Blake_
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Posts posted by Blake_
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1 hour ago, SnowDog1942 said:
I've never heard them say multiplayer is not a main focus. They have said their target was single player and small group PVE. PVP is not a focus, at least right now.
I would engage in an argument with you about this matter, but that would make it PVP.
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@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.
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2 minutes ago, PeNa1979 said:
Sorry, but i have to tell it :
TFP are getting too lazy !!!
This game is the best game EVER made for any platform !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But TFP is slowly killing it......
Im playing this game offcourse from alpha 1, that was totally unplayable, then alpha 1.1 that was first public fix...
And from alpha 1.1 to cca alpha 15 it was everytime really goooooood upadte...but then is it get not half so good...
Every update brings a couple new textures for the same zombies only ! NO NEW VEHICLE for couple years !!!
Almost no new weapons...For M4 we have waitd from a15 i think where she was already...but hidden...
And where is "THE ELEVATOR TEST" block gone ??????????????? WHY ?????????? Why it is not already in the game for us ?!?!?!??! WE WANTED IT SO MUCH !!!!!!!
Sorry TFP, but ONE GOOD MODDER IS WORTH MORE AS HALF OF YOUR DEVELOPER TEAM !!!!!!!!!!!
So many good mods were in a17 and a18 and you almost done to destroy it...thanks god for people like Snufkin Arrakin and much more that are modding and made for this game SO MUCH new stuff we all so love !!!
I hope one day will 7DTD team rise again and wake up finally !!!!!! THIS GAME IS THE ONLY GAME IM PLAYING LAST 3 YEARS........Why ? BCS is the BEST IN THIS UNIVERSE !!!!!!!!! So stop killing i please and go develop and make new stuff THX to TFP and MODDERS...
I have some extremely important feedback too. I believe TFP should really read this feedback below, if they don't, then I win, because my reasons are my reasons and they are important. Please notice me.
1-I believe EVERYONE should use caps when making a point. If not, the point would evaporate from the bottle and result in an artistic worldwide crisis forcing painters to use lines.
2- I firmly think that programmers at TFP should take my advice and use a new type of typing (more on that in the screenshot below).
Spoiler
3- Third and most very importantly mainly, they should really absolutely real learn how to rule a company and order sentences and a bit of spelingl.
Cheers.
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3 hours ago, falloutcloud said:
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?
TFP sexted me about the date for the next video stream.
They said it's gonna be Soon™️
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@faatal here's a question with a prologue:
In a19.3 doors do not structurally support other doors. That is ok to avoid exploits I guess. I noticed that said band aid resulted in less creativity overall, with less cool multi stacked doors on some designs, so now I'm "unsure" if the change is intended to stay or if it's just temporary while the new doors are implemented.
-Will the NEW doors be (physic-induced) blocks and also stackable on top of each other so entities can damage them and/or is the structural integrity between doors going to remain the same as this recent a19.3 change with/without the new door changes ?
Expected Result: That doors are cool and destroyable like in the Arlene test video, but also the entity logic is tweaked to think of doors as if they were just normal material blocks and therefore the structural integrity wouldn't need to be set to 0 for door on door, allowing the pre a19.3 freedom.
It's absolutely no great deal either way, but I think it's worth a thought.
Gentle Hugs.
15 minutes ago, Naz said:I've had a day 2 dog hoard in A16 & a day 2 Vulture hoard in A19.
Funny, I think the tweaks were made at some point in between, both done in a17 and tweaked later on pre19 release. I remember it from release notes off the top of my head. I could be wrong. A lot has happened over the years. But yeah, day 2 hardcore gameplay is a thing.
Edit: also, that later one (vultures) is a modified version of the horde timer, so that could also affect the wandering animal horde to just "always".
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11 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:
Also, no more day 2 dog hordes would be great.
Actually, animal hordes used to range from day three to day six. I could be wrong, as they were tweaked a few months back. Zd hordes on the other side, they love to visit at day 7 in the evening, bouncing boobs and jiggling jaws and everything.
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1 hour ago, Jost Amman said:
Why not 2022? There's no reason to rush.
Shall we call it the alpha"7 dtd Avatar 2" for 'funsies'? I'm sure that it IS gonna be about water.
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16 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:
I don't think so. The team that's now working on 7D2D is not the same team we had a few years back.
Now we have 2 AI guys, several Art guys (modeling, texture and so on...), several Design guys, Madmole can focus mainly on the general picture.
The only real bottlenecks I see are Gazz (who's the only one working on tying everything up in the XML) and (I think) Robert, who's working on RNG.
