PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Unkfester.pm]

Used tool to delete all game data exept profile.

Everything on default exept drop back pack on death

l run game on random world was playing within 14 min

spawned in desert with 40 fps loving it

Good job FP. Well worth the wait

 

[Laz Man]

I've got what the kids would call "a gaming potato". AMD FX 8350, SSD (with the game installed there), 16gb of RAM, with a Radeon R7 360 2gb video card. So far with Alpha 18, I've experienced no game killing bugs, and I get a decent framerate on medium settings. The only bugs I've encountered are that i cannot open the video settings menu on the main menu, which I chalk up to the Radeon issues everyone else is seeing, and the fact that the stuffed animals show blank in my inventory.
I ordered a new video card yesterday (Nvidia 1660ti 6gb MSI GamerX). I'm sure that will improve it even more.

Kudos to the whole Pimp staff! Thank you for continuing to work on my favorite game since Diablo 2.

What's your fps and resolution currently? I have a similar setup as you. I think I'm going to buy more ram first since it's cheaper then buying a new card. Pregen01 forces my system ram to max out (fps then tanks)

 

[Mechanimal]

I have not done a single quest, but got myself stuck in a looting loop and day five is dawning. Have lv3 AK, plan to craft grenades and tonnes of other stuff. Getting bit worried where i am going to hold up for my day 7 blood moon though.

The buried treasure quests are usually not far away and you can crank them out. Antibiotics and med kits are common rewards, plus you tend to find canned food in the chests you dig up. Anyway, highly recommend it, the extra XP and dukes they give are nice too. Even got my first Compound Bow as a reward once, they are very worth the effort. Some of them are too distant for me, I ignore anything over 1km, especially while still on foot. In fact I always choose whichever quest is closest, despite the type, and do them in that order.

I spent my first 5 days doing quests, day 6/7 was mostly prep for BM. I also do fetch and clear quests, so was still crawling POIs just as I would otherwise, just get a ton more out of it. I'm currently level 16 on day 7, all settings at default aside from 120 min days(60 min is just too dang short imho, barely time to do anything significant).

 

[MechanicalLens]

The buried treasure quests are usually not far away and you can crank them out. Antibiotics and med kits are common rewards, plus you tend to find canned food in the chests you dig up. Anyway, highly recommend it, the extra XP and dukes they give are nice too. Even got my first Compound Bow as a reward once, they are very worth the effort. Some of them are too distant for me, I ignore anything over 1km, especially while still on foot. In fact I always choose whichever quest is closest, despite the type, and do them in that order.
I spent my first 5 days doing quests, day 6/7 was mostly prep for BM. I also do fetch and clear quests, so was still crawling POIs just as I would otherwise, just get a ton more out of it. I'm currently level 16 on day 7, all settings at default aside from 120 min days(60 min is just too dang short imho, barely time to do anything significant).

Definitely worth the effort. Doing buried supplies quests gave me a beaker and a T3 baseball bat, as well as several high-end food recipes. Do those buried supplies, people!

 

[Zombuild]

..snip...

Looks like my day 5 will be doing quests, you got me convinced.

 

[AngryGamer]

@faatal: !THIS!
Reducing Anisotropic Filtering in Nvidia Control Panel from a manual setting of 16 to 4 gives me a huge framerate increase in the desert.

Having now stable 60 frames when watching distant desert terrain, before it was about 30 and less.

Yeah

Looks like, the game itself has 8 as internal setting? (compared "Application Controlled").

Thx for the idea!

My system:

I5 6400, 16GB, Nvidia 1060 6GB (exclusive fullscreen @1680x1050 + Nvidia adaptive VSYNC on)

Reduced AF to 4 aswell and had similar results, even bumped up textures from half to full, and still hit mostly 60 fps.

1060 gaming x 6gb

Xeon E3-1231v3

2x 8 Gb 1600 DDR3

SSD Samsung 850 EVO

Fullscreen @1920x1080

 

[Roland]

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.

You missed my point. Sorry I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t really calling for the end of experimental. Wulf was the one who mentioned the negative reviews and my point was we either have to ignore those or shut down experimental. If TFP is to take to heart the negative reviews then they should stop doing experimental builds (and by extension streamer weekends) and “prepare better” before releasing.

But they won’t stop it because of how useful it is. Wulf was telling TFP to pay attention to the bad reviews. I was responding that doing so would result in no more experimentals.

