HUD disappeared and menus wouldn't open after Alt-Tab

[Hungry4Blood]

This was a one-time bug, I alt-tab frequently and have only experienced this once.

Unfortunately, this happened Monday, so I don’t have access to the log files. I meant to report it immediately but got distracted by grinding echoes. Hopefully, my account of what happened can still be of some use.

DxDiag.zip (18.1 KB)

My graphical settings are set to Ultra, 1920 x 1080 resolution, uncapped FPS (typically runs 85 - 100). Not sure if it’s relevant but I have the background FPS capped at 60.

I was running four other programs: Chrome, Firefox, OBS, and VLC. Five if you include my anti-virus (Kaspersky). This is not abnormal for me while playing, and my hardware was not running near capacity.

I used alt-tab to pause music in Chrome and when I returned to the game my entire HUD was gone. I was unable to open any menus (options, character, inventory, etc.), but still able to cast spells and move around as per usual. I was unable to see or pick up any items, but I could hear gold collecting as I moved around.

I decided to keep playing because I didn’t want to lose progress in my timeline, and I was able to complete the echo. That said, some pretty strange things happened while doing so.

Both my health bar and enemy health bars were stuck at full. No damage numbers displayed but enemies still died at the same pace I would usually expect. Health bars persisted over corpses.

This was more entertaining than anything but, combined with no map, it made the rest of the echo quite confusing. To be honest, it was a lot of fun as a novel gameplay experience, trying to remember where I’d been while trying not to waste mana fighting corpses. I was able to track down the boss and my teleport still worked, and the echo registered as complete.

Upon arriving at 'Echo of a World" I decided to check Task Manager before resorting to Alt-F4. Upon pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, the game flickered black and then the UI was back! Things were still not normal. The gold collection sound started playing on a loop and my character was surrounded with ~10 unchanging gold-pickup notifications, which followed him as I moved around. There were black patches on the ground, clustered around the rewards chest, I assume they were item labels.

The Menus worked so I was able to click ‘exit to desktop’ at which point the game froze (not responding) and I used task manager to close it. Upon re-loading, everything worked great again. Strangely, I had ~200k more gold than I did before the echo, which is nearly 10x what I would typically expect to earn.

Anyway, I deeply regret not having access to the game logs, sorry about that. I will be sure to report it immediately if anything similar happens again. Please let me know if more info would be helpful, I can’t think of anything else that happened but questions may jog my memory.

[Turinqui]

In case something similar happens in future, hide UI is bound to the delete key by default.

Still sounds like this is a bug, but you may be able to prevent having to complete monos with no UI by hitting del (although I do quite like your description of the extra hard mode )

[Hungry4Blood]

That is a handy tip, thank you.

I just tried playing a bit with the UI hidden and, interestingly enough, it did create some buggy behavior with enemy health bars - they’re staying full while the enemy is taking damage. That said, they don’t persist on corpses, and my health bar still registers damage. The damage from hits is also displaying as it normally would.

Another thing is happening which echoes my previous experience but in a lesser form. When I turn the UI back on after playing for a bit, a bunch of gold notifications pop-up all at once. They don’t persist or trigger the gold sound effect like I was previously experiencing, but it’s oddly reminiscent.

Another similarity is that I can’t see the menus I open, but I at least hear them opening, as opposed to the other time when nothing at all happened.

Totally unconnected thing is behaving a bit strangely, if I cast spells with the UI off, my mana displays as empty when I turn the UI back on… but only if it’s full! It displays properly if I’m still regenerating mana when I turn the UI on, and casting a spell while it appears empty also returns it to normal.

I’m having way too much fun with this.