When did these new performance issues start?

[Rat Catcher]

since Power Play 2.0 it has run once every 5 minutes after initial login. I did some testing

I think I got used to the regular, but momentary, stutters a while back.
The 'new' one just after the hour, has been somewhat annoying though - but only noticed recently by me.
I know it isn't my hardware, it wasn't there before, so something is happening in the background to do it.

Not complaining though - I've just finished Fallout New Vegas, which, even with patching, crashes out completely at random... Adds a little tolerence to other game's issues!

 

[galahad2069]

You are assuming that the symptom has the same cause this time around.

This has been said a lot, I doubt it is universally true as per my first comment.

I'm pretty sure there is a specific part of the code which is responsible for rendering shadows. If it's bugged, shadows are not going to work as intended. Once you've fixed it, it will work and it's not going to break itself once again for no reason unless you've overwritten something in the code that you shouldn't have.

1. Odyssey shadows were bugged pretty much from the get go.
2. They fixed shadow flickering in an update in which they actually tried to fix it, as per the patch notes iirc.
3. They broke it again later in an update that had apparently nothing to do with shadows (there was no "we were fiddling with shadows again because reasons" line in the patch notes as far as I can remember).

No but it is the easiest conclusion.

Come on, you cannot be serious.
They very obviously keep leaving bugs unfixed for literal years. Even minor, very easy to fix ones. How many hotfix patches did they release after the PP2 update? How many of the actual bugs were fixed? They just disabled rares and escape pods and that was it. Okay, they had to focus on Trailblazers, fair enough. But did Trailblazers fix any of the bugs remaining in PP2? I cannot even name one. Even such insignificant and easy to fix bugs as the incorrect decals shown in the 'Loyalty' page of the PP2 UI are still there. It's not rocket science to display 100 images in the correct order. They just did not fix it because they did not bother to try.

 

[aRJay]

You say didn't bother to try I say didn't have time to fix.

We both agree it shouldn't be happening but I prefer to think better of them than didn't bother implies.

 

[galahad2069]

You say didn't bother to try I say didn't have time to fix.

We both agree it shouldn't be happening but I prefer to think better of them than didn't bother implies.

Oh, I did not mean they were/are lazy. I'm sure they had tons of work to do. But most of that work must have gone into different projects, not this game, by the looks of it.

 

[Dougie]

...
Because making snide passive aggressive comments is a real good look isn't it? If you don't think a thread should be closed then report the closing post, it's quite simple. Saying nothing, stewing about how you feel that a "major thread" (3 pages...) is closed, does nothing to help anyone.

Well, I was given to understand that is was verboten to criticise moderation actions - hence my "but we can't criticise can we" remark. For the same reason I didn't think of reporting a moderator’s post. But I'm rather new here so maybe I got the wrong impression.

BTW - when I called it a "major" thread, I was referring to the impact of the issue, not the length of the thread. My view being (as shown by other commanders in the PC thread) that not everyone looks at the PC sub-forum and so an issue that was causing people to distrust their equipment was not more readily noticeable to them. To be honest, I would have thought that a more satisfactory action might have been to move the thread from the PC sub-forum to the DD forum due to the aparrent prevalence of the issue.

 

[Scoob]

@Ozric - Ok, no worries.

So the stutter is linked to some event tied to Powerplay 2.0 that runs every five minutes? Ok, so it's a server-side thing then that momentarily causes some in-game stutter. Perhaps I lost track of time while shooting Pirates, but the stuttering didn't appear to be quite that frequent for me. Oooh, I can use the timer function on the X52 to test this lol. I just knew that feature would be of use one day...

I actually had to check when PP2.0 was introduced, October 2024. I last played with any degree of frequency back when the Titans still needed a good kicking. I never really cared for power-play - except doing the bare minimum to get a certain module - and not joined a power since back then. With it being so long since then, have FDev commented much on the issue? I mean, FPS drops like that during combat are pretty intrusive. Had it occur a couple of times earlier - didn't play for long - and it's a case of just let go of the controls and wait for it to recover. Tanky ship lets me do that, "fun" but rubbish ship not so much, as I mentioned previously.

Hopefully the current beta will include fixes that aren't just part of the new colonisation content. I'm encouraged that they are supporting the game more of late with content, even if it doesn't necessarily appeal to me.

 

[Ozric]

Well, I was given to understand that is was verboten to criticise moderation actions - hence my "but we can't criticise can we" remark. For the same reason I didn't think of reporting a moderator’s post. But I'm rather new here so maybe I got the wrong impression.

