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Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!


madmole

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!  

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  1. 1. Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

    • A18 Stable is Out!
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i think that there too easy to make

 

i think it IMO that it would cost a bit more iron! like 3 or 4

 

but aside form that i still love A18

 

I don't quite understand. You love A18 more when in asid form or not in asid form?

 

(Whoops - too fast. You see you corrected asid...) ; - )

 

(I suspect you mean 'from' instead of 'form' as well...)

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why get rid of "ground", like forest ground, blocks? hard to find level spots and those blocks help make that happen, I know there's other ways to, but that was one of the ways..

 

**edit: found a "dirt" block**

 

There is some new adaptive soil block that you want. It turns into whatever the block was originally.

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i dont know what kind of card i have my brother just gave me one of his friends old pc. lol

 

 

and ik i dont know anything about PC gaming!

 

You can check what card is in the PC with settings system info. Our old cards are fine for a18 with medium settings, and for $100 are a great value.

 

There are plenty of them on eBay, but don't spend $200 on a new one if you choose to upgrade. Just get a used one that is working.

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I don't get it...

 

I created a new game 4K map on my laptop (razor) with i7/16GB 512SSD and GTX1060 and I am playing in FULL HD on ULTRA and getting 60FPS outside.

 

I only turned off Motion Blur and I have the NVidia GPU Anisotropic Filtering to x2.

 

the game is LOCAL not online.

 

yet my high-end gaming rig at home with GTX 1060/6BG I7/32GB 2x 512SSD struggles on High to get 10-15FPS.

 

is there a difference between local and online when it come to textures/graphics?

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yes my laptop has sensitive keys lol

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

You can check what card is in the PC with settings system info. Our old cards are fine for a18 with medium settings, and for $100 are a great value.

 

There are plenty of them on eBay, but don't spend $200 on a new one if you choose to upgrade. Just get a used one that is working.

 

i really dont have the money so for now i'll stick with potato. thxs tho :D

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Yes this is the intent. Its still a huge quest to make a repair kit if you are on day 1 and don't know the game yet, unless you are lucky enough to buy forged iron and duct tape from a trader.

 

I like that you made them for everything too, saves me a couple of inventory slots, I used to always carry forged iron and/or steel on me, in addition to repair kits for weapons, just so I could repair those tools while out and about. Now I just need one stack of repair kits: sold. Is a smooth refinement imho.

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yes my laptop has sensitive keys lol

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

 

 

i really dont have the money so for now i'll stick with potato. thxs tho :D

 

I understand that. We have four computers that play PC games and three gaming consoles. It gets very expensive when you have a family who all play video games..You'll find yourself spending thousands of dollars very quickly to upgrade stuff all the time. I try to optimize and tweak things to work as well as possible before I ever upgrade anything.

 

We use lower native monitors on a few of them which helps dramatically. If I buy a brand new GPU that can run something at 4K, but it starts to get slow - I put that GPU on the 1080P monitor and it still looks nice and crisp but runs good - then when it gets slow on the 1080p monitor - i retire it to at 1360x768 (720P) monitor...before finally giving it away to a non-gamer friend or family. This way I'm never having to buy 4 brand new GPUs all the time. They cycle through all the computers that way. I do similar with memory, CPU - I try to keep the same gen of mobo on at least two or three of them for that purpose. Saves a lot of money. I simply couldn't justify upgrading 4 computers every few years on top of all the brand new consoles, hand-helds, and everything else my family wants all the time. :p

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I have a question:

 

Why are "open" cabinets even a thing in the furniture helper menu. Like, who would use those and why, can't think of a single scenario. Just seems like extra clutter in that menu.

 

Furthermore, why can't you just make them all have open and closed states in the first place? I tend to overtake POIs for my main base, then build BM towers from scratch. One of my fav things is making use of existing furniture, like stoves to store pots, grills etc. Fridges for food. Sinks for jars and water, etc. Right now I keep my coffee, beans and seeds in a coffeepot, is fun. But in A17 and now in A18 I get so many dud cabinets and fridges etc that I have to destroy them and replace them. Why not just have the model different when they are empty, open, and then revert to the closed model when they have stuff in them. I imagine there is some technical hurdle, but can it, should it, be overcome? I think it would make far more sense and be worth the effort.

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I understand that. We have four computers that play PC games and three gaming consoles. It gets very expensive when you have a family who all play video games..You'll find yourself spending thousands of dollars very quickly to upgrade stuff all the time. I try to optimize and tweak things to work as well as possible before I ever upgrade anything.

