Freezing when entering the game that eventually unfreezes

Bug Reports
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Hey there. I’ve been enjoying the game so far but unfortunately started having the same issue as this post today after a restart.

Here’s the weird part: If I let the game freeze and wait on that screen for several minutes without doing anything or killing the process. This makes me curious if the post linked above has the same scenario, but that user didn’t wait as long as I did. The time I have to wait is much longer than any loading screens used to be, something like 5-10 minutes when loading from an SSD. When going back to the main menu and loading up the character again, it loads almost immediately with a very brief (and working) loading screen.

It’s almost as if I should be getting a loading screen but I am not getting any visual cue that something is happening in the background when first loading a character. It just appears like a crash.

I’ve done almost everything the user in that post has done to try and fix this, save for installing the standalone game.
That includes:

  • Deleted and restored save files from both the steam cloud and locally.
  • Made new character to test, it crashed after the cutscene and has the same problem from character selection
  • Restarted everything
  • Verified files
  • Full game reinstall
  • Changed all graphics options to VeryLow
  • Even did a system restore to yesterday, no change

The aforementioned user also had their problem abruptly go away, so I figured I would make this post as kind of an update on the nature of this problem. Here is my log file from a fresh start, going to character selection and waiting the freeze out, then exiting once I’m in the game:

le_graphicsmanager.ini (493 Bytes)
Player.log (29.0 KB)

I see a line in the log that notes not being able to find my loot filter which is strange because I have it set to ‘no filter’ in the game settings as I ended up deleting the filter earlier during reinstall.

Anyways, hopefully, this can get solved at some point. It seems to have come out of nowhere. Thanks!

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Hey Mitsakes, welcome to the forum and sorry to hear you’re encountering the same issue, sadly as you said, for me it just suddenly started working after doing a failed system restore, it makes no sense in my head, the speculation is something changed with some windows dll or config file that messed with the game after the restart.

Your log already looks way longer than mine, hopefully someone with an understanding of what’s going on in it can comment as well.

in the meantime, could you also throw in a dxdiag report, try to download the standalone game, see if that works and check your reliability history, specifically look at the recent 2 days, see what changed between the day the game worked and the day it stopped working.

You’ve pointed out you already tried system restore and it didn’t help, any chance it’s taking you not far back enough before some specific change happened that messed with the game? do you have other dates/hours to try to go back to in-case nothing else works?

Try to fire up the game in windowed mode and have task manager next to it, once you click Enter Game, take a look at task manager and the state of your system and the game, does it go into Not Responding as soon as you click Enter Game?

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Ok…

(A dxdiag would be good… as would checking your View Reliability History to see if something else is going on)

First immediate point - there is a problem with one of your filter files… Bad filter files CAN and DO cause big problems in the game that will lead to the in-game UI failing and problems every time it tries to apply a filter to any drop or when you load in new maps/characters… Corrupted filters WILL cause the game to crash, freeze or do weird things. It is very important that you physically delete all the filter files from the filter folder while the game isnt running.

Freezing as you describe has multiple possible causes…

The most common cause is performance related, and usually occurs during play or when loading a new map if the game settings are too high… I use the same GPU as you do, and depending on in-game settings, I can almost guarantee 2 to 5 second freezing on my system during busy play moments or 10-30 second freezing when loading into new maps. I run the game at VeryLow settings at 1080p purely for best stablity - I can run it at higher settings, but then I get problems and I prefer stability to eye candy.

Freezing can also happen if your system is doing something in background while playing LE… this can be a wide variety of things - I have found this happening on my system if Windows Update tried to apply something in background (didnt even need to be actually installing, just attempting would cause the game to freeze) or if you dont prevent Steam from updating gmes in background… Even an auto antivirus scan can cause this kind of thing…

Slower harddrives can also have an impact on this… not much but the “freeze time” adds up… I did tests on mechanical, SDD and NVME drives and its pretty noticeable, especially from HDD to SSD. If you are already on SSD levels of performance, then its unlikely this is a primary cause unless there is some technical fault/driver issue.

