Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Victor.19]

9 hours ago, faatal said:

Eu não iria pelo que aconteceu na primeira ou mesmo segunda noite de horda. Não é para ser tão difícil.

Não há uma resposta simples. Há uma tonelada de diferentes CPUs e GPUs combinadas com as várias configurações de vídeo e gráficos.

 

O A20 é basicamente o mesmo que o A18 do ponto de vista do motor, mas com uma versão mais recente do Unity, algumas otimizações e recursos adicionais como malha dinâmica, cidades densas e conteúdo mundial atualizado.

 

Que CPU, GPU e memória você tem? Que resolução gráfica você está usando?

A gtx 980ti with i7 3770 and 16gb ddr3 ram. In large cities the fps reaches 20, even in the medium, all this at 720p while in the other biomes is at about 45-50 which for me is great. Seeing the percentage of resource use none reaches at least 50%. That is, low hardware usage and low fps.

13 hours ago, Star69 said:

Tente desligar a malha dinâmica e ver se ajuda na cidade. Quanto a uma explicação sobre cpu/gpu, vou deixar alguém entrar.

This sudden drop occurs only in large cities, the denser and within the POI so much that in the other biomes is a very acceptable fps.

[mstdv inc]

14 hours ago, Tmodloader said:

Thanks, I do like that they attack in a generic sense and aren't super smart but still it feels like there's some sort of thrill missing from horde night. I was on a small water tower type structure with support beams under me, I was planning an escape route for the inevitable collapse but instead the horde went for the building next to it all night which was odd.

I am of the exact opposite opinion, traders give too good rewards already where it almost seems wasteful to go into a poi without a mission for me these days.

During the time until one person gets to the trader, takes the quest, gets to the POI, completes the quest, gets back to the trader and finishes the quest, I will clear several houses and get more profit not in money, but in total.
I prefer to just loot all the buildings in a row, instead of completing quests.
As time has shown, I get the items I need faster, I also don’t have to purposefully dig for iron at the initial stages, and by the time the production of cartridges begins, I get a large number of radiators from the POI and I don’t need to purposefully search for brass.
80% of the cobblestones that I find in buildings, I disassemble into stones, add all the cement. By the time the concrete production started, I already had 7800 cement and 1.5 stacks of stones.
Despite the trader's rewards, the loss of time does not pay off for me.
Perhaps because I do not use perks for additional rewards and do not use profitable barter.
It already depends on the style of play.
And there are too many cool POIs in A20 to be missing. I want to clean them all. I want to take a bath with new POIs and bathe in them. I am very happy about the variety of POIs. 😄

[mstdv inc]

2 hours ago, Victor.19 said:

A gtx 980ti with i7 3770 and 16gb ddr3 ram. In large cities the fps reaches 20, even in the medium, all this at 720p while in the other biomes is at about 45-50 which for me is great. Seeing the percentage of resource use none reaches at least 50%. That is, low hardware usage and low fps.

This sudden drop occurs only in large cities, the denser and within the POI so much that in the other biomes is a very acceptable fps.

The most interesting thing is that I have Phenom II x4 925, RX 550 4GB and 8GB ddr 2 ram and I have 25-35 FPS in full HD in the downtown near Dishong and 45-72 FPS in medium-sized, small towns and outside cities.
Overall, I haven't seen 95% of the problems people write about.
@faatal Perhaps this is an insane assumption, but in more than a year I have met quite a few people who have severe performance problems with ddr 3 ram.
There may be some connection.
If it can somehow help, I could ask any additional data from these people?

