2 replies to this topic

[Mixu]

TL;DR: Fed up with the technical quality of MWO. Why won't the developers take care of known issues and especially regression? What's wrong with the latest build? Is there a powershell script, registry tweak or something similarly absurd shipped with the client that I have missed?
<rant>

Usually people talk about ensuring product quality - is the Piranha development team following some continuous regression principle?

I don't often rant about things, but they've had several years to make a stable software product - and in terms of stability this game just keeps getting worse and worse in every update. I can't remember similar issues even in closed beta, in which glitches and instability were tolerable.

Maybe the development team should spend the next few sprints (or whatever development process is followed) to study the Cryengine, and learn how to use it properly - and instead of focusing on new cockpit items, fix the any old instability issues as well as the new ones that are at the moment making the game unplayable.

</rant>

Most of the times the game is closed, the Cryengine throws up and creates a crash report. It's done it for a couple of years now, but hasn't really bothered as the intended action has been to close the application.

Occasionally some gamma-mess-up occurs and the brightness in game gets ridiculously low.

Occasionally the thermal vision only displays a black screen.

Occasionally the game might simply crash during gameplay.

Occasionally the consumables just don't auto-refill, keep displaying the same dialog regardless of the choices, or what not.

The game hogs an incredible amount of resources compared to the appearance and overall gameplay experience.

...and these are ok. It's just MWO. They've existed for ages, with any OS install I've had, with any display adapter I've had, with any DirectX version utilized, or with any MWO build version I've tried.

-->

Now the most recent experiences after reinstalling the OS and moving to Win10 (the game was actually surprisingly stable in Win10 tech preview):

I have reinstalled the game for a few times now, have the most recent display adapter drivers, do have C++ 2010 redistributables installed, have DX 11.2 and 9.0c end-user runtime installed, I have run the repair tool on each attempted MWO installation after ending up with these issues (repair tool, really? How about a stable and finished product that doesn't need external tools, utilities and scripts to keep it running?)

The underlying hardware is old, but healthy.

In the initial start-up attempts after installing and patching the game --> Mechlab loads to the point in which it displays the background, plays the audio, and begins drawing the UI elements (a flash-based UI.....?). Right after the "Conneting...." dialog has closed, the game client crashes.

The client kept crashing for as long as I tried running it in 64-bit mode. After forcing the game to run in 32-bit mode the client surprisingly started and the mechlab loaded fine.
However any time some certain maps (Frozen city, Tourmaline desert, ...) are loaded, the client simply crashes every time, right after the map has finished loading.

In 32-bit mode the client manages to start, but is extremely unstable, apparently crashing under arbitrary circumstances - most annoyingly right after loading maps or during the gameplay. I haven't yet identified any specific patterns or actions that would cause the client to crash. A wild guess would be related to limited memory space, over-sized textures and flipping the table during paging, cache-miss or such?

Switched back to 64-bit mode and the game client didn't even try to start. Patcher is closed after "PLAY" is pressed and nothing happens. No crash reports, no log files (nothing even in system log)..

However, if the game is first started in 32-bit mode, DirectX11 mode is changed to DirectX9 and the game is then restarted in 64-bit mode, the client actually starts up. In 32-bit mode switching between DX-versions doesn't really make any difference - except occasionally messing the gamma/birghtness settings (even though they are at the default 0,5 the entire game is very dark).

It appears that in 64bit-mode and with DX9 the game manages to start up and even load the Frozen city successfully ..at least once.

Is this kind of behavior a feature of the most recent MWO build?
Is the game generally just extremely unstable on Windows 10?
Is there a patch scheduled for fixing these (or similar) instability issues?

[Modo44]

The explanation is simple: Fixing stability issues and various glitches pays less that adding another mech pack. Now hiring more artists!

[ShinVector]

I am still Win8.1 Pro... Quiet stable...

Not planning moving on the Win10 until it is at least 6 months older.