Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

[Fanatical_Meat]

14 hours ago, welshboy0420 said:

Is there any possible way of getting beta codes for the private betas or not? Really wanna try alpha21 

Yes but it’s not work safe

 

[meganoth]

9 hours ago, MeanGean said:

As someone who just started on PC suffered on ps4 for years, someone who’s bought the game twice because they love it, to read what’s coming in the next alpha I’m a bit disappointed. The experience, lvl, perks, magazine system being tooled again seems like spinning your wheels in the mud, the game is already supper grindy this just sounding like more time swing a weak stone axe boourns to that. The alpha that console currently sits at is a terrible version, the alpha just before that one was an actual decent version and played pretty well, next alpha comes out and pretty much breaks the game and then we have what we had with the courts and console players are boned, if you had just left it how it was it would have been fine. Short version is with the amount of time and effort put into this one game you could have split it up made multiple games and made a ton of money but if you’re gung-ho on this one game; content, story’s, NPC’s, better vehicles, stuff to sink your teeth into not another relearning the mechanics patch. I don’t mean to be captain bring down but I’m digging a massive hole right now in my world and to do that with stone shovel would make me question my life choices.(give me excavator please lol)

 

Have you considered explosives and putting a few points into strength?

 

With the current system you can just invest 7-9 perk points into strength,sexrex, miner69 and mother lode and you are an acceptable miner. Then dig a trench around your hole and use explosives to undermine the center block until the whole thing crumbles down. Sure, still lots of work, but manageable.

 

About the current situation, there are some people who work on bandits, which is (together with the bandit-fueled story) the only barrier to release the game. While they do that other members of TFP's team are free to make improvements to parts of the game that are suboptimal. Crafting and water physics for example. Better than waiting and having a year long coffee break 😉

Edited September 12, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[WaywardEko]

On 9/9/2022 at 10:27 PM, mstdv inc said:

There are 4 topics that I would like to discuss:
2. Continuation of the previous topic.I'm honestly already tired of looking at complaints about FPS during the horde.People shout that they have a top computer and the game should give out so much fps.But not really.She shouldn't.And I understand why.But they don't want to listen to any explanations.Most likely, this will be an extremely unpopular offer, but maybe it's worth doing some kind of verification of the characteristics of the PC and the number of players who play together, in order to limit automatically limit the possible number of zombies in the horde?Not to give a choice of 24 or more zombies for a potato pc?Or forced dynamic resolution in skyscrapers and the horde?I don't know.I already feel bad from these eternal complaints about fps.
 

I think this is a 100% valid concern and I hope that the community continues to raise it.  I'll add on that I run a 3900x | 3080 | 64 GB DDR4 | 4 TB NVME and play locally as well as on a very robust server running 30GB ram for the server.  I'm not asking for the world, but running on stock medium settings with 3 other players, I was getting 15-20 FPS just a few days ago.  It is common that once we have 7-8 players playing, we all drop down to single digit FPS.  My community typically equates horde night to a power point presentation.

I love this game and I want it more accessible to people with all levels of hardware.  Additionally I want it to be competitive with other modern games so it succeeds.  I also realize that from and FPS perspective you can't do an A-A comparison to games with statics levels/worlds as they don't have to deal with the computational nightmare that the voxel-based world brings.  All that said, I think the current FPS level is out of alignment with market expectations.  Those of us complaining are doing so because we enjoy this game and spend an insane amount of time playing it.  We just want a better playing experience.  

 

- Eko

[JCrook1028]

On 9/12/2022 at 10:54 AM, WaywardEko said:

I'll add on that I run a 3900x | 3080 | 64 GB DDR4 | 4 TB NVME and play locally as well as on a very robust server running 30GB ram for the server.  I'm not asking for the world, but running on stock medium settings with 3 other players, I was getting 15-20 FPS just a few days ago.

There's something seriously wrong with those numbers. No way that system should be running the game so poorly. My 3700x and 3060 rarely drops below 60 fps and that's on some pretty high settings. other than the fps killers like shadows and reflections being tuned down a bit. You got some fixin to do! This is at 1080p res.

Edited September 13, 2022 by JCrook1028
added resolution (see edit history)

[meganoth]

Both of you should post your screen resolution.

 

[WaywardEko]

5 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Both of you should post your screen resolution.

 

I'm running 4k.  I learned the hard way that the 3000 series cards are optimized for that and actually give worse performance if you drop it.  

