PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[spacepiggio]

I'm pretty sure as soon as a player sets foot in a cave that isn't structurally sound it will collapse, regardless if it was generated or man made.
We'll keep optimizing and see where that lands, then we can think about some kind of underground cave networks. We took them out because we had no occlusion framework and chunk generation / rendering speeds were unacceptable.

Is it possible to stop the huge caverns a Collapse causes in your Cave or Mine? If you have a Cave-in say in your Forge Room underground it should bury the Room possibly Destroy Chests, Forges, etc. & you would have to dig the Room back out again.

Be neat to find the bones or bodies that were in the room so we can Harvest their Bones...

I kind of liked the time 1 caused on my mining but a lot of ♥♥♥♥ was lost & uncollectabe

 

[betam4x]

This might be news to you, but you didn't pay TFP to make you a game tailored to what you or the community wants. You funded them to make the game they want. That's the purpose of kickstarter and of buying a game on Steam. You don't hire a developer, you buy their product. You might be unhappy with the results, but all of this "WE PAID YOU", "We honestly don't care what you think man" is nonsense.

I came here to agree with this post. Also, to the troll: “You” didn’t pay TFP millions of dollars. The community did. Contrary to what you think, not everyone hates Alpha 17. Those of us with the hardware appreciate the visual upgrade and the refreshed skill tree is a breath of fresh air. Maybe you should have taken that Kickstarter money and upgraded your PC. :/

 

[Survager]

I'm pretty sure as soon as a player sets foot in a cave that isn't structurally sound it will collapse, regardless if it was generated or man made.
We'll keep optimizing and see where that lands, then we can think about some kind of underground cave networks. We took them out because we had no occlusion framework and chunk generation / rendering speeds were unacceptable.

But if the caves everywhere will have stone walls, it does not solve the problem?

 

[betam4x]

Well, then do something simple, like a primitive shooter, and there will not have to solve many problems and add things that make the game interesting. There usually, there are no interesting features that can create potential problems.... all as you like...Just more advertising at the launch.

I get 60fps at 1440p max details. You people need to stop gaming on budget PCs. :/

 

[n2n1]

I get 60fps at 1440p max details. You people need to stop gaming on budget PCs. :/

I agree. But you have to be tolerant of our younger brothers

I think, i've never had a problem with the speed of cave generation.

Besides, now the way of generation is changed, for what? Why then wait for an hour when generate the map if it doesn't solve problems of "real-time generation"?

 

[Ouch Quit It]

Even now in A17 if you start hitting the stalactites on the ceiling of those POIs that are down in the hole with either a door or scrap plates covering the opening...the ones with the indian crate in them....they are only a few blocks underground and the ENTIRE roof collapses.....But on the other hand..i think actual underground camp, mine, hideouts POIs would be better, as some of the larger POIs in game now have pretty big underground areas...think the scientist lab one under the house.

Make underground cave POIs that can be generated into the mix...they would not be as open as the large rooms that we find in the house POIs just add wood supports every 5 blocks to simulate cribbing inn a mine shaft.

Coughs* Oh and add a small airport while you guys are at it...we need one * Coughs

regards

Ouch

 

[TSBX]

You guys seem to be forgetting that caves were in the game, so "ideas" on how to implement them are moot. They were in, performance suffered for it, and they're out until performance allows them to be back in.

 

[KhaineGB]

I came here to agree with this post. Also, to the troll: “You” didn’t pay TFP millions of dollars. The community did. Contrary to what you think, not everyone hates Alpha 17. Those of us with the hardware appreciate the visual upgrade and the refreshed skill tree is a breath of fresh air. Maybe you should have taken that Kickstarter money and upgraded your PC. :/

I didn't. The laptop I was using for mod development went from a 70-ish FPS average to a 30-ish FPS average with mostly the same video settings. That's from A16 to A17. The only difference is I had a wider FOV in A16.

My desktop was just as bad, going from 130-ish down to around 80-ish.

I've since bought a new one and back to roughly 80-ish FPS, but I consider that to be pretty unacceptable when A17 was touted to be a performance INCREASE.

However it sounds like TFP are working on that now, so that's good.

 

[KingSlayerGM]

In a nutshell we want more 2000 hour guys by focusing on polishing the first 30 hours. How can anyone fall in love with the game and get hooked if the performance, bugs and lack of polish are hindering them?

