Pernicious

Seems like a bit of a silly argument to me. I mean, you could ask the devs to make the arrow keys change your view instead of spending money on a mouse... Macro keyboards are such a basic gaming feature now, gaming with an office keyboard is almost like trying to game with the iGPU. Sure, you could do it, but it just doesn't make sense. Sure, I paid a little more for mine as an early adopter, but a friend picked up a macro keyboard and mouse for AUD 130. I think that's about $100 USD? That's about two burgers or four coffees more than than an basic office keyboard.

Get a macro keyboard. When I fly between my main base and my wasteland base, I can get a drink, use the bathroom, read "War and Peace" twice, and never have to touch the keyboard.

You're stretching my memory back 25 years ago to University "Computer Systems Architecture 101"... I don't think Direct Storage would help that much in terms of computing more actions. CPUs used to need to handle all the interrupts between different components and memory, so slow peripherals tied up the CPU for disproportionate amounts of time. In the original Wolfenstein 3D, you were never surprised by enemies around corners or behind doors, because you could hear the hard disk spin up, and the game would jerk along until the enemy's sprites were loaded. Then the shooting would start! Direct Memory Access solved a lot of those issues. Direct Storage intends to take it a step further and allow direct communication between SSD and VRAM, without going through System RAM first. But while this speeds up load time, it doesn't really help with freeing up the CPU to do more calculations. What causes the delay is the sheer number of calculations that need to take place, and the difficulty in running those calculations in parallel. So if you have 64 Zombies, you need to path those 64 zombies in sequence, so you don't have all 64 zombies all trying to occupy the same space. Once you have that figured out, assets are usually already loaded into memory, and memory to video RAM transfer is already very quick, and doesn't take up CPU time. Don't get me wrong, Direct Storage will help any time you load assets from disk. Moving fast with a wide field of view like from a Gyrocopter would be one example. But doing so doesn't really free up CPU time. Given that you only need to signal that the load has completed, and return an address of where it can be found, the other cores of the processors which aren't busy calculating Zombie jiggle can do this work without interrupting the calculations needed to move Zombies. I am mostly speculating with probably out of date information from CSA 101, but from what I've read of Direct Storage, it does fit with what I'm seeing other people write about it. I'm looking forward to it, and I really hope it's included in 7d2d. But I wouldn't count on it letting you run any more Zombies.

Can I guess? I think it will check your steam link against your forums identity. If you've ever complained about "optimisation", it'll inject thousands of "No Operation" commands everywhere in your code. It will be terrible. 5fps on cutting edge machines. When you come back here to complain, someone will suggest turning off a seemingly unrelated feature, but in actuality, removes all the No-ops, making the game run like normal. It's not any faster or more optimised, but after having to suffer through 5fps, 40fps now feels great and well optimised!

My theory... Jennifer actually refers to Jennifer Check in Jennifer's body: She's clearly now the screamer, and has taken her treasure with her. Working as intended. Go kill a screamer, and she'll drop a loot bag with the treasure.

My first 7d2d server was on Ubuntu 20 LTS and a Dell 710 I currently have an AMD server with an Epyc 7402, NVME drives and excessive RAM as well. It takes around 45 minutes to generate a 10k map on this machine, I can't remember how long a 16k took (it was too big to be playable by a small group of friends, so I wiped it). If I were you, I'd consider giving it at least 2 hours before I consider it hung. You can also use "top" or a similar program to see if it's still chewing up CPU cycles. BTW, the shaders error is perfectly normal for a dedicated server. It's not indicative of a problem.

No, you're right, there is a difference in terminology. In my world, a router is a device that makes a decision on a layer 3 value of a packet. I.e. it decides which interface to send it down depending on the IP address alone. Technically, what most people have in their homes is not a router, because it doesn't make any routing decisions, it just takes a packet on one side, rewrites it, and drops it down on the other. A device that changes medium at layer 1 e.g. WAN Fibre, to LAN Ethernet, or LAN ethernet to WLAN should be called a bridge. A device that decides which port to drop a packet on depending on the layer 2 information should be switch. A device that decides which port to drop a packet on depending on the layer 3 information should be called a router. Even then, you can have a layer 3 switch, which most network engineers would not call a router. (E.g. crossing VLANs) My joke which I guess nobody but a network engineer would understand is that if for a home network, you need to make a layer 3 decision to reach another device on the same network, you've got an inefficient or overly complex network. To keep a network performing efficiently, you want to route packets as little as possible, and make the switching decision at wire speed without a routing decision (which is much slower.) I realised after I posted it, it probably came across as harsh for anyone who didn't get it. Apologies if you did take offence.

