Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Khalagar]

Got a couple of hours in (on company time of course) and lots of fun. A20 seems way harder, which is always welcome. I actually died on night one like a noob when a random feral got in my crappily boarded up garage with me and ripped me to shreds! A lot of my settings got reset, but I think I may be on max difficulty or something because these zombies are kicking my butt nearly as hard as the stamina bar is

 

I got a T3 Pipe Baton, it's like the game knew I was going to go int. I do think it's a bit weird that you can craft a club out of wood but the pipe baton takes pipes and glue etc . . . but the wooden club seems better stat wise. Pipe baton animations are too sick not to use though

 

Ammo spawns are *very* prevelant. I think I had over 200 of several ammo before I even finished my T1 PoI I spawned next to.

 

Performance is really rough for some reason. I've got a 5600x and 6900xt which should not even notice this game is running, but I'm still getting some pretty bad hitches when moving near a PoI. I assume it's spawning the sleeper inside them or something

 

Definitely a ton of fun so far, very excited to play later when stupid customers stop calling me with their dumb problems during "work hours" 🙄

[Games'n'Grumble]

26 minutes ago, faatal said:

Just a lot of things hitting the main thread leading to spikes. I've spent the last year occasionally hunting the spikes and reducing them. A big one was chunk collider mesh baking, which now happens on a separate thread.

I was streaming on Friday with "graph fps" turned on, and I've never seen so few spikes. Almost always a smooth pink stripe (at first I thought it was broken😄). And after the last FPS update today, next to the updated Dishong Tower and in general in the city center, even during the BM on 64 zeds, FPS did not fall below 30-40. It's just amazing. Thank you guys!🙏

[Matt115]

12 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

I had read your suggestion, but before I could reply Khalgar made too many useless posts about farming and lagged the forum. (I'm sure it was Khalgar because only he is allowed to) 😉

 

Generally a worthy alternative. Personally I prefer the original version because I see it as a feature that a single seed might not be sufficient (To feel success there has to be a chance of failure), but would not really shed a tear if it was changed to that.

 

 

 

Honestly topic about farming was good. In my opinion maybe 2 more types of plant could be good solution- tomato and chili. Well this will make few positive changes to make more types of food. Well maybe bigger about effective farming  in future could give more deep into this game. 

Well about new alpha - i won't to coment because i have controversial opinion about that and i w don't have tons of negative reactions

[hiemfire]

14 minutes ago, Khalagar said:

I got a T3 Pipe Baton, it's like the game knew I was going to go int. I do think it's a bit weird that you can craft a club out of wood but the pipe baton takes pipes and glue etc . . . but the wooden club seems better stat wise. Pipe baton animations are too sick not to use though

 

Could you check something when you get a chance. The wooden club is single target but, based on what I've seen on stream, I think the pipe baton can hit multiple enemies in a single strike for full or near full effect and also seems to have a decent chance to stagger or knockdown each of the ones hit.

 

What I'm thinking I've noticed:

Wooden club = faster attack rate, single target for power and normal attacks, can stagger single target with normal attack, can knockdown single target on a power attack

Pipe Baton = slower attack rate, multi target normal attack, single target power attack, can stagger multiple at once with a normal attack, may occasionally knockdown 1 or more on a normal attack, good chance to knockdown single target on a power attack

[Saera]

EDIT*** Neverminded, I am dumb, I figured it out. Just needed to talk it out I guess 😅 

 

Would any body happen to know...

 

I used the advanced tools to generate a new world with my preffered settings (towns, rivers, etc), but how to I actually play that world? 

 

Forgive me if its stupid simple, I am surely missing something.

 

 

[rigmormortis]

here we GO! no bugs yet on my side

[stallionsden]

Deletee response already answered lol

[Burrfly]

17 minutes ago, Khalagar said:

Ammo spawns are *very* prevelant. I think I had over 200 of several ammo before I even finished my T1 PoI I spawned next to.

 

I'm not sure wether you find that nice or too OP, but I certainly find it way too much. In my opinion ammo should be quite rare (not VERY rare, but rare), and it should feel special to use it and to use it in quite special occasions; not just use it in every single zombie encounter just because we have found 400 ammo in 1 day.

[faatal]

5 minutes ago, Saera said:

Would any body happen to know...

 

I used the advanced tools to generate a new world with my preffered settings (towns, rivers, etc), but how to I actually play that world? 

