meganoth

Alpha 19 is not being in development anymore, it is practically finished (AFAIK). A further version A19.6 just means that some bugfixes were backported from A20 because they were deemed a little too critical to be left alone in a stable version. In this case twitch integretation was a very recent addition, it was added in 19.3(?) not 19.0). Therefore it had much less time to mature than the other features in A19 and probably still had critical bugs. Especially because bugs on twitch integration are very public affairs.

Sorry, my posting was a bit ambiguous. What I was saying was that even IF it did penetrate (which I thought it did not), its effect would have to end two blocks from the hit block at the most because of <property name="Explosion.RadiusBlocks" value="2"/>.

There is more than CPU and GPU in a PC that can be a bottleneck. My guess is (without any proof though) that some data path being maxed out or simply overrun caches being the culprit in many of the slowdowns. And I also suspect much of that to be the result of this being a voxel game and that it would be happening in 7d2d/UE as well, maybe to a lesser extent.

Well, with an actual game dev as consultant you are probably better informed than me. My horizon on the Early Access front is somewhat limited to relatively few titles and I don't have much experience with AAA community work. Did your friend find TFP wanting compared to Codemasters/Electronic Arts or to other indie Early Access games? In the first case: AAA developers usually don't use Early Access and it is hard to beat the hands-on experience you get from playing the actual game. And the infos that get out are usually guarded and channeled by Marketing. How can that be more accessible? About speed of development I have no doubt Codemasters is faster, but what ratio did your friend assume to account for the different size of the dev companies? In the latter case: He is in the same position like me looking from the outside at dev companies, but his practical knowledge of development speed with 3D games should still come in handy. I know very few other EA titles well enough to estimate development speed and they don't seem any faster than TFP. What are the examples you both know about that seem much faster and how many coders do they have (if known)? About detachment/roadmap reveals etc.: There I have an example myself, Wube is far ahead in information policy compared to TFP, their FFFs are a vast source of information. Others seem to be much more closed up but usually I did not frequent their forums well enough to judge.

What is your goal? Getting the highest possible GPU usage or good framerates at highest settings? This game is unusual in that it is very CPU-bound and additionally at your resolution even most typical AAA games (which are usually GPU-bound) would be CPU-bound (like Naz already said). An underemployed GPU is to be expected If GPU usage is your goal you should buy a monitor with a 4k or even 8k resolution or decrease the frequency your GPU operates at 😉. If it is good framerates then increase your settings to ultra and post what framerates you get. Someone here with a similar setup might be able to tell you if that is in the expected range or if it could be better

Read the sticky thread that tells you how to post your logfile

I just objected to one of your claims. The other claim you made then was correct though IMO, there are expectations by (many) players that the time between alphas in EA is shorter. Though there are no rules from Valve how EA is supposed to work, how long between alphas, how many alphas, ... And here you are correct again, at least at the end: Yes, there is probably something going on in the back you might not know about. For example: 1) You probably don't know that at least the last three alphas took nearly a year. So what seems suddenly to you has been the norm for some time now 2) You probably didn't work as software developer, right? So here a few facts: The bigger a software project is the harder it gets adding features to it. Because inevitably there are a lot of cross dependancies all over the code base and adding one thing makes it neccesary to touch a lot of other places in the code. Changing old code makes it neccessary even for the writer of that code to first reread it to find out how it works in detail. Bug fixing gets more difficult for the same reasons. 3) Expanding the dev team is normal when a project increases in size. But it actually isn't a unproblematic fix, because any developer added needs someone to ease him into the code base so he is a liability at first. Then there are diminishing returns: Add one dev to a group and they spend 80% working and 20% coordinating among themselves. Add another dev and the group now spends 70% working and 30% coordinating (those are invented numbers, the principle is know in software development for decades). It is somewhat like the cores added to a CPU speed up the CPU less and less. 4) TFP added a lot of artists/designers to make more content like POIs or higher resolution graphics but good programmers seem to have been in shorter supply (according to TFP). Now designers can't help on the coding work or on the bug fixing, and bug fixing takes a long time now, each alpha now had ~2-3 months where we only heard about the number of critical bugs going down slowly. Naturally TFP could have decreased the feature size of later alphas to make it appear as if each alpha took the same time as the previous one. But they apparently have a few habits that are not easy to break or a feature list with many big features not easily broken up. And releasing an alpha to the players is partly extra work that would interrupt the work on the big features. So they might not be so happy to change their routine.