June 2021 for experimental sounds good enough for me AT the earliest. Gazz's work is quite extensive, I just hope that he gets help ordering all the stuff for the shape menu. Hooking up that system is more time consuming than, well, playing 7dtd.
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@faatal here's a quick take on a19.3 after a couple of hours of testing :
Deco fixes improved performance by a literal 10% (5-7 second freezes every minute are gone, though the "feeling" of the fix is more like 200% improvement on HDD drives)
Music has no significant performance impact judging from my initial tests. Deco writing was the main culprit here.
I believe wandering hordes have currently less impact on the CPU. More testing needed because the "spawnwh" is delayed and it's a bit unhelpful. A better use of the command for performance would be to add a way to set the exact time of the horde spawn and also make a delay of "15 in game minutes to spawn" the default behaviour of said command if nothing added.
Sleepers drop performance mildly in general and with severity in certain spawn situations. I believe you are working on this for a20 so I'll only say that they are currently the biggest issue, which is not HUGE. Dual cores at 2.4ghz can't handle a sleeper situation of, for example, "a Waterworks POI next to a Construction Site POI with the player passing through" without freezing a bit. Performance drops can get the game all the way down to 15 fps in a 4 core 2.7ghz system for a few moments. Thats quite noticeable yet playable. I would prefer a constant 30fps minimum.
Garbage collection fine-tunning with the new Event system should also help a bit in general.
GPU is currently correct at 4gigs of VRAM and 720p and generally ok at 1080p as long as everything is rock bottom quality. That means solid 60fps when only landscape is within sight, and from 45 to 60 in other graphic-related situations.
Overall, a19 is finally quite ok for my potato to enjoy. The performance is better than the best of a18 (that's a lot).
I will continue testing for a bit before starting a new map, in case something weird comes up.
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2 hours ago, faatal said:
Not by me. Just optimizing it.
Btw, thank you for 19.3 . I'll be testing again performance on my corn bread Pc shortly.
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@madmole a while back you leaked a few words about you doing some legendary weapon/tool design work.
Will you guys introduce them to the game in a20 at the same time as the new "legendary" clothing system or are they on hold while the rest of the weapons get done?
AKA "Where's our 1 hit legendary pickaxe to use with our miner outfit booty?"
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20 minutes ago, faatal said:
Specifically, I've been profiling the game and our MinEvent system, which has to do with processing all the rules in our xml files, like progression.xml, continues to take a good amount of CPU.
A good example is every 2 seconds an action tries to remove fire particles off the player, which was slow and made some garbage because it checked all the player transforms (200+). Now entities have a list of active particle effects, so basically takes zero time. The transform find function is also faster now and makes no garbage.
A19.3 has some optimizations, but these changes are for a20.
I see. That's why madmole called it a feature while technically optimizations are not. Handling transforms through an event system is IMO the best possible thing for potato PCs of the 2nd millenium. It makes sense if you are to introduce a good workshop environment in the future.
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21 minutes ago, SnowDog1942 said:
What exactly is an event system?
Unity explanation is no good at all for the faint hearted.
To make it as simple and vague as possible :
A good built event system is an order-input based code that usually handles "virtual happenings" in a videogame environment. It can be as simple as random timed spawns on a singular place (wandering horde, bandits on the roads, a farmer in distress, a dragon) or as complex as a pipeline with convoluted procedural triggers based on actions, player level, location, quest completion, npc deaths etc... on endless/random places.
It's basically the best feature of 7dtd or any videogame for that matter.
@faatal is essentially creating GOD.
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21 hours ago, faatal said:
Well, was off last two days on a trip to Michigan.
Been working on event system optimizations.
19.3 exp is getting close.
I truly hope you had fun in this troubled times. As for the 19.3 tweaks.... I didn't think you would pull off one of the lengthiest of CPU optimizations so soon. I was also thinking that maybe you had people helping you to do that part.
Imma see myself out now. Thanks for giving me hope to finally begin to enjoy a19. Have a great week.
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@madmole, any news about that sweet hair tech that was shown ( in a Noah model I think) a few weeks back?
And the most important question : is your own hair using that sweet new tech lately? Also, that gorgeous 4k headbush of your younger self surely eats VRAM like crazy .
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8 hours ago, madmole said:
We're looking at spring which always leads to more like summer. We'll see though, we're making good progress.
According to my calculations A20 will reach b180 in the week of June 7 2021 if there are no real life accidents. You are doing 0.67/ 0.68 builds per day since 2 years ago. A build can be anything from a texture clipping fix to a WIP system change, so while that's no real variable to calculate dates, it is a consistent and healthy speed indicator.
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@madmole , a few quick questions:
1- Are you guys working on legendary tools and weapons as well for a20 ?
2- Is the animal rework in the works or planned on the shorter term ?
