Fun while it lasted, but no more.

[DOS1129]

Most unfortunate that the game is completely unplayable late stage.  T4 started to get pretty bad but T5 is now impossible, between frame rate drops and unending waves of zombies that hear you from 5 blocks away and instantly re spawn, it makes it so that the T5 quests are impossible to do.

The new graphics look nice and all, but the game is unplayable unless you have a massive gaming rig.  I've got a 3.4 Ghz machine with 16 Meg ram and use a large page file, I've turned all settings down to bare minimum, followed every tutorial on the web to optimize and sure, in the country with a couple Z's I get up to 60 FPS.  I hit the city and it drops to 40 immediately and once I start a POI its routinely 25ish.  Until I get 12 mobs out, then its 11.

I dont even have Feral Sense turned ON and I still can't complete a T5 POI without near constant interruptions.  I've got max stealth, all possible mods and 5 stories up, Z's on the street hear you rustle in a garbage can.  Once they start, the frame rate drops even more.

The cosmetic changes are great, but if you're game is unplayable you're pretty much just pushing your player base to other games.  I tried 5 times to complete a T5 and I spent more time outside the POI circling it, killing the insta-spawn roamers, than inside it.  I ran out of 900 9mm, 600 7.62, 300 shotgun shells and 300 crossbow bolts before I had even cleared the first floor of the POI.  I've tried every weapon suppressed and usually even try to rely on Melee as much as possible to stay as quiet as I can, to no avail.  I killed over 900 Z's, most outside the POI.

There really needs to be some changes made to roamers and hearing range especially if I dont even have damned Feral Sense on, this is simply stupidity at this point.  I like a hard game sure, but unplayable isnt fun, just tedious.

If anyone has any pointers to either increase frame rate or to somehow stem the flow of Z's from the streets, I am ALL ears (eyes in this case).

I started in A-15 and have thoroughly enjoyed the game up to this point.  I've never been so disappointed in any previous iteration as I am now.

Edited February 10, 2022 by DOS1129 (see edit history)

[theFlu]

I suffer from the same issue on my normal settings, even the frame numbers are pretty similar. I can get the frames from 20 to 40 by dropping quality to the minimum preset in the skyscrapers.

 

For the lag caused by the walk-ins, the only thing that remotely works is to give them a route up; I usually just rebuild the staircase as I go up. I try to give the zeds pathable access to the floor I am clearing or above - so if I'll have to clear floors 5 & 6 before the path takes me back to the stairs, I connect the staircase up to floor 7. They'll keep flowing up, and I can keep their numbers down as they do.

[Darklegend222]

I have the same issues with skyscrapers, disabling the dynamic mesh seems to give 10 extra fps, but it stutters so much.

 

As for the zeds, we just let them absolutely annihilate the bottom areas. I rely on melee more than anything so by the time I'm 2+ floors up they stop pathing and just wander around. I'll take the oh @%$#z drop candy and jump off the side which has my vehicle for an easy escape. It's the most managable I can do, but with the stuttering i more than likely pull out the AK about 6-7 floors up.

 

I have occlusion enabled so I have no idea why it would be stuttering so insanely bad as the objects shouldn't be drawing.

[RipClaw]

Sounds to me like your T5 mission was in the wasteland. This is different than having T5 missions in one of the other biomes due to the high spawn rate in the wasteland.

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[Pernicious]

4 hours ago, DOS1129 said:

 I've got a 3.4 Ghz machine with 16 Meg ram and use a large page file,

 

Surprised you can even boot windows. I mean, that would mean you're paging the Windows Kernel itself, no wonder you have a large page file.

 

In all seriousness though, yes, this is a very compute heavy game, but we really have no idea whether you're playing using a 17 year old computer (The first x86 to hit 3.4Ghz is that old), or you're using a lower end, contemporary chip.

 

We have no idea what you did to tune the game except "everything".