 

We use lower native monitors on a few of them which helps dramatically. If I buy a brand new GPU that can run something at 4K, but it starts to get slow - I put that GPU on the 1080P monitor and it still looks nice and crisp but runs good - then when it gets slow on the 1080p monitor - i retire it to at 1360x768 (720P) monitor...before finally giving it away to a non-gamer friend or family. This way I'm never having to buy 4 brand new GPUs all the time. They cycle through all the computers that way. I do similar with memory, CPU - I try to keep the same gen of mobo on at least two or three of them for that purpose. Saves a lot of money. I simply couldn't justify upgrading 4 computers every few years on top of all the brand new consoles, hand-helds, and everything else my family wants all the time. :p

 

i'm a only child and i just got a Pc and a Xbox. but thx for understanding.

 

also i only uses my PC to play a few games. 7dtd is one of them

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Wrenching some cars, randomly (3 so far in this city), and they like to dance:

 

 

Ghost Car!!!!

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I have a question:

 

Why are "open" cabinets even a thing in the furniture helper menu. Like, who would use those and why, can't think of a single scenario. Just seems like extra clutter in that menu.

 

Furthermore, why can't you just make them all have open and closed states in the first place? I tend to overtake POIs for my main base, then build BM towers from scratch. One of my fav things is making use of existing furniture, like stoves to store pots, grills etc. Fridges for food. Sinks for jars and water, etc. Right now I keep my coffee, beans and seeds in a coffeepot, is fun. But in A17 and now in A18 I get so many dud cabinets and fridges etc that I have to destroy them and replace them. Why not just have the model different when they are empty, open, and then revert to the closed model when they have stuff in them. I imagine there is some technical hurdle, but can it, should it, be overcome? I think it would make far more sense and be worth the effort.

 

one day i want working stove that cooks food and can hold water like a generator for cooking! like this!!!!!

 

1200px-CookingStove.png

 

also i think that you should be able to find , build or buy all furniture

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Love the dynamic nature of confrontations.

 

I had two heavy army like zombies on my tail when a pack of wolves came out of no where and took on the zombies.

 

I ran off into a narrow fenced area near farm land which happened to have some spikes spread out near by.

 

Observed the mayhem from afar..

 

The wolves took out the two heavy zombies which I then popped each wolf with my AK for meat for days !!!!!!... :)

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After lots of testing i've come to some new insights.

Lets recap:

My system is i5 4690k running 4 cores @ 4.2Ghz / 16GB ram / amd RX480 8GB.

Running the game fullscreen @ 1080p on a 144Hz monitor with vsync on. FPS is therefore capped @ 144. Running latest (october release) AMD drivers. Using DX mode ingame. All FPS numbers are taken when looking at the same exact spot.

 

In a17.4 i was running most settings on high/ultra except the DoF, Motion Blur,Shadows and reflection and getting ~60-70 FPS both indoors and outdoors. Basically always smooth and no noticable drops.

 

In a18 (with quality preset to High and Occusion set to off))this drops to ~20fps when outside. (Indoors, this is 80+ FPS. This is when sitting at a relatively high spot and looking over lots of terrain, so it is kind of worst case. Biome doesnt seem matter, it happened in desert, snow and forest so far.

 

With quality preset set to low, this jump to about 28 FPS.

 

Using my old A17 settings with streaming ON and occlusion OFF. (very similar to high preset except with lower shadows/reflections and DoF/Motion blur/Bloom OFF)

 

Game DefaultFiltering - 18 FPS

anisotropic filtering set to x16 - 18fps

anisotropic filtering set to x8 - 22fps

anisotropic filtering set to x4 - 28fps

anisotropic filtering set to x2 - 38fps with Morphological Filtering on, still 38FPS

anisotropic filtering set to x2 - with "Performance" filtering in drivers ON - 42 FPS. (btw i've never seen this setting have any affect in any game, ever)

 

There should never be this kind of impact with anisotropic filtering. Not on this kind of hardware in this day and age. Even so, the FPS is still not were it should be (around a17 level) with very low anisotropic filtering.

Still it might be a good indication where to look. (I know the texture filtering is done in a shader since a few game updates)

 

Edit: Also, Turning on AA ingame makes 0 difference on FPS with either low or high ingame settings.

 

 

I did a pretty different benchmark related to textures.

 

I7 7700k, 16gb 3200, GTX 1080 8gb vram. 1080p, vsync off, no apps in background. Open forest area, no zombies near:

 

Medium preset: 84 fps

Medium preset, dt off: 98 fps

Medium with quarter textures: 105 fps

Medium with quarter textures, dt off: 118 fps

High preset: 60fps

High with half textures: 74 fps

High with half textures, dt off: 82 fps

High with quarter textures: 90 fps

High with quarter textures, dt off: 99 fps

 

 

Now lets investigate further with no bottlenecks. Everything to the lowest setting, vsync off, 1080p, texture streaming and occlusion off. Then started to increase settings one by one.

