If the bugs bother you that much, try shelving it until v1.0 .
However, if you can't wait, we can help. The devs are removing terraforming. If there are still cache problems after that, we will see (the devs seem to think terraforming is a high priority, and they made / are making the game, and are wading through thousands of bug reports, so I tend to believe them).
My understanding is part of the problem is they used the Unity Asset Store to buy the terrain system, and then used it in a manner it was never designed for. In most games, you're walking around on the ground, not floating over the terrain with a view for miles around you, and in early versions of this game that were all Safe Shallows and Wreckage, that was enough. Optimization has never been a priority for them, in part because the thing that needs optimizing in this case (terrain streaming) is not their code in the first place.
If it were me, I'd ditch Frustum Culling entirely (to fix camera-turn lag,) keep the absolute blockiest version of the voxel map in-world at ALL times (so there's no pop-in,) use a separate thread for terrain loading operations (so it can load across several frames when it's too much work to do it in one frame,) and progressively refine the terrain meshes in a sphere around the player, not a cone in front of their camera. But doing all that shit requires knowing the terrain code inside and out, or even rolling your own terrain engine, and they clearly never planned to do that amount of work themselves when they could just buy a terrain system already finished.
(Or, god help us, that shit could all be part of the Asset in the first place, and they just haven't configured the presets for "potato PCs," by which I mean a single-core $1000 build that was brand-new twelve months ago with an admittedly older operating system that still manages to run DOOM 2016 perfectly well.)
The problem is we don't know. They're not talking. At least, they're not talking in here. Presumably if you go hang out in the developer chat, you could talk to a real human being about this, but they've proven they're only interested in developing new features, so what's the point?
And the worst part is, the fact that they're pushing this on xbone already before it's even ready on PC, tells me that they're out of money. They burned their Steam launch early and hard, and constantly added new features instead of optimizing. (No you CAN'T do both at the same time! By definition, every man-hour spent on features was not spent on optimization!) A few high-profile letsplayers, one of them apparently genuinely Thalassophobic got ahold of it (who knows if that was sponsored?) and now all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. They've sold their broken game to all us Early Adopters willing to buy it in a broken state. Now they need extra money to magically appear from somewhere if they're going to unbreak it.
So they're trying to get that money from the only place untapped players looking for an underwater experience may still exist: Consoles. Judging based on the comments, that's not going so well either. Apparently, despite the Patch Culture this industry is currently mired in, Console consumers still expect their games to be in a somewhat playable state when they put down money for them. Imagine that!
Unknown Worlds pretty much backed themselves into a corner. Now it almost seems like they're trying to scrum for a 1.0 release so they can just wash their hands and be done with it. I sincerely hope that's not the case. We all deserve to one day play the game we paid for. Time will tell whether this project blooms to its full potential, or becomes the next No Man's Sky.
If you're reading this and you have a lot of money (I.E. more than full-time minimum wage adjusted for the cost-of-living in your area,) consider grabbing Natural Selection II when it's not on sale to support the development of Subnautica. (I assume you already have a copy of Subnautica. You could just buy that again, but why not get a free game for your philanthropic capitalism?) I hear those folks in the NS2 community could use some fresh players. Try and stick it out through the (dreadful) unskippable 30-minute tutorial. Apparently Unknown Worlds, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that clueless noob players learning from the more experienced players which made the Natural Selection 1 community so strong is just a bad idea all around. They'd much rather have everyone buy the game and then churn out in frustration before they even get past the tutorial when they realize the Alien tutorial is being voiced by the same tired man who voiced the Space Marines tutorial.
Discord isn't 'Developer Chat', it's Subnautica & Natural Selection II Community Chat, which the developers choose to hang out in, and (usually) respond to direct @mentions or direct messages (well, I've always gotten a reply, usually within ~10 minutes if the dev I message is on).
I would like to see your system specs if you don't mind sharing them (not that I'm doubting you, I'm genuinely curious) that you built one year ago with a single core processor (?? they make those still?). It might help to explain exactly where Subnautica is choking, if it runs Doom 2016 really well, but not SN.
