[Floating Effects from AI]

[Saddletank]

A thread for graphical glitches that result from the AI.

Someone posted about a hovering orange light a few days ago in another thread and I see Voodoo reported one as well. I have encountered them now as well. They vanish as you get close. I don’t think these are floating object bugs at all but something linked to the Havock rendering engine from an AI presence (beacons?). I frequently come across the blue jets of seekers on their own. I have seen this on two different PCs with completely different processors and video cards so I think its game engine related. The blue jets appear to be where the seeker spawns as I have often encountered them nearby but moving away in the direction I find the jets angled.

I find that opening the map then closing it makes them vanish.

OLD PC SPEC (up to mid-August 2019):

AMD II X4 645 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.1GHz / 16GB RAM / GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

NEW PC SPEC (after mid-August 2019 but just before August update):

Platform: PC
Description: Seeker blue jets graphic stationary in the air where seeker spawns
Steps To Reproduce: Not able to say, seems random. Disappears after opening and closing map
Images / Videos: see attached
Host or Client: Single player game
Players in your game: 1
Specifications: i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.6GHz - 16Gb RAM - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 - 8Gb VRAM

[Saddletank]

Flames and electrical flashes from destroyed machines floating in mid-air. This fire was away from several hunters I had just destroyed nearby.

PC specs etc in post above.

[Zesiir]

Good report I’ve also seen these things, I wonder if it’s related to an older bug where machine parts would stick in the air during combat, or if it’s at all related to the ghost machine sounds glitch.

[Saddletank]

Interesting that you mention the ghost machine sounds. Twice recently I have run around in a forest and on a farm trying to track down a seeker I could clearly hear but I could not find it, even when I got towards the loudest sound source.

[IanForce]

Yes, haven’t we all. and I’m on Xbox. These ghost sounds are quite annoying. Often when in bunkers I try to track down a machine that sounds like it is just round the next corner. The enemy indicator mid screen even points in the direction of the sound. But nothing there. I believe I hear a machine patroling the surface and perhaps even searching for me. This is silly knowing there is 10 meters of rock and concrete between us.

[Saddletank]

I agree. The whole enemy underground in a bunker reacting to you as you walk over the hill above thing is a little bit annoying.

[IanForce]

Yes, it works both ways as you indicate. Once I was searching for a mission where I should find a radio. I think it was at the Sodrs Saltholnen bunker, and I wasn’t yet aware of these ghost sound effects. I could see the waypoint and I could hear the radios static, and I was getting more and more frustrated that I couldn’t find anything at all. Thing is that I was on the surface directly over the room within the bunker, where the radio resided. Hrrmpf!

[Voodoo]

Here is another pair of those floating Seeker jets I found in an older recording. They vanished right at the moment I passed them. I did kill a couple of Seekers not long before this but that was quite the distance away from that spot. And I have personally never seen those jets remain floating after killing a Seeker.

(There is no sound in the video because, for some obscure reason, the rendering software did not want to play nice with this particular recording).

And here are some explosion remnants I encountered yesterday during some test runs. You can, sort of, see them “come into existence” when the explosion happens. It is hard to say from which explosion they originate but the direction in which the little flames travel suggests from the gas tanks on the opposite side of the road. However, they don’t line up with either source and there was nothing explosive nearby on that line.

It’s almost as if they “teleported” away and lost their connection to the parent explosion.

These ghost sounds are indeed quite annoying. I also had some strange thing happen with that which I also “recorded”. Too long and messy to make a video about it but here is the summary:

I was fighting a Tank that was standing between the buildings and the base of the hill between Haga and Tornsberget (on the side of Haga). Got killed by the Tank. Respawned at Safehouse - Kaptensvillan (which is about 500m away). Fought a Harvester and some doggies on the way back (which I encountered there before but left for later). Got killed by the Harvester. Respawned at Safehouse - Kaptensvillan again. Finished the Harvester on the way back and proceeded to the Tank to finish it off.

When I arrived at that hill, I could hear the Tank but it was nowhere to be seen. The sounds were coming from about the same location (within 10-20 meters or so) where the Tank was when it killed me.

At this point I am indeed starting to think that all these things are just different manifestations of the same bug.

It seems that sometimes sub objects (that being particle effects, sound generators, AI tracking modules, or whatever they call it) somehow get disconnected from their parent entity and are ignored by the “garbage collector” when it is time to clean up the mess.

Since (as I understand it) this is a problem that was present before re-spawning machines were introduced, it may have something to do with entities entering a “track only state” or something.

It would be really nice if the devs track down the cause of this problem.

[Saddletank]

It can be quite frustrating as it happened to me in a co-op session last night. Two of us holed up in one of the green port-a-cabin type buildings near Overby AFB north gate and blasted away about 15 enemies then went outside to take on two harvesters. All through the harvester battle I could very loudly hear seeker sounds and hunter guns but none were anywhere near us that I could see.

[Saddletank]

This is on PC.

The weirdest game bug I have encountered so far happened tonight and it was really creepy too. It is the bug that Ian Force highlighted where machines underground react to you above ground (or the other way around). Tonight I was above the Skvadern bunker near the wire fence that protects the cliff edge at about -1497, -3296 and had been in a fight with some runners and hunters. I’d fled the scene, patched myself up and returned. Then I heard a runner very close by scampering about and barking and my yellow indicator was turning. I knew straight away that he was underground so ignored him, then I turned around and out of the corner of my eye saw some grass move. I immediately thought I’d been fooled and focussed my shot gun on the spot but nothing else happened, so I checked with my IR scope on the binoculars and there was nothing there.

I moved away and as I was crouching the grass in front of me flattened as though someone was walking through it, just like you see behind a player in co-op. It was something invisible a few yards in front of me and it totally creeped me out.

So the bug where machines react to you through 20 or 30 feet of solid rock is a LOT weirder than we thought. The game processes where the machine is moving and affects the vegetation on the ground surface above it.

Pretty damn strange.

I run FRAPS while I’m playing to get screen shots so if it happens again and I have my wits about me I will record it.

[Voodoo]

That’s really weird and creepy indeed.

Wouldn’t it be something if it had suddenly de-cloaked and jumped into your face.

I also checked the ground area of that Tank with the OP Vision module to see if it sunk underground but there was nothing to see either.

It would be great if you could capture that indeed.

With MSI Afterburner (and I assume Fraps has that option too) you can start a “buffered” recording. It then keeps recording (and recycling) continuously for a specified amount of time until you actually press the “record button”. That way you always have plenty (in my case 10 minutes) of footage from before the moment you actually press the “record button”.

That’s how I got the floating jets and flames on video. It’s a lot easier and way more fun than having your wits about and trying to anticipate for something weird to happen.

And if you don’t actually record anything then you don’t have the hassle of managing your disk space afterwards either because it deletes the temporary recording automatically when you stop the buffered recording.

[Saddletank]

Thanks for that tip. I googled and FRAPS has something similar. I will definitely play using this feature from now on.

Fraps trick: Using the Loop Buffer

[Saddletank]

Happened again on the hill above the IGA facility. Two runners were in the bunker below me, getting as close as they could to my lat-long position then walking in place next to me but several metres underground. You can see the grasses getting pushed down exactly in time with the sound of their walking. Much less creepy this time as they are not walking in a straight line and its daylight. Can someone ask the dev team to watch this please?

[Voodoo]

That’s some pretty compelling footage right there. Good stuff!

You have the detection indicator disabled, I assume? I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for that from now on.