Arsene Lupin

I know what you mean, I spent a long time trying to rule out hardware issues, too. Went through a heck of a time fiddling with drivers, BIOS, and stress-testing my GPU. Not a lotta fun. To update on my game post-patch, after three additional attempts at the game I can probably confirm that the game, for me, is much more stable. It's still crashing on me, but after 20+ minutes of stability, which is an enormous improvement as prior to the patch I was lucky to make it 20 seconds without a crash. It's far from ideal, but it is playable. EDIT: oh, and for once one my my crashes generated an error message from the Deadfire application indicating the creation of a crash log. So now I've got an output log, error log and DMP file I can share. I've attached the output log, I'm unsure how relevant the other two files are, but if they're important lemme know and I can toss 'em up on GoogleDocs. output_log.txt

Y'all doing the hard resets, are you running the game fullscreen or windowed? I found that when it froze on me full-screen, I had to do a manual reboot, but in windowed mode I was able to access the task manager and kill the process from there w/out rebooting my PC. Also, while I didn't see anything specifically relevant to freezing/crashing in the patch notes, I just gave 1.02 a whirl and am pleased to announce that I was able to play the game for much longer without freezing/crashing. I was in-game for two whole minutes and moved between two different maps, and was then able to (for the very first time) exit the game and close the application normally! No idea if the problem is "solved" for me or simply "slightly better than the absolute worst," as I haven't had time to play the game "seriously" yet today, but once I do I'll be sure to give an update.

Hm... glad you found a workaround. On my end, I can have the client application running forever, it seems, but freezing/crashing only occurs after loading up a map. Longest period of stability I've had so far is maybe 40 seconds. It's possible it's only certain maps that have this problem for me, but it's hard for me to test b/c the very first map (the In-Between) is one of 'em. Yeah, I'm grasping at straws here. We all seem to have very different GPUs, CPUs and even OSs. There don't seem to be any common denominators with our hardware, but if it was purely a software problem, you'd think it would either be much more common or the freezing/crashing much less frequent. And what's really depressing if Obsidian has just as much trouble identifying the problem.

@thedarkbird I think you're the only one that's been that specific about memory, but I'm pretty sure I'm also using Corsair-brand DDR3 sticks. I have no idea how such a thing could be possible, but might this finally be our common denominator? The *brand* of RAM?

Ooh, cool! Thanks!

I've definitely tried disabling telemetry. Also wifi. Also the Steam overlay. Also the Steam client. Also DPI scaling and GPU scaling. All of the options I could possibly try, I have tried. I think I commented on this before, but that's precisely why this issue is so weird: people are reporting this problem on a diverse array of machines. There does not appear to be any common piece of hardware. If we were all using ATI GPUs, for example, that'd be one thing. Or if we were all running Windows 10. But we're not. And with this problem cropping up on so many machines that are so different, it's strange that it's not affecting more people. In other words, it seems like a very difficult problem to diagnose. And, no offense, but in general saying "I don't have any problems" isn't terribly helpful for discussions like these. Ultimately it only serves to diminish the people who *are* having problems at best, and at worst comes across as a kind of developer apologism. And I know most people usually don't, but I mean no offense. I genuinely don't think you intended either of those things. :D

Definitely! Thanks for the advice. I don't suppose y'all have any ideas about the yellow parchment background Obsidian uses? I guess I could try scanning in my watercolors and try adding some transparency effects in photoshop (though that doesn't sound particularly promising) or try adjusting the color balance to "yellow" the white paper. And maybe there's a filter I can apply that will give it that "old parchment" feel.

@GregoryBaltoro lol, you've been just as thorough as I've been. Frustrating, ain't it? (Though I'll admit I was unable to test more than one GPU myself). From what I can tell, this issue seems to be occurring on a wide range of hardware. I initially assumed it might be an ATI driver problem, as in my personal experience it's almost always an ATI driver problem, but it seems to me that virtually everyone else w/ this problem (who is posting specs) is running into the problem on very different hardware. GPU, OS, CPU, it doesn't matter. Which seems kinda weird to me as, evidently, the constant freezing isn't as common as I'd expect it to be if it were purely a software issue. I dunno, maybe we're all using the same sound card or something? Or have a very specific background application that is somehow interfering with things? @Yuliansavov I've no idea how to go about updating my mobo UEFI, but I'll look into it just in case. Here's hoping it won't take too long, as I've already sunk far more time than I'd care to admit trying to diagnose this issue.