Why do you think the devs will just follow your ideas for the game? I don't know if the vultures will eventually be changed or not, but they were made that way on purpose. Just saying. I found a comment on one of the lines that "IsEnemyEntity" is used to flag the entities that will be removed when you select to turn off all enemies in the options. So sadly a red herring. But I like Boidsters suggestion,sounds promising

As far as I remember (and I asked another person as well) cop vomit does not go through walls. According to the xml it can't be more than a 2 block wall and you have to be standing directly behind it to get splashed.

Please use "Discussion and Requests" or the mod creators thread to talk about mods. The Mods section is for listing actual mods

yes. PC + Mac + Linux versions are identical and with crossplay capability. As long as there is no version mismatch identical games and crossplay is the norm for games on these platforms

The immediate solution for you and your friends are big Game Modifications, for example Darkness Falls or War3Zuk. I mention these two as examples because I played them recently and know directly that they provide a lot more content. Just be aware that they also increase difficulty a few notches I don't speak for TFP, but from what the developers are telling us it is relatively clear that the vanilla game is not going to be expanded very much from its current state, a lot of subsystems are considered finished. They have a few features they still want to implement besides the ultimate goal "bandits". And that already fills their schedule to the brim. Apart from that it seems one or two workstation upgrades might still be a possibility but are low-priority at the moment

I suspect this might be enabled by <property name="IsEnemyEntity" value="false" in entityclasses.xml. Another way may be to rob the zombies of their senses. "animalTemplateTimid" has a lot of stealth settings that are higher than usual, they could be copied and turned down to very very low values

If AMD had so much possibilities with double the transistors and could do only 5% better, then NOW when Intel has the same amount of transistors than AMD they should be ahead by 45%, right? But they are not. Which means that you may be putting too much value on the effect of a shrink. 10 or more years ago every shrink of the litography was accompanied by a sizable increase in Mhz as well as better IPC. All of that together made a new generation of CPUs so much better than the previous one. But now the frequency stays constant and the small improvements with IPC and more transistors are not that much of a deal. Also both companies did probably notice that the notebook market is the current growth market (even before Corona) and have used the shrink to draw less power and not get out more performance

Which isn't surprising as i7-6950X is a 10 core CPU and that shows exactly what I was driving at. If you buy a 4 core CPU today you can still play a lot of games without problems but I would call that not future-proof or even a bad idea for the present time already. The games industry is in the midst of changing and supports a lot more cores already. At another time when AMD called their CPUs Athlon and Intel called them Pentium it was exactly the other way round, AMD was trailing behind Intels litography and their CPUs were more than competitive. So what does that tell us? The litography is just one of hundreds of parameters that influence the power of a CPU. Secondly the numbers like 7nm and 10nm are just labels now and not easily comparable as that depends very much on what exactly is measured in different litographic techniques. Here the info in laymans terms: https://www.techcenturion.com/7nm-10nm-14nm-fabrication Quote: "What Intel calls as 10nm, is similar to what TSMC calls as 7nm". So at the moment they produce somewhat equally good CPUs (if we use gaming benchmarks) with transistors about equally densly packed (see the Transistor Density Comparison table, Intels 10nm process is even slightly denser). There is no reason for AMD to be embarassed, maybe the 10(?) times bigger Intel should be embarrassed that they can't get a lead with a multiple times higher research budget. So you are saying Intel made the same mistake? And learned from it like AMD did now? Well, here is 1 point for both 😉

