My thoughts on the Private Beta (4.20.3.0)

This message is mainly directed towards Nelson but this is an open discussion.

The private beta that people have been trying out lately is good, but it’s not great. There’s a couple things I noticed with it that are important to fix, in my opinion, if you want a successful game. I’ve played the game since Unturned 2 (classic) and hosted a 3 year old server so I am speaking from what I’ve experienced thus far. In my opinion these are the most outstanding issues currently in the beta:

  1. Power Usage - My laptop shouldn’t be getting hot on the main menu. It’s currently rendering a couple buttons and some text and the task is using 20% of my CPU. Now the idea of a rendering on the home menu is probably going to happen at some point, but it should still be fixed before then.
  1. Response Time - I don’t know if it’s because of my graphics settings, but I get a crazy amount of input lag, especially when using a touchpad. I could feel it. For example, play minecraft to compare how experience is. People who talk about the “Clunky” characteristic are talking partially about input lag.

  2. Jump/gravity mechanics - Now people have different opinions about this, I know. But from what I’ve found the gravity multiplier is way too low. It feels like you would be moon walking if you spam jump.

  3. User Interface - I made another post specifically about the UI in Unturned II, but I’ll summarize here. I think the UI should be left to someone other than Nelson, who’s used Unreal before and knows the tricks to make it snappy as well as styled. Unless Nelson thinks he can do a perfect job himself on the home screen, escape menus, inventory, and everything else involved, I think he should find someone who can take the pressure off Nelson. Even though the UI is temporary as it stands now, I think it has to be completely redone. That way Nelson can focus on core mechanics.

  4. Documentation - While this doesn’t necessarily apply currently, when Nelson eventually releases the “moddable” aspects of the game, I would like to see good (and updated) docs on how to get started.

What do you guys think? Any other problems you’ve noticed?

5 Likes

With the highest respect. I feel like this is likely a problem on your end, perhaps an older laptop, or maybe dusty. But there isn’t anything special about UII that I can think of that would cause a laptop to get hot, other than usage. The main menu is a level in Unreal Engine, so perhaps that’s why it takes a bit of resources.

I don’t receive any input lag. Do you experience input lag while playing singleplayer?

All UI is in a placeholder state as far as I know. The UI he has looks like untouched UMG Widget Blueprints, I would be shocked if the UI stayed in its current state permanently.

Take a look at a post I made a while back talking about documentation.

In short Molt says documentation is a huge priority in UII, you can see the beginning of that here on the wiki

9 Likes

To just very briefly add on to this, there’s also some documentation on a private GitHub repo (similar to the public U3-Docs repo).

5 Likes

Most of your performance issues seem to come from having a low-end laptop. Power usage means all your available resources are being used to run the game (aka You don’t have powerful hardware), and the input lag is due to your device not being able to handle the processes (I tested with a crappy laptop and the game indeed does have input lag while there is none in my good PC).

But again the dev aims to get the game to run for decent PC (or just better than the previous game). Just hope for some good optimization along the way.

And the rest is due to not being finalized (UI, gravity mechanics, documentation). Expect better and more polished versions of those.

4 Likes

You might be right, but the power aspect I could only notice on my laptop. Here’s my task manager, with Unturned II idle on the main menu:

45% of my gtx 1080, 10% i7-6700k and high power usage. Exactly why my laptop was getting hot.

As far as response time, it’s easier to notice on higher refresh rate monitors. Most 120hz monitors would easily show this problem.

The interface is exactly what you said, untouched. That’s why it would be a perfect opportunity for someone to “expedite” the process and make a well thought-out solution quickly. At least that’s how I see it.

As long as the game is responsive and has an elegant feeling people will always play it. That’s what Unturned 3 eventually lost.

2 Likes

my 980 ti does just fine lol. i’d really like to say its the computer more so than the game. of course, you can’t expect flawless performance this early on - the game shouldn’t even be called a beta, so its not strictly your computer by any means.
overall, i’d say have patience and wait for the game to become more optimized.

1 Like

I never had an odd issues in the game with a GTX 960M and an i7-4720HQ. Unturned isn’t too optimized so that obviously remained a problem but it wasn’t using an excessive amount of power or anything. Temperatures were generally high no matter what I did though because laptops usually have poor cooling. With how mine was designed, it was made to run well into the 90-100 degrees Celsius range and stay there under any load.

1 Like