26 minutes ago, JCrook1028 said:

There's something seriously wrong with those numbers. No way that system should be running the game so poorly. My 3700x and 3060 rarely drops below 60 fps and that's on some pretty high settings. other than the fps killers like shadows and reflections being tuned down a bit. You got some fixin to do!

I will say that I'm not alone on this challenge and that these numbers are not uncommon.  I did a performance video on 7DTD w/ over 400+ comments and the variability of FPS is all over the map.  I've seen folks w/ 3090s also have issues.  Bottom line is with that level of hardware, I shouldn't even have to worry about tweaking settings to squeeze out FPS.  I'm not trying to run on ultra settings.  I'm taking a modest approach.

 

[v3tro]

1 hour ago, WaywardEko said:

I'm running 4k.  I learned the hard way that the 3000 series cards are optimized for that and actually give worse performance if you drop it.  

I will say that I'm not alone on this challenge and that these numbers are not uncommon.  I did a performance video on 7DTD w/ over 400+ comments and the variability of FPS is all over the map.  I've seen folks w/ 3090s also have issues.  Bottom line is with that level of hardware, I shouldn't even have to worry about tweaking settings to squeeze out FPS.  I'm not trying to run on ultra settings.  I'm taking a modest approach.

 

 

I have 3900x, 2070super and 32DDR4. Everything is on ultra+ (except shadows,motion blurr off) and I`m playing on 1440p. Frames are above 60 majority of time, drops low at intense horde nights but I`m running 64zombies per player.

[meganoth]

2 hours ago, WaywardEko said:

I'm running 4k.  I learned the hard way that the 3000 series cards are optimized for that and actually give worse performance if you drop it.  

I will say that I'm not alone on this challenge and that these numbers are not uncommon.  I did a performance video on 7DTD w/ over 400+ comments and the variability of FPS is all over the map.  I've seen folks w/ 3090s also have issues.  Bottom line is with that level of hardware, I shouldn't even have to worry about tweaking settings to squeeze out FPS.  I'm not trying to run on ultra settings.  I'm taking a modest approach.

 

 

(I'm not sure this still works:) If you want to tank your FPS, just try to grow a massive forest of tightly packed trees and look at it. Now do the same in Call of Duty? You can't? That is one reason why Call of Duty does not have this problem.

Trees have been optimized some time ago, the new "trees" are windows right now in A20. I heard that they got optimized for A21 so if you have seen the FPS drops when looking at a packed city you should see improvements in A21.

 

Another one is that 7D2D (unlike other games which run beautifully on your setup) is CPU-bound. In other words, you could throw out your 3090s and stuff a 3060 into your PC and the game would probably run with the same FPS. Your GPU is bored to death. And most of the cores of your CPU are not used as well.

 

 

 

 

[WaywardEko]

8 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

(I'm not sure this still works:) If you want to tank your FPS, just try to grow a massive forest of tightly packed trees and look at it. Now do the same in Call of Duty? You can't? That is one reason why Call of Duty does not have this problem.

Trees have been optimized some time ago, the new "trees" are windows right now in A20. I heard that they got optimized for A21 so if you have seen the FPS drops when looking at a packed city you should see improvements in A21.

 

Another one is that 7D2D (unlike other games which run beautifully on your setup) is CPU-bound. In other words, you could throw out your 3090s and stuff a 3060 into your PC and the game would probably run with the same FPS. Your GPU is bored to death. And most of the cores of your CPU are not used as well.

 

 

 

 

 

Trees can definitely still have an impact, but I feel like that is more localized.  We generally just push people to do tree farms away from populated areas.  I did have a hilarious streaming experience on the Totally Not Prepared server while flying a gyro over Temreki's tree farm and being punted .... took a while when I logged back to find where the gyro materialized.

And yeah - you are spot on on the GPU side.  3900x on the CPU is still plenty  hefty - granted it's more core oriented to help for my video editing, but processor speed should still be fine at 3.8mhz base clock.  

1 hour ago, v3tro said:

 

I have 3900x, 2070super and 32DDR4. Everything is on ultra+ (except shadows,motion blurr off) and I`m playing on 1440p. Frames are above 60 majority of time, drops low at intense horde nights but I`m running 64zombies per player.

 

This is where all the feedback has been all over the board.  I've connected with folks with older systems getting better FPS as well as newer systems getting less FPS.  I don't have the data to narrow down hardware commonalities though.