I actually was considering traditional LAN parties - i.e. no internet. I'm old... My first LAN party was done over IPX/SPX... on 10Base2... Guess I didn't think through all the different ways that question could have been interpreted. If the LAN party does have internet, it solves all the Steam Auth and EAC stuff. But the traffic would still loop through the local router, as the host advertises the public IP. E.g. My server is 192.168.3.3, but it registers itself as 20?.12?.?.? 2022-02-23T09:41:10 78.166 INF [Steamworks.NET] GameServer.LogOn successful, SteamID=90156471837211657, public IP=20*.12*.2*.2* So, traffic from players would hit the router, and in my case, since it's a true router, will just go straight back in, after being NATed. I've seen a lot of "routers" that are pretty dumb, and are more like modems or bridges, and will just pass the packet on to the other interface, which means it actually goes out to the internet and comes back. In that scenario, @JoeDaFrogman was right - you might want to use direct IP to connect, and there's that work to find out what the host's internal IP is.

If you need a router within a home LAN, you need a better network design, not a better router! @Fanatical_Meat A simple question usually solicits a simple response, and you've got those. Yes you can. However, you're going to run into problems with things like Steam authentication, the anti-cheat system, and finding the "server". All of those can be overcome, but most require a reasonably lengthy explanation. So perhaps give it a go, and if you have any problems, come back here and explain which step you stumbled on if any?

I think that bug has been fixed, but there are still hard to replicate stability bugs. About a week ago, I was building a pole with a platform above, and one block which should have been no question stable, collapsed. I thought nothing of it, thought I just mis-clicked. Last night, I built something very similar. It's actually not possible that I missed in that case, and not only did it take itself out, it took out the top couple blocks of the pole too. Wish I had the presence of mind to look at the logs, but I just thought it was weird, and kept building.

Just used built in Windows features to bind it to particular cores. This is a shortcut on my desktop to start 7D2D C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "7D2D" /affinity AA "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\7DaysToDie_EAC.exe" The part "/affinity AA" binds it to the first four cores of a 6 core CPU, from memory. It's hexadecimal converted from binary.

Port checkers generally can't tell if a UDP port is open or not, because processes that receive a UDP packet that isn't what they expected most often just ignore it. That's exactly the same behaviour as a firewall/router instructed not to forward the packet on. Note that to list in the server directory, you actually need to allow 27000-27099 UDP OUTBOUND https://7dtd.illy.bz/wiki/Ports

It seems that most your queries have been answered by someone else, while I was sleeping. To summarise those answers up - There are a handful of things you can try, such as getting proper port forwarding working, but most of them require pre-requisites to be met, as well as a reasonably high level of technical skill. There's always the indirect fixes though. If you're both getting good connections to a 3rd party server, perhaps hire a 3rd party server?

Yeah, probably an exaggeration on my part there. I am very aware that prices are currently very influenced by chip shortages and for GPUs - Crypto mining based demand. Maybe it's different in other countries, but I'm aware the group of friends I game with, most are between 100% and 130% of the median income, one just bought a second hand 1080 card, because he couldn't justify anything newer. Another jumped from an AMD RX460 to a Nvidia 3060, because it was the most he could justify - and he waited that long to upgrade. And these guys are single - no kids, so no big mortgages either, on average to slightly above average incomes... Every single guy I personally know with current generation GPUs are either miners, casual miners to offset the cost, or work in IT and are on high incomes/can write off IT equipment on tax. So I'm aware my sample is small, and my bubble is real, but I don't think it's unfair to say right now that a decent gaming rig is a luxury for most people. Big Yep. Thanks for stimulating discussion and debate. 😛 It looks like you've tried mostly GFX fixes. This game isn't GPU bound. In fact, even when I'm getting 45fps, which is the lowest I go, my GPU is still only about 30-35% utilised, with everything maxed out on 1440p. Unfortunately, aside from processor affinity setting, and overclocking if it's possible, most the other fixes will cost money, so I assume those options are off the table. I don't want to write off the game for people unwilling to upgrade... But at some point, you have to cut your coat according to your cloth.