I really don't think the devs would keep piling on content if they knew they wouldn't be able to optimize the problem away, as the game ran fine before the Bones update, or so I hear. If they wanted to v1.0 and scram, they wouldn't keep sinking time into making new content. It's just illogical.
All that being said, though, I do understand your frustration and concern. I'd suggest direct messaging the devs once you've calmed down a little as you seem to know a lot about the Unity engine and have some ideas (that the devs may have already considered and rejected, or maybe not! ).
I would like to see your system specs if you don't mind sharing them (not that I'm doubting you, I'm genuinely curious) that you built one year ago with a single core processor (?? they make those still?). It might help to explain exactly where Subnautica is choking, if it runs Doom 2016 really well, but not SN.
I'm not running DOOM 2016 with all the settings maxxed out, of course. But it looks as good as letsplays led me to believe it would, the action is fast and I can turn 180 degrees without any sudden dips in framerate. It runs DOOM 2016 a hellofalot better than it runs Subnautica, is the point. And that's sad.
Oh, and it looks like I was wrong about the number of cores. I bought one processor. Apparently that one processor has eight cores.
I really don't think the devs would keep piling on content if they knew they wouldn't be able to optimize the problem away, as the game ran fine before the Bones update, or so I hear. If they wanted to v1.0 and scram, they wouldn't keep sinking time into making new content. It's just illogical.
I agree that as a general policy it's illogical and untenable, which is why it makes me so angry that they're choosing to do it this way. Subnautica has been getting worse and worse with every update past a certain point, and instead of fixing it, they're just piling on new zones and content.
It didn't run fine before Bones. It ran pretty badly then. It got worse after Bones, but it's always been getting worse. It became a problem when they added the first deep biome, Grand Reef, I think, and it's been getting progressively worse ever since. And they've always known about it. That's why they added the PRAWN.
The PRAWN was originally envisioned as an alternative to the Seamoth for people who couldn't stream terrain data fast enough to use the Seamoth. You walk along the sea floor (like the land-based games the terrain engine was actually designed for where nearby ridges block your view of the surrounding countryside) at a slow speed (so the terrain can load slowly.)
All that being said, though, I do understand your frustration and concern. I'd suggest direct messaging the devs once you've calmed down a little as you seem to know a lot about the Unity engine and have some ideas (that the devs may have already considered and rejected, or maybe not! ).
They already know that they're using a terrain asset from the Asset Store instead of rolling their own. They already know that they're focusing on the graphics and adding content instead of doing something about the lag and crashes.
All that "if it were me" stuff was what I would do if I was designing an underwater game from scratch using Unity and rolling my own voxel-based terrain generation system. It's academic, at this point. They've already made the game the way they made the game. They can't sink the resources into completely building their own terrain system from the ground up, and if they did, it's questionable whether or not they could convert their old map data to it at 1:1. It might not even run any better than this build, or might run worse for the people currently not complaining. The only way to know would be to perform the experiment.
But yeah, if they'd realized how much swimming was like flying with the very first draft, they might have tried to set things up so they could display a coarse version of the whole world at once without any problems, and then load in more refined voxels as needed. Other than a few simple, obvious things like letting players turn off fustrum culling in the Graphics options or mute the Reefbacks and Underwater Vents so they can see whether or not it fixes the lag spikes, there's really not a whole lot you can do at this point.
I don't think Unknown Worlds is going "We should buy parts and build a copy of WarpZone32's computer, find and install Windows 7 on ebay or something, and try to reproduce these crashes!" Nothing I say is going to compel them to do that. Worst case scenario, they might just be using the DxDiag data to know how high to raise the "minimum system specs" bar to keep people with systems like mine out.
Instead I think they're too busy going "Oh, god, why isn't it working on xbox? We really needed that extra money from xbox! Quick, keep pushing out content so the letsplayers have something to talk about! We need that Markiplier Bump!"
