that was one of the ways..
**edit: found a "dirt" block**

There is some new adaptive soil block that you want. It turns into whatever the block was originally.

 

[Gareee]

i dont know what kind of card i have my brother just gave me one of his friends old pc. lol

and ik i dont know anything about PC gaming!

You can check what card is in the PC with settings system info. Our old cards are fine for a18 with medium settings, and for $100 are a great value.

There are plenty of them on eBay, but don't spend $200 on a new one if you choose to upgrade. Just get a used one that is working.

 

[Lonestarcanuck]

I don't get it...

I created a new game 4K map on my laptop (razor) with i7/16GB 512SSD and GTX1060 and I am playing in FULL HD on ULTRA and getting 60FPS outside.

I only turned off Motion Blur and I have the NVidia GPU Anisotropic Filtering to x2.

the game is LOCAL not online.

yet my high-end gaming rig at home with GTX 1060/6BG I7/32GB 2x 512SSD struggles on High to get 10-15FPS.

is there a difference between local and online when it come to textures/graphics?

 

[Adam the Waster]

yes my laptop has sensitive keys lol

- - - Updated - - -

You can check what card is in the PC with settings system info. Our old cards are fine for a18 with medium settings, and for $100 are a great value.
There are plenty of them on eBay, but don't spend $200 on a new one if you choose to upgrade. Just get a used one that is working.

i really dont have the money so for now i'll stick with potato. thxs tho