Developer Discussions: Alpha 17

[DaVegaNL]

Yes. Some people are acting like this is done. It is absolutely NOT DONE. It is experimental.

 

I just checked SVN and every single day since our Friday b194 streamer release, there have been tweaks and bug fixes to the game. Our test build is up to b203 with a dozen changes already done for b204. Many of these changes were made on the weekends or on the days we should have been off for Thanksgiving, so I'd say the team is busting their butts to make it better.

 

Do we know about problems? Of course. hundreds of them. We do play the game too. Do I want to build a cool base and beat the zombies? You bet. Can we snap our fingers and it all be done tomorrow? Not possible. Changes take time.

 

People need to chill out. If you can't handle the roller coaster of experimental, then wait for stable.

 

Hear, bloody hear.

 

A17e is really awesome, it's a good job you guys did with the game!

[Bipolar Bear]

Many of these changes were made on the weekends or on the days we should have been off for Thanksgiving, so I'd say the team is busting their butts to make it better.

 

Please guys, don't forget to take your much needed rest. No horde of screamers on the forums is worth your health.

[Doctor3D]

is the requirement for graphics card higher than 2 gig now

 

Doesn't seem to be, no. I had Nvidia Inspector graph up on other monitor last night and noticed usage hovered around that amount on mostly max settings. There's spikes where it uses more - but that's due to me having more available than that. I could see 2G working just fine with possibly only some slight paging.

[ahulme]

Playing since 2013 and this is your first post ? WOW...

 

Sounds osom.

 

Had a great weekend playing!! There is no game like it despite the odd issues here and there. Anyway, I found that after playing around for ages to get the best FPS possible i7 gaming processer, GTX 1070, plenty of RAM, the resolution didn't do anything for me. Nor did reflections and reflection quality. The two biggest factors that massively boosted FPS were draw distance and... Tree quality. The latter in particular hits performance hard if on ultra quality. On high I get 10 FPS more, and if tree quality is medium I get 15 FPS more. I try to keep the world/surface/terrain quality all on the highest, effectively meaning that everything looks amazing around the player, but drops off quickly the further one looks ahead. I'm one of those people who obsesses over getting the smoothest experience! It's so good now. Again, resolution didn't do anything, but draw distance and tree quality did. Shadows off/on also helped a lot, but I really do not want to play with no shadows. I get around 50-75 FPS. Interestingly, even if I switch everything to low, and I men everything, I get 75 max FPS. The same as if I was playing high with tree quality medium!

[Psychodynamics]

Do you already have any timescale when you're releasing A17 stable?

Or is it too early to ask?

[Quantum Blue]

Check it out. =)

 

 

 

=)

 

Thanks for that. btw - Your real voice seems a little higher and less raspier than 'GuppyCur' would seem to imply...

 

btw2 - Now that we have A17 (which should be a good foundation for a while) just let me know when you want my help on developing some HTC Vive mods... (I am learning...)

[Noob191]

Had a great weekend playing!! There is no game like it despite the odd issues here and there. Anyway, I found that after playing around for ages to get the best FPS possible i7 gaming processer, GTX 1070, plenty of RAM, the resolution didn't do anything for me. Nor did reflections and reflection quality. The two biggest factors that massively boosted FPS were draw distance and... Tree quality. The latter in particular hits performance hard if on ultra quality. On high I get 10 FPS more, and if tree quality is medium I get 15 FPS more. I try to keep the world/surface/terrain quality all on the highest, effectively meaning that everything looks amazing around the player, but drops off quickly the further one looks ahead. I'm one of those people who obsesses over getting the smoothest experience! It's so good now. Again, resolution didn't do anything, but draw distance and tree quality did. Shadows off/on also helped a lot, but I really do not want to play with no shadows. I get around 50-75 FPS. Interestingly, even if I switch everything to low, and I men everything, I get 75 max FPS. The same as if I was playing high with tree quality medium!

 

 

For me, reducing the resolution brings any amount to play A17 with nice graphics, I had to make a compromise.I reduced the resolution . My current resolution is 1366x768 in 16:9 my texture quality I have on full and tree quality also on full, the rest I have left on low.

Currently I have in the environment 50-60 fps in buildings they fall hiss 32 - 45 fps it is always different, however it is for me so relatively well playable, but as I said it is different with each system.

 

My system :

i5 2500K not overclocked

geforce 660 gtx 2 gb

8gb ram

Win 7 ultimate

[GARGEAN]

Had a great weekend playing!! There is no game like it despite the odd issues here and there. Anyway, I found that after playing around for ages to get the best FPS possible i7 gaming processer, GTX 1070, plenty of RAM, the resolution didn't do anything for me. Nor did reflections and reflection quality. The two biggest factors that massively boosted FPS were draw distance and... Tree quality. The latter in particular hits performance hard if on ultra quality. On high I get 10 FPS more, and if tree quality is medium I get 15 FPS more. I try to keep the world/surface/terrain quality all on the highest, effectively meaning that everything looks amazing around the player, but drops off quickly the further one looks ahead. I'm one of those people who obsesses over getting the smoothest experience! It's so good now. Again, resolution didn't do anything, but draw distance and tree quality did. Shadows off/on also helped a lot, but I really do not want to play with no shadows. I get around 50-75 FPS. Interestingly, even if I switch everything to low, and I men everything, I get 75 max FPS. The same as if I was playing high with tree quality medium!

