Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[dhlmaster]

I've only got a few hours in, but so far this is the smoothest running experimental build I have participated in. I'm not having the low FPS issues others are having. I have an i7 8700, rtx 2080ti with 11gb vram, and 32 gb system ram. I'm running on mostly ultra, minus shadows. 1440p is holding a steady 59 to 61 fps most of the time. I saw it start dipping down to 55fps after a couple hours, but I wouldn't have even noticed the difference if not for the fps counter on my screen. I haven't personally run into any bugs I can confirm, except that I thought pummel Pete would increase the quality of my club crafting. Maybe 2nd rank is needed? I bought 1st rank of pummel Pete and still crafted a q1 club. A few people on my server were claiming that if they logged out with a broken leg, then logged back in, it was healed. Didn't verify this for myself yet, so I'm not filing a bug report unless I see it in action.

[Masiher]

I have feeling that most of the optimization went into CPU and ram than GPU and vram this experimental. That's why a lot of people with not so great graphic cards have problems.

 

So far i turned my textures to half and everything to low or off and its around 30-70 now.

 

Still I'm having a blast using new spear and club. Game does not have those weird stutters as before in a17. Blades feels like they are viable now. Food is not a problem (i through it will be) as it seems. Trader quests feels like they were buffed but for me it works. Stone tools also looks like they get buffed. I dunno if intentional but stone axe seems to work and yield the same as wrench.

[Jay_ombie]

•Snowdog1942•

 

Same here the melee animations just feel wrong with the half swings.

 

Maybe have them like as they are when they make contact else let the swing follow through specially with heavy hammers etc.

[vonstorm]

Had to log in just to say - Well done. This is by far the best Alpha since the square stepped hills. I have worries when I eat or drink, Zombies are scary on day 1, and I have reason to loot like a Visigoth. Best of all I feel like I have control of my playstyle again, and feel that planning a character matters.

[MechanicalLens]

You didn't type in debug shot, so that doesn't help us. Debug shot gives us the position, seed name, etc.

 

Right, sorry about that. I had a million things to do that night so I guess it just slipped by my mind. I'll have it by today sometime!

[SnowDog1942]

Had to log in just to say - Well done. This is by far the best Alpha since the square stepped hills. I have worries when I eat or drink, Zombies are scary on day 1, and I have reason to loot like a Visigoth. Best of all I feel like I have control of my playstyle again, and feel that planning a character matters.

 

 

Visigoth? Jeeeesus Chriiiiist....

 

Blah, no ones gonna get this reference

[MechanicalLens]

It should be night only. I wonder if you are seeing night zombies still around after the day begins?

 

We are. Post 11:00 AM I still saw a spider zombie wandering around my base.

[canadianbluebeer]

So far, A18 is living up to the hype.

 

The zeds snuffling about at night, very very creepy. Nope, t'ain't goin' out thar. nope. nope. nope!

 

Enrage: just nasty. got me kilt once. mumble.

 

Feathers: lots of them, just hit EVERY bird nest, I'm doing fine on those. Takes a LOT of arrows though to kill stuff.

 

Spear: love it.

 

Performance is fine, no real difference I can see from 17 on linux, with most things cranked up. A few odd things to be expected in an E release. (crash talking to trader, etc)

 

Music system is nice, still fiddling with that. Spending a lot of time trying to decide where to put points. (40k for fergetting elixer? fergit that!) Overall, looks great, plays fine. Have to see how first horde goes. (gonna get munched, I just know it)

 

Oh, got food poisoning once already, barf, yer starving, and then had to eat up all the rest of my food to get back to normal. (day 2)

Don't like food poisoning. Took a point in Iron Stomach after that. Lotsa meat, lucked out with a pot and grill on day 1. THen got killed with the grill in the road chest (that was the stupid boar. got him and his brother when I went back)

 

First time playing without mods in a long time, and so far, 2 thumbs up an a shaken fist at ya!

 

Well done. Worth the wait.

 

[MechanicalLens]

You didn't type in debug shot, so that doesn't help us. Debug shot gives us the position, seed name, etc.

 

@MADMOLE The seed is: WhySoSerious

 

Here is the other info:

 

 

[Syrex]

@TFP:

 

the best i've sorted out is: in snow biome, when night falls my fps plummets. whether its all the moving tree parts, or the "fog / snow drift", or something else I get knocked down to about 5-10fps. I9-9900k, rtx 2070, 32gb ram. A relog seems to clear it up though, at least til the next night happens (120 min days).

