faithful freeze and crash

[IRCrimson]

I hate to make this a general complaint but I feel like this is the coldest, least stable build in the history of this alpha. I know there was a ton of work and development that went into this but damn... this is premature and unbalanced.

Day 1 fine, get my bearings. A few crashes but not too bad.

day 2 blizzard all day, can't do anything much, triple down arrow thermal all day, random wind direction that shifts 180' every 2 hours

day 3 blizzard all day, can't do anything much, triple down arrow thermal all day, random wind direction that shifts 180' every 2 hours

day 3 blizzard all day and random crash that night

I can barely make it from shitty rocky outcrop shelter to shelter without crashes outside and the constant, unending, daytime blizzards that change direction randomly from day 1 that make windbreaks useless for more than 2 hours at a time make it impossible to even jokingly try to map anything, not that the map in any way indicates north or even hints at where you physically are since it doesn't even center. I guess I'll just wait until the next update and hope for some improvements. The prior builds were NEVER this unstable. This build crashes more than Besthesda games and for the uninitiated, that is BAD. I just feel like I'm fighting the game engine more than I'm fighting the elements right now, though not by much.

 

The prime issue with prior builds which is the game starts at the absolute maximum difficulty and gets easier as you gather gear rather than harder to compensate for that gear persists. It's a literal crapshoot whether your particular game will be worth a damn or not every time you start, It's like a D&D game where you make a full character then roll a D6 to see if you choke to death on a 2+ in your sleep the first night before you really get a chance to play and you're just waiting for that lucky 1 so your character survives. It just feels like the game has turned from a casual survival experience into something that is truly not fun to subject onesself to.

 

EDIT: After further checks the issue seems to be memory leak related based on the logs. After the initial useful info just hundreds of lines of 

Internal: JobTempAlloc has allocations that are more than 4 frames old - this is not allowed and likely a leak
 
(Filename:  Line: 371)

[JAFO]

I don't see this kind of crashing at all in Win7.

It might help if you at least also mentioned which OS you're using.. Win, Mac or Linux?
(and while you're at it, listing your system specs would be nice, too...)

[Thrasador]

On Saturday, July 15, 2017 at 0:47 AM, IRCrimson said:

Internal: JobTempAlloc has allocations that are more than 4 frames old - this is not allowed and likely a leak
 
(Filename:  Line: 371)

I just spent the last two hours Googling that error, trying to figure out what it is and if there is a solution

From what I can tell it is an invalid memory pointer (memory leak) that is seemingly common to users of Unity 5.5...

Unity has allegedly fixed this memory leak in versions of Unity 5.6 and onwards.

I found a bug report from a game designer who seemed pretty reluctant to send his project to Unity for them to sort this bug out, lol

Here is that thread:

https://fogbugz.unity3d.com/default.asp?868528_k3b1goulbr0s5r8t

So I guess we will have to wait for Hinterland to upgrade their unity version again if they are not using 5.6 yet....I don't know what version of Unity the game is using.

Some other threads, designers seemed convinced that bug had to do with mass adding trees, but then someone reported having the leak in a game with no trees....

Some anecdotal evidence seems to suggest running the game in DX9 instead of 11 might help, and/or running the game in windowed mode....but those things may just slow the leak down by using less memory...

In Steam interface, click on "LIBRARY".
In games list, right click on "The Long Dark".
Choose "Properties"
Click "SET LAUNCH OPTIONS..."
Paste into text box "-force-d3d9" without the quotes
Click "OK".
Click "CLOSE".

You could also try adding that launch option with tld_borderless.bat to run dx9 in a borderless window....I think...

Or: tld_borderless.bat -force-d3d9

I haven't tried this personally though, so I cannot confirm that option is possible 

How do I run the game in Borderless Window Mode?

For players that want to run the game at native (desktop) resolution but not in Fullscreen mode, launch the game as:

tld.exe -popupwindow

There is a tld_borderless.bat and tld_borderless_dx11.bat that you can use to launch the game like this.

[IRCrimson]

Wow, that's a lot of research, thank you. The error itself looked memory leakish but my days of fighting games to get them to work are long over, especially when it's still in development. I'm just going to let this one go until the next patch.

[Thrasador]

8 hours ago, IRCrimson said:

Wow, that's a lot of research, thank you. The error itself looked memory leakish but my days of fighting games to get them to work are long over, especially when it's still in development. I'm just going to let this one go until the next patch.

Of course that is your right to do so, I was just trying to help solve the issue. Like I stated though this leak is a failing of Unity 5.5 itself, not so much The Long Dark. Unless you consider Hinterland's decision to run their game with the Unity engine a failing....

[IRCrimson]

Tried again at the Wintermute release. Things looked fantastic until the memory leak crash hit again. It seemed to take significantly longer this time so it's progress. The Wintermute content and design is just... absolutely stunning, and I'm really hoping Hinterlands figures out a work-around for the memory leak in Unity soon. This is really fantastic work, and the engine is just hindering it, painfully. I want to fully love this! Can't wait for the next update!