PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Total voters
    3
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Having fun so far, but can't for the life of me figure out how to craft rounded corner blocks anymore.
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Its in the shape menu of flagstone for sure, I used them for my small castles. Not all the shapes are in concrete and r/concrete yet so you have to start with flagstone and upgrade.

 
Having fun so far, but can't for the life of me figure out how to craft rounded corner blocks anymore.
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I'm building my base inspired by your design in my current build btw, but don't plan on using the blade traps or fighting below, just using the 12x12 layout and the draw bridge and crafting area. A LOT of digging omg. Not bad with 3 ranks though.

 
It is new mechanic. Not an opinion.
- *We lowered the default difficulty from Nomad to Adventurer since A18 is a little harder with the new zombie rage speed boosting behavior.*

- *Zombies have a new rage mode. There is a chance when damaging zombies, based on the game difficulty, that they will move faster for a short amount of time. This add more variety to combat.*

Source - https://7daystodie.com/a18-official-release-notes/
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Sounds like he can lower the difficulty further to reduce the chance of rage.

 
The low FPS problems many people are having are, from what I can tell, happening on GPUs with lower amounts of memory.

While A18 has been optimized in many respects, it also has more art and some art at higher resolutions than before, like the UI icons. That comes at a cost of higher VRAM use. Texture streaming helps greatly in reducing VRAM use, but it has its limits, since not all textures can be streamed. Once VRAM is low, FPS can drop greatly due to fighting over a limited resource.

Games also do not have access to all the GPU's VRAM, since your OS and other programs may be using some. On my computer about 1GB of my 8GB of VRAM is already in use. Shutting down programs may help.

Streamers generally play on higher end computers, so we have not seen them have much of a problem. Granted that was on a build from last week, but there have been no changes since then, that I am aware of, that should change VRAM use.

We do have testers with lower end computers with limited VRAM that have low FPS, especially outdoors. Solutions to their low FPS have not yet been found.

We know you want to play, but this is experimental, not stable. We said there would be small issues and possibly big issues and there are. Some of these issues may take days to research, find fixes and test.

 
Processor Intel® Core i7-4720HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz, 2601 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

Name NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 16.0 GB

getting 15 -20 FPS

I will wait I guess

 
So, I managed to sneak in some playtime even on this very busy day for me. (Managed to play for 30 mins)I played on a pre-generated 02 RWG world, with all default settings. Turned on the Dynamic Music System.

Here's how I played some feedback, enjoy MadMole! :D

I spawned in a Burnt Forest - Desert border. I started doing the quest. While doing it, I heard a coyote (which is great, there are no more ninja animals, I heard the coyote before even seeing him), shot it, it started fleeing, then it came back to bite me in the ass :p , I smacked it, and it fleed again. I started to go through the desert to get to the trader. Looted some POIs on the way, found a nice amount of ammo, and a Q1 Pistol and Shotgun. Put just a point into a Fortitude perk which gives you natural healing, haven't decided on what to get next yet. Didn't get to the trader yet. Also, I got infected :o

I almost died a few times, which shows this is a good Alpha, considering I'm using the default difficulty, which is lower than what I played before with :D . Rage zombies are cool. The Burnt Forest looks meh with its fog and colors (maybe because I'm having pretty low-ish graphics currently), but the Desert looks fantastic with its textures, and the RWG is just amazing. The Dynamic Music System sounds great and is really atmospheric and gives a whole new feel to the game. Needs polish (weird how it fades out when sound effects play and etc.), but this is just the first version, so I'm waiting for updates to it! While outdoor performance is a bit worse than A17 for me, the indoors run great and are super smooth (the occlusion works really well! I saw a single artifact yet) The gun reloading animations look fantastic. The wooden club impact sounds sound funny sometimes, think they need improvement. ;)

All in all, this is a really good Alpha! Going to post some bug reports for some very minor issues :) (Snakes clipping into blocks partially, inconsistent capitalization). Great Job Fun Pimps! :thumb:

Might want to show the block shapes system and the power attack in the tutorial.
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Glad you are loving it :) That is a good point.

 
Is it reasonable to upgrade a recent build of Alpha 18 to "stable" to replace Alpha 17.4 on Steam? Long story short, I can't play until this happens.

I don't have access to a gaming PC for the foreseeable future, so I am using GeForce Now, which is a cloud-streaming service. For this to work, 7DTD is hosted on a remote gaming server and the game is streamed to my laptop so that I can play. The problem is, the service I use only supports the latest 'stable' version of the game, which is by default Alpha 17.4. Users are not granted access to modify any files on these servers.

 
The AI already have a 66% chance of destroy area on each fall.Also if they make long paths that don't reach you the stupid ones already will randomly bail and destroy area. His loop is short.

