Random crashes

[Hackaloken]

Hi there,

I’m very sorry about the issues you’re facing and I apologize for the non-existent response from us. It’s been a very busy time internally, but I know that’s not an excuse.

I also very much appreciate the lengths you’ve gone to for providing information and trying to resolve this issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a firm answer or suggestion to give you, which I’m sure is disappointing. I’ve looked at your crash reports and while I see the error it’s reporting, I can’t see the reason why it’s occurring. I’ll pass on the files to a developer as well to confirm, but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of actionable information.

It looks like you’ve tried everything from what we normally recommend in this case, except for perhaps one thing: have you tried playing the game on the lowest graphics settings you can? (i.e. Master Quality turned down, as well as everything else).

Obviously that’s not a way we can expect you to play the game, but it would be helpful in determining if the problem is potentially caused by a specific graphical feature. For example, I’ve seen some reports of turning off anti-aliasing helping stability, but I haven’t confirmed that and it certainly seems like it could just be placebo. But, it should be easy to try.

We do have a potential fix for crashing issues we’ve seen on Nvidia graphics cards coming in our next patch, Beta 0.8, but it doesn’t seem to match the errors you’re reporting. Regardless, I would definitely appreciate you trying out that update when it is available.

I don’t imagine you kept the RX 5700XT, but we did find and resolve the most prominent crashing issue that was affecting AMD graphics cards back in June. I don’t think that helps you now, I’d just like to provide you with some evidence that we don’t completely ignore crashing issues. We certainly do need to improve though.

I think that’s about all I can offer at the moment, but I’ll pass this along. Again, my apologies for the situation.

[greenpowa]

Hi man,

first of all: thank you for responding. Even if it comes kind of late (I know you are working in a small team), i feel heard now. I know it sounds kind of childish, but sometimes you just want to be heard. Even a “sorry, super busy here, no time to help, will come back to it” is waaaaaay better than nothing in the end

I know that there won’t be a simple solution to MY problem, and I don’t want the whole wide world to care about my crashes, but thanks for checking this out and forwarding it.

No, I gave back the 5700XT (this whole driver thing was a mess; I couldn’t use my PC anymore, it was not related to LE ) and turned to team green with an RTX2070.

I just followed your suggestion and turned everything graphic related to very low / off (yes, AA too), but I just crashed again about 10 minutes into the game.

So thanks again for answering this post.
This is what customer care is all about: giving them the feel that they matter and that you understood their problem. The solution is not that important at all (I mean yes… but… you know what I’m trying to say). And yes, I also understand that you guys are a small team with high ambitions creating an awesome game. With only a small percentage of people having issues you can’t focus on them. But - as you just did - a simple reply works wonders

So I guess I’ll wait for the 0.8 update and keep this post up to date.

Thank you!

(EDITS: grammar and stuff… not a native english speaker)

[greenpowa]

Update on 0.8.0:
Still the same. Game crashes, no matter what I do. Crashed twice during gameplay and I also tried just standing arround in a hub => crash after a few minutes. Without any inputs at all.
So like before: completely out of ideas.

[greenpowa]

-Push-
Problem still without solution. Not just me, according to all the crashes threads in this sub.

[greenpowa]

-Push-

Don’t want this post to be entering the void so I have to start all over in 1-2 years, when there will be some focus on all those crashes. Guys, as posted above: Why don’t you simply reply something on all those threads? There are so many right now…

[vapourfire]

Hey… Chipping in on your old post…

Not sure if it would help in any way, but the thought crossed my mind while reading your posts… Do other high graphics Unity based games run ok on your system?

I have no idea regarding the Unity platforms implementation or if this is a stupid suggestion but perhaps knowing if other Unity games cause similar or no problems on your system may help steer the Devs in finding what is causing the problem?

Just a suggestion?

ps. Obviously LE uses more than just plain Unity but hey…

Unity games 2020 (Wikipedia)

[greenpowa]

Thanks for your suggestion here. But I think LE is my only “graphics heavy” Unity game.
Some of my other unity games: Temtem, Among Us, Rimworld, Pillars of Eternity 2, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Risk of Rain 2, Hellpoint, …
They are not really graphics intense. And none of them ever crashed. That in addition that I’m by far not the only one with crashes (which became more and more frequent with every additional update) simply let’s me jump on the conclusion: it’s about LE.

Do you know of any cheap game / demo of a more graphics heavy unity game? So I could try this, too - just to be sure.

