[Crash]Travelling at Seamoth speeds causes crash in some locations![5.4.2f2]
WarpZone32
Join Date: 2016-12-13 Member: 224911Members
Join Date: 2016-12-13 Member: 224911Members
DxDiag.txt: http://pastebin.com/99DZjsDe
output.log.txt: I'm having trouble uploading it to any of the usual suspects, possibly because it's 1.4 MB. Will email it to a dev upon request, or attempt uploading it to a specific pastebin service if you can recommend one that accepts files that size.
Stay tuned for the play-by-play. It's been a rough, emotionally draining 48 hours and I need to purge this bile. In exchange, you get a human-readable "how to reproduce this bug."
output.log.txt: I'm having trouble uploading it to any of the usual suspects, possibly because it's 1.4 MB. Will email it to a dev upon request, or attempt uploading it to a specific pastebin service if you can recommend one that accepts files that size.
Stay tuned for the play-by-play. It's been a rough, emotionally draining 48 hours and I need to purge this bile. In exchange, you get a human-readable "how to reproduce this bug."
Comments
So I started a new game yesterday, got my Seamoth today, and instantly the game became unplayable. I've submitted bug reports with F8, and I'll be pasting output_log.txt. But I figured I'd also walk you all through a human-readable version of my play session, because I found a couple playstyles and areas that made crashes much more likely to happen.
Also, be warned, I intend to VENT in this post, because this has been a STRESSFUL couple of days for me. This game is horrifying when it's bad, and lately it seems like it's bad more often than it's good, and second-guessing what the game is trying to tell me just makes it even worse.
Note that this is NOT a guide on how to play the game well, or efficiently, and certainly not how to play it the way the fickle devs at Unknown Worlds want you to play it. (Seriously, guys, stop writing guides on how to play well. It just makes them patch even more deliberately confusing mechanics into the game! At this rate the next update will probably have the left and right mouse buttons switch functions every time you step in the water or all your arms and legs fall off every time a Reefback looks at you funny or something stupid like that... BUT I DIGRESS!)
First of all, here's a map with a general overview of what I built, when, and where:
<img src="http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=109919" alt="" />
Green lines mean I can go from a lower number to a higher number and back again. Yellow lines mean the trip is laggy in a few places where the game chugs like crazy. Red means the game crashed before I could reach the destination. You'll notice that going TO 7 seems to be a lot easier than going FROM 7 to anywhere nearby. More on that later. This is self-reported and half-remembered and not to scale so take it all with a grain of salt. On with the playthrough:
1: Starting base. I built an above-water base somewhere around here. It's that shoal northwest of the thermal vent that comes up to just below the surface. You know the spot. Photogenic as hell, especially if you can resist picking up that quartz crystal outside your window.
2: First forward base. I was thinking about raiding the aurora like back in the day. Kept forgetting to bring fire extinguishers. At this point I was still using pipes and building close to the surface. Added a ton of support structures to #2 when I noticed the Reaper Leviathan beneath the aurora's thrusters. ("That's new!") These came in handy when the sandsharks started playing near the foundation. Mostly I just used this place as a repository for titanium salvage from the surrounding debris field.
7: Went to the island and scanned everything, got some fruit. You know the drill. Didn't have any problems at this point. Funny thing. We'll come back to that.
3&4: Armed with a Multipurpose Room blueprint and some lighting, I tried to build some more effective bases and upgraded the base at #2 to include food. Kept forgetting to bring my fire extinguisher and had to postpone. Ground a lot of titanium.
5: Needed more silver to put replicators in all these new bases, so established a base in this (literally and figuratively) gnarly kelp forest explicitly for that purpose. Didn't find as much as I thought I would, but I'm glad I built where I did, because it led me to...