 

Very strange... What's your resolution? Cuz I with my i5 4690K and 980 have stable 60FPS outside of buildings with all maxed but draw distance for shadows and grass on medium + DoV and motion blur disabled (hate those).

[Quantum Blue]

3rd time's the charm. Day 43 (just made it past BM horde 6) level 78. (All defaults. Navezgane. No xml edits except for the science progression one which I just did 30 minutes ago. and no console commands.)

 

1st: People REALLY need to understand this is not like any previous Alpha! And it's EXPERIMENTAL! (Hello?)

Play it like it's a NEW game!

 

The first week IS really tough. And you do find a LOT more guns than food.

Well until you get to Demon hogs. Then you have 'WEIGH' too much meat! (I mean a LOT!) I had saved up 4000 'units' (I think of the units as ounces - not counts) before I started selling extra to trader. (and I have a ton of bacon and eggs and boiled meat)

 

Level progression does need some balance as does the amount of experience for things.

(Normal zombies = 700, snakes and vultures = 170?)

(And, imho, (as opposed to 'most') the perk system seems fine. Just needs a little tweaking.)

I KNOW TFP will be do more balancing work.

 

POI quests are AWESOME! My best is still a Lvl 1 quest (I was lvl 12) that had me clear a junkyard with 4 dogs, 6 snakes, 4 vultures, and 2 'normal' zombies. My last one (Lvl 2 quest with me at lvl 72) had a mess of normal zombies, 3 cops, 3 ferals, and 8 demon hogs on the roofs. (and waiting overnite inside the poi was very nerve wracking...)

 

And I was just able to make a minibike - as I had found only 1 acid in ~40 buildings, and a couple hundred trash heaps. Just got 5(!) in that last POI quest (2nd floor bathroom). BTW - I accidentally discovered that 'shift' will speed up the minibike... I can now go over 2 km to places without buring up a lot of stamina or carrying a lot of food/water. makes you appreciate it so much more. (just like, forge, iron, workbench, steel, farming!, etc.)

 

Thank you very much, TFP, for the honor of being able to test your wonderful game idea before it goes Gold. (4200+ hours and still going...)

 

Whoops. Sorry. Let me rephrase...

 

I paid $20 for this and it NEEDS to work the way I and EVERYONE else wants it to (cuz everyone just seems to want what I want) - RIGHT NOW!!!

 

[wolfbain5]

@Gazz

You are the xml guy last I checked. is there a way for us to put in a property for locked and unlocked status of a door or safe?

as it stands for people doing stealth mods lockpicking requires us to do a whole new door upgrade progression. as far as I know we can only have 1 upgrade or downgrade progression. this kinda mucks things up if multiple mods were to access the same blocks. A toggled property of locked or unlocked that we could manipulate would be an excellent way to clean it up and keep it tidy.

 

Is this possible to do currently, and if not, what can we do to mimick it?

[Jimmy_James]

2 minutes before the 14 day horde night.

 

And THIS was the craziest and most intensive horde night I can remember in 2000h in 7 days.

Tell you short why.

 

- it started with radiated cops,spiders and wrights and we didn’t expect that in the 2nd night (Me and my mate)

- the vultures were a big pain in the ass (Love them)

- Our 4x4 Block-Iron bars-Iron Spikes Tower was hard damaged after we killed the wave of hungry zeds

- ! But ! Something felt wrong with the spawning... no single zombie at 12 o’clock and I thought that the server was out of EVERYTHING...so I decided to log out and restart the server to rejoin...

- after we joined we had the same massive horde night the 2nd time and we were just running the street up and down cuz our defense tower was gone after 5 minutes...just running...few shots...regain stamina and running.

- I got killed in the end because of server lagging

 

* the server was out of performance in both hordes

* it felt like that there was the double count of zeds that I configured (configured 32 and difficulty:warrior )

* the 7 day horde was over after the big wave in the beginning. Only 1 after 1 spawned until 4 o’clock. (Don’t know if it is the same in 14 day horde because of the double wave :-P

[DUST2DEATH]

Thanks for that. btw - Your real voice seems a little higher and less raspier than 'GuppyCur' would seem to imply...

 

btw2 - Now that we have A17 (which should be a good foundation for a while) just let me know when you want my help on developing some HTC Vive mods... (I am learning...)

 

So you're volunteering to do a VR mod? Do it. Would be a god tier game in VR. Much Want.

[CplCritter]

I am not able to mod a machete. I'm assuming this is a bug.

 

Also, @faatal - I mentioned before my FPS dropped to 4-7 at my base when I normally get 35-40 FPS. I've noticed it seems to happen every morning when 0400 hits. I try to restart game/computer and it does not help. Around 0800 my FPS starts climbing back up to normal numbers. Do you think I should submit this as a bug?

