PC Hanging back until stable, methinks!

D

DeadGerry

Refugee
Thanks Pimps! I'm sure 17 will be great once we get past the initial release problems that we all find; am thinking back to the launch of 16, 15 and 14 to give me strength; there's a lot of cool stuff in this update, but I think I'm gonna have to hang back until stable is out; if it's of any use to anyone here's why :D

Graphics: Looking GREAT on streamers videos, twitch and youtube; and I'm sure the game will look great with some jiggery pokery for those of us with non state of the art machines; but for us potato merchants it's not good at the moment. On alpha 16 I could get mid - high setting happily and have a smooth game; but so far I'm having to play this on min settings to get anywhere near 30 fps. I know my machine ain't great - decent i5 processor and a mid range Nvidia graphics card; but if 16 could work smoothly on mid to high I'd hope to get 30+ here without resorting to min settings.

IF one does turn the settings down to get 30 + then the game looks like potato. You literally can't tell plants apart until you're right next to them nor can you tell trees and bear apart. It looks terrible, and still isn't 'smooth'. Im an old fashioned gamer, fallout New Vegas looks and plays 'great' to me; and so far alpha 17 is playing closer to quake 1 than FNV.

Worst, there are MASSIVE drops whenever entering a POI. More importantly there are massive drops for me whenever I'm bleeding! It makes runnning / fighting / bandaging impossible; and so far all of my deaths have occurred as a direct result of losing control during bleeding FR drops. For the moment this is game breaking on my machine. I understandn ot everyone is having this problem, but just wish to register that while it's not strictly a 'bug' it is happening.

Difficulty: Holy one handed tetris. Single zombies are life threatening, and thats cool - but I've played on nomad, warrior, scavenger and there isn't a lot of difference betwen them at the moment. Good for experts, real bad for beginners! I'm encountering multiple vultures, wolves and even Zombie bears straight off the bat; and with the FPS drop from bleeding, that's not good. Every hit is causing a bleed, and every second hit is causing infection. Not sure if this is a bug, or just bad luck, but the early game is a little too unforgiving for my blood - at least until the FPS is reliably 30+. Additionally, tinned food now brings a chance of food poisoning? Really? Come on! Give the newby's a break; or a grace period. It seems everything that can go wrong does go wrong early game; and while some people live for the challenge and will like that, even Scavenger level is hard now - I'd venture too hard at this time. My own experience is that everything I've done that has a % chance of a bad effect - bleeding, illness, infection - HAS occurred often enough that I genuinely wouldn't be surpized if it's been 100% of the time; and while I might just be supremely unlucky; I doubt it - what are other players finding?

Bioms: Eurk. My only real out and out complaint. So far my maps have all been pretty uniform and somewhat bland; forest surrounded by a lot of burned biome. One small orange desert. Not seeing a lot of variety, which is a shame; but if that's a decision can I register my vote that you reduce the amount of burned biome? Poor visibility, frame rate drops and distracting noises; its a bad biome to be in; and so far I'm seeing way, WAY too much of it. Desert looks poor, imo - it's orange and green? previous desert looked much better; graphically this feels like a step backwards, not forwards - although I can't speak for people running on higher settings, obviously! Not a massive issue, graphics aren't everything - but it's looking more Fallout 3 than Fallout NV at the moment.

So at the moment it's a very, VERY unforgiving beginning / early game - perhaps too much so; vultures in particular; but wolves, bears and dogs too. Healing is a little too hard, food / drink is a little complicated and it looks worse than alpha 16 IF you can't play at high settings. All of these thing are okay; but when combined with the FPS drops from entering POI's, taking damage and approaching towns it's no good for my machine at this time.

I'll check back in when stable drops; and will go back to 16 in the meantime; looking forward to it and hope you guys can smooth out the FPS for us potato's in the meantime, and I don't have to invest in new CPU and GPU to join the fun!

Kind regards!

 
Yeah I've been watching a lot of the streams and I think I'm gonna wait a few more weeks till things balance out a bit.

I think the update is fantastic and I really can't wait to sink my teeth into the new vehicles n such, though as a Solo player I just think having to clear 20 zombies to get into one POI then another 20-30 that show up is just a little too much.

 
It's definitely a good idea, if instability and bugs aren't your thing... And kudos to you for not raging that an experimental is broken. =)

 
You might not be the only one. The peak population in the last couple of days is ~20k. Significantly up from the baseline that has been hovering around 10-11k for months, but when A16 released it was over 32k. I'm curious to see how many people login over the holiday.