BTW - when I called it a "major" thread, I was referring to the impact of the issue, not the length of the thread. My view being (as shown by other commanders in the PC thread) that not everyone looks at the PC sub-forum and so an issue that was causing people to distrust their equipment was not more readily noticeable to them. To be honest, I would have thought that a more satisfactory action might have been to move the thread from the PC sub-forum to the DD forum due to the aparrent prevalence of the issue.

Well discussing moderator actions is against forum rules because otherwise you just get people complaining about warnings they've gotten, but you're always free to query actions by reporting a post as all reports against moderators are handled by the CM team.

The OP of the other thread chose to create it in the PC forum because they thought it was the best place and it's lived there quite happily for months getting regular interaction. No one has reported it and asked for it to be moved, and we don't just move threads around unless it is very clearly in the wrong place. I could see it belonging in either personally.

 

[gbjbaanb]

I get the impression that sometimes they introduce a bug and it probably turns out to be so obscure and complicated that they take a long time to find and fix it. And sometimes, apparently, they don't find it at all.

We are still suffering from the effects of the shadows bug that was introduced in update 18. The situation has been improved slightly, but it has never been restored to the flawless pre-update-18 shadows. That one is a damn shame.

From experience, what happens is that bugs are impossible to reproduce on a dev machine, as they run a small subset of the environment. Its only when faced with real-world datasets that the little niggle becomes an issue. I'm surprised it isn't addressed more by the devs as it is a truly big problem.

 

[alquemir]

From experience, what happens is that bugs are impossible to reproduce on a dev machine, as they run a small subset of the environment. Its only when faced with real-world datasets that the little niggle becomes an issue. I'm surprised it isn't addressed more by the devs as it is a truly big problem.

Yeah that is why you usually have an active QA team responsible for catching regression bugs before signing off a release. At least that's how it worked in places where I worked.

 

[galahad2069]

Anyway, just thought I'd ask when these huge FPS drops started.

The game used to have (somewhat) similar issues a couple of times during its lifetime (I remember a particularly bad kind of freezing issue that started around the end of December 2018 and only got fixed about a month or two later in early 2019), but I noticed the first signs of this "modern" kind of stuttering/freezing hiccups in July 2024. It was nowhere near as annoying at the time as it is today, but I even made a video of it with unlocked fps (in order to make it more easily visible):

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXG-Q9NMPZ8


The main difference was that these freezes were shorter and more random (they were not happening regularly every 5 minutes or so), but they gradually became worse and worse since the end of the last summer, reaching very annoying level after the PP2 update (and especially after the Trailblazers update).

 

[Neilski]

If you don't think a thread should be closed then report the closing post, it's quite simple.

Oh, good to know - it had never occurred to me to ask for a closure to be reconsidered.

I get the impression that sometimes they introduce a bug and it probably turns out to be so obscure and complicated that they take a long time to find and fix it. And sometimes, apparently, they don't find it at all.

They just did not fix it because they did not bother to try.

To both of these, I'd say: my belief is that most times they do find the bug and do try to fix it, but sometimes they come to realise they can't do it with the available resources.
The latter might mean FD are penny-pinching to an unreasonable degree (not a crazy suggestion) or - more likely, in my view - simply that the code base has such massive technical debt (think spaghetti) that the effort required to fix it properly becomes enormous. And of course, when fixing something "properly" costs a lot, and you choose to fix it "not properly" to save time & money, bingo: you just raised the bar for the next fix.

 

[photomankc]

The now dusty thread that was last posted in today, and has over 13 pages of responses? The thread that the OP could have easily found if they bothered to search?

Why do you think we close duplicate threads, for the hell of it, or to keep information in one place?

Scoob has, as usual, slammed multiple questions/issues into a thread that makes this more of a Grey area. But I'd be more than happy to close it to keep discussions in one place.

The dusty thread in the PC subforum that very few people visit. Pages of responses by people who are already in the thread doesn't mean that it is very visible overall. Surprisingly I do understand the need to prevent every thread in a forum from being duplicated 20 times, however there is also the balance point that say as a new or infrequent user when I drop into a 3D printer forum and see 7 threads on bed warping issues I quickly come to understand that bed warping might be a concern and might explain some problems I'm having with my printer so they actually do serve a purpose as well.

 

[photomankc]

Oh, good to know - it had never occurred to me to ask for a closure to be reconsidered.


