PC Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[Xeen]

Most people don't have a very good understanding of voxel games and think they should run at the same frame rates as a first person shooter and that couldn't be further from the reality.

It is also worth noting that the game is still experimental Alpha, it's not even stable Alpha yet and most of the performance enhancing features haven't even been added yet so right now there is massive overdraw in towns and cities which is wrecking your FPS.

This still doesn't mean you can play the game with a potato and expect 60+ frames per second, that is completely unrealistic.

 

[Guppycur]

Well said, Commander.

 

[Gnomaana]

GT 840M. Which could play A16.4 very well.

I think TFP need to increase their minimum hardware requirements.

"Many games of 2013/2014 can be played fluently in WXGA resolution (1366 x 768) and medium or high detail settings" That was a blurb for the GT 840 when I googled it.

I understand it sucks to not be able to upgrade. Im running on an 8 year old computer myself but there is no way a company could develop for that video card. If I ran a dev company and found out my employees where even spending an hour trying to program for that I would probably fire them.

 

[meganoth]

I beg to wonder that at this stage of development at A17 if there was a way to speed up the game mechanics it would have already been done by now.

Have TFP ever shown enthusiasm for "premature" optimizations? I would guess that they never did more than just enough to get the game playable in all the alphas before.

And what if game mechanics is not the culprit for most machines? There are many hints that the GPU seems to be involved in FPS problems (for example the trees, they don't do much in game mechanics).

which is odd since one of the reasons stated for a17 taking so long was for performance gains of new unity build

You win some, you loose some. A new version of Unity probably also adds opportunities to get better graphics at the cost of performance. New toys for graphics designers

I would report this as a bug but i don't know how to describe it as anything but "HORRIBLE"]I can only describe it as severe framerate drop into the single digits...

If you ever want to do a bug report: You could for example mention if its a general drop in fps, or only near pois or near trees or near whatever. Or when you are doing specific things or running around. You could add which CPU and GPU and the size of your RAM.

At the moment it wouldn't be of any use, they already know the performance is bad. Next release seems to get a big performance patch (source: Roland), after that performance reports are probably helpful again

 

[SickoBasterd]

You are complaining about the performance of an experimental ALPHA release. Do you know the size of the Dev team for Battlefield? Do you know how long battlefield has been around? Lower your settings so its playable and find and report bugs. Give feedback on game play and mechanics.
I do not want TFP to waste time on performance issues at this time. I"d rather they work on the bugs and mechanics of the game.

My post wasnt to complain, just to state the fact that people with decent rigs having poor performance with bf as an example.

I dont think comments like buy a 500$ GPU or ist a voxel game expect it to run crappy or go back to A16 arent really helpfull.

 

[Royal Deluxe]

And the damn next Death is Death game finished by mining, this time in rock.

SCREW this Experimental

No more unmodded feedback from me

 

[Gareee]

And the damn next Death is Death game finished by mining, this time in rock.
SCREW this Experimental

No more unmodded feedback from me

We reap what we sow.

 

[Ricowan]

I've done a ton of mining in the various A17 builds and I've never died to a cave in. Not once. I've dug probably 30km worth of tunnels and rooms.

A17 is different than previous alphas in many, many ways. If you die by playing as if A17 was still A16, it really is your fault, not the game.

 

[Menace312]

Yeah... They used new mechanics/texture streaming, and probably counteracted the positive gains. Probably went very negative with their gains.
- - - Updated - - -

GT 840M. Which could play A16.4 very well.

I think TFP need to increase their minimum hardware requirements.

True... The GT 840M is horribly old! And a laptop card even...

If this card is stated as working for the game, I hope they either update the minimum requirements or remove some of the new improvements...

But really... Get a new card ffs...

 

[Royal Deluxe]

i cant care less about meanings and specially strange ones

I played the alpha 369 Hours and i am on arround 12 Kilometers of tunnels

I am pissed and if i would not be able to mod it i would have deinstalled the game 10 minutes ago

 

[FileMachete]

Just a thought Royal, but isn't there a way to disable SI in the debug ESC menu?

Thinking if you disabled SI while you tunnelled for a while, then go into godmode to take a couple screen shots, then re-enabled SI and if there was a collapse, take more screen shots. That _might_ provide some useful info to devs?

Only mentioning this since other than the Sand, I haven't had anything collapse. Dug out a 7x8 room in Sandstone without it falling. Largest I've dug in Stone is a 5x5, but no issues.

Or maybe the devs (I'm looking at you Gazz...) added in a hidden 'Earth Shaker!' effect for the Auger to trigger random cave ins... :suspicious:

 

[The Gronk]

We reap what we sow.

I'm expecting a bountiful crop of sarcasm this year

 

[Royal Deluxe]

Just a thought Royal, but isn't there a way to disable SI in the debug ESC menu?
Thinking if you disabled SI while you tunnelled for a while, then go into godmode to take a couple screen shots, then re-enabled SI and if there was a collapse, take more screen shots. That _might_ provide some useful info to devs?

Only mentioning this since other than the Sand, I haven't had anything collapse. Dug out a 7x8 room in Sandstone without it falling. Largest I've dug in Stone is a 5x5, but no issues.