They're trying to just finish the damn game already because they don't know how much longer they can afford to keep it in beta.
They wouldn't be releasing an unfinished game on xbox otherwise. I mean, who does that? This is the first time I've ever heard of a release on xbox one while the game was still in Early Access. Even by modern standards, that's too early. But they wouldn't be doing it if their hand wasn't being forced.
So that's why UWE has repeatedly pushed back the deadline to do more on the game (thereby also pushing back a team trip), works on details no one would miss if they were never implemented at all but make the world a little more lively all the same, improves existing gameplay like building and signals, and has been redrafting the story heavily and continuously in the past months.
Glad we have an individual with the power of mindreading so they never have to even be near a dev to know what's up to bring us the truth.
(XBOne has an EA program for which applicants and updates have to be approved by Microsoft. So, yeah, not too early and checked by a secondary company.)
@WarpZone32 Have you ever, on your current rig, installed and activated Windows 10? If so, you should be able to upgrade to it now, I think. Possibly even if not, as there was a loophole that I'm not sure if MS ever closed.
Also, you're running an R9 200 series graphics card, but I can't tell which one, only that it has 2GB dedicated memory, and 2GB shared memory (pulled from your normal RAM, if I'm not mistaken, meaning that extra 2GB is slow, especially considering that processor only supports DDR3-1866).
Can you go into your device manager (start > run > devmgmt.msc) and tell me exactly what graphics card model is listed when you expand the heading "Display Adapters"? Also, double-click that graphics card heading, and under the 'drivers' tab, tell me who is the driver provider (should be AMD or ATI, but it might be generic Microsoft drivers).
I'm currently running on an Intel HD 530, which means all of my graphics memory is from normal system memory, and running at that slower speed. I average 20FPS, sometimes 24, sometimes 16.
@WarpZone32 Have you ever, on your current rig, installed and activated Windows 10? If so, you should be able to upgrade to it now, I think. Possibly even if not, as there was a loophole that I'm not sure if MS ever closed.
Actually, Windows started aggressively installing Windows 10 on a bunch of users' systems without their permission, ruining apps and workflows and in some cases irrevocably bricking systems. I installed a piece of anti-malware called GWX Control Panel specifically to prevent Windows 10 from being installed.
I appreciate that Windows 7 isn't perfect, and that Windows 8 was worse, and that Windows 10 isn't as bad as Windows 8. But Bill Gates can have my operating system when he pries it out of my cold, dead case... no, wait, I already prevented him from doing exactly that.
Windows 10 is pure cancer. It's everything that sucks about mobile, pissed all over the venerable PC platform. Trying to destroy my system with a wave of forced updates just turned it from a mild annoyance to an act of war. I would rather move to Linux than Windows 10. I would rather stop playing Subnautica than switch to 10. If you paid for Windows 10, you got ripped off. If you accepted a free upgrade, you got ripped off. If you went to bed one night and woke up with Windows 10 mysteriously there, you got ripped off.
I appreciate the thought, though. There are no stupid questions.
Also, you're running an R9 200 series graphics card, but I can't tell which one, only that it has 2GB dedicated memory, and 2GB shared memory (pulled from your normal RAM, if I'm not mistaken, meaning that extra 2GB is slow, especially considering that processor only supports DDR3-1866).
Can you go into your device manager (start > run > devmgmt.msc) and tell me exactly what graphics card model is listed when you expand the heading "Display Adapters"? Also, double-click that graphics card heading, and under the 'drivers' tab, tell me who is the driver provider (should be AMD or ATI, but it might be generic Microsoft drivers).
I'm currently running on an Intel HD 530, which means all of my graphics memory is from normal system memory, and running at that slower speed. I average 20FPS, sometimes 24, sometimes 16.
AMD Radeon R9 200 Series
Diver Version 21.19.137.1
What's the solution? Install more dedicated memory?
@WarpZone32 Have you ever, on your current rig, installed and activated Windows 10? If so, you should be able to upgrade to it now, I think. Possibly even if not, as there was a loophole that I'm not sure if MS ever closed.