 

Forgive me if its stupid simple, I am surely missing something.

In New Game it should show as a choice in Game World, like pregens do.

[Doomofman]

Enjoying it so far. Seems to be a lot of hitches though, and I've not even really found a proper downtown area yet. Also noticed that the road markings in the middle of one of the road tiles are out of line with the others.

 

But it's been an overwhelmingly positive experience in the first couple of hours for me

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, TGondii said:

Where do we report bugs? I've already found a couple.

 

The major one is an infinite block issue. I built a wood frame for the starting quest and placed it down only to find that I still had the frame in my toolbelt. I can continue to place more frames down indefinitely. I can also pick up all of those blocks and scrap them for wood. Long story short, I can build one frame and turn it into an infinite number of additional wood blocks.

 

After enabling the creative menu I was able to confirm that the same issue exists for other frame blocks such as steel. For just 10 steel I can build one steel frame block which in turn can be placed down an infinite number of times. In other words, I can build an entire steel base out of one steel frame block.

Not a bug, when cm is on, blocks are no longer consumed from your belt.  I believe this change is already being discussed as well.

[jorbascrumps]

I put roughly an hour in over lunch. Obviously not a large sample size but performance was great in the town I spawned near.

 

I did experience an issue placing my bedroll where it wouldn't render the block preview and then was destroyed when I did place it. Not sure if it was just user error though so I'll have to try and repro later.

[Laz Man]

50 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

And maybe a POI surprise or two...?

 

Actually, did fix several minor POI issues this weekend myself...I am hoping for at least a couple more new ones to add before stable. 😁

[Tete1805]

I would like to report a bug.

I was hunted down by a feral zombie on day 1 and he murdered my face. 😂

[Myth]

Just now, Tete1805 said:

I would like to declare a bug.

I was hunted down by a feral zombie on day 1 and he murdered my face. 😂

Same here and then a dog 🤣

[falloutcloud]

51 minutes ago, Blake_ said:

Just a tiny check on steamdb. 7dtd jumped from position 64 to 21 in just 1 hour. And It's a Monday. I can't even begin to predict a21 player base. The green line of the graphic charts jumped so high that the internet runned out of virtual ink to draw it.

 

Some people are still getting off work

 

[Roland]

7 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Actually, did fix several minor POI issues this weekend myself...I am hoping for at least a couple more new ones to add before stable. 😁

 

I hope by fix you mean you placed a few more snakes in strategic places...lol

[Laz Man]

9 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

I hope by fix you mean you placed a few more snakes in strategic places...lol

 

Vertigo Gaming would disagree with you... 😅

[uJard]

I feel like TAA could use some tweaking. It flickers a lot and doesn't seem to do much blending. At the moment there's hardly any benefits from using it.

[POCKET951]

2 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

There was no 12:00 pm CST deadline.

 

The only 12:00 pm CST mention was the meeting to discuss the experimental release of Alpha 20.  The best estimate we got was from Roland who said he hopes it would be similar to Alpha 19 where it was released a few hours after their meeting. 

 

And I even tracked down the post for you

 

 

It's about 13 posts down, or Roland's second post in that thread.

Roland should definitley get some knuckle rubs for this edit. 

[faatal]

10 minutes ago, uJard said:

I feel like TAA could use some tweaking. It flickers a lot and doesn't seem to do much blending. At the moment there's hardly any benefits from using it.

It is a Unity effect and Justin and I have already tweaked it as good as we could. Increasing the blending actually causes motion blur, so we kept it low. We would have to customize their code to get it any better. Or they could update it, but they don't really improve the built in rendering pipeline anymore.

[BFT2020]

1 minute ago, POCKET951 said:

Roland should definitley get some knuckle rubs for this edit. 

😆 At first I couldn’t figure what I had wrote required him to edit……then I realized he edited the post I quoted and then went into my post and edited his post again.

[icehot]

I'm really impressed with the FPS I'm getting, this is performing far better than A19 was, and I'm playing on ultra, in the city i'm getting 120fps regularly

[wclem1974]

Can someone please tell me if RWG is disabled right now?

 

[faatal]

1 minute ago, icehot said:

I'm really impressed with the FPS I'm getting, this is performing far better than A19 was, and I'm playing on ultra, in the city i'm getting 120fps regularly

Nice! What CPU/GPU and video res?