[meganoth]

19 minutes ago, WaywardEko said:

 

Trees can definitely still have an impact, but I feel like that is more localized.  We generally just push people to do tree farms away from populated areas.  I did have a hilarious streaming experience on the Totally Not Prepared server while flying a gyro over Temreki's tree farm and being punted .... took a while when I logged back to find where the gyro materialized.

And yeah - you are spot on on the GPU side.  3900x on the CPU is still plenty  hefty - granted it's more core oriented to help for my video editing, but processor speed should still be fine at 3.8mhz base clock.  

 

This is where all the feedback has been all over the board.  I've connected with folks with older systems getting better FPS as well as newer systems getting less FPS.  I don't have the data to narrow down hardware commonalities though.

 

I have often voiced my suspicion that the real bottleneck may be some data path as 7D2D has to shift a lot of data around. Cache size could also be a hidden factor. There is a new AMD CPU with a huge cache, I hope that eventually someone with that CPU turns up and can tell us if the game runs much better on his rig.

 

Edited September 12, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[WaywardEko]

7 minutes ago, meganoth said:

 

I have often voiced my suspicion that the real bottleneck may be some data path as 7D2D has to shift a lot of data around. Cache size could also be a hidden factor. There is a new AMD CPU with a huge cache, I hope that eventually someone with that CPU turns up and can tell us if the game runs much better on his rig.

 

 

Yeah - the 5800X3D is up tot 96MB of cache.  I'm at 64MB cache on the 3900x.  I'm not sure if it's some combination of hardware ... but something is definitely fishy. 

[SoulKing95]

Although I’ve never played 7 days to die on pc I do own on Xbox series x and love the game! A lot better then Minecraft!! Hope to the alpha 20 version come to consoles soon I want my turrets and blade traps lol 

[Laz Man]

2 hours ago, WaywardEko said:

 

Yeah - the 5800X3D is up tot 96MB of cache.  I'm at 64MB cache on the 3900x.  I'm not sure if it's some combination of hardware ... but something is definitely fishy. 

 

Are you referring to Vanilla?  I encourage you submit a bug report with your log files and such.  See red banner above.  

[WaywardEko]

46 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

Are you referring to Vanilla?  I encourage you submit a bug report with your log files and such.  See red banner above.  

Thanks and will do.  It's vanilla with some minor quality of life mods.  We had the same issues in pure vanilla though.  Would it be best for me to replicate the horde night FPS and then pull the logs?

[maxousara]

1 hour ago, SoulKing95 said:

Although I’ve never played 7 days to die on pc I do own on Xbox series x and love the game! A lot better then Minecraft!! Hope to the alpha 20 version come to consoles soon I want my turrets and blade traps lol 

They start work on console port. But it's for 2023 maybe 2024. I wait for this port too. I play another game until that happened. I have bought a ps5 its very better than a ps4

[Laz Man]

42 minutes ago, WaywardEko said:

Thanks and will do.  It's vanilla with some minor quality of life mods.  We had the same issues in pure vanilla though.  Would it be best for me to replicate the horde night FPS and then pull the logs?

Yes, client and server logs would be ideal. 

[Roland]

1 hour ago, maxousara said:

They start work on console port. But it's for 2023 maybe 2024. I wait for this port too. I play another game until that happened. I have bought a ps5 its very better than a ps4

Hence the 5…

[Riamus]

I am a new player, having just started playing shortly before A21.6 was released.  First, I wanted to say that this is a very fun game already.  I have read through a lot of pages of discussion about A21 and wanted to provide my thoughts on the changes as well as some suggestions for improvements from the perspective of a new player.  It is a lot, I know.   

 

First, some suggestions for QoL improvements and other features suggestions:

• Please consider adding a "Lock" option for items in inventory to prevent moving the item(s) when using the R key.  This is mainly for vehicles and drones.  For vehicles, I like to keep a stack of Gas in the inventory so I don't have to spend time trying to get some if I run low.  For my current drone (well, until my game crashed and I appear to have lost it though it still shows on the map- along with all held items), I used the medical mod, so kept some medical supplies in the inventory there.  I use both vehicle and drone to store loot until I return to my base and then need to transfer it to the base's chests.  It is a pain to use R to quickly get the loot out, but then have to manually put back the items I want to remain - especially when it auto-closes the inventory and then you have to hold E and select inventory to open it back up again.  Being able to lock items so they don't get taken out when using R (you can choose to allow manually moving them or not, either is okay with me), it will make handling inventory transfers much better.
• Please allow us to refuel a vehicle that has Gas in its own inventory without having to transfer the Gas to our inventory to refuel and then transfer it back to the vehicle.
• Please consider a way to make lockpicking less annoying.  It's fine if it can break a bunch of lockpicks if you have bad RNG luck.  The annoyance is that you have to keep holding E and selecting lockpick after each attempt, which with the delay when you hold E, just gets annoying fast.  Some sort of quick "retry" button or something would be much appreciated.
• I saw the video of the new gas fire environmental hazard.  The pipe was red.  This should really be changed.  In the US at least, red is generally your fire suppression/sprinkler system.  Gas lines, if color coded, are usually yellow.  If not color coded, they'd usually be black.  There may be different colors in some states and quite possibly elsewhere in the world, of course.  But I think the number of red gas pipes around the world are very low, even if they aren't yellow or black.  Better to use the color most commonly seen or else black (or your unpainted iron/steel color that you use for other pipes) to avoid color coding entirely.
• The game has some minor character creation options that I feel are nice to have in the game.  I'd like to suggest another option to consider for further character creation choices.  I think adding something like a character background would be nice.  Now, I'm not talking about one of those text boxes many RPGs add for bios that are almost never read and don't have any impact on the game.  What I'm suggesting is a VERY limited "class" option.  And, no, I'm not suggesting adding classes as you might be thinking and might be about to scream "No!" to.  😜  What I'm suggesting is having basically an option of prior job, career, or hobby.  I'm not actually sure how many years after the world came apart that the game is set, so perhaps your character has never worked an actual job or perhaps it is soon enough that your character would have had a job (assuming they are old enough) before the fall.  Even if it's too many years after for it to make sense as a job, it might be considered a hobby or an interest.  Here's the idea of how it would work.  The player chooses the background when creating their character (it would require being able to have separate profiles for each game played).  This background would allow for a special "ability" that is not game changing and does not affect your ability to play the game in any way.  It should *not* be something where players feel one of the choices is better than the other for meta reasons.  Here are some possibilities:  If you were an artist, you might have the ability to make unique paintings (it doesn't have to be more than a few) that cannot otherwise be made or purchased or found that you can hang in your base.  If you were an electrician, you might have the ability to create lights that are different colors for your base, vehicles, and light mods.  I know you can change light values/colors when editing POI, but I don't believe that's currently an option in the game itself when making your base.  This might also allow you to make undercarriage lights for your vehicles (maybe even the bicycle?  ).  Those are just a couple of examples.  As you can see, they don't have any "real" effect on the game and only offer a cosmetic option.  I think that's crucial.  The lighting itself is already available, so would be a very quick thing to add to the game and even the artwork wouldn't be too hard to add.  Undercarriage lighting would be new and would take more time to add, of course.  Now, I do suggest cosmetic abilities as they avoid metagaming issues and complaints and balancing.  However, if you wanted to, you could consider having ones specific to each weapon type that would add a very small increase to damage (maybe only +1-3 or something like that).  So a police officer gains bonus damage on batons, while a baseball player gains bonus damage on bats, and a fireman gains bonus damage on fire axes.  I think this would be minimal enough to not be a big deal for metagaming and balancing.  However, it should not include the top end weapons that you can't get until mid game (such as SMG).  I'd recommend it only for the early weapons as a slight bonus when starting the game, where you don't yet know what weapons you'll find and have the potential for it giving a bonus to a weapon you end up not using because you found something else that was better in loot.  I think that option is okay, but I personally prefer the cosmetic options.  Other options include a background that offers a few extra "paints" (wallpapers can be from a separate background from paint colors or textures depending on how you do it), being able to add a logo to armor/clothing instead of dye, being able to make a flag with a number of options for how it looks, etc.  I believe the additional option for characters would interest both new and old players alike without risking unbalancing the game and with minimal effort.

