PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[faatal]

Ohhh... is there maybe a way we could up the RAM ourselves, but leave it at 2GB default for the masses? I had to up the RAM for Minecraft from 2GB to 8GB for some of the modpacks I installed, it made a huge difference, barely if at all ran otherwise. Again just a suggestion, I know texture streaming offers benefits, especially on lower spec machines, but for those who have monster rigs we'd sure love to make good use of them, if/when we can.

We don't have our own max RAM setting to change. Just texture quality, which reduces their size. Unity and the drivers do what they do. We have fairly basic control over Unity's texture streaming. We can tell it the memory budget, but we already have it maxed at 4GB.

 

[Syrex]

Probably because streamers are not going to make bug reports. They see a bug and talk about it. People in their chat talk about it. That is all 99% of them are doing.

maybe as a pre-req for streaming they have to have a sidekick or secondary person to report bugs.. other than the free publicity (which i refuse to watch streamers), they're there to show off and test (so-to-speak). If they come across a bug during their gameplay, the secondary person does the report, if the streamer is caught seeing and talking about a bug and doesnt report it then they are barred from being allowed to stream for "x"-amount of playthroughs (alphas - I know we're hoping to go gold but still sounds like a few more alphas to go)

 

[CannedSmeef]

Depends on the bugs, if they're game breaking or exploitive in nature, than i think people would rather have them sorted out than to release a bugged version that they'll have to wipe anyways.. Anything that would cause people to wipe and start over would eventually make the masses more angry than a short delay. We've waited this long whats another "x"-day to that. There are some people that are deciding to wait for some iterations of A18 to drop before they start.. So the spectrum of what people want ranges from black to white and all the greyness intbetween

It's true that an unplayable game wouldn't go well at all, but seeing as how the streamers are having no issues of that scale I don't see that as a relevant point. I don't think it would be rash to make the claim that based off of what we've seen bugwise, the grand majority of 7DTD players will have it now rather than wait. They're already fully expecting to lose worlds to patches, it is experimental after all. I don't think the upset of a bugged experimental release would be at all comparable to the outcry at a delay this close. The streamer weekend has come and gone, people are ready to give it a whirl themselves. Undoubtedly a decent portion would be furious at another delay, and would quickly complain and spread the upset to other people.

 

[Syrex]

there's always gonna be complainers, TFP could release a perfect release and there would be some kind of complaining. Hoping they have plenty of cool-off pills ready for the blow up. But it does "sound" like there's gonna be more praise that WILL overshadow the complaints. Though, logically, if people are enjoying the game they arent going to be forum bound so the complainers will have the floor. LOL

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

It's true that an unplayable game wouldn't go well at all, but seeing as how the streamers are having no issues of that scale I don't see that as a relevant point. I don't think it would be rash to make the claim that based off of what we've seen bugwise, the grand majority of 7DTD players will have it now rather than wait. They're already fully expecting to lose worlds to patches, it is experimental after all. I don't think the upset of a bugged experimental release would be at all comparable to the outcry at a delay this close. The streamer weekend has come and gone, people are ready to give it a whirl themselves. Undoubtedly a decent portion would be furious at another delay, and would quickly complain and spread the upset to other people.

What are you hoping to accomplish here? TFP will release when they think it’s ready to release. They are the ones that have to deal with any backlash from bad bugs or a delayed release. I don’t think any comments or second-guessing here is going to influence their judgment on what is or isn’t a viable release candidate for A18-E.

 

[KLOWN]

What are you hoping to accomplish here? TFP will release when they think it’s ready to release. They are the ones that have to deal with any backlash from bad bugs or a delayed release. I don’t think any comments or second-guessing here is going to influence their judgment on what is or isn’t a viable release candidate for A18-E.

you do know what a forum is for right

 

[CannedSmeef]

What are you hoping to accomplish here? TFP will release when they think it’s ready to release. They are the ones that have to deal with any backlash from bad bugs or a delayed release. I don’t think any comments or second-guessing here is going to influence their judgment on what is or isn’t a viable release candidate for A18-E.

What are you trying to accomplish by voicing your opinions on the 7DTD forum? It's highly unlikely TFP is going to listen to you either.

I'm just spitballing with the community, the chances of TFP actually taking advice on this from a forum user such as myself is basically impossible. I'm just voicing my opinion that it would be inadvisable to delay within 24 hours of the scheduled release.

 

[Gareee]

Yes.
No, we need to support all our players. Texture use needs to be handled better.

@Fataal:

You might have missed my post. Streamers are turning off texture streaming because it causes memory issues with their cam overlays. Several mentioned that today.

So thier cam video looks smooth, but the game performance suffers.

 

[Mechanimal]

We don't have our own max RAM setting to change. Just texture quality, which reduces their size. Unity and the drivers do what they do. We have fairly basic control over Unity's texture streaming. We can tell it the memory budget, but we already have it maxed at 4GB.

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying. Although Unity is pretty great in general I imagine it can get frustrating having to rely and wait on a totally separate dev team to make changes and tweaks to the engine you guys work with, especially since they are not laser focused to tune it for a game like 7DTD.

So what are the odds that you guys could maybe one day make your own engine?

TFP already takes Unity to the next level by making a voxel world, when the engine you use was not specifically built for that in the first place. So it seems you're all deep enough into it that you could handle it. Maybe, with a few more properly experienced team members perhaps. Heck if you did maybe you could even license it out as a voxel engine to others and justify the extra effort that way. Def don't mean for A19 or even A20, but maybe for gold, or post-gold. Just curious how big of a stretch it would be from where you're at and all that you do already. Seems like over all this time you've collectively gained enough experience and insight to actually make something like that happen at TFP.