6: With 4 o2 tanks, started pushing into the Koosh zone. There was a base 5.5 in there somewhere that mostly kept me from drowning or starving en route to 6. Anyway, from here I found diamond and got all excited about being able to loot wrecks. HAHAHA that didn't pan out for a while because of their depths... Finally got around to raiding the Aurora at some point. Eventually, after lots of wiki research and squinting at maps, I started trying to raid some of the wrecks that I thought likely to have Moon Pool fragments. (I'd already built a Seamoth, but like hell I'm going to run the battery down with no way to recharge it.) Oh, also. Finally raided the Aurora. For as tough as the outside is (both in terms of enemies and in terms of lag) the inside was surprisingly playable.
7. Didn't find the Moonpool, but I did stumble across the Energy Cell charger and a few other technologies. Good enough. Time to start actually using the Seamoth. It's a long drive, so I set up an Island Base at 7. See that, game developers? I'm relocating to the island mid-game like you wanted. I'm playing the game exactly the way I'm supposed to. You can stop hitting me now making the game harder and adding psychological cues.
8. Unfortunately, this is where shit started to fall apart. I think 8 was where I finally found the Moon Pool? Or maybe 9? It was somewhere in the south. (Spoiler warning: this infomration will be obsolete in 2 weeks when they shuffle the fragment locations around and the new info will be on the wiki a few days after that so who cares what I write here?) It turns out going from 1 to 8 was easy, but going from 7 to 8 was hard! I experienced incredible lag and I needed to stop moving forward or else the game would crash! (I have no idea which wreck around 8 I actually hit, but let's just assume I didn't go into any caves under the seabed.)
9. I tried to raid 9 a few times, but again it kept crashing on me. I'm not sure if it's underwater caves or the fact that you can (in theory) see so far unoccluded in the deep ocean out there, but it seemed tied to chunk loading and biomes, not graphics. Turning your head was likely to cause a few seconds of freeze, but not a crash. Moving forward at Seamoth speeds caused crashes.
10. I needed Lubricant to build my first Moonpool, so I tried to go to 5 and 10 to get some. This ALWAYS caused a crash. I tried to get there by Seamoth a bunch of times, then gave up and decided to swim. Then when that crashed TOO, I gave up and swam from 7 to 1 and had no further problems getting lube. That sounded dirty. Grinding lubricant? Argh, I think I just made it worse! I gathered the materials I needed!
Around this point I started to put my finger on some general trends that had been bugging me the entire time:
- It felt a lot like client-side chunk-generation lag in minecraft on a really slow multiplayer server. (Though I'm sure the technologies invovled are very different and I am in no way comparing the two games other than in how they slowed down and froze when I moved.)
- Approaching a "four corners" area where 4 "chunks" connect seemed especially likely to crash me, particularly when going directly from 7 to 8 as fast as possible.
- Turning your camera would drop a few frames, but not crash the client. Head-turn-lag seemed worse in the seamoth, which makes sense because it can turn a lot faster.
- Lowering the graphics quality didn't help. In fact, sometimes I almost thought it was making things worse as it bounced between different LODs more rapidly!
- The first time you hear a Reefback's cry, you're likely to lag a ton. I doubt this has to do with the sound itself loading. It's more likely that either the deep ocean floor in those areas causes more terrain chunks to be visible at once, or else other assets from that biome needed to load, or some third thing only UW would understand.
- I suppose it's possible some of the plotline / ecological collapse events are what made things slow down after I got the Moonpool, rather than anything I was doing. I don't really understand how those systems work so I can't really speculate in greater detail.
- Now that I think about it, I wonder if something's wrong with those light grey "null" regions that haven't been defined yet?
- Oh, looking at the map now, it seems like a lot of red and yellow lines pass through Grassy Plateaus and the Reefs. Hmmmmmm!
I've pretty much stopped using submarines at this point, which is going to make the endgame a PITA. I can try going real slowly, but in some situations you need to hustle because of o2 or power or other constraints, so we'll see if the game is even finishable.
Here's the thing that really bugs me, though. This has been going on forever. And I think Unknown Worlds has always known about it. Not just because Metrics are a thing that exist. (Believe me, I'm sure they have a much better heatmap of my actions this game than I could remember and describe here!) But just look at the achievements. There's only 3 of them? What? No "Dive to 300m?" No achievement for building your first Moon Pool? Gee, I wonder why.
