I was in a barn somewhere… No way I’ll recall exactly where at this time. It was definitely in one of the northern areas. It is a place with two barns perpendicular, and a rather large pond nearby and always seemingly in the path of Harvesters. No matter. The particular barn I was in was of the two-level variety with a ramp on the outside coming up to two large doors. It is also a safehouse and the Plundra is downstairs.
In any case I had attracted the murderous desires of several Hunters, seekers and dogs. I had all the doors closed. One of the doors was set slightly ajar as some often are and they are nice to be able to shoot out of. Wish you could set them that way in game yourself but you just have to find them that way. Anyway the door I was shooting out of was on the second story with no ramp leading up to it and the doors at the top of the ramp were completely shut.
But one by one, each Hunter kept appearing directly behind me about where the stairs are. I have no idea how it happened. When I would kill one, another one would appear there. They would not appear when I was facing but only when I had my back turned. I tell you it’s quite an upsetting thing to turn around and see one hovering over your head in a dark barn when they are supposed to be outside.
So this happened three… no I think four times. I’d kill one, a few moments later the next would appear.
No idea how that works but it’s dangerous and could give someone a coronary.
I was just thinking about this for a bit… My game never crash when joining others in their game. Has never happened. I only crash on my “own” game.
Imho, that rules out any hardware related issues, with one possible exception - when I play “my game”, I’d guess it’s my computer doing all the background calculations, so that could of course be a factor to consider. However, that seems very unlikely, so for the crashes most of us seems to experience (the combat related ones), we can be 99% sure this is game related only.
I had weeks of crash free gaming (hosting, playing solo), then I got into a crash-fest of gigantic proportions (almost every tank killed led to a crash, most likely related to rivals). I then disabled all overlays (MSI Afterburner), and had a good few weeks of crash free gaming, so I thought - hey, Afterburner must have been the cause!
Now the crashes are back again, I can to a certain degree anticipate when they’ll happen - ALWAYS after combat, in some regions. These regions refuse to spawn rivals, despite high region level and score.
It’s related to some of the data saved in our saved game progress for sure. Sometimes, it feels it can clear itself up, and then return yet again.
As for other players that seems to crash no matter what - how’s thing working out for you guys when you join others?
How about you, @SkEyE? Can you play the game if joining someone else?
I don’t know if related but I was crashing 6-8 times per day until I went into offline mode and for the last 3 days no crashes…strange coincidence or just having a lucky run I don’t know
I’ve never even clicked on the multiplayer option in the menu so I really can’t report on that.
Offline mode - Tried it before. Thought it worked, then turned out it didn’t. I do think there’s something haywire in their network code because there does seem to be a correlation. I continue to suspect an underlying DRM that constantly checks the validation of the user to continue operating properly and errors in that cause the program to dump out, which is typical of such systems at least in the past. Such a system could have a very rigid phone home allowance such that a little hickup or delay could trigger it, and of course a heavy load on the server its calling home to could have the same result. That would mean that during times where many players were playing the game (both solo and multiplayer) “random” crashes would happen more frequently. Some people have reported that they feel the crashing happens more during busier times of the day, so again… maybe something to it. I have DSL will has typically lousier pings than cable or fiber so that could explain why I crash more frequently as well. Of course this explanation also could explain why identical hardware setups have wildly different stability experiences.
Still I think as I said before there are such messy issues deep in the code that you can play whack-a-mole all day (or for months) with it and it’s still going to manifest in crashes somehow or another. It’s so nutty because you can make a change in your system or in how you run it and you may say an immediate reduction in crashing for a while but then after what for me is usually two or three days of much more limited crashes it will resume the ultra-random crashing that sometimes hits one minute or less into continuing a game.
