Observations after 6 months

Howdy, I burnt out on SOTA a while back and figured I'd give it a shot again at release. I've got around 10 hours in on r52 and I didn't see and of the observations below in on the top page so I figured that I might be doing something wrong. I'm on Linux so that might be the reason, but it is hard to imagine these being Linux only issues.

1. Performance is far below similar titles. I have a system capable of handling just about any title at 60 fps, GTX 1080, SSD, plenty of fast RAM, the works, but SOTA often struggles on Fastest. Pop in is so bad that in POTs I run into invisible walls that take 30 seconds or more to load. Is this working as intended?
2. Maps still have glitches and look unfinished. I was working on a quest in Sequanna Colussus and there are buildings missing textures on the inside. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the insides are exposed. Elysium now has black boxes on the light sources. Rhun Ruins has a way to fall through the floor.
3. Pathing is still broken. I understand, though disagree with, the desicion to make enemies immune to attacks if they can't fight back, but it still fails in simple situations. I had a melee skeleton spawn on a roof behind an ankle high wall, I had to cross the wall to fire arrows at it, the AI wouldn't path over. The bottom of Graff Mines has a bunch of earth elementals that continually get hung up on terrian, rendering them immune to ranged attacks.
4. Rubber banding is as bad as ever. I was figthing a troll in the Rise with a party and it might as well have been a yo-yo way all the running back and forth. It seems like I stumble over some rocky terrain and every melee enemy is combat desides to run home.

If this the final product? I left a while back because these types of issues were making the game difficult to enjoy. Now that it is released, are these now features? Does Port plan to fix these types of issues?

 

Welcome back!

Could you give me some examples of Linux games that people can own their own towns and have boat tons of items in the lots, so I can give a comparison, too?

What they have right now is not the final product as they will continue developing the game as long as they can.

The map issue on Linux seems to be the known issue and they are working on fixing it. For path finding and rubber banding issues, feel free to post on the bug report forum if you have time and feel like making a contribution.

If anything, the "ep1 commercial release" did was to abolish store credits and add sales taxes to add-on store items to meet with the compliance of all countries they provide the services, which cause inconvenience to many.

Other than that, it's business as usual.

 

Mischievous Dragon's TOP-3 list:

1. The 'Death by Fire' Avatar animation (a R44 feature) was missing 6 months ago and it is still missing.
2. You still cannot choose 'Sir/Dame' title to be displayed in Gold colored font (Pledge reward) if you are playing with a Royal Founder Knight+ account.
3. The inventory icon of the Tomato is still unpolished and not visually competitive.

 

@Burzmali
Well it is maybe just me but I recognized that it looks like the internet connection is involved with "invisible structures". If I’m not at home with a bad connection the items slowly materialize one by one but if I use the same system at home all items are normally already visible after the loading screen.
I see very rarely missing textures, black boxes on light sources are new to me and the same with your other points…e.g. the elementals in Graff Gem Mines do not had those problems one or two weeks ago as I visit them.
I fear this is sadly for you and others but it looks out of my perspective like it is a problem with the Linux client but if these problems are already reported in the bug section I'm sure the devs are working on it.

 

I have a machine that I play on that is similar to yours and I can tell you it's not just Linux for some of the issues you mentioned. I play on windows. Specifically the Trolls are pretty bad. I've provided feedback on the Trolls rubber banding and crazy behavior release after release after release.

 

On the perf issues, you should not have them with your set up. I play in 4K with a GTX 1070 without any fps issues (in the largest areas) on "beautiful setting". I have never had rubber banding in this game, that might be your internet.

The scene loading is normal and expected. Large zones have hundreds of thousands of active placibles that you need to load and can take a little while. No way around this, you may see it as a negative but in reality its a positive, name any other game doing that.

Try reinstalling windows.

 

Exactly.

Considering that more than 99.9% of those objects haven't moved in the 15 minutes between my visits, one can hope that the game wouldn't need to regenerate the scene from scratch each time I visit. Personally, the positive benefits of folks building stuff ends when it chokes the server to the point that I can't navigate through a POT.

Couldn't if I wanted.

