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(part 2) No Man's Sky

Started by fragger, August 15, 2016, 05:54:00 AM

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fragger

Me again. In an earlier post, I mentioned a glitch that I was having where sometimes when I lifted off from the surface of a planet (just to fly around the landscape, not leave the planet) I would abruptly shoot straight up into orbit in just a second or two. Sometimes I wouldn't quite go into orbit, just very high up, and then I'd have to spend a couple of minutes getting back down because Pulse won't w@&k in that situation - when I try it I get that message about atmospheric interference. But sometimes I will get thrown all the way into orbit and there will be a fraction of a second where I'll see the Pulse visual effect. I can Pulse back down when that happens,  but because I'm then a lot higher up it still takes a couple of minutes to de-orbit.

I thought it was maybe just a glitch with that particular planet. But no, it's a common problem, both on PC and on PS4. I looked it up online and it's being reported quite a lot. I had it twice in a row once - I got flung up into orbit, came back down, then got flung up again on my very next take-off. It's quite annoying as not only can it take a couple of minutes to get back to the surface, but you lose track of where you were.

Some players believe it's most likely to happen when you try to lift your nose when you're taking off, but I'm sure I've had it happen without me doing that.

Hopefully Hello will address it soon.

fragger

Cheers :) I think the Atlas stuff starts after you make your third hyperdrive jump. I got fed up with being attacked by pirates every time I stuck my head above a planet's surface (they increase in numbers over time, it seems - at first it would be just one, by the final time there were four of them). So I jumped to another system for some peace and quiet. When I did my first planetary scan, the Atlas monolith appeared. I've also noticed that the Atlas orb is available for purchase through the Galactic Trading system - for about 2,000,000-and-something units ???

The new system I jumped to had the same hassle with pirates. I got attacked shortly after I came out of hyperspace and before I could even get to the space station :angry-new: I fought them off, but my shields were badly damaged. The trading terminal on the station didn't have enough of the resources I needed to buy to effect repairs, so I went down to the nearest planet to see if I could find some. It turned out to be another Sentinel Hell, so I gave up on it. Going back into space, I got attacked by pirates again and this time I got killed.

(During this debacle, I accidentally discovered that you can fly backwards in space! Just keep holding down your stop or slow down key - soon you'll find yourself travelling arse-first. You can't stop altogether though, you have to be moving in either direction).

So I reloaded and went straight on to my fourth system, which is where I am now. I hope these pirate attacks aren't going to be too frequent a thing or it's going to put me off. I actually don't want to have space combat. I want to explore, trade, build up, learn the story and try to get to the galactic centre. If I want to have combat all the time, I'll play Wing Commander.

I bought a new ship, a 24-slotter with some good weapons and shields. Cost about 1.8 mill.

BUT - That damned glitch is getting worse. Much worse. I really, REALLY hope they fix that, it's rapidly becoming a game-breaker for me. It's happening with increasing frequency. When I first started playing, I went for two days without encountering it. Then it happened once, and didn't reappear for the rest of that day, so I put it down to a one-off. Since then it has become more and more frequent - to the point where it's now happening every two to four lift-offs. Soon, taking off will be a fifty-fifty proposition, and soon after that it will be doing it all time, the way it's going. It's a bitch, an absolute bitch, and I'm about ready to shelve the game until they fix it. And if they don't fix it, I'm afraid it will be goodbye No Man's Sky.

I know it's not just me, other players are reporting the same issue. There is a patch on the way though, hopefully it will address this.

Art Blade

 :)

I just had a major problem.

At 9:24PM and 9:25PM, I created "restore points" (savegames) when arriving at a crash site of which I had decrypted a distress signal (it was a riddle of sorts to be able to use an alien machine that then gives you the location if you didn't screw up the riddle) -- I was there before 9:24PM but wanted to see whether I could get a different result so I rearranged my inventory and went back into my ship and out again, creating another restore point to which I would fall back in case what I had planned didn't w@&k.

Well, it worked, so I got into my ship and out and naturally it created a restore point. It was a bit laggy, actually the game froze for a second or two, for the first time.