I have plans to make destroy area trigger in some other cases, but it needs hours of research and testing and there are more important performance issues I'm looking at now.
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If by 66% chance of destroy you mean it stops going into the loop and whacks at stuff until it breaks, the Jawoodle video obviously hints at a bug.

 
The low FPS problems many people are having are, from what I can tell, happening on GPUs with lower amounts of memory.
While A18 has been optimized in many respects, it also has more art and some art at higher resolutions than before, like the UI icons. That comes at a cost of higher VRAM use. Texture streaming helps greatly in reducing VRAM use, but it has its limits, since not all textures can be streamed. Once VRAM is low, FPS can drop greatly due to fighting over a limited resource.

Games also do not have access to all the GPU's VRAM, since your OS and other programs may be using some. On my computer about 1GB of my 8GB of VRAM is already in use. Shutting down programs may help.

Streamers generally play on higher end computers, so we have not seen them have much of a problem. Granted that was on a build from last week, but there have been no changes since then, that I am aware of, that should change VRAM use.

We do have testers with lower end computers with limited VRAM that have low FPS, especially outdoors. Solutions to their low FPS have not yet been found.

We know you want to play, but this is experimental, not stable. We said there would be small issues and possibly big issues and there are. Some of these issues may take days to research, find fixes and test.
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well...Thanks?

 
The low FPS problems many people are having are, from what I can tell, happening on GPUs with lower amounts of memory.
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It's not VRAM, Faatal. I run an 8GB card (RX480 8GB, with an 4.2 Ghz quadcore, 16GB, not great but the 'typical' setup a lot of gamers still have) and so do many other people. When i just look at terrain the FPS tanks. The more of the 'outside terrain' is on the screen at once, the lower the FPS. I could be in the most complex city and still have decent to great fps. But as soon as I look at the outdoors, it tanks to ~30 FPS.

Madmole mentioned a new terrain shader? Couldnt that be the cause?

Changing my settings has very little impact on FPS when it tanks. I could be running everything @ LOW and it still tanks.

Edit: Performance Metrics report that VRAM Utilization is at 5GB. And my card has 8GB, like i said.

 
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Its in the shape menu of flagstone for sure, I used them for my small castles. Not all the shapes are in concrete and r/concrete yet so you have to start with flagstone and upgrade.
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Thanks madmole!

 
Is it reasonable to upgrade a recent build of Alpha 18 to "stable" to replace Alpha 17.4 on Steam? Long story short, I can't play until this happens.
I don't have access to a gaming PC for the foreseeable future, so I am using GeForce Now, which is a cloud-streaming service. For this to work, 7DTD is hosted on a remote gaming server and the game is streamed to my laptop so that I can play. The problem is, the service I use only supports the latest 'stable' version of the game, which is by default Alpha 17.4. Users are not granted access to modify any files on these servers.
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No. The purpose of experimental is to stress test the game with 1000s of players so that problems that emerge from people playing it on older machines and laptops can be addressed. Also rare bugs will emerge once 1000s of players are playing and those can be fixed. Right now there are going to be problems for Mac users, Linux users, and users using the various brands of video cards. All of that needs to be mostly taken care of for the game to be considered stable enough to go out as an official version.

When the game goes stable there will STILL be some edge cases where the game isn't working properly and you'll see some threads popping up of raging players wondering how TFP can call the game "stable". It would be 100 times worse if they just threw an unstable experimental build out to stable just for people to be able to play who cannot opt in right now.

There are some people who will actually prefer to wait until 18.1 or 18.2 before they start playing.

 
Just turn and run away for a couple seconds. The rage only lasts a few seconds anyway then they walk again. New mechanics = new tactics. Figure out a way to adapt instead of quit. Another option is to lower difficulty even further which lowers % chance of rage mode.
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This. If you don't like the rage mechanic then just play on default difficulty as that lowers the chance of it happening quite a bit. If you really don't like it go to Scavenger which is default -1 and then it almost never happens. It was tough for me to adjust to it too at first but now I've got my rhythm with it and I'm fine. You just have to sometimes disengage and run away a bit before re-engaging.

 
about how long should it take to boot up a server on my pc for the first time ?

i keep getting stuck at this line:

2019-10-07T18:31:27 15.008 INF WorldGenerator:Generating Detail Data

 
Very early first impressions

Positives

Scenery, atmosphere, icons and textures

New POI's look interesting - I can't wait to explore them

Tons of new lootable "stuff"

New wildlife with new ai

Performance has been ok for me (low-end hardware)

New fighting tactics keep things interesting

Start doesn't feel sluggish like A17

The hint of world lore in the starter quest.

Things I'm not sure about yet

Melee with things like the bat - I feel it needs a little something?

Too much loot to soon? Will balance well over a longer play?

Maybe too much zombie rage - will it make fighting indoors problematic?

The game feels a bit easier - this could be my imagination.

Over all my first impression have been really good, it's clearly a huge update and I'm looking forward to playing more :smile-new: .

 
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