PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary
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Khalagar
Active member
So for A20, question about the Pipe weapons. There's a pipe equivalent for everything besides the Junk line. Will there be some kind of Junk Pipe weapon added? ATM there is no stone age weapon for the int line, and a Pipe Baton will be nice but will still leave the Int tree a weapon behind the others. You can craft a stone sledge and will have a pipe shotgun, for example, giving strength 2 tier 0 weapons while Int will only have the Pipe baton
MechanicalLens
New member
I'm pretty sure I can speak for a lot of us that some inside corner filler stairs would be grand. Perhaps someday?
Also, no more day 2 dog hordes would be great.
Also, no more day 2 dog hordes would be great.
Demonoid74
New member
Or do it how minecraft does it and the stair blocks auto-configurate into what should be in those situations? They figured it out , can not be that hard for the Fun Pimps 
faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
Sorry. Don't know. I have never looked at our rumble code.
We could, but probably better to wait for world events to get developed and have options for that.
Cool. Thanks for the feedback!
It could go either way. Probably depends if we find any major issues.
sinda
New member
on the subject of new character models and clothing, will character creation be changing?
as an aside from that, currently any hair color given to the character turns to black when you don a hat. such a small, annoying thing haha.
also thrilled the feral sense slider is coming back, that has been greatly missed by many
as an aside from that, currently any hair color given to the character turns to black when you don a hat. such a small, annoying thing haha.
also thrilled the feral sense slider is coming back, that has been greatly missed by many
I have 2,000 hours in this game and literally my only complaint is the zombie combat system badly needs an overhaul. I have introduced many friends to the game, but many don't stay because combat is so "jittery" and "unbearable.". The poor combat interactions make it hard for me to justify coming back to test out new alphas as well. It is painful to struggle through.
Let me just say, I love everything else you guys have been doing. It's truly remarkable how far you've come along. But please heed some friendly advice, combat needs massive work as it is a critical and ubiquitous interaction people have with the game.
Let me just say, I love everything else you guys have been doing. It's truly remarkable how far you've come along. But please heed some friendly advice, combat needs massive work as it is a critical and ubiquitous interaction people have with the game.
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faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
falloutcloud
Active member
This makes a lot of sense to me. Glad the change was made
On a separate note, is a video stream of more features going to be coming sooner rather than later?
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SarkMCPFan
New member
i would like to know if bigger cities/skyscraper chances will increase.. i LOVE finding cities to explore and trying to make a base out of a pre-existing building. thanks in advance! (would love slighter bigger towns/cities) i just love exploring!
Blake_
Captain Obvious
@faatal I've been further testing a19.3 and I have a few questions.
1-Does the loading-unloading of assets in the memory uses just VRAM and/or some CPU ?
2-Does the process involve more dedicated memory usage than expected surpassing the total budget and using general purpose RAM ? How much VRAM does the game use on a minimum specs setting ?
3-Is the RSS RAM feed in the dev console the actual total amount of memory used by the game due to garbage collection and other factors?
4-If so, can it be cleared/emptied/reset in game ?
5-Wouldn't it be cool to have a CPU and VRAM and RAM tool (like a very limited version of FRAPS) available through console commands ?
I believe the speed of the Graphics card processing is at play here, though it shouldn't really amount to less than the necessary memory needed to the loading and unloading of resources.
The thing is, I have microstutters when the yellow warnings pop up (symptom). They are of various levels of severity depending on just how much stuff is being processed and I wonder about just how much do they tax the system in that short amount of time. They look like RAM microstutters, so I was just surprised given that my map is 720p and according to the console consumes just about RSS 3800 Mb of memory (with the other two feeds below 1200MB) , so I guess I'm either mistaken and they do use some CPU or they are indeed too taxing for a minimum GPU to handle and systematically surpass the budget every time. ((EDIT: Interesting, RSS feed DOES go from 3800MB to 4300MB in just 1 hour of gameplay in 720p half size textures, a bit too much if you ask me; and it never empties to avoid that surpassing within that timeframe))
Maybe a more spreaded (lighter) loading and unloading would solve the issue, yet Is that even possible at this point ?
