Jump to content

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!


madmole

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!  

3 members have voted

  1. 1. Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

    • A18 Stable is Out!
      2
    • :)
      1


Recommended Posts

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?

 

After I read that I went beck into my game and tried putting textures at full again. But this time I exited to the menu and did it from there, then restarted my save. Last time I tried it while paused in game, that's when it crashed. Glad I tried it again, worked and all is still smooth, and looks even better, woot woot.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

O.M.G

 

Mining helmets should just come with the mod in them, and you can always use it in another better helmet when you aquire it.

 

I've found exactly one mining helmet, so the rng gods might have been nice, but it came with the helmet light mod already installed. That adds to the helmet light mod I found on its' own. It's good to be lucky.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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.

 

 

 

Yeah We need more mutated animals.. Look at that bear from the film Annihilation. !!! - we need things like that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmm, not sure if this is intentional or not. So now a level 1 item has one mod slot, which is nice... but a level 2 only has one slot, what up with that?

 

From the release notes: "Faulty and poor quality items have one mod slot, fair and good quality items have two mod slots, great quality items have three mod slots, and fine quality items have four mod slots."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmm, not sure if this is intentional or not. So now a level 1 item has one mod slot, which is nice... but a level 2 only has one slot, what up with that?

Patch-notes :

"Faulty and poor quality items have one mod slot, fair and good quality items have two mod slots, great quality items have three mod slots, and fine quality items have four mod slots."

;)

 

EDIT : UNLIKE THEM ! Stop running faster than me :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

@madmole

On another subject the game feels great. Granted we're only day 3 but the early game feels challenging, rewarding and looting our first dungeon-type POI was super exciting. Took some amazing screenshots, we especially like the new ores very much, they look very polished. And the hills on Pregen01 are awesome, unless you're on top of one and there's no easy way down haha !

 

Thanks for this masterpiece !

 

Awesome I'm glad you like it!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am enjoying this Alpha so far, way better than 17 but there is a real and tangible issue here. To suggest that they will pull experimentals because of legitimate and valid complaints is the worst PR possible.

 

You guys went full steam ahead with this streamer weekend and promoted to as many people as possible this release was coming. You welcomed with open arms the praise, the rave reviews and scoffed at the haters, raising a nose to anyone who thought 18 would be met with mixed results. And the Alpha itself is great and many agree.

 

Experimental used to be much quieter, therefore issues such as this were kept more confined. You're playing with big boys now by using streamers to advertise. You get the same eyes on you as Bethesda and Blizzard. You cant just take your ball and go home because criticism rolls in. Casual gamers are going to leave bad reviews because casual gamers have no knowledge of what experimental or EA is. Just look at all the console posts you get. STILL. Even after answers were given.

 

And you are saying that QA could be used to catch the issues with FPS behind closed doors over several months? Problem there is people with no QA tag associated with them caught it in.... 10 minutes. And solutions started rolling in a few hours later, or at least solutions that could be investigated. Everyone working together to help fix it, offers of actual help looking at things. THAT is a success to experimental but you guys are so damn focused on publicity and reviews you cant even see that.

 

Youre ALWAYS going to get troll reviews. Ignore them. Did NO one in QA have any FPS problems? If not it may be time to expand your team with testers who have different types of hardware.

 

Can we keep the discussion to A18 game play, bugs, performance and not discuss our past business decisions? And leave the drama at your discord, we're trying to run a business here. All we care about is fixing bugs and getting the performance problems solved so people can enjoy the software. Roland you too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Fataal

 

Could the performance issues have anything to do with Chunks? I've had awesome performance up until Day 10 When I decided to leave my little area and head to another city/biome. I went from 90fps outdoors to 15fps when I left my city limits. Up until that I never my city. My performance stayed pretty bad even when I returned home, then it slowly started to get better.

 

I wonder if chunks are not unloading properly or whatever. Super weird.

 

I think its the splat map shader is just super expensive to some cards.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I like this alpha. Melee is now a real challenge. I got infected on the second day, and there are no antibiotics and honey, the merchant also (I play with 25% loot)

In alpha 17, I just walked on a relaxed, zombies were not dangerous.

Thanks for playing.

And yes, 25 fps outside the city, fix it please

 

Chop tree stumps for honey, otherwise medicine cabinets in houses and traders.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think its the splat map shader is just super expensive to some cards.

 

This could very well be the case since the shaders on my hardware are very much overloaded/bottlenecked by something.