 

I've found the optimisation step that made the most difference is assigning processor affinity, followed by overclocking. I did the clock speed and the memory speed in the same step, so not sure which one made the difference.

 

The game is also very memory heavy. That's with a 10k map loaded (admittedly, I also have a lot of other things, like 20 odd tabs on my browser, Discord, Steam, etc. all open too):

 

If you're paging, you're putting a huge load on your hard drive, so I hope it's an NVME drive, not a SATA SSD, or worse, a magnetic drive.

 

The reality is, on the one hand, computers are getting insanely capable. Most developers are getting excited by monstrous compute power that lets them realistically calculate physics and light, program AI, and use huge textures and high quality audio like never before. At a price - That they can afford (Seen the pay of a senior dev lately?) But not everyone can. A top of the line GPU in Australia, is about a month's wage after tax. Even a high end CPU with no motherboard, memory, or any other component is a week's wage, easy.

 

But here's the rub - Who do you want to be developing games for. Those that can afford to buy them, or those that can't? Gaming is becoming the new Golf/Polo/Skiing - the leisure of the rich. There's a massive market out there for mobile games with micro-transactions. Everyone has a phone, and everyone can afford a buck or two. But PC and Console games are a different ball park entirely. They are being written to cater for at least the moderately well off.

[meganoth]

15 minutes ago, Pernicious said:

 

Surprised you can even boot windows. I mean, that would mean you're paging the Windows Kernel itself, no wonder you have a large page file.

 

In all seriousness though, yes, this is a very compute heavy game, but we really have no idea whether you're playing using a 17 year old computer (The first x86 to hit 3.4Ghz is that old), or you're using a lower end, contemporary chip.

 

We have no idea what you did to tune the game except "everything".

 

I've found the optimisation step that made the most difference is assigning processor affinity, followed by overclocking. I did the clock speed and the memory speed in the same step, so not sure which one made the difference.

 

The game is also very memory heavy. That's with a 10k map loaded (admittedly, I also have a lot of other things, like 20 odd tabs on my browser, Discord, Steam, etc. all open too):

 

If you're paging, you're putting a huge load on your hard drive, so I hope it's an NVME drive, not a SATA SSD, or worse, a magnetic drive.

 

The reality is, on the one hand, computers are getting insanely capable. Most developers are getting excited by monstrous compute power that lets them realistically calculate physics and light, program AI, and use huge textures and high quality audio like never before. At a price - That they can afford (Seen the pay of a senior dev lately?) But not everyone can. A top of the line GPU in Australia, is about a month's wage after tax. Even a high end CPU with no motherboard, memory, or any other component is a week's wage, easy.

 

But here's the rub - Who do you want to be developing games for. Those that can afford to buy them, or those that can't? Gaming is becoming the new Golf/Polo/Skiing - the leisure of the rich. There's a massive market out there for mobile games with micro-transactions. Everyone has a phone, and everyone can afford a buck or two. But PC and Console games are a different ball park entirely. They are being written to cater for at least the moderately well off.

 

Well said, but I wouldn't read too much into the current situation. Some parts of the chip market (like RAM) have been fluctuating with their prices for decades. Now with practically only 3 suppliers of chips, often 1 supplier for interconnect layers, and again 1 supplier for the photolitographic machines we see the same with CPUs and GPUs. 

 

And with chip manufacturing plants needing years to build those cycles are measured in years as well.

 

And don't tell me people generally can't afford a PC when too many throw away their hard pay away just to buy a new phone every 3 years (Statistically it is nearly 3 years in Europe now, in the US it is still only about 1.5 to 2 years if I remember correctly). Not to say there aren't people who can't afford a PC even at normal price.

 

 

[Darklegend222]

5 hours ago, RipClaw said:

Sounds to me like your T5 mission was in the wasteland. This is different than having T5 missions in one of the other biomes due to the high spawn rate in the wasteland.

