PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Ralathar44]

There are probably few players that can solo a 32 zed horde on nomad so I'd say its working pretty well tbh.

lol. Unexpected compliment. Thank You. I'm really not one to toot my own horn, but now you've put me into a position where it's relevant to discuss my own skills/limitations so now I have to talk about it . I'd say from my perspective that I could prolly solo a 32 zed horde using no skill points at all If I adjusted my normal play to compensate. As I said at the end " A greater focus on careful pulls/kiting/splitting enemy groups and farm can overcome most power differentials in this game if need be." As mentioned, baseline wooden club is basically the same DPS as baseline stun baton and I've been handling most POIs with baseline heavy armor + stun baton. A baseball bat, even unperked, would get me more killing power than a stun baton with perks. An AK, even unperked, would get me about the same killing power as 2 turrets and in some respects not being confined to a specific weapon can actually be a significant advantage. In fact, after I get through with a purist playthrough of each stat to day 40 I'll prolly do a playthrough with no weapon stats perked focusing on farm and flexibility. Though it'll be quite some time before I've gotten to that. As you mentioned, hours are limited .

From where I stand as a player 32 zeds on nomad is what I need to apply pressure to myself and give the chance/risk of failure playing normally and not doubling down on farm/build/pulls, thus it's what I need to be able to properly evaluate weapon power. But from my perspective what you're saying is "A Diamond League player was able to beat a Silver League Player with X character, therefore X character cannot be underpowered". But that's a fallacious comparison because balance is not a capability based thing but a relative power level thing.

How strong one weapon is vs another isn't based on what I can accomplish with it with my level of skill, but rather based on what I can accomplish with it relative to what I can accomplish with other weapons. For instance, explosives feels completely OP atm. I could prolly survive every horde night just by spamming unperked explosive arrows/bolts and grenades/pipe bombs with a based designed to take advantage of that. In fact, that's exactly what my agility playthrough did. I started using explosive arrows for horde nights and it just became explosive spam. I though maybe resources would be an issue, but as it turned out I could easily afford to craft 80ish explosive arrows per horde night and that's more than enough and I was actually stockpiling explosive arrows. Buy glue and duct tape from vendor, harvest all bones, you get duct tape for days....duct tape for DAYS. The gunpoweder is cheap with new mining. But even if duct tap was nerfed, Pipe bombs don't need duct tape and so I could just use pipe bombs for days. Slightly less effective than grenades/explosive arrows/bolts but more than enough. And I'm not even perked into those .

 

[erlgrey]

how big should be the performance difference between AF 0 and 1 usually without hitting vram limit?

for me its around +100% when i turn af off, which means its essentially still only playable with af 0 and blurry image. (28 vs 54fps)

this difference in performance feels a bit excessive, but not sure what i should expect here.

1440p, vega56 (8GB Vram), 8700k, 32gb ram

which af setting i use in driver settings does not make much difference, texturestreaming on or off too.

 

[Ralathar44]

No, has. The snow biome still has that exact same performance drop when looking at terrain that the first experimental build has. Desert has it also, but to a smaller extent.

Forest, Wasteland and BurnedBiome have no issue and are currently performing roughly the same as A17 (although i have to turn AF off for that, which hurts image quality, but that issue will hopefully be fixed sooner or later).

There's still plenty of people reporting it as well (specifically mentioning snow biome as well)

Edit: as far as numbers go, looking at lots of terrain in the Snowbiome, the fps can go as low as 15, but typically sits at 20-30FPS. Forest/Burned/Wasteland biome is ~50 FPS for me now(no drops).

Edit2: Specs: Intel 4.2 Ghz Quadcore (Haswell) , Radeon RX480 8GB, 16GB DDR3. Running 1080p on Win10. Texturesize or streaming/occlusion does not matter for framerate.

I can verify this. FPS is good elsewhere but snow biome is death to FPS and the more terrain you can see at once (ex being higher up or natural valleys/mountains) the worse your FPS gets. I dunno where it's the terrain textures or distant terrain or fog effects or what but wno biome is definitely having performance issues and desert is much smoother but can have an impact as well. Everywhere else is butter smooth pretty much.