3- The breakable door system that you guys showed is awesome. Will it be applied to other surfaces, like those thin walls in some POIs?
4- On the same subject : Have you guys thought about cheap/fast cloth simulation for curtains/dimmers on the windows instead of the current blocky ones?
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1 hour ago, Morloc said:
This is just my opinion, but less equipment slots is not better. Ever.
I'm not sure I feel more strongly about anything else in gaming.
-Morloc
Yes. I understand the situation. But in my opinion they are not dumbing down the game but deleting useless insulation barbie clothing garbage and turning every single piece of equipment (and tools and weapons) into a legendary marvel with buffs. So it isn't really a bad tradeoff. Plus, the new armour effects are WAY better than anything you could ever have by using those dull a19 clothing slots.
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1 hour ago, Ranzera said:
I have quite a few take aways from the stream, but this is bar-none my biggest one. You guys clearly want to have some kind of class system. Why not just stop beating around the @%$#ing bush and implement one and leave the gear out of it. You would have so much more freedom with it and much less stupid "LeT mE pUt On My CoRn PiCkInG hAt."
ETA: Also, 10 (I think that's the right number) equipment slots down to 4 is a travesty. What a loss. I used to argue with the guys in the older alphas who said that removing complexity was becoming a problem.
I was wrong.
I'm not sure about your point. Seems a little bit like this:
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1 hour ago, Delta7x said:
Are there any plans to consolidate the UI? There's a few menus that could be moved onto one screen as opposed to flipping between several.
A while back someone in the community had come up with a UI concept that better shows what I'm trying to describe.
The concept itself isn't bad on the info part, but those colours make me puke rainbows brighter than a Pride parade.
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3 hours ago, Survager said:
I have a little complaint about the new nurse 😃
The new zombie nurse has a movable lower jaw and hairy tail, but the stethoscope is firmly glued to the zombie.
A stethoscope, unlike a tail of hair, is constantly in front of the player's eyes, and the fact that it has no physics is very striking.
Will the stethoscope have physics like this zombie's jaw and hair?
I have another question. If you are talking about the stethoscope, why are you pointing the green arrows at her boobs?
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3 minutes ago, meganoth said:
For mining this seems already to be true in the proposed sets. The important stuff (bonuses similar to sexrex,miner69er and mother lode) can be had with 3 pieces.
No mining is ever too fast, so no unbalance there. Time constraints are real in late game. Having the full Auger dress would be "fastastic".
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3 hours ago, Gazz said:
Yes, obviously.
The proposed bonuses seem... really good... but that's just the first pitch. AFAIK no balancing has yet been done in the greater context of all the perks and assorted buffs.
We certainly don't want to get back to the Barbie Dressing Game of earlier alphas.
Could also have something like a set bonus cooldown.
Sure, you can switch gear anytime but any gear switch disables all these bonuses for 10-15 minutes. Constant switching would not be beneficial.
There's no significant gameplay issues in switching clothes on the spot, specially as it generates inventory management problems by having more than one set on the backpack. No cooldown and letting it be just as it is (sets with no penalties on changing) might be the best design solution. Simple, direct and fun. The implementation of some temporary penalty is interesting and logical, but not really fun in reality, nor in paper.
You will understand what I'm saying when vehicle criticals are online and they backlash deeply in the fun factor, and in the short term they will also make running with a buff more efficient than with any vehicle. Sometimes focusing on the micromanaging side of things is worse. Good thing Madmole plays like an tired rabbit and will immediately notice the flaws of any system just by playing and getting frustrated. That's one of the things that make him a good designer.
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40 minutes ago, SnowDog1942 said:
I totally get what you are saying and ive never considered myself the min/maxer type. I guess if the bonuses are too good it may affect non min/maxer types as well by being too good to pass up.
There are min/maxers that will do ANYTHING to be more efficient, but on the opposite end of the spectrum there are gameplay mechanics that encourage tedius micromanagement because they are too good to pass up. Im NOT saying this is how it will play out, its just a thought on a possible downside.
If jumping in place was was boring and tedius but healed you — would you accuse people of being a min maxer when they did it?
By the way I do think the new system sounds interesting and Im looking forward to it in action.
Oh I will be switching clothes like crazy. Call me what you want. This new system doesn't let any piece of wearable be completely useless for any situation , which is good.
Are you sure you aren't going to suggest a sensual type of clothing for the pool?
49 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:Edit: Nevermind, it's a protected chunk. My bad. 😛 Ignore the post above.
Yeah, it is. Someday, though. Someday.
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Alpha 20 Dev Diary
in News & Announcements
Posted · Edited by Blake_ (see edit history)
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.