Let's talk about the in-game stuttering

[Wanderlust]

I love this game, even though I've had to perform many unnatural acts to get to a point where I can avoid the many common and easy traps for the unwary to find the joy.

But the one thing that threatens to be a deal breaker for me is the ongoing stuttering that starts showing up once you have any significant amount of data to load at once (e.g., approaching a big base, riding fast on a moa). This is mind-numbingly immersion-breaking, not to mention dangerous and very unfun.

In various and many conversations I've picked up around the net it appears that the problem is not with anyone's gaming rig or connection, it's a result of issues with the Unreal 4 engine.

My question is, have the devs acknowledged this and do they intend to find a way to deal with it? Is there any hope of a move to Unreal 5 or later? Are there optimizations on the way? My understanding is that this is primarily an issue for players like me who are playing mostly on open world on a dedicated server, but I would think that's a sizable percentage of the player base.

Please say "Yes, a fix is coming". Fuses are running out. Thanks.

[oobymach]

Yeah I get slowdown on my rig, 5800x3d 4070ti, mostly it has to do with open world mode not being properly implemented, it was an afterthought, though it's the only mode I've played so far.

I've modded my game quite a bit though, unlocked cinema mode and a bunch of unreal mods to make the game look better. It goes from smooth as butter to so slow the mouse lags.

The BEST way to increase fps is to set the shadows to medium but this makes the game look not so good. You can do a bunch of stuff like setting simple building shadows to on but once you start mining world resources with long cables to connect base power to drilling machines it gets laggy.

[Spaceminnow]

Let off the "gas" when the stutter starts...
Allow the system to catch up.
It works for me!

[Wanderlust]

Once your base grows to a certain size, it doesn't matter how much I slow down on approach on foot, even, the stuttering is maddening. I think it's an issue with how many individual objects the Unreal engine has to load in on approach, which is why it affects big bases and riding fast on mounts.

[Tanyon]

Yup the more you build the worse it gets.. I've actually quit playing for the time being. I hope they figure something out.

[dave887]

Originally posted by DarthTanyon:

Yup the more you build the worse it gets.. I've actually quit playing for the time being. I hope they figure something out.

Same here. This game is fun to the point of being addictive, but this issue/bug was enough to convince me to find something else to play.

[J45]

I've been playing Medieval Dynasty (also Unreal Engine) Co-op mode and have created a massive village and i still get a solid 100+ fps with no stuttering or signs of slowing down. So the engine is capable of allowing huge bases for multiplayer games, i just hope they can fix the root cause otherwise like the above poster said i prefer to play other games even though i really like Icarus.

[DrLamp]

The stuttering was TERRIBLE for me when I first started playing about a year ago, to the point that I quit playing. However, the updates that have been made so far in the past several months have improved things alot. The game definitely needs more optimization but things are headed in the right direction. I hope Rocketwerkz continues to devote resources toward these efforts.

If we ask nicely, Rocket himself may elucidate what seems to still be the issues people are facing as seen from the studios end. Having some programming experience myself, I can tell you that optimizing often is not finding one thing to change that fixes all the problems. That's called a bug. It's usually pouring into the code and looking at graphs trying to find a way to "buy" a millisecond here, half a millisecond there. If you can get enough then things will "feel smoother" when played.

I've heard syncing up audio cues to animations for things like guns can be real tricky. That sharp crack or pop or bang has to happen at JUST the right time to feel crisp. Audio engineers don't get enough love in my humble opinion. That's a hard job.

[Wheelieboat]

dx11 on my rig uses 13Gb of the 32Gb of ram. Dx12 uses 30gb of my 32gb.

Dx12 runs better on my rig. Especially around my base.

[Wanderlust]

Interesting. I'll try that out just for kicks. I'm putting the game aside for a few months due to other issues (my wife's workshop items disappear after every mission no matter what sequence she uses to bring the stuff down after the mission. It's just too frustrating), but before I go I want to see what DX12 looks like on my 32GB. Thanks for the tip.

[Wanderlust]

Didn't help. Looks nicer but still stutters like a stuck pig. Thanks for the tip tho.

[Areebob]

If there was no fix for this "loading objects" stuttering in UE4, Satisfactory would have been unplayable pretty quickly. Instead, it's MOSTLY smooth, with occasional stutters as it loads world segments if you're moving fast. A lot of that has been cleaned up even more since they switched to UE5, but it was on UE4 for YEARS and worked a million times better.

Optimization is the least fun part of making a game, and it feels like every single studio that makes a survival game just...skips it. They all kinda run like crap. Icarus does better than most, honestly, at least until you hit tier 4, at which point it gets pretty rough to hang around your main base. Meanwhile here's Coffee Stain Studios, letting you have conveyor belts with thousands upon thousands of items moving around ONSCREEN and the stutters are rare.