Pernicious

But when Bond villians fail to deal eith Bond, it's not the end of the movie. Why isn't there more game when the Duke fails to deal with us?

If it's not official, I'd love someone to make a mod where once you finish tier 5 quests with all traders, you have to collect a full hazmat suit and fly into an irradiated zone with a gyrocopter or the upcoming helicopter. Once there, you have to fight your way through a castle, with only the guns and ammo, and first aid supplies you have on you. (5 first aid kits, or another stack of 9mm? Antibiotics? Or a stack of grenades? Choose wisely) Finally, you confront the Duke, and you see it was you all along... Ah wait, no, too many drug store novels. Nah, there should be a final battle with the Duke of some sort. Credits scroll. That's my hope at least.

Funny thing is, I thought the complaint was going to be the other way. My first playthrough on A19, it felt we were on the edge of starvation for the first 3 weeks. Chickens and rabbits weren't exactly plentiful but they were around- at least every 3rd day or whenever the respawn rate was, but you also had to be good with the bow or willing to risk using a blunderbus. Don't know how much was getting better at the game and how much was rebalance, but A20 felt like small game was everywhere and their hitboxes got bigger. The introduction of pipe weapons also made hunting easier and by day 3 or 4, it felt like hunger was no longer a risk, as long as one day a week could be spent hunting. By the time you got to the snow biome, the biggest risk was that your inventory would be full of meat before you got to your quest if you didn't stop hunting. By day 40 or so, after making one box for meat and another for cooked food, we decided that we were only keeping leather and bones for crafting and would discard the meat and fat. But I guess everyone has differentsettings and plays in different ways. Meganoth has some good advice. The only few major ones I'd add is don't forget you can run into town and raid houses for food without a quest (both the kitchen cupboards and often small piles of food lying around) and if you get a quest in that house, the shelves all magically restock Also aiming down sights and keeping a bow drawn drains stamina and therefore food. Finally, the perk to speed up healing also consumes food and you should wait until you have a steady supply of food before you spend points in it. Bon appetit!

1. Find the IP address of your two favourite servers 2. Edit your hosts file and add the lines: 1.2.3 4 fav1 5.6.7.8 fav2 Where 1.2 3.4 is the server's IP, and fav1 is any short name you like. Now any time you want to join that server, just direct connect and type in fav1 or fav2 and forget searching. I am currently on a phone so if you need more detailed info, I can return tomorrow to provide it.

I thought I saw one of the mods say it was part of joining Game Pass. It was a vague cross reference, so don't take my word for it.

You mean complaints were made years ago? If it's a replicable bug report, can you post a copy here? If a packet dump or trace is available, I'd love to have a look myself.

Submitting replicatable bug reports helps pointing out mistakes. Making generic critical comments like the netcode is trash, and comparing a real time strategy game with a couple hundred units to a first person shooter with tens of thousands of entities and blocks needing stability checks doesn't help improve the game.

It's not that bad. It's 95% to country, and about 75% to city: https://www.arin.net/blog/2018/06/11/ip-geolocation-the-good-the-bad-the-frustrating/ and the game is only trying to identify region. But is that the real issue anyway? That you're seeing a few French or Chinese servers sneak in? Or your server is being misclassified into the wrong region? Seems like it's just cumbersome to use is the main complaint. Perhaps a way to improve it is to browse to regions only, but as long as you have decently refined filter, (With criteria that don't need to ping thousands of servers to narrow your search), then a search could be allowed across "Any" region.

Nope. Worse. Even very decentralised networks like Bitcoin have hard coded default "peers", and Torrents have seed files to get them started before using the network to find more peers. How do you think a player finds a list of servers without asking TFP for them? Broadcast across the entire internet on port 26900 asking if they are a 7d2d server? It's a serious question. I'm curious as to how you think player matching works if TFP don't get involved at all.

Don't know. I haven't reverse engineered their protocol, but I have seen references to Steamworks, which means it could use the Steamworks Datagram Relay as part of the way to find player hosted games without revealing their IPs. But unless you're very certain it doesn't use any centralised resources at all, the point stands - you might not know what was the reason behind the new feature, and it could be a performance/scalability one.