I think this is a good strategy. I had many friends that I tried to get hooked on this game, but it was just too unpolished to them and they couldn't play it. Get the performance up, the graphics good and fix the bugs, and a lot of new players will enjoy 7dtd!

A17 is another A13. It was a LOT of changes but by the time we fixed the bugs and got it balanced (a14) it was received very very well and at the end of that phase 99% of the players would prefer A14 to A12 as they will A18 to A16.

Speaking of which: @MadMole how is the development of A18 coming along? Is it still set to be released in the first half of 2019?

 

[Ouch Quit It]

You guys seem to be forgetting that caves were in the game, so "ideas" on how to implement them are moot. They were in, performance suffered for it, and they're out until performance allows them to be back in.

thats why if you make them as a POI...less problems than the perlin worm system that went nowhere.

 

[Demonoid74]

I would be happy for ANY caves...POI or otherwise...

When I found some of the newer POIs with underground areas , it made me happy...

We definitely need more of that in one way shape or form...

 

[KingSlayerGM]

thats why if you make them as a POI...less problems than the perlin worm system that went nowhere.

Since the problem was performance, not generation. Your suggestion to use POIs (a different generation) in order to have less problems, is nonesense.

 

[Damocles]

I would be happy for ANY caves...POI or otherwise...When I found some of the newer POIs with underground areas , it made me happy...

We definitely need more of that in one way shape or form...

There are 4 cave POIs, and a decently large mine, and several larger houses with underground areas.

Not sure if the RWG is spawning all of them.

There could be more of that stuff though...

 

[TSBX]

thats why if you make them as a POI...less problems than the perlin worm system that went nowhere.

Except that POI caves are boring and cookie-cutter, not interesting content.

 

[JaxTeller718]

Good then you guys can listen to everyone cry about your performance problems

Considering you guys somehow managed to halve performance from 16 to 17 while at the same time crippling larger mods I would say you did a very good job of that all by yourself.

Id love to have a thread of people playing vanilla A16 with a snapshot of their CPU and GPU stats, and then a shot of A17 with a snapshot of those same stats. I think the drastic difference would shock you.

There is no way you will ever get back to the performance you had in 16, no matter how many artificial handicaps you throw at the game like Texture Streaming you implement.

And telling people to get better systems isn't going to work, because there are people WITH those better systems that are close to maxing GPU usage playing just vanilla on high settings, and thats before people even install a single mod.

And considering this whole thing was branded as "mod friendly" thats a bit of irony I certainly wasn't expecting.

 

[Trankitas]

Working on the hold/fire/reload animations.

Very nice! I've been asking that for a long time!

 

[Star69]

See I’m in the camp of better performance in A17 vs A16. I have a 5 yr old gaming laptop. FPS is capped at 60 due to monitor refresh rate. In A16, if I wandered into a city with lots of buildings, my FPS dropped to 20. In A17 with same settings, I have not found any map region that causes my FPS to drop at all, ever. I’m just not seeing what some others are complaining about....runs smooth as silk and the only time it tanks is if horde night is set to 32 then my frame rate drops to 5, as it did in A16 too. I’m not trying to run the game at max settings, no shadows and instead of 1080p, I dropped to the next lower resolution. Looks & runs wonderful and, again, it’s a 5 year old laptop. <<Shrugs>>

 

[AtomicUs5000]

Also why are we having this conversation? The caves we used to have did not collapse and they were large enough to me.. I'd just make them longer and deeper..

Yes they would collapse. Several times I would walk over them and they would cave in.

 

[xyth]

modders should also make their mods optimized. I've seen in some mods models with hundreds of thousands of polygons (and hardly they had a LOD). So you will never have enough performance.

I totally agree, and the good ones do optimize as much as possible. This is a constant topic on the modding discord channels, and modders are constantly reducing the mesh complexity of new models, and code is refactored with speed in mind. My point is every new feature takes some of the games engines power, not that we intend to be sloppy with that power.

 

[KingSlayerGM]

Yes they would collapse. Several times I would walk over them and they would cave in.

Actually you are right, but only when they are not deep enough. So this is not a problem, it is actually fun to discover the entrance of a cave by walking on the surface and collapsing a few blocks. The rest of the cave, if deep enough would not collapse.