 

Outside that hiccup, absolutely enjoying myself. The bow takes some getting use to (up to wooden bow atm). The spear is okay (not really a melee fan) but it is sometimes hard to tell if it hits the target, i mean i see the minor blood splat sometimes, sometimes theres a sound, but there is those times where you cant tell if it hit <<shrugs>> it does the job though for what it is (again not a melee fan, lol). Died once thus far (day 8, so 16 hours in). Normally go deathless till several hordes later so the threat is real, love the challenge (rage zombies). The radial menu for blocks -- yes, yes, yes... Just cleared the BIG pig area, so meat for days (or at least for a couple hours hahaha). No real bugs to speak of, only oddities (other than fps drop every so often) are the tree oddity i mentioned earlier and my bag from death (which is still on my compass 15 hours later) sooo LOOKS GOOD 11/10 would buy again.. Thanks for all the effort TFP!

[Gazz]

ok people saying junk turrets are op? finally killed my first zed with a yellow junk turret... took 20 shots. no perks yet, but peeps saying it is op straight out? bull♥♥♥♥

On the weekend they were arguably OP. Mainly the ROF was high enough to reliably stun-lock everything.

 

Now... a turret MAY solo kill a small zombie most of the time but it will at best slow down 2 or 3 that are charging you.

 

The turret perk changes all that. If you're serious about turrets they become proper badasses, just like every other weapon type.

[RestInPieces]

@TFP

 

Found three more people having the same graphical artifacts with 5700/5700xt:

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?127932-Graphical-artifacts

 

PS: Launching with OpenGL fixes the problem (however it's obviously not a good alternative).

[Wulf]

@Faatal

 

Changing the distant terrain to off, using the gfx dt setting gives me back about 5-10 FPS. So i go from ~25 to ~30/35.

Doesnt look like that's it. I should be getting more than double that on this setup (60-70).

 

Is there anyway we can get a list of the gfx commands, so we can test ourselves? I tried 'help gfx' but that didnt do it.

 

'gfx pp enable 0' gives literally 0fps extra while dramatically changing the lighting for the worse.

 

There's something completely hogging my GPU to 100% load and it's not the textures since it's an 8GB card and i can see the VRAM util hovering between ~5 and 6GB.

When looking at a scene full of water, it's the same low FPS btw. It's not limited to distant terrain or anything. In the case of the waterscene it's probably the ground underneath the water that's causing it. Chaning any water settings doesnt affect it in the slightest.

[AlabasterW]

Another graphics saving console command is 'gfx pp enable 0', which turns off post-processing effects. It'll make the game a little flat and washed-out looking, but it can save an easy 5-10+ FPS depending on your settings. 'gfx dt' is a big one though.

[Roland]

Snow biome is meant to be a more difficult biome due to the wildlife. It isn’t a mistake or an imbalance that you could get killed on day 1 or 2 by a cougar, bear, or wolf. The mistake is entering the snow biome before you are ready and then not going slowly and carefully to be able to give those animals a wide berth when you see them before they see you.

[MajorMunchy]

Another graphics saving console command is 'gfx pp enable 0', which turns off post-processing effects. It'll make the game a little flat and washed-out looking, but it can save an easy 5-10+ FPS depending on your settings. 'gfx dt' is a big one though.

 

yea im late here, but were we not promised BETTER performance? I had a 40% decrease in FPS same settings as A17.4...? Plus random FPS drop to 10 when in a crafting menu

[TopAce6]

Is there anyway we can get a list of the gfx commands' date=' so we can test ourselves? I tried 'help gfx' but that didnt do it.[/color']

 

 

This Please.

[ArMaReZ]

Wooaahh, where did you find it?

 

I find this by looking at the xml "Item" and I found this wonder in creative mode

[Jedo]

Think this is the first Alpha release I've seen without major bugs, as compared to the previous 8 Alpha's!

Agreed. I’ve been stuck with reading (on vacation), but there only seems to be 1-2 major complaints. No doubt there is plenty of small things that they will address, but that’s a world of difference from the previous updates. Plus, most people really seem to like/respect/appreciate the balance and content changes. I’m really excited to play it next week!