Over the weekend, I was just playing around with how single thread speed and multi-thread speed affect FPS. While keeping the graphics card and the memory speed the same, I changed the number of available cores between 4 and 6, and the CPU clock speed between 4Ghz and 5.2Ghz per core. My findings was that additional cores did appear to be used - but had no discernible impact on FPS. The core speed did appear to impact minimum FPS, but not significantly raise average FPS. Single thread performance therefore does seem to impact the performance of the game, but not linearly, and there are other bottlenecks in play. I'd say that as long as your server is well speced, then an upgrade would see some improvement to your minimum FPS while in cities and there are a few zombies around.

Full disclosure - I only play on a single server that I host, so this feature isn't even relevant to me. However, as a network engineer, I'm probably a bit more aware than most that scalability is a huge issue. In most technologies that use a queue of any sort, there comes a point where a tiny bit of extra traffic causes huge latency. Think stuff like cars on the road - Apparently school holidays takes only 5-10% of cars off the road, but can reduce travel times by 30%+. Or your CPU - at 95% utilisation, everything feels normal. At 98% utilisation, it feels like everything is laggy and frozen. Same thing happens in networking where you are so close to capacity, you start wasting time with re-transmits, back offs and retries, etc. I don't know exactly how the server finder works, but from what I can observe, it seems like the client reaches out to a centralised server for a list of available servers. This part is very scalable. If there are 10 servers online, you get 10 results. If there are 100 servers online, the results returned to you are exactly 10x larger. Even to the tens of thousands, this is scalable. The next bit is still mostly scalable. It looks like your client then goes through that list and tries to retrieve data about it - latency, number of players, descriptions, etc. You would think if you double the number of servers, refreshing the list simply takes twice as long. Not exactly. Aside from the bandwidth used, any network device can only hold open a certain number of connections. But we still wouldn't be close to that limit. Where it becomes unscalable, is when you have more users and more servers. Imagine if you had 10 users searching for 10 servers. You'd have a total of 100 queries. Now imagine you have 100 players looking for 100 servers. You have 10,000 queries. If you had 10,000 players looking for 10,000 servers, you have 100 million queries going out, and each player really only cares about 1 server they want to join. It's extremely wasteful and at some point can cause network issues. So what was "perfectly fine to begin with", might not stay perfectly fine as the game grows in popularity - and perhaps they are expecting a spike in users and servers once the game goes gold and is no longer early release. I don't even know if Geo IP is how regional selection works. But if it was, it's one of the simpler methods of segmenting a network, and mostly effective, even with inaccurate location. You might have thought "Why try to fix something that was perfectly fine", but in reality, the old server finder might have been heading straight for a cliff you couldn't see. I know this sounds like a fan-boy defence of TFP, but it's something that can really get the goat of a lot of IT workers who have capacity planning as part of their job descriptions.

Of course. And once it's in game, I'll probably use it over my macro as well. But in the mean time, my goods are being shipped in the figurative pickup truck, and warehousing hasn't even agreed to break up the pallet yet. 🤣

You guys feel like some of my indecisive customers. Customer: "We need a way to carry one cubic meter of goods from point A to point B" Me: "Here, have a pickup truck" Customer Rep 1: "Yeah, right, spend money on a new pickup truck when we can get get the warehouse to break down that cubic meter into four lots of 0.25 cubic meters and fit it into our sedan" Customer Rep 2:"But some of our goods are longer than 3 meters, we can't break those up" Customer Rep 1: "Just stick those on the roof!" Customer Rep 2: "It might get wet up there" Me: *Drives off in pickup truck*

I ain't stopping you petitioning for the feature, just offering you a way to get it without relying on the devs.

Hmm. Recording macros seems easier to me than turning on a non-default action? This is my 7d2d Run Macro: But, to each their own. I solve problems with the tools I have, not wish for tools I don't have.

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?