PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Laz Man]

Well, finally got in game and it looks like I have the same FPS issue outside in the wilderness (GTX 960 and 12GB RAM). After turning down settings to medium and reducing resolution alittle I am able to get the game playable around 30 to 50 FPS. Will do some more tweaks later. Despite that, just finished my first night and I AM LOVING IT!!!! I love the spear as I predicted based on what I saw in the streams and the looting is pure awesomeness.

My first POI had a F@*King dog that scared the $H1T out of me but was quick on my feet and killed it. Sitting on a rooftop at the end of Day 1 going over all the skills/perks planning out my build now. 1 point into Javelin Master and Lucky Looter so far. BEST GAME EVER!!! sooooo happy right now.

 

[Auger]

This update is just.... incredible. Rage zombies, new weapons, overhauled perk trees and books. Oh the books! Gotta catch em all!
Two glaring balance issues. Way too many bullets in looting and too few feathers for arrows. I will just forego bows at this rate with so much ammo and that seems a bit off.

Kills some vultures, I had 50 stone arrows and 137 feathers at the end of the first day

 

[Doctor3D]

For those with bad FPS when they go outdoors and look at terrain, you can try this in the console:
gfx dt

That will toggle distant terrain off/on. Does your FPS jump back up with it off?

I just went and tried this on the worst GPU I had that had this problem A GTX 660 TI SC 2GB. I teleported to the desert where she was having this problem and let everything settle. It was averaging 30fps - I did that command it it instantly went to 60fps vsync..It also gets 60fps in the POIs virtually non-stop as well.

The settings are on the default "medium" preset with the only exception being the trees are on "high". Due to the age of the card, we have that hooked up to a monitor with a native resolution of only 1360x768 - but she plays it in 1280x720 with small borders all around it so that it still looks crisp and not blurry. This allows for the game to have a much smaller frame buffer and it normally runs the game exceptionally well and looks good that way. On a 1080p or beyond monitor - it would run much worse, of course.

If I put textures on "full" on that card the VRAM is constantly full and is paging in causing the FPS to just hover in the teens.

Edit* Also when I turn it back on the console is spammed with terrain shader errors. I noticed those errors before too. The error is that it couldn't use the shader for my render path (dx11) using default shader....spammed about 2 dozen or so times before it stops.

 

[Skippy5]

My two favorite starting Base POI’s - roof of Buzz bar and the front raised room in AmIGone funeral home. Both were completely reworked and are great! Not sure so will use AmIGone as a starter base anymore, but love the new looks.

 

[sillls]

Well anyways/ Happy birthday you old fart!

 

[AlabasterW]

Rule #1, never get encumbered. Drop a chest on the ground, mark it on your map and put the crap you can't use yet in it, like brass, mechanical parts, engines etc. If you stray from this advice, make sure you have at least 70 rounds of ammo and an ak or smg.

I'm learning the very, very hard way. All the changes are really screwing with me; encumbrance being such a death sentence is a real damper on my pack-rat tendencies. Not to mention that between rage zombies and the now much shorter melee distance, close-quarters combat is extremely dangerous. The spear is neat and helps with that, but the lack of a proper spammable knockdown power attack brings its own problems to the table... It's all very tricky.

 

[Zaroff]

So I can make a lvl 1 stone axe and shovel. How do I make them lvl 2,3,4,5? I don’t see the perk for it? Or are they always lvl 1?

 

[stallionsden]

Rule #1, never get encumbered. Drop a chest on the ground, mark it on your map and put the crap you can't use yet in it, like brass, mechanical parts, engines etc. If you stray from this advice, make sure you have at least 70 rounds of ammo and an ak or smg.

Or upgrade backpack lol

 

[bobross]

For those with bad FPS when they go outdoors and look at terrain, you can try this in the console:
gfx dt

That will toggle distant terrain off/on. Does your FPS jump back up with it off?

RX580 8GB, Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB RAM, 960 EVO NVMe SSD. 1080p and I've been tweaking. Prior to issuing the command I was getting about 24-25 FPS facing a hill near our early start point. Turning around and looking at the edge of town (forest biome) would cause the FPS to jump to about 32-33. Note, there's a lot more trees and several buildings.

Issuing the command, and I'm getting 60 FPS on the town view, 46-47 on the hill view. Turning DT back on, I get a massive spam of "Detail rendering shaders not found for the active render pipeline, falling back to default shader." Below are screenshots with dt on and dt off.

I'm not a coder, just a gamer, but I would DEFINITELY expect that hill to be less costly to render than a town with a bunch of trees. Let me know if you need additional data.