Another possible cause is also throttling on the system - there have been instances where people have not noticed that components have been overheating (e.g. case fan broken or a loose wire blocking a GPU fan) and intermittently causing freezes… Usually these kinds of causes end up with crashes rather than recoverable freezing tho… and are hard to trace unless you are actually monitoring things.

Freezes when the game is loading new maps is usually because the CPU is offloading new data to the GPU and if there is any issue during the process or either component is waiting on the other or the CPU is trying to load a large texture into GPU memory but has to wait for something else to unload first… This point is usually when the game will experience freezes, crashes etc. and will exacerbate any minor problem that is generally ignored at other times…

Old GPU drivers (not correctly installed or corrupted) & driver level overrides can also cause unexplained problems - i.e. if you have a non-default driver configuration where the driver ignores the game settings can cause odd problems… sometimes its something as simple as a conflicting antialiasing setting…

Important note here too… if something has caused an instaiblity on your system like a freeze, it is very likely that any attempt to restart the game etc without doing a physical reboot of your system between attempts will mean you will suffer the same problem again…

Windows Update have been known to cause issues - April 2021 as an example had an update that messed with FPS in various games - so you need to double check what changed on your system - the fact that you also restarted your system points to something that was possibly awaiting reboot to update and now has caused a secondary problem.

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So first of all, thanks for the replies. Didn’t mean to drag you into this SniperMex1. Looks like in your instance you got away unscathed lol.

Your log already looks way longer than mine, hopefully someone with an understanding of what’s going on in it can comment as well.

That’s because I don’t end up with a hard crash, just a freeze that eventually resolves itself. I’ll attach a video further in this post to make it clear what I’m talking about. Kinda hard to explain.

in the meantime, could you also throw in a dxdiag report, try to download the standalone game, see if that works and check your reliability history

I tried with the standalone game and had the same issue. Reliability history is pretty clear on the hours from my last non-freeze game launch up until this problem, just one Windows Defender update KB2267602. I’ve tried disabling windows defender realtime protection entirely and still get the same problem so that seems an unlikely source. Here is the dxdiag report:
DxDiag.txt (107.0 KB)

The last (and unfortunately only) restore point was from the day I bought the game I believe, so definitely well before the issue presented itself.

And to Vapourfire:

First immediate point - there is a problem with one of your filter files

Honestly I think this may be a different bug entirely. The filter file referenced in my first log had been both deleted from the filter folder and the ingame settings had “no filter” selected for maybe a day before this issue appeared. Upon installing new filters today, this line in the log seems to have gone away entirely:
Player.log (27.4 KB)

Seems like this might tie into problems that others have, but doesn’t seem to impact mine.

The most common cause is performance related

I’ve never had stuttering or even significant frame drops with my 1060 as of yet (act 7, I bet things get more hectic though lol). I’m going to post a link to a video to show exactly what is happening.

https://youtu.be/oI80oNOvkT8

Memory is still being allocated during the freeze (albeit very slowly) and I have no experience in game dev so not sure what that could mean. Before I pull the resource manager into view most (5-6gb) of memory is already allocated and the majority of the rest is once I actually get the loading screen and load the world. Also something to note is that I’ve tried disabling every background process I can to see if the results are the same and they are. Even without NVidia replay and the steam overlay in the standalone, it doesn’t seem to change anything.

I did a CLEAN reinstall of GPU drivers to make sure there were no custom overrides causing any trouble, all my case/component temps are fine, and seeing as I tried a restore point from before the problems occurred I’m pretty stumped. It’s definitely not a game breaker but is definitely odd. I’m sure a clean OS would solve it but as Vapourfire said, it’s not exactly a satisfying solution.

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Hey there…

Filter files… that is very odd and could have pointed to some install corruption problem - especially if the game was still referencing a file you had already removed. Note: it doesnt matter if the in-game setting is set to no-filter, the game still parses filter files that exist in the folder when it builds the filter list…

Performance issue - I think you misinterpret the issue - the game is generally unoptimised and has bugs related to performance - these issues present in different ways - i.e. you can have 60fps and still experience game freezes. The one doesnt preclude the possibility of the other happening… There are also very specific issues that also tend to appear more often with different settings - e.g. even people with system well capable of max settings can get a particular issue if they use Ultra quality… Certain settings are more likely to cause issues than others and in most cases, being conservative with settings - while possibly not removing the cause - tend to lessen the recurrance of the known issues for most people.

