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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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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small chance? Day 1 at night 75% of the zeds we ran into were ferals.

 
There may be a new name for this child:hidden treasure

;-)
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tp0hT-q.jpg


We could call it "Rafter Treasure" and point and shake our heads at the buried ones.... :p

 
For those with outdoor lag, I switched to OpenGL and it gave me an extra 15ish FPS, still barely playable but I was able to mess around a bit anyway. Fair warning, I did get some random flashes I assume is from natural lighting though.

Absolutely love everything so far, I can't wait till you guys knock out the lag issue :D I seriously love the new enviroment; the music is kickass - you should definitely hire those guys to do a few more scores :) Didn't find too many bugs, none are gamebreaking, but I'll save that for when outdoor performance is fixed and I can do a proper playthrough on DX 11.

Notably, I absolutely love the spear and stun baton(which, I luckily found literally in the first house I looted) -- melee is feeling boss!

 
I don't do much with the UI, so can't say. I can say I would like them using less memory.
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If the icons are using enough memory that you as coder notices it? That's a problem. I could care less how good the icons look personally. Save the memory for important stuff like gameplay. It kinda boggles my mind a bit that apparently the upgraded icons are contributing to memory issues? Bring back the old icons!

 
Mining helmets no long come with a light - you need to find and install the mod.
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D1 on my run to the snow trader in Nave I looted a mil helmet with light from one of his towers. Mil gloves in the other. Woot!

 
If the icons are using enough memory that you as coder notices it? That's a problem. I could care less how good the icons look personally. Save the memory for important stuff like gameplay. It kinda boggles my mind a bit that apparently the upgraded icons are contributing to memory issues? Bring back the old icons!
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You are accurate in that saying, but with 4K display and VR I think we have to sacrifice there, and won't be getting low res icons. Though I do prefer to them to ship low res and give hd icons for 4k etc as DLC. Or make it a switchable for those who don't have high specs to play off.

 
Strange, I just continued my save game (PREGEN01) and my FPS drops back down into the single digits. When checking my system resources I see that my 12GB of system ram is maxing out. I will try playing PREGEN02 to see if my performance consistently stays good or whether it eventually drops to what I am seeing in PREGEN01. Perhaps I need to buy more system RAM as a workaround :p
EDIT: Thinking out loud, is it possible there is something unique to PREGEN01 that would cause it to run worse then PREGEN02?
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The lag seems to last about 5-10 seconds on my PC, so just make sure your in a safe spot before quitting.

Edit: My guess is that Pregen01 has more buildings than Pregen02.

 
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MM and I, would call it: "Get off your lazy ass and find the damn Treasure!" :D
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Edit: Found the quick way to get Buried/hidden chest:

For level ground:

Head to the treasure marker exactly facing north, once the marker starts blinking, stop and its two squares in front of you

And on tricky sloops:

do the same north facing, and if the marker doesn't blink but becomes behind you, dig straight down.
 
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Your analysis is off. Indoor performance is better because of occlusion period.
Mountains are Unity terrain and Micro Splat shaders, which are both new to A18. Terrain also has new high res textures in texture arrays (also new). There is no indoors or outdoors. It is just voxels under, around, above you or some combination.

The game has always rendered terrain that is not visible to the player.

I've been profiling the last 2 days and the occlusion system has never shown up as using a lot of resources.
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I see. Sounds hard as ballz to fix.

Wait a sec, Now that you mention it... terrain/mountain/cliff textures are at full resolution on lowest settings, or at least very detailed. Shouldn't they be crappy by reducing texture size in video options? Changing it to mid/quarter/eighth size seems to have no or very little effect on them. .

Thank you for taking the time to answer .

 
@faatal

From our experience yesterday with two friends of mine :

- looking at a big open field makes FPS way worse, looking at the floor makes it so much better

- having 2 friends right in front of you makes your FPS way better, probably thanks to the occlusion

- I had mega issues when it started raining. Then again it might just be coincidence (see my next point)

- we had random SUPER low FPS (1-5 FPS range) for 2-3 minutes before it "fixed itself". Fun fact, we never had it at the same time. We're running a 8 yr old PC, a RX480 and a GTX 1060. All of us had the issues "randomly" during the day.

