PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[unholyjoe]

Yep, that fixes it and confirms it's one of my add-ons. Now I can try completely disabling them one at a time to try to figure out which one is causing it... but I'll probably turn it back on anyway once I figure out the culprit because I'll like what it does more than I like embedded pictures.
Thanks for the suggestion.

np now its easy to deduce. good luck

 

[KhaineGB]

Having multiple threads CAN entice the OS to run them on separate cores, but not necessarily. I cant think how you would force each thread to run on a separate core.

Technically you don't want to do that. It can cause issues with windows.

Basically, A16 Unity isn't very multi-threaded optimized... so Windows will try to assign tasks to each core (because that's what it's supposed to do), but it doesn't work very well. That's why 7 Days to Die uses like... 2 cores-ish.

New Unity should have better scheduling code built into it, which means TFP won't need to do much. It's going to make their lives a lot easier.

 

[Pille]

That wasn’t smartass. That was answering your question under the table using a pop culture reference. At least one person responded showing that they “got it”.

I know what you were trying to say but there must be a limit for the max. number of different blocks and I bet IDs are still used internally.... Anyway, I want my horse head back.

 

[Menace312]

That wasn’t smartass. That was answering your question under the table using a pop culture reference. At least one person responded showing that they “got it”.

Uh, careful with that Roland... The game, and thereby this forum, is mainstream now. No room for such subtle references.

Easy way to tell when a game goes from indie to mainstream:

People laugh at funny bugs and weird stuff.

VS

People complain about perceived long development time and other silly things when they know its alpha. And when they have ZERO say in anything game related, even...

When one group grows larger than the other, you'll know where we are. I'd say its mainstream now...

It's both good and bad

 

[Guppycur]

Towards the end of July, as people were submitting bug fixes and uploading new art assets from their local builds to the shared build the magnitude of new art assets overwhelmed the atlases that they use. This has caused another unforeseen delay as they have had to find an alternative solution to be able to include all the new art in the game. They have found a solution and are doing that conversion. The bad news is the delay it caused but the good news is that all the new content that will be included in A17 is awesome and will be able to be supported.

@Roland, can you elaborate on this a bit more? Specifically... are we getting another atlas? Has the atlas been increased? Have the current items IN the atlas simply been shrunk to provide more room?

My takeaways from the past 40 pages...

...screw "strength to increase backpack size", I'm going to have an inventory item, called oh I dunno, rucksack, that if equipped, provides the buff for additional slots.

...hoping falling debris still causes damage, because I see a lot of frame towers holding up heavy concrete littered around my horde base in the future...

...downward digging zombies confirmed, check. Upward HITTING zombies NOT confirmed, but being higher will no longer help... even I'm smart enough to glean what that means, although I won't spoil the surprise (mostly because if I'm wrong I don't wanna be embarrassed). =)

...#releasedategate. Really? Again? Well, not like Joel didn't know what can he was opening when he said July. =) I'm all for pushing the date back again and again, at least until my busy season is over. =)

...modding. I kind of get peoples objections to modding, especially the whole "just mod it". Because so many things get that answer, finding the perfect soup of mods to suit what you want will be nigh impossible. And finding players to join your server with your changes is also going to be challenging. Even though on the surface it appears the larger mods have a huge player base, we know from simple deductive reasoning that it doesn't represent but a small portion of the total player base. But, on the fiip side, vanilla can't appease everyone, so modding IS the only real alternative. Such is life.

- - - Updated - - -

I know what you were trying to say but there must be a limit for the max. number of different blocks and I bet IDs are still used internally.... Anyway, I want my horse head back.

It'll depend on what they use... int, float, whatever. Either way we're looking at what, a minimum of a ♥♥♥♥♥-ton, so I think we're going to be okay.

 

[PiercedFromWithin]

Yep, that fixes it and confirms it's one of my add-ons. Now I can try completely disabling them one at a time to try to figure out which one is causing it... but I'll probably turn it back on anyway once I figure out the culprit because I'll like what it does more than I like embedded pictures.
Thanks for the suggestion.

np now its easy to deduce. good luck

Okay, I found it. It's not an Add-On at all. It's Firefox's "tracking protection" in preferences. Yeah, I'll be leaving that one on even if it makes pictures more of a hassle.

 

[Pille]

It'll depend on what they use... int, float, whatever. Either way we're looking at what, a minimum of a ♥♥♥♥♥-ton, so I think we're going to be okay.

