Number of bugs seems to have increased 10fold

[Burning Bridges]

I am not angry or something, just giving an honest opinion of how the game plays for me at the moment.

When I played TLD last fall and into winter I was totally amazed how bug free it was. I played for days on end without any problem.

Unfortunately the current version is giving me tons of trouble. It's still playable but went from "remarkably stable" to "normal", Beta or early access. Feels finally like being in a beta test. If ~v1.6 was 10/10 stability I would say it's currently no more than 6/10.

In 3 days:

4 x crash to desktop upon exiting building

1 x stuck in terrain (can still load but progress lost)

1 x trapped inside building because door does not open (end of game)

Have needed the Quit button only a few times, normally the game shuts down by itself

Also, the loading times upon leaving buildings have become a real concern, especially as the game crashes often at this point (what is going on there that needs more time than launching the game?)

[DenverDad]

I am not angry or something, just giving an honest opinion of how the game plays for me at the moment.

When I played TLD last fall and into winter I was totally amazed how bug free it was. I played for days on end without any problem.

Unfortunately the current version is giving me tons of trouble. It's still playable but went from "remarkably stable" to "normal", Beta or early access. Feels finally like being in a beta test. If ~v1.6 was 10/10 stability I would say it's currently no more than 6/10.

In 3 days:

4 x crash to desktop upon exiting building

1 x stuck in terrain (can still load but progress lost)

1 x trapped inside building because door does not open (end of game)

Have needed the Quit button only a few times, normally the game shuts down by itself

Also, the loading times upon leaving buildings have become a real concern, especially as the game crashes often at this point (what is going on there that needs more time than launching the game?)

This is completely normal for a game in active development. As complexity increases and changes are made instability is introduced which will need to be addressed in subsequent patches. In an attempt to make your feedback more useful to the dev team could you possibly post your dxdiag (if your on windows) so they can see what system specs you are running. I know there is also an in game log (although I'm not sure how to obtain or post it - maybe someone else can chime in as well) which could contain some useful information concerning the specific issues you're experiencing.

[Burning Bridges]

Careful, it's not like I don't know how bugs creep into code. One can expect that every new piece of software has N bugs, but it's a huge mistake to conclude that always having N bugs is normal. And it creates a wrong impression that everyone is totally happy. I for one am not happy with the way the stability has developed in the last months. And the game, which was almost perfect, has become very troublesome recently. There is a kind of bug that does not worry me which is if anything does not work under certain circumstances. But much more concerning are indications of flaws in the system, like the engine crashing ca every 10th time I exit a building, which I would not call "normal". New versions should not be released until this is ironed out. This is Early Access, and not a beta test, I see a very distinct difference between the two. If the situation stays like it is, it would be much better to have two versions, a Stable release and a Beta.

Anway I see no reason to panic, but also not to clap shoulders.

[Spottdrossel]

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[Bill Tarling]

Careful, it's not like I don't know how bugs creep into code.

That sounds rather threatening (or at least rather snarky and condescending towards the other poster's comment. :?

I for one am not happy with the way the stability has developed in the last months.

As the other poster said - bugs are expected, and yes the game is still underdevelopment and yes there will be more bugs... thi9s isn't a final release, it still alpha...

the game, which was almost perfect, has become very troublesome recently.

Perhaps from your perspective you felt it was a complete game, but not from the devs goal... they make and test changes as necessary to fit the larger picture of their final goal for the game.

Personally I loved the settings from around v.023 as fantastic -- but I can understand and accept why they were changed as the game developed further.

But much more concerning are indications of flaws in the system, like the engine crashing ca every 10th time I exit a building, which I would not call "normal". New versions should not be released until this is ironed out.

Ironing them out is part of the process... plus they'll be running a new version of the Engine which may hopefully solve some issues for the few users such as yourself experiencing crashes with your configuration. Since the game is in Alpha, submit your output files and F8 screenshots (which include coordinates) and the devs will have an easier time trying to track down what's causing issues on your system and configuration. To suggest all production and development should be halted and no new versions released until your alpha copy works perfectly first though is unrealistic.

The devs have been extremely fast and helpful in providing the updated hotfixes as the few individual system configurations have been solved.

This is Early Access, and not a beta test, I see a very distinct difference between the two. If the situation stays like it is, it would be much better to have two versions, a Stable release and a Beta.

The devs haven't determined they're at the Beta stage yet, or at a Stable Final Release version yet - that's why it's alpha [it's not expected to be bug free, and yes it's expected to continually change as it develops further

Anway I see no reason to panic, but also not to clap shoulders.

