[.805][Request] Please focus on stability first

from Elemental Forums

I'm very excited about the coming launch and have been playing the beta from the start. But each time I try to play, the performance and stability issues make the process too frustrating. So I stop before I really get to test the balance and game-play aspects you are wanting us to look at. Then the next Beta comes out and the hope is that the issues have been fixed. And so on.

I don't know if many other testers feel the same but the stability issues seem to have been around for ages.

Specifically:

1. Intermittent blurry 3d.

2. Problematic fog in 3d.

3. Intermittent darkness in 3d.

4. System crashes (where you need to completely reset the computer).

5. Alt-tab (so we can write notes etc but continue playing).

6. Load game from menu without needing to restart (and now loading a game causes a system crash).

I would love to be able to give meaningful feedback but the above are real killers.

3,529 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Totally agree. And I still get crashes, often every 100 turns or so. There are memory leaks, and the game can crash from memory with only 5 towns, and the whole game graphically slows down with AA applied, even on my i7 920/ GTX260 system.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

For all of those issues with the blurry/dark 3D, you'll probably be able to solve them by turning off the advanced lighting (the check mark next to the slider, not the slider itself). You'll probably then get some little white overlay stuff on the 3D screen, but I'm pretty sure they're aware of all of this. You can be sure that they'll have a game that you can play without disabling things and past the 300ish turn mark come release. 

 

For future reference typically issues with video and the like are accompanied by a DXdiag, so that if your problem is new and intriguing you can help the devs solve the issue.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

These are pretty much old issues. I had already reported them a few Betas ago. I'm sure the game will be fine come release which is why I asked that the stability be given some priority now instead of at the end. I would guess that many of the nVidia graphics card players are experiencing the same issues (seems to be the common denominator from what I've read) and I would think that the feedback is less than it could be because of it.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm getting a crash when loading a game about every three times I try to load a game.  Sometimes when I try to run the game from Impulse it does not run.  Also, if you could fix two things quickly it would be - 1. prevent the game from crashing when loading a saved game, and 2. give an option to load a saved game without having to quit.  I've only had the game for less then a day and I'm already up to 92 Plays in Impulse, so those two issues reported in this thread are quite important. ;-)  One or the other aren't so bad, but having to restart the game plus crashing frequently on loading are essentially a triple whammy. =)  But apart from those two, it would be great if you could fix the problem with running Elemental from Impulse resulting in no program running (I'm not sure what causes that one).

I have a total of 14 0.805 [Crashes] for Elemental in my Dropbox.

Here are the links:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T15-25-55-895.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T17-31-52-934.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T17-41-23-134.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T18-22-50-299.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T18-38-44-190.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T20-30-06-800.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T20-55-24-224.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T21-29-17-136.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T22-01-44-93.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-02T22-26-03-677.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-03T08-56-14-993.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-03T08-58-08-823.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-03T10-45-10-292.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8710134/Elemental0_805-2010-07-03T10-49-55-76.zip

 

Hope these help. <grin>


Best regards,

Steven.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting StevenAus, reply 4
I'm getting a crash when loading a game about every three times I try to load a game.  Sometimes when I try to run the game from Impulse it does not run.
End of StevenAus's quote

Most of the crash reports are for crashes on exit, and those I was able to fix.

When trying to run the game from impulse and it doesn't run, is there already an instance of Elemental in the process list? I also fixed a bug today where the game was locking up on exit, which would have kept the process in memory and not generated a crash report.