Thanks man!

[vapourfire]

Just a thought then…

The issue is without a doubt LE and as you say there are plenty of people having crashes so there is something causing it… the trick is to try and find the common denominator… which… without being a dev is pretty hard and for the LE devs its pretty hard too because the people having the issues have very different setups that are impossible to replicate each time.

Personally I have (thankfully) never experienced a LE crash so thats why I tend to chip in on posts like this to try and help… Sometimes its a challenge and most times there is little that can be done, but once in a while a penny will drop and we get lucky…

As to a “tester” game/app… honestly I dont know of one… I do wish Unity would release something like Book of the Dead as a runtime for exactly these times but you have to have a dev environment setup to use it… That would definitely help in times like this… Almost like a 3dMark for unity…

BTW… I rooted around on the net and found some references to potential issues of unity with Citrix apps and another with virtual desktop type apps… this was a year ago so its unlike to still be a factor but quite a few people on Steam were saying the remote working apps caused problems with other unity games… Made me also think that maybe something else you have running that could be doing the same… The trick is that you are able to launch the game… so its could be something that runs periodically in background and when it does, it borks Unity/LE. This kind of thing happens to me but it doesnt crash, it drops FPS down to single digits for a few seconds if I forget to disable it before playing…

LE has optimisation issues and maybe these are affecting or being affected by other things on your system specifically.

Maybe there is even something silly like different versions of Unity files from various games messing each other up - although thats a flyer of a guess as I have zero idea on how Unity works on the backend.

And thats not even considering drivers of graphics cards, m.2 drives and other things…

Always really hard to figure out crashes … and I feel for your pain…

[greenpowa]

Thanks a lot for your time and effort in helping finding a solution.
The thing here is (as you stated) that we don’t even understand the problem.

I googled a lot. A. LOT.
And yes, I also found all these posts about Citrix. But I don’t got anything like this installed on my PC. (I also had an issue with Unreal Tournament and TeamViewer, which was super weird, but people figured it out eventually).
But just to be sure I wiped my drives clean a few months ago (I posted in this thread about this) and just installed my GPU driver alongside with LE. It was exactly the same thing. Random crashes.
Of course, it has to be something also specific to my system that transforms fps-stutters others are experiening inzo crashes for my system. But in the end it’s still coming from LE.
Maybe - just maybe - I’ll get another graphics card during summer. Let’s see if that solves the issue.

The basic thing is - as already written a few posts above - that EHG’s focus is not on the few percent of people crashing. They are developing the game and content. And I understand that. I just feel unheard as someone who backed this on KS almost 3 years ago. And I was really looking forward playing this game - it IS a great game with good design in the end. I just can’t play it

EDIT: Typos and grammar. English is not my first language :X

[vapourfire]

Sounds like you have tried most things then…

Honestly have nothing more to offer… and all I can hope is that this instability will be fixed - either on purpose or when they fix another issue and you are lucky… Lets face it, LE is a long way from technical completion (performance & stability) and out of all the small dev houses with similar games in EA that I have experience with, they are one of the few that are actively making regular progress… sure we all wish it was faster, but hey, I believe they will get there…

you may just be one of the unlucky ones that has to wait longer to enjoy the game…

good luck…

… ps… Might be a silly thing to try, but have you disabled Steam Overlay to see if it helps?

[greenpowa]

@vapourfire

… ps… Might be a silly thing to try, but have you disabled Steam Overlay to see if it helps?

Yes, I tried. The crashes are weird and random. Sometimes it crashes after just standing AFK in an area (any quest hub or in the end of time) for several minutes, without any inputs at all. Sometimes the crashes become way more frequent in certain areas (I listed them in on of my earlier comments).
But thanks for your help. I appreciate it

[greenpowa]

Update on 0.8.1:
Found some time (and the mindset) today to try it again. Crash in the monolith after ~5 minutes. Well… Don’t know what I expected.

[greenpowa]

Update:
Ok, I did not give up entirely on this. The thing is: In 50+hrs of Among Us (also built in Unity) I had one crash similiar to the ones I am experiencing here. So I startet further investigations…

I found a 3 year old reddit post about a guy with a RTX2070 (the same I have) also crashin out of unity games. So here we go. GPUs are super cheap and easy to get right now /s, so I bough a RTX3060. For way too much money.
Conclusion: I could play for a few more minutes before the first crash appeared. Yay! Progress!

