Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[jdzane]

Anyone else on steam seeing "Missing Downloaded Files" when they check their downloads page?  I keep hitting retry but it doesn't do anything, and I can't get the game to load (goes to a black screen with the custom cursor and the music playing but then it just stops.

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, jdzane said:

Anyone else on steam seeing "Missing Downloaded Files" when they check their downloads page?  I keep hitting retry but it doesn't do anything, and I can't get the game to load (goes to a black screen with the custom cursor and the music playing but then it just stops.

Nope. Do you have enough disk space?

[Jason83380]

14 hours ago, meganoth said:

Wouldn't it be nice if you could only repair a weapon if you know the schematic for that weapon?

 

It occured to me that that would have a few advantages, like

1) schematics for non-perked weapons would still be useful to you

2) durability mods would actually be worth using

3) A lucky find of a high tier weapon would have to be used sparingly until you also have found the schematic

 

(just wanted to throw out this idea to see how others think about it)

What if you can only repair a weapon/item a certain number of time depending of the level of the weapon/item ? A shotgun level 5 could be repair 5 times before it broke definetely ?

[dcsobral]

14 hours ago, meganoth said:

Wouldn't it be nice if you could only repair a weapon if you know the schematic for that weapon?

 

It occured to me that that would have a few advantages, like

1) schematics for non-perked weapons would still be useful to you

2) durability mods would actually be worth using

3) A lucky find of a high tier weapon would have to be used sparingly until you also have found the schematic

 

(just wanted to throw out this idea to see how others think about it)

Didn't it use to be like that? Or maybe it was a mod I played, but I definitely played with "no skill, no repair" for weapons before, and it just sucks. It's an annoyance for no purpose, particularly since you don't learn weapons through the perk except for the tier 1. And it just makes that schematic useful once, so it's no fix for duped schematics. The system @madmole hinted at seems like a much better solution for that.

[hiemfire]

5 hours ago, Demonoid74 said:

Is it made from real Hobo's?

 

Just like in the original Fallout game...Wasteland...Hobo Dogs...they were in FACT...made with real Hobo's!

Body bags and stray corpses are handy sources of one of the key ingredients.

[Tmodloader]

3 hours ago, Uncle Al said:

Gamestage still works off level + days alive, while loot stage is purely based on level (which is then heavily multiplied by biome, POI tier etc.).

 

Very rapid levelling will actually bring your lootstage closer to your gamestage, as your days alive isn't going up.

 

That said, you'll be in the position where you're getting tougher zombies right now and you haven't had time to actually loot at your new loot stage, so your gear will be outdated for your gamestage.

 

If you're playing solo you could dial down your exp setting before a big build then put it back up again afterwards.  Otherwise, using pre-crafted blocks is probably your best bet.  Even if you use frames for the finesse/aesthetic stuff, doing the big simple blocky stuff, like foundations, in pre-crafted will noticably reduce the building xp you're seeing.  You'll need a fair few workbenches though as concrete shapes take a while to craft and steel ones are absolutely absurd.

Lootstage shouldn't be based on level. I've come to the conclusion the best way for lootstage to be is to have it tied to kills since last death. Like maybe lose half or so of your lootscore on death so that there's progression over time still. Level focus makes the rng feel more rigged than my idea, and makes you want to rush levels early instead of enjoying the world.

Edited January 4, 2022 by Tmodloader (see edit history)

[MechanicalLens]

18 minutes ago, Tmodloader said:

Lootstage shouldn't be based on level. I've come to the conclusion the best way for lootstage to be is to have it tied to kills since last death. Like maybe lose half or so of your lootscore on death so that there's progression over time still. Level focus makes the rng feel more rigged than my idea, and makes you want to rush levels early instead of enjoying the world.

 

Wouldn't this just rush players to kill as many zombies as possible as quickly as possible? Two sides, same coin.

[dcsobral]

21 minutes ago, Tmodloader said:

Lootstage shouldn't be based on level. I've come to the conclusion the best way for lootstage to be is to have it tied to kills since last death. Like maybe lose half or so of your lootscore on death so that there's progression over time still. Level focus makes the rng feel more rigged than my idea, and makes you want to rush levels early instead of enjoying the world.

But how does that help people who try to avoid fighting zombies?

[Gazz]

17 hours ago, Kalex said:

You can't use the higher level blocks for layout as you cannot pick them back up.

 

You don't need to.

If you plan a complex piece of your structure, use frames.

Then grab your higher quality blocks, copy shape and rotation. Replace.

[dcsobral]

5 minutes ago, Gazz said:

 

You don't need to.

If you plan a complex piece of your structure, use frames.