 

If the wasteland is able to cause that much damage to FPS, then that doesn't change a thing about the game being near unplayable for the end-game. All my worlds I've generated have only had tier Vs in the Wasteland, and the wasteland is the best biome for loot. If you're going to drop well over half your FPS because of how the optimizations and engine are, that's not the fault of a skyscraper or bad RWG.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Darklegend222 (see edit history)

[Darklegend222]

20 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

Well said, but I wouldn't read too much into the current situation. Some parts of the chip market (like RAM) have been fluctuating with their prices for decades. Now with practically only 3 suppliers of chips, often 1 supplier for interconnect layers, and again 1 supplier for the photolitographic machines we see the same with CPUs and GPUs. 

 

And with chip manufacturing plants needing years to build those cycles are measured in years as well.

 

And don't tell me people generally can't afford a PC when too many throw away their hard pay away just to buy a new phone every 3 years (Statistically it is nearly 3 years in Europe now, in the US it is still only about 1.5 to 2 years if I remember correctly). Not to say there aren't people who can't afford a PC even at normal price.

 

 

I agree with all that, but the chances of a phone making it 3 years for the average person are pretty low. Especially when new phones release and they do the good ole planned obsolescence to slow down older phones to a point of needing a new one.

 

Getting a good PC is one thing, but not everyone is tech savvy or wants to get a new build for thousands of dollars. Even my i9-10850k isn't running the wasteland well, it won't just come down to hardware in the case that me and the OP are in the wasteland biome as more optimizations and a better engine are needed for the game. Never had an issue with the Wasteland until the A20 update so something is up.

[Roland]

6 hours ago, DOS1129 said:

If anyone has any pointers to either increase frame rate or to somehow stem the flow of Z's from the streets, I am ALL ears (eyes in this case).

 

Try using the killall command after killing all the zombies in a volume but before approaching the next volume so that the zombies don't spawn yet. That should kill all the zombies outside first.

[Jugginator]

Dynamic mesh may help with performance on your machine.

 

For the T5 quests, big tip is to try to ignore outside spawns the best you can while trapping behind you: carry some wooden spikes and cobblestone blocks. Utilizing that I speed run through T5's, trapping/blocking behind me (the stairs/ladder you took to get there? Get rid of them or trap them).

[PoloPoPo]

3 hours ago, Pernicious said:

Gaming is becoming the new Golf/Polo/Skiing - the leisure of the rich.

Big nope.

 

As for performance issues, I agree with whatever has been said here. I know criticising TFP is not a good idea here but nontheless, if 20 of those walking pixels called Zs cause performance to go through the floor there is definitely something wrong with how the game mechanic works or uses hardware ressources. And if I am honest here, no matter how much I love this game, with A20 and skycraper / downtown performance they have completely messed up.

[meganoth]

3 hours ago, Darklegend222 said:

I agree with all that, but the chances of a phone making it 3 years for the average person are pretty low. Especially when new phones release and they do the good ole planned obsolescence to slow down older phones to a point of needing a new one.

 

Getting a good PC is one thing, but not everyone is tech savvy or wants to get a new build for thousands of dollars. Even my i9-10850k isn't running the wasteland well, it won't just come down to hardware in the case that me and the OP are in the wasteland biome as more optimizations and a better engine are needed for the game. Never had an issue with the Wasteland until the A20 update so something is up.

 

I run the game at 1080p with reduced settings on a middle class CPU from 4 years ago (Ryzen5 2600x), the PC cost me 800 Euros. And it runs well, though for A20 I specifically needed to turn off the new feature dynamic mesh. And very important, VSYNC just doesn't work right.

 

Now I don't want to excempt TFP from fault. IMHO they don't do enough to make the switch between versions unproblematic. I personally would have routines in the game that wipe any configuration and old worlds when the game finds out it changed between alphas (ok,ok, maybe with a warning to klick on). Then tell everyone to use different accounts if they want to play two alphas at the same time.