I didn't expect something bad had happened so I ran about for some time, mapping and collecting stuff and so on. I returned on foot to my ship like half an hour later. When I checked the save date and time, it was still those two mentioned above while it should have been the current time stamp. I tried to make it save but no dice. THE GAME DIDN'T SAVE!  :o

I ended up running around and back, trying to get the blasted game to save. It would freeze for a few seconds and then (yet again) it told me that it created a restore point but it still showed 9:24 and 9:25  >:((

I flew to a new location, landed there, restore point.. same as above. I had the idea to use the local "antenna" kind of thing to save with it, the thing you use when you discover a location to make it count. I checked my discovered locations and named it before uploading it. Save game still showed the old time stamps. I quit and restarted.

Funny enough, this time it worked. However, I was still at the crash site but my list of discovered locations showed the new location that I had renamed and uploaded. It was on my list despite the fact that starting with that old savegame, I shouldn't yet have been there.

At least it works again after restarting the game, but man, I'll make sure I don't ignore lags or freezes when a restore point is being created. I'll check the time stamps every now and then just to make sure.. Now the game made me a bit paranoid.

From within the game, the uploaded location's name must be related to my game registration or else it wouldn't have been on the list. Which means, once you upload something, there is no going back.

I just hope that it was a one-time glitch but damn, that wasn't really a nice one. Imagine you do something really important and then it bugs out, convincing you it was still OK by pretending to create restore points while it actually doesn't.

That is a major bug and I do hope they find out about that and fix it, or else I'm going to react like fragger.
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Art Blade

I have been thinking about what might have caused that and I can now recall what happened:

- I solved a riddle and that gave me the location of a distress call
- I flew there and it was a crash site, I landed right next to it
- I inspected the stuff around the plane, picked up "normal" stuff from containers
- picked up a Pulse Jet Sigma blueprint from a broken engine (we all have got that one, already)
- I found a pod like the one with the red orb, it was a beacon, actually
- opening it, I had to choose between retrieving cargo or tech (a blueprint)
- I chose tech and got a blueprint I already had
- I opened a canister with my AtlasPass and got a Suspension Fluid

Then I decided to go back to my savegame because I wanted to see whether I could get a different blueprint as the tech choice

When I got the same blueprint again, I opened the canister with the pass and this time I found Antimatter which is really nice and the last component I needed for creating a Warp Cell with a blueprint.

So I thought hey, let's reload again and this time start with that AtlasPass box and see if I can get that Antimatter again which I did, so I had to rearrange my inventory, created the Warp Cell and now comes what might have caused the bug

with the Antimatter converted into a Warp Cell, I went into my spaceship to create a restore point and then I went out and tried to get a different result from the tech or cargo choice. I could reload and didn't notice as it was exactly where I wanted to restart. In front of the shipwreck.

That's when the game stopped saving.

So, I suppose that I wasn't supposed to "trick" the game like that, I was probably supposed to arrive, pick up whatever I chose, without reloading and all that, and then I should have continued with whatever comes to mind.

Hehe.. still, it annoys me.
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Art Blade

ARGH, it happened again!  :D

This time it MIGHT have had to do with the fact that I outsmarted and outran pirates who wanted to attack me. I flew with boosters (why, oh why can't I use warp or pulse to escape? WHY DO I HAVE TO FIGHT if I could just run?) straight down to a planet's surface and had those pirate ship symbols on my scanner all the time. When I couldn't get rid of them, I decided to turn around but.. they were nowhere to be seen.. but the game still showed me the threat. I landed next to an alien facility, went in, traded, went out and those pirates were gone. When I took off, the message was there again but I couldn't see any pirates. When I went off-planet, it showed a message with ONE pirate (whom I still couldn't see) and  later it were three (I still didn't see anyone) so I made a "run" for the space station ONLY using boosters because the game didn't allow other speeds despite the fact that obviously there were NO pirates around :D

[smg id=8947 type=preview align=center caption="pirate bug"]

That anomaly you see in the pic was in a different system than my first one but it turned out to be populated with the same guys. I could choose again which path to take and that tech guy asked for three words to trade in for help, which he then offered, right away for 800,000u. So they remembered my last 500k purchase. Strange stuff.

***

Now I disabled steam cloud synchronisation so it wouldn't load my current last saves from there and deleted the entire local folder with those savegames and replaced the savegames with a backup from before the bug. Let's bloody hope it won't happen again or I'm going to throw it out the window, at least that's how I feel right now >:((

If it happens again DESPITE that old savegame, I'll put it aside and wait for a patch.

DAMN I HATE IT
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

fragger

There are definitely issues with the game that need to be ironed out. I'm wondering if it would be better to play offline to avoid problems with saves. I haven't tried offline play but I remember reading somewhere that you can. Mind you, that wouldn't have helped with your pirate bug, Art.