Then grab your higher quality blocks, copy shape and rotation. Replace.

Except frames don't have enough SI to support the structures that higher level blocks can support.

[Gazz]

Yes. If you want that ease of planning you may need some temp supports.

[faatal]

On 12/26/2021 at 4:00 PM, Victor.19 said:

I think this video better illustrates the problem.

There were big changes to block entity LOD culling after that video was made, so the numbers they got are old.

[skippy0330]

48 minutes ago, faatal said:

There were big changes to block entity LOD culling after that video was made, so the numbers they got are old.

Not to mention he was running a 3080 on 1080p and wondering why there was little difference.  The video is really flawed. well done, but flawed big time. 
 

[Red Eagle LXIX]

Ok, this is annoying me.

I put a temporary wall around my horde base after horde night to do some repairs so the day's predictable and inevitable 'wandering' horde would not see me.

I did my repairs, then took the wall down.

Now every time I approach from a distance I see the wall appear then disappear around the horde base.  This isn't the first time I've noticed that the distant view implementation seems more able to handle additive changes and less able to cope with subtractive changes.

 

Any way to force it to update that information to be more current and accurate?  Going on 2 in game weeks now (took far less damage after the upgrade to steel).

Edited January 4, 2022 by Red Eagle LXIX (see edit history)

[fragtzack]

9 hours ago, Firecat said:

 

 

(P.S. I can't live without the parkour perk anymore. I put two points each into sexy rexy and pummel pete, then my next points are all going into getting parkour to level 2. It just makes everything faster what with being able to jump up places or hop fences, and it is VERY handy in a pinch too, if you get cornered by something nasty. One of my top 2 or 3 favorite perks in the game.)

Parkour level 4 is OP, jumping 2M high is just sweet.  /hug AGI

[dcsobral]

1 hour ago, Red Eagle LXIX said:

Ok, this is annoying me.

I put a temporary wall around my horde base after horde night to do some repairs so the day's predictable and inevitable 'wandering' horde would not see me.

I did my repairs, then took the wall down.

Now every time I approach from a distance I see the wall appear then disappear around the horde base.  This isn't the first time I've noticed that the distant view implementation seems more able to handle additive changes and less able to cope with subtractive changes.

 

Any way to force it to update that information to be more current and accurate?  Going on 2 in game weeks now (took far less damage after the upgrade to steel).

The default for dynamic mesh changed right before stable. Maybe it's at the new default (LCB) and your horde base doesn't have an LCB? Or maybe you disabled it at some point?

[RolandDT]

On 12/29/2021 at 4:01 PM, palikkamaa said:

I don't get how he got so bad performance on rtx 3080 1080p. I have 2070s /9600k /16gb ram and I'm matching/exceeding his performance at 1440p. 

(Sorry for the late reply - catching up on this thread.)

 

It's because the game is more CPU bound @ 1080p versus 1440p. This game is heavily CPU bound, and appears to be worse in A20 than A19 (I am having MUCH worse framerate issues in this version versus past versions). I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of the issues, but for right now there are times where the game is unplayable for me, and altering graphical settings has minimal effect because it's not a GPU issue but a CPU issue.

 

FWIW - I run a 9700k OCed @ 5.0GHz, 32GB of RAM (3200MHz, very tight timings), RTX 3080 (EVGA FTW), and multiple SSDs (OS on an M.2, games off a SATA SSD), running on a 1440p UltraWide G-Sync monitor.

[Outlaw_187]

10 hours ago, Firecat said:

..............(P.S. I can't live without the parkour perk anymore. I put two points each into sexy rexy and pummel pete, then my next points are all going into getting parkour to level 2. It just makes everything faster what with being able to jump up places or hop fences, and it is VERY handy in a pinch too, if you get cornered by something nasty. One of my top 2 or 3 favorite perks in the game.)

100% agree. I've never even given this perk a 2nd look until I started watching Guns, Nerds, & Steel.

Now it's a totally useful perk that I too find almost a necessity.

[Red Eagle LXIX]

34 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

The default for dynamic mesh changed right before stable. Maybe it's at the new default (LCB) and your horde base doesn't have an LCB? Or maybe you disabled it at some point?

Checked my settings:

Dynamic Mesh Enabled: Yes

Mesh Distance: 1000

Mesh Quality: yes

Land Claim Only: No

Land Claim Buffer: 3

Max Region Loads: 1

Max Mesh Processing: 3

 

[Adam the Waster]

21 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:

 

 

Weaklings may eat corn, chads may swear by potatoes, but kings live off of meat stews.  