 

[Gareee]

You would have waited until Monday even if streamers didn't get an early preview. No sane software company releases a new version on the weekend, or Fridays.

These are The Fun Pimps. They do what they want, when they want to.

Hell Fataal has been running on all cylinders since the streamers started, other than watching some of the streams.

 

[Jarod_Silverstar]

Yes.
No, we need to support all our players. Texture use needs to be handled better.

Just curious - do you have some way of telling what the average specs are for systems that are running the game? I mean, I don't think the game itself is taking a CPU/GPU/Memory inventory and reporting it back somewhere, but I would not be surprised if Steam doesn't have something that could give you some numbers. With the game being in development for 5 years or so, I would imagine the average spec has risen some.

Another post you mentioned you were waiting for a new version of Unity with performance enhancements. I would think that having some updated info on the systems running the game would only help with your tuning and optimization processes.

 

[Mechanimal]

We don't have our own max RAM setting to change. Just texture quality, which reduces their size. Unity and the drivers do what they do. We have fairly basic control over Unity's texture streaming. We can tell it the memory budget, but we already have it maxed at 4GB.

4GB max, ok. I have 32GB and I am not afraid to use it! (well, most of it anyway.)

I should know this but I don't: that's system RAM not graphics card RAM right?

The Titan I have is around 6GB, my mobo has the 32GB, so in a way I have 38GB in system totality... sure would be nice to put it all to work. Heck this Titan card can reach up to 4.5 Teraflops of performance, which is supercomputer numbers back in the early 2000s. I am constantly dissapointed that it is rarely utilized due to software setting/restrictions, there should be a lucrative way for that not to happen and for software to better adjust more appropriately to the system it runs on.

I have no serious probs with 7DTD, just spit-balling and trying to learn more about system bottlenecks, etc. Talking in general here, it's not only games that fail to do this, have 3D modeling packages and other software that also under-utilizes the hardware at it's disposal.

 

[Roland]

Take a look at the top of this thread and tell me what day it says. We are still on track. There is a morning meeting planned tomorrow and if there is going to be a delay it will be announced then but so far everything looks pretty good.

 

[jdifran]

Take a look at the top of this thread and tell me what day it says. We are still on track. There is a morning meeting planned tomorrow and if there is going to be a delay it will be announced then but so far everything looks pretty good.

Been watching streamers all weekend and I don't see anything remotely resembling a showstopper.

My wife knows I'll be emotionally unavailable all week, so I'm really counting on playing when I get home from work tomorrow.

 

[faatal]

I was turning it off in A17 because with it on the textures were poor (dirt, rocks to be more precise were fuzzy and garbled looking, but there was other noticeable oopses), soon as i turned it off they were more crisp

Which is probably a Unity issue with texture streaming, but possibly we could do something different with textures. Our testers have had the stuck in low res issue many times, but we have not found a fix when it starts doing that other than restarting the game. It currently puts us in the position of which bug would you like?

I'm making a build to test/profile the effects of texture settings, but this is becoming a can of worms.

 

[faatal]

@Fataal:You might have missed my post. Streamers are turning off texture streaming because it causes memory issues with their cam overlays. Several mentioned that today.

So thier cam video looks smooth, but the game performance suffers.

I saw, which is why this is getting ugly. I don't know that I want to remove the tex streaming video option anymore. Might be better to force half res textures as the max in that case, but that could be jumping the gun.

 

[Mechanimal]

Which is probably a Unity issue with texture streaming, but possibly we could do something different with textures. Our testers have had the stuck in low res issue many times, but we have not found a fix when it starts doing that other than restarting the game. It currently puts us in the position of which bug would you like?
I'm making a build to test/profile the effects of texture settings, but this is becoming a can of worms.

It does seem like a can of worms, yeah. One of the reasons I was curious about TFP making your own engine, at some point, sure it'd be a bigger can of worms, but one you could wrangle on your own instead of waiting on Unity devs.

 

[madmole]

Madmole, can you confirm the steel armor has the armor rating scale correctly with random values and correct default values?
I saw something weird in the streamings, like Blue quality steel armor always has 15 armor rating and the Pink one always 13 or something.

I'm sure its fine I found various armor rating pieces in my games. Random is random, but sometimes you get the same roll. There isn't a ton of numbers to vary from.

 

[madmole]

I think what he's trying to say is that it's not intuitive. Which I agree with, it's a confusing way to display stat comparisons, I'd show their raw damage side by side.

Its 10x better than it was (opposite). Not sure how it can be confusing, if it says + its better if it says - its worse. Better is green, red is worse.

 

[faatal]

4GB max, ok. I have 32GB and I am not afraid to use it! (well, most of it anyway.)
I should know this but I don't: that's system RAM not graphics card RAM right?

The Titan I have is around 6GB, my mobo has the 32GB, so in a way I have 38GB in system totality... sure would be nice to put it all to work. Heck this Titan card can reach up to 4.5 Teraflops of performance, which is supercomputer numbers back in the early 2000s. I am constantly dissapointed that it is rarely utilized due to software setting/restrictions, there should be a lucrative way for that not to happen and for software to better adjust more appropriately to the system it runs on.

I have no serious probs with 7DTD, just spit-balling and trying to learn more about system bottlenecks, etc. Talking in general here, it's not only games that fail to do this, have 3D modeling packages and other software that also under-utilizes the hardware at it's disposal.

Who knows because Unity's doc are often vague, which means you end up guessing and doing time wasting trial and error:

"The total amount of memory to be used by streaming and non-streaming textures.

Non-streaming textures will always be loaded at the largest mipmap level (even if that exceeds the budget). Streaming textures will pick the smallest mipmap level possible to try to hit the memory budget."

Generally you never want to use system RAM for textures, since it is slow to access.