I'm still having the orbit bug. It's very intermittent, both in frequency and in effect. Sometimes I can go for  a few hours without it happening, but once I had it happen on two consecutive lift-offs. It doesn't always put me in orbit either, sometimes just very high up. The last time it only threw me a few thousand meters up, so it didn't take long to get back down.

I haven't had any problems with pirate bugs - just the effing pirates themselves. Yep, they're in this system too - that's three out of three systems so far. I'm not counting the first system because I don't think anybody gets pirates in their starting system, but I've been attacked in all three systems that I've jumped to since. Why do the devs seem to assume that everybody wants combat in a game? NMS was NOT promoted as a space combat game! Combat was probably the least-mentioned aspect of the game during all the hype, which seemed to focus mostly on exploration and trade, yet it's beginning to look like it's going to play a major part in the game. It's not even good combat - it's absolute crap. Your ship has a tendency to try to align itself with a planet's horizon when you're n its atmosphere, but if you're in space yet in close enough proximity to a planet, that alignment tendency still kicks in and you get flipped around unpredictably when you try to roll or pull any type of twisty dogfight maneuver, which apparently is how you're supposed to fight since the pirate ships are all nimble little fighter craft themselves. The ship handling, and control, is just not suited to what's being asked of it.

An occasional - very occasional - appearance of pirates would be acceptable for variety's sake or to spice things up once in a while. But not every freaking time I venture out into space :angry-new: Why, oh why, did the devs think it would be a cool idea to do this? We don't all want to be Bill The Galactic Hero. Some of us just want to explore, trade, and interact with the aliens in peace.

I could so love this game - I do love almost all aspects of it - but that glitch and the overly-frequent @#$%& pirate attacks are putting a major damper on the experience. I might try one more jump after I've done whatever I want in this system, but if the pirates show up in the next system I'm gonna give the game the flick and wait for Civ VI to come out. I might even try for a refund.

Art Blade

agree, it wasn't supposed to be some sort of remake of Wing Commander (which actually was fun but here it just isn't) but an exploration and survival game. Survival is the part that accounts for all those sometimes crazy climate conditions and perhaps fauna. Or simply to keep your suit powered and your ship fuelled.

I have reverted to that savegame and so far it has saved. But now I am wondering, why is it that I keep getting restore points that are virtually identical? I checked the files and they're only one second apart. I am sure I didn't enter and exit my ship within one second and those antenna type of things on the ground after discovering a location can't be triggered twice within one second. Well, better twice than not at all but damn, this makes "falling back" impossible.

The downside of my reverting to an older save is that I have to retrace my steps and that isn't exactly easy, if at all possible. I miss some cool upgrades and I don't know where I got those.

The game got "mixed" critics on steam, currently "58% of 38,843 reviews are positive." What I read there was mostly "it's not worth 60€, wait for it to go on sale for 20€."

The game needs some fixes soon. I'd like to be able to switch pirates on and off or at least have a say in how much combat I want. It's silly to be a trader who doesn't attack anyone yet gets into a fight EVERY time he leaves a planet or station. I mean, how the flipping heck can pirates pull you out of pulse drive or warp drive or prevent you from running by disabling said drives? That's nonsense. Even Elite:Dangerous gave you an option to try to escape through an escape vector and even that game didn't sport pirates just about everywhere.

Same goes for those fricking drones. Why is EVERY planet of the universe populated with drones?
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Art Blade

OK, tried everything, deleting and replacing some savegames but either it won't save at all or two identical saves = one savegame to "choose" from. Well, better than none. :D
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

fragger

Quote from: Art Blade on August 16, 2016, 05:05:56 AM
The game got "mixed" critics on steam, currently "58% of 38,843 reviews are positive

I had a look at that. Maybe I didn't scroll down far enough (although I scrolled down quite a way, through about the first hundred player reviews or so) and I saw very few thumbs-ups - certainly not 58% positive. More like about 3. Most complaints are about laggy frame rates and CTDs. I had to reduce all graphics settings to "low", turn off AA and take a big resolution hit (1280p, still stuttery at times but playable. That was as low a res as I could go while still looking halfway decent and without getting non-widescreen aspect ratio stretch). Many people found the gameplay boring, which didn't surprise me, and a lot of folks had start-up crashes just like I did. Updating my graphics driver solved it for me but there are a lot of CTDs during the title animation being reported.