[Gazz]

The first week IS really tough. And you do find a LOT more guns than food.

Well until you get to Demon hogs.

 

You don't get these unless you re-use a savegame from a previous patch.

[SnowDog1942]

You don't get these unless you re-use a savegame from a previous patch.

 

That was on purpose right? To call out those who didn't start new and submitted bugs?

[Jimmy_James]

My thoughts after the stream event were that the difficulty is bigger in comparison to A16.

 

- decided to change our server setting from insane to warrior for the first A17 start

- after 19 days in A17 we decided to go one step higher and insane definitely in the stable version

 

What really feels wired are the huge boars... Going to delete them in the spawning xml... They don’t fits in this game in my opinion.

And I hope that the performance will getting better until stable release. It’s not my rig I would say.

[beerfly]

That was on purpose right? To call out those who didn't start new and submitted bugs?

 

It`s called testing.

[Noob191]

@gazz

hi can you maybe tell me why you can't build all the lights anymore ? Why were these taken out in A17, at the moment it is possible to build only one lamp in the workbench, will you integrate them again later ?

[Guppycur]

So you're volunteering to do a VR mod? Do it. Would be a god tier game in VR. Much Want.

 

It would be super easy.

 

...if we could swap out the character controller. =)

 

Kidding aside, I spoke with... I forget who, and it comes down to adding a VR accessible ui.

[GrumpyGringo]

I have a microstutter with b199 that is reoccurring around a minute apart. You could set a timer to it. I've been playing with the graphics settings to try and get rid of it, but haven't tracked it down yet. So far both mine and the wife's system seems to do it. Does anyone else have the stutter?

 

Also - love alpha 17 so far

[giKoN]

My thoughts after the stream event were that the difficulty is bigger in comparison to A16.

 

- decided to change our server setting from insane to warrior for the first A17 start

- after 19 days in A17 we decided to go one step higher and insane definitely in the stable version

 

What really feels wired are the huge boars... Going to delete them in the spawning xml... They don’t fits in this game in my opinion.

And I hope that the performance will getting better until stable release. It’s not my rig I would say.

 

The giant boars shouldn't be spawning if you did a proper fresh install after B199 and a new savegame. At least in my Config there is no spawn for animalBossgGrace. I highly recommend checking your savegame.

[Jimmy_James]

The giant boars shouldn't be spawning if you did a proper fresh install after B199 and a new savegame. At least in my Config there is no spawn for animalBossgGrace. I highly recommend checking your savegame.

 

I only checked the patch notes from b199. We are going to start a new save after 21 horde night on our server. Nice to hear that they get rid of the massive spider pig.

[Quantum Blue]

You don't get these unless you re-use a savegame from a previous patch.

 

Thanks kemo. I blew away everything for B197, but did forget to blow away data folder before b199. I kind of figured it was related. (as well as a few other things.) I've only done 1 'official' bug report since doing 197 to 199 as I am familiar with the 'rules'.

 

I also had a few hours in and for my own selfish reasons I wanted to get to ~level 100 (vacation this week, experience things before others spoil, etc.). I figure you'll prolly have another update relatively soon, and I'll start over then.

 

Thank you for the message. And the game.

[Doctor3D]

I have a microstutter with b199 that is reoccurring around a minute apart. You could set a timer to it. I've been playing with the graphics settings to try and get rid of it, but haven't tracked it down yet. So far both mine and the wife's system seems to do it. Does anyone else have the stutter?

 

Also - love alpha 17 so far

 

Not getting any kind of consistent stutter like you describe. I do of course get the occasional stutter on events like loading a chunk with lots of things in it or zombie group spawns. If I remain in a relatively empty chunk and just run around - it's as smooth as glass, actually. Inside POIs though the game feels laggy even when FPS is still relatively high. The memory controller on my GPU is absolutely maxed out in those areas. It's like the pixel shaders are eating up every bit of bandwidth in the memory bus. The reason I think it's something to do with shaders is the only time I've ever seen anything eat that much power is when I play with extensive shader mods for games and emulators and go crazy with them. There's something going on with the textures that's just costing WAY too much performance.

[giKoN]

I only checked the patch notes from b199. We are going to start a new save after 21 horde night on our server. Nice to hear that they get rid of the massive spider pig.

 

It really is nothing they got rid off - it is something only spawning when you mix both builds. Items, blocks, entities have no clear ID anymore thus mixing two builds leads to weird recipes (e.g. cans of acid for a bedroll), weird items in the inventory (i tested importing a B197 player profile to B199 and he ended up with 14000 headlights) and disallocation of zombies spawning. The pig in your mix-up savegame replaces the vulture in its spawnpoints. So it's really nothing they did right or wrong - its something you interfered with through keeping the savegame.

 

Until you start a fresh game (verify your game files before doing so and make sure to get rid of the old one) - enjoy your crazy amount of meat you get from those pigs!