Or maybe the devs (I'm looking at you Gazz...) added in a hidden 'Earth Shaker!' effect for the Auger to trigger random cave ins... :suspicious:

i made a few pages ago a test about SI of Sand, same counts for gravel

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?74084-Developer-Discussions-Alpha-17&p=899727&viewfull=1#post899727

Glue value 4 = Deathtraps,

glue value 5 = As soon as you dig broader than 1 Block you need to care about SI

But it looks like some people here and TFP want a "Kill the player button"

Hey that can be done much easer

Get randomnumber 1-6000

If Randomnumber = 1

Kill player

Anyway, why do i care about the game, i am egoistic now and keep silence about that issue.

I moded it out of the game one minute ago.

 

[FM2009]

A17 is different than previous alphas in many, many ways. If you die by playing as if A17 was still A16, it really is your fault, not the game.

Nice assumption mate. Just because it did not happen to you, does not mean it does not happen.

I have died multiple times while mining, and that was not due to me assuming this was A16. I was using extensive buttressing, but with low "glue" sand around the ore, and it going down 20+ blocks down, instability is a very real issue when mining. Even by moving to strip mining I still get the occasional wall collapse.

My last death from mining came when a single block of sand insta-killed me while at max health. It is almost certainly the legacy clipping issue, which you can see from all the "fell off the world" messages in the log after a collapse. But since I am testing in SP it is easily compensated for via the console, like most of the other A17 issues.

 

[FileMachete]

i made a few pages ago a test about SI of Sand, same counts for gravelhttps://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?74084-Developer-Discussions-Alpha-17&p=899727&viewfull=1#post899727

Glue value 4 = Deathtraps,

glue value 5 = As soon as you dig broader than 1 Block you need to care about SI

But it looks like some people here and TFP want a "Kill the player button"

Hey that can be done much easer

Get randomnumber 1-6000

If Randomnumber = 1

Kill player

Anyway, why do i care about the game, i am egoistic now and keep silence about that issue.

I moded it out of the game one minute ago.

Fair enough Royal, sorry you had to, but glad you were able to work around it and continue playing

 

[Hek Harris]

i cant care less about meanings and specially strange onesI played the alpha 369 Hours and i am on arround 12 Kilometers of tunnels

I am pissed and if i would not be able to mod it i would have deinstalled the game 10 minutes ago

I really feel like you're playing another game than us. Something like "7 days spent digging in the sand and moaning". Get out of your hole and enjoy the work done on the game. And wipe your feet, you put sand everywhere. :becky:

By the way, why don't you go and do the same thing in another biome ? Seems like desert is an hostile place now.

 

[Royal Deluxe]

I really feel like you're playing another game than us. Something like "7 days spent digging in the sand and moaning". Get out of your hole and enjoy the work done on the game. And wipe your feet, you put sand everywhere. :becky: By the way, why don't you go and do the same thing in another biome ? Seems like desert is an hostile place now.

AS i said, this time it was in rock / gravel.

I would LOVE to play 7Days to die. Means building a Base

But it looks like TFP want the player no longer build in the game.

* Mining = Deathtrap

* Nailgun is now so fast as the hammer in A16.

* Waiting for stamina 1/3 of playtime (except you have a auger)

- to top that Coffee is now so scarce in vending machines that you dont even need to check them (last run the 8th machine had coffee)

Really, i dont like that i need to play COD to level up. But Mining and stamina are both gamebreaking issues i really cant understand how people can perceive it different. Its like you Punch someone with a sledgehammer in the face and he ask for a second serving.

 

[Drithyl]

AS i said, this time it was in rock / gravel.
I would LOVE to play 7Days to die. Means building a Base

But it looks like TFP want the player no longer build in the game.

* Mining = Deathtrap

* Nailgun is now so fast as the hammer in A16.

* Waiting for stamina 1/3 of playtime (except you have a auger)

- to top that Coffee is now so scarce in vending machines that you dont even need to check them (last run the 8th machine had coffee)

Really, i dont like that i need to play COD to level up. But Mining and stamina are both gamebreaking issues i really cant understand how people can perceive it different. Its like you Punch someone with a sledgehammer in the face and he ask for a second serving.

The nailgun is faster than the hammer for sure. Waiting for stamina is not that bad, just keep hydrated so that it comes back faster. And this last patch actually made mining easier (digging, maybe not so much). Plant coffee. XP for mining is also pretty good in this last patch.

 

[Gnomaana]

AS i said, this time it was in rock / gravel.
I would LOVE to play 7Days to die. Means building a Base

But it looks like TFP want the player no longer build in the game.

* Mining = Deathtrap

* Nailgun is now so fast as the hammer in A16.

* Waiting for stamina 1/3 of playtime (except you have a auger)

- to top that Coffee is now so scarce in vending machines that you dont even need to check them (last run the 8th machine had coffee)

Really, i dont like that i need to play COD to level up. But Mining and stamina are both gamebreaking issues i really cant understand how people can perceive it different. Its like you Punch someone with a sledgehammer in the face and he ask for a second serving.

Stamina is gamebreaking? In what way? I mined for an entire night last night and didn't run out of stamina one time. I drank a coffee every few minutes and I could spam LMB continuously. Never dropped below 90 stamina unless I didn't notice the coffee buff running out. I can't say about the SI issues because I didn't really run into enough gravel to have issues.

 

[Royal Deluxe]

The nailgun is faster than the hammer for sure. Waiting for stamina is not that bad, just keep hydrated so that it comes back faster. And this last patch actually made mining easier (digging, maybe not so much). Plant coffee. XP for mining is also pretty good in this last patch.

Plant coffee, well i need arround 7 Ingame days to make a working farm (if i get 1-2 seeds on day 1)

Weans when my farm works i am allready level 60+ and need no longer coffee

Edit: and i said A16 hammer