That was the only fair thing I agree with, and I'm glad your rushing to judgement. You've at least been active and participate a lot of the board which is great -- and given the current frustration I can imagine you're facing with the game suddenly crashing a lot on your system (I would probably feel the same way), it's understandable perhaps needing to vent a bit...

But at the same time, you've been here long enough to see how active and responsive the Hinterland team have been, and continue to be... Hopefully with your debug file, they'll be able to track down the issue quickly for you, and you'll be back in full playing mode again soon... As well, the new Unity 5 update should hopefully solve a lot of performance issues as well when they finish the conversion updates [and, I expect, may also generate some newer interesting bugs too with the changes *lol* ]

[DenverDad]

Careful, it's not like I don't know how bugs creep into code. One can expect that every new piece of software has N bugs, but it's a huge mistake to conclude that always having N bugs is normal. And it creates a wrong impression that everyone is totally happy. I for one am not happy with the way the stability has developed in the last months. And the game, which was almost perfect, has become very troublesome recently. There is a kind of bug that does not worry me which is if anything does not work under certain circumstances. But much more concerning are indications of flaws in the system, like the engine crashing ca every 10th time I exit a building, which I would not call "normal". New versions should not be released until this is ironed out.

Nothing about my initial response was meant to imply that we should be satisfied with a buggy product. I was merely trying to stay optimistic by reminding everyone that things aren't finished yet. The issues you report do sound extremely frustrating. I myself have had at least a couple game crashes during the loading time entering or exiting buildings (although my issues disappeared with this last round of updates)

This is Early Access, and not a beta test, I see a very distinct difference between the two. If the situation stays like it is, it would be much better to have two versions, a Stable release and a Beta.

You are correct in one respect. There is a difference between early access alpha and a beta test. The alpha typically precludes the beta. On that note, there is no such thing as a stable early access game. That is the entire point of early access - give the fans and community a chance to try the game early and leverage their feedback and game play experiences to help make the game as smooth as possible. I don't mean to belittle your frustration - far from it - but simply remind you that this is what we signed up for. We did not sign up for a completed or stable game.

Any logs or configuration details you can provide would most certainly go a long way in helping the devs fix your issues. I know they want the game to be as bug free as possible too.

This is exaclty the thing that alerts me.

Bugs that keep coming back indicates that you are not in full control of your software.

As a developer myself this is purely conjecture and not what I would consider constructive feedback. You're implying that because some issues have been ongoing the developers have no idea what they're doing which is nothing short of rude and completely unhelpful. I've seen this many times over with people rushing to get into early access games only to imply the developers don't know what they're doing because the product isn't finished. Again, this is EXACTLY what we signed up for. Be helpful and constructive with your feedback.

[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

Just going to chime in real quick on this one. We are still in Alpha, as Bill stated. This means, lots of bugs are still going to be present. This also means, bugs you find might not be reproducible on our end, due to PC's being all different. This is why we ask people to send us their debug logs/ player logs. With those files we can see where in the code your game messed up at, the programmers can then make a fix. They aren't going to catch every exception first time around, it's software.

Sorry to hear that you are crashing, we've had a similar problem before and thought we fixed it. Again, it's software these things sometimes come back, you can never fully kill a bug, only tame it. Same with the fog one that was mentioned above. We had a fix for it, now that fix doesn't work because more code has been added to the game since. More code = more problems.

We try to have the game stable before releasing to the public every update, but because we are still in EA, and still in Alpha, some people will update and not be stable, that is the nature of games in Alpha, that is the nature of any software in Alpha.

Anyways, we are here to help, we don't want our game unstable as much as you do. So anything you report we try to fix as soon as we can. We are a small team so things need to be prioritized. An as Bill said, we are moving to Unity 5 soon, this will potentially fix your problem, but also may bring a slew of new problems.

Jeremy

[Bill Tarling]

Well said Jeremy (and in a much easier explanation than I was able to try)...

And Burning Bridge, hopefully my response didn't come across too harsh... I can understand the frustration if the game is crashing regularly at your end, even though it may be working fine for most users. My sincere apologies if it did read unintentionally harsh.

System bugs can be wacky - it was just a week or so ago that one user sent in a game output file for a tech issue they were having, and it provided a very excited Alan with the solution they had been trying to track down for over a month.

