Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[AngryGamer]

For those with bad FPS when they go outdoors and look at terrain, you can try this in the console:

 

gfx dt

 

That will toggle distant terrain off/on. Does your FPS jump back up with it off?

 

Yes it does.

[faatal]

Is there any way possible to make a separate texture option just for the distant terrain so that you could for example put distant terrain texture quality on "Half" and leave others on "Full" and other combinations like that - i guess going further - could it be possible to say put weapon textures, biome textures, distant textures, and creature textures all in their own categories or are all the textures in one pool with no way to allow manual adjustments in that way.

 

It seems to me that the texture quality of distant terrain is almost overkill compared to the other "Half" textures. The distant terrain, as pretty as it is - looks better than everything else when you're just playing on medium. You'd think the distant terrain would take second seat to the forefront textures..

 

Yes. I just was testing distant terrain textures. I'm pretty sure we can down sample our distant terrain texture arrays, because there is no way you can see a 2k texture when the closest you can get to it on the screen is like 20% the height of the screen. That would mean at 4k monitor res, that texture is about 400 pixels tall. Talk about overkill. Plan on trying that tomorrow. Been a long day.

[DaVegaNL]

Yeah I have to say A18 is one of the smoothest experimental version to date! It's really awesome!

[The-Walking-Dad]

Very well done with this alpha! Running really smoothly and loving the new spear.

[minisith]

Is anyone else becoming thirsty and hungry at 75 water or food?

[DaVegaNL]

00 What are you talking about? Those are still in the game.

 

Yeah but not so many anymore man!

I miss my rock friends

[Syrex]

Tree falls are a little wonky.. sometimes they fall normal, other times they turn 90 degrees on an axis and then fall. Little trees, big trees, on a hill, on flat land -- cant seem to find a reason why

[Gazz]

I was very excited for the spear but it feels ridiculous. It's just way way way too slow when thrown.

No way, no how.

Players are already raging over missing zombies and losing their spears in the grass despite the pulsing red shader glow.

Oops, pardon, I meant spears totally flying through zombies and disappearing in the terrain forever.

[ArMaReZ]

I love you The Fun Pimps

 

[DaVegaNL]

I say I have to get used to having to let the reload animation fully play out on the bow, else you don't end up with an arrow loaded next time you switch to the bow.

[Mechanimal]

Just encountered the weirdest bug. If it happens again, or if you hear of it otherwise I'll get a screenshot/make a report.

 

So, basically, some blocks in a POI vanished. I did place a door, then went in room, turned around and 4 blocks on side and above door were simply gone, poof.

 

Maybe it was the door I placed? Dunno, and I remember this POI from A17. The yellow loft style A-Frame, it's on the western lake in Navezgane.

 

I mean it's an easy fix, just place some replacement blocks, buuuut what in the... I'm just hoping it was a fluke, again I will elaborate if it happens again or if anyone else encounters it.

 

OTHERWISE I am having a blast, been in game instead of forums, so that's a good sign. A18 truly is Amazeballs!

 

Gonna get back to it, just poppin in to see if this has happened to anyone else.

[Damocles]

There are some console shader warnings that we have determined are a bug in Unity. We will update Unity at some point, but we need solid testing on a newer version first, because there are often new Unity bugs in newer versions. Last time I tried an update, it crashed the editor every 5 minutes.

Is this the cause? :

 

**********

WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Nature/Terrain/Utilities' - All passes removed

ERROR: Shader Shader is not supported on this GPU (none of subshaders/fallbacks are suitable)WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Nature/Terrain/Utilities' - Setting to default shader.

**********

 

I have it, and seen it in other logs. (my card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB)

 

This then probably causes the console message:

 

**********

Detail rendering shaders not found for the active render pipeline, falling back to default shader.

(Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Modules/Terrain/Public/DetailRenderer.cpp Line: 66)

**********

 

That might help:

"OK, this is fixed by adding the standard terrain shader to the build. Project Settings -> Graphics -> Always Included Shaders. Add Terrain/Standard."

https://forum.unity.com/threads/using-terrain-drawinstanced-in-a-build-shader-unsupported-hidden-nature-terrain-utilities.709418/

[Gazz]

I love you The Fun Pimps

Oh noes! You found a totally secret thing! LOL

[Aurelius]

Rule #1, never get encumbered. Drop a chest on the ground, mark it on your map and put the crap you can't use yet in it, like brass, mechanical parts, engines etc. If you stray from this advice, make sure you have at least 70 rounds of ammo and an ak or smg.

 

So to be clear, Alabaster's point was that he was meeting feral/rager zombies (the glowing eye'd zed's) on day 2 - and you are OK with this?

 

So far, I'm four for four game starts meeting ferals on day 2 in the AM. They've usually been wandering around my location from the night before.

