Bugs and frustration in XR 4.0

[antikangaroo]

This is my list of bugs and frustration behavior I've experienced in XR 4.0 so far:

• When I tab out of the game and back in again, the displayed mouse position is offset from the actual position by the width of my task bar. I should note that I've placed the task bar vertically down the left side of the screen to conserve (more valuable) horizontal space
• The game is very choppy; Even at 60 frames average I get pauses in combat, which can make dogfights really annoying. Even turning around while walking around a station can stutter. See my system specs at the end of the post.
• I've seen groups of enemies just freeze up and sit in space doing nothing. Most recently it was a group of Reivers in DeVries, but it's happened before.
• Faction reputation appears to be broken sometimes. I was killing a Taranis that was spawned for a kill mission in Home of Light. At the beginning a got a "thank you" com for killing one of it's escorts and saw I had a reputation of +8. Once I finally killed the ship, I got another thank you and saw my reputation improve to -7! When/why could I possibly have lost more than 15 faction rep??? This is almost certainly a logic bug. If you somehow determine that it is not, then it's a display bug instead. If I'm losing huge chunks of reputation, I really want to know about it.
• I really, seriously hate the enemy AI for the "kill a capship" missions. It seems incredibly illogical to me that these capships would spawn and then immediately kamikaze against the nearest station. They really need some kind of logic that keeps them out of the inhabited zones, otherwise the mission story makes no sense. Nobody would offer a bounty against a fool who is about to commit suicide. They do spawn fairly far out, but I understand that capship radar ranges have been increased in 4.0 - perhaps this is an undesired interaction?
• I'm unhappy whenever I have to wait for some kind of audio to complete. Most importantly all the bla bla associated with the main mission - is there a key to skip it? The other short samples while flying can also be annoying, eg "thank you for saving our station" when they occur at an unfortunate time. I'd like to be able to skip these too.

My system: Intel i7 4770k @4.7GHz; Radeon R290X (both water cooled) 32Gb Ram; SSD

[antikangaroo]

So, more items for my list:

• The ships that are recaptured during the main mission are all unable to move. I have the original Rahanas and two Titurel all sitting around the gat in Auspicious Excavation and not responding to orders. I thought I had this bug when I played 3.5 and that the solution might be to replace the captains. Sadly that did not work.
• Capital ship pathfinding in Home of Light and Toride is totally messed up. I got on one of my capships in West Gate, HoL in order to travel to one of the distant red sectors, and the capship simply would not leave the asteroid field. Open empty space to the left, open empty space to the right, same above and below. But no, all travel apparently must go through the asteroid field, bouncing off asteroids every few seconds and getting nowhere quickly Let's just say that I was not amused.
  Toride is just as bad.
• Did bouncing get worse in 4.0 or did I just not remember how bad it was?
  I took a wrong turn in a dogfight, got caught in an angled section of the nearby Taranis, bounced uncontrollably for a while and then found myself trapped inside the geometry of that ship. Couldn't get out and had to reload. Brilliant. NOT.
  If you feel bouncing is necessary, then at least decrease the total speed of the ship with each bounce, so that it quickly comes to a stop instead of gaining enough speed to go through walls.

[strude]

[*]I'm unhappy whenever I have to wait for some kind of audio to complete. Most importantly all the bla bla associated with the main mission - is there a key to skip it? The other short samples while flying can also be annoying, eg "thank you for saving our station" when they occur at an unfortunate time. I'd like to be able to skip these too.
[/list]

There is a mod call Silence You All that removes a lot of the blah blah from the game. I don't think it makes any changes to the main story dialogue though.

For anything that pops up on the radar screen while flying, toggling the radar mode will cancel anything on the screen at the time. Press it twice to return to the original radar mode. Not really a solution, but better than nothing.

[Ezarkal]

Did bouncing get worse in 4.0 or did I just not remember how bad it was?
I took a wrong turn in a dogfight, got caught in an angled section of the nearby Taranis, bounced uncontrollably for a while and then found myself trapped inside the geometry of that ship. Couldn't get out and had to reload. Brilliant. NOT.
If you feel bouncing is necessary, then at least decrease the total speed of the ship with each bounce, so that it quickly comes to a stop instead of gaining enough speed to go through walls.

I also noticed an increase in the bouncing.
Prior to 4.0, if you were caught inside an object, you could just set the autopilot on an object in another zone. You'd then ram the structure once or twice before collision detection would disable, letting you out.
I managed to use that trick in 4.0 too, but it doesn't seem to work in every instances now. 2 days ago I got stuck in the PMC station in Al - Far Our - The big empty, and the trick didn't work. It was the first time it ever failed me, though. Luckily, I had made a quicksave something like 30 seconds before.

When I tab out of the game and back in again, the displayed mouse position is offset from the actual position by the width of my task bar. I should note that I've placed the task bar vertically down the left side of the screen to conserve (more valuable) horizontal space

What's your display setting? Fullscreen? Borderless window? Is your taskbar in auto-hide mode? Try playing with these settings a little. It might solve your problem. Especially the auto-hide. I've often seen it induce display bugs.
Otherwise, do you have dual screen? If so you might want to consider moving your taskbar in the second screen. It would solve your problem right away.
Or you can simply put your taskbar on the right side of the screen instead of the left side. (That's how I set mine, and I don't have that bug.)

