Terrible, Game-Ruining Bug

NolSinkler

This happens to me every time I play. Not immediately, mind you, but it will occur if I play the game long enough, whether it is in the first round or the second round. What happens is that suddenly, when I try to move there is a terrible, high-tempo, mid-high pitch, repetitive "boop" noise that occurs, accompanied by a rapidly increasing ping. I cannot move, cannot type in the game or in the console (when I try to type all that I get are question marks), and the game has to be restarted.

Sadly, I cannot share my screenshot of the console because steam sucks, but generally some stupid error will be repeating in console when this occurs. This time it was "Error: No shader specified for material".

douchebagatron

might be helpful to post the log from your C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Natural Selection 2\ folder when this happens, and maybe even record a video of it. sounds pretty bizarre, might also want to validate steam cache.

Tquila

Hmm, I don't recognize this one has been reported before. It would be really really awesome if you could get a video of it.

It's also quite hard to try and reproduce seeing it's very random, yet consistent.

From your error description you say "this time", does that mean it's a bit random what it is? Or is it always shader specific?

Also when it crash, you have the option to include a minidump.dmp file, try to get this uploaded as well (or press the send button when the game crash).

NolSinkler

I figured it out. It is because I had the Chinese language package installed on Windows (I was taking Chinese classes and would sometimes need to type in Chinese). For some strange reason while gaming Chinese would get enabled. Maybe some combination of keys that I was pressing was set to change the language to Chinese. The game would then obviously freak out because I was typing Chinese letters (pinyin) instead of English letters. I removed the Chinese language package and have not had the issue since.