The game also seems to have not enough fault tolerance but that is VERY hard to judge from outside.

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Reth]

I played numerous T5 missions on nomad difficulty in a wasteland. I did die a couple of times, but I learned a few lessons there. 

• First of all, use a suppressed or a silent weapon whenever possible. Unsuppressed auto creates too much heat.
• Get parkour - well timed jumps will save you.
• Have some decent, well modded light armor. You will get hit a plenty, you'll need that protection.
• Get a skill that lets you reload while sprinting (forgot the name).
• In taller PoIs - Book/Towers - you can cut off access to the upper levels once you get there to make them safe from the roamers.

Basically, don't go there until you are well prepared. T4 quests give very good rewards for the difficulty.

 

Can't help you with the frame rate though.

[DOS1129]

Thanks for all of the replies and tips.

Apologies for not listing everything I've tried to increase FPS, I just naturally assumed it'd be a TLDR.

 

Syncing the G-cards, turning off Dynamic Mesh, V-Sync, Reflection Quality, Motion Blur, Reflected Shadows, SSAO, DOF and Sun Shafts.  I turn down texture quality and water quality.  Set UMA and plant quality to mid, view distance to 10, particles to as low as possible

I try the GFX fixes in game, run it from teh shortcut, I've optimized my graphics card specifically for 7D2d, and I've tried editing some of the storm values.

Lot's of things to try and mix, but still get ugly FPS when I attract too many Z's near those T5's.

I've tried going around teh T5's before starting them and killing anything that moves in a block radius, but all that does is insures that by the time I've looped around, more Z's are spawning where I started.

I'd be fine with ignoring them, but they cause my FPS to drop when there's too many of them below, romping around.  They themselves arent the issue, their rendering and tracking are.

Thank you all for the replies, I appreciate everyones input here and I see a couple new things to try out at least.

Hope everyone is safe and healthy, enjoy your week folks.

3 hours ago, Reth said:

I played numerous T5 missions on nomad difficulty in a wasteland. I did die a couple of times, but I learned a few lessons there. 

• First of all, use a suppressed or a silent weapon whenever possible. Unsuppressed auto creates too much heat.
• Get parkour - well timed jumps will save you.
• Have some decent, well modded light armor. You will get hit a plenty, you'll need that protection.
• Get a skill that lets you reload while sprinting (forgot the name).
• In taller PoIs - Book/Towers - you can cut off access to the upper levels once you get there to make them safe from the roamers.

Basically, don't go there until you are well prepared. T4 quests give very good rewards for the difficulty.

 

Can't help you with the frame rate though.

Thanks, I appreciate it, but game play tips aren't what I was frustrated with.  I can do a T5 easily enough, when my Frame rates will oblige.

I've been playing since A-15 and have over 4000 hours played.  Killing the darned Z's isnt the issue :-).

It's got to be something with the new city generation for sure.  That and the insanely increased spawns, even without Feral Sense.

Hopefully they'll give us more options on control over spawns and respawns in future.  If a Z wouldn't respawn for a guaranteed 24 hour window after I kill it, I'd be fine I think, but I have no idea if they'll give us that as an option on respawn rates.

Cheers.

[Boidster]

It's pretty easy to change it if you want (though it's not a UI slider). Just open spawning.xml and change the "respawndelay" to whatever you prefer. It's measured in game days, so for a 24-hour in-game respawn, you'd use "1". You can see that for downtown daytime zombies, it's currently an 8-hour (.3) respawn. Worse at night.

 

One of these sections for each biome.

