PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[SnowDog1942]

yes my laptop has sensitive keys lol
D

Does it have a safe SPACE

Ohhhhh!!!!

 

[Mechanimal]

Yes this is the intent. Its still a huge quest to make a repair kit if you are on day 1 and don't know the game yet, unless you are lucky enough to buy forged iron and duct tape from a trader.

I like that you made them for everything too, saves me a couple of inventory slots, I used to always carry forged iron and/or steel on me, in addition to repair kits for weapons, just so I could repair those tools while out and about. Now I just need one stack of repair kits: sold. Is a smooth refinement imho.

 

[Adam the Waster]

Does it have a safe SPACE
Ohhhhh!!!!

no or else it would go in the trash!

 

[Quantum Blue]

Does it have a safe SPACE
Ohhhhh!!!!

And how could we possibly extend that to the forum?

; - )

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no or else it would go in the trash!

And that ties in perfectly with my previous post!!!!

; - )

 

[Doctor3D]

yes my laptop has sensitive keys lol
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i really dont have the money so for now i'll stick with potato. thxs tho

I understand that. We have four computers that play PC games and three gaming consoles. It gets very expensive when you have a family who all play video games..You'll find yourself spending thousands of dollars very quickly to upgrade stuff all the time. I try to optimize and tweak things to work as well as possible before I ever upgrade anything.

We use lower native monitors on a few of them which helps dramatically. If I buy a brand new GPU that can run something at 4K, but it starts to get slow - I put that GPU on the 1080P monitor and it still looks nice and crisp but runs good - then when it gets slow on the 1080p monitor - i retire it to at 1360x768 (720P) monitor...before finally giving it away to a non-gamer friend or family. This way I'm never having to buy 4 brand new GPUs all the time. They cycle through all the computers that way. I do similar with memory, CPU - I try to keep the same gen of mobo on at least two or three of them for that purpose. Saves a lot of money. I simply couldn't justify upgrading 4 computers every few years on top of all the brand new consoles, hand-helds, and everything else my family wants all the time.

 

[Mechanimal]

I have a question:

Why are "open" cabinets even a thing in the furniture helper menu. Like, who would use those and why, can't think of a single scenario. Just seems like extra clutter in that menu.

Furthermore, why can't you just make them all have open and closed states in the first place? I tend to overtake POIs for my main base, then build BM towers from scratch. One of my fav things is making use of existing furniture, like stoves to store pots, grills etc. Fridges for food. Sinks for jars and water, etc. Right now I keep my coffee, beans and seeds in a coffeepot, is fun. But in A17 and now in A18 I get so many dud cabinets and fridges etc that I have to destroy them and replace them. Why not just have the model different when they are empty, open, and then revert to the closed model when they have stuff in them. I imagine there is some technical hurdle, but can it, should it, be overcome? I think it would make far more sense and be worth the effort.

 

[Syrex]

Wrenching some cars, randomly (3 so far in this city), and they like to dance:

 

[Adam the Waster]

I understand that. We have four computers that play PC games and three gaming consoles. It gets very expensive when you have a family who all play video games..You'll find yourself spending thousands of dollars very quickly to upgrade stuff all the time. I try to optimize and tweak things to work as well as possible before I ever upgrade anything.
We use lower native monitors on a few of them which helps dramatically. If I buy a brand new GPU that can run something at 4K, but it starts to get slow - I put that GPU on the 1080P monitor and it still looks nice and crisp but runs good - then when it gets slow on the 1080p monitor - i retire it to at 1360x768 (720P) monitor...before finally giving it away to a non-gamer friend or family. This way I'm never having to buy 4 brand new GPUs all the time. They cycle through all the computers that way. I do similar with memory, CPU - I try to keep the same gen of mobo on at least two or three of them for that purpose. Saves a lot of money. I simply couldn't justify upgrading 4 computers every few years on top of all the brand new consoles, hand-helds, and everything else my family wants all the time.

i'm a only child and i just got a Pc and a Xbox. but thx for understanding.

also i only uses my PC to play a few games. 7dtd is one of them

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Wrenching some cars, randomly (3 so far in this city), and they like to dance:

Ghost Car!!!!

 

[Adam the Waster]

I have a question:
Why are "open" cabinets even a thing in the furniture helper menu. Like, who would use those and why, can't think of a single scenario. Just seems like extra clutter in that menu.