 

[Ayrton]

I would like to thank @Faatal for his great work, and I am 100% sure that the bandits will be a great challenge for us and we will enjoy it

@Faatal is among my personal idols of this game.

 

[SnowDog1942]

I would like to thank @Faatal for his great work, and I am 100% sure that the bandits will be a great challenge for us and we will enjoy it
@Faatal is among my personal idols of this game.

But I am one of your personal idols outside of the game, right?

 

[Gareee]

Well, I said one thing and MM said another. You can either believe him or me or both or neither or just be confused or unsure or take a nap or pretend you never read this.

Since you are doing he AI coding, I ALWAYS take your comments factually. Since you are also trying to optimize as well to kick performance up, You've done an amazing job in the last few weeks!

So you were in a crunch before a18 launch... id you expect an even bigger crunch after release?

The game has improved a lot because of you.. I hope yer in it for the long haul road to gold!

I know its tough to pop in and see mostly complaints, but THANK YOU! With this last build, its a big return of the game we've played the most. (Between us we have 6000+ hours!)

And that said, games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Spiderman, God of War, Monster Hunter World, the dishonored series, Shadow of War, Vermintide 2, and many others have been sitting in the want to play pile, even though we bought them. I think the stack is well 2 feet high now, not counting digital purchases.

Glad we bought two RTX 2060 for a18 now!

- - - Updated - - -

Ugh. I completely understand the need to fix the "invisible barrier" issue with horizontal arrow slit blocks, but maybe just make it so that block can't be rotated to the horizontal?

NO! If I had my way, all blocks would have full rotation to feed our creativity.

 

[sillls]

What happened to the storage and horn for the bicycle?

 

[Gareee]

I remember talking about what could work, you implemented it so you know exactly how it works. I never die on blood moons so I have no idea if it even works

I rarely die either, but it was a good opportunity to tr out the change. on my sp game, I have over 2400 kills and 4 deaths. And one was when I got off my still moving vehicle, and it killed me.

@Madmole:

BTW, took two days to just drive and explore with the motorcycle, and finally found wasteland and snow. I love the seed city layout but hate the giant biome placement. I started lower se on the map, and the only desert is the ne corner... two days drive away. (and I still wouldn't have found it until I finally looked at the biome image file. (and thats 67 days in.)

I'm not sure many new players will even experience all the biomes with the size and placement of them.

(Gas IS an issue for the 4x4, so I really do need to mine some oil shale.)

(I missed your reply if there was one....was the 4x4 exhaust smoke removed, or is it broken?)

 

[falloutcloud]

I just want to say after reading the notes from the new update that I actually liked the fact I could still run into a feral that had spawned during the night. Made that first trip out in the morning a bit more exciting.

 

[Adam the Waster]

We love to reward creativity.

i have some ideas for mods for the junk turret! (im sorry i have two notebooks full of ideas and pictures i drew of ideas for the game!)

Junker mod: This mod allows you to fire more kinds of "junk" like broken glass (witch causes bleed but low range)(also fires like a shotgun) , arrow heads (go's through zombies)(max is 3), and bullet tips. (dose more Max damage and fires faster!)

Air compressor: like the bow it charges up and when you fire the junk turret when the bar is full it does more damage and farther range! (and if can just click it for the normal shot but hold the trigger when you want to uses a charge shot

Ignition module: has a 45% chance to set zombies on fire with the shot (its lowered to 30% when it turret mode) but the durability is lower!

- - - Updated - - -

But I am one of your personal idols outside of the game, right?

XD you do not fail to impress me!

 

[DaVegaNL]

But I am one of your personal idols outside of the game, right?

Yeah you're my favourite doll.

 

[Gareee]

Are we going to get geologist zombies? You know.. They attack you with their geological hammer.. And as a special attack they throw a rock.

I'll bet the construction worker zombies could be reskinned for that sort of look....maybe they could be a construction site boss dressed in beige, slightly larger and using the lumberjack walk?

 

[Ralathar44]

So... you want to do a pure Int build but you don't want to be using Int stuff?

2 junk turrets, 1 rifle/MG to wield and use up 7.62mm, SMG turrets to use up 9mm, shotgun turrets to use up shells.

That's quite the firestorm. As the meek Int guy you can use up all the ammo that you find and all the gun parts.

