PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Aldranon]

Yeah but A16 was so great.... rolls eyes.

Most anyone could face roll A16. A18 however, is tough! Playing dead-is-dead now, is scary.

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Day 21 was done by midnight. I'm thinking bm's were nerfed?

You play with a group?

For solo play, 16 for a BM should make most vets happy.

 

[THARN]

So I was at 85 for food- I ate a can of miso... went up a bit... then I ate bacon and eggs that my friend made...

suddenly I had a red flashing plate icon on the side of the screen and it said I was starving... and I was at 28 food..

is this food poisoning? it didn't say it in the player menu-just said I was starving.. I ate 2 more bacon and eggs and it went away,,

maybe a bug,,, ?

 

[Guppycur]

Most anyone could face roll A16. A18 however, is tough! Playing dead-is-dead now, is scary.
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You play with a group?

For solo play, 16 for a BM should make most vets happy.

Yeh but there were only two of us on at the time. maxAlive 80, got the rush, but it turned into a trickle real quick.

I'm sure gazz will comment, but I'll compare xmls after work slows a bit more.

What sucks is soon after I had some uh, misadventures with candy tin mines, three times in like 5 minutes, so the next bm will be even worse. Ah well, simple to mod.

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So I was at 85 for food- I ate a can of miso... went up a bit... then I ate bacon and eggs that my friend made...suddenly I had a red flashing plate icon on the side of the screen and it said I was starving... and I was at 28 food..

is this food poisoning? it didn't say it in the player menu-just said I was starving.. I ate 2 more bacon and eggs and it went away,,

maybe a bug,,, ?

You puked. I don't think there are animations or sounds yet for it.

 

[Slingblade2040]

Day 21 was done by midnight. I'm thinking bm's were nerfed?

just did my day 14 horde. game stage at 55 and it was done at 1am and this is with a BM count of 8. feels the same as alpha 17. I just logged out and logged back in to restart the whole thing.

on that note isn't it good for these blood moons to end faster? I always see people complaining about how it's a waste of resources? I personally love them for the easy exp and possible game over if my base is wrecked.

 

[archergod]

Okay, I install game on my second/office computer and it too fail to use sharder for streaming. And yet again fps falls. But my brother got it working fine on his machine. Will check his driver status as it seems my work machine share same driver as home one.

Work machine is

i7 8th Gen, 1050 GTX, 16GB RAM. (ROG Motherboard).

 

[Odetta]

Landmines grant no exp? How does the junk turret give exp but a land mine doesn't? So much for going a Demo Build, which is more of a group and ambush type build. Laying traps, luring into a tight space and such. Man this dampens the spirits a bit.

I could have swore Madmole said he was gonna add exp for mines in the past. :dispirited:

 

[ArMaReZ]

Where did you find that? Was he in the editor or in the vanilla?

I find this by looking at the xml "Item" and I found this wonder in creative mode

 

[Blake_]

You are assuming people craft everything or something. Everyone loots 99% of their gear now. You don't need the mining bonuses but can get 3 ranks pretty cheap. Even then none of its needed, a good looter/quester can buy all the materials he needs from a trader. Open your mind up a bit, not everyone thinks or plays like you do.
Its not 14 tools its 3. Shovels, Picks and axes. Nail guns have no quality and don't count.

I could stick chainsaws and augers under int somewhere, or make them so awesome you don't need any perks at all nor perks influence them, but I feel like you are making a mountain out of a mole hill. Strength is not needed.

Maybe I am... tools are tools. Just being passionate.

On another topic,

Don't get me started on mountains lol.You guys managed to improve indoors performance by a LOT in this alpha (sometimes up to 30%).

But Mountains... they eat fps like crazy on lower rigs. I'm talking 30-90% fps drop .

Maybe expand the Occluder video options so it only works inside buildings? The Occluder checks outdoors are killing potato rigs. That's a bit of work but it will help to get outside performance back and better.

Also, the game is currently rendering terrain textures that are not visible to the player. Just go to god mode and go below the terrain.