Wandering hordes still give bumbs (lesser bumbs), but I believe that it's the spawner itself that might be causing problems. Apparently it's just too heavy to activate a spawn with a bit of complex logic.
Unity 2020.1 and 2020.2 might hold some answers for stability in these cases, though I don't believe in night and day situations this far into the dev cycle.
A penny for your thoughts. Thanks in advance.
1-Does the loading-unloading of assets in the memory uses just VRAM and/or some CPU ?
2-Does the process involve more dedicated memory usage than expected surpassing the total budget and using general purpose RAM ? How much VRAM does the game use on a minimum specs setting ?
3-Is the RSS RAM feed in the dev console the actual total amount of memory used by the game due to garbage collection and other factors?
4-If so, can it be cleared/emptied/reset in game ?
5-Wouldn't it be cool to have a CPU and VRAM and RAM tool (like a very limited version of FRAPS) available through console commands ?
I believe the speed of the Graphics card processing is at play here, though it shouldn't really amount to less than the necessary memory needed to the loading and unloading of resources.
The thing is, I have microstutters when the yellow warnings pop up (symptom). They are of various levels of severity depending on just how much stuff is being processed and I wonder about just how much do they tax the system in that short amount of time. They look like RAM microstutters, so I was just surprised given that my map is 720p and according to the console consumes just about RSS 3800 Mb of memory (with the other two feeds below 1200MB) , so I guess I'm either mistaken and they do use some CPU or they are indeed too taxing for a minimum GPU to handle and systematically surpass the budget every time. ((EDIT: Interesting, RSS feed DOES go from 3800MB to 4300MB in just 1 hour of gameplay in 720p half size textures, a bit too much if you ask me; and it never empties to avoid that surpassing within that timeframe))
Maybe a more spreaded (lighter) loading and unloading would solve the issue, yet Is that even possible at this point ?
Wandering hordes still give bumbs (lesser bumbs), but I believe that it's the spawner itself that might be causing problems. Apparently it's just too heavy to activate a spawn with a bit of complex logic.
Unity 2020.1 and 2020.2 might hold some answers for stability in these cases, though I don't believe in night and day situations this far into the dev cycle.
A penny for your thoughts. Thanks in advance.
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faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
This is not an exact science, since Unity does a lot of things in the background that we don't have control over.
1 Depends on the asset, but everything uses some CPU and many assets use system RAM or VRAM or both. Unloading also tends to be delayed because many resources are not specifically tracked by the game and flushed by Unity by UnloadUnusedAssets, which is slow, so not called very often.
2 Only the gfx driver and Windows really know how much VRAM is in use and VRAM use is often padded to a higher amount that what it actually needs. Microsoft is working on tech to report more info back, but then Unity has to support it to, so maybe in a few years.
3 Not sure. There are various pools of memory in use, which grow and shrink.
4 Using the mem console command does call UnloadUnusedAssets, but it won't clear memory being used by resources, since many resources are loaded once and they would never come back. Also the Mono mem heap can never shrink, short of restarting the game.
5 We have the Unity Profiler. For you, FPS is a good indicator of CPU use. Use console command "gfx g fps 200" to graph it.
Our micro stutter is generally from CPU use spiking on a single frame. I've been working to find spikes and spread work across frames. Some of those changes have already been done for A20, but more can still be done.
We are moving to Unity LTS releases, so A20 should be on 2019.4. We won't try 2020 LTS until after A20.x in second half of next year.
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SeabeeMan
New member
Hello Guys,
I would like to know if by chance will you be doing anything with the Terrain Blocks?
Examples are: When placing a Snow Terrain block on sand it TURNS into sand but even though it looks like sand you get snowballs from it if you dig it. Can we make it like it used to be where if you put snow on forest ground it remains snow and NOT turn into forest ground just the looks of it and not the properties?
Making a museum POI for my servers I made scenery that had different biomes in them. Using the Prefab Editor it was perfect snow in it's own place, Sand in it's and so on. Well when the POI spawns in with the map creator it all looks good but those terrain blocks change depending where the POI is spawned in at.
This is a real bummer. The Museum POI lookes great but my scenery areas all change terrain types. Anyway of preventing this or at least is there a way to keep the look of these blocks the way they are suppose to be even when placed on different terrain?