[Mechanimal]

1 hour ago, mstdv inc said:

During the time until one person gets to the trader, takes the quest, gets to the POI, completes the quest, gets back to the trader and finishes the quest, I will clear several houses and get more profit not in money, but in total.
I prefer to just loot all the buildings in a row, instead of completing quests.
As time has shown, I get the items I need faster, I also don’t have to purposefully dig for iron at the initial stages, and by the time the production of cartridges begins, I get a large number of radiators from the POI and I don’t need to purposefully search for brass.
80% of the cobblestones that I find in buildings, I disassemble into stones, add all the cement. By the time the concrete production started, I already had 7800 cement and 1.5 stacks of stones.
Despite the trader's rewards, the loss of time does not pay off for me.
Perhaps because I do not use perks for additional rewards and do not use profitable barter.
It already depends on the style of play.
And there are too many cool POIs in A20 to be missing. I want to clean them all. I want to take a bath with new POIs and bathe in them. I am very happy about the variety of POIs. 😄

I think an option to turn off quest repeats in options menu would be awesome... for my play style anyway. I prefer to see the world around me change throughout a playthrough, and stay that way. I turn loot respawn off entirely nowadays. If I looted a building and then got a quest there I would be fine with that happening once, only. After that I'd prefer to move out to other towns for fresh loot, POIs and quests. It also solves another issue I had when quests were first introduced: making certain POIs off limits for base building, something that never mattered before suddenly does. But if an option for non-repeat quests was on then I'd know which buildings became available once I did a quest there. I'd also likely stick to playthroughs longer, lately I tend to get bored around midgame and start a new map because the world feels more and more fake over time as the POIs around me magically regenerate.

For now I just quit a quest when I get to a repeat and recognize it, even though that wastes even more time overall, I personally find it a mild nuisance and worthy compromise. So in the meantime/alpha days these things can be managed by player behavior, "fine, I'll do it myself". I do hope such a thing is in by Gold though. I also think, and it's only an opinion, that both loot respawn & repeat questing should be off by default, mainly because it dramatically promotes adventuring out and makes longer games feel far more real. But that's me, and obv not the best idea for MP games, mainly SP and maybe small/private MP games, just spitballing on the topic.

[Kalex]

6 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Did you mean mushroom seeds or mushrooms (which would be converted to just 4 seeds) ?

 

I harvested yesterday and the best results I had were mushrooms with 2 seeds from 2 plants. Don't ask about the corn though.

Planted mushroom seeds/spores, let them grow, harvested them with LotL 3, out of 20 plantings only got 1 seed. I did the test because a couple of my players were saying they weren't getting ANY seeds/spores.

[faatal]

5 hours ago, Doomofman said:

Anyone else getting occasional really bad stutter that doesn't manifest itself on the FPS counter?

 

Was doing one of the Warehouse POIs just now and the game started stuttering like it was running at 20fps or something but the FPS counter (both Steam and built in) said the game was 60/70 fps 

Try using the console command "gfx g fps 200". That will show a graph of FPS, which may show short drops that do not appear in a single averaged FPS number.

[faatal]

5 hours ago, Victor.19 said:

A gtx 980ti with i7 3770 and 16gb ddr3 ram. In large cities the fps reaches 20, even in the medium, all this at 720p while in the other biomes is at about 45-50 which for me is great. Seeing the percentage of resource use none reaches at least 50%. That is, low hardware usage and low fps.

This sudden drop occurs only in large cities, the denser and within the POI so much that in the other biomes is a very acceptable fps.

With a 9 year old CPU, you should not have anything above medium and probably some settings on Low. My old 4790K needs medium/low settings to be playable. The 980ti at 720p should not be an issue.

 

Many Unity tasks have to be on the main thread and there is a fair amount of load on the graphics thread. That means those other 2 cores can not contribute to that load, which is why you typically see less that 50%. Your GPU use would not get that high, because it draws a frame and then is waiting on the main and gfx threads to finish the next frame.

[mstdv inc]

We have 60,000+ people playing at the same time! 15 place in the top 100 best steam games!

[Doomofman]

1 hour ago, faatal said:

Try using the console command "gfx g fps 200". That will show a graph of FPS, which may show short drops that do not appear in a single averaged FPS number.

 

How does one read that graph? I'm guessing red is bad... Is the yellow line 60fps?

