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%
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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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This is the standard workaround I've seen for VRAM issuse:

Check Full screen mode to "NO" then lower the resolution. Should still look good, only it's a smaller window. But Fps should increase by a lot.

 
First of all, thank the team for this almost masterpiece, first impressions

-Game at 60 fps with ultra and without occlusion (I update this line, 35 to 45 fps in cities)

-Go smooth and without errors at the moment

-The bestial weapons, that new crossbow is the best

-The new icons give an almost exciting freshness

My pc is a potato but I don't know why I don't have performance problems like some

Features

W10

I5 6th generation

Ram 16

Msi GTX 1060 3 GB

A very important fact! I have all the drivers updated!

Update all your drivers !!

 
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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
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Same here. Only get this when changing to RWG.

 
A little change I did in regards to zombie thinning I thought I would mention now. I didn't want to promise it until it went live:
There might be less zombies on day 1, but I added night time zombies with a small chance for ferals to spawn at night (bringing back fear to night time), and staggered the respawn delay so its more performant and less "dead time", so overall there will be more zombies by far than in any previous version, just not more alive all at once in one area eating cpu for no reason.
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Awesome!

i7 6700 and 1060 3gb and the 8k map took 13 minutes. If I leave textures at full, performance sucks, but we are vram starved. If I drop down to medium, I can still turn a few things up and hit 60 with some drops with grass and a lot of trees and buildings.

If someone is using an old controller profile, menus and game functions can act oddly... using the steam gampad with hi resolution camera also acts oddly, but using the gamepad only option seems to work fine.

The game also remembers your old preference even if you manually wipe the folder, and ours was defaulting to nomad... I'm nopt trying that till I try the current default.

Looting IS king! I found a t2 junk turret, axe, steel sledge and iron spear by day 3 with one point into looter.

Some of the in game options are missing prompts.. for instance when you pick up the turret, it highlights, but doesn;t tell you what controller of keypress actually picks it up.

Gameplay feels tight when I'm not getting the framerate dips, and the new melee takes getting used to.

 
First of all, thank the team for this almost masterpiece, first impressions-Game at 60 fps with ultra and without occlusion

-Go smooth and without errors at the moment

-The bestial weapons, that new crossbow is the best

-The new icons give an almost exciting freshness

My pc is a potato but I don't know why I don't have performance problems like some

Features

W10

I5 6th generation

Ram 16

Msi GTX 1060 3 GB

A very important fact! I have all the drivers updated!

Update all your drivers !!
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Good point about the drivers. Also Windows 10 has some ♥♥♥♥ery going on with their updates as of late, causing performance issues with some users.

 
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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If I can be of any help feel free to reach out, not that you really need it :)

well...Thanks?
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eh?

The terrain textures in A18 are a significant increase compared to before.

The bundle prior was 77MB @ 1K. its now 996MB @ 2K.

Now for comparison more equal because same amount of maps used.

My Texture mod for terrain, the bundle at 2K was 123MB. @ 4K it was 293MB.

So you can see the jump in an all things equal situation from 1K (77MB) to 2K (123MB) isnt that large but it can also depend on a variety of factors.

Some things are faster than others.

There is also a near (rough) doubling of maps used for a single material (stone/dirt/forest/desert etc).

All of these things will eat more cpu than before. (for example, using my 4K textures would generally incur a 5fps hit from the added cpu load)

Turning the game res down will not really help, it will make a cpu bound situation more cpu bound.

As before single core speed will matter most overall in the game.

IMO, 6GB VRAM would be the minimum you should have for the game. (that was the rec spec I set for my mod so I didnt have to deal with the above issues :D )

 
Fuuuuuuuuud. Loving A18. Spear is amazing, using it to the exclusion of all other melee weapons so far. Rage is changing the game, have nearly died twice in three days. Find 2xak46s so loot may need to be balanced but they saved my life more than once!

 
This is the standard workaround I've seen for VRAM issuse:
Check Full screen mode to "NO" then lower the resolution. Should still look good, only it's a smaller window. But Fps should increase by a lot.
Click to expand...
This is a correct statement. Playing in windowed mode works wonders for FPS. It's a very good work around to keep playing the game smoothly until you can either get better hardware and/or TFP make additional fixes.

 
In regards to performance, I get at least the same FPS as 17.4 which is an average 60. I see a few dips into the high 40's outdoors but the game play is still smooth. I'm only rocking a GTX 970 which has 3GB of physical VRAM. The majority of my setting are on ultra at 1080p, the same settings I used in Alpha 17. I have not done a clean install since January 2016 and have not updated my video drivers in months.

I don't know what the cause of some people's performance drops are but it may be more than just a hardware issue especially those with higher specs.

5820k

32GB RAM

EVO SSD

GTX 970

 
Same here. Only get this when changing to RWG.
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before your start your server.bat file: load 7D2D. START a NEW game (multiplayer) with seed name you want (i did this on my gaming pc , then copied/paste the saved game to my PC running the server) , now when i boot up the startdedicated.bat it didnt have to generate the map and it started normal !

saved maps are in C:\Users\YOURNAMEHERE\AppData

 
I've been doing my testing next to a pond facing mountains and getting 30-40 frames less than A17 so terrain could very well be the performance issue. I'm going to go into a flat city area and see how it works.

 
Anyone running the game on Linux? Just curious how it performs.
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My experience is not a viable answer because I'm on a potato computer (Could barely play A16, A17 I got average 16 fps, A18 experimental I'm getting 3fps outdoors and 10 fps indoors). But I can tell that their optimizations especially the occlusion system is doing its job. Alas I will resort to watching others stream until I get a decent modern computer. But based on my A16 experience comparison between windows and linux, gameplay is very similar as long as drivers are updated and settings are tweaked to keep resource overhead low.

 
@Madmole

Life Extension

You seem to be passionate about eating right, exorcising etc. I think it would be safe to assume that this is with the end goal of extending ones life as much as possible. If your end goal is that, well I have something I doubt you know because the world barely knows about this. I discovered this fact about 5 years ago when I read or heard something stupid, I cannot remember what it was, I set out to prove it wrong.

1 hour of reading is all I was thinking it would take to prove it wrong, 3 months later and a couple hundred hours of research..turns out it is true and if you ask me, kept hidden fromt he world.

Look in to starvation as a scientifically backed way of extending your life. You are going to have to dig deep, I'm talking published scientific journals, multiple studies, information going as far back as WW2. We have over 80 years of solid evidence supporting it, the research has already been done and published just not announced to the world.....yet. Like I said this is not well known so is not easily accessible doing general google searchs. If you truely want to extend your life...you must seek after the science. :)

PS ever wonder why "God" commanded people to fast in the christian bible?...... ;) science has finally come far enough to answer it and yet..its kept a secret... *puts on tin foil hat*

 
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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.
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Or spec into knockback perks to nullify it. 😁

Edit: OMW HOME TO DOWNLOAD AND PLAY A18. 😎

 
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This is a correct statement. Playing in windowed mode works wonders for FPS. It's a very good work around to keep playing the game smoothly until you can either get better hardware and/or TFP make additional fixes.
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That statement is in general backwards compared to fullscreen exclusive + input lag.

But hey, if it works for you it works.

Gsync I find to be the better solution. Butter smooth even at 24 fps :D

 
Unlike most 53 year olds my performance is still quite vigorous. Lesson learned: Eat organic paleo diet, workout and do cardio or feel like crap and fall apart like every other old person.
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Thats pretty much what I did, and at almost 84 people still say I look like I'm 45, so I'll take it!

 
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