Iron, brass, paper... you can convert all of it into damage at the same time.

The Int guy is supposed to be the smart one and figure this out. =P

Rifle/MG is not Int Stuff. Rifle/MG is Perception/Fortitude stuff. Every other Stat is able to run purely off of it's own specialized weapon groups that it gets buffs for by investing into. When doing Agility/Strength play throughs for example I do not use junk turrets for POIs or defense nights. I give myself a grace period early on where I can use any non-perk weapons/items and then after I have looted proper weapons for my stat I survive off of those and whatever scavenged explosives I find + molotovs (perk nuetral) + base defenses. But even barring that, I'm using AK alongside my 2 turrets AND I'm using shotgun turrets and will be using auto turrets soon (resources willing). My last horde defense used 300 shotgun shells and 500 AK rounds in addition to the 3,000 junk turret rounds.

But you need to understand that 2 skilled turrets + baseline AK =/= baseline AK DPS + skilled turrets DPS. The AK spends 3/4 of the time dormant on the hotbar due to the need to do 6 second reloads (timed from pickup to place) of each turret and then the AK's own reload. This downtime is so significant that fully skilled AK + 2 fully skilled turrets is only 20% more DPS than a fully skilled AK on it's own. Because skilled AK DPS is so much higher and you spend so much time reloading you lose most of it's theoretical DPS. Ironically baseline AK kills faster than 2 skilled turrets . In my test So, if you have no ammo issues, then adding 2 spec'd turrets to baseline AK only increases your damage about 20%. Reloading the turrets is just so much downtime you dont get to leverage the AK much. Especially once you start using AP ammo (which makes your brass use far more efficient too). The question becomes one of ammo and whether you have enough ammo varies wildly on how good of shot you are and whether you are using AP or not. But with new brass drop rates I feel pretty confident that I could easily keep supplied with ammo. Madmole sure managed to with his M60 and while learning the new update he was wasting hundreds of hollow point rounds on soliders .

Next Base defense I'll be using 4 turrets for no turret downtime. When the two primary turrets run out of ammo I'll reload them while the 2 backup turrets power up. After testing the extra uptime on the turrets almost pulls even with baseline AK + 2 turrets. Baseline AK + 2 spec'd turrets cleared 25 feral bikers in about 1 minute 20 seconds, 4 spec'd turrets alternating the two active to keep 100% firing uptime while reloading cleared 25 feral bikers in about 1 minute 30 seconds. I could prolly even squeeze off a few (very few) rounds with the AK in between all the reloading (once you have drum mags on all turrets) to get that time down to 1 minute 20 and put less firing on the AK. This is all a far cry from the 50-60 second clear times of most weapons (not even using AP rounds) or the insane 35 second clear times of the M60 of course.

Electrical Turrets are also something that every perk can use. Strength can leverage auto turrets with scavenged 9mm, Agility/Perception/Fortitude can leverage both 9mm and shotgun ammo into turrets while having superior direct combat strength with on perk weapons. Int has no special advantage here outside of getting exp for their kills. A shotgun + auto turret for fortitude/perception is just as strong as a shotgun turret + auto turret for Int for example and it's "free ammo" for both of them too.

Strength is the only perk who doesn't have a huge advantage against Int on both horde and POI, but Strength has a massive advantage against INT when it comes to resource harvesting. Ironically strength even performs much better with Augurs/Chainsaws, which are unlocked via Int. Their crafting quality/performance is enhanced by Strength based Miner69, so Strength even does Augurs/Chainsaws better...which you think would be the Int domain considering their skill unlocks it! So Strength with T6 modded Augur (that they can craft from finding the recipe) and Miner69er + Motherload is insane resource harvesting but Int with Augur/Chainsaw and Advanced Engineering is only ok, easily eclipsed by steel tool using Strength builds. I feel like you can justify this via "well, Chainsaws and Augurs are tools and therefore are under Miner69er" but the fact that the class that knows how to craft them ends up not being the best at using them (in the current redesigned system based around that concept) is a bit of a disconnect. Especially since Int using their brains to overcome their lack of brawn fits into the fantasy you described.

