PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[SrslyGTFO]

Anyone rocking a GTX 1060 6GB care to share their experience with A18.0 b143 and what settings are working for you?

 

[Tetrameth]

Ummm go to Chernobyl and plant some crops and come back tell me your ok lol

Reminds me of that episode of 'cooking in the danger zone' where the guy eats the soup and guzzles down moonshine made from ingredients gathered 15km from Chernobyl.

 

[Guppycur]

Beginner & casual are not the same thing at all.
Concerning the difficulty, a lot of people here should try higher difficulty levels et stop playing in default mode. Default mode is NOT for seasoned player.

Difficulty =/> warrior, zombie run or sprint at day, loot around 50 or 25%, z damages 300%, (no air drop, no loot respawn - sounds obvious), etc, etc... there is many ways to make the game challenging.

Who can honnestly say the game is easy when zombies are killing machines, when the guns and ammos are rare, when you lost everything each time you die ??

Yeh but then you're not giving fair input on base vanilla settings, and I think that input is critical.

 

[madmole]

I feel like heavy armor and cooking should be swapped in their skill trees.
Heavy armor slows you down, and doing fist fighting makes you have to get a bit closer than club or sledge to connect, so going heavy armor really just seems to make you get hit more because you cant get in/out as needed and you take more damage than running around neked with a sledge. I think its a bit better suited for the slower attacks of the strength melee weapons where if you end up in a bad position it buys you some time for your slower attacks to decapitate everything.

With fists you want booze, to make that booze is a pretty deep trip into strength. You also get stuff like extra meat from harvesting, and the farming perks in fortitude, so having cooking in there as well just seems like a better flow than to have to dip into strength to actually turn those resources into something that has less of a chance to kill you from eating it.

Being a big strong person running around in cloth armor to avoid penalties, with a frying pan in hand (add this weapon please?) just doesn't feel as good as being a big strong person running around instead big tin can armor. And the fortitude tree really seems about natural healing and and natural damage resistance and...living off the land, where the big heavy armor on top of your naturally healthy and resilient self to also keep you safe seems out of place.

Armor perks don't do anything for armor rating though. You can be a strength guy and have just as good as armor rating as the fortitude guy but you won't move as fast. There are mods that improve movement penalties. Fortitude is all about staying alive or being tough, and heavy armor is a good fit. It could easily fit under strength but strength was super awesome anyway so under fortitude it went.

 

[Doctor3D]

Some decent performance increases here..I'm still getting a few weird drops. But, it plays well enough on all computers to at least enjoy the game. Lowering\Disabling AF (which I did even before this patch) was the biggest increase for me.

For those still suffering to unplayable levels, and couldn't disable AF through your graphics control panel, don't forget to try the new AF console command for a possible large FPS boost.

Faatal and his team posted them here:

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?111778-Alpha-18-Dev-Diary!!&p=1032210&viewfull=1#post1032210

 

[Tetrameth]

Yeh but then you're not giving fair input on base vanilla settings, and I think that input is critical.

He gave his input, it's that base vanilla settings are too easy and that the difficulty needs to be pumped up in order to provide a challenge.

 

[Hek Harris]

Yeh but then you're not giving fair input on base vanilla settings, and I think that input is critical.

Sorry but you, me and most of the players here are not in the best position to judge the standard difficulty: it is obviously much too simple ... I prefer to hear the opinion of the new players - not casual ^^ - than ours.

 

[madmole]

Exactly. That's exactly where I am at. My thoughts where what's the point of having a primitive bow or spear if you only need them for just a few moments? We have all this primitive tech and mechanics in the game, but we don't utilize it for gameplay purposes.
In my own personal opinion, the game works best when there are tiers or ages (if you will) that you play through. It's for me, the best way a survival game to progress. You start with very primitive gear and struggle, and progress from there. But, that has been a common complaint from everyone I play with. The first few moments are scary like you said..OMG this is awesome! You struggle for a bit and then you get a gun..and it just cascades from there.

I know it's hard to balance all that out...to where you don't have new players complaining about how tedious the early game is..and you don't have long-time players complaining how short it is.

To be frank, this is the best the game has ever been for NEW players who just bought the game. By far. They nailed it when it comes to getting a new player introduced to the game and hooking them for a bit. But, I think it went slightly too far in the direction and it hurt the early game.

I know a goal was to make sure they don't make the early game so difficult and tedious as to run off people that play it. And, that's a good goal. There's got to be a way to make the primitive age of the game like that instead of just making progression into mid-game so fast. A better utilization of gamestage could help make primitive weapons a bit more effective and early shelters like wood more effective against weaker zombies - so that it all plays out a lot longer.

Most people I know go straight to cobble and defend with guns. If early gamestage zombies had much lower damage to wood and died easier to wood and stone weapons..there could be some fun progression there. The potential is there for expanding the early game without making it tedious or just expediting it.

I see iron armor and tier 2 weapons as early game. Primitive is garbage starter stuff and shouldn't last too long. You aren't going to see top gear until level 60 or so on average, that is 45 hours on average invested into that game, how long should people play with meager stuff?

I like what you said about nailing it for new players. You could probably get where you want the game to be by turning up the difficulty, slowing down XP and reducing loot. There is a HUGE difference between knowing exactly what to do and knowing nothing, so its really tough for vanilla settings to appeal to guys with hundreds or thousands of hours of experience.

Part of it is clinging to that ideal guppy has of "a rare chance for a great item". Leveled loot would help you enjoy the game a lot more IMO. I'd prefer t6 items didn't even show up in loot until at least level 60. 10 ranks per item would play well on average IMO.

 

[madmole]

@MADMOLECrafting seems more a mid to end game thing now. That might not be bad to hook new players and ease them in.