Actually, Windows started aggressively installing Windows 10 on a bunch of users' systems without their permission, ruining apps and workflows and in some cases irrevocably bricking systems. I installed a piece of anti-malware called GWX Control Panel specifically to prevent Windows 10 from being installed.
I appreciate that Windows 7 isn't perfect, and that Windows 8 was worse, and that Windows 10 isn't as bad as Windows 8. But Bill Gates can have my operating system when he pries it out of my cold, dead case... no, wait, I already prevented him from doing exactly that.
Windows 10 is pure cancer. It's everything that sucks about mobile, pissed all over the venerable PC platform. Trying to destroy my system with a wave of forced updates just turned it from a mild annoyance to an act of war. I would rather move to Linux than Windows 10. I would rather stop playing Subnautica than switch to 10. If you paid for Windows 10, you got ripped off. If you accepted a free upgrade, you got ripped off. If you went to bed one night and woke up with Windows 10 mysteriously there, you got ripped off.
I appreciate the thought, though. There are no stupid questions.
Also, you're running an R9 200 series graphics card, but I can't tell which one, only that it has 2GB dedicated memory, and 2GB shared memory (pulled from your normal RAM, if I'm not mistaken, meaning that extra 2GB is slow, especially considering that processor only supports DDR3-1866).
Can you go into your device manager (start > run > devmgmt.msc) and tell me exactly what graphics card model is listed when you expand the heading "Display Adapters"? Also, double-click that graphics card heading, and under the 'drivers' tab, tell me who is the driver provider (should be AMD or ATI, but it might be generic Microsoft drivers).
I'm currently running on an Intel HD 530, which means all of my graphics memory is from normal system memory, and running at that slower speed. I average 20FPS, sometimes 24, sometimes 16.
AMD Radeon R9 200 Series
Diver Version 21.19.137.1
What's the solution? Install more dedicated memory?
To my knowledge, you can't (you used to be able to in the earlier 90's IIRC), you can only install a newer graphics card that has more dedicated memory. More normal system RAM is always good as well, but it's nowhere near as fast as GDDR5.
Comments
If the bugs bother you that much, try shelving it until v1.0 .
However, if you can't wait, we can help. The devs are removing terraforming. If there are still cache problems after that, we will see (the devs seem to think terraforming is a high priority, and they made / are making the game, and are wading through thousands of bug reports, so I tend to believe them).
If it were me, I'd ditch Frustum Culling entirely (to fix camera-turn lag,) keep the absolute blockiest version of the voxel map in-world at ALL times (so there's no pop-in,) use a separate thread for terrain loading operations (so it can load across several frames when it's too much work to do it in one frame,) and progressively refine the terrain meshes in a sphere around the player, not a cone in front of their camera. But doing all that shit requires knowing the terrain code inside and out, or even rolling your own terrain engine, and they clearly never planned to do that amount of work themselves when they could just buy a terrain system already finished.
(Or, god help us, that shit could all be part of the Asset in the first place, and they just haven't configured the presets for "potato PCs," by which I mean a single-core $1000 build that was brand-new twelve months ago with an admittedly older operating system that still manages to run DOOM 2016 perfectly well.)
The problem is we don't know. They're not talking. At least, they're not talking in here. Presumably if you go hang out in the developer chat, you could talk to a real human being about this, but they've proven they're only interested in developing new features, so what's the point?
And the worst part is, the fact that they're pushing this on xbone already before it's even ready on PC, tells me that they're out of money. They burned their Steam launch early and hard, and constantly added new features instead of optimizing. (No you CAN'T do both at the same time! By definition, every man-hour spent on features was not spent on optimization!) A few high-profile letsplayers, one of them apparently genuinely Thalassophobic got ahold of it (who knows if that was sponsored?) and now all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. They've sold their broken game to all us Early Adopters willing to buy it in a broken state. Now they need extra money to magically appear from somewhere if they're going to unbreak it.