*EDIT: It should be noted that with such a heavy reliance on automated defenses as you are via Int I'm prolly completely screwed when demolishers spawn. My only real hope is to pull out an AK with AP rounds and desperately DPS him down, because junk turrets set them off super consistently. I'll face that challenge when it arrives, I'll see if I can overcome.

 

[Gareee]

This is experimental so even if someone breaks a savegame this is of no concern whatsoever.

And I have no issue with that at all... its experimental, after all.

Honestly, in order to ee the new progression changes, I'll probably have to start a new game up anyway, but I'm liking me 66day + game, so I'll keep that.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah running games in 4k, either by native or upscaled, is intensive. I'm sure you can still use your 4K monitor, just make sure in your graphics settings (from your hardware software, like Nvidia control panel) aren't set to upscale or anything. Change them to Application controlled.

@Jugginator:

Do you know where in the nvidia control panel upscaling is so I can make sure its off, or does application controlled handle that?

 

[Adam the Waster]

I'll bet the construction worker zombies could be reskinned for that sort of look....maybe they could be a construction site boss dressed in beige, slightly larger and using the lumberjack walk?

i got so many ideas for zombies. but ill tell you my favorite zombie idea.

"the trapped prisoner" he kinda looks like a feral but is wearing a prisoner jumpsuit (that's all bloody) and he's covered in barbed wire.

due to the barbed wired on him, this zombies is used to it and he can walk through it with little problem and if he attacks you he has a high chance of a bleed damage! . also due to the wire shock attacks like a stun baton or electrical cable he can still walk when he's shocked and if he hits you! you can get stunned by it

 

[Adam the Waster]

And I have no issue with that at all... its experimental, after all.
Honestly, in order to ee the new progression changes, I'll probably have to start a new game up anyway, but I'm liking me 66day + game, so I'll keep that.

- - - Updated - - -

@Jugginator:

Do you know where in the nvidia control panel upscaling is so I can make sure its off, or does application controlled handle that?

same thing. due to the update i get around 10 to 15 frames and im so happy. and i can put it on a setting so i can what boxes im looting and what zombies look like! i love this patch!

 

[Survager]

Spear offer

@MM, I’m not sure if it’s already been offered on the forum, I’ll just offer it again.

I think it makes sense to add a mark on the map and compass for the spear in order to know exactly where to look, just as it has already been done for a transport or garbage turret, and even animals! )

We even manage to lose transport and garbage turrets. And losing a spear is much easier.

In addition, the spear can be equipped with mods no worse than other weapons, and losing it will be very disappointing.

 

[Adam the Waster]

Na, its a convenience feature for the steel knuckles. Its got knives on it, so yeah it should be able to gut an animal.

you got to tenderise the meat!

- - - Updated - - -

@MM, I’m not sure if it’s already been offered on the forum, I’ll just offer it again.
I think it makes sense to add a mark on the map and compass for the spear in order to know exactly where to look, just as it has already been done for a transport or garbage turret, and even animals! )

We even manage to lose transport and garbage turrets. And losing a spear is much easier.

In addition, the spear can be equipped with mods no worse than other weapons, and losing it will be very disappointing.

that happened to me. but idk about the marker thing.

i just try not to uses the throw and was think of ideas for mods that would remove that throw and replace it with something else!

edit im working on some ideas for it a i got a few ideas for weapon mods like the knuckles , stun baton , spear etc

 

[spacepiggio]

Can we get the Steam Game Page Recent News updated please.

Streamer weekend is over & it would be nice to have the current XP News instead of an old event...

 

[Haidrgna]

THanks, yeah I'm having a blast with it as usual. Is a shotgun guy viable on horde night? I just have a crap q2 double barrel so hopefully things get better. I might need to get closer to them and build bars in my basement trench because shooting from above I have to wonder if half the rays are getting wasted.

Why was the decision made that the double barrel shotgun should always be sawn-off? Would it not have been more logical to have it have a full barrel too so it can share the sawn-off modification with the pump shotgun? This way the 2 shot shotgun can have a bit more range and a sawn-off mod would have its use in close quarters. I am also curious if a tier 3 shotty is planned, I find the blunderbuss as tier 1 a bit odd (despite it being a shotty). It has to much problems fitting in, since it needs to much precious ingredients to build to be viable early game and cannot be looted either. The sawn off double barrel is crap for a tier 2 weapon atm.