 

yea im late here, but were we not promised BETTER performance? I had a 40% decrease in FPS same settings as A17.4...? Plus random FPS drop to 10 when in a crafting menu

It’s the second day of experimental. There are performance improvements (at least some people have noted them), but they have to debug it for the wide variety of PC rigs. This happened last alpha, but they eventually sorted that for most people. Just wait.

[Morloc]

- Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8GHz [4.6GHz Turbo] 12 Cores/ 24 Threads 70MB Cache 105W Processor

- GeForce RTX™ 2080 Ti 11GB GDDR6

- 32GB (8GBx4) DDR4/3200MHz Dual Channel Memory

- 1TB Corsair Force MP600 Series (PCIe Gen4) NVMe M.2 SSD - Seq R/W: Up to 4950/4250 MB/s, Rnd R/W up to 680/600k

 

 

60 FPS

 

 

 

 

-Morloc

[Locusta]

Is it alright depending so much on that attribute for mastering all tools? Tools should be like weapon crafting. The Wrench is obvious where it belongs . Miner69r for pickaxes, maybe... also shovels (Might be Ok to have 6 tools with similar objective I guess...). Hammer and nailgun... well... Grease Monkey perk? . I don't know. It wouldn't hurt a second pass of MM's wisdom on that stuff. It's not that you are not right when you insist on the subject of KISS, but 12 tools behind a perk is a little too "must have" ain't it? I'm not that hands-on a18 yet so correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I agree. Miner69r is maybe too powerful for a single perk. Seeing how intellect isn’t supposed to be a character build on its own, maybe it belongs in there? I dunno. I really think something might need some tweaking on that. I’m still having fun so far, despite the FPS and mouse lag (which I’ve remedied for the time being)!

 

 

Loc

[iBane]

18 had to be big because of the perk overhaul, we needed all the new weapons to flesh out each play style and make each build feel unique. Books were easy to do with the new framework and more will come in future alphas.

 

I love what you are saying, and that my hyperbolic state has infected you and many others I wrote the Duke's note, I'm glad you liked it

 

Now that we feel the game is in a great spot smaller updates will finally be possible.

 

A18 is a homerun so far. Runs great, tons of great additions and improvements, RWG is massively better, world is threatening, and on and on. Fantastic work TFPs!

[MajorMunchy]

- Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8GHz [4.6GHz Turbo] 12 Cores/ 24 Threads 70MB Cache 105W Processor

- GeForce RTX™ 2080 Ti 11GB GDDR6

- 32GB (8GBx4) DDR4/3200MHz Dual Channel Memory

- 1TB Corsair Force MP600 Series (PCIe Gen4) NVMe M.2 SSD - Seq R/W: Up to 4950/4250 MB/s, Rnd R/W up to 680/600k

 

 

60 FPS

 

 

 

 

-Morloc

 

This gets 60 and its a top of the line system....something is definitely going on lol

[MajorMunchy]

I just went and tried this on the worst GPU I had that had this problem A GTX 660 TI SC 2GB. I teleported to the desert where she was having this problem and let everything settle. It was averaging 30fps - I did that command it it instantly went to 60fps vsync..It also gets 60fps in the POIs virtually non-stop as well.

 

The settings are on the default "medium" preset with the only exception being the trees are on "high". Due to the age of the card, we have that hooked up to a monitor with a native resolution of only 1360x768 - but she plays it in 1280x720 with small borders all around it so that it still looks crisp and not blurry. This allows for the game to have a much smaller frame buffer and it normally runs the game exceptionally well and looks good that way. On a 1080p or beyond monitor - it would run much worse, of course.

 

If I put textures on "full" on that card the VRAM is constantly full and is paging in causing the FPS to just hover in the teens.

 

Edit* Also when I turn it back on the console is spammed with terrain shader errors. I noticed those errors before too. The error is that it couldn't use the shader for my render path (dx11) using default shader....spammed about 2 dozen or so times before it stops.

 

This shader path seems to be the bigest issue for anyone. anyone find a fix/work around?

[Kosmic Kerman]

This gets 60 and its a top of the line system....something is definitely going on lol

 

I’m getting 80 with a 1070 on medium+ settings. Don’t read to much into the reported 60. It could be capped, v-sync enabled, ultra settings, 4K resolution, etc.