Game crashes and sometimes "bricks" my PC

[Kelevra142]

As the title says. My game crashes very often. 

 

• Often when I'm approaching a Market on Alioth and there are too much Advertising and Shop Constructs.
• Sometimes it crashes while flying atmospheric and big player-built structures are being rendered.
• A few times it crashed while just mining underground.

 

 

When these crashes occur almost always DU is taking down something else with it.

 

For Example:

 

• Sometimes it bugs my Videocard so that my 2nd screen just goes to standby and I have to uninstall my graphicscard in the Device Manager.
• Sometimes it bugs my VoIP programm (our Mumble server a friend set up at home) so that I cant hear my friends anymore and my microphone appears to be active all the time, but they cant hear me also.
• Sometimes it makes my wallpapers on both screens disappear so that they are just black.
• Sometimes it crashes Chrome Browser too, stopping the Video I'm watching or shutting down the Page I'm on and saying "Oops. Something went wrong". Chrome has to be restarted

 

There were a few other aftermaths that occured less often and some of them I don't remember but ONCE I even had to hard reset the whole PC because it bricked.

And I almost always have to restart the PC since it's becoming slower after a crash.

 

 

 

But one crash I can "safely" reproduce everytime since yesterday (playing for a week now) is the following:

 

I'm at my base building my ship, when I place a wing for example and quickly double tap so I leave and re-enter the building mode

(for me wings or airbrakes etc. dont always automatically update their color. i.e. when they are obstructed and wont work),

it always crashes if I have selected an element that the game "de-renders" and has to load in again.

 

I could live with the occasional game crashes while I'm approaching a market, but now the game is slowly becoming unplayable.

 

I tried adjusting the pagefile, have cleared the cache multiple times and reduced the threads to 1 from 2.

 

 

If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

 

Kelevra

[Uajrh1]

What are your specs?  Also, I recommend closing your browsers while playing DU.

 

[Kelevra142]

Its an

i5-6600 @3,30GHz

16GB Ram

Geforce 1070 

 

playing in 1440p

[sHuRuLuNi]

Yes, I've had some 30 crashes in the last 2-3 days. Latest one was today, just as I lifted off near Market 7. 

[GraXXoR]

Hot Holy Damn!!! It actually bricked your PC?

THIS IS COMPLETELY OUTRAGEOUS!!

 

I hope you ask DU to reimburse you the cost of sending your PC back to the vendor for repair. Or at least just the motherboard or graphics card for reflagging/repair..

 

or did you buy a new one each time? You should send the bill the JC. 

 

or did it not actually brick your computer at all and just damage your driver settings? ?

[Dupont]

Feels like a memory leak in the graphics card code to me. If I have had DU running, my computer needs a full shutdown to clear it within 5 minutes of exiting. Rebooting the operating system without power cut to the graphics card isn't enough.

Yeah, doesn't happen with other graphics intensive games. Graphics card coding is very hard, and debugging it is even harder. Might be a while before they fix this...

[joaocordeiro]

Hum a reproducible bug like that. 

 

My uninformed guess would be somekind of disk->ram near infinite loop. 

 

This could be 2 processes

1 Ram exhaustion

DU quite often spikes in ram. Maintaining a low ram usage in average but spiking 10-20GB for a few seconds. 

I have only seen this happen when traveling at high speed and loading terrain. 

For ppl with 32gb or less this can be deadly. 

Lack of ram will impact every program in your computer making it go wako, sometimes showing data transfer between programa. Graphic disruption like crazy patterns apearing on screen, blue screens, but also total unresponsive hardware needing a full power cycle. 

 

2 CPU unavailability

Basicaly the same problem that happens above. But with better hardware. 

So if you have a large amount of free space you are not that likely to exaust ram. 

But if your disk is fast like 3GB/s NVME and/or your network is gbit low latency fiber, your computer's ability to get data to process, either from DU servers and/or cache can overwhelm the CPU. 

Completely stopping any other process from getting a hold of the Processor. 

This is usually below 1sec. But some ppl reported more. 

Extended CPU blockage can lead to errors in other programs, specially to hardware related calls like discord accepting packages or failed disk sync. 

 

A GPU problem (hardware or software) was on the table at some point but i ruled it out, because GPU problems either crash the computer completely or do not affect other programs, just DU. 

 

Im also assuming that your GPU has dedicated ram. 

 

The main issue here is that DU appears to lack an intelligent thread controller. 

It appears that any part of the game, no matter its importance is free to launch any number of threads, with the same priority of each other. 