Like I said, the whole Hinterland team has been pretty good at solving the bugs and tech issues once they can see what might cause it - I'm sure they'll do their best to get you back in the game as quickly as possible so we can join the rest of us dying again soon

[Spottdrossel]

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[DenverDad]

This is exaclty the thing that alerts me.

Bugs that keep coming back indicates that you are not in full control of your software.

As a developer myself this is purely conjecture and not what I would consider constructive feedback. You're implying that because some issues have been ongoing the developers have no idea what they're doing which is nothing short of rude and completely unhelpful. I've seen this many times over with people rushing to get into early access games only to imply the developers don't know what they're doing because the product isn't finished. Again, this is EXACTLY what we signed up for. Be helpful and constructive with your feedback.

I did not say they had no idea what they're doing, I said they "are not in full control".

It is a common logical error to assume "not 100%" means "0%" but that's just not the case.

You're not the only one who happens to be a software developer; my assessment was based on experience.

90%, 80%, 0%... it doesn't really matter. I've yet to meet a developer who has ever possessed complete mastery of their software so I guess I'd have to ask what the point of your original quoted statement was. To me it seemed needlessly inflammatory. I'll say it again - bugs happen and the team is undeniably dedicated to improving the game so if the game is giving you grief offer up logs and bug reports so they can fix your issues.

[Hotzn]

It should be noted that there are also players (like me) who have not experienced a single crash during the last months, and for whom the game works perfectly well. Crashes could be limited to certain PC setups/components. Certainly unfortunately if the game does not work on your rig, especially if it worked fine before, but I for one would not conclude from such a phenomenon that the majority of players must have the same problems or that the game is generally deteriotating.

[Spottdrossel]

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[Scyzara]

It should be noted that there are also players (like me) who have not experienced a single crash during the last months, and for whom the game works perfectly well. Crashes could be limited to certain PC setups/components. Certainly unfortunately if the game does not work on your rig, especially if it worked fine before, but I for one would not conclude from such a phenomenon that the majority of players must have the same problems or that the game is generally deteriotating.

I didn't have a single crash during the last months, either.^^

However, I noticed slightly longer loading times when exiting a building or travelling zones, but the increase was minor. Maybe my loading screens lasted for 1.5s in V.181 and now that increased to 2.5s or something. But that's nothing I would ever consider a real problem.

[Burning Bridges]

First of all I will take nothing personal in a thread that has to be controversial by nature.

Seems this thread is swarming with programmers. Good, I also have 20 years experience as a software programmer. That's also what I meant with "know how bugs creep into code", and that not every complaint can be reversed by simply asking for dxdiag or other stuff relating to our computer (which usually does jack to solve the problem).

One of my favorite lines is "the best way to reduce bugs is to stop putting them in".

This might sound nonsensical to users of software who have become used to the mantra that bugs in software are inevitable. I personally never liked that mantra. Because even if having no bugs is an impossibility, 99% of bugs are avoidable, and people should be more critical of programmers who appear to not be on their toes (not directed at anyone here, mind you). Like software bugs, spelling mistakes are unavoidable, but not to a point that pupils should think their latest essay being full of mistakes is "normal".

Which also is to say, last fall I honestly had the impression that Allan and whoever does the coding was the sort of smart programmer who thoroughly thinks ahead, checks their stuff before anything goes out and releases with only a minimal amount of bugs. Now, if said game was praised for its coding less than a year ago, and 8 months later I get complaints that it is normally crashing before people reach the Quit button, then there might have been decisions in the last months that were not as good as the one's a year ago.

I am not talking about item X showing wrong amount of calories or other trivial stuff. I am talking about the resource management and the long loading time when exiting buildings. My intuition tells me there is stuff going on that is not working well at the moment, and as a consequence the game crashes a lot. Again, it's not a reason to rage quit or criticize, it's just something that has been deteriorating, that was all I was saying. You will already know what's going on, if there are problems with Unity or internally some people have not been available, or if nothing happened at all. All in all Hinterland does a good job.

Peace, and keep up the good work.

The first step towards fixing a problem is always recognizing that it exists.

Bravo!

[DenverDad]

Friends there is no argument to be had here and I'm not interested in getting into a massive debate about semantics. We all seem to want the same thing. We all seem to want The Long Dark to be the best game it can be. We all agree that the first step towards addressing any issue with the game is reporting it. We agree on what matters. As I and others have said can either of you offer up system specs or logs for the devs to leverage?

Let us focus on the data surrounding performance, bugs and gameplay issues and not make too many assumptions about their causes or what the appearance of those problems means for the project as a whole. That was my entire point.

