PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Mechanimal]

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?

After I read that I went beck into my game and tried putting textures at full again. But this time I exited to the menu and did it from there, then restarted my save. Last time I tried it while paused in game, that's when it crashed. Glad I tried it again, worked and all is still smooth, and looks even better, woot woot.

 

[Ricowan]

O.M.G
Mining helmets should just come with the mod in them, and you can always use it in another better helmet when you aquire it.

I've found exactly one mining helmet, so the rng gods might have been nice, but it came with the helmet light mod already installed. That adds to the helmet light mod I found on its' own. It's good to be lucky.

 

[Jay_ombie]

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.

Yeah We need more mutated animals.. Look at that bear from the film Annihilation. !!! - we need things like that.

 

[unlike them]

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?

From the release notes: "Faulty and poor quality items have one mod slot, fair and good quality items have two mod slots, great quality items have three mod slots, and fine quality items have four mod slots."

 

[Hek Harris]

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?

Patch-notes :

"Faulty and poor quality items have one mod slot, fair and good quality items have two mod slots, great quality items have three mod slots, and fine quality items have four mod slots."




EDIT : UNLIKE THEM ! Stop running faster than me

 

[meganoth]

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?

It is intentional. Max slots is lower as well.

 

[madmole]

@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 !

Awesome I'm glad you like it!

 

[madmole]

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.

Can we keep the discussion to A18 game play, bugs, performance and not discuss our past business decisions? And leave the drama at your discord, we're trying to run a business here. All we care about is fixing bugs and getting the performance problems solved so people can enjoy the software. Roland you too.

 

[unlike them]

So, I found a mining book "you can craft ore into bundles". So I see we can craft stone/iron/coal/nitrate/oil/wood bundles, but lead is missing.

 

[madmole]

@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.

I think its the splat map shader is just super expensive to some cards.

 

[madmole]

I haven't had a chance to read the forums much, been hopelessly addicted to alpha 18.

Awesome to hear! I meant to pop in your channel and see how you were liking the mid game or wherever you are at by now.

 

[Blake_]

I think its the splat map shader is just super expensive to some cards.

Yeah, I noticed a glowing halo on things in lowest resolution at night. That, and the stuff in my previous post.

 

[madmole]

I like this alpha. Melee is now a real challenge. I got infected on the second day, and there are no antibiotics and honey, the merchant also (I play with 25% loot)In alpha 17, I just walked on a relaxed, zombies were not dangerous.

Thanks for playing.

And yes, 25 fps outside the city, fix it please

Chop tree stumps for honey, otherwise medicine cabinets in houses and traders.

 

[Wulf]

I think its the splat map shader is just super expensive to some cards.

This could very well be the case since the shaders on my hardware are very much overloaded/bottlenecked by something.

There's still people with the same graphics cards having much different experiences but that could be attributed to different filtering settings, resolution, etc etc.

Any idea's how to solve this in the short term?

 

[Atomic Zen]

Played so far up to 18:00 on day 7...got up at 4:30 am to play before work ...

Damn it @madmole I need sleep. Why is a18 so addictive? Can't wait to get home and try my first horde. Everything so far runs buttery smooth and looks great.

 

[Jarod_Silverstar]

Awesome to hear! I meant to pop in your channel and see how you were liking the mid game or wherever you are at by now.

Madmole - does it seem weird that the graphics on the spears seems backward? The stone spear has a nicely shaped stone with clean wrapping holding it to the shaft, but the steel spear honestly looks like a random piece of metal that has been sharpened and stuck on the end of a stick? I mean the image looks good if you are ever going to implement different graphics of items based on quality with the stone spear being a level 5-6 type and the steel being a level 1-2.

 

[Doctor3D]

This could very well be the case since the shaders on my hardware are very much overloaded/bottlenecked by something.
There's still people with the same graphics cards having much different experiences but that could be attributed to different filtering settings, resolution, etc etc.

Any idea's how to solve this in the short term?

There used to be away to force shader models. I haven't done it in a long time. On Nvidia, I think you could use Nvidia Inspector to force the driver to report a lower shader model to the API. Could goof around with that. Unity also has this in the way of DX feature levels..but you have to do it differently now than before due to the launcher changes. The game will automatically supply the force DX11 max feature level command at startup even if you put in your own command on the steam client or launcher. You can either try to use the boot config file in the data directory to possibly override it or make your own shortcut and add the command lines there. I'm not able to goof with that right now to even know if it works. Game uses shader model 5.0, iirc, so you could try to force shader model 4.x - which I believe works with most DX11 shaders and it might have a faster pathway on certain cards or something. Long time since I really did any of that stuff though.

 

[Laz Man]

we'd have to convert them to model entities instead of blocks.

a19?

 

[alchemi2]

Only managed 4 days so far, Holed up on the roof of Academy. Not really spec points into anything yet only found guns on day 4 but got pump shot gun so happy boy.

So far i search around 20 remnants 2 houses and a pass and gas, only found the miner coffee book, done 1 quest for buried supplies, no deaths and seen no animals in burn zone on a RGW.

Got around 60fps occassional drop to 40fps out doors but it will do for me at this stage of experimental, can't wait to have a full sit down over the weekend but great job TFP loving it.

 

[madmole]

Melee seems to be horrible.

I've read the opposite a 1000 times, can you be more specific?