 

There's still people with the same graphics cards having much different experiences but that could be attributed to different filtering settings, resolution, etc etc.

 

Any idea's how to solve this in the short term?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Awesome to hear! I meant to pop in your channel and see how you were liking the mid game or wherever you are at by now.

 

Madmole - does it seem weird that the graphics on the spears seems backward? The stone spear has a nicely shaped stone with clean wrapping holding it to the shaft, but the steel spear honestly looks like a random piece of metal that has been sharpened and stuck on the end of a stick? I mean the image looks good if you are ever going to implement different graphics of items based on quality with the stone spear being a level 5-6 type and the steel being a level 1-2.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This could very well be the case since the shaders on my hardware are very much overloaded/bottlenecked by something.

 

There's still people with the same graphics cards having much different experiences but that could be attributed to different filtering settings, resolution, etc etc.

 

Any idea's how to solve this in the short term?

 

There used to be away to force shader models. I haven't done it in a long time. On Nvidia, I think you could use Nvidia Inspector to force the driver to report a lower shader model to the API. Could goof around with that. Unity also has this in the way of DX feature levels..but you have to do it differently now than before due to the launcher changes. The game will automatically supply the force DX11 max feature level command at startup even if you put in your own command on the steam client or launcher. You can either try to use the boot config file in the data directory to possibly override it or make your own shortcut and add the command lines there. I'm not able to goof with that right now to even know if it works. Game uses shader model 5.0, iirc, so you could try to force shader model 4.x - which I believe works with most DX11 shaders and it might have a faster pathway on certain cards or something. Long time since I really did any of that stuff though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Only managed 4 days so far, Holed up on the roof of Academy. Not really spec points into anything yet only found guns on day 4 but got pump shot gun so happy boy.

So far i search around 20 remnants 2 houses and a pass and gas, only found the miner coffee book, done 1 quest for buried supplies, no deaths and seen no animals in burn zone on a RGW.

Got around 60fps occassional drop to 40fps out doors but it will do for me at this stage of experimental, can't wait to have a full sit down over the weekend but great job TFP loving it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wonder why mine doesn't have the mod in it? There is no gear, and I spawned in one from cm as well to see if that one worked, but it also had no mod in it or gear over it.

 

I'll see if I can find a second, and report here if it has the mod in it.

 

It might be just an oddball quirk.

 

Also, I noticed the pocket mod can't go into the mining helmet anymore. There was also some leg armor it could no longer go into.

 

Does the pocket mod only go into chest armor now?

Because you spawned one in is why. Ones found in loot have lights installed.

 

There are two classes of pockets, and I probably need to word them better to fix the confusion. The ones that look like a blue jeans pocket and the one that is a brown cargo pocket go into pants, shirts and coats. The ones that are green go into armor which is head, hands, feet, leg armor and body armor.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I thought that too at first, however, the repair kits are relatively cheap to make now so it means any tools or weapons you find are reusable even early in the game. It now makes perfect sense to me.

 

I'm on the fence regarding this change. On the one hand I liked that you needed to repair with the materials of the tool. It felt reasonable to make repairs and I would wait to use a higher tier tool until I had the materials to routinely repair it. On the other hand, I just found a steel shovel by day 3 and with the new repair scheme, I can maintain it right away. Shout out to trader Bob for having a working forge.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read the opposite a 1000 times, can you be more specific?

 

I know for me melee has been a bit interesting. I'm sticking with spears because they have range. I haven't got that far in yet, but I've also tried the club, stun batons, and iron reinforced club. I'm hosting a server for my friend and I to play on. I've noticed that other than the spear, the other weapons have shorter range than zombie melee, which to me makes no sense. Many times I could have a zombie in my face, swing, the crosshair on the zombie the whole time, and it doesn't hit, not even a glancing hit. Even sneaking up on sleeper zombies, I can get within like a foot of a zombie, swing while they are sleeping, and not hit either. Only thing I don't have issues with is the spear. I probably won't even try to use any other melee because of this. I have not tried to play a solo game yet, so it may be because of the server, but I never had this issue prior a18.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A quick question, when you plan for the next unstable release of A18?

 

Not sarcastic, neither a joke.

 

The game is AWESOME from a gamplay mechanics perspective, but from a graphical perspective, i can only play at 40-50fps only if i play in low screen resolution(1.2k:780 rez) and gfx dt and some tweaks in biome.xml.

 

Can you guys release a hotfix for fps lag issue? Was it identified from where it comes? :D

 

Thanks,

Chris

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...