[mstdv inc]

2 hours ago, Mechanimal said:

I think an option to turn off quest repeats in options menu would be awesome... for my play style anyway. I prefer to see the world around me change throughout a playthrough, and stay that way. I turn loot respawn off entirely nowadays. If I looted a building and then got a quest there I would be fine with that happening once, only. After that I'd prefer to move out to other towns for fresh loot, POIs and quests. It also solves another issue I had when quests were first introduced: making certain POIs off limits for base building, something that never mattered before suddenly does. But if an option for non-repeat quests was on then I'd know which buildings became available once I did a quest there. I'd also likely stick to playthroughs longer, lately I tend to get bored around midgame and start a new map because the world feels more and more fake over time as the POIs around me magically regenerate.

For now I just quit a quest when I get to a repeat and recognize it, even though that wastes even more time overall, I personally find it a mild nuisance and worthy compromise. So in the meantime/alpha days these things can be managed by player behavior, "fine, I'll do it myself". I do hope such a thing is in by Gold though. I also think, and it's only an opinion, that both loot respawn & repeat questing should be off by default, mainly because it dramatically promotes adventuring out and makes longer games feel far more real. But that's me, and obv not the best idea for MP games, mainly SP and maybe small/private MP games, just spitballing on the topic.

I've always played with the loot respawn disabled. I always play through a full city cleanup and relocation with the construction of a new base near a new city. Usually it is 70-80 days and 3 bases.
And for this reason I do not communicate with traders. I do not need an excuse to clear the POI, I will clear them all anyway.
Then he sends me to the next, closest trader, but I want to choose the place for the base myself and the city that I will clear next.
Therefore, I understand you. I also do not like the wonderful revival of loot in POI and the carefully packed backpack after death. I play with the complete removal of everything from both the hot bar and the backpack.
I found a way for myself to prolong the pleasure so as not to get bored by 70-80 days.
I am not using the power and intelligence tree in my new survival and I play with 25 experience multiplier and 50 loot multiplier. Lots of killed zombies, infections, broken legs and arms, 45 days and only 90 stage of the game. All the fun is yet to come!
I plan to survive for at least 200 days and clear the city in the desert, winter biome and in the wastelands in turn)
The game for me was revealed in a new way.
The A20 + is not the usual settings for my survival, this is the secret of my new cocktail of emotions. And damn it, I really like it!

[Eromivus]

Sorry if I missed mention of it, but weren't you supposed to be able to shoot through the holes in partially broken down doors for A20? Is it just for certain door types, or was the feature just not ready yet?

[Victor.19]

1 hour ago, faatal said:

Com uma CPU de 9 anos, você não deve ter nada acima do meio e provavelmente algumas configurações em Low. Meu antigo 4790K precisa de configurações médias/baixas para ser jogável. O 980ti em 720p não deve ser um problema.

 

Muitas tarefas do Unity têm que estar no segmento principal e há uma boa quantidade de carga no segmento gráfico. Isso significa que esses outros 2 núcleos não podem contribuir para essa carga, e é por isso que você normalmente vê menos de 50%. Seu uso de GPU não ficaria tão alto, porque desenha um quadro e, em seguida, está esperando nos fios principal e gfx para terminar o próximo quadro.

I think this video better illustrates the problem.

 

 

[Callum123456789]

3 hours ago, mstdv inc said:

We have 60,000+ people playing at the same time! 15 place in the top 100 best steam games!

 

yeah its nice to see it progressing in popularity its even higher right now the peak anyway 

2 hours ago, Eromivus said:

Sorry if I missed mention of it, but weren't you supposed to be able to shoot through the holes in partially broken down doors for A20? Is it just for certain door types, or was the feature just not ready yet?

i mean you can shoot through damaged roll up doors but thats about it i think i remember seeing some experimental door tech on twitter a while ago when one of tfp broke the door it broke into pieces rather than disappearing i know its a side note but i don't really know where that went 

[DEATH MECHANIC]

2 hours ago, Victor.19 said:

I think this video better illustrates the problem.

 

 

too bad he didn't show how much better the game would run if it had vulkan support.

[Tmodloader]

I am still confused on what Feral Sense does, does it just increase detection range or also increase sensitivity?

