PC Came back to game. Have thoughts and questions A17.2

[Snoogz1983]

Took a break for about a year, and upgraded hardware on my PC so thought I'd play again. I have to admit there has been a lot of changes. As a heads up I did try searching for some of the questions I have, but so many posts to sort through so not sure if an issue or something else. I will try to group my topics/questions so not to be cluttered. I also just wanted to point out I still enjoy the game and think you all are doing a great job.

My first topic is the gear stats. My question is if the hovering over gear to compare with what you have equipped viewed backwards? If I have an equipped hat that gives say Defense 6 and I hover over another hat with Defense 8 it says for comparison the Defense is -2. So I been playing this game logically thinking negative is good and positive is bad. I'm used to games that provide what your stats will be if equipped so that unequipped hat with Defense 8 would reflect a +2 when equipped.

The new addition of vehicles I been hoping for ever since I got bored of the minibike and looting cars . I really like the simplicity of making them and maintaining I thought that was a nice transition. The question I have is with the steering. I found that when driving I can use my wasd keys for steering, but it is extremely sensitive (minibike does a lot of 360s if press left or right too long). If I click the left mouse button I found it changes to the mouse steers which is better. Just odd I can toggle between the two. I wasn't sure if one serve a different purpose over the other.

As mentioned earlier I had upgraded most of the hardware on my PC. I thought I'd play this again to see how much of a performance improvement it would make. The one thing I'm running into is an extremely long time to generate random maps. Doesn't matter if the preview generator or creating a new game. I was wondering if I'm in the norm or what, but it is much longer than in previous builds. Minimum 5 minutes up to 15 minutes. I will start playing on my phone while waiting its that long. My PC build is as follows:

Hard Drive: Samsung EVO 970 Pro M.2 500GB

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 8-Core Summit Ridge 3Ghz

RAM: Corsair 16GB (2x8GB) 2900Mhz

Video Card: Nvidia Geforce GTX1060 6GB

Internet is a 100Mbps service

I've removed all previous saves and create only new ones. Is my build not good enough still? Is there a setting or something I need to do to optimize it more so?

The last questions I have is in regards to looting. Is it naturally rare now for zombies to drop anything? When I started playing again I thought the game broke cause corpses were just disappearing and I couldn't loot them. After day 3 of killing I finally got to see what a loot drop looked like as the fat yellow bag. During a bloodmoon I saw only two of these. The other loot question is the one perk for looting. It mentions of a loot bonus but I don't know what this means. Before the loot bonus was towards item quality (Axe going from 25 quality to 50 etc.), but now that's gone away not sure what this bonus applies to.

 

[JCrook1028]

The compare function shows the difference between what you have and what you select. It is a bit counter intuitive and takes getting used to.

The two steering types is a personal pref thing. While mouse steering you can hold right button down and move cam view around.

RWG initial loading is slow, it's not just you. Good thing tho is it's only the first time.

The loot is based on yuor gamestage as far as quality of the loot you get. The plus 50 adds 50 to your gs for this calculation.

 

[Snoogz1983]

Thanks for the reply. I noticed when I went to create a new game it was caching my previous generated world names, and when selecting one of them it took seconds. So initially bad but gets better afterwards.

I think I understand what you mean with the loot. So an example I'm thinking of is with the mods for example. With a lower loot bonus you will see tier 1 and 2 mods, but higher your loot bonus higher chance of seeing the higher tier mods sooner than normal as you progress further into the game.

 

[zombie4hire]

In A17x I did the first ten games with no loot perk and the last ten or so with loot perk and it makes a big difference. Without it I basically never found items above 1 or 2 and with it I find quite a few. Even at low levels. Same in A16x as i remember. That first perk seems to make a big difference.

 

[Jackelmyer]

Took a break for about a year, and upgraded hardware on my PC so thought I'd play again. I have to admit there has been a lot of changes. As a heads up I did try searching for some of the questions I have, but so many posts to sort through so not sure if an issue or something else. I will try to group my topics/questions so not to be cluttered. I also just wanted to point out I still enjoy the game and think you all are doing a great job.

Welcome back. And don't sweat it. A17 is a huge update and lots has changed. It's very much worth reading all of the release notes from A17 to A17.2. But there's lots of nuances, so fire away with them questions.

