Bug: Crash to Desktop and Stuttering Crash

[Deviance]

Hi,

I've had issues recently after upgrading to 2.4.0(b). I'm experiencing straight crashes to desktop when entering the unholy monastery around 1/10 times. I'm also experiencing the game slowing down to a few frames per second and then completely freezing. I've checked my GPU + CPU settings during these crashes, and they are still rending 60 fps at a low temperature, so the issue appears to be in the game itself. It appears to be common for this issue to trigger when My Tech Adept is dealing large amounts of AOE damage to lots of enemies on screen, so I see this most frequently in Unholy Monastery and Maelstrom of Carnage. The AOE mechanism is the "shock aura when enraged effect", however even when turning this off, the AOE from Kataphron Destroyers triggers the same issue on both maps.

Is this a known issue? I noticed 2.4.0b patch notes were supposed to fix a number of crashes and stability issues, however it has gotten much worse for me to the point the game needs restarted every 3-5 missions. I've turned down the game settings to very low, ensured my Nvidia GPU is the selected graphics card (both from within the game and the Nvidia control panel) and I run the game in full screen mode

System specs as follows:

OS - Windows 10
CPU - Intel 17-8750 (hex core)
GPU - Nvidia RTX 2060
Ram - 16gb

Any help would be appreciated!

[TEKnowledgy]

i wonder if this isn't a side effect of this: https://steamcommunity.com/app/527430/discussions/0/3145179175826219188/

[proba 1 2 3]

You encounter these crash issues only in Maelstrom of Carnage and in Unholy Cathedral? Nowhere else?

[Schalimah]

I have had these issues since season 1.
I can recreate it consistently within 3-5 runs of Maelstrom of Carnage.
I did see the issue as well on "normal" missions but it takes way longer.
It took around 5 - 6 hours untill it occured.
Frame rate drops massively.
On MoC it usually crashes a couple seconds later, whereas in normal missions I can usually complete the mission.
If I make it back to the bridge everything is back to normal, but if I start another mission the issue returns and almost immediately crashes the game.

[Malkenon]

I haven't noticed a specific pattern in my crashes, unfortunately, but I do know that since the update my game has been pretty unstable. Sometimes I can play for hours without it crashing, other times only 5 minutes. Sometimes I'm in the middle of a mission, running down a hallway, other times I'm on my ship or looking in my inventory. I'll try to detect more of a pattern, but all I know for certain is that I didn't - or very rarely - crashed before the update, but now I expect to crash all the time.

[Deviance]

Originally posted by proba 1 2 3:

You encounter these crash issues only in Maelstrom of Carnage and in Unholy Cathedral? Nowhere else?

I played some void crusades last night with no issues (about 6 missions). I have experienced the frame slowdown on the campaign, but it takes much longer to recreate. I'm having the exact same experience Schalimah described, I bought the game towards the end of Season 2, but only recently started having enough free time to play multiple missions in a row. This almost always is triggered during large enemy densities with lots of AOE occurring.

The most consistent way to recreate this issue has been to play Unholy Cathedral, as there will eventually be numerous tough enemies to perform lots of AOE on. I can consistently recreate this issue within 3-5 runs, which leads to the game stuttering (and 1 second on the Unholy Cathedral timer will take multiple seconds), but having my frame rate / CPU / GPU monitor reporting 60FPS (my capped rate) with low temperatures / utilization.

The reason this is less of an issue in other missions is because there tends to be lower enemy pack density then the two mentioned above.

[Deviance]

Originally posted by TEKnowledgy:

i wonder if this isn't a side effect of this: https://steamcommunity.com/app/527430/discussions/0/3145179175826219188/

That's interesting, that would explain a lot of what I'm experiencing. I'll set up my monitoring tools to see if the GPU memory usage hits a certain threshold before crashing. The maps above could certainly increase the rate at which this condition occurs, as they have a much higher number of enemies during a single mission than other maps, which would certainly accelerate any memory leak. 3 - 5 missions of Unholy Cathedral / Maelstrom produces a crash in under an hour which I'm much more likely to notice, rather roughly 5-6 hours of playing void crusades / normal campaign which I would rarely have the time to do.

[Deviance]

I tested the memory whilst paying last night, and it doesn't appear to be the root cause of the issue. Got to the fifth run of Unholy Cathedral, and it crashed like clockwork. VRAM was at 1.8gb and system RAM was at 7.5GB / 16 GB. I'll try a few more over the weekend, but for my setup the memory leak doesn't appear to be the source of the issue for me.

[TEKnowledgy]

Originally posted by Deviance:

I tested the memory whilst paying last night, and it doesn't appear to be the root cause of the issue. Got to the fifth run of Unholy Cathedral, and it crashed like clockwork. VRAM was at 1.8gb and system RAM was at 7.5GB / 16 GB. I'll try a few more over the weekend, but for my setup the memory leak doesn't appear to be the source of the issue for me.

Good to know still stay away from minimizing It's not good for ya lol. Stay game focused if at all possible.

[edfrancis001]

ive had this a lot on the valorous hearts thing, with the waves of demons and orbital thing, first 3-4 are fine then frames slow to a stop and game crashes, if you exit to bridge it seems ok, but next game will insta freeze, only exiting to desktop and back in fixes it

[Deviance]

Originally posted by edfrancis001:

ive had this a lot on the valorous hearts thing, with the waves of demons and orbital thing, first 3-4 are fine then frames slow to a stop and game crashes, if you exit to bridge it seems ok, but next game will insta freeze, only exiting to desktop and back in fixes it

Yeah this has been my experience too. I've done quite a bit of testing and memory doesn't seem to be an issue, I have 6gb of VRAM and at worst the game only taking up 2.5gb with very low settings, and normal memory is 10-12gb / 16gb of system Ram. There was a patch today so I'll do some more testing to see if it's more stable now and let you know how it goes.

[TEKnowledgy]

read the leak post i figured out why i was leaking its a game related bug but seems to be in relation to 3rd party overlays other than steam.

[Deviance]

Originally posted by TEKnowledgy:

read the leak post i figured out why i was leaking its a game related bug but seems to be in relation to 3rd party overlays other than steam.

Glad you figured it out, I've had to give up on this game for now as the crashes are too frequent to make for an enjoyable playing experience. It's a shame as it is a good game!

[Grim@FU_BARRACUDA]

Originally posted by Schalimah:

I have had these issues since season 1.
I can recreate it consistently within 3-5 runs of Maelstrom of Carnage.
I did see the issue as well on "normal" missions but it takes way longer.
It took around 5 - 6 hours untill it occured.
Frame rate drops massively.
On MoC it usually crashes a couple seconds later, whereas in normal missions I can usually complete the mission.
If I make it back to the bridge everything is back to normal, but if I start another mission the issue returns and almost immediately crashes the game.

I can also confirm this, i had it 2 times in normal missions and 1 time in moc in the last 3 weeks. I always play with afterburner overlay, it seems that it is hard to reproduce in normal mission, so i cant say anthing new about it, I just wanted to confirm it aswell. The only thing i can say for sure is that i never had it befor these 3 weeks, but i guess that was just luck.

I hope you find a fix neocore ;-)