So they're trying to get that money from the only place untapped players looking for an underwater experience may still exist: Consoles. Judging based on the comments, that's not going so well either. Apparently, despite the Patch Culture this industry is currently mired in, Console consumers still expect their games to be in a somewhat playable state when they put down money for them. Imagine that!
Unknown Worlds pretty much backed themselves into a corner. Now it almost seems like they're trying to scrum for a 1.0 release so they can just wash their hands and be done with it. I sincerely hope that's not the case. We all deserve to one day play the game we paid for. Time will tell whether this project blooms to its full potential, or becomes the next No Man's Sky.
If you're reading this and you have a lot of money (I.E. more than full-time minimum wage adjusted for the cost-of-living in your area,) consider grabbing Natural Selection II when it's not on sale to support the development of Subnautica. (I assume you already have a copy of Subnautica. You could just buy that again, but why not get a free game for your philanthropic capitalism?) I hear those folks in the NS2 community could use some fresh players. Try and stick it out through the (dreadful) unskippable 30-minute tutorial. Apparently Unknown Worlds, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that clueless noob players learning from the more experienced players which made the Natural Selection 1 community so strong is just a bad idea all around. They'd much rather have everyone buy the game and then churn out in frustration before they even get past the tutorial when they realize the Alien tutorial is being voiced by the same tired man who voiced the Space Marines tutorial.
God, I'm angry. But it's only because I care.
Discord isn't 'Developer Chat', it's Subnautica & Natural Selection II Community Chat, which the developers choose to hang out in, and (usually) respond to direct @mentions or direct messages (well, I've always gotten a reply, usually within ~10 minutes if the dev I message is on).
I would like to see your system specs if you don't mind sharing them (not that I'm doubting you, I'm genuinely curious) that you built one year ago with a single core processor (?? they make those still?). It might help to explain exactly where Subnautica is choking, if it runs Doom 2016 really well, but not SN.
I really don't think the devs would keep piling on content if they knew they wouldn't be able to optimize the problem away, as the game ran fine before the Bones update, or so I hear. If they wanted to v1.0 and scram, they wouldn't keep sinking time into making new content. It's just illogical.
All that being said, though, I do understand your frustration and concern. I'd suggest direct messaging the devs once you've calmed down a little as you seem to know a lot about the Unity engine and have some ideas (that the devs may have already considered and rejected, or maybe not!
01/21/15 according to the BIOS in my DxDiag I posted earlier: http://pastebin.com/99DZjsDe
I'm not running DOOM 2016 with all the settings maxxed out, of course. But it looks as good as letsplays led me to believe it would, the action is fast and I can turn 180 degrees without any sudden dips in framerate. It runs DOOM 2016 a hellofalot better than it runs Subnautica, is the point. And that's sad.
Oh, and it looks like I was wrong about the number of cores. I bought one processor. Apparently that one processor has eight cores.
I agree that as a general policy it's illogical and untenable, which is why it makes me so angry that they're choosing to do it this way. Subnautica has been getting worse and worse with every update past a certain point, and instead of fixing it, they're just piling on new zones and content.
It didn't run fine before Bones. It ran pretty badly then. It got worse after Bones, but it's always been getting worse. It became a problem when they added the first deep biome, Grand Reef, I think, and it's been getting progressively worse ever since. And they've always known about it. That's why they added the PRAWN.
The PRAWN was originally envisioned as an alternative to the Seamoth for people who couldn't stream terrain data fast enough to use the Seamoth. You walk along the sea floor (like the land-based games the terrain engine was actually designed for where nearby ridges block your view of the surrounding countryside) at a slow speed (so the terrain can load slowly.)
They already know that they're using a terrain asset from the Asset Store instead of rolling their own. They already know that they're focusing on the graphics and adding content instead of doing something about the lag and crashes.
