PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[LostandAlone53]

This is totally off-topic, but if the pics with the accounts are the people talking.. you all look so young! And I am so green with envy! lol

 

[faatal]

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.

You never know. I noticed this fun looking bug on our list a few hours ago:

"When a turret is placed with a mod on p2p and dedi it can prevent other players from joining the game. You can get so far and then are returned to main menu."

 

[madmole]

No, it shows the looted item's actual damage before the +/-. It does not show the EQUIPPED item's actual damage, which is what he is (and frankly, I myself am) asking for. Just show us the existing equipped item's stat in the parentheses. Figuring out if that + represents your equipped item or the one you're looking at is non-intuitive and hard to remember.

If it says 11 (+4) then that means its the equipped armors rating is 7 because 11 is 4 better than 7. You don't need to remember anything you compare two items and decide if the pluses outweigh any possible minuses.

For two guns in your inventory, select one and hover over the other. You can do it your way by clicking one and reading the stats, then clicking the other and reading the stats. Nobody has had an issue with how we set it up so far, other than if its modded it gives the modded one false boosted stats, so you have to pull the mods to compare apples to apples right now. We'll proabably add a second set of stats and have unmodded vs unmodded and modded vs modded (if mods are installed in both).

 

[madmole]

Where are you getting the idea that people in the 19th century were any better behaved?
The Sherlock Holmes story "The Final Problem" was supposed to be the last story Arthur Conan Doyle wrote for the character. After several death threats and many pieces of homoerotic fan-fiction being sent for his approval Mr Doyle decided to continue the character himself.

They shot each other for snoring too loud.

 

[madmole]

My wife told me that.

Poor guy getting cuckold.

 

[Mechanimal]

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.

Oh, damn, and here I thought they'd provide a ton more detail than that for those who use their engine, which is a ton of people/games. Surprised they leave such critical info vague like that. See, even more reason to make a TFP voxel engine, one day, when you're ready and up to the task, if ever.

Again I think the motivation would be so you could license it and make bank that way to justify that level of development cost and time. UnReal sure did with their engine, ha I remember how stupid expensive UE3 was when it first came out, like 2 mil or something.

So system RAM is not up to task for textures, interesting and not surprising. Working in robotics I see very very similar struggles, always going to be there with a "von-nuemann" style serial architecture. Luckily graphics cards have been pushing that limit really well for a solid 10-15 years now, hence why nVidia makes autonomous car brains now. Between that and SSDs becoming cheaper and more practical gaming has had a huge boost from the old days. But still, the bottleneck issues are real, and heavy, due to the nature of the system method adopted decades ago.

Thanks for the explanation, appreciate it.

 

[madmole]

One of the experienced modders (I think dust2death) mentioned that texture streaming would consume CPU time. I conducted some tests and as far as I remember he was right (not absolutely sure though).

yeah but we've added so many new textures to the game a person would have to cut it down to the lowest texture settings for everything to possibly fit into memory. All modern games stream textures. Unity probably has to improve it some more its fairly new.

 

[Mechanimal]

This is totally off-topic, but if the pics with the accounts are the people talking.. you all look so young! And I am so green with envy! lol

Well I'll be 44 soon. Gingers don't grey, we go straight to white, eventually, and I do have some already. But thanks, sure wish I still felt younger lol. All of Madmoles fitness talk makes me realize I should probably eat better and exercise more. Sure seems to help.

 

[DUST2DEATH]

Oh, damn, and here I thought they'd provide a ton more detail than that for those who use their engine, which is a ton of people/games. Surprised they leave such critical info vague like that. See, even more reason to make a TFP voxel engine, one day, when you're ready and up to the task, if ever.
Again I think the motivation would be so you could license it and make bank that way to justify that level of development cost and time. UnReal sure did with their engine, ha I remember how stupid expensive UE3 was when it first came out, like 2 mil or something.

So system RAM is not up to task for textures, interesting and not surprising. Working in robotics I see very very similar struggles, always going to be there with a "von-nuemann" style serial architecture. Luckily graphics cards have been pushing that limit really well for a solid 10-15 years now, hence why nVidia makes autonomous car brains now. Between that and SSDs becoming cheaper and more practical gaming has had a huge boost from the old days. But still, the bottleneck issues are real, and heavy, due to the nature of the system method adopted decades ago.

Thanks for the explanation, appreciate it.

You cant pool the RAM together like that....yet.