To both of these, I'd say: my belief is that most times they do find the bug and do try to fix it, but sometimes they come to realise they can't do it with the available resources.
The latter might mean FD are penny-pinching to an unreasonable degree (not a crazy suggestion) or - more likely, in my view - simply that the code base has such massive technical debt (think spaghetti) that the effort required to fix it properly becomes enormous. And of course, when fixing something "properly" costs a lot, and you choose to fix it "not properly" to save time & money, bingo: you just raised the bar for the next fix.

Its the repeated re-introduction of bugs that gets really frustrating. Requiring a whole new cycle with that horribly broken thing called the issue tracker.

 

[Morbad]

To both of these, I'd say: my belief is that most times they do find the bug and do try to fix it, but sometimes they come to realise they can't do it with the available resources.
The latter might mean FD are penny-pinching to an unreasonable degree (not a crazy suggestion) or - more likely, in my view - simply that the code base has such massive technical debt (think spaghetti) that the effort required to fix it properly becomes enormous. And of course, when fixing something "properly" costs a lot, and you choose to fix it "not properly" to save time & money, bingo: you just raised the bar for the next fix.

I get the impression that development has always suffered from terrible version control and that the bulk of developers currently working on the game aren't those who originally wrote it. The game is built on a niche engine, integrates defunct middlewear (I specifically recall commentary about how transitioning away from Scaleform has been a chore), and may well be a black box to those responsible for maintaining it. The whole situation sounds like kludges on top of kludges by a team with poor internal communications.

Its the repeated re-introduction of bugs that gets really frustrating. Requiring a whole new cycle with that horribly broken thing called the issue tracker.

That's a clear sign of version control issues, as are things like the Odyssey Alpha not being the branch of the game that became release Odyssey.

I'd guess they've done studies and audits that tell them their bottom line is better served by what they're doing than the expense involved in addressing systemic issues with the game's development.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I get the impression that development has always suffered from terrible version control and that the bulk of developers currently working on the game aren't those who originally wrote it. The game is built on a niche engine, integrates defunct middlewear (I specifically recall commentary about how transitioning away from Scaleform has been a chore), and may well be a black box to those responsible for maintaining it. The whole situation sounds like kludges on top of kludges by a team with poor internal communications.

I thought that was precisely the reason we had the beyond season which had very little new content planned (and half of what was planned got cut) so that they could rewrite and improve the code to make it a more stable platform to build on.

or are you suggesting that that was just blowing smoke up our exhausts?

 

[Morbad]

I thought that was precisely the reason we had the beyond season which had very little new content planned (and half of what was planned got cut) so that they could rewrite and improve the code to make it a more stable platform to build on.

or are you suggesting that that was just blowing smoke up our exhausts?

I don't doubt their intentions, but it's pretty clear that the game was still a complete mess throughout the Beyond 'season'. I filed more bug reports from 3.0 through 3.6, and especially around 3.4/3.5 than at any point before or since and some of the most glaring problems still exist.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

I don't doubt their intentions, but it's pretty clear that the game was still a complete mess throughout the Beyond 'season'. I filed more bug reports from 3.0 through 3.6, and especially around 3.4/3.5 than at any point before or since and some of the most glaring problems still exist.

Wasn't it the 3.3 update which introduced changes to mining and exploration? That one made the game buggy to the point of being unplayable for about a month. At one point the game would freeze you out on a black screen, which couldn't be fixed by relogging and support had to move you to another system with the instruction not to go back to the system where it happened.

Beyond was certainly not a time that I look back on and think the game was running in a smooth and stable state.

 

[S0rkvild]

i'm getting these since deployment of post colonization patch

 

[Starshot_Jigawatts]

Well discussing moderator actions is against forum rules because otherwise you just get people complaining about warnings they've gotten, but you're always free to query actions by reporting a post as all reports against moderators are handled by the CM team.

Is there a way to discuss warnings in a private setting though? I recently got a warning, it made no sense to me, and I apparently have no avenue to appeal it or even ask someone for clarity on what I did wrong. It says I'm not allowed to PM moderators. Maybe if we had SOME due-process to ask questions people wouldn't use this forum to voice them publicly? It's just a thought.

 

[Rat Catcher]

That's a clear sign of version control issues, as are things like the Odyssey Alpha not being the branch of the game that became release Odyssey.

That was a very odd one, the Alpha version was obviously different than the release version of Odyssey, particularly in performance, with the release being the lesser...