[Blake_]

 

@faatal I've been testing performance like crazy these days and I found out that trees are still a big problem after all these years. They drop my frames a ~25% for every 100 animated trees on view, so there's that (from 81 to 50 fps avg in a normal place with my lowest settings)

 

-The GPU options in 7dtd are quite good and allow for downgrading all the way down to 4 gigs of total memory( 3.x gigs + garbage collection for a while) in 6k maps which is very nice. Trees are cheap in the distance, but their animations are expensive for the cpu when they are close.

 

-Is there a way to make an option to make the tree animations OFF-SIMPLE-FULL in order to significantly boost performance on every CPU-bottlenecked system? (Most of them) . And I'm not finished, lol:

 

-About the occluder: can you make it so the occluder reads the player's location and turns off when the  player is outside POIs (and outside player bases if possible)? That way you will instafix the sneaky " vanishing trees bug " and even increase CPU performance outdoors for us.

 

More feedback:

 

The most damaging situation for my PC right now is a 64 entity horde hitting on walls. It drops to 14 fps and averages at 20fps. I can't think of a way to fix that though. I would love to hear your ideas on the subject.

 

Meshes perform good, the problem is that they don't. I'll be honest: they hit RAM and clog the system hard enough that players are experiencing what I was experiencing in a19 with a single channel 8gig ram and an hdd: instability, HUGE disk writting times and noticeable freezes with ssd too, most noticeable in larger worlds but also frequent in smaller ones. (plz check that if you own a potato) and other distance-related glitches (destroyed structures like a bunch of frames occasionally remaining visible when reentering the area)  that also points to inadecuate memory clearing.

Edit I believe a good Hotfix would be: just reducing the default mesh options for below- medium presets would be ok, aside from mesh options' bugs of course.

 

Having an opposite thought on that memory clearing.... Precaching more data would be crazy..... wouldn't it be? Can it be done with other things aside from textures, like animations, spawns, block damage or pathing or am I saying nonsense here?  

 

Thanks for reading. I hope this feedback helps if just a bit.

[Tmodloader]

9 hours ago, mstdv inc said:

During the time until one person gets to the trader, takes the quest, gets to the POI, completes the quest, gets back to the trader and finishes the quest, I will clear several houses and get more profit not in money, but in total.
I prefer to just loot all the buildings in a row, instead of completing quests.
As time has shown, I get the items I need faster, I also don’t have to purposefully dig for iron at the initial stages, and by the time the production of cartridges begins, I get a large number of radiators from the POI and I don’t need to purposefully search for brass.
80% of the cobblestones that I find in buildings, I disassemble into stones, add all the cement. By the time the concrete production started, I already had 7800 cement and 1.5 stacks of stones.
Despite the trader's rewards, the loss of time does not pay off for me.
Perhaps because I do not use perks for additional rewards and do not use profitable barter.
It already depends on the style of play.
And there are too many cool POIs in A20 to be missing. I want to clean them all. I want to take a bath with new POIs and bathe in them. I am very happy about the variety of POIs. 😄

True, the increase in poi variety is great, I am still trying to decide whether to use feral sense or not. I don't want sneaking around to be useless but when I fire an unsilenced gun, I want it to be intense and all zombies around hear and start going for me if I fail to hide myself well enough. The problem is I am not sure if feral sense basically removes the ability to hide altogether.

I read tier 5 rewards are underwhelming so my goal right now is to clear out my first tier 5 and setup a holdout in one to make it interesting. 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

A handful new quest types, bandits, an event system, a defended truck spawning in and out, an escort mission. Lots of stuff that depends on AI.

 

I still wonder how they could possibly implement bandits, part of me keeps thinking that's a dream and will end up being cut from release. The AI programming for bandits in this game sounds like a tremendous feat to achieve.

[mstdv inc]

1 hour ago, Tmodloader said:

True, the increase in poi variety is great, I am still trying to decide whether to use feral sense or not. I don't want sneaking around to be useless but when I fire an unsilenced gun, I want it to be intense and all zombies around hear and start going for me if I fail to hide myself well enough. The problem is I am not sure if feral sense basically removes the ability to hide altogether.

