Invisible Players

Support and Bug Reports
1

Hello!

Trying to play this game with my brothers / sisters. When we connect, everyone is able to join successfully but two players specifically cannot see each other, and one of them cannot see in game enemies (the robots) if they are triggered or aggro’d by the one player he cannot see.

We are all on PC. It is the same two people who cannot see each other, and the one same person who does not see the enemies if they are triggered by the one person he cannot see.

Symptoms;

  • Hosting a multiplayer game on 3 different computers (from different households with different internet providers), always the same two players cannot see each other no matter who is host.
  • When trying different hosts, that meant also different worlds / save games so not a problem with the specific save game / world / instance.
  • Does not matter who invites who, once loaded in game the same two people cannot see each other.
  • Everyone else can see both of them fine.
  • Both affected users have tried exiting / re-launching Steam, sign out / sign back in to Steam friends, and even fully reboot their PCs, the same problem persisted.
  • Both affected players ran the “Verify integrity of game files” function for Generation Zero in Steam. Did not help.
  • The two users are in different households so different internet, etc…
  • Both of them have their Windows Firewall profile set to Private, so not under Public with more aggressive blocking of traffic or ports or etc…

We observed briefly a very similar problem in a different game The Raft, where those same two players briefly could not see each other, but after one of them disconnected and reconnected to the game host a couple of times then eventually could see again.

I see several other threads describing the same problem, going back to the year ~2020 at least. I did not see any solution posted. Just wanted to open another report to state this apparently is still an ongoing issue.

As well tonight specifically, as another test, the two players who could not see each other tried to create a game in Enshrouded and the one could not join the game of the other, received error stating game server was full (though the game server had 16 slots not restricted to friends only but wide open to public, and all 16 player slots were open and available to connect).

We tested a game of Dota 2 and there they could see each other fine.

Could the problem be related to the integration or implementation with the Steam friends network and matchmaking - the functionality for 3rd party titles to use Steam friends for joining / hosting / inviting?

It is very frustrating to see this persists for years. Any advice or guidance is appreciated.

1 Like
2

This sounds like a desync that I am (rarely) experiencing during multiplayer and if it is happening with other games, I would not necessarily blame the game. We usually can rectify it by restarting the Steam-Client and/or our computers. Have you tried to force an update on the Steam Client or to re-install it for the players that have this issue?
[Steam Support :: Steam Client Troubleshooting]

3

I’m not necessarily sure it’s the game, that’s why I mentioned I wondered if it could be related to how Steam plugs in to these 3rd party titles to enable friends to host / invite / join through Steam Friends. Or maybe the way this game has integrated that functionality.

I only wondered so since coincidentally we saw a similar symptom (though only once in weeks of play sessions) in The Raft - which is pretty janky as well.

When you search these forums though, they do have regularly recurring bug report / support posts describing very accurately this issue going back ~4+ years. It does seem this game is possibly more so affected or more so likely to have this problem, however the problem is caused;

For what it’s worth, we have been gaming together every week for years across a variety of titles, pretty well always on Steam, and have not seen this problem anywhere else before (Valheim, 7 Days To Die, ARK: Survival Evolved, Project Zomboid, DayZ, Grounded, Dota 2, Factorio, Deep Rock Galactic, Human Fall Flat, Core Keeper, Terraria, Starbound, CounterStrike: GO, and a variety of other titles).

That’s why I figured posting here to either signal that this issue continues to persist, or possibly to get more suggestions beyond what we tried the other night - exactly as you have done. We did not consider re-installing the Steam client, we may try that if we decide to give Generation Zero another shot next week on game night.

Besides that, if the devs continue to see this issue coming up over and over, that adds weight to it being worth some attention and effort towards fixing, in case it is related to the game.

4

Putting it this way, it could indeed be an error in the game. The pattern in these older reports seems to be that this happens if more than two players are playing (and apparently it was happening more on consoles). Since I have only played the game on PC with one other player until now, I never experienced more than a classic desync.

So maybe one first step to narrow down the problem could be: Are these two players and machines still invisible if they are starting a two-player game with each other in Generation Zero?

If yes, this still would not tell me anything, but it would be more likely that something is amiss on their end. And the issue could be as stupid as the game simply not loading the textures of their player characters for some reason (which would not explain the invisible machines, admittedly).
But one thing I realized was that playing on my old PC with a slower internet connection could give us all kinds of funny issues when I was hosting a session with two players (esp. the game crashing, but also desyncing; playing as client worked quite well). My newer PC (also with a stronger internet connection) has no such issues. The game just seems to be happier on stronger hardware (see above: Apparently 3-player games on PS4 being affected the most, meaning pretty old hardware was dealing with a slightly higher workload). So there would also be the question of whether the affected players are also the ones with weaker hardware.

Anyway, this is probably one hell of a bug and/or performance issue for the devs to track down and my rambling most likely does not help at all. And yes, a report does not hurt :wink:

But from my experience, it does help if the player with the strongest PC and the best internet connection is hosting the game - which is a very basic rule, but other games usually show you clearly that your computer is too weak to play as host; GenZero seems to do its best to run, but then it seems to develop more subtle issues.
Next thing you could try would be simply downloading and installing the Steam Client over the existing installation (usually doesn’t hurt and will take only a few minutes). If you are also experiencing issues in other games, we might be on to something.

I would exclude the firewall settings as a cause, because these should simply prevent these players from joining the game. But after re-installing and verifying the Steam Client and the game itself (assuming the issue was fixed), probably only the not-so-helpful tips remain, i.e. update Windows, update all kinds of drivers and so on … (Ultimately leading us to the most helpful one: Just buy a new PC and be done with it!)

I mean, esp. your symptom ‘Does not matter who invites who, once loaded in game the same two people cannot see each other’ does sound strange. Even more strange if this happening in other games, too.