My first topic is the gear stats. My question is if the hovering over gear to compare with what you have equipped viewed backwards? If I have an equipped hat that gives say Defense 6 and I hover over another hat with Defense 8 it says for comparison the Defense is -2. So I been playing this game logically thinking negative is good and positive is bad. I'm used to games that provide what your stats will be if equipped so that unequipped hat with Defense 8 would reflect a +2 when equipped.

Frankly I find how the comparison works confusing too. My suggestion to get used to it is to actually take off gear, put it in your inventory, and do a side by side comparison where it doesn't show those comparisons. Then pop back on the item and compare it. I know that doesn't answer the question directly, but I find it's much easier to learn how it works that way as opposed to a butchered description of the comparison functionality.

The new addition of vehicles I been hoping for ever since I got bored of the minibike and looting cars . I really like the simplicity of making them and maintaining I thought that was a nice transition. The question I have is with the steering. I found that when driving I can use my wasd keys for steering, but it is extremely sensitive (minibike does a lot of 360s if press left or right too long). If I click the left mouse button I found it changes to the mouse steers which is better. Just odd I can toggle between the two. I wasn't sure if one serve a different purpose over the other.

Best I've been able to tell, it's really a quick switch between driving preferences. I will say, that driving by mouse seems a little better on reaction than keyboard steering. However being able to switch to keyboard steering let's you look around while you're driving a straight line. That's the best feature aspect I've found to that toggle.

As mentioned earlier I had upgraded most of the hardware on my PC. I thought I'd play this again to see how much of a performance improvement it would make. The one thing I'm running into is an extremely long time to generate random maps. Doesn't matter if the preview generator or creating a new game. I was wondering if I'm in the norm or what, but it is much longer than in previous builds. Minimum 5 minutes up to 15 minutes. I will start playing on my phone while waiting its that long. My PC build is as follows:

Hard Drive: Samsung EVO 970 Pro M.2 500GB

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 8-Core Summit Ridge 3Ghz

RAM: Corsair 16GB (2x8GB) 2900Mhz

Video Card: Nvidia Geforce GTX1060 6GB

Internet is a 100Mbps service

I've removed all previous saves and create only new ones. Is my build not good enough still? Is there a setting or something I need to do to optimize it more so?

It's not your PC. How RWG maps are created dramatically changed in A17.

Know how back in the day when you'd run around the map on RWG, the actual map would generate as you moved into unexplored areas?

Prior to A17, RWG maps were actually largely created as you played the map. Caused a lot of issues.

In A17, TFP changed how RWG maps are created. Instead of being created as you explore the map, the whole RWG map is created when you first start the game. Hence the long map generation time in A17. I don't know if much if this makes sense. Hope so.

FYI, map sizes have changed too. You can now have a huge 16K x 16K map. However at the moment, it's best to use an 8K x 8K map. The larger maps seem to be a bit buggy and drain performance the longer you play.

The last questions I have is in regards to looting. Is it naturally rare now for zombies to drop anything? When I started playing again I thought the game broke cause corpses were just disappearing and I couldn't loot them. After day 3 of killing I finally got to see what a loot drop looked like as the fat yellow bag. During a bloodmoon I saw only two of these. The other loot question is the one perk for looting. It mentions of a loot bonus but I don't know what this means. Before the loot bonus was towards item quality (Axe going from 25 quality to 50 etc.), but now that's gone away not sure what this bonus applies to.

Yep. Zombies them fat yellow bags now. But very rarely.

So a little speculation and bad memory in this next bit... Another A17 change was, I believe, to get rid of all the corpse blocks on Horde night. Prior to A17, when you killed a zombie, it'd lay on the ground for a bit, then turn into this butchered looking corpse. All dead zombies devolved into that corpse block. However TFP stated those corpse blocks caused severe performance issues.

In A17, you'll notice dead zombies fully disappear pretty quick. You can't butcher them anymore for rotting flesh, animal fat, or bones. And they rarely drop that yellow bag. It's all a part if A17.

Welcome back. Hope that all helps.

 

[FA_Q2]

In A17x I did the first ten games with no loot perk and the last ten or so with loot perk and it makes a big difference. Without it I basically never found items above 1 or 2 and with it I find quite a few. Even at low levels. Same in A16x as i remember. That first perk seems to make a big difference.

Do you know if this passes above the max GS? IOW, does this perk lose all utility in the endgame (other than making looting faster)?