I know all that but I asked the question for a reason, a reason which I can't remember atm.^^

 

[Menace312]

-snip-

...modding. I kind of get peoples objections to modding, especially the whole "just mod it". Because so many things get that answer, finding the perfect soup of mods to suit what you want will be nigh impossible. And finding players to join your server with your changes is also going to be challenging. Even though on the surface it appears the larger mods have a huge player base, we know from simple deductive reasoning that it doesn't represent but a small portion of the total player base. But, on the fiip side, vanilla can't appease everyone, so modding IS the only real alternative. Such is life.

That's fair.

But things like turning traders off in the xml or similar, does not require users to download a mod, does it?

That kind of thing is reserved for more elaborate changes...

Having every possibility as a switch in the options menu, might make it cluttered. I dont mind that at all, but it does not seem like TFPs style... Not sure why, but that's my take.

 

[Azmodeth]

How does the system resource management compare between say the engine in A16 vs A17, Roland ?

Does it use more CPU cores, any improvements made ?

I have a 7980XE whcih has more cores then I could know what to do with, but I game and run and stream all on the same PC. What pisses me off is when the server I'm hosting slows down not because the PC running it is running out of resources, which never seems to happen, like I have 128GB of RAM, but the engine itself can not seem to use what it needs or something. Like as if it's stuck in a 32Bit world and had the old 4GB limitation on RAM (though I do not think that is the case, dear god I hope not.)

I usually make my servers open for 64Players just so it loads more memory anyways. I run my OS and server off of a RAID0 SM961 1TB set, giving me speeds upwards 4-5GB/s in sequential and like 75Mb/s in 4K with like realistically 200K+ IOPS (though rated for something like twice that, this is what I get. Which is great honestly).

I just want to increase performance and would happy to know what to expect from running and gaming on the server in A17, if you can help me understand all that. Personally I use 7dayservermanager to host in dedicated mode. Will I be able to use it to host day 1 on release of A17 as well, or do we simply run a single player game and "allow" others to join ? There was some talk about this, just not sure how it goes anymore. Care to elaborate ?

 

[PiercedFromWithin]

Whatever you put in an options menu, some people will still want to change something that you didn't think of. Some people will also complain because the options are too complicated and they can't find the important bits(I think that is part of the reason so many games have such woefully inadequate options).

And you have to draw a line somewhere on what should be an option and what shouldn't... even if you think it's fine for people to change it. Things like XP per level, or whether you need duct tape to make a splint probably shouldn't be in an options menu but it's nice to be able to change it if you feel it's necessary. Turning traders off might be kind of on the border of that. It's not THAT big of a change but it's still a pretty big change(might be getting even bigger in A17 if they're the ones giving most of the quests).

Some people have no problem with opening a text file, searching for a fairly simple thing and changing it. Some people have no problem looking for things you can change in there and just testing to see what it does. I absolutely loved being able to do that kind of thing with rFactor, though I barely scratched the surface of what you could do even after a million tweaks. For other people, doing that is as appealing to them as editing everything in binary while someone drives screws into their skull.

Telling somebody to mod something themselves will be taken completely differently depending on whether they like fiddling, think it's a waste of time, or think that it involves understanding some alien magic language and buying fancy editing programs. If you are running a server for other people however it might be reasonable to expect you to be willing to put in a little of that extra effort, I don't know.

Part of the apprehension is down to there not being much a distinction for most people between "modding" by downloading a suite of comprehensive changes to the game and "modding" by changing 2 numbers in one text file.

 

[NoMan]

Okay, I found it. It's not an Add-On at all. It's Firefox's "tracking protection" in preferences. Yeah, I'll be leaving that one on even if it makes pictures more of a hassle.

That tracking protection has an Exceptions list. You can add this site and probably see the pics.

 

[deathless]

How does the system resource management compare between say the engine in A16 vs A17, Roland ?
Does it use more CPU cores, any improvements made ?

I have a 7980XE whcih has more cores then I could know what to do with, but I game and run and stream all on the same PC. What pisses me off is when the server I'm hosting slows down not because the PC running it is running out of resources, which never seems to happen, like I have 128GB of RAM, but the engine itself can not seem to use what it needs or something. Like as if it's stuck in a 32Bit world and had the old 4GB limitation on RAM (though I do not think that is the case, dear god I hope not.)