It also appears that there is little to no performance evaluation on any of those thread. 

 

An example of this was a issue some earlier version had where closing the F1 help menu would make CPU spike for like 5 secs. 

Programmers can be excused for a bug there, we are all humans and we all make mistakes. 

But why is a helper UI in the position to spawns endless threads, making all my 16vcores go unresponsive? 

It is quite obvious that closing a F1 menu is a low priority operation. Surely the game needs to stop the running browser rendering, sure it needs to free the ram used by it, but that could be done over a long period of 30 secs if needed. No reason to block the entire game for 5 secs.... 

 

There should be a thread controller saying that operation was hard limited to 1/4 of total vcores and running with a low priority. 

 

But this pice of technology does not appear to be there. 

Instead of a

core.startthread(tag, class, priority, limit)

They have a

core.startthread(class)

 

If my belief is true, this is a major issue.

Because this needs to be changed.

Because this would require to change something that should be stable at alpha1. 

[Uajrh1]

21 hours ago, Kelevra142 said:

Its an

i5-6600 @3,30GHz

16GB Ram

Geforce 1070 

 

playing in 1440p

You have around the same specs as me. If you close browsers and turn graphics down you won't crash ever really.

[Kelevra142]

Thank you for all your replies so far! 

 

So yesterday I played the game for about 6 hours without any crash. Even when I was approaching different Markets. It was awesome.

But when I closed the game it crashed (without crash report) and now the game won't start again. Guess im just re-installing.

 

It seems that  the PC and the game needed some time after I tried the things I listed in my original post because one day later I could play without any disturbance. 

After so many problems with any other game I would usually have dumped it but something keeps me still wanting to play DU.

We will see what the updates will bring in regards of stability.

 

[Kelevra142]

On 2/11/2021 at 2:06 AM, GraXXoR said:

Hot Holy Damn!!! It actually bricked your PC?

THIS IS COMPLETELY OUTRAGEOUS!!

 

I hope you ask DU to reimburse you the cost of sending your PC back to the vendor for repair. Or at least just the motherboard or graphics card for reflagging/repair..

 

or did you buy a new one each time? You should send the bill the JC. 

 

or did it not actually brick your computer at all and just damage your driver settings? ?

Oh and you very special Specimen know exactly what I mean by "bricked" if you read the post. 

[GraXXoR]

1 minute ago, Kelevra142 said:

Oh and you very special Specimen know exactly what I mean by "bricked" if you read the post. 

So by that token you're saying I can just use any word I want however the f... I want without regard to the actual meaning... You're a lady with some very special ideas.

cool... A new entry in the Alternative Dictionary to go with the Alternative Meanings for all Alternative Facts.

 

[joaocordeiro]

1 hour ago, GraXXoR said:

So by that token you're saying I can just use any word I want however the f... I want without regard to the actual meaning... You're a lady with some very special ideas.

cool... A new entry in the Alternative Dictionary to go with the Alternative Meanings for all Alternative Facts.

 

Is this necessary? 

[GraXXoR]

4 hours ago, joaocordeiro said:

Is this necessary? 

I'm just fed up with hyperbole EVERYWHERE these last four or so years... pretty much the reason why a couple of unnamed countries are in such a shitty situation going into 2021...
Someone  just randomly redefine things like "most" and "biggest" and in this case "bricked" (which means damaged beyond the user's ability to repair) as they see fit and use hyperbolic language to get attention, and then when they get called out on it they get all defensive.

So, in answer to your question, no it's not necessary: This forum is part of a game. it's one of the least necessary things in the world.

[joaocordeiro]

3 hours ago, GraXXoR said:

So, in answer to your question, no it's not necessary: This forum is part of a game. it's one of the least necessary things in the world.

You are not wrong in the entirety of the post.

It was just the way you went hard on the guy, full of sarcasm.

 

You could just make a small comment on his situation and add a "PS: By the way, 'brick' implies that the computer will not boot, please don't use it in this case"

I know your objective was not this, but the result was:
1 Ppl thinking you just vented your own problems on someone

2 Ppl lose focus on the important subject of the topic

 

And by all means, I'm not helping on staying on the focus and I have done what you did 1000 times in the past and will do it again.
Just trying to give a friendly heads up.

[GraXXoR]

9 hours ago, joaocordeiro said:

And by all means, I'm not helping on staying on the focus and I have done what you did 1000 times in the past and will do it again.
Just trying to give a friendly heads up.

Noted! Thanks for the honesty. I do tend to get a bit too sarcastic at times.