PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[SnowDog1942]

What doesn't make sense to me is the talk of TFP removing the FOV console command because of the occlusion culling they plan to add.
The game ran amazing in A16 and prior iterations without occlusion culling and allowing wider field of views.

I really hope they find the real problem that is causing the performance issue because I (and anyone else who suffers from motion sickness) can't play below 90 FOV.

Yes i wonder what specific system... from A16 to A17 is causing the performance issue. It seems like they cant get to the root cause. A16 ran amazing...what specific change in A17 is causing the majority of the performance loss?

 

[DaVegaNL]

Miner zombie is close, right?

Yeah fair enough. But you would have to dress a miner zombie in very expensive clothing because geologists obviously make a heck of a lot of money ^^

 

[madmole]

What doesn't make sense to me is the talk of TFP removing the FOV console command because of the occlusion culling they plan to add.
The game ran amazing in A16 and prior iterations without occlusion culling and allowing wider field of views.

I really hope they find the real problem that is causing the performance issue because I (and anyone else who suffers from motion sickness) can't play below 90 FOV.

Larger FOV causes slower FPS because a lot more geometry is in the view, and most games limit it for that reason, and screenshots and large FOV settings looks bad. A17 has probably twice the geometry A16 had because we wanted to update the fidelity of our POI visuals and improve the game play.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

I think we said you are supposed to add smileys when you are joking....

Reverse psychology, maybe. Or is it?

 

[madmole]

Fair enough but if you neuter gas can harvesting it just will force people to mine oil shale. I do this already and I just like 30 min if that and get 3-5 full stacks and I never run out of gas lol. whatever you decide i'll be grateful!

The balance I'm looking for is you can harvest enough to use a vehicle a few days a week or on short runs near your base every day. But if you want to go exploring or drive everywhere, all the time (like now) you should have to mine shale and get a chem station going.

 

[madmole]

Yeah fair enough. But you would have to dress a miner zombie in very expensive clothing because geologists obviously make a heck of a lot of money ^^

I'll take those carets as a joke.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

Larger FOV causes slower FPS because a lot more geometry is in the view, and most games limit it for that reason, and screenshots and large FOV settings looks bad. A17 has probably twice the geometry A16 had because we wanted to update the fidelity of our POI visuals and improve the game play.

FOV +/- 10 would probably be enough to ease the sickness some players get. Wouldn't that be reasonable while maintaining performance?

 

[n2n1]

Larger FOV causes slower FPS because a lot more geometry is in the view, and most games limit it for that reason, and screenshots and large FOV settings looks bad. A17 has probably twice the geometry A16 had because we wanted to update the fidelity of our POI visuals and improve the game play.

Yes, certainly....

But....

on my i5(3.5ghz)+GTX970 no large drawdowns performance in FOV=85.

Then why should i suffer ?

give a option to those - who hardware allows.

Yes, yes it will improve my game play !

PS: you know what?.. disable this "Motion Bloor" - it will improve the gameplay and visual POI

and also - disable antialiasing - he also down performance!

 

[madmole]

FOV +/- 10 would probably be enough to ease the sickness some players get. Wouldn't that be reasonable while maintaining performance?

I'll let you know when we get our performance where it should be.

 

[madmole]

Yes, certainly....But....

on my i5(3.5ghz)+GTX970 no large drawdowns performance in FOV=85.

Then why should i suffer ?

give a option to those - who hardware allows.

Yes, yes it will improve my game play !

No because everyone will turn it up to get an advantage in MP, and then complain it runs bad. Once performance is out of the red zone we can talk about it.

 

[Space4Ace]

Yes i wonder what specific system... from A16 to A17 is causing the performance issue. It seems like they cant get to the root cause. A16 ran amazing...what specific change in A17 is causing the majority of the performance loss?

You probably know this already but... When in game, press F1, then type: gfx pp ssr 0

You'll see your frame rate nearly double, with nothing really noticeable quality wise. I could only get 30-40 fps in 4K, now I get around 70 fps.

There's a link about it in general discussion somewhere.

 

[Can'tadian]

@TFP

When I think about how much work you guys have put into the frontier of both RANDOM GEN and VOXEL GAMING technology, I hope you guys get to implement it in your future titles/releases (Or sell it to other companies that could take a lesson from you guys in true hardcore development!)

 

[Pille]

Yes, certainly....But....

on my i5(3.5ghz)+GTX970 no large drawdowns performance in FOV=85.

High FOV can even improve the FPS significantly. It's situational (depends on the rendered scene). Usually the difference is very small.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

I'm curious if game developers do this...

Do you guys update a standard IEEE Software Requirements Specification along the way?... with full listings and descriptions of the "Software Interfaces", Entity Relationship Models, "Use Cases" listing all of the possible actions and their expected outcome, listing each and every Class and Object with descriptions, each listing members and their purpose, etc, and each revision of the SRS examined and signed off by the project manager?

If not, I need to get into this. SRS is torture. It takes so long and is so archaic. I wonder if the AAA giants do it.

 

[Weazelsun]

The balance I'm looking for is you can harvest enough to use a vehicle a few days a week or on short runs near your base every day. But if you want to go exploring or drive everywhere, all the time (like now) you should have to mine shale and get a chem station going.

Hm... maybe a way to balance it would in regards to the cars. Is, have the fully wrecked cars, the ones with only a frame, not have any gas when wrenching it. And then require a siphoning tool to harvest gas from cars? Since it does seem weird, that just by wrenching we are able to somehow magically harvest gas. Or simply remove gas from wrenching and just put more gas in the loot table of the cars.

