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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After playing a18.0e a bit with my kids last night, I can say we were all intrigued by the changes and didn't have much confusion or frustration to report. Both of them had a death within maybe 10 minutes of start. I noticed weird texture issues, like a low-res bird's nest at my feet when everything else nearby was crystal clear, and the bird's nest "popping" after a few seconds to its normal texture. Mine is arguably the beefiest computer in the house and I was hosting our 3-player game. Mostly medium settings.

Kids had to turn the graphics down 1-2 notches to play a18. One is using the computer I had run a17 and a16 on and while I ran on high or ultra (a16 ultra everywhere, a17 high near the complex POI's but ultra worked in wilderness) but couldn't get decent framerates until he dropped to medium. Other computer we just started it out at medium and he says it's tolerable but constantly a little laggy. I had a bit of stuttering at times but generally it was ok except when I turned, where I'd sometimes get a lag spike for a full second or so, out in hilly wilderness. We never made it into a town so I can't yet say how that locale's performance might be.

Loving the spear. For some reason I'm having much better of a time in melee with it over the usual club. One of the kids is a very good (a17 and earlier) archer and he was thoroughly disappointed in the crude bow's inability to take anything down even with multiple headshots. Day 1 on default difficulty. I only used that bow a small amount and I don't think I killed ANYTHING with it, but I'm not particularly good at headshots anyway so that's probably more me than the bow. Both of us chased a rabbit around for nearly 5 minutes trying to stab it to death with spears. I think that rabbit took about 10 stabs before it died. It was...silly.

 
My go to living quarters since late a16 has been to take over top floor of a tall apartment/hotel building. The normal zombies would never seem to make it all the way up the stairs. I build horde night structures away from living buildings. Eventually, I also outsource the heat generator items like forges away from living quarters building also. (only like 50 squares away), but this is enough to keep screamers/etc out of night time living arrangement.

a18 has changed that. 6 visitors throughout the first night and there is land claim block in place! Junk turrets saved my hide, but still took damage.

IN fact, seems like every day I am taking damage doing something or the other...

Lots of goodness.

 
Yes I love doing the buried treasures now, it gets me a power food item, a recipe and some much needed food, and I can do these at night, with caution of course.
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Definitely need to try some of those now. 😁

Edit: btw I love the food/water balance right now. Been eating almost every canned food I can find. And the added worry of dysentary from drinking boiled water is no joke. I get tense everytime I chug one down praying my stomach doesnt get upset. 😅

 
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I think you guys made some great steps in the new perk descriptions. I like the flavor text a lot, and it's a more clearer what type of bonus you are getting.
However, for some perks it's still unclear what exact weapons it applies to. Hope you can improve on that! :)
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Which ones?

 
I say I have to get used to having to let the reload animation fully play out on the bow, else you don't end up with an arrow loaded next time you switch to the bow.
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Correct. Switching cancels a reload, which is the trade off for not getting stuck doing a reload when you want to switch.

 
Everybody with low end graphic card experiences problems. But is there anybody with relatively weak cpu and got to first horde night?Before in a17 horde night made my fps tank to around 20-10 even 5 (i was playing first on 16 spawns then changed to 32).

Today in a18 my first horde night (16 zombies set) i did not see any impact on performace what so ever. I was still rocking 60-80 fps without stutter. Its impressive optimization from cpu side in this alpha.

Cheers! Now i can enjoy horde nights without lags. Even on old Phenom processor.
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We did a lot of cpu optimizations now we just need to do the gpu side.

 
Hi Lurker here, only bought the game in Alpha 17.4 so no baggage to speak off from previous builds. I have to say that i love A18. Its a masterpiece of a game already IMHO. Kudos to all the team and thanks for engaging with your customers!

 
Is this the cause? :
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WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Nature/Terrain/Utilities' - All passes removed

ERROR: Shader Shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable)WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Nature/Terrain/Utilities' - Setting to default shader.

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I have it, and seen it in other logs. (my card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB)

This then probably causes the console message:

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Detail rendering shaders not found for the active render pipeline, falling back to default shader.

(Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Modules/Terrain/Public/DetailRenderer.cpp Line: 66)

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That might help:

"OK, this is fixed by adding the standard terrain shader to the build. Project Settings -&gt; Graphics -&gt; Always Included Shaders. Add Terrain/Standard."

https://forum.unity.com/threads/using-terrain-drawinstanced-in-a-build-shader-unsupported-hidden-nature-terrain-utilities.709418/
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We don't use the standard Unity terrain shader, so should not need to have it in there, but you never know with Unity.

 
So I am stuck with low FPS ? or is there any work around? I will try to reinstall game though.
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From what we have seen, those warnings are just warnings and don't effect the game, but we could be wrong.

 
Definitely need to try some of those now. 😁
Edit: btw I love the food/water balance right now. Been eating almost every canned food I can find. And the added worry of dysentary from drinking boiled water is no joke. I get tense everytime I chug one down praying my stomach doesnt get upset. 😅
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Yes It can vary some from game to game, but I like that I am concerned about food for a bit now.

 
Everybody with low end graphic card experiences problems.
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Please don't try to hem me in with your complaint. I have what you would consider to be a 'low end' graphics card but am having no problems with playing the game.

 
Please don't try to hem me in with your complaint. I have what you would consider to be a 'low end' graphics card but am having no problems with playing the game.
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See, some people (like Me) beleive the standard of gaming GPU should be high and better settings @ 60FPS +, and others, (you i assume) think low-medium at 45-60 fps is good gaming. Try playing a beautiful game (Ark,Halo idk) on low and get 40 fps and say thats fine, hell might as well call minecraft a AAA game deserving of a noble prize equivalent award!

 
What about biome placement? Is it always snow in the NW corner, with forest under it, followed by desert, with wasteland in the extreme south. Burned forest seems to be squeezed into the eastern portion of the island.

Is this also with you guys? At least the relative location of these biomes.

 
I don't want to leave my base, there is a new zombie that lurks outside who has a special power of tanking my FPS to 5, they call him the experimental terrainacabra.

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I don't want to leave my base, there is a new zombie that lurks outside who has a special power of tanking my FPS to 5, they call him the experimental terrainacabra.
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Playing on 640x480 with 10 fps does take me back in time a bit so thanks for that i guess.

 
Tech question about that, does it use the same core(s) as the game or does it take advantage of free mostly unused cores?(that would definitly tip me over to get a Ryzen 6+ core CPU next upgrade :) )
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It is actually quite complex. It uses the main thread update, but also render updates with an occlusion camera and sends data to the GPU, so the GPU is used and the visibility data is read back by the CPU, which is applied to groups of renderers.

Most of that could probably not be done off the main thread. CPU use is actually pretty light after it was optimized.

 
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