Bug: autosaving freezes game

[scormaq]

Each autosave causes game to freeze about 10-15 seconds. When I change autosave frequency from each 10 to each 30 minutes it freezes forever. Also, sometimes game freezes just for no reason.
No mods, hard difficulty, powerful pc.
Each time I try to start a new game it appears devs thrown completely new gamebreaking bugs, FFS

[SenorRagequit]

What are your pc sepcs?

[scormaq]

Processor AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor 3.70 GHz
RAM 32.0 GB
SSD, Win11 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
GPU GTX 1080TI
Screen resolution 3840x2160

[voidreaver]

Hi! In order to help I'd like to take a look at the save games the game has created and the log files. Please zip 'The Riftbreaker' folder from your documents and send it to piotr.bomak [at] exorstudios.com via google drive or wetransfer. I'll try to find a solution to that.

[FUNDEMORT]

it happens to me too. my ssd is seagate firecuda 2tb. about 3-4s freeze every autosave. abit annoying esp in combat. i set mine to autosave every 20 mins. i assume files+folders in Documents\The Riftbreaker\CampaignV2\ with .map extensions are the save folders. each between 4-13mb. so i assume the longer we play the more we built, so the bigger the save files, so it takes longer seconds to autosave? tell me if im wrong.

[Stimpacker]

I run NVMe SSDs, no issues.
1) Make sure BIOS is running the SSD's SATA or PCIe port in AHCI mode.
2) Make sure the SSD isn't close to full.
3) Some Firecuda models are actually hybrid drives - mechanical drive with SSD cache. A large file operation occasionally may exhaust the cache and cause the drive to spin up. Try putting your PC in Performance mode (not balanced, not power savings).

[Wisain]

Same thing is happening to me... and it is driving me insane. I have a really beefy computer and having freezing every autosave that lost 3-5 seconds makes it very difficult to enjoy the game.

PC Specs:
Processor: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900K 3.20 GHz
RAM: 32GB
Graphics Card: GTX 3080

[Stimpacker]

3-5s sounds like hard drive spin up time.
Try putting your PC in Performance mode (not balanced, not power savings). Set the HDD to never go to sleep.

[FUNDEMORT]

Originally posted by Stimpacker:

I run NVMe SSDs, no issues.
1) Make sure BIOS is running the SSD's SATA or PCIe port in AHCI mode.
2) Make sure the SSD isn't close to full.
3) Some Firecuda models are actually hybrid drives - mechanical drive with SSD cache. A large file operation occasionally may exhaust the cache and cause the drive to spin up. Try putting your PC in Performance mode (not balanced, not power savings).

i assure you its an SSD sir. its the size of a bubble gum with thickness of a credit card. its Firecuda 510 M.2 2280 Nvme. bought it myself 4 years ago in 2019 with all the official mint package with 5 years warranty for around $420. and installed it myself in the only M.2 spare slot on now my aging-yet-still-smooth MSI Raider GE75 laptop.

i appreciate so much your doubts on other people's comment good sir.

its 2023 and you still thinking hybrid drives.. wow...

[Stimpacker]

OK good. You're running a SSD.
1) Same thing as I said earlier - set PC power policy to max performance. NVMe drives also turn off for power savings, while there is no disk spinup, there is PCIe link retraining. Advanced power settings > PCIe > Link State Power Management > Off
2) When you have done #1, leave the PC running at Windows idle for a few mins. This allows the SSD to do garbage collection. Unlike HDDs, SSDs cannot simply write anywhere. They have to erase a whole block first and to manage flash wear, they randomize the writes. So over time all the blocks end up with written data. This is different from HDD fragmentation. During active idle time (not SSD sleep which it is turned off), the SSD controller will free up blocks.
3) Next, install CrystalDiskInfo and check the health of the SSD.
4) Next, if the SSD is more than 50% full, try to free up space. SSDs are typically TLC (or even QLC) these days. The massive cache that it has is implemented in SLC. So that means the more full the drive is, the smaller the cache gets. Then cache eviction policy may amplify drive writes causing more wear and slow down the drive.
Doing all this will help the game developers focus on their side of the debug. Good luck!

