I just started up the game for the first time, and am fiddling with the graphical settings. There seems to be a bug with the ambient occlusion, which disappears when I put it to Very Low (off). At the top of the screen, there are horizontal lines where the Ambient Occlusion doesn’t work correctly. I’m not sure if the camera zoom affects it, but it does move along with the camera. I hope it is visible in the video, Youtube’s compression didn’t do it kindly.
EDIT: This is on a 1080p display, all settings maxed, 144hz, with Gsync enabled.
You are right, its damn hard to see it in the Youtube video but I seem to see one or two fuzzy horizontal lines going from one edge to the other edge of the screen. Maybe a screenshot would be clearer?
Does this stay no matter the map you have loaded? Is it visible in towns or on menu screen/startup?
144hz obviously translates to a high framerate and you dont say what GPU you are using to establish if the game is actually running at 144fps or is it possible that Gsync is involved and causing this anomaly in the display while adjusting refresh rates to match? Have you tried to see what happens if you dont use variable refresh and lock the game to something like 60fps 60hz? I ask this because I play at 1080p with locked 60fps (no gsync) and have never noticed this when testing various different settings (for stability/performance) so its important to try and figure out each possible factor that could be involved before assuming anything.
Individual settings could also be involved here - i.e. one of the subsettings may point to the culprit. Ultra settings generally exhibit more problems than lower ones especially on lesser hardware but even on the best components. It may be useful to test individual settings rather than just maxed out and very low - it could be one specific one causing the issue.
Also - assuming you are not running any other third party applications that relate to graphical use in any way - sometimes simple things like screen overlays have been known to cause issues. Just check to be sure.
Usual things to check too:
Gpu drivers no older than 3 months & installed with clean not upgrade.
Run a Game file verification in steam to make sure your install is ok.
Also, the devs are likely going to want to see your game log from a session where you experienced this - its unlikely that it would contain anything pertaining to this issue but you may as well post it (zip and upload directly here).
Okay I tried the possibilities you mentioned. I fiddled around with Gsync and it did not seem to be a factor. Enabled, disabled, locked framerate, unlocked, etc. I also tried different graphics settings, but the only one that seems to apply to the issue is the Ambient Occlusion. The only time the problem disappears is with the AO on low (which seems to disable it entirely), with the other settings on any setting, doesn’t matter.
Next I tried disabling some overlays, both Steam’s and Nvidia’s. No result.
GPU drivers are up-to-date, game files are verified.
I’ve attached the two log files in case a dev might want to take a look. Both are from very short sessions because I just logged onto a new character to test if the problem is still there (my current character is in a place without grass, the problem is still there, just harder to spot, so I went to the start real quick.)
Thanks for verifying that it doesnt seem to be involved with Gsync.
Cannot really think off hand of what else it may be - the last time anyone spoke about issues specifically with Ambient Occulsion was specifically related to Linux and updated Mesa drivers which solved it. It was the same as you experience on anything higher than the lowest AO setting but this was years ago now (2021 - if you search the forum).
I am wondering if the merging of the two codebases (there was a single player and internal only multiplayer version of the game before 0.9) has somehow let this problem slip back in?
Not sure there is anything else we as players could try - this could be one of those dev only kinda things.