Some general thoughts:

• Water voxel improvements sound great.  Hopefully it means no more "dry" areas in the middle of lakes and ponds.  Looking forward to that and to see how it works in regard to sharing space with other blocks.
• The new environmental hazards (broken gas lines) look great.  I do think that you should find a way to make them similar to electrical wiring in that if you break the pipe connecting the valve to the broken part, it will shut off the flame or move the flame to the appropriate pipe piece.  Having a single piece of pipe that is on fire without being connected to anything would really look bad.  If you could make it so that breaking the pipe will shut off the flame on the broken piece and start a flame on the new end of the pipe, that would be ideal, though I understand that's a lot more work since the broken piece on fire is a specific block that is different from the other pipe blocks.  Perhaps all the pipes could be set up with a check on attached blocks... if there is another pipe attached, it is automatically "off" and if there isn't, then it is automatically "on".  The difficulty there is if you break the pipe in the middle, do both ends light on fire?  Because they shouldn't.  Maybe it's set up as a one-way pipe where it only checks the "out" end for another pipe piece connected to it?  Seems doable with a little work.
• Please consider adding additional vehicle types to the game (props, not drivable).  Please consider at least one of each type of personal vehicle - coupe, sedan, pickup, SUV, minivan and maybe even a sports car or convertible.  I know you're adding a couple new prop vehicles, but we really need at least one of each major type of vehicle as I listed so that we can have variety that makes sense and allow for POIs that make sense.  I'm sure not everyone out there drove a sedan or utility vehicle/ambulance.  If you could also add a semi rig as well, that would be great, but less important.  Still, having one considering you already have semi trailers would be nice.
• If possible, it would be nice to see the occasional prop car crashed, such as partly in a ditch or up against a guardrail or something.  I did see a utility vehicle that was crashed through a POI wall, which was nice to see.  Having more of those would be great.  I'm sure if the apocalypse happened, many people would leave their vehicles and flee, but many others would end up trying to drive away and crash.  It would probably require additional car props that show crash damage, but it would help to make the world more believable.  And I think having so many cars sitting in the middle of the desert is a bit strange.  It could perhaps be believable, but only if you really work at it.  Maybe that needs toned down somewhat or at least place them closer to roads/paths so it looks like they tried fleeing away from the roads instead of that they were all just driving around the desert for no reason.  In the same way, the wasteland has so much debris so far away from buildings that it really looks strange.  I guess the idea is that the hilly wasteland terrain is the rubble of buildings and the debris is just what's left on top of the piles of destroyed buildings.  The problem with this is that you have partial buildings on top of the rubble terrain, which wouldn't be the case if the terrain was the crumbled remains of lots of buildings.  It just looks odd.  I'm not sure a good way to improve it, but maybe you can talk it over and come up with some ideas.
• Please look into how zombies sometimes stand/crawl/stand/crawl repeatedly in a short time.  It gets really annoying to try and hit one when it keeps laying down every half second or so due to some object it is next to and it thinking it needs to crawl.  Because there's no animation between standing and crawling, they just blink up and down repeatedly at times, forcing you to move around to get them into a position where they don't do this so you can actually hit them.  Note that this is more of an issue with melee as you're usually far enough away with ranged that they won't stay in one space and keep doing that the way they can with melee.
• Removing cans and jars from the game seems like a poor way of making water become a challenge, but I'm open to seeing how it works.  Personally, I think that few game developers understand the idea that a game can, of course, do things for better gameplay at the cost of realism, but that doing so in a game that is meant to be semi-realistic needs to have a believable and understandable reasoning behind it.  Making clean water is something that anyone can do with very little training.  As someone mentioned, a picture would be enough to understand how to do it, which works well with the magazines being used to teach you.  And if you can learn to forge metal from a magazine, you certainly can learn to make clean water from one.  At least you do still allow boiling murky water, but removing options that would allow you to boil water from water sources makes no sense.  You can carry water in a bucket, but you can't boil it?  You can't melt snow?  These make no sense and if you can't make some background story or something that explains WHY you can't do those simple things, then you shouldn't remove them as options.  There are other ways to make water more difficult in the early game.  Removing an option that is so obvious a solution to water (carry water in a bucket and boil it) that almost any new player will assume is possible when they have a bucket is a really bad idea.  Even without actual containers, you are able to make so many items that the idea that you can't make a container of some kind to carry boiled water is crazy.  It doesn't have to be glass, which admittedly could be a challenge for someone to make IRL.  But you could put a plastic bag inside a boot and carry water, it's so easy to come up with ideas.  It isn't exactly difficult to carry water around if you needed to.  Better options would be to reduce water in the world significantly and/or make most of the water irradiated, requiring special tablets to make it potable.  That allows you to use water that isn't irradiated (very limited sources available) while reducing the amount of water sources in the game and making it understandable and believable.  You improve gameplay without ruining realism.  The dew collectors are nice and all, but their sizes are likely to make them an eyesore due to the numbers you'll likely end up needing.  You'll probably have players placing them away from their bases if zombies don't attack them just to avoid looking at them (such as on top of a POI that isn't questable.  That really isn't what you want your players doing with a new base feature.  As I said, I'm open to seeing how it works, but I don't think my opinion will change.  And even without considering that, you're still removing water options that are so obvious that removing them is a bad idea.
• It would be nice if you could have the ground next to your base go right up to the wall of the base instead of dipping down 1/4m or so all the way around the base.