Furthermore, why can't you just make them all have open and closed states in the first place? I tend to overtake POIs for my main base, then build BM towers from scratch. One of my fav things is making use of existing furniture, like stoves to store pots, grills etc. Fridges for food. Sinks for jars and water, etc. Right now I keep my coffee, beans and seeds in a coffeepot, is fun. But in A17 and now in A18 I get so many dud cabinets and fridges etc that I have to destroy them and replace them. Why not just have the model different when they are empty, open, and then revert to the closed model when they have stuff in them. I imagine there is some technical hurdle, but can it, should it, be overcome? I think it would make far more sense and be worth the effort.

one day i want working stove that cooks food and can hold water like a generator for cooking! like this!!!!!

also i think that you should be able to find , build or buy all furniture

 

[Jay_ombie]

Love the dynamic nature of confrontations.

I had two heavy army like zombies on my tail when a pack of wolves came out of no where and took on the zombies.

I ran off into a narrow fenced area near farm land which happened to have some spikes spread out near by.

Observed the mayhem from afar..

The wolves took out the two heavy zombies which I then popped each wolf with my AK for meat for days !!!!!!...

 

[HeLLKnight]

After lots of testing i've come to some new insights.Lets recap:

My system is i5 4690k running 4 cores @ 4.2Ghz / 16GB ram / amd RX480 8GB.

Running the game fullscreen @ 1080p on a 144Hz monitor with vsync on. FPS is therefore capped @ 144. Running latest (october release) AMD drivers. Using DX mode ingame. All FPS numbers are taken when looking at the same exact spot.

In a17.4 i was running most settings on high/ultra except the DoF, Motion Blur,Shadows and reflection and getting ~60-70 FPS both indoors and outdoors. Basically always smooth and no noticable drops.

In a18 (with quality preset to High and Occusion set to off))this drops to ~20fps when outside. (Indoors, this is 80+ FPS. This is when sitting at a relatively high spot and looking over lots of terrain, so it is kind of worst case. Biome doesnt seem matter, it happened in desert, snow and forest so far.

With quality preset set to low, this jump to about 28 FPS.

Using my old A17 settings with streaming ON and occlusion OFF. (very similar to high preset except with lower shadows/reflections and DoF/Motion blur/Bloom OFF)

Game DefaultFiltering - 18 FPS

anisotropic filtering set to x16 - 18fps

anisotropic filtering set to x8 - 22fps

anisotropic filtering set to x4 - 28fps

anisotropic filtering set to x2 - 38fps with Morphological Filtering on, still 38FPS

anisotropic filtering set to x2 - with "Performance" filtering in drivers ON - 42 FPS. (btw i've never seen this setting have any affect in any game, ever)

There should never be this kind of impact with anisotropic filtering. Not on this kind of hardware in this day and age. Even so, the FPS is still not were it should be (around a17 level) with very low anisotropic filtering.

Still it might be a good indication where to look. (I know the texture filtering is done in a shader since a few game updates)

Edit: Also, Turning on AA ingame makes 0 difference on FPS with either low or high ingame settings.

I did a pretty different benchmark related to textures.

I7 7700k, 16gb 3200, GTX 1080 8gb vram. 1080p, vsync off, no apps in background. Open forest area, no zombies near:

Medium preset: 84 fps

Medium preset, dt off: 98 fps

Medium with quarter textures: 105 fps

Medium with quarter textures, dt off: 118 fps

High preset: 60fps

High with half textures: 74 fps

High with half textures, dt off: 82 fps

High with quarter textures: 90 fps

High with quarter textures, dt off: 99 fps

Now lets investigate further with no bottlenecks. Everything to the lowest setting, vsync off, 1080p, texture streaming and occlusion off. Then started to increase settings one by one.

All to the lowest, no zombies near: 125fps, 3747mb vram used (msi afterburner overlay)

Same but DT off: 120fps

All to the lowest but textures from quarter to half: 100fps, 4750mb vram used

Same but DT off: 125fps

All to the lowest but textures from half to full: 76 fps, 6997mb vram used.

Same but DT off: 95fps

Touching all other settings gives little difference when I'm bounded with high texture settings.

 

[Adam the Waster]

Love the dynamic nature of confrontations.
I had two heavy army like zombies on my tail when a pack of wolves came out of no where and took on the zombies.

I ran off into a narrow fenced area near farm land which happened to have some spikes spread out near by.

Observed the mayhem from afar..