All that "if it were me" stuff was what I would do if I was designing an underwater game from scratch using Unity and rolling my own voxel-based terrain generation system. It's academic, at this point. They've already made the game the way they made the game. They can't sink the resources into completely building their own terrain system from the ground up, and if they did, it's questionable whether or not they could convert their old map data to it at 1:1. It might not even run any better than this build, or might run worse for the people currently not complaining. The only way to know would be to perform the experiment.
But yeah, if they'd realized how much swimming was like flying with the very first draft, they might have tried to set things up so they could display a coarse version of the whole world at once without any problems, and then load in more refined voxels as needed. Other than a few simple, obvious things like letting players turn off fustrum culling in the Graphics options or mute the Reefbacks and Underwater Vents so they can see whether or not it fixes the lag spikes, there's really not a whole lot you can do at this point.
I don't think Unknown Worlds is going "We should buy parts and build a copy of WarpZone32's computer, find and install Windows 7 on ebay or something, and try to reproduce these crashes!" Nothing I say is going to compel them to do that. Worst case scenario, they might just be using the DxDiag data to know how high to raise the "minimum system specs" bar to keep people with systems like mine out.
Instead I think they're too busy going "Oh, god, why isn't it working on xbox? We really needed that extra money from xbox! Quick, keep pushing out content so the letsplayers have something to talk about! We need that Markiplier Bump!"
They're trying to just finish the damn game already because they don't know how much longer they can afford to keep it in beta.
They wouldn't be releasing an unfinished game on xbox otherwise. I mean, who does that? This is the first time I've ever heard of a release on xbox one while the game was still in Early Access. Even by modern standards, that's too early. But they wouldn't be doing it if their hand wasn't being forced.
Glad we have an individual with the power of mindreading so they never have to even be near a dev to know what's up to bring us the truth.
(XBOne has an EA program for which applicants and updates have to be approved by Microsoft. So, yeah, not too early and checked by a secondary company.)
Also, you're running an R9 200 series graphics card, but I can't tell which one, only that it has 2GB dedicated memory, and 2GB shared memory (pulled from your normal RAM, if I'm not mistaken, meaning that extra 2GB is slow, especially considering that processor only supports DDR3-1866).
Can you go into your device manager (start > run > devmgmt.msc) and tell me exactly what graphics card model is listed when you expand the heading "Display Adapters"? Also, double-click that graphics card heading, and under the 'drivers' tab, tell me who is the driver provider (should be AMD or ATI, but it might be generic Microsoft drivers).
I'm currently running on an Intel HD 530, which means all of my graphics memory is from normal system memory, and running at that slower speed. I average 20FPS, sometimes 24, sometimes 16.
Actually, Windows started aggressively installing Windows 10 on a bunch of users' systems without their permission, ruining apps and workflows and in some cases irrevocably bricking systems. I installed a piece of anti-malware called GWX Control Panel specifically to prevent Windows 10 from being installed.
I appreciate that Windows 7 isn't perfect, and that Windows 8 was worse, and that Windows 10 isn't as bad as Windows 8. But Bill Gates can have my operating system when he pries it out of my cold, dead case... no, wait, I already prevented him from doing exactly that.
Windows 10 is pure cancer. It's everything that sucks about mobile, pissed all over the venerable PC platform. Trying to destroy my system with a wave of forced updates just turned it from a mild annoyance to an act of war. I would rather move to Linux than Windows 10. I would rather stop playing Subnautica than switch to 10. If you paid for Windows 10, you got ripped off. If you accepted a free upgrade, you got ripped off. If you went to bed one night and woke up with Windows 10 mysteriously there, you got ripped off.
I appreciate the thought, though. There are no stupid questions.
AMD Radeon R9 200 Series
Diver Version 21.19.137.1
What's the solution? Install more dedicated memory?
To my knowledge, you can't (you used to be able to in the earlier 90's IIRC), you can only install a newer graphics card that has more dedicated memory. More normal system RAM is always good as well, but it's nowhere near as fast as GDDR5.
What is the difference between performance of DDR3 and GDDR5 graphics card? Which one is better: 2gb GDDR5 or 4gb DDR3?