Have you tried fast traveling to a land far, far away? Two things that sometimes seem to slow down the crashes when they get to that every 5 minutes or less level is one to delete the cache and two going to an area that you haven’t been to yet or that is mostly cleared out. You can putter around looting and shooting the odd random machine but stay out of any areas with active missions. Maybe kill of some rivals, but not all of them. Any combination of that kind of stuff and you might find the crashing has lessened for a while. Like psoriasis it will keep coming back but you can work yourself out of the worst of it for periods of time if you are persistent. Honestly though after almost three months of this and no real solution, help or support I’ve stopped starting the game up at all. I got maybe halfway through Alpine Unrest and the crashing has just spoiled so much of the entire experience for so long that I have lost all immersion in its world.
Had same issue, crash when pressing Continue in menu. But I found a workaround: Since I just wanted to do single player I turned off the internet, started game - and after initial “no network” warning from Steam (which I had to wait out like 10-15 seconds before being able to press “Play” it was just unclickable to begin with) I could play Generation Zero without fuss!
So it seems likely this is an issue around network code in the game.
I’ll try that later on Sunday (since it’s about 3:30 AM here) and let you know my results.
I’ll load the game up in Steam Offline mode and see if the game crashes on me within an hour (as it loves to crash on me between 10 to 60 minutes of gameplay).
I don’t know for sure, Peg. I suspected drm, the fmod audio, or the apex engine’s general touchyness.
It’s not clear what drm GenZero uses, if any, outside of steam drm. When people have asked, they’ve been ignored specifically on that point. Further digging showed my main suspect was not involved at all.
GenZero does do a bunch of tracking, but I don’t know if that has an impact on stability or what happens if you block it or turn off your internet.
Putting steam into ‘offline mode’ hasn’t made much difference to people. Offline mode in steam and playing while disconnected from the Internet are two very different things. The tracking doesn’t go through steam, it’s between you and avalanche.
I’ve never played in off-line mode but my game seems to be more stable when playing single player which sucks because co-op is why I bought the game. I can play for hours ,only crashing here and there, but playing co-op as a client is a toss up. I’m sure the devs are looking at it but there seems to be a lot of variables. I read in the forums all the time about what people are experiencing and all the diff scenarios that seem to lead to the crash and have experienced almost every one. I’ve said before in other threads that I’m not that pc savvy but I’ve learned a lot from you guys here in the forums and I research a lot about what you guys talk about. You all seem to be on the right track . Hopefully the devs are watching and will have a solution one day.
You’re probably referring to my posts. I first brainstormed on that on Steam a few months back and have been bringing it up now and again here as well because reports keep suggesting that possibility to me.
Companies started trying internet-based DRM in the early 00’s from my memory and before that they were using increasingly deep level DRM on physical media that was causing increasing system failures for people. Sony’s star… star something got a lot of press. I remember people being furious about Spore’s always-on internet DRM and other companies around the same time implementing internet-based DRM that would kick people out of games if there was a glitch in their connection which would ruin their saves or lose hours of progress. Companies had to at least pretend to backtrack on that, and malware-like DRM like Sony’s star(something) got raked over the coals in the press. I also remember people having issues with the games outright crashing when the connections were lost because that’s just how the DRM was programmed to deal with a DRM check failure. No clear messages, just crash out. Unfortunately the zealousness to stop unlicensed software use became malignant to the legal operators of the software. Characteristic of those crashes was that type of system relies on constant validation checks with a host server. If a check fails the game application is shut down. If it’s tuned very tightly then a user’s app crashes from the slightest latency in their network connection or the host’s. So servers becoming full at peak times could result in more “random” crashes for more people.
It’s just all conjecture whether or not that applies to our situation with GZ unless Avalanche came out and said well yes we need to re-tune our DRM, but that would require them admitting its there. If you’re trying to protective your property from theft you don’t want to get the would-be thieves any clue as to what’s going on. So we may never know if it’s the case.
I also continue to suspect that since they are using so many third-party technologies in their engine that they may have a conflict between one or more of them, or the problematic code might be buried within those technologies that are essentially plug-ins for their engine that they don’t have direct access to and therefore unable to re-code. It would be a real headache.
DRM, to a degree, punishes the paying customer, since it’s not uncommon to also experience performance issues as well as larger EXE files caused by DRM. Overlord Gaming on Youtube has a couple of interesting videos on this subject for anyone interested.