Think the game is awesome, been playing since A2 still enjoying every moment of it. Keep up the good work!
SeabeeMan....
I would like to know if by chance will you be doing anything with the Terrain Blocks?
Examples are: When placing a Snow Terrain block on sand it TURNS into sand but even though it looks like sand you get snowballs from it if you dig it. Can we make it like it used to be where if you put snow on forest ground it remains snow and NOT turn into forest ground just the looks of it and not the properties?
Making a museum POI for my servers I made scenery that had different biomes in them. Using the Prefab Editor it was perfect snow in it's own place, Sand in it's and so on. Well when the POI spawns in with the map creator it all looks good but those terrain blocks change depending where the POI is spawned in at.
This is a real bummer. The Museum POI lookes great but my scenery areas all change terrain types. Anyway of preventing this or at least is there a way to keep the look of these blocks the way they are suppose to be even when placed on different terrain?
Think the game is awesome, been playing since A2 still enjoying every moment of it. Keep up the good work!
SeabeeMan....
Blake_
Captain Obvious
Thank you for the quick response. I kind of expected some of the memory usage answers, which are not really great news as they depend on Unity improvements.
I don't expect huge performance out of my Single Channel 8gb DDR2 1666Mhz RAM (833Mhz double rate) for those intensive juggling tasks, yet I had to ask in order to separate CPU from GPU situations.
I will be using gfx g 200 for my next test to help things further. FPS do drop, but not always . That "not always" alone could hint at a bigger problem.
EDIT: Further testing revealed that 99.9% of the performance problems (for a Windows with Nvidia GPU system ) are CPU related and happen in these cases:
-Sleeper/entity spawn, respawn and relocation after reentering the area. More than 1 sleeper can be expected to drop fps in a 4C/8T 2.7ghz system.
-Music uses CPU. It has a generally low CPU overhead on its own, but can worsen the experience if added to any other CPU situation, doesn't matter how low. It has a hard to spot impact on my system. I spotted it nevertheless, but never alone. Too much stop, start, pause, transition in a short timeframe generates spikes that make the system susceptible if there are other CPU bottlenecks close by.
-Particles, Collapses, many entities on screen, big POIs with too many Zds/rooms and also in any situation with many vertex calculations. Texture Atlas reading also uses CPU yet it is almost at its prime currently, so it probably can't get better than this in many cases.
-Loading and unloading of assets uses CPU , external profiling reveals that the overhead it's not constant and comes in spikes/bursts, too big for confort. Better systems should not notice these spikes, yet I do, every single time (microstutters). I don't have a clue on how to fix this. I mean maybe unplugging the power supply , blowing and plugging it again or also punching the screen while swearing in Navajo. I got nothing.
-Wandering hordes still generate stutters. At least they do not freeze the system for 5 seconds anymore. Just the 1 second it takes for fps to instantly drop 30-45 frames out of nowhere, it is noticeable but playable. Maybe a bit more spread would help..... 1 and a half seconds between spawns ? lol.
In order to clean test all of this I did a full wipe/formatting of my system on top of my OCD for absolutely no programs in the background (except the profiling). No EAC nor Gamesparks either.
I hope this helps to confirm currently known issues.
Salutations.
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Let me ask this very serious question, I'm very fond of the momentum that this game is moving at; believe me it's great.
That being said, why don't we have a usable hearse? I as well as a few other players that I know think this would be a perfect addition to the game. Also, preacher zombies to go with the church POI's would be pretty sweet.
That being said, why don't we have a usable hearse? I as well as a few other players that I know think this would be a perfect addition to the game. Also, preacher zombies to go with the church POI's would be pretty sweet.
Wow! Alpha-20 looks good so far. I'm looking forward to seeing all the coming details.
First day back to the forum.
I was reading where crawlers can now crawl thought one meter holes. I hope that means that players once again have the ability to go through one meter openings.
First day back to the forum.
I was reading where crawlers can now crawl thought one meter holes. I hope that means that players once again have the ability to go through one meter openings.
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Door228486
New member
Will there be water transport in 20 alpha? and so will the bandits to raid our homes, or steal airdrop
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