 

    <biome name="pine_forest">
        <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="2.9" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" notags="commercial,industrial,downtown" />
        <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="3.3" time="Night" entitygroup="ZombiesNight" notags="commercial,industrial,downtown" />

        <spawn maxcount="2" respawndelay="0.3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" tags="commercial,industrial" notags="downtown" />
        <spawn maxcount="3" respawndelay="0.15" time="Night" entitygroup="ZombiesNight" tags="commercial,industrial" notags="downtown" />

        <spawn maxcount="3" respawndelay="0.3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesForestDowntown" tags="downtown" />
        <spawn maxcount="3" respawndelay="0.1" time="Night" entitygroup="ZombiesForestDowntownNight" tags="downtown" />

        <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="1" time="Any" entitygroup="WildGameForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
        <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="1.1" time="Night" entitygroup="EnemyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
    </biome>

 

[Pernicious]

8 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Well said, but I wouldn't read too much into the current situation. Some parts of the chip market (like RAM) have been fluctuating with their prices for decades. Now with practically only 3 suppliers of chips, often 1 supplier for interconnect layers, and again 1 supplier for the photolitographic machines we see the same with CPUs and GPUs. 

 

And with chip manufacturing plants needing years to build those cycles are measured in years as well.

 

And don't tell me people generally can't afford a PC when too many throw away their hard pay away just to buy a new phone every 3 years (Statistically it is nearly 3 years in Europe now, in the US it is still only about 1.5 to 2 years if I remember correctly). Not to say there aren't people who can't afford a PC even at normal price.

Yeah, probably an exaggeration on my part there. I am very aware that prices are currently very influenced by chip shortages and for GPUs - Crypto mining based demand. Maybe it's different in other countries, but I'm aware the group of friends I game with, most are between 100% and 130% of the median income, one just bought a second hand 1080 card, because he couldn't justify anything newer. Another jumped from an AMD RX460 to a Nvidia 3060, because it was the most he could justify - and he waited that long to upgrade. And these guys are single - no kids, so no big mortgages either, on average to slightly above average incomes... Every single guy I personally know with current generation GPUs are either miners, casual miners to offset the cost, or work in IT and are on high incomes/can write off IT equipment on tax.

 

So I'm aware my sample is small, and my bubble is real, but I don't think it's unfair to say right now that a decent gaming rig is a luxury for most people.

 

5 hours ago, PoloPoPo said:

Big nope.

Big Yep.  Thanks for stimulating discussion and debate. 😛

 

32 minutes ago, DOS1129 said:

Syncing the G-cards, turning off Dynamic Mesh, V-Sync, Reflection Quality, Motion Blur, Reflected Shadows, SSAO, DOF and Sun Shafts.  I turn down texture quality and water quality.  Set UMA and plant quality to mid, view distance to 10, particles to as low as possible

I try the GFX fixes in game, run it from teh shortcut, I've optimized my graphics card specifically for 7D2d, and I've tried editing some of the storm values.

Lot's of things to try and mix, but still get ugly FPS when I attract too many Z's near those T5's.

It looks like you've tried mostly GFX fixes. This game isn't GPU bound. In fact, even when I'm getting 45fps, which is the lowest I go, my GPU is still only about 30-35% utilised, with everything maxed out on 1440p.

 

Unfortunately, aside from processor affinity setting, and overclocking if it's possible, most the other fixes will cost money, so I assume those options are off the table. I don't want to write off the game for people unwilling to upgrade... But at some point, you have to cut your coat according to your cloth.

 

[DEATH MECHANIC]

15 hours ago, DOS1129 said:

Most unfortunate that the game is completely unplayable late stage.  T4 started to get pretty bad but T5 is now impossible, between frame rate drops and unending waves of zombies that hear you from 5 blocks away and instantly re spawn, it makes it so that the T5 quests are impossible to do.

The new graphics look nice and all, but the game is unplayable unless you have a massive gaming rig.  I've got a 3.4 Ghz machine with 16 Meg ram and use a large page file, I've turned all settings down to bare minimum, followed every tutorial on the web to optimize and sure, in the country with a couple Z's I get up to 60 FPS.  I hit the city and it drops to 40 immediately and once I start a POI its routinely 25ish.  Until I get 12 mobs out, then its 11.