- indoors is perfect even on the 8yr old potato PC

- the video options have way less impact than one would think

@madmole

On another subject the game feels great. Granted we're only day 3 but the early game feels challenging, rewarding and looting our first dungeon-type POI was super exciting. Took some amazing screenshots, we especially like the new ores very much, they look very polished. And the hills on Pregen01 are awesome, unless you're on top of one and there's no easy way down haha !

Thanks for this masterpiece !

 
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All you are promoting is for TFP to go back to not doing experimentals. Experimental builds are a relatively new thing and before TFP pulled the trigger on it one of their worries was exactly what you are describing. If TFP can't even get a grace period of a few days to configure performance for the suddenly massive number of configurations that are suddenly playing then I can tell you that their response is likely to be to take away the experimental build model rather than somehow "prepare better" next time.
Preparing better would be testing different configs behind closed doors for a few months to keep the poor results private instead of letting the community who chooses to opt in try it on their potatoes and report.

Now if your response is, "I don't mind waiting for a good launch and a good version if it means they have good performance from day 1" then by all means opt out and wait until 18.2 to be your own day 1 and you will have experienced your much better launch.
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I am enjoying this Alpha so far, way better than 17 but there is a real and tangible issue here. To suggest that they will pull experimentals because of legitimate and valid complaints is the worst PR possible.

You guys went full steam ahead with this streamer weekend and promoted to as many people as possible this release was coming. You welcomed with open arms the praise, the rave reviews and scoffed at the haters, raising a nose to anyone who thought 18 would be met with mixed results. And the Alpha itself is great and many agree.

Experimental used to be much quieter, therefore issues such as this were kept more confined. You're playing with big boys now by using streamers to advertise. You get the same eyes on you as Bethesda and Blizzard. You cant just take your ball and go home because criticism rolls in. Casual gamers are going to leave bad reviews because casual gamers have no knowledge of what experimental or EA is. Just look at all the console posts you get. STILL. Even after answers were given.

And you are saying that QA could be used to catch the issues with FPS behind closed doors over several months? Problem there is people with no QA tag associated with them caught it in.... 10 minutes. And solutions started rolling in a few hours later, or at least solutions that could be investigated. Everyone working together to help fix it, offers of actual help looking at things. THAT is a success to experimental but you guys are so damn focused on publicity and reviews you cant even see that.

Youre ALWAYS going to get troll reviews. Ignore them. Did NO one in QA have any FPS problems? If not it may be time to expand your team with testers who have different types of hardware.

 
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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.
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UMMMMM ya need to have a18 city and town code MISTER lol

 
@Fataal

Could the performance issues have anything to do with Chunks? I've had awesome performance up until Day 10 When I decided to leave my little area and head to another city/biome. I went from 90fps outdoors to 15fps when I left my city limits. Up until that I never my city. My performance stayed pretty bad even when I returned home, then it slowly started to get better.

I wonder if chunks are not unloading properly or whatever. Super weird.

 
Playing on Warrior difficulty is a heck of a challenge for a solo player now...in A17 warrior diff was like a walk in the park.

Night time is more dangerous than the horde night...unless you have a ranged weapon, you'll be dead in seconds.

I will try the Nomad difficulty tonight, hopefully i can take my breath time to time.

@faatal

i am running a 1080 gtx and i do have huge frame drops in snow biom. I know from your recent posts you are looking into it, hopefully you will find a resolution too asap.

Oh, and i still didn't see any rivers yet. Are they not part of the RGW anymore?

 
Let's just all breathe in for a while and remember this is experimental day 3. I'm pretty sure they are working OT to fix those issues asap.

The only point I agree on is that doing a huge streamer week-end, even delaying the date on the sole purpose of not doing it during the Twitchcon, is probably a big mistake for an "experimental build". But then again, there wouldn't be any hype to have it only for the stable release so...

@Roland just swing the banhammer stronger tbh. Whiny frustrated guys with 5 posts total coming with the "my favourite game is dead" because the launch has technical issues just don't belong here and don't add anything meaningful or positive to the community.

And keep your heads up, the Alpha is amazing, it will shine in no time.

 
My first feral

BDsafK0.jpg


This is Fred the Feral. Fred is my friend. Fred watches my back at night, every night. ;)

(Note: He's in the center of my crosshairs.)

 
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