Texture streaming helps a solid 10-15% outdoors (tested) so as soon as the occluder thing gets tweaked the game will run better everywhere.

 

[Roland]

On another topic,

Don't get me started on mountains lol.You guys managed to improve indoors performance by a LOT in this alpha (sometimes up to 30%).

But Mountains... they eat fps like crazy on lower rigs. I'm talking 30-90% fps drop .

Maybe expand the Occluder video options so it only works inside buildings? The Occluder checks outdoors are killing potato rigs. That's a bit of work but it will help to get outside performance back and better.

Also, the game is currently rendering terrain textures that are not visible to the player. Just go to god mode and go below the terrain.

Texture streaming helps a solid 10-15% outdoors (tested) so as soon as the occluder thing gets tweaked the game will run better everywhere.

Blake don't be 5-Star General Obvious....

....or have you not read any of the posts the last two days and all the back and forth discussions with faatal?

 

[DaVegaNL]

I'm pretty sure the roads and towns are using 17's code mostly. Terrain gen is brand new and looks great IMO, so we'll improve roads/towns more in the future.

Ok good to hear. Looking forward!

 

[ParadiseLostUK]

I may be late to the party on this but I'm disappointed you need a repair kit to melee tools and weapons.

I thought that too at first, however, the repair kits are relatively cheap to make now so it means any tools or weapons you find are reusable even early in the game. It now makes perfect sense to me.

 

[Gazz]

on the bright side i have now learnt that spears fly really far. Was going to shoot a zombie, it juked and i just watched my spear traverse the roof and fly beyond thw edge never to be seen again...

And that is exactly why spears can not be thrown as far as a "realistic" spear.

You would lose so many...

 

[DaVegaNL]

Not at all. Just stating that the game has to be tested fully on minimum spec hardware and that can be done behind closed doors by the QA team slowly or it can be done naturally in an experimental build where many people with rigs at or below minimum will play and report. No insult to your identity intended.

Roland, all due respect, but i don't have minimum specs on my pc. I don't think that most people here have that.

 

[DaVegaNL]

I'm wondering what people here think of the RWG, and specifically the cities and their placement in the world. Are the cities in a17 better?

 

[pregnable]

I am not sure about the early game fist weapon. I was using it and it takes so many punches and wears out so fast that I was out of leather in no time and throwing spears again lel.

 

[Baltazar]

I heard somewhere that a18 B139 is not liking Radeon GPU's that much. Is it true?

 

[Blake_]

Blake don't be 5-Star General Obvious....

....or have you not read any of the posts the last two days and all the back and forth discussions with faatal?

What do you think? -runs back to a18-

Edit: of course I read it. I just re read it. I talked about mountains and occluder. Faatal just about snow and a coworker that has "low specs" I wonder if he was insulting said coworker?

 

[Laz Man]

All you NVIDIA Card owners having FPS issues, if you haven't tried this already go download the following driver (if applies to your card) ASAP. Massive performance gains. I am now able to play at 1920x1080 resolution on medium settings with 20 to 30 FPS on my 5 year 2GB video card (EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SuperSC ACX 2.0+). Happy Days! I plan to do some tweaking to see if I can get my FPS even higher.

Additional Screenshots below (PREGEN02):

https://imgur.com/a/mCB7LW9

 

[faatal]

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.

I get crashes in Vulkan too. Only fix I see is updating to a major new version of Unity, which we won't do until A18 is stable or A19.

 

[faatal]

I'm getting terrible performance for some reason. It was fine in A17, but no matter what settings I try now it is really laggy and almost unplayable.
Someone mentioned turning off occlusion earlier in the thread, but it's greyed out for me on all presets and custom.

Specs are AMD 2600, 16gb ram, 1070ti and the games on an ssd. I'm on a 1440p monitor, but even setting the res to 1080p is not much better.

Also followed the instal instructions and cleaned all files and validated before playing.

The occlusion tooltip says it can only be changed at the main menu.