 

[madmole]

@MadMole
Makes sense when you talk about geeking out over the engine changes, framework for cool future features, and just all the pure potential amazeballsness you could imagine with the overhauls. You're still hyperbolic as ♥♥♥♥, but I can see where the hype and excitement was coming from with A17. To your credit, you quickly acknowledged it fell short and that the next alpha should bring the goods you were imagining with A17 - and you were right!

The junk turret was such a great idea, and it's implementation, ESPECIALLY considering it's its first alpha, is wonderful. Great sounds, model, perks, the loading animation is awesome (just shove some metally bits in there na!).

I'm playing a Brainy Brawler, beating the piss out of zeds while the junk helps with stun damage, looking forward to having two wicked turrets and a modded M60 to just rain endless fire on the masses and, as you mentioned above, chugging beers with top tier knuckles and armor and just smashing everything that moves - I CANNOT WAIT FOR THAT YOU GUYS.

New sounds... XP balance... THAT STUBBY FACE MELTING SHOTGUN... new predators... streamlined tutorial... THAT NOTE THO from the Duke! (butt = puckered)... new mods... I can barely take it man. You need to release smaller alphas just so my reward center doesn't have a critical meltdown with all the new content and improvements!!

18 had to be big because of the perk overhaul, we needed all the new weapons to flesh out each play style and make each build feel unique. Books were easy to do with the new framework and more will come in future alphas.

I love what you are saying, and that my hyperbolic state has infected you and many others I wrote the Duke's note, I'm glad you liked it

Now that we feel the game is in a great spot smaller updates will finally be possible.

 

[faatal]

Distant terrain has been redone, so very different than before. It now uses Unity terrain, with Micro Splat shaders and new high res textures.

 

[madmole]

I'm learning the very, very hard way. All the changes are really screwing with me; encumbrance being such a death sentence is a real damper on my pack-rat tendencies. Not to mention that between rage zombies and the now much shorter melee distance, close-quarters combat is extremely dangerous. The spear is neat and helps with that, but the lack of a proper spammable knockdown power attack brings its own problems to the table... It's all very tricky.

WE removed a whole row of encumbrance since 17 so its much more forgiving. Craft pockets for your clothing once you find a few sewing kits and can make duct tape, it helps a lot. The club has some nice knockdown with power attacks, sledge can one shot all weak zeds if you hit the head.

You will figure it out, its just a bit different. Gear helps a lot.

 

[madmole]

So I can make a lvl 1 stone axe and shovel. How do I make them lvl 2,3,4,5? I don’t see the perk for it? Or are they always lvl 1?

Perk into miner 69'r.

 

[DaVegaNL]

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.

But can yoi explain the massive drop in performance between a17 and a18. For me the game plays fine, but for many people it is really bad at the moment.

 

[Doctor3D]

Distant terrain has been redone, so very different than before. It now uses Unity terrain, with Micro Splat shaders and new high res textures.

Is there any way possible to make a separate texture option just for the distant terrain so that you could for example put distant terrain texture quality on "Half" and leave others on "Full" and other combinations like that - i guess going further - could it be possible to say put weapon textures, biome textures, distant textures, and creature textures all in their own categories or are all the textures in one pool with no way to allow manual adjustments in that way.

It seems to me that the texture quality of distant terrain is almost overkill compared to the other "Half" textures. The distant terrain, as pretty as it is - looks better than everything else when you're just playing on medium. You'd think the distant terrain would take second seat to the forefront textures..

 

[Pico]

Distant terrain has been redone, so very different than before. It now uses Unity terrain, with Micro Splat shaders and new high res textures.

Hey, thanks for the "gfx dt" toggle. I've yet to try it, but the feedback sounds very encouraging.

I just want to add that accompanying my fps issues is a massive lag when inside Inventory or Cookpot menus. So massive that the mouse can be stalled for many seconds, and is barely normal for any more than a few seconds at a time.

 

[ParadiseLostUK]

What gpu do you have? I'm trying to run that resolution with a GTX 1050ti and can't get more than 30 on the lowest settings possible.

I'm running a 1080ti, processor is an i7 4790K.

 

[Axe13]

For those with bad FPS when they go outdoors and look at terrain, you can try this in the console:
gfx dt

That will toggle distant terrain off/on. Does your FPS jump back up with it off?

Distant terrain off made a world of difference for me...literally...half literally anyway.

 

[fragtzack]

Oh my, the large stone cathedral POI. Huge, fun to explore, fun too loot.

 

[Hek Harris]

I was a freaking badass in A17, playing survival mode with always sprinting zombies.

Now I'm just a little piece of crap whining at night.

So good...