[FUNDEMORT]

Originally posted by Stimpacker:

OK good. You're running a SSD.
1) Same thing as I said earlier - set PC power policy to max performance. NVMe drives also turn off for power savings, while there is no disk spinup, there is PCIe link retraining. Advanced power settings > PCIe > Link State Power Management > Off
2) When you have done #1, leave the PC running at Windows idle for a few mins. This allows the SSD to do garbage collection. Unlike HDDs, SSDs cannot simply write anywhere. They have to erase a whole block first and to manage flash wear, they randomize the writes. So over time all the blocks end up with written data. This is different from HDD fragmentation. During active idle time (not SSD sleep which it is turned off), the SSD controller will free up blocks.
3) Next, install CrystalDiskInfo and check the health of the SSD.
4) Next, if the SSD is more than 50% full, try to free up space. SSDs are typically TLC (or even QLC) these days. The massive cache that it has is implemented in SLC. So that means the more full the drive is, the smaller the cache gets. Then cache eviction policy may amplify drive writes causing more wear and slow down the drive.
Doing all this will help the game developers focus on their side of the debug. Good luck!

oh God... can't you just stop?? whats wrong with you. im familiar with all those you said power savings, CDI, spare some free space, even letting my laptop on idle i do it all the times. in fact i hardly shutdown my laptop and just put it to sleep and that was fine according to many articles in internet.

but those are not the issues. i play many heavier games than the Riftbreaker without issues at all. Jesus dude you really should not look down on people like that.

words of advice: you really should learn to stop telling strangers what to do unless asked. even if you really mean well. stop think you are the only how know things. stop belittling people dude. that same person might be much more intelligent and know much more than you. it's just that same person don't want to waste precious time proving him/herself to you. it's pointless. Jesus.

[Stimpacker]

Sigh, I know your type. Come in with an issue but don't tell the support team what you've done so far to triage the issue. Then when given basic issue segmentation steps, you take offense and get all riled up.
OK I'm off then.

[FUNDEMORT]

Originally posted by Stimpacker:

Sigh, I know your type. Come in with an issue but don't tell the support team what you've done so far to triage the issue. Then when given basic issue segmentation steps, you take offense and get all riled up.
OK I'm off then.

i talked and read thousands support responses in hundreds of game forums. you didn't sound like a support person. you just sound like a gamer. i already said maybe you meant well. but you started with bad assumption about ssd vs hybrid drive. thats belittling people.

and you seem to divert the issue here is about the game Riftbreaker. it's not about my system or other people's systems who play it. yes, you tried to give technical solutions, but you missed the whole point (or you meant to do that). you acted defensive, you refusing to acknowledge that there might be an issue with the freezing seconds during autosaves.

if you really are a support person, than acting defensive will make gamers think that you are a bad support person typically trying to point back at the players (ie: your customers). gamers nowadays are not stupid. they know their systems, and they know if their systems have issues. and they tested into their own systems before they decided to write a complaint.

also there are others complaining the same thing. so no. it wasn't me who taking offense here.

[scormaq]

Originally posted by Stimpacker:

Sigh, I know your type. Come in with an issue but don't tell the support team what you've done so far to triage the issue. Then when given basic issue segmentation steps, you take offense and get all riled up.
OK I'm off then.

I played a campaign like 6+ times or so. Last but one was on December - absolutely no issues with autosaving (I don't remember having one).
And last time was week ago, horrible freezes. Nothing changed in my PC setup all along, so I assume, some nasty bug was introduced between my 2 runs, that's why I reported the issue.

Did this triage work for you?

[voidreaver]

Hey everyone. The issue OP described wasn't about the autosave feature holding the game up for a couple of seconds - it was about the game stopping completely. A small freeze is expected - we write down a lot of data during the saving process, including the terrain grid, which is held as one large data structure. One optimization we've done regarding the future co-op update is to change this up. Now the terrain grid is divided into a lot of smaller entities, which is much easier for the game to handle. It will reduce the autosaving hiccup, as well as reduce the save file size.

Unfortunately, there is nothing I can offer at the moment when it comes to trying to reduce the mini freeze you're experiencing. However, we expect it to get better when we deliver co-op.

[Shade]

lol today the game is out for like one week and still the same problem for a lot of people as we can see on discord