BUG - freeze in skill menu

[dawashere]

I've been enjoying the game so far. It's a great tactical.

However I'm dealing with issues in the menus, especially the skill menu for Zoe, Marcus and the warden. I've seen the devs reply to some topics so I wanted to report thisThe game freezes once the menu have poped up and I have to manually force the game to close. I'm at Amber Harbor level and it seems to happen more and more, probably because there are several characters that seem to trigger this bug. It also happened twice in the usable store in the past hour of my playthrough. The freeze mostly happen in the quarters but it also has happened during the episodes.

My config :
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core 3.70GHz
Ram 32 Go
Windows 10 up to date
GTX 1050 Ti drivers up to date, I think I'm going to check and I'll edit if not.

[Artificer Jan | Lead Designer]

Sorry to hear that. Some players still seem to experience stability issues because of problems with the codec that we use for the cutscenes and tutorial videos.

We currently have our hands full with our upcoming title, Sumerian Six, but I hope we'll be able to work out a definitive fix for this once things have settled down a bit.

I'll also try to find out if our tech people know some way to eliminate those freezes on the user's end.

[Artificer Jan | Lead Designer]

Okay, here's an idea: go into the game's folder, specifically it's "Movies" directory. You will find it wherever you're installing your Steam games and it will be something like this:
steamapps\common\Showgunners\ArtificerOne\Content\Movies

There rename the two folders named "AbilityPreviews" to literally anything else. Make sure you also get the one in the "H264" subfolder.

If you do this, the game should only display white squares instead of the preview videos on the skill tree and inventory screens. Chances are that this will put an end to the freezes, though.

I'd be very grateful if you tried this and reported back if it worked. It might help us in finding a more legitimate solution in the future.

Also, chances are that the freezes are actually caused by outdated codecs. Before you disable videos via the method I described above you may want to try installing the K-Lite Codec Pack - I think the Basic version should do.

[VonFIDDE]

Renamed the folder for AbilityPreviews, seems to have solved my issue.

[Artificer Jan | Lead Designer]

Originally posted by VonFIDDE:

Renamed the folder for AbilityPreviews, seems to have solved my issue.

Thanks for letting us know. I hope that we will be able to deliver a definitive clean fix eventually but it's good to know that this hacky solution at least allows players to get past the freezes.

[dawashere]

Hi again ! I installed k-lite. Didn't change very much but I leveled up to max my characters rught after that and finished the game, which I definitely find awesome.

I couldn't try to rename the folders as I reached the end of the game. I will redo the campaign on stream in a few weeks, I'll try that fix ! I will let you know then if it fixed the problem for me too.

Thanks for your replies.

[Artificer Jan | Lead Designer]

Originally posted by dawashere:

Hi again ! I installed k-lite. Didn't change very much but I leveled up to max my characters rught after that and finished the game, which I definitely find awesome.

Thanks, that's also useful information. As far as I'm aware we've never even managed to reproduce the issue on our end and that's the reason why all attempts to fix it have been shots in the dark. I guess we can at least eliminate outdated codecs as a cause now.

Originally posted by dawashere:

Thanks for your replies.

Thank you for buying and playing our game! Happy to hear that you enjoyed it!