What's the deal with this A21.2 Exp build? And what's the deal with this airplane food?

[Arez]

I tried to read through the patch notes but it's in developer speak, and I don't understand most of it.

 

Is it me or do the graphics look better? And the lighting...it's changed, no?

I loaded up the Exp build, started a fresh Navez-game, went to the Mushroom Mining Co. and the lighting was nice! I can swear it doesn't look like that in the stable build. 

It reminded me of Day of the Dead, when they had to run through the cave and the lighting got all colorful. It was very vibrant. 

 

I also noticed the boot.config file has the lines for pushing things to the GPU. My frames were through the roof. I was flirting with 300fps, and I don't lower my graphics settings. Though there were stutters. Maybe it was loading textures, shaders, I don't know. I didn't play for too long.

 

Would I be able to open a save that was started on the latest stable A21.1 build without issue? I have a game where I'm in a city and I want to compare the performance.

 

 

[meganoth]

Started up the newest experimental just 10 minutes ago for some other test, loaded a testgame where I was standing in a city square, and actually my first thought was: "Oh, the scenerys looks so good, very sharp colors. Since I changed a setting on my monitor 2 days ago it could have been for that reason though, or both.

 

Edited November 18, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Rotor]

If they start using the GPU more often, is definitely a game changer.

[Arez]

5 hours ago, meganoth said:

Since I changed a setting on my monitor 2 days ago it could have been for that reason though, or both.

I don't think it's placebo...it might be, but I just got finished playing on A21.2 for some hours and at the end I switched over to A21.1 to show someone a house I built, and I noticed that it did not look as nice. I don't know how to explain it. There's a subtle classiness to the visuals of A21.2. I could be fooling myself, but I don't think so. Also, reflections in windows and such look better too. Really good.

 

But...there's something wrong with the shadows. I've only noticed it when talking to Joel though. The shadows on him look as if I turned the setting all the way down. They're kinda blocky and shifty. 

5 hours ago, Rotor said:

If they start using the GPU more often, is definitely a game changer.

You can do that right now if you swap your boot.config file out for the one that has the lines of code to push things to the GPU. There's the "Yakov Performance Mod" you can find on Nexus mods. It's not a traditional 7 Days mod. It's a Unity thing, that is officially being used in other big games like Tarkov. 

 

On A21.1, I ran some benchmarks with MSI Afterburner and Riva Tuner and it most certainly improves framerates and works the GPU harder. 

I did the test in the desert city on Navezgane.

Without mod - Min FPS = 71 | Avg FPS = 135 | Max FPS = 221 | 1% lows = 47 FPS

With mod - Min FPS = 104 | Avg FPS = 161 | Max FPS = 248 | 1% lows = 54 FPS

 

I haven't gotten to that city yet on my A21.2 run. I might just start up a test save to run a new benchmark and see if the 1% and 0.1% lows improve.

Edited November 18, 2023 by Arez (see edit history)

[Riamus]

Interesting.  I didn't notice a difference in how things look but maybe I didn't pay enough attention.  I was only in the game a short time.  It would be nice to see an improvement, though.  I'll have to look more closely.