I think maybe Hello should have done a bit more testing and polishing before they released the game. But that's par for the course nowadays, isn't it - sell now, patch later ::) I would have been happy to wait a bit longer for the wrinkles to be smoothed out.

$60 USD ($80 AUD) was a bit of a cheeky ask really for an indie developer, regardless of Sony's backing. If the game was some kind of superlative example of flawless programming the price might have been justified, but it's not and it isn't.

I dunno... I could have so much fun with this - I do have fun with it - but that lift off glitch is a deal-killer. Some flaws in a game I can live with, but this one is simply way too disruptive. I think maybe I'll quit until the patch comes out and see if that fixes it. If it doesn't, I'll be hanging up the spacesuit and waiting for Civ VI to come out.

Art Blade

agree

I keep having problems with those saves. Now I get two different saves again but not always and sometimes the game just doesn't save. Whoa. In this case I don't care whether or not I am alone with this problem, it's enough for me that I've got it. I mean, really, a game that doesn't save? On top, it tells you that it DOES when it DOESN'T?

I am more focussed on "will it save or won't it" than on the actual game. Which kind of took the fun out of it, really.

And PIRATES.. I escaped from my far-away system back to my original system. I had to take three jumps from the system I was last at when the save problem occurred, there I had the pirate problem on top. So, I hopped through three systems and arrived, looking for the space stati.. and bzzzz.. scan.. PIRATES! And this time they killed me. All the way back to my last savegame some three systems back. There I cleared my cargo in a way that I only had stuff to keep me fuelled for the trip, and.. not saving the game. Back to windows, slapped the backup on (now, really, make a backup every time you save? Because if you don't, the one you've got, with the progress, might get corrupted or overridden? Seriously?) and started anew, trying to remember how exactly I had cleaned up my inventory. Could have been a simple "click on previous save" in game but no, not for me.

Really takes the fun out for me.
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Art Blade

Oh just to top it off, I can't even help myself during the game by creating a backup with alt-tab or restoring a file with alt-tab.. because the game doesn't go back whit alt-tab. It's just an application that can't be switched to. >:((

OK, I'll stop until the first (or next) patch is out.
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Art Blade

Maybe not.. I can't stop thinking about the game, I'm going to play carefully. But I am SO waiting for a patch!
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Art Blade

I am now part of the experimental branch.

right-click on your steam entry for NMS, go to properties, there should be a BETA programme (mine was empty BUT..) as soon as you enter "3xperimental" in the password for the "private" beta.

Once you did, a new download (20MB) will be available.

Let's see.. :)
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

fragger

Now YOU'RE doing it - posting in before I can :-D

I know just how you feel about the game, I don't want to give up on it either.

Incidentally, I just tried playing offline. The game can indeed be played that way. Not only that, but it ran better. My pointer wasn't so sluggish and there was a noticeable improvement in performance. Not great, but noticeable. Whether it would help with your save prob I don't know, but cutting out the cloud altogether might do some good.

I think I'll say bugger Steam and go with offline mode. I don't give a s#!t whether anyone else sees my discoveries or not. It might even fix that orbit thing. you never know... I might even start from scratch.

Dweller_Benthos

Seems we've all had some issues with this game. Hopefully they will iron them out. If I can actually keep it running more than 5 minutes tonight, I'll try it out more in depth.

In the tips link that mandru posted above, the third image down looks about like the bonus ship I got for the pre-order. I really can't tell, as I only had it in game for a few minutes before crashes. But it looks like a cross between an X-wing and a Battlestar Galactica Colonial Fighter, original series.

I always have Steam cloud save off, because, slow internet. My save games for Fallout 4 are 20MB or more, it would take hours to save those to the cloud.
"You've read it, you can't un-read it."
D_B

Art Blade

I like the cloud and it only kicks in after you quit the game, then the savegame  files will be uploaded. With 50Mbit it's not a problem. When I was testing around, I disabled the cloud and just again did it so I can start from scratch. With cloud, you'd get the last saves back again.. which is what the cloud is for. Good if you get a new PC, I love it that it just installs the game and the saves and you can go from where you left. Nice.

And sod it, I will start new and with that beta which is basically the upcoming patch.