As for shale, tied in above, I've never really have had to go out and mining for shale. I've always gotten my gas from cars in the wasteland biome.

 

[Blake_]

What doesn't make sense to me is the talk of TFP removing the FOV console command because of the occlusion culling they plan to add.
The game ran amazing in A16 and prior iterations without occlusion culling and allowing wider field of views.

I really hope they find the real problem that is causing the performance issue because I (and anyone else who suffers from motion sickness) can't play below 90 FOV.

Well, a16 ran more or less the same with similar settings for me, though I must say it ran a little bit better (_5fps+) on low settings and hard areas and, if not, definitely a lot less jumpy and smoother. What you should understand is that this is difficult to optimize due to the fact that they improve the visuals and the content the better the gains resulting in the same performance. We got postprocessing in a17 (light bouncing from every object, volumetric godrays and whistles and stuff) so at ultra everything looks damn good and in lowest in looks decent and my eyes do not bleed despite the zombie bushes , at least for me. Also FOV isn't really that important if you see everything texture-streamed (a17) but I understand they cutted it because of the performance impact even on high rigs.

That was 17.0. 17.3 is quite a bit better and more stable (17.0 was jumpy and felt heavy on the movement, partly due to stamina and the lag of the debuffs plus the lack of tweaking on the graphical balance).

As madmole once said, It's all about the gains. 8 Ram with GTX780 will be medium settings when they optimize the memory comsumption, now is kinda lowest because of the Ram eating. That's what I take from what they said. And then They will bring bandits and we will cry again because of a further drop on performance. That will happen though the only real difference (We hope) is that Dishong tower and Hospital situations will get to the stable 40 FPS and not the jumpy 5-10 FPS of a16 (again, for me and my potatoe).

 

[ZombieHorde]

I've started giving 17.3 a good go and was really enjoying the balance and progress until I was scavenging in a house and around the corner came a running, irradiated zombie. Even though I've been focusing pretty much all of my points on stamina, I didn't stand a chance with her and my character level was nowhere near good enough for that sort of a challenge yet. Well done on those creepy eyes, though. The were haunting me for ages after that.

So I don't suppose we can get some different sounds for the radiated zombies? So we can tell if they are around the corner? Maybe even a slightly detectable voice? Seeing as they seem more 'with it' than other zombies in order to be able to run. So maybe they aren't completely overtaken by the zombie illness yet and they're still able to make some human noises?

The other things that's frustrating me is when I run out of stamina while using my club, it's not really obvious until I just can't swing any more. Which of course is always going to be when you really need to swing or run away, but you can't. And in the heat of the battle, it's really annoying to constantly be looking down at the stamina bar. Not sure what the best solution of this is, but again, maybe generate a sound representing the effort from the swing can tell us that our avatar needs a rest?

Either way, I don't think swinging a club should take that much stamina, though.

 

[madmole]

Hm... maybe a way to balance it would in regards to the cars. Is, have the fully wrecked cars, the ones with only a frame, not have any gas when wrenching it. And then require a siphoning tool to harvest gas from cars? Since it does seem weird, that just by wrenching we are able to somehow magically harvest gas. Or simply remove gas from wrenching and just put more gas in the loot table of the cars.

As for shale, tied in above, I've never really have had to go out and mining for shale. I've always gotten my gas from cars in the wasteland biome.

Ummm I used to work on cars for a living. I can easily remove your gas tank and run off with the fuel. There are literally 2 straps with a spring tension bolt and a hose clamp on the rubber neck. Anyways, no complicating harvesting gas is a bad idea, and the whole thing is an abstraction of reality anyway. Again, solved with some balance.

 

[madmole]

I've started giving 17.3 a good go and was really enjoying the balance and progress until I was scavenging in a house and around the corner came a running, irradiated zombie. Even though I've been focusing pretty much all of my points on stamina, I didn't stand a chance with her and my character level was nowhere near good enough for that sort of a challenge yet. Well done on those creepy eyes, though. The were haunting me for ages after that.
So I don't suppose we can get some different sounds for the radiated zombies? So we can tell if they are around the corner? Maybe even a slightly detectable voice? Seeing as they seem more 'with it' than other zombies in order to be able to run. So maybe they aren't completely overtaken by the zombie illness yet and they're still able to make some human noises?

The other things that's frustrating me is when I run out of stamina while using my club, it's not really obvious until I just can't swing any more. Which of course is always going to be when you really need to swing or run away, but you can't. And in the heat of the battle, it's really annoying to constantly be looking down at the stamina bar. Not sure what the best solution of this is, but again, maybe generate a sound representing the effort from the swing can tell us that our avatar needs a rest?

Either way, I don't think swinging a club should take that much stamina, though.

The goal the only thing that drains stamina is sprinting and power attacks, lmb mining and attack shouldn't use enough stamina to get into a no stamina situation unless you have a disease or some kind of stamina drain buff.
Stamina management outside of combat or endless sprinting just isn't fun, its frustrating.

That is good feedback. Perhaps we can make special sounds for the ferals so you can take off running before its too late, or lay some traps and get ready.

 

[The Gronk]

Ummm I used to work on cars for a living. I can easily remove your gas tank and run off with the fuel. There are literally 2 straps with a spring tension bolt and a hose clamp on the rubber neck. Anyways, no complicating harvesting gas is a bad idea, and the whole thing is an abstraction of reality anyway. Again, solved with some balance.

You know that gasoline is a distillation and prone to solidifying when left for a long period of time?

Ever had to clean those little pinholes in a motorbike carb after it's been sitting a while? That's why.

I'm also weirded out by finding fresh gasoline _anywhere_ <obligatory smiley to denote non-hostility>