 

I'm also four for four games where I've had a pack of dogs home in on my location, on Day 2 in the afternoon.

 

I don't think that falls within the definition of "low chance."

 

-A

[Aurelius]

Two glaring balance issues. Way too many bullets in looting

 

You shut your filthy mouth!

 

-A

 

j/k

[Moonflower]

Have to disagree there are plenty of zombies outside, maybe they arent crawling at every single spot, but i was surrounded by zombies on multiple occasions, there were easily 4-5 in my field of view.

[archergod]

There are some console shader warnings that we have determined are a bug in Unity. We will update Unity at some point, but we need solid testing on a newer version first, because there are often new Unity bugs in newer versions. Last time I tried an update, it crashed the editor every 5 minutes.

 

So I am stuck with low FPS ? or is there any work around? I will try to reinstall game though.

[Gazz]

Way too many bullets in looting

Fine.

 

Bug: Perlin_Worm capable of aiming

Expected result: Perlin_Worm misses way more.

[TSBX]

RE: The Spear,

 

People keep losing it because they are spam-throwing it which leads to more misses, which in turns causes more 'critical misses' that end up with spending 5 minutes trying to figure out where it went.

 

The crux of the problem is that behavior is encouraged by the ability to instantly retrieve a thrown spear from a zombie. The throw should be used as a coup-de-grace or a way to knock down a zombie so you can finish it off with another melee weapon.

 

I've been playing with a gentleman's rule that I can only pull out the spear once the zombie is dead, which has led to some riveting combat and emergent gameplay. It's been a blast.

 

Adding a glow or a map icon or the like is not a real solution, it's a band-aid for a bad mechanic. Throwing your weapon should be a calculated risk or last resort, not an opportunity to mash buttons.

[kuratowakiru]

so far, got my ass kick several times, there aren't a million zombie on the screen, yet it feel like there always one around the corner. I'm starving so I got low stam so I HAVE to use a gun, haven't found a town yet, in constant state of this isn't ideal, but it will have to do for now, all that aws just first day. Love A18.

 

although I'm one of the unfortunate one with fps issues. gfx dt command only give me about 5 extra fps so I'm gonna stick with half texture, everything on mid~low and 1600x900 reso

[-Holo-]

It varies from system to system, if you have enough cpu to afford it, its a win, if not the calculations can cost more than the gains.

 

Tech question about that, does it use the same core(s) as the game or does it take advantage of free mostly unused cores?

(that would definitly tip me over to get a Ryzen 6+ core CPU next upgrade )

[JCrook1028]

Nope, you will run out of ammo and be mining your ass off to keep armed soon enough. Feathers are only for stone arrows now, polymers for the good arrows, so feather balance is perfect. Perks increase arrow retrieval rate too.

 

That's simply not true. Both stone and iron arrows use feathers. Only steel arrows use plastic. I'm feeling the feather nerf hard as I like to use the bow. Steel arrows are quite a ways down the road so maybe turning up the feather loot a touch is worth looking at.

[Pico]

So I am stuck with low FPS ? or is there any work around? I will try to reinstall game though.

 

Fataal's earlier advice to turn off Distant Terrain has worked well for me (although I still find bad lag in Inventory and Cookingpot menus).

 

His suggestion: Go into console (F1). Turn off Dist Terrain (gfx dt).

Repeat the process to get dist terrain back when you need it.

 

It's made the game playable again, and I've been able to lift many grafics options to a pleasant level with DT disabled.

[TSRViper]

Hey TFP - A18 is awesome!

 

A few minor glitches here and there but overall a very soft landing as far as my game play goes.

 

Well done all!

[Pico]

So to be clear, Alabaster's point was that he was meeting feral/rager zombies (the glowing eye'd zed's) on day 2 - and you are OK with this?

 

So far, I'm four for four game starts meeting ferals on day 2 in the AM. They've usually been wandering around my location from the night before.

 

I'm also four for four games where I've had a pack of dogs home in on my location, on Day 2 in the afternoon.

 

I don't think that falls within the definition of "low chance."

 

-A

 

Yeah, MM has previously acknowledged his preferred technique is to configure stuff way harder than it likely needs to be, then to wind it back in later updates, depending on all the griping from the players.

 

My own grizzles include the dog pack at way too early a stage, but top of my list is the frequency of infections, and the relatively low incidence of cures (at least thats the case in the early gamestages).

 

Snow biome was awash with Snow Zombies. Took a bunch of damage from them, then had a glowing eyed Wolf, followed by a Cougar to finish me off.... Day 2. Sheesh.

 

However... I may just need to adjust my playstyle. A17 made it too easy to go melee all the way (and to attack everything), and that is proving to be a bad way to start in A18... so back to arrows and maybe spear for my primary attack/defense I think... at least until I've got some armour, strength and other attributes to back up a melee playstyle.