I chose the compromise option; Wild Sense is only on at night.
By day I am the master, by night zombies and animals. I believe that everything is fair
If you want to clean the POI without haste, you go to it during the day, if you are bored and you want adventure - do it at night.

[Laz Man]

6 hours ago, Eromivus said:

Sorry if I missed mention of it, but weren't you supposed to be able to shoot through the holes in partially broken down doors for A20? Is it just for certain door types, or was the feature just not ready yet?

 

New doors and windows like the cellar doors, roll up doors, and shutters can be shot through when they are partially broken.  The older doors will get their pass once they are updated.

13 minutes ago, mstdv inc said:

I chose the compromise option; Wild Sense is only on at night.
By day I am the master, by night zombies and animals. I believe that everything is fair
If you want to clean the POI without haste, you go to it during the day, if you are bored and you want adventure - do it at night.

 

I'm leaning more towards feral sense during the day since night time has running zed threat already.

 

If playing with no bloodmoons, I'd suggest feral sense on all the time. 😁

2 hours ago, Tmodloader said:

...I still wonder how they could possibly implement bandits, part of me keeps thinking that's a dream and will end up being cut from release. The AI programming for bandits in this game sounds like a tremendous feat to achieve.

I hear yah, there is a fine line between super OP aimbot AI that insta headshots you and blind bandits that can't shoot the broad side of a barn...

 

I have faith in faatal and the programming crew....😎

[Tmodloader]

1 hour ago, mstdv inc said:

I chose the compromise option; Wild Sense is only on at night.
By day I am the master, by night zombies and animals. I believe that everything is fair
If you want to clean the POI without haste, you go to it during the day, if you are bored and you want adventure - do it at night.

Do you know what it does exactly? Can you still sneak effectively with Feral Sense if you try to sneak carefully?

[n2n1]

Question about the new function introduced in A20:

 

What is the essence of the <property name="AllowedRotations" value="Basic 90"/>, which was intended for <block name="questGeneratorSmall">  ?

Do i understand correctly, that it was designed to block 45-degree rotation angles, but ....

it works exactly the same as <property name="OnlySimpleRotations" value="true"/>. That is, it is not an respective limiter now.

 

Does it work now as intended? Maybe there is some kind of omission? (bug?)

Or it's not ready yet ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Neminsis]

19 minutes ago, Tmodloader said:

Do you know what it does exactly? Can you still sneak effectively with Feral Sense if you try to sneak carefully?

Feral sense increases the detection range for the Z's. Stealth reduces the player's output of detectables... Effectively, with Feral sense on and points into stealth it's a wash...until you have to go loud...and then all hell can break loose. 😁

Yes, you can still sneak, but even without feral sense on, there is a chance to wake the entire sleeper volume now which has made stealth just a little spicy. 

[Tmodloader]

10 minutes ago, Neminsis said:

Feral sense increases the detection range for the Z's. Stealth reduces the player's output of detectables... Effectively, with Feral sense on and points into stealth it's a wash...until you have to go loud...and then all hell can break loose. 😁

Yes, you can still sneak, but even without feral sense on, there is a chance to wake the entire sleeper volume now which has made stealth just a little spicy. 

That sounds great, thank you, I'll try it on my next run probably since I dont want to touch the difficulty on my current permadeath, I've had some good intense moments so far. A20 is great.

[DEADFACE]

5 hours ago, DEATH MECHANIC said:

too bad he didn't show how much better the game would run if it had vulkan support.

It does have a Vulkan renderer and it doesn't change much at all I'm afraid.

[Khalagar]

10 hours ago, faatal said:

With a 9 year old CPU, you should not have anything above medium and probably some settings on Low. My old 4790K needs medium/low settings to be playable. The 980ti at 720p should not be an issue.

 

Do you test with AMD equipment as well? With a 5600x cpu and 6900xt GPU I still get pretty rough frame drops sometimes at 1440p, especially in cities. Turning off dynamic mesh etc hasn't helped it for me.