PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[ZombieSurvivor]

Odd, I would think the motorcycle wall trick would still work, since the changes were to the back tire, which was not touching the wall if I recall your picture correctly.
Cool. We can hope there are no more attempts at achieving orbit.

ummm... I do not want to say anything in public but.....the picture was taken to trick the eye so no one could reproduce.

 

[madmole]

we have watched you use the tunnel cheese.

What is cheesy about a tunnel? Its a choke point.

 

[starmage21]

What? Nothing in those changes is forcing a setting on.
Does having the texture budget fixed at 4 GB sound good to you? That is what it was doing before.

AF is not post processing. It is a basic part of texture look up and a prime cause of low FPS when the texture is not in VRAM. What do you think the chances are of a texture being in VRAM are when you don't have a lot of VRAM? Can we force a texture into VRAM? Can we even tell if a texture is in VRAM? Should we tell users to read a manual on that and figure out for themselves if AF should be off or on?

I wasnt speaking specifically of AF, but in a general sense. post-processing effects being the main example.

 

[ZombieSurvivor]

The Unity mode we use for fullscreen is borderless window. Trying our setting vs F4 vs Alt+Return, gives me the same FPS, so I don't think there is a difference.
I did try full screen exclusive mode some days ago, but saw no benefit, so left it alone.

tested this 5 minutes ago. doesnt improve fps, u r correct.

 

[pregnable]

Exactly, but they didn't want to make intelligence a must-have, now it's really balanced tho, I think my idea of having a separated skill tree for crafting (maybe construction too?) don't interfere with the current design and balance of the skills.

I believe I have suggested before that could have a tree of perks that require X in any attribute, rather than a specific one.

So for something in that tree, you could buy a perk that requires 7 in an attribute, by having 7 in any attribute.

 

[Odetta]

Just expressing my opinion. They are bad for framerate, chunk building speed and at most 10% of players use them. I'd rather see more tier 2,s 3's and 4's, those huge ones take way too long to play and too long for us to develop. If we could develop teleport tech and make them dungeons I'd be all for them, but big framerate hogs in the middle of limited town real estate is a bad choice. Its a neat novelty then after you've done it its a waste of space because nobody in their right mind will want to do it again. We could make 5 tier 2s, 4 tier 3s and 2 teir 4's in the same time it takes to make one tier 5. Now which one adds value?
I say let the modders do that, we have bugs to fix, and pois to overhaul yet and a severe lack of tier 3's IMO. I'm not doing level design any more but I think the average player wants more unique tier 3's and 4's. I'd be ok with smaller tier 5's but no more giant ass factories that take 2+ real hours to clear out that only large groups can do. There is enough of them for now, maybe add more when we get everything polished up, there are still lots of crappy POIs that were blocked out 3 years ago that need that professional overhaul.

Something akin to Helicopters at the trader. To do these high tier, huge quests you would take it from a trader then get in the helicopter (teleporter), it would then load up a separate space with the poi. Surrounding the poi could be radiation as a type of boarder.

Raids and Dungeons. Could even add Colosseum's and such for PVP. Or even entirely different regions (like the nether in minecraft)

I could see it working in 7d2d.

 

[wolfbain5]

What is cheesy about a tunnel? Its a choke point.

lol, some call it cheese, some call it tactics, like ramps and such

 

[pregnable]

What is cheesy about a tunnel? Its a choke point.

I do not like doing it, tbh, because it feels like I am exploiting the horde ai to walk a path when they could just break a few blocks near where I am and get into my base.

The horde can already chew up all building materials like paper. It would be cool to see the ai smarter so that building hps can be buffed a little bit.

It feels like the horde is stupid strong against blocks because of how easy the ai is to abuse. I have not messed with it much in this build though.

 

[Maynard69]

I'm hoping to give each trader something he specializes in so if you want guns you go to hugh. Joel sells the best armor and clothing. Jen sells meds, Bob electrical and vehicles.

Will RWG maps then have a guarantee of all traders on maps? Or you get what you get

 

[madmole]

Starting a new rwg map, 16 alive on bm, nomad, air drops once every 7 days markers on, and nightmare run speed on every setting.

 

[madmole]

Will RWG maps then have a guarantee of all traders on maps? Or you get what you get

Hopefully we can guarantee each trader spawns.

 

[meganoth]

Ultimately I'd like options in RWG where we can pick a % of POIS from buckets. Tier 1's, 2,'s, ruins houses, etc. Then I wouldn't have to look at a town full of teir 5 factories and not one book store. I had two shamways next to each other and a shotgun messiah and the water plant thingy eating up a whole town prior to release and it was disappointing. I cleared them, but it was nuts plus there are bugs where it collapses every time and is a cheap death trap.
Like something 60% as big full of bandits with chaos shootouts would be a lot more fun IMO.

You mean player options? I'm not sure this is even necessary as most players will just want a nice mix of everything.

If buildings had tags like "bookshop" to group them it should be easy for the RWG mixer to add a percentage of buildings of specific tags to each town.

Isn't something like the bandit town already possible? I thought RWG had districts where buildings of a specific theme like "industrial town" were placed.

 

[faatal]

Through the process of elimination I have a strong feeling (I'll bet 10 bucks) the drop in FPS in the snow biome is related to whatever you call the effect that gives snow that shiny and reflective surface regardless of graphic settings. no way to turn this off and it doesnt show up in forest biome.

