Intermittent crashing during area transition


ajb1978

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I'm assuming this is a known issue, but I'm looking for clarification on a nuance.  Occasionally when going through an area transition, the game will crash.  The next time I load the game, I would expect to be taken back to my last save. But instead for some reason, it's like the last 3 or 4 saves are undone, and I lose several days of progress.  Today, I just lost about 3 real hours worth of fishing, hunting, and breaking down items due to a transition crash.

Why does it take me back that far?  Like I said, I would expect to be taken back to my most recent save, not 3 days, 2 wolves, a deer, and 120kg of fish ago.

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  • 5 weeks later...

One possibility is that the save game function failed several saves ago (I assume survival mode). You still see the hatchet indicating saving game but that does not happen. Why? I don't know. I have had several instances where game progress was not saved and in one case it was an hour, two hours, I forget, but I lost several game days of progress. Now I have the folder where the save game files are and check them when I am about to log off. The user001 file, so far,  has always saved but if the save game day/time stamp is more than one minute different than that of user001, I am pretty sure I am about to lose some game progress and the game is about to crash if I try to force a save.  I have been sending the crash files and the unity crash files to Support but I don't expect them to fix the problem anytime soon. This propensity to crash can be rather frustrating.

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Yes, as time has gone on I've gotten better and better at predicting when this is going to occur.  Now I periodically check my save folder (I leave it up on my 2nd monitor), and the moment my sandbox save and user001 files get out of sync, I restart the game.  In regions where you can survive weeks without an area transition, something like this could be devastating if you don't nip it in the bud right away with a restart.

From reading the log file myself, it appears to be some kind of out-of-memory issue.  Likely because the survivor save files tend to get much larger than story saves.  My current survival game save is almost 13mb, compared to a 3mb file right at the end of Wintermute Episode 2.

Edited by ajb1978
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I attributed my crashes usually to my habit, when doing a cook fest, to running in and out of the Camp Office to drop cooked meat outside and pick up something else to cook on one of the stoves. I started to keep an eye on the wolf icon during transition and if it got irregular I would go "okay time to log off and do something to clear memory". 

Lately, I have been getting crashes somewhat unexpectedly. I had three crashes over July 4th and seem to average 1 per day (I play almost every day) always (it seems) when I exit a building. Just checked the last two error files and the problem modules were unityplayer.dll and mono.dll. Before I could see a problem with allocating memory, now I see access violations which seem to be writes to certain memory locations. I don't have any idea what changed. Oh well...

My save games (I have three Pilgrim ones) are almost 17 MB each. I wonder how much of that is related to my writing in the journal almost every game day and sometimes a page or a page and a half or so.

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2 hours ago, Admin said:

This shouldn't be happening for you. We'd suggest logging a ticket with our Support Team at thelongdark.com/support and they can investigate what's going on. 

I did on July 7, actually.  Another strange quirk is that after the game crashes, I have to reboot my computer before I can play it again.  If I attempt to load right away without rebooting, it either hangs prior to the disclaimer screen, or loads up and has super stuttering audio that is out of sync with everything that's going on.  However if I manually exit out of the game, I can start it right back up no problem.

The audio shenanigans could possibly be a problem with my rig though.  Integrated audio, and I had to reset my BIOS the other day when it started hanging on the splash screen.  Rebooting isn't a super huge deal anyway though, thanks to the magic of an SSD.  It's exactly enough time to refill my water bottle.

 

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My crashes recently have always been back to desktop. I have to restart TLD then resume the save game. Since I now email the crash.dmp, error.log, output_log.txt, and (now) the Unity crash files, to support@hinterland etc. , generally before restarting the game, I figure that ensures that the old crashed application (Unity) has been cleared from memory. Restarting TLD should be enough to get a fresh setup of Unity in memory without whatever memory structures that crashed but I keep on bombarding Hinterland with my crash files anyway. :) 

I don't reboot my computer when TLD crashes. I might give that a try if the crashes to desktop become more obnoxious.

I also see an audio problem, aside from the times when a raging blizzard is absolutely silent, where when I break branches, and I break a lot of them, I will come across instances where the progress circle has completed its rotation but the sound of a breaking branch continues for a few more seconds. I wonder if this might also be a transient issue due to memory management. It is mostly annoying for now. 

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15 hours ago, UTC-10 said:

I also see an audio problem, aside from the times when a raging blizzard is absolutely silent, where when I break branches, and I break a lot of them, I will come across instances where the progress circle has completed its rotation but the sound of a breaking branch continues for a few more seconds. I wonder if this might also be a transient issue due to memory management. It is mostly annoying for now. 

Now that you mention it, I also had that issue a while ago, I think I was playing on Broken Railroad at the time.  The issue cleared up at some point, presumably when I moved out of the map.

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