Alpha 19 Dev Diary

[katarynna 115]

@madmole I thought one of the traders was supposed to specialize in food and seeds, but i have never seen seeds offered for purchase at any trader, either in my own game or any of the youtubers/streamers i watch. 

 

Is this an oversight, or are they just exceptionally rare?

 

Sort of on the same subject, any chance of adding 3 or so of random veggie seeds or farm plots to t1-2 quest rewards?

[Blake_ 328]

Hi @faatal , I posted some performance feedback with screenshots, output log and some suggestions that might help you further in optimizing a19. It's in the General Support section of the forums:

 

 

[faatal 1,359]

4 hours ago, Naz said:

I can't say for sure for that aspect ratio, i have a 21:9 3840x1600 and 7dtd seems to work quite well with it. The only 2 nit picks i have really is 1. the loading screen images get stretched, it's not too bad in 21:9 but it would be worse in 32:9 i'd imagine, but not a big issue. 2. some ui elements are sometimes not positioned conveniently for ultra wide users. Things like the buff pop outs and active quests are right in the far corners and can strain your eyes a bit stretching to look over there. But those are very minor issues and as a whole it works quite well on ultra wides, so i'd say go for it.

It is not something I've tried and I don't know of anyone on the team that has one. I use a 32 inch 4k 16:9 monitor for my main.

 

Running in windowed mode would allow us to test any aspect ratio.

[TECHMIKEMWO 1]

On 9/22/2020 at 9:55 PM, faatal said:

Do you know that this is a team with many different skill sets, like pretty much every game team? Most people on the team can't fix FPS issues, so they do spent their time working on their "stupid" stuff.

 

FPS issues don't have an "I Win" button you can press to make it all better. It takes lots of time to analyze performance and find bottlenecks, which then often have no easy fix, but to rewrite and retest something, which often results in minimal gains. Features have maximum limits at which they can be optimized to run.

 

I've actually been spending half my time the last few weeks doing that and cleaning up the project of old/unused files. For example, I found an old unneeded water depth camera, that was rendering nothing each frame. After time spend researching it, removing and testing, I saw a 3% FPS gain. Not much. Path grid updates have also been optimized, which is not something increasing overall FPS, but reduces frame spikes. Terrain shader has been updated for good gains. Tree batching/instancing is being analyzed and tweaked. To get large gains, you have to do that over and over on many systems. Today I started moving many of those improvements to 19.2 for testing, so the next exp will have them.

I  look at what they update every time  they  do one & none ever make sense  & from what I see it don't fix game play issues that  I notice. then I have  a friend who plays on a laptop & she's always complaining about fps issues even after changing settings & she still has issues. one of my issues is when mining the world glitches  & u can't see where  I'm mining that spot till I clear it.

[Naz 36]

1 hour ago, faatal said:

It is not something I've tried and I don't know of anyone on the team that has one. I use a 32 inch 4k 16:9 monitor for my main.

 

Running in windowed mode would allow us to test any aspect ratio.

Looks like this
 

Spoiler

 

[madmole 3,545]

3 hours ago, katarynna said:

@madmole I thought one of the traders was supposed to specialize in food and seeds, but i have never seen seeds offered for purchase at any trader, either in my own game or any of the youtubers/streamers i watch. 

 

Is this an oversight, or are they just exceptionally rare?

 

Sort of on the same subject, any chance of adding 3 or so of random veggie seeds or farm plots to t1-2 quest rewards?

It is a bug I noticed and tried fixing, but it's an engine bug. I reported it to Prime so once he gets that fixed Traders Rekt will be selling seeds.

 

[Yoshino 16]

Hi Fun Pimps,

 

Could you tell me, please?
Do you plan to expand the color palette?
Please add many different paints. 
Builders ask for a lot of paint

 

Edited October 1, 2020 by Yoshino (see edit history)

[Adam the Waster 696]

18 minutes ago, madmole said:

It is a bug I noticed and tried fixing, but it's an engine bug. I reported it to Prime so once he gets that fixed Traders Rekt will be selling seeds.

 

Wait! Engines have bugs!

 

Thats Stupid! everything has bugs!


Life, my houses, Games, Cars, and Game engines! Smh

[madmole 3,545]

21 hours ago, Yoshino said:

Hi Fun Pimps,

 

Could you tell me, please?
Do you plan to expand the color palette?
Please add many different paints. 
Builders ask for a lot of paint

 

Not without some serious framework changes or addition of tinting.

[mr.devolver 270]

On 10/1/2020 at 10:26 PM, madmole said:

It is a bug I noticed and tried fixing, but it's an engine bug. I reported it to Prime so once he gets that fixed Traders Rekt will be selling seeds.

So trader Rekt will be the farm guy? Who would have guessed? I don't know why, but I always thought this grumpy old man will be selling some mechanical parts for vehicles and such lol

[hiemfire 189]

48 minutes ago, mr.devolver said:

So trader Rekt will be the farm guy? Who would have guessed? I don't know why, but I always thought this grumpy old man will be selling some mechanical parts for vehicles and such lol

From the first post of this thread, may have been added during one of Roland's edits of the post (underlined pertinent):

Quote

Traders

• All traders still sell everything, but now each one specializes in something. Joel sells armor, Jen sells meds, Bob sells vehicles and tools, Hugh sells weapons and ammo, and Rekt will sell food and seeds.
• After graduating to the next quest tier traders offer a special quest that will take you to the next trader.
• Traders have head tracking so they look at the player.