Oh, we are back at the Intel-AMD wars. You can always find software that runs better on Intel. Sometimes all that is necessary is that the company of that software uses Intel compilers to do the work. That works very well for 80% of the PCs out there (Intel compilers are very very good, on Intel hardware) and somewhat less well on the other 20% of PCs. That doesn't seem to hold for games though. Maybe because AMD is relatively popular with private buyers there are relatively few games where it makes a difference. I'm not talking about "tuned" benchmarks by Intel and AMD themselves, gaming magazines (paper-based and online) do real world benchmarks with typical AAA-games. And AMDs recent ryzens (3xxxx and up) are on-par with the best CPUs Intel can field. (And for a time, until Intel released moderately priced 10xxx CPUs, magazines declared AMD the clear winner on all counts) Currently 4 cores are enough except for a few games, but the number of games who can use more are slowly growing. Which is the same that can be said about raytracing. UPDATE: I checked out Cyperpunk 2077 because it is one of the most hardware-intensive games and looked for information on cores used. I found a website that said a current 6 core from AMD or Intel is the best in price-performance and the results indicated that 6 or even more cores are utilized. Then I found an article in german that surprised even me: It said that to run Cypberpunk with high details performantly you NEED at least 6 cores WITH HT and if you want raytracing then 8 or more cores WITH HT are advisable. Furthermore sizable performance increases could be seen up to 12 core cpus (i.e. 24 core with HT) suggesting that Cyperpunk is able to use as many cores as you let it: https://www.computerbase.de/2020-12/cyberpunk-2077-benchmark-test/4/ I would guess this is surely not the only triple AAA game that is able to use any amount of cores already as the time for speed increases through MHZ increase is over and the gaming industry knows that for quite some time now. Why are we suddenly talking about GPUs? Yes, if you want ray-tracing or DLSS enhancement, AMD is still a large step and a medium step behind. In all other cases the current line-up is good enough so I don't have to buy anything from the cutthroats at nvidia.

The horde night vultures are deadly because they respawn immediately on horde night. At a lvl 5 quest you can drive away to get some space between you and the earth-bound zombies, shoot the vultures if they are really in a cloud around you and preventing you from driving and then continue on.

I strongly expect one of the 18 "bandit" models that are designed right now is the Duke. That final confrontation was hinted at for years

Did you check lately? At least in Germany this CPU is available in the usual venues at prices comparable to the 3200G. Especially the availability of CPUs has greatly improved in the last few weeks.

Combining was an option in the workbench, not in inventory. You can tell steam to download alpha16 to see it or by playing a mod like Darkness Falls, which has reenabled it as well. In vanilla A19.5 it is gone though

Balancewise this disadvantage of moving shows up only on horde night so this should be a horde-night-only malus on gamestage. There is a way to get more time for horde base construction by the way, use a few POIs as one-time horde bases that just need to hold up a few hours before collapsing. Even a high level horde needs quite some time to demolish a sturdy POI. There is also the possibility to simply drive back to your normal horde base for a day to give you another 7 days for building. And if you plan ahead and craft the concrete and other materials BEFORE you drive off to your new horde base location I don't see a problem in building a whole horde base in less than a week In short, I would see building a new horde base somewhere else as an interesting task for a high level character and one that I already think I have solutions for. And not something the developers have to solve for me.

Well, I was commenting on your assertion that "My intention was to point out there are other means to increase the difficulty, like ..." and then you mention two possibilities that simply don't actually work. Which probably means that this is a very hard problem to solve, since nobody came up with a better solution yet. And steel walls were mentioned by you when you proposed the changes, I was only parroting that, we can look at early- and mid-game and substitute steel with concrete or cobblestone and your ideas still won't work.

Why are only ryzen APUs mentioned as ryzen alternatives? I feel like the elephant in the room is never mentioned 😉 Seriously, if you buy a dedicated GPU (which you should) there is no reason to go for a RxxxG. For the same price as the 3200G you can get a ryzen 5 3600 which gives you 2 more cores (6 core instead of 4core) and a boost frequency of 4.2 instead of 4.0. The ryzen 6 cores are by far the (gaming) bestsellers of the ryzen family for a reason.

With muscle memory are you refering to the motion the zombie does when the bomb is activated and ticking the count down? Yes, that is hard to explain. Everything else can be explained by the bomb being strapped on people when they are already zombies.

Shouldn't you have a fast minibike or motorbike by the time you can do lvl5 quests? Position the bike so can immediately hop on it after opening the chest and you might get some fire damage, but thats it.