DX12 has implementations that could/would allows devs to pool vram between gpu's of same or diff branding into a unified pool.

Faatal is stuck between and rock and hardware unfortunately..

Up the rec specs.

 

[Syrex]

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.

I brought this up before and you mentioned the same, which is why I never officially bug reported it since turning it off didnt harm me in any way even with me hosting dedi. So play with it carefully, wouldnt want you messin nothin up LOL ^5'z

 

[joshwa0816]

@fataal

A issue with low FPS the testers were able to reproduce last night, is people turning off texture streaming (why???)

Turning it off for me stopped a blur effect when in a mine that the person next to me had no issue with.

Lead, iron, etc. would be completely blurry for one or the other ore,

we both had the same high settings, except texture streaming was off on his end.

when turned off on my end the blurry texture immediately came into focus and never happened again but when turned on, started happening again. Some things would never come into focus with texture streaming.

so I keep it off now.

please leave this as an option I don't have to use console for.

 

[JCrook1028]

One thing that stops me from playing alot is how hard it is to play solo, or maybe im just bad idk

It's not that it's hard solo, more like it's too easy MP.

 

[DUST2DEATH]

yeah but we've added so many new textures to the game a person would have to cut it down to the lowest texture settings for everything to possibly fit into memory.

Well, thats entirely relative, to how much VRAM you have...

You arent exactly topping out 8GB VRAM with Full textures. I dont think I ever managed to get A17 to hit the upper limit. I know I could in A16..

 

[madmole]

This is the first alpha release that I didn't mind waiting a little while to get. I was sitting in a bar when a guy pulled a knife and stabbed it through my left hand, after beating him and 3 of his friends senseless I had to go to the hospital and get it stitched up. It was unusable for a while, but it's okay now so I will be ready to play tomorrow.
At least that's the story I'm gonna tell people when they see the scar, not the truth that I fell face first while walking across my bedroom floor while holding a plate, the plate broke and sliced my hand up.

I have the day off tomorrow, so I'm ready for some Z smashing.

That is what you get for not eating at the table!!! Hope your hand is ready for some serious button mashing.

 

[Mechanimal]

Turning it off for me stopped a blur effect when in a mine that the person next to me had no issue with. Lead, iron, etc. would be completely blurry for one or the other ore,

we both had the same high settings, except texture streaming was off on his end.

when turned off on my end the blurry texture immediately came into focus and never happened again but when turned on, started happening again. Some things would never come into focus with texture streaming.

so I keep it off now.

please leave this as an option I don't have to use console for.

Yep. I even felt bad turning it off because TFP was so excited for it during A17 development. But the struggle is real, just wish you the best of luck getting all the worms back into the can on this one Faatal, or whoever's task that is(I assume it's you, but not 100% sure, just sounds like it.)

- - - Updated - - -

That is what you get for not eating at the table!!! Hope your hand is ready for some serious button mashing.

My body is ready! *

* albeit because I don't have to actually move much...

 

[madmole]

Well, thats entirely relative, to how much VRAM you have...
You arent exactly topping out 8GB VRAM with Full textures. I dont think I ever managed to get A17 to hit the upper limit. I know I could in A16..

There is probably 500 gigs of new art added lol.

 

[SnowDog1942]

Poor guy getting cuckold.

/cry

 

[Mechanimal]

There is probably 500 gigs of new art added lol.

Half a terabyte you say?! (I detect tech sarcasm)

I just reinstalled R6:Seige and that mofo was, I ♥♥♥♥ you not, a 110 Gig download. I'll need yet another SSD soon at this rate.

I am really looking forward to all the new art, stuff in the streams looked awesome.

 

[Gareee]

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.

Sorry, I missed your reply earlier. Maybe just remove the option to turn it off in the menu, and add it as a console command as you mentioned, but add a streamer note in the change log? You could also send a message to your affiliate streamers.

The point of the game is playing, and limiting it because streamers are using single underpowered systems instead of dual systems can't be later at TFP feet.

 

[DUST2DEATH]

There is probably 500 gigs of new art added lol.

Sure, but we (the end user) arent getting the RAW files. We're getting the compressed bundled versions. 2K up from 1K isnt a huge increased in terms of data, certainly not 4K levels. (in terms of terrain)

You mentioned earlier they are PBR now, so certainly an increase in the number of maps used (compared to 17), will also increase the VRAM requirements overall.

limitations going to limit.