Balls on the reactor growing very large

[Wookie]

I was trying to complete the bonus time stage 99 reactions. I have found that at around 50 some of the balls start to grow on the table. One of them grew so much that it covered all of its surrounding hexes so I was unable to remove it! They are still solid so when you throw other balls they will bounce off it. They also never seem to deflate so I was pretty stuck with this huge cyan ball covering 7 hexed and blocking a further 3 (except from a very high optimistic shot!).

Is this a feature or a bug?

[grooviak]

I'm sorry, but that's definitely a bug. I have also encountered it a couple of times but whenever I set out to recording it, of course it DOES NOT occur ;-) So this bug is somewhat elusive and I haven't seen it cover other hex fields. Actually, I did assume it's only a visual bug that has no effect on physics - but it seems I assumed wrong! All the more reason to find and eliminate that bug :D

[Wookie]

I'm pretty sure it's repeatable on my system. Every time I get 40+ reactions a few of the balls start to grow and spill out of their cell. And the further i get the more it seems to happen. This extra large one was an exception but I find it very common and generally aim to get rid of them before they become an issue.
I'm going to double check other balls still bounce off them. I'm pretty sure they do but I wasn't explicitly trying to hit them.
I'm happy to enable any logs that'll help.

My system is.
6 core i5 24Gb ram
Titan xp
Original vive
Windows 10

I run on ultra and max rendering (x1.5 is it)?

[Wookie]

Also I raised this in general because I wasn't sure but as you confirm it's a bug you should probably move it to bug reports

[Wookie]

So I confirmed the balls are definitely solid.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2294540898

I that image you can see the green ball (from the end game spew of balls) is being held between the oversized cyan and yellow. I also threw balls at another very large ball close up (and a few others) and they all definitely bounce off.

Some other things I have noticed are, it doesn't matter if the ball is thrown or comes from the reactor, either can get enlarged. Also the balls are fixed in size when they become enlarged, they don't grow. Lastly it seems to be a timing thing, if I were to guess I think it is related to the gentle up, down motion of the balls on the reactor table i.e. when the ball joins the table it's size is determined by the position it will be in its up, down motion.

It is highly repeatable for me though. As you can see I had 2 huge at the end of the game and there were many others a few even larger than the cyan in the picture above and that has been true in every game I have played today. Even in that image you can see that the near red and yellow fill their whole hex, whereas the yellow and cyan in the middle seem to be the correct size.

[grooviak]

great, thank you for taking the time to take a picture! I'll contact the SUPERHOT team and tell them to fix their buggy game ASAP ;D

No but in all seriousness, this particular bug looks more extreme in your pictures than I have ever seen it. And if balls of the size are even solid and prevent balls from entereing the adjacent slots (and thus probably even making it impossible to remove them through a reaction) we definitely have to look into it quickly!

If you like, you could send us the logfile(s) from the game session(s) where the bug occured. You'll find them at C:\Users\(winusername)\AppData\LocalLow\Muikkumedia Oy\Rainbow Reactor\DebugLogs and they are helpfully named "SendThisToDeveloper" ;-)

Of course it would be easiest for us to identify the bug if you'd stop a play session immediately after the bug happens and then send that file, but we can also look through the others.

Again, thanks for your help!

ps: I had a look into the Steam forum admin tools but it seems it's not possible to move a thread from one forum to the other :P

[Wookie]

Logs sent. The long time between the end of 1 game and the start of another is when I was trying to work out how to send you the picture. Pretty sure I played a few games after that though.
Not sure the latest session recorded any useful logs. I think I needed to get to the end of the level rather than just quitting.
I'll let you decide if you want more (better) logs.

[grooviak]

thank you, we'll look into it :D

[Wookie]

I managed to complete level 9! Woohoo
I also tried a few other things.

The bug is not affected by the graphics setting, either the quality or resolution. Tried high and x0.5. I also tried colour blind mode and got large white and purple balls.

Something I did notice when getting towards the end of the bonus stage, the probability of getting an oversized ball seriously increases, I think it was almost every other throw. Also the probability that the ball would be huge increased too (i.e. earlier on many of the balls are only a little too large). Whatever this bug is, it gets worse the longer you play.

Also when level 9 restarts (which is a little underwhelming) the bug is gone again. The balls all return to normal size and the next few throws were all normal too ... then I lost my last strike.

[grooviak]

first of all, congratulations on the win :D

After looking into it, I assume the bug has something to do with thrown balls and "back pipe balls" slotting in at the same time. It could be that the start value of their "breathing" animation doubles up in such a case. So probably it only has something to do with how long you play, in sofar as the longer you play, the more likely it is that such an event takes place. And of course the later levels with high drop rates would have a much higher likeliness for the bug.

[Wookie]

If your theory is correct then if I time my throw so that it coincides with another ball slotting in at the same time then I will get an oversized ball (I don't think that is what I see but I can test that).

Also how does that explain why the size of the ball increases over time? i.e. when I get oversized balls in the early part of the level they rarely spill over into the next cell, but later on pretty much every oversized ball spills over. Does the speed of "breathing" increase over time?

[Wookie]

So I can confirm that the issue is not related to the timing of balls coming from the reactor.
Here is a picture of an enlarged ball on level 1.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2296669010

Pretty sure it's just to do with the timing of the throw to the up/down animation ... not sure what else there could be! Are there any config options I could set to turn off that animation so they are all static?

The only other things I can think of are, I am using Vive wands (one of the controllers has a broken haptic) and I always use the trigger. I pull the trigger as soon as I throw so I am holding it for a while before picking up next ball and pick up the next ball with the back of the closed fist ... tested and it makes no difference as far as I can tell even when holding 1 trigger for a long time.

[grooviak]

thanks for these new observations! They should really help to narrow it down.
And BTW, I don't have a Vive, but I found that to take a Screenshot, "press the System button and the trigger at the same time" … does that work?

[Wookie]

Not sure if it's worth adding much more to this I hear you're working on a new engine.

I recently got Knuckles Index controllers and the bug still happens. So it's nothing to do with my broken Vive wand haptics or the way I picked up the balls.

I also ran with the Steam Developer GPU panel showing and it is rock solid at 90Hz. Very occasional spikes (not really sure what that graph shows me) but the spikes never coincided with large balls appearing.

Tried med graphics and 1.0x resolution.

Didn't find out how to do the FPS overlay till after I stopped playing but I will report next time.

Each time I got the bug, in fact I have never played a game on level 9 where I didn't see it.