 

[Blake_ 328]

3 hours ago, madmole said:

Not without some serious framework changes or addition of tinting.

That's not a no nor a yes. I like the new "no promises" policy. Any news on a20 features ? All that's been shown is a breakable door with no texture and poor ol' Arlene falling and getting shot at . 

[unholyjoe 476]

16 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

That's not a no nor a yes. I like the new "no promises" policy. Any news on a20 features ? All that's been shown is a breakable door with no texture and poor ol' Arlene falling and getting shot at . 

and absent news on a20, being silent is new too...  shhhh listen... hear that.....

[Snekser 1]

@madmole

The vehicles feel too overpowered and safe. been watching youtubers exploiting the almost instant get in/out of the car to put distance between them and danger(or abusing the stun mechanic to run something over, get out shoot it and repeat) such as running zombies and wildlife. I hope you'll nerf this and maybe make it more immersive so to speak, like a real animation to get in your vehicle that takes a bit of time and maybe while in the animation if you get hit the animation stops(imagining like the wildlife/zombies catching up to you and dragging you out).

 

[wolfbain5 188]

1 hour ago, Snekser said:

@madmole

The vehicles feel too overpowered and safe. been watching youtubers exploiting the almost instant get in/out of the car to put distance between them and danger(or abusing the stun mechanic to run something over, get out shoot it and repeat) such as running zombies and wildlife. I hope you'll nerf this and maybe make it more immersive so to speak, like a real animation to get in your vehicle that takes a bit of time and maybe while in the animation if you get hit the animation stops(imagining like the wildlife/zombies catching up to you and dragging you out).

 

and vultures flying to outpace a car and cops puking acid is immersive? dont animals get stunned when hit by a car? the only reason we get out is to shoot cause we cant while in the vehicle. in an apocalypse, wouldnt we hit them, stun them, then shoot out the window? no getting out needed?

Edited October 3, 2020 by wolfbain5 (see edit history)

[Jost Amman 281]

I was looting a kitchen and a simple idea came to me... toasters should be lootable and have sometimes "old sham sandwiches" inside. :-]

[wolfbain5 188]

2 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

I was looting a kitchen and a simple idea came to me... toasters should be lootable and have sometimes "old sham sandwiches" inside. :-]

hmm, maybe moldy bread instead

[bloodmoth13 24]

36 minutes ago, wolfbain5 said:

hmm, maybe moldy bread instead

Honestly is there a reason those two are separate items? may as well merge them imo.

[MechanicalLens 890]

10 minutes ago, bloodmoth13 said:

Honestly is there a reason those two are separate items? may as well merge them imo.

Agreed. Moldy Bread just feels like a filler crafting recipe. It should take 10-20 old sham sandwiches to craft an antibiotic (depending on the workstation you're using) and just ditch moldy bread altogether. Thoughts @madmole?

[Naz 36]

Ran some more benchmarks for a19.2 in general support. I'll just post the tldr tables instead of cluttering the dev diary 😛

Ultra Settings

Spoiler

 

Gain From Update Stock Gain From Update OC FPS (avg) ▲7.15% ▲9.69% Min ▼1.60% ▲1.70% Max ▲7.63% ▲8.12% 1% Lows ▼0.51% ▲2.56% 0.1% Lows ▼5.56% ▼6.00%

 

Lower Settings
 

Spoiler

 

Gain From Update Stock Gain From Update OC FPS (avg) ▲5.40% ▲5.76% Min ▲3.64% ▲3.43% Max ▲3.45% ▲3.57% 1% Lows ▲1.49% ▲2.01% 0.1% Lows ▼4.64% ▼6.87%

 

 

[MechanicalLens 890]

Unless it's impact game performance (in which case ignore this post), I think it would be splendid if animal corpses stayed around for much longer on horde night. It's always a shame to slaughter dog after dog, vulture after vulture, only for them to disappear right before the horde ends, even if they appear during the last in-game hour of the horde.

[Survager 150]

Some time ago, I noticed a problem with grenades and other similar items?
The problem is that after the explosion, zombies run to where the grenade was thrown from, and not to where it exploded.
Is this mistake?

Edited October 3, 2020 by Orsey (see edit history)

[Milkshakes 0]

On 10/2/2020 at 3:34 PM, madmole said:

Not without some serious framework changes or addition of tinting.

On the paint/textures note, how does this currently work? I've always been itching to create a texture pack cause it's something I'm good at, but information how to add such new textures into the game is obscure, could never really find anything about it.

[Phoenixshade35 99]

@faatalor @madmole i got a curious question involving painting.  Would it be hard to add the items from the world, like a working stiffs box or cobblestone stack to the paint ability?  We have the eyedropper icon which allows us to absorb a texture to paint with, but if its not available for the brush it comes in as red, u mentioned a new texture thing or fix for blocks with a new system, would it be possible to have these items be available to paint, but you have to bring a paintbrush to absorb their texture?  Could make it a learn by doing, you can only paint basic colors, and you have to use the eyedropper on one or a few of the same item to gain its texture, could make for removing painting for those not wanting it and for those that do it could be an amusing hunt to find the perfect wall art for your base, or color.

 

Like how someone mentioned tinted glass, why not have it as a painted feature on the glass itself to make things fun

[Space4Ace 41]

I heard that the new nurse is basically done... Will we see her in Alpha 19, or is she waiting for Alpha 20?

New physics like the stripper on her too I think? Can't wait to see her.