• More corner pieces for things like railings, fencing, and the trellis for under a deck would be nice.  Many of the types have corners, but not all of them (such as the trellis).  This is problematic at times due to even a small item taking up an entire block of space.  Without a corner piece, it can be a challenge to align these railings/fences/etc. properly around corners because you're stuck placing the "block" on the outside of the corner since you can't place two of them on either side of the corner from the inside because the "block" will overlap even though the pieces don't.
• Similarly, being have to place items like furniture in the same block space as a thin "block" item would be very helpful.  I'm not really expecting much here as this is something that would likely take a LOT more work to do.  But personally, I like making a POI house have thin walls as opposed to 1m thick walls.  This works except that you can't place anything on or against the walls (whether that is on the inside or outside, depending on which side of the wall the rest of the "block" is.  This also limits abilities to place things on custom-made tables or furniture items - a cylinder piece with a flat top as a table that looks different from one of the few tables in the game, for example, because that flat top would have a lot of empty space above it from the "block" that nothing could sit in and you're left with anything you put on top of it "floating".
• Food is really odd to me in this game.  In order to not be hungry in the game, it seems like I have to eat something like 10,000 calories a day (or more) unless the food is cooked.  I get that you want to have cooked food be far more useful than uncooked/canned food.  That does make sense.  But you run out of food too quickly with uncooked foods.  If I were to eat 3 cans of food in a day (any kind of canned food in a normal-sized can), I'm not going to be hungry by the end of the day IRL.  In the game, you're likely to need 8-10 cans of food or more to avoid starving.  I think it would be more valuable to have the food values adjusted so you don't need to eat so much to stay alive.  Have cooked food offer benefits over canned/uncooked food to make it worthwhile (including healing) without making it 10+ times more filling.  After all, a can of soup is going to fill you up about as much as a chili dog IRL, though perhaps less than a steak and potatoes dinner (but only by about half).  Of course, an egg would be far less filling.  My point being that the differences in how filling the food is makes no real sense.  It's there entirely for gameplay and entirely without realism in mind.  I'd suggest adjusting it to be more in line with the amount of food you'd actually need to consume and then just have cooked foods offer other benefits (as they sometimes do now).  And then just reduce the quantity of canned foods that you find in the game to compensate.  Make it so that in order to have a decent amount of food, you almost have to farm or do a lot of hunting.  With far limited canned food options, you keep a survival aspect while making the game more realistic.
• I know you're working on the drone, so you're probably already fixing this, but it's annoying to have the drone be in the way of an attack or tool use.  It doesn't allow itself to be injured by you, which is good, but it also prevents you from targeting through it.  In tight spaces, it can be a pain to try and get the drone out of the way.  It has also managed to block me from going through a doorway by sitting in the doorway.  I barely had room in the room I was in to move far enough to get the drone to move out of the doorway so I could get through.  Since you can't pick it up when it has stuff in its inventory and you can't control it directly, this is a problem.  Hopefully you'll also make it reappear next to you (if set to follow) after a short period of time (perhaps 10s) even if it can't find a way through to you.  I know it does so if you go far enough away from it, but in some POI, you stay close enough to it, but in other rooms, that you aren't far enough for this to work.  This would resolve pathing issues even if it "teleporting" isn't realistic.  Unless you can fix the pathing issues in tight POI spaces, this would be the best solution I can think of.  Note that it should appear behind you instead of in front of you.  As it stands now, even in my base, it would often get stuck on the lower level and I'd have to spend time moving around in the right way to get it to figure out how to change floors or else just exit the base far enough to get it to teleport out and then go back inside.
• The changes regarding schematics and magazines sound good overall, but I'm concerned they won't really work well with this particular game.  Games that focus heavily on crafting and do well are games where the loot options are either not as good as your crafting options, or games where you can craft things that can't be looted (not necessarily better, but different), or games where there are noticeable differences in stats of items so crafting gives better options to get the higher stat versions of items compared to luck of finding those items and them also having higher stats.  This game does have some different stats between items, but the differences are honestly so minor that I rarely even bother comparing two items of the same tier and level to see which is better.  If I have a T6 Steel Shovel, I'm not usually going to see if the T6 Steel Shovel I just looted (or crafted) has better stats than what I am using.  You can loot everything you can craft (and currently more than you can craft until you allow T6 crafting) and often far sooner than you can craft them.  So in this game, lengthening the time to craft better items is more likely to make crafting less appealing than it already is.  As it stands now, I can typically find better items in loot far sooner than I can make them.  Not due to lack of parts, but simply because in a single player game, there are just too many perks that are important to spend too many points on higher tier crafting right away.  In MP, it might be different when people can specialize, but you are also looting far more, so are still getting good loot faster than crafting in most cases unless someone is going 100% down a specific crafting perk line.  With the new magazines, sure you might find them more often and not have to put points in perks or deal with finding specific volumes, all of which are good... but you're also making it so that you're going to spend a lot of time trying to find enough magazines to craft a specific item and you're going to get those magazines while looting, so you're very likely to find better items in loot faster than you can craft them even more now than before.  I'm thinking that the odds of needing to craft items will reduce even further unless you're trying to craft many high level items for a large group of players.  It does prevent issues of not being able to find a specific schematic, but overall, I think it only really benefits (possibly) specific crafting items that are less likely to be found or found in quantity (traps, electrical items, ammo, vehicles) and make crafting tools, weapons, and armor (and most mods) even less worthwhile.  Games where this work have different mechanics, which allow this type of thing to work well.  This game just doesn't.  Maybe it'll work, but I think most players who don't craft much still won't craft much and many who do craft will end up crafting less - at least with weapons, tools, armor and most mods.