Each terrain image type can have Diffuse, Normal, Height, Smoothness and AO textures. They each have at least 3 of those, while some like snow and stone have all 5. The more there are, the more texture look ups, the slower the pixel shader runs.

I can try some combinations of less textures on the GTX 960. See what the FPS does. If there is an issue we would have to come up with a way to remove some of those at run time.

 

[madmole]

Something akin to Helicopters at the trader. To do these high tier, huge quests you would take it from a trader then get in the helicopter (teleporter), it would then load up a separate space with the poi. Surrounding the poi could be radiation as a type of boarder.
Raids and Dungeons. Could even add Colosseum's and such for PVP. Or even entirely different regions (like the nether in minecraft)

I could see it working in 7d2d.

I'd totally love them then. Mainly want to see everything polished before we add new stuff or add new tech.

 

[ZombieSurvivor]

My 960 has 2 GB VRAM, so AF will be off. Your 4 GB will still have AF on, so can you try "gfx af 0" and let me know?An AF video option is probably coming, but I'm still evaluating.

@faatal

Ok so i tested the game all setting as low as possible and i disabled AF as you said. doesnt help at all... the fps still drops

I also tried disabling AF via nvidia control panel. still massive drop in frame when in snow

pic shows game with all setting off/lowest possible 48fps should be near 70-80

Spoiler

I'm giving up, all out of ideas and burnt out from testing for 48 hours straight time for sleep.

 

[Jugginator]

I have a theory about mountains causing more overdraw (than normal) due to all the vertical layers. I need to look into it.

Something I was thinking of. Granted, I have no idea on the technical side since gaming programming is way above my head lol.

Some more food for thought I was thinking of / noticing, hills cause no tax on the system, and I was playing around earlier on the minibike and noticed no hitching in fps when loading in large cities or anything. Really got drastic improvement with smoothed out terrain on that map.

All the huge mountains that had various jagged (not the jagged AMD gfx generation bug, just the various sharp slopes and whatnot) did cause a lot of overdraw lag, but the biggest offenders were the one in burnt/wasteland biomes.

And one more thing that may tie into vertical layers you mentioned: Since I was wiping my last build's save, I decided to play around with dev tools and found the terrain removal/adder tool. I used the removal tool to shave off a mountain (huuuge mofo with various plateaus and jagged cliffs) for... science... and I noticed quite a lot of top-sections not collapsing, even though there was nothing attached to the sides/bottoms. They wouldn't collapse for anything (restarted game, ran stability, etc) - huge, floating, unsupported plateaus everywhere. Some collapsed when no support was there, but most stayed up.

Perhaps that may give more insight, maybe that's part of the overhead? *shrug* just random thoughts.

 

[Wulf]

@faatal
Ok so i tested the game all setting as low as possible and i disabled AF as you said. doesnt help at all... the fps still drops

I also tried disabling AF via nvidia control panel. still massive drop in frame when in snow

pic shows game with all setting off/lowest possible 48fps should be near 70-80

Spoiler

So in other words, same exact result i found.

I wish more people did more side by side actual fps comparisons instead of just saying "it's fine, because i have smooth fps". That you still have smooth fps does not mean you're not suffering from this issue!

 

[Laz Man]

Starting a new rwg map, 16 alive on bm, nomad, air drops once every 7 days markers on, and nightmare run speed on every setting.

You forget to add dead is dead.

 

[Jugginator]

Starting a new rwg map, 16 alive on bm, nomad, air drops once every 7 days markers on, and nightmare run speed on every setting.

I did something similar, cept jog during day nightmare every other setting. A stealth/archery/pistol build, something I've never done in the game.

Man is stealth fun!! I feel like it's Splinter Cell. The attack, sneak away works so awesome. They're like, "Must have been a damn rat", and wander off. So much fun.

 

[MechanicalLens]

Just expressing my opinion. They are bad for framerate, chunk building speed and at most 10% of players use them. I'd rather see more tier 2,s 3's and 4's, those huge ones take way too long to play and too long for us to develop. If we could develop teleport tech and make them dungeons I'd be all for them, but big framerate hogs in the middle of limited town real estate is a bad choice. Its a neat novelty then after you've done it its a waste of space because nobody in their right mind will want to do it again. We could make 5 tier 2s, 4 tier 3s and 2 teir 4's in the same time it takes to make one tier 5. Now which one adds value?
I say let the modders do that, we have bugs to fix, and pois to overhaul yet and a severe lack of tier 3's IMO. I'm not doing level design any more but I think the average player wants more unique tier 3's and 4's. I'd be ok with smaller tier 5's but no more giant ass factories that take 2+ real hours to clear out that only large groups can do. There is enough of them for now, maybe add more when we get everything polished up, there are still lots of crappy POIs that were blocked out 3 years ago that need that professional overhaul.

More T1/2/3/4 quests being shown at any given time would be hugely welcome in my opinion, if you would ever be willing to put that in. Once you get to T5 (and especially T5, since they take ages to clear out), the trader often offers you 4 (occasionally 3) T5 quests to do and only 1-2 lower end quests. In my opinion, it should be the opposite. Just saying.