[Admin]

:mrgreen: Group Hugs For Everybody Now :mrgreen:

Even though things may have gotten a little heated on multiple ends, there is an interesting discussion [debate] about various techniques towards approaching bugs and game programming... if that's the topic of interest, then that topic might be best restarted or moved to the general discussion section. Could be a pretty decent subject of conversation 8-)

[Burning Bridges]

Hinterlands handling of bugs in the subforum is VERY fast and productive, and I had a response to all bugs I posted within one or two days. In this topic I was pointing out some things that may be not going well and which are more at the root, i.e. technology and important subsystems. This is imo cannot be handled with a plethora of bug reports, but reassessment of the systems that are causing the problems. If this is already going on, threads like this one will quickly dissappear.

[Spottdrossel]

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[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

Unity 4 doesn't utilize multi core CPU, that is why you see that spike, the game is CPU bound also because of Unity 4. We're in the process of updating to Unity 5 and I can tell you... 60 fps all exteriors. Game utilizing the Graphics card properly, multi core CPU being utilized. Our performance issue was an Engine issue, nothing with the codebase.

The reason we increased the Load time on exiting interiors was actually partially due to the CPU issue, but also for players still running a 32 bit system and some 64 bit users who were crashing all the time trying to get into PV. We basically load an empty scene between transitions and this is why the load time is a few seconds longer. That was our solution at the time, why? because prior to releasing that update, everything was fine on the testing end, release an update to thousands of different PC builds, you're gunna have someone get a bug that you didn't get or crash that you didn't have.

The reason you saw a huge drop in performance as the game progressed was because of the amount of stuff that is in the game. There's a lot. As we add more the CPU that was taking the hole load was getting more and more cramped, thus lowering performance.

So in short, when we update to Unity 5 you'll see huge improvements on Performance.

[toebar]

Thanks for the explain JPOW.

For the record I haven't had a crash yet in game (knock on wood!).

Out of curiosity, is there a timeline for updating to Unity 5?

[Jeremy JPOW Powell]

I don't have a date yet for release, we are still sorting out issues from upgrading.

Jeremy

[DenverDad]

Solid and detailed response. Thanks JPOW! I had a couple crashes with v200 but have been steady so far in v218. I have noticed some general graphics flickering here and there while out in the wilderness but I know this has already been reported. Curious to see how Unity 5 improves performance here as well!

[ChillPlayer]

I did not say they had no idea what they're doing, I said they "are not in full control".

This can never happen if you're game is written towards an engine you don't control, like Unity. And that's the problem the devs are facing, players don't care if the game crashes because of a bug in the engine that the devs need to work around or if their own code has a bug. From the OPs description it sure sounds to me like an issue with the engine and not the game code, Unity is not known to be the most stable and bugfree engine out there. I also don't think that Unity let's you hack the engine itself, everything you do in Unity is within it's constraints and therefor it's the engines job to not crash. That's not to say you cannot write code in Unity that crashes because it is written wrong, but this would affect much more players than the handful complaining now about crashes.

By sending in your debug logs the devs have a chance to figure out if they need to work around an issue with the engine or if they did some wacky coding that does not work as they expected. Given the combined experience the team has, my money regarding crashes would be on the engine

[Spottdrossel]

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[Burning Bridges]

Unity 4 doesn't utilize multi core CPU, that is why you see that spike, the game is CPU bound also because of Unity 4. We're in the process of updating to Unity 5 and I can tell you... 60 fps all exteriors. Game utilizing the Graphics card properly, multi core CPU being utilized. Our performance issue was an Engine issue, nothing with the codebase.

The reason we increased the Load time on exiting interiors was actually partially due to the CPU issue, but also for players still running a 32 bit system and some 64 bit users who were crashing all the time trying to get into PV. We basically load an empty scene between transitions and this is why the load time is a few seconds longer. That was our solution at the time, why? because prior to releasing that update, everything was fine on the testing end, release an update to thousands of different PC builds, you're gunna have someone get a bug that you didn't get or crash that you didn't have.

The reason you saw a huge drop in performance as the game progressed was because of the amount of stuff that is in the game. There's a lot. As we add more the CPU that was taking the hole load was getting more and more cramped, thus lowering performance.

So in short, when we update to Unity 5 you'll see huge improvements on Performance.

Ah ok, thanks for this clarification. This would mean it's only a temporary solution, because too many people had problems when PV was released. I actually remember some people saying this.

No problem then.