I’m all for experimentals. Keep it open year round I say.

 

[meganoth]

Odd; it's not showing up. Do you need to craft it in the workbench or tablesaw or something?
Found it in the CM menu. Wooden Furniture. Not showing up in the default crafting menu. Huh.

EDIT: Found it in the default crafting menu. Odd that the icon for it is a park bench. *Shrugs*

Type "furniture" into the search box. No need to scroll through menues.

Just ordered two msi rtx 2060 z cards for $800.
7 Days to die a18 costs a LOT!

You take some risk there, SLI is probably not well tested.

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

Yes, just use one of the pregenerated worlds until the bug is fixed.

 

[unholyjoe]

snip -
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.

we did expand the test team... it's called a18 experimental and we now have many many more eyes on the issue.

welcome to the team to those who opted in to "latest experimental"

 

[madjack75]

What's your fps and resolution currently? I have a similar setup as you. I think I'm going to buy more ram first since it's cheaper then buying a new card. Pregen01 forces my system ram to max out (fps then tanks)

I'll check the FPS when I home, as I've not looked that that number since loading the new alpha, but my resolution is 1920 x 1080.

i was gonna get a new Radeon 590, but the power requirements are just insane.

 

[Moldy Bread]

So something I have noticed with Random Gen. You almost never get skyscrapers but get like 30+ gun factories. Is there any way to guarantee that you at least get one of each type of large POI?

 

[LewZephyr]

Yup. Pregen01 is basically perfect.
It has a lot of towns (dont know about high rises yet)

A good mix of biomes with a leaning toward forests.

It has at least five Traders.

I think it does, this is from pregen01

https://i.imgur.com/pPEui8v.jpg

 

[Damocles]

The magic word is "city". As long as you stay in the city, buildings will occlude most of the far away textures that seem to be part of the problem.

Then we should build a wall around the city, and let the zombies pay for that.

 

[Laz Man]

Just ordered two msi rtx 2060 z cards for $800.
7 Days to die a18 costs a LOT!

Dedication right there.

 

[kuratowakiru]

@faatal: !THIS!
Reducing Anisotropic Filtering in Nvidia Control Panel from a manual setting of 16 to 4 gives me a huge framerate increase in the desert.

Having now stable 60 frames when watching distant desert terrain, before it was about 30 and less.

Yeah

Looks like, the game itself has 8 as internal setting? (compared "Application Controlled").

Thx for the idea!

My system:

I5 6400, 16GB, Nvidia 1060 6GB (exclusive fullscreen @1680x1050 + Nvidia adaptive VSYNC on)

wow, confirmed this.

I bump my res back to 1920X1080, full screen, go to a "bad spot", fps drop to 28~30, change the setting Anisotropic Filtering to x2 and I'm getting 48~50 fps.

spec: i5 6600 @ 3.30GHz, 12 Gb Ram, GTX 1050 ti.

 

[Mechanimal]

we did expand the test team... it's called a18 experimental and we now have many many more eyes on the issue. welcome to the team to those who opted in to "latest experimental"

That's how I see it too, hence it being an opt-in only thing, it doesn't force experimental on anyone by default. You'd think peeps would realize that since they have to go into their settings to make it happen.

I think the overall sequence of how TFP does it is great, from internal testing to streamer weekend to opt-in public experimental, and they should stick to it. There will always, always, be overly grumpy douchebaggery, no matter what, take it with a grain of salt and keep on trucking. I for one am happy for this rare opportunity to be so interactive with devs during a game as it evolves.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

wow, confirmed this. I bump my res back to 1920X1080, full screen, go to a "bad spot", fps drop to 28~30, change the setting Anisotropic Filtering to x2 and I'm getting 48~50 fps.

spec: i5 6600 @ 3.30GHz, 12 Gb Ram, GTX 1050 ti.

If this is actually the problem than turning off AA in game should have solved it as well. Did you try turning off AA in game before using NVIDIA Inspector?

 

[OzHawkeye]

Dedication right there.

Nah, it ain't fur'real till ya order 3 of 'em. ;-)

 

[NL-Chaos]

Just ordered two msi rtx 2060 z cards for $800.
7 Days to die a18 costs a LOT!

Why? most games play better with one grahaics card with more video ram then playing with 2 cards with lower ram but thats my opinion.

 

[Guppycur]

Why? most games play better with one grahaics card with more video ram then playing with 2 cards with lower ram but thats my opinion.

He and his wife.