I got the rtx 2060s in today and updated. I can play on ultra now and get 60 fps, but like others I'm getting that oddball fps drop at times.

One thing we DO need now is a toggle on the map screen to turn off specific waypoints. Marking a bunch of loot drops gets very cluttered on the compass.

(More icons would be good as well...maybe there are some already in the game that could be made available?)

Something else I thought of... Players are still the old Uma code, and everything they are wearing is displayed when driving, other than the 4x4.

If 1st person driving mode could be added, the player textures could be unloaded, and the overlay of handlebars or the truck interior would reduce the screen real estate being updated.

That would be a win win offering another immersion option, and a performance boost as well.

Now I need to dig up that post about where to find steel...I can't make the motorcycle without it, and I've only found one trader so far.

I'm trying to resist red eagles mod with trader adverts in mailboxes to the closest one.

Still haven't seen snow or dessert biomes on day 36, but minibike travel is slow.

I use the red marker to mark the one marker I'm going to when I get too many. THe toggle active ought to show on compass IMO, otherwise it isn't. I'll talk to Prime about improving it.

Mine street lights, power line thingy, gunsafes and the iron chest I think, oh and the army munitions box for steel

 

[madmole]

Could airdrops have their smoke take longer? It's almost impossible to find the airdrops when in the desert without airdrop markers because of the new RWG having huge mountains in the desert.

Its kind of expensive to pump particles across the entire world, you can turn on map markers on air drops.

 

[Sam_Neill]

If i get 45-65 fps with my cheap Radeon RX590, with the command "gfx af 0" then users with end cards should get easily very high fps too.

Nice update. Did not test for hiccups so far, but it is definitly smoother now.

 

[madmole]

This right here is reasonable and very likely for an experienced player. This indicates to me though, that there isn't too much ammo spawning... because you are making it.

A lot of people said "POIS aren't worth the ammo". Kage was one if I recall. So we added more ammo to POIs, and we improved the loot at the end. Here is the thing, with the massive hordes late game and ability to mine all you want, people could still have all the ammo they wanted by mining, but we don't want to force everyone into mining to get ammo. Now some people are saying its too much ammo blah blah blah, well I say you aren't using the right settings. Lower your loot and raise your difficulty, problem will be solved on day 100 I assure you. So all that ammo people are talking about will dry up faster than piss in the desert once people put in 100 hours and find out what Alpha 18 really is.

 

[Jugginator]

Quick question before I jump in game: what does gfx st budget and forceload do?

 

[Good Idea]

even with the new patch I get 15 fps looking around outside, while I get 40 looking at the ground.

Anyone know any settings I could try to improve my fps?

 

[madmole]

Is there a way to scale looting with what day in game it is? As exciting as it is to find a level 5 AK on day 1, that excitement only lasts for the moment and then its kinda just meh moving forwards. It feels like you can get incredibly good things too early which does kinda take away from the quality level that crafting can give you. If you could craft fairly decent stuff early if you pour points into it, and have to survive the earlier game on that, THEN start to find really high quality things after you've put in the effort to survive it would be great

But a blue AK might be a piece of crap. If its less than 60 damage it is. A proper 762 ammo does at least 120 damage before perks. I hear you though, but need to collect more data. We can certainly reduce chance to find nice stuff early game I'd be on board with it.

 

[RacketLord]

Hey all!

Just fired up the new experimental update, but most unfortunately it didn't solve my rather odd performance issue. The game absolutely, positively will not run well in Fullscreen mode. It's choppy, laggy and totally unplayable. However, once I enable windowed mode the game is super smooth and a joy to play. It's just a shame because I can't stand playing in windowed mode. I'm just stumped as to what could be the issue. My system is as follows:

OS: Windows 10 64-bit, version 1809

CPU: Intel i7 4790k 4.0GHz

GPU: MSI Gaming GTX 1080 8GB, latest drivers installed (436.48)

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR3 1600

Motherboard: MSI Z97 Gaming 5

Aside from this, what I played of the update so far has been immensely fun from a design standpoint. Rage makes zombies scary for me again (early on, still need to get further), looting is fun and satisfying, food poisoning hasn't been an issue for me yet. I'm super hopeful I can get this fullscreen issue sorted so I can really sink my teeth into A18.

Great work overall, devs!

 

[ZombieSurvivor]

Finally an Update, now I can try the game out!!!!! have not tried alpha 18 just because I already knew A18 was going to have FPS/graphic issues. Time to try the game out now that it sounds like those issues have been improved a little with whatever the current build is

 

[BobbyLee298]

Looks like they went with two parts now, handgun and rifle. I guess it makes things simpler.

Thats what i was thinking, but its only just a few more parts and they already made custom icons for the parts

 

[Wulf]

even with the new patch I get 15 fps looking around outside, while I get 40 looking at the ground.Anyone know any settings I could try to improve my fps?

"gfx af 0" is the only one right right now that will improve FPS dramatically at the cost of texture sharpness. (mostly noticable at certain angles).

P.S. I don't think this latest experimental patch was aimed at fixing performance problems. That is still coming.

 

[Sam_Neill]

even with the new patch I get 15 fps looking around outside, while I get 40 looking at the ground.Anyone know any settings I could try to improve my fps?

Which hardware, which settings, which resolution do you run the game?

I can get 15 fps too, if i run in 4k with ultra with my graphics card.

And dont forget to restart the game, after you have changed settings.

When starting a new test, after getting ingame, wait for 10-15 seconds. the initial framerate is very low.

"gfx af 0" is the only one right right now that will improve FPS dramatically at the cost of texture sharpness. (mostly noticable at certain angles).
P.S. I don't think this latest experimental patch was aimed at fixing performance problems.

I do have a massive increase in fps :smile-new:

but lets wait for more people to test it.