Surprised you can even boot windows. I mean, that would mean you're paging the Windows Kernel itself, no wonder you have a large page file. In all seriousness though, yes, this is a very compute heavy game, but we really have no idea whether you're playing using a 17 year old computer (The first x86 to hit 3.4Ghz is that old), or you're using a lower end, contemporary chip. We have no idea what you did to tune the game except "everything". I've found the optimisation step that made the most difference is assigning processor affinity, followed by overclocking. I did the clock speed and the memory speed in the same step, so not sure which one made the difference. The game is also very memory heavy. That's with a 10k map loaded (admittedly, I also have a lot of other things, like 20 odd tabs on my browser, Discord, Steam, etc. all open too): If you're paging, you're putting a huge load on your hard drive, so I hope it's an NVME drive, not a SATA SSD, or worse, a magnetic drive. The reality is, on the one hand, computers are getting insanely capable. Most developers are getting excited by monstrous compute power that lets them realistically calculate physics and light, program AI, and use huge textures and high quality audio like never before. At a price - That they can afford (Seen the pay of a senior dev lately?) But not everyone can. A top of the line GPU in Australia, is about a month's wage after tax. Even a high end CPU with no motherboard, memory, or any other component is a week's wage, easy. But here's the rub - Who do you want to be developing games for. Those that can afford to buy them, or those that can't? Gaming is becoming the new Golf/Polo/Skiing - the leisure of the rich. There's a massive market out there for mobile games with micro-transactions. Everyone has a phone, and everyone can afford a buck or two. But PC and Console games are a different ball park entirely. They are being written to cater for at least the moderately well off.

In plain English: 6:44:08 pm, Tried to connect 5 seconds later, it gave up Immediately, it tries again. The connection succeeds, but after 22 seconds, it has gotten nothing 21 seconds after that, it tries again. 5 second later, it gave up Immediately, it tries again - This time it connects. 6 seconds later, it hands over a password, which is accepted. After exactly 2 minutes, the connection is closed by the other side. We don't have the log from that side, but I presume it's because the game host isn't getting the information it needs. In other words, you're getting some intermittent poor quality internet. Just because both of you have good internet to 3rd party sites, doesn't mean you have good internet to each other. Neither is the fact that you have good quality Discord. Discord is a client/server VoIP protocol, so you might just both have good connections to that. The fact that another internet connection works (Your WiFi) - but is very slow, would seem to confirm this diagnosis. I blame the Obese Doggo.

Glad it worked out for you. Sorry went a bit offline for a week because of a heavy work load.

Not sure what you're expecting anyone to do about it? No call to action? No request for help? The game is very compute and IO heavy. It's pretty common that people who don't try to optimise it complain about low FPS, but there is so much material on how to optimise, there's very little point in repeating it over and over again. FWIW, I can play 3 player, 128 maximum zombies alive at any one time, drops to about 45fps during horde night, but I have a decent dedicated server. During non-horde night, it's generally 90-120fps.

Ah, glad this is coming. Our team usually has a dedicated miner. Not a lot for them to do unless we're upgrading our base at the moment. Seriously, I used to run into T5s with two stacks of ammo. Now I run in with about half a stack, knowing I'll still leave the POI with more than I entered with.

If your friend's dedicated server has "Persistent Profile" turned on, no. If they don't have Persistent Profile turned on, you can go to Options/Player Profile, and change your character. You probably got randomly assigned to Roxy: Or Grace

Some people approach their problems systematically, logically, rationally. I've never claimed I was one of those. So after a little over 30 minutes of trying to find enough to trigger the yellow dots to help me find the rest, I did was any other logical person would do. "killall". When that didn't work, well, unusual problems need innovative solutions. Or a bigger hammer. Guess which one I went for? If you guessed, "100 sticks of dynamite", you were probably correct: Note top right hand corner and compass. Still no yellow dots. Anyone watched this movie? (Spoiler alert - They destroy the house trying to get the mouse). Then I remembered I never cleared the sewers under it... Ah well.

From your specs, it looks like your CPU would be the issue. This game is really CPU intensive when it needs to control a large number entities.

I always take them, just because they always have wheels which is the hardest part. Acid is so rare these days. But if I really wanted a vehicle, it's not many points in Grease Monkey to get the rest of the parts. Nail gun? Yes, I do regret not getting one, and 20 days later, I still don't have one. But a claw hammer is half as good, where as a push bike is not half as good as a minibike.

10 seconds of googling? Also, since I am here, when I worked as a CTO, I got some briefing on what makes information "personal" for the purposes of GDPR. It's a nightmare due to a vague clause that says "can be reasonably attributed to a natural person". So IP address - personal? Case (1) - IP is from a company that does not log user access. Does not resolve to a natural person. No. Case (2) - IP is from a home address with a single person and country allows private citizens/corporations to subpoena ISP records. Yes. Case (3) - IP is to a share house with open WiFI. Who knows? So - a company logs IP addresses, is this PII? Shut up and sign off on your compliance.... So SteamIDs? Also grey areas. Will Steam give Epic enough information to identify it to a natural person? Maybe if sued - in your jurisdiction? In the US? In Europe? I doubt anyone could say, and even if you were a judge, subject to appeal to a higher court and then eventually a parliament. Maybe stop worrying about it unless you have millions for an international court case to test.

Steam also has to be running. It uses Steam APIs locally to get your steam ID so you can log into any game and track your character profiles - including local ones.