Thanks! TBH I've kinda gotten spoiled w/ digital painting. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I love being able to adjust every little detail and easily undo/erase stuff. <3 layers. I'd say that my experience with my Wacom tablet might help make me better w/ physical media now than before, because digitally mistakes are so much easier to create, I've lost (hopefully) the habit of stressing out about little errors. I'll definitely try to share them when I'm' done, if they're not too awful. Should probably scan 'em in stages just to be safe--have a feeling I'll end up ruining at least one decent pencil sketch w/ the watercolors.

You mean PillarsOfEternityII.exe? Anyway, I tried it. Got about 15 seconds of play-time before the game crashed. Thank you. I'll admit I feel a bit better seeing that other people are having the same issue.

I'm playing the game well, well *below* minimum specs. But not by choice--since Deadfire crashes constantly and incessantly on my gaming PC, my only option is an ancient laptop that was never intended to play games. I get like 15fps exploring, lost of load times, lots of delays pulling up new dialogs and scripted interactions. But, even on the lowest settings, the game still looks good. (I could try seeing if lowering the resolution might help framerate, but TBH it doesn't seem like going down to 720p from 768p--laptop native--will do much.) The main problem is combat, as the game grinds to a halt if there's more than one or two enemies on screen. We're talking 2-5fps. I've gotta crank the difficulty down to the lowest possible, slow down combat as much as possible, just to follow the action. Actually *fighting* myself is not an option. It's really not a viable way to play a 70-hour game IMHO. Will probably cut myself off from playing much further than the first island to keep from ruining myself on the experience.

I prefer Deadfire's general approach in theory, but in practice, yeah, it feels a bit lacking. Feels like it could've benefited from a small inventory of generic map bits that could be stitched together to create larger "random" areas for the scripted sequences that end in combat. You know, so it's not *just* an arena, but also an opportunity for some exploration and maybe the chance to find a cool item, a new quest, or maybe another monster. To work, there'd probably have to be an extra option in the scripted sequences for when you successfully avoid a combat encounter to w/ something like, "keep exploring the area," or " keeping going." A more dynamic world map might help, too. Something like Shogun 2: Total War's map where a hand-drawn parchment map overlays the fog-of-war, slowly being revealed as you explore, coupled with the tried-and-true technique of new areas "exploding" into the map when you discover them. Maybe tie area/item discovery with a perception stat to give exploration a bit more depth.

It'd be nice to see happen, especially in a patch, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it. White March's new companions were barely integrated into the rest of the game, and from all appearances the three Deadfire expansions are even less ambitious that White March.