I dont even have Feral Sense turned ON and I still can't complete a T5 POI without near constant interruptions.  I've got max stealth, all possible mods and 5 stories up, Z's on the street hear you rustle in a garbage can.  Once they start, the frame rate drops even more.

The cosmetic changes are great, but if you're game is unplayable you're pretty much just pushing your player base to other games.  I tried 5 times to complete a T5 and I spent more time outside the POI circling it, killing the insta-spawn roamers, than inside it.  I ran out of 900 9mm, 600 7.62, 300 shotgun shells and 300 crossbow bolts before I had even cleared the first floor of the POI.  I've tried every weapon suppressed and usually even try to rely on Melee as much as possible to stay as quiet as I can, to no avail.  I killed over 900 Z's, most outside the POI.

There really needs to be some changes made to roamers and hearing range especially if I dont even have damned Feral Sense on, this is simply stupidity at this point.  I like a hard game sure, but unplayable isnt fun, just tedious.

If anyone has any pointers to either increase frame rate or to somehow stem the flow of Z's from the streets, I am ALL ears (eyes in this case).

I started in A-15 and have thoroughly enjoyed the game up to this point.  I've never been so disappointed in any previous iteration as I am now.

 

go to where your save game is located and find the folder Dynamic Meshes and delete everything inside the folder, then start your game and go to the dynamic mesh tab in settings and turn it off and every other setting to 1 or no then (the most important) turn dynamic mesh distance to 100. start the game and let it run for a minute or two then quit the game completely (so everything saves  the changes). now restart the game and see if anything improves for your frame rate. the only thing that turning off dynamic mesh does is it wont save anything to that folder anymore, Dynamic distance is the new view distance and can be confirmed by checking the log file and looking for a line that says Max Load Distance = it will have the same number set to the setting in the dynamic mesh distance so 100,500,1000 ect also turn shadow distance to low or off. you would think that turning dynamic mesh off would disable all of those setting but that is not the case for everything. even doing this you may still have crappy frame rate around the sky scrappers but it should be better.

[pahbi]

The way I can tell that zombies have entered my T5 mission and started beating on walls is by the frame rate drop.

 

Once I kill them, the frame rate comes right back.

[JoeDaFrogman]

21 hours ago, Pernicious said:

Unfortunately, aside from processor affinity setting, and overclocking if it's possible, most the other fixes will cost money, so I assume those options are off the table. I don't want to write off the game for people unwilling to upgrade... But at some point, you have to cut your coat according to your cloth.

 

 

Could you detail what exactly you did for processor affinity?   For me it defaults to all processors being checked and I would ASSUME that's what one would typically want on a multicore CPU

[BFT2020]

1 hour ago, JoeDaFrogman said:

 

Could you detail what exactly you did for processor affinity?   For me it defaults to all processors being checked and I would ASSUME that's what one would typically want on a multicore CPU

 

Processors are divided up between real and virtual.  Starting at Core 0, it alternates between real and virtual.  Real cores, in simple terms, are the actual physical cores in your CPU.  Virtual cores make use of the extra hypertreads in the CPU to transfer data.  The reason you would limit a software to real cores only is that virtual cores contend for the unshared resources like memory.

 

If your CPU is the bottleneck, a possible solution is to limit the program to the real cores only.  I did it in the past on an order machine, but I think my current machine doesn't need it really.  I can't recall the exact method I used in the past, but I am sure others will be able to share.

[Pernicious]

6 hours ago, JoeDaFrogman said:

 

Could you detail what exactly you did for processor affinity?   For me it defaults to all processors being checked and I would ASSUME that's what one would typically want on a multicore CPU

 

Just used built in Windows features to bind it to particular cores. This is a shortcut on my desktop to start 7D2D

 

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "7D2D" /affinity AA "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\7DaysToDie_EAC.exe"

 

The part "/affinity AA" binds it to the first four cores of a 6 core CPU, from memory. It's hexadecimal converted from binary.