PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[SMiThaYe]

Your mileage will vary. Depends on how close you are sitting to running out of VRAM.
Mem command is triggering a flush of the old high res texture atlases, which is a subset of all textures in the game. These seem to also be getting loaded on startup and staying in mem for a while.

Whenever I used memcl in previous alphas it helped a little, A18 so far has no bearing on memory usage as it remains the same from what I've noted: 7.3GB VRAM (out of 12GB available) and 5.7GB RAM. Playing for several hours, afk, etc that's what I see.

Faatal, Is memcl redundant for most or are there cases you've seen it can be beneficial in A18?

Btw, I keep seeing one core (core 12) pegged at 100% on 9900K, first four are at 50% normal gameplay and the other 12 at 25%. It would help performance if load was evenly distributed to avoid a potential bottleneck, I hope AI isn't pegging on core 12.

Have to say that the work TFP have done is fantastic, too many great things to single out and yes it's fun again :applouse:

 

[Damocles]

We don't use the standard Unity terrain shader, so should not need to have it in there, but you never know with Unity.

In the forum post, they stated that this behavior (not loading the shader) only occurs in a build, not the editor.

And that including the standard shader offers a fallback then.

The debug log looks like Unity is desperately trying to assign some shader, taking down the framerate meanwhile.

 

[Gareee]

Haven't tried this myself, but looks like the game is using Antisotropic Filtering - if you want to lessen that tiling effect you could try forcing the AF to say 4X or so in the Nvidia Control Panel and then the edges beyond that will blur out in the distance.

Good to know! I'm hoping they enable the same type of random texture rotation system Minecraft uses... its just enough to break up that repeated pattern issue.

 

[faatal]

Question about GUI.

Faatal, whether there are plans to increase the number of animations when icons grow when hovering over them with the mouse (adding intermediate sizes for smoother animation)?

Now we have only two - initial and max, unlike the smooth animation of growth in the old GUI.

I don't do much with the UI, so can't say. I can say I would like them using less memory.

 

[alnom]

What is the command to show the memory and CPU stats in the upper left?

This is Sparta!!))) MSI Afterburner

 

[Damocles]

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.

The biome placement is define by a fixed biome stamp. (Thats why you will always see about the same biome arrangement)

RWG needs to add some more biome stamp variations (load a random one of the list), or generate the biome-distribution procedurally for more variation.

A simple fix to do basically.

 

[faatal]

Missing zombies with your spear and having to run in circles being chased by them while you try to find it and pick it up without being hit is hilarious.
9/10 - could only be improved by the addition of Yakety Sax.

Which is why I tend to not throw a spear. Having a second melee weapon might just be a good idea.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

I Honestly cannot for the life of me, understand how people game at horse #$^! settings. That would make me go bonkers and quit PC gaming all together!!!#PCmasterrace

Some of us have experienced the awesome graphics of an Atari 7800 after playing the Atari 2600 for years, but never let go of the ability to make out objects from the most basic of shapes. In general, games having graphics at all was a big step up from reading words.

 

[faatal]

+1 And running after an injured wolf to get back my spear was a great moment too.

That is precious. Have not seen that way to lose a spear.

 

[bobross]

For Faatal (and for Wulf) I was able to see a 20 FPS jump with distant terrain enabled by switching from DX11 to Vulkan. This is on Windows 10. Still seeing the 7-10 FPS drop between town and hill though.

 

[faatal]

I had a great moment yesterday when I was fighting two zombies on day one. I finish the first one off with my spear and upon dying he promptly ragdolls off a cliff with my spear still stuck in him, forcing me to scramble down after him trying not to break a leg while avoiding his friend who seems perfectly happy to lemming off the cliff after me.

LOL! Just LOL!

 

[Drithyl]

Apparently if you leave a server with your junk turret placed, it's not yours anymore. A friend is getting shot by mine and when I rejoin I can't pick it up either. We're also allies within the game so it shouldn't shoot him.

 

[Skippy5]

I honestly don't think this is intended.You guys went to so much trouble and hard work making sure this would be a relatively smooth launch, because of what happened with a17, and when you look at the steam forums, this forum, and twitch, people are talking about the bad performance. (On the flip side, that seems to be about the only bad part of this release, so kudos for that )

As far as this being an experimental to an early access game, yes that is true. But public perception being what it is, the real worlkd doesnt work that way. First impressions matter, no matter if it's experimental. That type of information just gets lost in the noise.

Hope you guys prepare a better launch for A19/Gold.

I have not looked but that is pretty sad if people are leaving bad reviews due to performance for “an experimental” launch. Same people complain when the new release takes too long - ugh people suck.

 

[Slingblade2040]

Faatal. dude I'm so loving the limbs exploding off animals. that has saved my ass a few times against wolf's and dogs. I will say the fortitude build is insane and using fists and watching all those heads or limbs explode has me feeling like I'm in fist of the north star lol.

 

[wolfbain5]

I will say, other than the at times funky near vertical roads/paths. the rwg is great. the map I am on, in the desert, reminds me alot of the buttes and plateaus of Utah and Nevada

 

[RestInPieces]

everyone is complaining about fps drop, but together with fps drop I also got bunch of flashing pixels all around terrain hehehe xDDD

You are not the only one - already found 3 other people (+ myself) who also have this problem. Here is the thread describing it https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?127932-Graphical-artifacts. Seems to happen with 5700/5700xt.

 

[Matyese]

https://www.reddit.com/r/7daystodie/comments/df6k4b/cant_believe_how_broken_a18_is_i_was_riding_my

 

[DaVegaNL]

Its a brand new rwg tech but we will improve it.

With all due respect, i don't know whether it's such an improvement. Yes, the areas outside the cities look nice enough. The cities themselves are placed in rather massive craters again, as we saw in a16. They don't have very steep slopes, but it still looks unnatural. All cities are also just.. squares..

- - - Updated - - -

And you got me, but 11.114 km away approx.

* steps one meter to the SW *

Now I'm closer to you <3

 

[Wulf]

For Faatal (and for Wulf) I was able to see a 20 FPS jump with distant terrain enabled by switching from DX11 to Vulkan. This is on Windows 10. Still seeing the 7-10 FPS drop between town and hill though.

Yeah i noticed Vulkan giving an FPS boost of about 10-15 FPS for me (Which is actually expected since i'm running AMD hardware).

Unfortunately Vulkan isn't properly supported yet in this game and is causing some crashes for me.

 

[DaVegaNL]

I will say, other than the at times funky near vertical roads/paths. the rwg is great. the map I am on, in the desert, reminds me alot of the buttes and plateaus of Utah and Nevada

You honestly like the completely flat and square cities? Try to see if you can find height differences within one city.