Hey all, Had more time to play today than expected, so I'm having a longer session than usual. However, the longer I play, the more glitchy behaviour I'm experiencing. At least, I think it's linked to time played, but it may be just coincidence. I've been doing well, raiding both surface and space-based POI's. However, the latest POI has been a bit of a nightmare due to constant glitching. I'm being hit through blocks fairly consistently - from both static defences like Sentry Turrets and from Troops - which frustrates. I'm also having more issues than usual regarding actually hitting targets. Despite perfect LoS, my shots are impacting on blocks, rather than the target - though how a block's collision mesh would change due to time played I don't know. Additionally, and this is most common when in a space POI, I'm noticing my shots - that are all perfectly on target - often doing ZERO damage to a target when they do hit with no dodgy blocks nearby "blocking" things. The final bit of weirdness seems to be related to damage dealt by basics Troops. A basic Level 1 Zirax Trooper - the one with the machine gun, is killing me in under a second, while I'm wearing Heavy Armour - that's not worn out. It's all gone a little nuts. This is all in Single Player, so I cannot blame things on network gremlins. Perhaps I just got unlucky. All of the listed issues have been around for years at this stage, but to have them occurring this often isn't usual. Any ideas? Do longer sessions cause the game to become a little unstable in this regard, whiel still running fine and maintaining good fps? I'm a little puzzled as my session started well and I felt I was getting the hang of on-foot combat again, after a bit of a break, but it all went to hell this session lol. I'd like to say a big thank you to the Console for helping out when things glitch. Glad it's still accessible.
The behavior you describe has been around "forever" (as long as have been playing, A18 I think). The cure for me has been to shut the game and steam down and restart. This seems to be the consensus of most server owners as well they will invariably have routine restarts of the server, usually 3 times per day. When playing on a server there are some benefits to restarting the local game. The most common reason given is memory leaks, I have no expertise in this area.
It's possible that this behavior is tied to memory fragmentation caused by Unity's garbage collector. I linked an example from a game designer some time ago explaining how this works, and how some memory-intensive games tend to degrade after some time due to this.
Thanks for the replies guys. I usually have shorter play sessions these days, yesterday's longer session is quite rare. Hence why the issues became so pronounced for me, I'm not accustomed to it. I would love to play some MP Empyrion, but judging by the various issues I get that require access to the console to solve even in short SP sessions, I worry that I'd get too frustrated to enjoy things. Shame things are still quite unstable six and a half years later... I started just before 3.0 Alpha/Beta (summer 2016) came out. Anyone else remember POI's being able to shoot through mountains? That put me off from buying it myself for a while, after trying it around a friend's. Might have another session this evening, but yesterday's experiences have made me less keen than I was, even though it'd only be a short session today.
I bought the game mid 2017 (alpha v5.5) after watching its development for a while, when I deemed it "worthy" of a try, based on players reviews and Steam discussions. I had loads of fun, and that was just prior the "temperature/ radiation hazards" were implemented for devices, and also the "airtight-ness" concept for interior spaces (ships and bases). The game grew steadily since then, and I think it would be fair to say that despites the addition of many more "core features" the game has been in a relatively "stable" state, if we compare it to the earlier stages, more or less. It's not like they were only adding cosmetics and just had to fix the loose parts : they added lots of features that were due to interfere with one another, sometimes causing big problems and force backpedaling a bit here and there. I'm not "more" or "less" surprised to see the game in its present state ; it's almost the same "ongoing duct-taped" experience I had at the beginning, but with more clutter in the UI and more convoluted rules for building and doing basic stuff (mining, putting an armor on, managing inventory, crafting, WIFI, etc). The thing that frustrates me more than the state of the game is the fact that along the years some players asked for features that would bring very little in terms of playing enjoyment, and that would inherently make the game harder to play just for the sake of pseudo-realism, at the cost of computer performance. It also forced the developers to change the minimal PC requirements to play the game, and incidentally forced many low-end PC owners out of the game, at least for the latest versions. And these players who asked for these useless features in relation to "simple enjoyment" of a 1st/ 3rd person shooter / sandbox exploration / building game, well... these players have simply left the game for quite some time now. There were endless discussions around the desire for these "realistic enhancements" which only dragged the experience down, scared and confused new players, and generated tons of debugging labor, while the core experience remained unchanged for the most part. What is left on these forums is a tiny percentage of the veterans, mostly builders, and a handful of new players that can't compare what they see now with what it was before, and these players will obviously "appreciate" the actual features without knowing how their addition changed the experience when they were first introduced, for better or for worse. My stance never changed, even though some new stuff is pretty cool (AI factions fighting each other, the galaxy, all the modding candies we got, etc) : there is just too much content crammed in most playfields for this engine (Unity) to manage everything without loosing parts here in there during playtime. The devs surely have some beefy machines, like most game developers have to be able to build the game without waiting too long each time, and surely they have installed tons of DLLs and tools that made their system far more reliable than the average player's machine which only do basic maintenance and updates. This may be one of the reasons why the developers have problems seeing bugs and strange behaviors that players see on a regular basis. Just a theory of mine...