I usually make my servers open for 64Players just so it loads more memory anyways. I run my OS and server off of a RAID0 SM961 1TB set, giving me speeds upwards 4-5GB/s in sequential and like 75Mb/s in 4K with like realistically 200K+ IOPS (though rated for something like twice that, this is what I get. Which is great honestly).

I just want to increase performance and would happy to know what to expect from running and gaming on the server in A17, if you can help me understand all that. Personally I use 7dayservermanager to host in dedicated mode. Will I be able to use it to host day 1 on release of A17 as well, or do we simply run a single player game and "allow" others to join ? There was some talk about this, just not sure how it goes anymore. Care to elaborate ?

You know its Very overkill to have a 18core cpu for 1 server also it doesnt use all the cores for games, and your not gonna get that much more performance out of it. 128gigs of ram isnt going to optimize your game that much because it just doesnt use that much ram, less your running your game for weeks with no restarts then there a memory leak and maybe you could use more ram. And to your question to 7daysserver manger is another developer who would have to update it to use A17. But everything your saying is like 100x overkill for one server for 7days to die.

I currently run my server with a dual xeon 64gigs of ram with raid 0 and I have no issues hosting one server, I hosted 5 servers with no problem. Also I run 5 VMs at the same time for a few other things and it doesnt effect my 7 days to die server. Only problems that I get is the fact when you run the server for a long time you tend to get server lag or when people start to drop mine on your server then you might see issues.

 

[Xrt]

To me those pictures bring some reassurance that A17 will be simply amazing.

If I baked you a cake you wouldn't want to eat it half-way through its baking time.

(Unless it's cookie dough, I guess)

Also, I don't think they want to show off gameplay that give errors every minute or so, I'm guessing, but I think that's where they're at.

The playerbase may be at an all-time low now, I don't really know, but I can guarantee you when A17 drops that figure will double if not triple, this release is probably going to be their best one yet (imo) and that should bring in new and older players as well. This game is far from dead.

There are days when I really want to play A17, but that just ain't gonna happen until TFP pull the release trigger. They work during the holidays, and even weekends, they post pictures and try to keep us up to date, they answer our questions and listen for feedback. Not many game developers bother with this.

 

[wicketness]

How does the system resource management compare between say the engine in A16 vs A17, Roland ?
Does it use more CPU cores, any improvements made ?

I have a 7980XE whcih has more cores then I could know what to do with, but I game and run and stream all on the same PC. What pisses me off is when the server I'm hosting slows down not because the PC running it is running out of resources, which never seems to happen, like I have 128GB of RAM, but the engine itself can not seem to use what it needs or something. Like as if it's stuck in a 32Bit world and had the old 4GB limitation on RAM (though I do not think that is the case, dear god I hope not.)

I usually make my servers open for 64Players just so it loads more memory anyways. I run my OS and server off of a RAID0 SM961 1TB set, giving me speeds upwards 4-5GB/s in sequential and like 75Mb/s in 4K with like realistically 200K+ IOPS (though rated for something like twice that, this is what I get. Which is great honestly).

I just want to increase performance and would happy to know what to expect from running and gaming on the server in A17, if you can help me understand all that. Personally I use 7dayservermanager to host in dedicated mode. Will I be able to use it to host day 1 on release of A17 as well, or do we simply run a single player game and "allow" others to join ? There was some talk about this, just not sure how it goes anymore. Care to elaborate ?

I have a pretty dam good idea when it comes to systems and A16.

the trend has always been each new patch 7dtd uses more and more,

this is gonna once again hinder the amount of zombies we can have at once.

However from experience a system like that doing all it is doing will be hindered by your network and if you not using a NVME drive (SSDs) are too slow for that much)

your network should at least have 50MPS upload for that type of work load on one machine also no phone no tv nothing else on that network and make sure you have a static IP, and if your not using server software don;t expect much from the standard windows, server 2016 is the best for 7dtd when it comes to windows server OS, i seen it out perform all other system and OS such as 2012 when it comes to multicore use for the server it self.

however 7 days to die greedy for CPU speed i have rented systems before that use a 4.7-5.0 ghz OC i7 7700k ddr4 ram 64 gb and 2 NVME drives, one server with 35-40 players held stable at full load but it used 85% of the system cpu and peaked at 95%. and we did manage to crash it a few times (the actual system lol)

so from experience expect A17 to use alot more once you get past the 8 player mark and probably will run very badly after that till they start patching the major issues. by 17.3-5 we should have a playable game again.

Thats my nickle EHH!