 

ok, let me say it again. Your computer *will* run this game fine with that configuration, its just not now due to something on your computer.

Im not sure really what to tell you if you cant help yourself. We just had someone with a system just like yours have the same complaints and they ended up fixing them with a reload.

Your loading issue is probably also related to your other perf issues. Again, with my GTX1070, it does take a bit to load HUGE PoT areas but were are only talking a few seconds.

 

Same computer, same config handles XCom 2 at highest settings without a hitch, it also handles a half dozen other titles with higher graphical fidelity than SOTA without a stutter. SOTA grinds to a halt when I turn on shadows in a POT. If "reinstall your OS", which is a Windows fix, not a Linux one, is the best recommendation, it is likely the game's fault not the system it is running on.

 

I had this one and also have GTX 1080. Updated video card drivers and it went away. Unity and NVidia seem to consistently have issues if you are not extremely attentive to staying up to date with drivers. I've experienced it with other Unity games as well which is how I knew to check my drivers.

 

What FPS do you get with 4k on a GTX 1070 in different areas? Any chance you could upload a video showing your fps and load times and how the game looks in 4K?

 

Im usually in 3/4 screen 4K in a window playing. 60fps on beautiful settings in Owls or Serenite PoT (HUGE zones).

Examples:

The Rise:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/248078270

Ulfeim:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/240196012

 

ok lol! there is more to it then that.

I had an issue once near persistence where SOTA just broke after a release patch. If I recall right, it was after a huge unity upgrade and I think they enabled DX11. Well, I was getting like 5 fps and it took 3 minutes to load a zone. At the Same time, I could play Tomb raider at 4K (max res) with no problems. I spent a week trying to fix it and in the end I reinstalled Windows and BAM... it ran flawless.

Turns our it was clear that something broke with the video driver in windows and probably directX 11 which I could not fix with anything other then a windows rebuild.

Just like YOUR issue, it was my PC.

IT troubleshooting 101 dictates this. If one user calls up and says the whole internet is down and no one else is having the issue. The internet is probably not down.

If the vast majority of GTX1070/1080 players are playing this game in high settings in at least 1080P with no problems and you are... then the issue is usually yours.

 

That's a stretch, I have seen zero Linux users state that they have solid performance any time in the last few years. I know the Linux client isn't perfect, but it should be able to handle shadows.

 

Thanks!
I dont have the 2 hours to look at the whole thing, got a rough time where it shows your FPS counter?
I am able to get high FPS in some areas but it doesnt often stay at that for any length of time, i'm curious what yours is doing over a few minutes of play and whether it is going up and down like mine does.

 

@Burzmali - Game plays fine, until you hit the towns, the one with player housing especially. It's the number of items that have to load over the internet that makes servers fall to their knees. Try to play the game offline, you'll see that all the issues suddenly disappeared. Offline Game will run on your system the same way those other articles you mentioned. Online games always run slower because they have to load all the custom items that players consist off from the server, add to that thousands of items used as a design in players houses and you get the idea what makes things slow down a notch. There is no way around this, unless you instance the housing. The decorations and the interactive 3D items will ALWAYS take their toll on the servers / game overall performance. And with the instanced housing, the game wouldn't be what it is.

 

Which driver are you using? And which OS (name, version, 32/64-bit?)

 

This is something non technical people have a hard time grasping. SoTA is revolutionary in this way - though it comes with a hefty memory (and other resource...) management burden.

That said, there is a def need for improvement in general performance. Theyve made great strides over the last few releases, but of course there needs to be more to come.

This one is another misconception - what similar titles? Are those titles also multiplatform, have the same feature set (see above), and run by a skeleton crew on a crowdfunded budget?

 

erm... sorry but no.

do you really think that SotA has more items being loaded than Skyrim does?

Unlike SotA, Skyrim actually has a fully interactable environment, where you can pick up and move around anything that you see in the world.

SotA does not have a fully interactive environment, even though it was promised many times from the kickstarter on.


By the way, Skyrim is quite old already, and i'm not even gonna talk about newer games.

This idea that Shroud is special in this regard is just laughable.

 

Yes, actually it does. Most of the stuff in Skyrim is static and you don't have hoards of players creating junkyards.