Performance issues:

• I've noticed performance issues loading the game and within the game that would be nice to have looked at.
  • When loading the game, even after moving the game to a SSD (the game took almost 10 minutes to load on an HDD because it was using 100% of the HDD speed while loading, causing a lot of "not responding" problems), there is still one loading point that seems to be problematic for me.  It's on the INF [DECO] line.  At that point, the game will go to "not responding" for a couple of minutes before continuing on.  It will then, due to that, give a warning (WRN Forcing mesh processing after large delay), which shows that such freezing during loading is not intentional.  I have disabled mesh options entirely and will test that out next time I load the game.  Perhaps that will solve the problem during loading, though I like what having that enabled offers in the game itself.  Edit: The loading still froze in the same area (this time, the line after the [DECO] line) but didn't give the Warning.
  • Around every 20 minutes or so, the game will usually freeze when I open a container or inventory, for up to 3-4 minutes at a time (in a "not responding" state).  This has been enough at one point to disconnect me from the server.  This happens with single player maps/games.  And it is almost like clockwork... right around every 20 minutes, this tends to happen.  However, I noticed in my recent game that it wasn't happening (or at least, it didn't happen for more than 5-10 seconds, which although still annoying isn't anywhere near as bad), so perhaps it is map-based (normally I used the Pregen8k map).  I'll have to take a look and also try to see what warnings or other info is shown when it happens.  Note that when this happens, the game time can sometimes continue to advance, but when I come out of this freeze, any personal timers (broken bones, etc.) have not advanced in time.
• A better backup system should be used to better handle crashes.  My latest game crashed and corrupted one region.  Thankfully, this wasn't where my base was, so deleting the bad region didn't remove my base.  However, this is what happened... I had been riding my motorcycle when it crashed, saying it couldn't save the game.  When I removed the corrupted region save file and loaded the game, my motorcycle was gone as well as my drone.  Okay, annoying but not critical.  I saw my drone on the map at a trader, so figured I'd go grab that after getting another vehicle and trying to find my motorcycle, which wasn't shown on the map.  I ran all the way back to the base to get a minibike so I could go out searching for the motorcycle and also go to the far trader where the drone apparently was located.  When I was almost to the base, I happened to hit F1 and saw an INF line that stated the coordinates of the motorcycle.  So I finished going to the base and got the minibike since the base was close.  I drove to the coordinates and when I got there, I was suddenly on my motorcycle and the minibike was missing.  Okay, whatever.  I'd rather the motorcycle anyhow.  I drove to the trader to get my drone and when I got off the motorcycle at the trader, the game froze... sort of.  The game kept running and I could do some things like open inventory, but I couldn't move or attack.  After a short time, it teleported me to where I had originally crashed and my minibike was half in and half out of the ground, bouncing up and down with me standing on top of it, again unable to move or attack.  My motorcycle appeared on my map where I had gotten off of it at the trader.  I had to force close the game because I was stuck there.  When I reopened the game, I was on the minibike.  My drone and motorcycle showed up at the trader, so that was all good.  However, all my held inventory items (toolbar items, not armor items) were gone.  Not in inventory or on the ground... gone.  That was a lot of high level tools and weapons all gone, including a level 6 pistol I had just gotten prior to the original crash.  Very upset (I'd rather lose the motorcycle than all those equipped items), I still drove on the minibike to the trader to collect the motorcycle and drone.  When I got there, the motorcycle was fine.  The drone showed on the map and even showed the map icon in front of me ... until I got close to it.  Then it disappeared (still showing on the map).  If I moved away, it appeared again.  If I went close, it disappeared again.  I can't see the actual drone - only the icon (like you'd see if it was out of sight on the opposite side of a floor or wall really close to you).  Apparently I can't get it back now.  So I lost the drone and its full inventory as well as all equipped items.  I had a great game going and now I'm not sure if I'll play that one again because it's so frustrating.  Why not have a backup in place that will backup around every 5 minutes or so and include everything - regions, inventory, equipped items, etc.?  I know there are some backups, but not everything.  And it appears that it can lose the data with the current setup.  A 5 minute backup that will NOT overwrite the old backup unless the current save is valid would be helpful.  Or even have 2 backups - one at 5 minutes and one at 10 minutes.  That way, it can throw an error message if it can't save the file without corrupting your current game and your backup both.  As it is, I'm going to have to start making daily backups of my own manually so at worst I only lose a day of time instead of the entire game.  But I shouldn't have to do this manually.  It should be built-in and working.  I know it's still alpha, so I'm giving it some leeway here, but it should really be looked into.