Good luck everyone :)
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Art Blade

D_B, the saving or not saving thing:

I can't create a restore point anymore with my "old" game. That means, if you go to the options where you can choose to load the current or previous restore point, you'll see a time stamp of said restore points. Imagine they were 1PM and 2PM. Like, having saved at those times the last two times. Savegames aka restore points. Now, when I do some stuff on foot and get into my ship and fly some place and land, getting out creates a restore point. Say I did that at 3PM.  So I see the message and symbol, "restore point created" (at 3PM) but when I now go to the options and want to load a previous or current save, it should read current 3PM and previous 2PM but it STILL reads 1PM and 2PM. As in, it didn't save, I can't save. WHICH IS FUCKING ANNOYING.

That is why I tried the experimental branch. Same, but at least the alt-tab works now. So I decided to remove the savegame folder and disable cloud saving so it won't load from the cloud when I start over and fired up the game, started from scratch and saved. Success. I quit, enabled cloud saving and steam downloaded my new save files. I restarted the game and found myself where I last left it, so it works.

Only I LOST about 40 HOURS of progress. All the upgrades, money, you name it.

By the way, I tried and loaded an old savegame, alt-tabbed out now that I can, deleted the savegames and alternatively the entire folder, alt-tabbed back in and tried to create a restore point aka savegame. I got the message as always but the options said NO DATA -- I couldn't save. I still got those backups in case they later find a fix for it but until then, I rather play with a new career.
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

PZ

 ???  Pirates? drones?

I really do not like continual annoyances because they remind me of yellow jackets buzzing around my picnic. I do not  know why game developers feel the insatiable desire to introduce annoyances into a game, or if they cannot restrain themselves, at least give the gamer the option to turn off the annoyance.

I also do not know why developers are increasingly taking out the ability to create game saves.  All that says to the gamer is: "we're going to force you to have a bad time whether you like it or not."

fragger

I'm hoping the damned get-kicked-into-orbit bug gets fixed. It's back with a vengeance.

I'm starting to think the severity of the bug varies depending on the planet format. I only had it very occasionally on my last planet, but on the one I'm on now it's like 2 out of every 3 take-offs.

This current planet is like the one I called Scarlett (another planet where I was really plagued by that glitch), only it's predominantly blue, so I called it Azure. Same deal - no animals, few plants in caves and depressions, waypoint locations all over the place, very laid-back Sentinels, and moderate temperature so that the Exosuit power gauge doesn't appear at all (though Life Support continually goes down, but only very slowly). And an absolute treasure trove of high-end resources, this time huge pillars of Aluminum and giant floating eggs of Copper. I'm sure these planets exist solely for the purpose of making a killing - if you're willing to take the trouble to do all the mining. I made just over 800 grand in a single run (I now have 30 slots in my suit, and I filled 14 of them with Copper, another 4 with Aluminum, and I had a bunch of those valuable knick-knacks that you find in the big green drop crates. The mining took a while though - about an hour and a half).

I lucked out - the value of the Copper just happened to be 101% of the Galactic Average. I went to sell a bit more later (just a hundred units or so) and it had plummeted to 0.5%. Evidently I glutted the copper market with my little haul :-() Had I immediately done another big copper run right after the first one, I would have only gotten half of what I made previously.

OWGKID

Sounds like a mess still... Why would they charge 60$ for it?!  >:((
LEGACY

PZ

Have an issue with No Man's Sky or perhaps a solution?  Post here  ^-^

OWGKID

Yes, first would be: STOP PRE-ORDERING GAMES THAT ARE OVERLY HYPED WITHOUT WAITING FOR PROPER REVIEWS!!!


2nd: Wait for a patch

3rd: Or download mods that fixes/enhances stuff ;)

PZ, did you shrunk the topic down to 1 page?

Nevermind, looks like I posted to a board called "Now Being Played"  :-X
LEGACY

PZ

Quote from: OWGKID7891 on August 17, 2016, 11:40:40 AM
Nevermind, looks like I posted to a board called "Now Being Played"  :-X

Yes, I created a new category called "Now Being Played" and out in a new board called No Man's Sky as the first game in that new category.  I figured that we have so many games that the most talked about game(s) should have their own category, and then be moved to the archives once they are no longer being played.

We can easily create more new boards, or move existing games into the category for anyone wanting their favorite game in a more visible spot.

Art Blade

It is irritating that the topics have the same name except RE:RE: and so on -- I was completely lost for a moment :-D
[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

OWGKID

LEGACY

🡱 🡳