 

[dhlmaster]

Don't be surprised if you find a severed horse head in your bed. It's exactly this kind of smartass reply that lead to unpleasant situations... :nono:

Edit:

Damn, 47 new pages since my last comment. I am too slow for this thread.

A few months back, they showed a snippit of code that made it look like any block using the "extends" property doesn't need a unique block ID. That means you could technically have as many blocks as you want, just have some of them extend off of other ones. I think the example they used was all the different models of toilets we're using the same block I'd. I hope that doesn't cause some major complications with the your prefab editor (I think that was your program, anyway)

 

[Erik Louden]

Fun Pimps, is the bug where the player starts holding their weapon in a weird way after a while (switch to another item and back fixes it) fixed in A17E?

It is super annoying.

 

[Darthjake]

Fun Pimps, is the bug where the player starts holding their weapon in a weird way after a while (switch to another item and back fixes it) fixed in A17E?
It is super annoying.

Just shift weapons / equipped items, not a big deal, now a big deal is getting stuck in zoom mode with the crossbow, when you are trying to run away from the charging feral.......

 

[Tearstone]

Aim drift is annoying, yes.

 

[Tearstone]

Uh, careful with that Roland... The game, and thereby this forum, is mainstream now. No room for such subtle references.
Easy way to tell when a game goes from indie to mainstream:

People laugh at funny bugs and weird stuff.

VS

People complain about perceived long development time and other silly things when they know its alpha. And when they have ZERO say in anything game related, even...

When one group grows larger than the other, you'll know where we are. I'd say its mainstream now...

It's both good and bad

Spoiler

 

[Korrasis]

Thank you Roland and Devs

Hey Skippy,
No disrespect meant. I know not everyone reads every single post as they try to catch up on all the posts so I will break it down for you and everyone else who are wondering what happened.

In June Madmole said in a video that he was hopeful that they would be done with A17 by the end of July. He admitted that it was a guess but that it was his estimate on what he felt would be possible.

In early July the team made the choice to upgrade to Unity 2018.2 because at first glance it appeared that it would have some solid performance benefits and no major inconsistencies from the previous version. It was a risk but one they felt was worth it for the benefits. They were right about the benefits but they were wrong about inconsistencies. It turned out their shaders became incompatible and needed to be redone. This caused a delay much longer than they anticipated.

Towards the end of July, as people were submitting bug fixes and uploading new art assets from their local builds to the shared build the magnitude of new art assets overwhelmed the atlases that they use. This has caused another unforeseen delay as they have had to find an alternative solution to be able to include all the new art in the game. They have found a solution and are doing that conversion. The bad news is the delay it caused but the good news is that all the new content that will be included in A17 is awesome and will be able to be supported.

At the end of July when I knew that Madmole's guess was going to be wrong I changed the date to August which caused an eruption from a segment of the community who thought that "hope" and "guess" and "estimate" really meant "promise" and "vow" and "set in stone". Then when August 1st came and all the "It's August where is it?" posts started appearing I changed it to "August or....." so that people would know that even August was just an estimate. But people went ballistic and the dev diary went off the rails. I had to move over 150 posts out of this thread all because some people couldn't understand the difference between "Maybe" and "Definitely".

That is how "It's done when its done" came about. I realized that the immature segment would never understand the concept of "estimate" and if they were going to be mad no matter what then I didn't want to have to deal with constantly updating the date. I added the smilie because someone thought the phrase sounded petulant and passive aggressive and smilies always make forum posts better. Right?

But now....lol....we have people trying to assign special meaning to the smilie...

It will be done just as soon as the unforeseen issues are handled and the known bugs that are considered show-stoppers are squished. There aren't going to be any more Unity updates before A17 and they know the full extent of the massive amount of new content and have a framework that can support it all. They are not holding out on us and stringing us along. They will get it into our hands at the soonest possible moment they can.

Hey Roland,

I know you guys all work hard on this game and it truly does show. Thank you for bringing us amazing content in ALPHA rather than bum-rushing it to Beta or even skipping beta and going straight to Production (ARK, PUBG). You guys are making one of the best games I've ever played and you are one of the few development teams I've ever seen stick true to the heart of what an ALPHA purchase is truly supposed to be. You are bringing us extraordinary amounts of great content with each upgrade and making the games leagues and leagues better than it once was. I am sorry for all the people who are a bit too immature to understand how great your game making standards are compared to most other developers. Please keep on doing what you've been doing and maintain your high standards of game design, for me at-least it is incredibly appreciated.

Thank you,

Korrasis.