E.g. my own setup (10603gb, i5-7500, 16gb ram)… I can replicate your exact experience - I had it when I first started playing LE almost 2 years ago… I would get the exact same random freezes, I could even make them happen by alt-tabbing at specific loading points… I could almost guess the duration of the freeze based on settings and I had exactly the same result by just waiting for the game to recover… I toned down my settings & now I virtually never have the issues again. Not saying that his is the ultimate cause of your issues, but its important that you understand the performance side as a possible contributor to the problem…

Your video is pretty much exactly the kind of thing I experienced… In fact, its almost identical to the issue that sometimes happens if you alt tab while waiting for a character or map to load.

I see that your screen flashed a green block on the right and then showed the Steam overlay message - please can you make sure that you are not using any overlay apps (Nvidia geforce experience Or Steam Overlays) while playing le… These are known to cause issues.

Memory use is very dependant on in-game settings - e.g. higher settings & special features & resolution will all affect the memory that the game uses - even the specific map loaded… Your figures are not something I would worry about - they seem normal to me - especially if, over time, the usage is relatively stable.

One thing from your dxdiag:

You are using VoiceMeeter - there are PLENTY of issues with people using Voicemeeter virtual audio setups … obviously these affect sound problems more but there have been a few instances where people have experienced instability that has seemed to be related to this or its interaction while playing LE… updating this software as well as disabling it has made a difference for some people. Not sure if its related to your issues, but its worth mentioning because of past problems that others have had.

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Yes the filter issue was odd, I haven’t seen it since. IIRC I imported that filter from pastebin instead of actually placing a downloaded file in the filter folder. I don’t have that missing filter issue now that there are downloaded filters in the folder, so possibly related to using that import (paste from clipboard) method?

Performance - gotcha. I’ve had around the same enter game freeze time with both VeryLow and High settings, and have never had a gameplay-related freeze when playing. Strange that lowering graphics settings does nothing for me. Then again, I’ve played on High since I bought the game and this issue seemingly came out of nowhere a few days ago.

The video - yes, overlays can and have commonly caused issues. I recorded that video before trying to disable ALL background apps including NVidia replay (the green popup) and running the standalone which has no overlay. The freeze lasts about the same time whether I have anything running in the background or not, including Voicemeeter and anything else in the system tray. Furthermore, I didn’t change any configuration with any of these programs to my knowledge that would have caused this to happen: they’ve all been there even before the freeze.

Maybe this is just for the notebook by this point, as it doesn’t prevent me from playing really. Like you saw in the video, after waiting out the first freeze there are NO future ones when loading new characters. It does indeed sound like you have had the same issue that was performance-related, so I think I’ll try again to disable as much as I possibly can and run the game to see if there is a change in the freeze duration. Just a strange problem.

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Very possible… it may have been something simple like missing a char in the xml from a copy paste or something more complicated like a malformed xml - there is no way to tell if the xml was created externally to the game… If its gone, then I’d consider it ok for now… especially if you redid the filters in game where there is less chance of a corruption (still possible, but less likely).

Strange problem… yes… If you are willing to try and troubleshoot to see if anything makes a difference, then that will help when the devs try and isolate this… The key unforutnately is to do this on a very granular level - the way the game currently works is that there are things enabled ( some that we dont know about) with each setting so its hard to tell exactly what the cause is without being very pedantic in testing… for example, based on peoples problems, I am willing to bet that there is some flags that are enabled between quality settings that dont visually do much, but affect stability… especially between Low/Medium Medium/High Very High/Ultra… There are also definite issues with special features like AA and even less obvious ones like grass density…

Caveat to all of this: The next patch 0.9 is likely to contain so much behind the scenes updates that it may make debugging this a moot point right now… Beyond unifying the single & multiplayer versions into one (massive back end changes), the devs have promised performance improvements across the board… So who knows if whatever they change will totally negate any efforts to fix problems people are having right now… may even change them entirely or make the problems worse… I have no idea…

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