[antikangaroo]

There is a mod call Silence You All that removes a lot of the blah blah from the game.

Thanks for the suggestion! I've just installed it.

[X-Series]

[*]Faction reputation appears to be broken sometimes. I was killing a Taranis that was spawned for a kill mission in Home of Light. At the beginning a got a "thank you" com for killing one of it's escorts and saw I had a reputation of +8. Once I finally killed the ship, I got another thank you and saw my reputation improve to -7! When/why could I possibly have lost more than 15 faction rep??? This is almost certainly a logic bug. If you somehow determine that it is not, then it's a display bug instead. If I'm losing huge chunks of reputation, I really want to know about it.

I had this issue too early in the game. Every time I cap a ship during a kill mission it causes me to lose reputation points but I was able to overcome this issue by purchasing the police license and navy/defense membership. I really don't know how it's related but ever since I purchased those licenses I no longer suffer reputation penalties when capping ships during kill missions.

[Ormac]

• I've seen groups of enemies just freeze up and sit in space doing nothing. Most recently it was a group of Reivers in DeVries, but it's happened before.

My Guess might be that this happens when you kill the squad leader.

I had this happen in Shady Vault after I blew up a Dronstar. Playing chicken Dronstar pilot bailed the escorts fired on me during that first pass.
boosted around the highway loop and came back by the cell fab and the stations turrets were trying to shoot the idling escorts.

Not exactly nice and fair but I got some simple kills for a change. (Stations get so much target pratice anyway)

-- Ormac

[Chair5768]

[*]Faction reputation appears to be broken sometimes. I was killing a Taranis that was spawned for a kill mission in Home of Light. At the beginning a got a "thank you" com for killing one of it's escorts and saw I had a reputation of +8. Once I finally killed the ship, I got another thank you and saw my reputation improve to -7! When/why could I possibly have lost more than 15 faction rep??? This is almost certainly a logic bug. If you somehow determine that it is not, then it's a display bug instead. If I'm losing huge chunks of reputation, I really want to know about it.

I'm experiencing a bug where I lose rep with the zone owner if I kill a construction URV, even when the URV is in the "Enemy" faction. There's another post about this bug already, not sure how common it is. Since some capital ships have dozens of those things, that's a lot of rep loss.

I took a wrong turn in a dogfight, got caught in an angled section of the nearby Taranis, bounced uncontrollably for a while and then found myself trapped inside the geometry of that ship. Couldn't get out and had to reload. Brilliant. NOT.

Try going next to the geometry wall then entering the crew quarters of the skunk, when you come back you should be on the correct side of the wall. Only happened to me once where I couldn't bounce myself back out and this worked.

[BrianPaone]

RE: Losing rep in a zone where you're killing things:

Try getting a police license. Understandably, some jurisdictions don't appreciate unregistered vigilantes. I mean, if you ran around your hometown icing schmucks just because someone's offering pay and you don't have any kind of authority to do so, then the actual authorities are probably gonna be cheesed.

[ajax34i]

Game being choppy:

I've only seen this once on mine; my hard drive started thrashing, and the game went to 1 FPS. My guess is that it couldn't find a texture for something in the VRAM, and started looking for it on the HD. Even with an SSD, it'll still stutter. Fix was to exit and restart the game, and I press the quicksave button every minute, since then.

Incidentally, I have the EVGA Precision and a keyboard with a little applet screen, and the game starts off by using about 800 MB VRAM but as the hours go on, that increases to 2000, 2500 etc. If I save, exit to desktop, and then start X-Rebirth again from that save I just made, I'm back at 800 MB. So, to me, that says there's a VRAM leak, and I've noticed more stuttering as more video card memory is used and not released.

[RAVEN.myst]

[*] Did bouncing get worse in 4.0 or did I just not remember how bad it was?

Yes it did (get worse, that is) - they added collision detection that previously wasn't in, when traversing asteroid fields. There is a workaround that will improve your experience considerably - go to external view and zoom all the way out, while riding on a capital ship that's travelling through asteroid fields - you will enjoy the pre-4.0 behaviour, with the ship flying right through asteroids. Not ideal, certainly not from a "realism" or immersion perspective, but then again, the semblance of being stuck inside a pinball machine doesn't exactly do much for immersion either, while also adding the injury of time wasted to the point of zero progress!

[Nanook]

....

I took a wrong turn in a dogfight, got caught in an angled section of the nearby Taranis, bounced uncontrollably for a while and then found myself trapped inside the geometry of that ship. Couldn't get out and had to reload. Brilliant. NOT.

Try going next to the geometry wall then entering the crew quarters of the skunk, when you come back you should be on the correct side of the wall. Only happened to me once where I couldn't bounce myself back out and this worked.

You're replying to a thread that's nearly six months old, and I doubt the OP is even watching it anymore. For anyone that has bugs to report, it's best to post them in the Tech Support Forum, or at least, in a new/current thread. This one can be sent down, I think.