Wouldn't it be more logical for games developers to program their games on the beefy computers but do a long test on a mid rage standard computer, so they can see any issues?
Big companies have teams of paid playtesters and still release games with bugs, so... not a guarantee... ^^ Eleon relies on us for that ( long playtests ), and I also think @Germanicus and @Kaeser are part of their closed beta testing team, though I have no clue on what this implies, or if their computers can be described as mid range class. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is a link to the topic I mentioned in my first post up here, from the Unity engine documentation : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/performance-managed-memory.html Memory fragmentation can occur equally in SP or MP, by the way. It's a good read to understand what the game engine is doing behind the scene, and why a game like Empyrion that constantly loads / unloads huge amounts of data (like whole playfields at once) can have very noticeable FPS dips at seemingly random times. In reality, there is nothing random here, it's just too hard to track everything like distances from objects, timers ticking or AI "decision making", for players or even the developers to be able to easily pinpoint a problem quickly.
I've been suffering from longsessionitus again today. Hadn't realised how long I'd been playing for until I raided an "Abandoned Assembly Yard" POI - I think this one is a Reforged Eden one. The main symptoms appeared to be regular delays firing guns - especially the T2 Shotgun - where it'd simply not fire for over a second after pressing the button. That lead to some sticky situations! Secondly, I seemed to be suffering from spawner delays. Either that, or things were deliberately spawning right on top of me (literally) when triggering the sensors tied to the spawn pads. I also noticed that weapon damage would often not be counted at all when shooting enemies. At one point it got so bad that I used "GM IV" to buy myself time and my shots (T2 AR and T2 Shotgun) were simply not being counted. After moving away, then back again, damage started counting once more. I do wonder why I don't read more accounts of people running into issues like this. I've had to make frequent use of the console during this POI as things really haven't been working well. It's funny, I get so into playing that it doesn't even occur to me to save / reload (I'm single player needless to say) as I generally only save before / after certain events. I.e. about to raid a POI or have just Cored a POI for example. Game seems to be running perfectly smoothly - no frame rate issues - but there's certainly a different type of lag at play here. Things are still fun - though they wouldn't be if the console didn't exist - so it frustrates even more when things go screwy like this. These issues, which we think are caused by longer play sessions, only compound the general issues such as hit detection being way off at times. For example, I opened a Hangar Door on this POI and there was a Sentry Turret on the ceiling. I took cover but I simply could not hit the Sentry Turret even through the wide open Hangar Door with perfect LoS. Hits just kept incorrectly impacting on the Hangar Door. I had to go through the door - and be exposed to fire - to shoot the thing. I do hope these sort of things eventually get sorted. I'd love to join an MP server some day - only interested in PvE, I like Co-op play - but without access to the console to work-around these issue, well, I'd likely not have a good time. I have wondered if some quirk of my PC leads to be having more issues than most - judging by the general silence on such things - but it's a well-built PC, with a lean software build used just for gaming. Ah well.