But gods live off Steak and Potatos 

[Red Eagle LXIX]

2 hours ago, Red Eagle LXIX said:

Ok, this is annoying me.

I put a temporary wall around my horde base after horde night to do some repairs so the day's predictable and inevitable 'wandering' horde would not see me.

I did my repairs, then took the wall down.

Now every time I approach from a distance I see the wall appear then disappear around the horde base.  This isn't the first time I've noticed that the distant view implementation seems more able to handle additive changes and less able to cope with subtractive changes.

 

Any way to force it to update that information to be more current and accurate?  Going on 2 in game weeks now (took far less damage after the upgrade to steel).

I did a quick test and it is easy to reproduce in an unmodded game on Navezgane.

 

Built a quick little test.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708089678

Moved far away to confirm distant mesh created

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708084461

Removed the center structure

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708084512

Moved far away and still see center structure

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708084587

Still showing 3 buildings as I get closer

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708084660

Cross the threshold and the middle one disappears to reflect reality of the game universe

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708084695

Take a few steps backward and like magic the removed/destroyed structure re-appears.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708084748

 

Dynamic Mesh Options

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2708086979

 

test structures were built with shape Cube 3x3x1 in a configuration of only 4 per building.

 

Edited January 4, 2022 by Red Eagle LXIX (see edit history)

[Frekton]

Been searching for some info the on the structural integrity not recalculating on it's onw bug to no avail. Have  the pimps responded to this and is it being looked into?

[faatal]

On 12/26/2021 at 7:44 PM, Blake_ said:

 

@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.

Trees need optimization work, but the last programmer who tried did not find any good solutions. We have some new programmers coming on that may get tasked with it.

Occlusion needs a tree bug fix, not a hack. POI come in all shapes and sizes.

Zeds banging on nearby blocks could maybe use a delayed/combined mesh update.

Precaching works in some cases, but can be a lot of overhead itself. Animations are already loaded. Block damage is way too dynamic. Individual pathing is threaded and not expensive.

 

Meshes? You mean dynamic mesh (the far ones)?

 

Thanks

26 minutes ago, Frekton said:

Been searching for some info the on the structural integrity not recalculating on it's onw bug to no avail. Have  the pimps responded to this and is it being looked into?

There is a bug ticket for it. I will get to it at some point, but am currently working on ground collision bugs (player/zeds falling into, vehicles falling into and getting moved. Turrets falling into may also be related).

[Tmodloader]

7 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:

 

Wouldn't this just rush players to kill as many zombies as possible as quickly as possible? Two sides, same coin.

That's not nearly as easy to rush as levels, especially if death would set lootstage back.

[Blake_]

12 minutes ago, faatal said:

Trees need optimization work, but the last programmer who tried did not find any good solutions. We have some new programmers coming on that may get tasked with it.

Occlusion needs a tree bug fix, not a hack. POI come in all shapes and sizes.

Zeds banging on nearby blocks could maybe use a delayed/combined mesh update.

Precaching works in some cases, but can be a lot of overhead itself. Animations are already loaded. Block damage is way too dynamic. Individual pathing is threaded and not expensive.

 

Meshes? You mean dynamic mesh (the far ones)?

 

Yes. Dynamic meshes.  After further testing, I believe I might be wrong about disk writting. I found out that dynamic meshes generate lots of freezes and frame drops due to bloated garbage collection handling, bottlenecking CPU,  so it actually decreases performance on most systems, it being more significant with few CPU cores and 3ghz or lower (bad news). Better systems just see occasional abnormal drops in fps and micro stutters, common in a20.

 

About trees: Further testing revealed that shadow size and minimum quality are the real culprits for performance drops. 

 

Zds also have shadows of significant quality even on lowest (near) setting.

 

How big of an impact do shadows make? Turn them off and you will see. You can even plant 100 zds and they are stable without sudden drops.

 

Zds and trees (in lower settings) should have a simpler shadow. Like a simple small circular one at their feet, or a slightly deformed circle. Same for trees, they need simple shadows, light processing ones either bia option or by default. In higher settings, shadow LOD could also do good stuff for fps.

 

Big oak trees and some others should have their ridiculously ginormous shadow reduced like 10 to 30%, in any option. Eye aberration will make their shadows look ok, as we can't really appreciate the whole area of the tree from most angles anyway.

 

These shadow hacks should in theory increase performace by around 20% in worse systems, as I'm seing a 50% boost when turning shadows off from just "near" (every other shadow option off) in any part of the world.

 

A lighter way to process shadows for blocks would be amazing too, but I don't know if that's possible, and simpler hack circles wouldn't work, nor a pregenerated shadow texture due to the voxel nature of the game.