It reminds me of another underwater game I played recently, some kinda submarine game about salvaging wrecked boats on android. It looked and played beautifully. Until you got out of the starting shoals and (just like Subnautica) hit a giant reef and suddenly the game just choked to death on all but the most powerful devices. That's when I realized that the game had asked me to rate it right after I unlocked the exit from the tutorial area, but before actually letting me go through it. The developers knew that retention fell off a cliff after that point, and they wanted to at least wring a positive review, if not a purchase, out of their users before they churned out of the game. I wonder if they realized it was because they were just drawing ten times as much stuff on the screen once you pass through that gate, and half their players' devices couldn't handle the strain?
Which came frist, the chicken or the egg? Did they design that starting area to mislead people with weaker devices into thinking the game runs on their device, just long enough to get a 5-star review? Or was it an honest natural starting point for the campaign, with a hastily implemented churn countermeasure? It's a moot question; I'll never know the answer. But it's obvious that they designed around it. (There's a Z-shaped section of Ruins you have to pass through to exit the starting shoals that were pretty obviously designed to block visibility.)
I see a simmilar type of design in Subnautica. You start in the Safe Shallows, move on to the island and the mountains, and eventually go deep into the trenches and do god knows what to Cthulhu's horrible grandchidren. But I think Unknown Worlds knows that 90% of players choke as soon as they fire up the Seamoth, that's why there's no Achievement for it. (Can you imagine the shitstorm on Steam if there was a cheevo that kept crashing players?)
I don't have a great solution here, other than "reduce the complexity of the map by rendering larger and therefore fewer voxels per 500m, at least in the regions you already know are laggy for most players," or possibly "give us more granular control over our graphics options." Maybe there's some kinda occlusion trick you could do like making the tunnels into the Lost River all be Z-curves or something.
I really, really want to like this game. It was great back when it mostly worked. But now it's mostly broken, because the developers have just been (literally!) digging themselves a deeper hole all this time. Now they're wanting to port this hot mess to xbone before they've even fixed it on PC? Come on!
But I get it. They're not making the world's most ambitious half-life 1 mod anymore. Unknown Worlds is AAA now. Probably have been since NS2. (Which I bought but never made it past the Khara tutorial... WHY did they reuse the marine voice!? For some reason that, of all things, was the dealbreaker for me.) I'm digressing again. The point is it's been an extremely stressful 48 hours. This game feels like an abusive relationship. I keep thinking if I boot it up and play a little more, if I put in the time and energy to progress the story, maybe it'll be as good as the first 20 minutes of the game. But it never is. The game just gets worse and worse and diving gets darker and more oppressive and horrible and the whole game just turns to shit and never rebounds. The constant crashing isn't even the straw that broke the camel's back. It's the straw lying pathetically on top of a rotting camel carcass that makes you realize how ridiculous and pointless this whole exercise has been.
Sigh.
Anyway. Love the game! Hope this feedback helps! Players, if you're still reading this, and you crash a lot, consider posting your own map showing where you crash and what direction you were going. I'm sure UW already has all this data, since data mining is a thing after all, but I figured it would be nice to let the players know about it. Maybe we can discover a series of routes through the game that work around the crashiest areas.
And devs? If you don't like us sharing information about this, you can make this conversation obsolete by FIXING YOUR 2 YEAR OLD GAME ALREADY! I don't care if it's a beta. It's 2016. Conventional wisdom on Steam is that You Only Get One Release. You've had yours. Fix the old shit before you put in new shit!
And if you think I'm bad, wait until you get an earful from the 12 year olds on xbone!
Devs stated a few times in the past that they fully intend to release content on a regular basis until its all finished and then keep the main performance management for last. This strategy is debatable altho thats what they decided to go for and it seems they have not derrogated from this standing point once. They do however dedicate some time to performance here and there in the meantime altho its sparser than their reef
So , in other words, they fully intent to keep releasing the new shit 'til theres no' mo' then theyll focus on fixin' da old shit
Also, you can try clearing your cache after you upload to see if that helps you a little.