 

All to the lowest, no zombies near: 125fps, 3747mb vram used (msi afterburner overlay)

Same but DT off: 120fps

All to the lowest but textures from quarter to half: 100fps, 4750mb vram used

Same but DT off: 125fps

All to the lowest but textures from half to full: 76 fps, 6997mb vram used.

Same but DT off: 95fps

 

 

Touching all other settings gives little difference when I'm bounded with high texture settings.

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Love the dynamic nature of confrontations.

 

I had two heavy army like zombies on my tail when a pack of wolves came out of no where and took on the zombies.

 

I ran off into a narrow fenced area near farm land which happened to have some spikes spread out near by.

 

Observed the mayhem from afar..

 

The wolves took out the two heavy zombies which I then popped each wolf with my AK for meat for days !!!!!!... :)

 

i think if zombies kill them they should eat them and vice versa!

 

and there should be zombie's for almost every hostile animals like boar , mountain lion , coyote and wolf!

 

AND some mutated animals like Chickens and rabbits are a bit larger , wolfs and coyotes increase in size and have bigger muscles, deer are bigger and males will attack you! , boars are bigger and are very violent! , snakes increase of size. and the Bears are 3xs bigger and his arms make the tank from L4D look like a scrawny tooth pick! and the mountain lion is 2xs bigger and has large sabertooth like teeth.

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All to the lowest but textures from half to full: 76 fps, 6997mb vram used.

 

 

It's just WAYY too much VRAM (relative to the actual quality of the textures). That excludes at least half (probably more) of the people who play the game from even using the intended textures without eventually or immediately slowing down to a crawl. From best I can tell, to avoid any performance penalty you need at least 8GB of VRAM. You can get by with 6GB of VRAM - but with extended playthroughs - you might eventually start thrashing and the FPS will even suffer with that - you might have to do that 'mem' command or alt-tab or something to flush it. With 4GB of VRAM - your FPS is definitely suffering as a result and how playable it will be will just depend on how much bandwidth you have in the pipe..3GB cards and below would probably always dip below 30fps frequently except when in a POI or looking at the sky or ground due to texture overload.

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That's interesting Hellknight. Texture size has almost no real impact for me FPS wise. But im pretty positive that's because my bottleneck is elsewhere (shaders). I'm sure once that's fixed, my FPS jumps significally and texture size becomes a real part of the performance equation.

 

What type of texture filtering are you running?

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Did you disable occlusion and get better fps outdoors?

 

 

No. I tested it again and again last night and after a few hours, while sometimes it seemed to, Occlusion is indeed making it better. It works because when I turn it off the performance drops around a 30%.It is indeed increasing fps. So is texture streaming. While in GOD MODE I think I found out the real problem for the performance drop. Just look at this images:

 

TEST IN LOWEST SETTINGS OCCLUDER ON TEXTURE STREAMING ON.

 

20191009172959_1.jpg.7f2c3e9fab33f351a24c95d26bd5378e.jpg

20191009172922_1.thumb.jpg.de42293f64a83429bb11e6a2cd528647.jpg

20191009172915_1.jpg.a3d0fea08db2ab8658d478d088e504f9.jpg

 

 

Seems like the game is rendering every single tiled terrain texture above and below ground and FULL DETAIL every time you move, and guess what, the fps drop is mathematically consistent to the volume of those 4 faces being rendered in real time. I used to get 90-100 fps in a17.4 (60 if I fix my fps to screen refresh rate). Now I get what the screenshots show with drops to the single digits that worsen the faster I move.

 

Make no mistake, that is not per chunk. Every time you move the game renders those faces block by block (texture map by texture map? I mean it's like a courtain rendering every block you move relative to the surface). I can literally see that cascade of redundant textures loading in my minimum specs rig when i go below ground in god mode.

 

In a17.4 there was the same problem but with a HUGE difference: those textures below ground were just low resolution stretched lines. Look at this images from a17.4 with fps included:

 

TEST IN LOWEST SETTINGS

 

20191009175816_1.thumb.jpg.398dc7c2626083e04c834cde24c6d87a.jpg

20191009175838_1.thumb.jpg.8642d9eb7ae6f61010fc58d7c64b2d4a.jpg

 

 

That seems to be the real reason why a18 performs crappy outdoors. In a17 it was a problem, but when the texture system improved fps took the full hit on lower rigs.

 

SUGGESTED FIXES:

 

Lazy ass but must have fix: Reduce the texture resolution of ground textures to match texture quality in video options. It should look way worse than it looks now if I chose 1 eight (Those images are 1 eighth texture size, they seem full detail)

 

Hard but awesome fix: Do not render anything below ground, period. No memory usage there. Hello bandits.

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