I’ve also only had 2 or 3 unexplainable crashes since I started in August.
And a ton related to RivaTunerStatisticsServer (which comes with MSI Afterburner). And only after stopping (mostly) a (second) recording. Never did I lose any stuff or progress other than the exact world location.
Check the top right corner of the screen whenever you rearrange your inventory or pick something up. You’ll see the save icon flash.
It indeed also saves the game when entering a Safehouse but only when you enter it “manually”. If you fast travel it saves before leaving your current location. Which explains why you respawn at another location (possibly very far away) if the game happened to crash after you fast traveled somewhere else (or if you slam ALT+F4; which I conveniently did a lot when testing stuff).
Can’t really complain about that too much. I just shuffle my inventory when I want to set my respawn location. After all, it’s called a Safehouse and not a Savehouse.
It also saves when missions or objectives complete, if I remember correctly, and who knows when else.
By the way … did I just see my vanished Gas Tank in that Alyx-trailer?
Besides the cringe-worthy humor, it actually doesn’t look too bad. Graphically pretty good even. But then there is … VR-only … grrrrrrrrr!
Heh. Those are the only reasons I’m interested in it in the slightest – good-looking VR games don’t grow on trees (yet), and we can reasonably expect good Index support from Valve.
Half-Life as a franchise I can take or leave. Mostly leave, really. Given that one of the obvious fits for VR is puzzle games, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a Portal game first, really. But then, I mostly remember Alyx as, “Hi, I’m Alyx, you go left to do the actual fighting, while I’ll go right to work the door locks,” and sure enough, HL:A shows Alyx doing some puzzles. At least it seems like we’ll get a protagonist who can talk this time!
I’ll probably get that one. Wouldn’t bother with another pancake HL game.
Can you elaborate on those? The RTSS, and the recording part? I don’t quite follow. I am also using RTSS in the background (as a frame limiter).
Yeah, that is kind of weird. The saving seems to be related to the door step or something. That is always the first/simplest approach and at some point you find out that it has weird side effects. That is the difference between event and state detection/monitoring. The question would be: Am I now in a safe house where before I was not? Has my state changed? How I got there would be rather irrelevant.
EDIT: In case the question was addressed to me: I lost stuff, because on inventory management I “parked” things on the ground. Because I was completely full and did not want to go above the 100/100. Because I am a loot goblin.
Aha. Well, I hadn’t worked out how the save works, so every time I want to be certain of hanging onto any given reorganisation, I leave the safe-house and walk back in again, just to be sure, Turns out it was a good strategy - who knew?
I’ve had a look at Alyx - pfff… A thousand squids for the headset, another for a new computer, but the game is free afterwards. I shall have to stick with GZ until I win the lottery.
As for Rivertuner, my poor little laptop (that I bought specifically to play GZ) gets too hot as it is. If I overclocked, it’d explode. The keys aren’t quite too hot to touch, but nearly!
Why would you move that bucket (just because you can) - movement draws attention! She could have learned that from GZ… Curious how the head-crabs exactly mimic Ticks. Or is it the other way round?
Yeah, VR is pretty expensive. And you should never get a setup just for one specific title. Reviews first, and then try VR at a friend and see if it is for you. Then, maybe then…
We are talking about the Statistics Server, which can be used to display info in an OSD, or limit frames in order to save power, or limit latency due to pre-rendered frames piling up.
I’m just not fond of all this prequel stuff. It’s basically a guaranty for screwing up the franchise and lore. Even the better ones (Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands TPS) didn’t really cut it, even though I still had a ton of fun playing them. But never even mind television series like STD. Besides, I’m not about to smash a 1000+ simoleons on an Index (and probably only to find out it makes me sick). HL was pretty good for the time and I have good memories from it. But it has lost it’s appeal for the most part.
I hope so.
I usually start a buffered recording with MSI Afterburner (and therefore RTSS) when I start Generation Zero. That way I always have up to 10 minutes of footage from before the moment I actually press the “record button”. So, I can just enjoy the game without having to focus on possible upcoming interesting/buggy scenarios and not waste disk space at the same time.
Now, when a recording is stopped it returns to a buffered recording (and saves the actual recording). Usually that indeed happens flawlessly (but sometimes not).
When I start a second recording (within the same buffered recording session), all goes well until I stop that recording. Most of the times (but not always) the game then crashes to the desktop without an error report.
A pretty reliable precursor is when it takes a long time (up to more than a minute or several) to return to “buffered recording” mode. But, again , not always. I also had a few instances when it just CTD’d virtually instantly.
Before one of the updates (I think the September one) I did get error reports on crashes (but, you guessed it by now , not always). Sometimes it stated ntdll.dll as the faulting module but other times it stated SaveMedia64.dll as the faulting module. The latter being part of RTSS.
Whether the problem is because of a bug in the RTSS software, a bug in Windows or as a result of a fragmented (relatively) full disk or whatever, is hard to say. Since nothing is actually completely consistent and predictable.
The only consistency is that, if it happens, it happens when stopping a recording.
A trigger radius, I’d guess, since it would trigger also when you leave or otherwise be a very big doorstep. My guess is that the proximity is either being checked before the player actually is there or the state of the player is such that the proximity doesn’t trigger anything. But then again, it may also be something completely different.
Actually it was and now I understand.
I usually just swap two items. Works great. Just lifting and dropping a single item didn’t work in the past so I don’t rely on that (even though it shows the save icon)
What kind of laptop, how “old” is it and was it new or used?
Laptops are notoriously warm (and prone to overheating) in any case, and GZ definitely lets your system work for its money (although that got reduced significantly I think) but “nearly too hot to touch” sounds like there might be something “wrong” with the heat dissipation.
If it’s quite a bit older (and assuming you don’t block the intakes and exhausts yourself) you might need to clean out the dust (plus dog/cat hairs) and maybe even replace the thermal paste here and there.
I bought it new about, oh, this time last year, specifically as min spec for playing Gen Zero (i.e. just before GZ came out).
It is cool and quick doing anything else, but GZ stresses it a bit! But it hasn’t got slower at all, so it doesn’t seem to be suffering! It has a separate graphics card too, umm,
This thread’s gone extremely off-topic, guys. It’s only a hindrance for the devs to have to sift through all this to work out the actual issue. Please move any discussions unrelated to the topic, to another thread.
I think it went increasingly off-topic following @Bootie 's post:
If you feel so inclined, @Zesiir, you could perhaps move the following posts to a new thread in the Off-Topic category (that’s a thing, right?). Name it… “Screen capture, overclocking, and VR”.
Yeah, I think I have the right to do it, but I don’t know how! Perhaps you could send me a message telling me how to do it, and I’ll shift it myself next time…
@Zesiir Oopsy. You are abolutely right. We obviously got a little bit carried away.
If this sub thread cannot be moved: maybe it’s an idea if we all edit our off-topic posts and put the irrelevant posts/segments in hide tags, like this:
Off-topic
At least then it’s not a mess of text anymore and can simply be ignored and scrolled over.
I’ve dropped mines in a multiplayer session (me as a client), and had them disappear right in front of me where I just placed them, so in that scenario distance to them didn’t have anything to do with it.
At least it seems like we’ll get a protagonist who can talk this time!
, not always. I also had a few instances when it just CTD’d virtually instantly.
My guess is that the proximity is either being checked before the player actually is there or the state of the player is such that the proximity doesn’t trigger anything. But then again, it may also be something completely different.