You know what? Fuck it.
How to play Subnautica: Salvage Wars
Save this map to your hard drvie. Boot up Subnautica.
Start a new game, build small bases wherever you can. Every time you build a base, find its location on the map (or use coordinates if you have them) and number it so we know what order you built your bases in. Put replicators in each base so you can process titanium onsite and putting it in lockers, then when you've depleted the area of scrap, start funneling your processed ore towards your central hub. Put it in lockers for later use building more bases.
As you swim back and forth from one base to another, you'll notice which of your "trade routes" are more likely to lag than other ones. I doggy paddle, by swimming near the surface, because it's faster than deep-swimming, so try that. It'll let you haul salvage faster, but it will also make the lag worse. (Remember, our theory is fast travel == map loading == crashes.)
Take notes of when you lag and when you crash. Above all, make sure you note the locations of the bases and the order in which you built them.
Draw green, yellow and red lines between the numbered bases on your map. (This graphics editing is mandatory, so fire up MS Paint or whatever and just do your best.) Green means you can go back and forth from point A to point B with little or no lag (by your rig's standards.) Yellow means you experience some noticeable lurches or stuttering on the way. (I.E. noticeably more than the background level of lag.) Red means the game crashed. When this happens, try to make part of your line in yellow and the last leg of your journey in red so we know what direction you were going and roughly where the crash happened.
Then once you build a seamoth, run those routes again. You'll find that the yellow lines turn red, and the green lines turn yellow. WRITE DOWN which route you were attempting when it crashed and an estimate of how far you got before it crashed.
Upload your map to http://forums.unknownworlds.com and tell your story! Winner is the one who uploads a network of routes that accesses the most wrecks, pods, fragments and PDAs without cheating and despite crashing. (If you don't normally crash a lot during the Seamoth phase of the game, you can't play. Sorry. :P)
Second Prize goes to the most epic Tale of your struggling salvage company!
Enjoy!
(Update: Wow. Wikia deleted it within minutes. Their loss. It'll last 5 months on pasteall, which is way longer than it will take for the map to get out of date.)
Right, working on it. Sorry.
I don't just want the devs to understand what's going on. I also want us players to understand what's going on. Crowdsourcing and visualizing the crashes with a fun game was the best method I could come up with.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3MH_gIgtwe4dUFtRWpGc1d1Z28
Current save is inside a base on the northern beach of the Floating Island south of spawn. Look up and use the hatch to get out. Seamoth is in the water. If you hop in and drive it directly towards the "Silver Mine" beacon at full speed, ascending with space to dodge the occasional reef but never breaching the surface and never taking your finger off W, you should crash before getting there if your system is anything like mine.
Given the relatively low visibility in most of the deeper biomes, you'd think you could whittle it down to 8 visible chunks and 4 or so streaming chunks depending on the direction the player is moving (just don't draw anything obscured by underwater haze, right?) Instead, I'm bobbing up and down trying to surface for air and spot chunks on the ocean floor, and seeing vast swaths of mushrooms and grassy kelp appearing and disappearing over a depth difference of 30 meters or so.
It's clear that whatever the terrain system is optimized for, it's not optimized for viewing your planet from the air and then zooming in on a tiny part of it. Solution may involve a more generalized (less grid-based) voxel-sampling system at the most fundamental level, or caching a low-resolution world that never stops displaying in the background, or even just popping up a "terrain loading" icon and letting items visibly fade in one by one like Second Life or something rather than trying to load it all at once every frame and crashing the game.
Also, I posted this on Dec 5:
Not sure when those updates are going to be merged, but they should help. What version are you on? (top-right of the screen)
EDIT: I'm not a dev, just to clarify, I found that picture posted by a dev on Discord and shared it on the forums.
Feel like pasting your sig in a code tag in this thread so I copy your sig without fucking up the links?
If they don't like supporting "potato PCs," then why are they developing for xbone?
The problem is on the developer's end.