 
Unfortunately I'm there with you. It makes me very sad to see how much fun the game is, but A17 is just unplayable for me. I can get great framerates in A16 but I cant do anything in 17, literally crashing all the time. I look forward to the game being playable without high-end hardware, and hopefully it does get optimized back to a point that I can play it without needing a 2080ti

 
I'm away at work for the week, and have tried to play it on my laptop. Admittedly it's a few years old, but it could play A16 at low detail on 1080p - and Joel kept telling us how the Unity update made it run 20% or so faster, so I was actually hoping that my performance would get better, not worse.

But no. At 1366x768, with everything on minimum so it looks ugly as anything, I still have poor frame rates, and get a few zombies in the mix and I can't react quickly enough due to the lag.

Am I missing something here, or when you buy a game, do you not do it with the expectation that its minimum requirements will continually rise to the point where you have to upgrade your computer just to play it?

I'm just glad I have a desktop at home that's newer and more powerful than my laptop, but to think that I might have to start packing it up and taking it away with me for a week at a time... that's just crazy.

 
Just so I'm clear, and I'm not trolling, the complaint isn't that it doesn't run on lower end systems, it's that it's too ugly to play if you do?

... But isn't that the point of lower settings?

 
For some, the option isn't even available. I appreciate that if you follow my posts I sound like a broken record but for a considerable percentage of us A17 has been rendered unplayable due to FPS issues.

I'm not sure if I'm going to go back to A16 though, as even that has FPS issues for me. Granted my FX chip is effectively the ginger stepchild of single core IPC, but even then other titles (both indie and AAA) seem to run fairly well in comparison.

Ultimately now I've seen what A17 has to offer, it's really the case that I just need to wait until either (a) TFP sort out the FPS, or (b) I get round to upgrading a PC that in all other regards functions perfectly. Playing A16, which don't get me wrong has provided me with hours of entertainment, would seem like a retrograde step.

 
No, the complaint is that even when I turn it down to minimum, it still runs like a one-legged dog and gets me killed due to lack of responsiveness.

Unless you were addressing the OP and not me...

 
Was just curious in general, thanks.

... it's so weird reading these posts and seeing two people with identical systems having completely different results. I always wonder why that is.

 
Was just curious in general, thanks.
... it's so weird reading these posts and seeing two people with identical systems having completely different results. I always wonder why that is.
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Yes, someone with very similar specs to my own is noting a massive FPS issue, yet for me, it runs perfectly at highest possible settings.

In any event, there's definitely nothing wrong with waiting out for 17.0 - anyone playing Experimental right now, may well have to go through at least one map wipe before 17.0, so 17.e isn't the version to play if you get too attached to your current game.

I do hope that the cause of the FPS issues being reported, be it within the game or with certain types of hardware is nutted out before stable drops.

 
Yes, someone with very similar specs to my own is noting a massive FPS issue, yet for me, it runs perfectly at highest possible settings.
In any event, there's definitely nothing wrong with waiting out for 17.0 - anyone playing Experimental right now, may well have to go through at least one map wipe before 17.0, so 17.e isn't the version to play if you get too attached to your current game.

I do hope that the cause of the FPS issues being reported, be it within the game or with certain types of hardware is nutted out before stable drops.
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Unfortunately very few of the posts mentioning bad FPS are including hardware specs and video settings. However, Joel said they added some new culling so that may help some people once that build is released.

 
Unfortunately very few of the posts mentioning bad FPS are including hardware specs and video settings. However, Joel said they added some new culling so that may help some people once that build is released.
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True, though I suspect strongly we'll end up finding out it's not (at least) solely the game, but some possible issue in some of the games coding (maybe) along with some combinations of hardware.

 
Just so I'm clear, and I'm not trolling, the complaint isn't that it doesn't run on lower end systems, it's that it's too ugly to play if you do?
... But isn't that the point of lower settings?
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More just in comparison to Alpha 16 turning the settings down was fine, and the world still looked okay; but in 17 the difference between medium and low is massive - everything is blotchy and indistinct; literally can't tell plants apart without the text showing up; literally couldn't tell the difference between bears and trees; and vultures, dogs and wolves close the distance on you so fast that they might as well be invisible.

Don't mind low graphic settings, as long as it remains functional, but low settings on A17 really push it; and don't sufficiently improve the frame rates anyway. I'm a REALLY old game player, so when I say it looks ugly in 2018 I mean it would have looked ugly in 2006; cos those tend to be the games I play. Low settings on this are more like Marathon or Quake 1 than Fallout 3 or New Vegas; let alone more recent games.

Again, I got an elderly but capable machine - decent i5 processor and a mid range gtx gpu; and I'll upgrade eventually; but if I could get smooth good results on A16 I'd HOPE to get decent results on 17 without having to upgrade; but am happy to wait and see.

I remember the devastation of too many wolves in 16, of infinite spawns, of no ores, am no stranger to the unstable being a bit rough for a while, and look forward to giving it a good go later; just popping up my experience in case it's of any use :)

 
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