OK, so thats not the solution. (I can, and will send the 3060 back to the vendor… way too much money spent here).
But I still got an AMD CPU in my system. Maybe thats worth investigating. Googling “AMD system unity crash” is like opening pandoras box. The unity creator forums are full of these exact same crashes some of us are having here. Which means: It has to be about unity - or something not optimally coded in unity - and AMD systems?

So, what can I do now? Can I finally have an answer from a dev about this issue? Did you investigate? I mean, the technical support forum is full of people crashing randomly.

Your turn.

[vapourfire]

Hey…

Buying a 3060 - now thats commitment to testing… Sorry you have to send it back… I found some at my local supplier but havent had the guts to pull the trigger on the purchase yet…

From my involvement on the forum and reading most of the techical postings about problems I have also noticed a similar trend with regards your AMD observation… and YES, i have also seen the abnormal skew of Unity based games & AMD problems when doing a search… I have not mentioned it specifically as there doesnt seem to be more than anecdotal proof yet… There is something but I, without access to the devs, cannot say for sure… It does seem like older AMD systems are having issues but I cannot say definitively WHY… especially when there are people playing perfectly well with Ryzen & Threadripper systems…

The crashing seems to range from everything from older systems just struggling, old drivers, overclocking causing instability on hardware when pushed by LEs unoptimised code and other issues…

I personally think that a lot of this is related to the state of performance & optimisation - things like GPUs maxing out to 100% when not manually frame limiting mean (to me at least) that there are problems that can exaccerbate even the tiniest bug or issue…

[MVPiz]

I’m not sure if you’re also experiencing freezes, but that’s what is actually plaguing me since i installed the game a week ago. I’m on a i7 6700K and GTX 1070 and either screen freezes every few mins or once in few hours. Screen simply freezes but i can still hear when i pop potions or use skills while screen is frozen. Genuinely disappointed since game is actually showing huge potential in this genre, but i can’t really enjoy it at its current stage. I have over 9k hours in POE and, believe it or not, i’ve never had such stability issues ever in 7 years there, even though POE has never being known to have great performances or stability…

[vapourfire]

Hey… Welcome to the forum…

You really should post in a new thread this one is showing its necro already …

But yes, some people are experiencing freezes where the entire game would stop and then be fine a second or two later… I have definitely experienced this since the last patch (C not the recent D one) but I also realised that it seemed to be related to whatever else I was doing on my system at the time - I cannot make it happen on demand which doesnt help… All it says to me is that pushing LE in its current state is likely to cause problems. With my old 1060 based system, I dont run anything more than 1080p on low or very low settings… If I dont do this, things break…

LE is in EA and it has plenty of performance issues that improve with each patch so I try not to compare it to anything launched and especially not games that have had years to resolve their issues.

[greenpowa]

Nothing necro here - post is alive and kicking… at least I’m keeping it this way until my issues are resolved.
The “micro-freezes” MVPiz is experiencing: I had them too in the beginning (not exactly since the first alpha build, but they came with one update) - and they turned into crashes one day.

Don’t get me wrong here, but with a growing player base you have to focus on both: content AND bugfixing. Most recent example: Valheim. They had to switch their focus from content to bugfixing.
I know that they got their roadmap - and even with 0 knowledge about this topic I am pretty sure that implementing the whole multiplayer/server thing is far from an easy task. But without even properly responding to people with crashes you’ll lose potential players right now. But ok, I also don’t know their refund-numbers on steam or something…

It’s not like I am completely dumb and did not try to help them helping me in any way. But the way they are “helping” people who are just trying to enjoy what they are creating feels utterly wrong to me.

[MVPiz]

@greenpowa

But without even properly responding to people with crashes you’ll lose potential players right now.

pretty much, i literally have no will to keep playing such an unstable game until things will improve. I guess i’ll come back in few months to see if things will be better…

[greenpowa]

I think I finally found the issue…
After resetting my PC I started a lot of my downloads remotely from my work PC via TeamViewer, thanks to an aweful download speed (German Telekom </3). I did not start TV during my tries - but the TeamViewer service keeps running in the background. And if you stop it, it restarts itself after a few minutes. In addition I’m using TV for work anyway.

Long story short → UNINSTALLED TeamViewer, no more UnityPlayer.dll violation access crashes so far (played roughly 3+ hrs; but thats the longest time since the alpha).

I read a lot about citrix causing problems with unity. Not a word about TeamViewer. But here we go.

Still dissapointed about the non existing support though.