The wolves took out the two heavy zombies which I then popped each wolf with my AK for meat for days !!!!!!...

i think if zombies kill them they should eat them and vice versa!

and there should be zombie's for almost every hostile animals like boar , mountain lion , coyote and wolf!

AND some mutated animals like Chickens and rabbits are a bit larger , wolfs and coyotes increase in size and have bigger muscles, deer are bigger and males will attack you! , boars are bigger and are very violent! , snakes increase of size. and the Bears are 3xs bigger and his arms make the tank from L4D look like a scrawny tooth pick! and the mountain lion is 2xs bigger and has large sabertooth like teeth.

 

[Thecolours]

What game stage do you have to it before demolishers start showing up on horde nights?

About the stun baton, when the zombies get electrocuted they are still able to attack. Shouldn't they be stunned so they cant attack?

 

[Doctor3D]

All to the lowest but textures from half to full: 76 fps, 6997mb vram used.

It's just WAYY too much VRAM (relative to the actual quality of the textures). That excludes at least half (probably more) of the people who play the game from even using the intended textures without eventually or immediately slowing down to a crawl. From best I can tell, to avoid any performance penalty you need at least 8GB of VRAM. You can get by with 6GB of VRAM - but with extended playthroughs - you might eventually start thrashing and the FPS will even suffer with that - you might have to do that 'mem' command or alt-tab or something to flush it. With 4GB of VRAM - your FPS is definitely suffering as a result and how playable it will be will just depend on how much bandwidth you have in the pipe..3GB cards and below would probably always dip below 30fps frequently except when in a POI or looking at the sky or ground due to texture overload.

 

[Mechanimal]

Hmm, not sure if this is intentional or not. So now a level 1 item has one mod slot, which is nice... but a level 2 only has one slot, what up with that?

 

[Will_McDodge]

Got a seed surrounded by sea (almost), a Sahara like region disrupting a forest home, burnt forest South, lakes dispersed everywhere. Favourite advanced gen map so far

 

[Wulf]

That's interesting Hellknight. Texture size has almost no real impact for me FPS wise. But im pretty positive that's because my bottleneck is elsewhere (shaders). I'm sure once that's fixed, my FPS jumps significally and texture size becomes a real part of the performance equation.

What type of texture filtering are you running?

 

[Adam the Waster]

Got a seed surrounded by sea (almost), a Sahara like region disrupting a forest home, burnt forest South, lakes dispersed everywhere. Favourite advanced gen map so far

need them gators man!

 

[Blake_]

Did you disable occlusion and get better fps outdoors?

No. I tested it again and again last night and after a few hours, while sometimes it seemed to, Occlusion is indeed making it better. It works because when I turn it off the performance drops around a 30%.It is indeed increasing fps. So is texture streaming. While in GOD MODE I think I found out the real problem for the performance drop. Just look at this images:

TEST IN LOWEST SETTINGS OCCLUDER ON TEXTURE STREAMING ON.







Seems like the game is rendering every single tiled terrain texture above and below ground and FULL DETAIL every time you move, and guess what, the fps drop is mathematically consistent to the volume of those 4 faces being rendered in real time. I used to get 90-100 fps in a17.4 (60 if I fix my fps to screen refresh rate). Now I get what the screenshots show with drops to the single digits that worsen the faster I move.

Make no mistake, that is not per chunk. Every time you move the game renders those faces block by block (texture map by texture map? I mean it's like a courtain rendering every block you move relative to the surface). I can literally see that cascade of redundant textures loading in my minimum specs rig when i go below ground in god mode.

In a17.4 there was the same problem but with a HUGE difference: those textures below ground were just low resolution stretched lines. Look at this images from a17.4 with fps included:

TEST IN LOWEST SETTINGS





That seems to be the real reason why a18 performs crappy outdoors. In a17 it was a problem, but when the texture system improved fps took the full hit on lower rigs.

SUGGESTED FIXES:

Lazy ass but must have fix: Reduce the texture resolution of ground textures to match texture quality in video options. It should look way worse than it looks now if I chose 1 eight (Those images are 1 eighth texture size, they seem full detail)

Hard but awesome fix: Do not render anything below ground, period. No memory usage there. Hello bandits.

 

[Ouch Quit It]

Why does my charecter need a smaller sledgehammer....found a level 2 on first day and he swings like he is exhausted.......little slow on the swing ???

Coughs* Bigger Maps * Coughs