 

Okay, that's all for tonight.  Great game, even with the issues.  Keep up the great work and I'm definitely looking forward to A21 even with some changes I'm not too sure about.

Edited September 13, 2022 by Riamus
Correction/additions (see edit history)

[zztong]

32 minutes ago, Riamus said:

Okay, that's all for tonight.

 

Are you suggesting you held material back for tomorrow? 😅

[AtomicUs5000]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

Hence the 5…

 
No wonder you think A17 is very better than A16.

[Melange]

@Riamus - Let me be one of the first to welcome you to the forums!

 

Many of us here tend to have a short attention span, or at least prefer dealing with one issue at a time. Your post is well written, but covers way too many points for one sitting imo. If you haven't already, take a few evenings and read through the forum threads, since some of the things you mention have been addressed (not necessarily resolved) before. Then, maybe those in the know can help answer your remaining how-to's or why-not's one at a time.

 

See ya next time! 🙂

Edited September 13, 2022 by Melange (see edit history)

[Roland]

14 minutes ago, AtomicUs5000 said:

 
No wonder you think A17 is very better than A16.

 

Oh I don't think. I know. The numbers don't lie.

[Laz Man]

54 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

Oh I don't think. I know. The numbers don't lie.

 

[Riamus]

2 hours ago, Melange said:

@Riamus - Let me be one of the first to welcome you to the forums!

 

Many of us here tend to have a short attention span, or at least prefer dealing with one issue at a time. Your post is well written, but covers way too many points for one sitting imo. If you haven't already, take a few evenings and read through the forum threads, since some of the things you mention have been addressed (not necessarily resolved) before. Then, maybe those in the know can help answer your remaining how-to's or why-not's one at a time.

 

See ya next time! 🙂

Yeah, I know it was a lot.  I didn't want to make a bunch of posts, but maybe that would have been better.  Oh well.  Maybe some of it will be read - hopefully at least the QoL/suggestions at the beginning.

 

As a note, I determined the cause of the 20 minutes freezing seems to be "UnloadUnusedAssets" that occurs every 20 minutes.  I'll have to search the forum to see if this has ever been looked into before.

 

Thanks.

[NukemDed]

11 hours ago, SoulKing95 said:

Although I’ve never played 7 days to die on pc I do own on Xbox series x and love the game! A lot better then Minecraft!! Hope to the alpha 20 version come to consoles soon I want my turrets and blade traps lol 

bro! get it on pc, and you can have it now! you wont regret it. i even bought a pc to play it on (the ones i had were under powered)