CONSTANT RANDOM CRASHES -- An Unplayable Game Hello Obsidian. I am revising this post because the "bug" I originally wrote about is much, much worse than I originally thought. I am getting constant random crashes. They occur 100% of the time. They make the game completely unplayable. If the opening PoE1 recap isn't skipped, the game will freeze/crash before the introduction cinematic (narrated by Eder) can play. If I skip the recap, the intro movie plays (Deadfire has not yet crashed mid-intro) and the first area--the In Between--loads and the game appears playable and stable. However it will always freeze/crash before the Watcher/Soul character makes it all the way to the Adra Pillar at the far right of the screen. Often the audio will cut-out, or seem to, a few moments prior to the freeze/crash. Exactly one time an audio line played to the end after the game froze, however. I have attempted everything I can possibly do on my end to diagnose and/or workaround the problem, including but not limited to: Windows compatibility mode (Win7, Win8, even WinXP) settings. Administrator privileges off/on. Countless possible Deadfire configurations--windowed, fullscreen, every quality preset, every available resolution, multiple vfx enabled/disabled combination. The gamut. Steam did, of course, verify the integrity of the game cache. I also redownloaded the game, multiple times, after manually purging it from my system (not a fun thing to do when you suffer from bandwidth caps) Oh, and I've also tried running the game off of an SSD, off an HDD, from the default Steam install directory and from a unique Steam install directory. I was able to get the game to run off of an old laptop, with an integrated GPU, albeit very poorly (10fps are far from optimal; combat is impossible) that doesn't even come close to the minimum recommended specs... but it doesn't crash. Using Steam cloud saves to load saves from the laptop to my PC (in the starting island, the world map and inside the cave) and... you guessed it, Deadfire still crashes on me, usually a few seconds after loading up the area. Sometimes I have time to move my party, but the game usually crashes before anyone can make a it a half-dozen steps. To be perfectly honest, I've been a PC gamer for a very long time and I haven't had this much trouble with a game since I bought a copy of Daikatana out a bargain bin for $0.99, and that game was quickly re-purposed into a Frisbee. My PC specs are as follows: 3.55ghz quad-core i5 CPU 16gb memory 2gb HD6870 GPU Windows 10 x64 (Note that this is a PC that ran Pillars of Eternity perfectly. And also note, as I've proved, that Deadfire is capable of running on a toaster.) My working theory is that this may be a compatibility problem between whichever version of Unity Deadfire is using and my GPU drivers, but only because ATI drivers are typically the cause of my headaches (whenever I upgrade, I'm going nVidia and never touching ATI again). But at the same time, the game does load and appear to render properly, so I have no idea. No ideas, just lots of frustration. Output file retrieved after recap crash: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13RPzhDTiaT_MdV-IeoeAOz8yzT1atwjX/view?usp=sharing Output file retrieved after in-game crash: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AxLN1f9scVlJvda2K00c7b6FeacD8GQp/view?usp=sharing .... NOTE I originally posted about this problem here, but am reposting it now because my initial assumptions about what was happening were incorrect. I will request moderators lock/delete the original thread. .... EDIT1 I am experiencing greatly improved stability after patch 1.02. I can now play the game for 20 minutes--sometimes longer--before seeing a crash! And, now, when the game crashes a window pops up informing me of the creation of the output log, which is handy. I've attached the new output log file to this post. output_log.txt

Heyo folks. Unlike many (most, hopefully) of y'all, I can't play Deadfire. At all. Because crashes. Constantly the crashes. So in the meantime I thought I'd try my hand at some watercolor portraits to mod into the game. Gonna do myself as an elf w/ a goatee because Evil Spock, and am thinking of make a Death Godlike based on Avery Brooks (who you may know as Benjamin Sisko) and an Orlan based on Ellie Kemper (who you may know as the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). Only I haven't done much more than pencil sketches (and digital oil painting) in more than a decade. It's probably been two decades since I've tried watercolors (kindergarten/preschool, basically). So I'm here to pose a few questions to any artists who might be floating around the forum. Specifically: Is it possible to use a minimal amount of water to prevent sketchpad paper from warping, or am I gonna have to go buy some thicker watercolor paper? Is it better to do the ink outlining before or after the watercoloring? Is there a good, hi-resolution example of Obsidian's water-color portraiture out there that would make a good reference for me (so I can mimic the style)? I'm really not very good at shading. Is there a good way to keep the water colors from bleeding into each other (or the ink)? Like, would a charcoal pencil or chalk or maybe something like a waxy crayon be helpful? Ideally something that would be easy to remove or render "invisible" b/c I don't believe Obsidian's water-color portraits appear to have anything other than ink and paint in 'em. Any general advice/tips for someone who hasn't done much 2D art in a long time without the aid of a Wacom tablet and sophisticated art applications? (Tablet is currently broken, hence my return to physical media).

Do your music/sound seem to cut out before it happens as if it's a warning something is going wrong? Mine does. Yup. Most of the time. Exactly one time an audio line played to the end *after* the game froze. Not sure if the audio is cutting out before it freezes or at the moment it freezes, though, as it can be hard to tell when, precisely, the game freezes due to it being 2D.

That's nothing compared to game not working on OSX.. I mean, it's basically the same. I can see the main menu, but that's it. Have to skip through the intro cinematics because letting them play will crash the game. Can't even make it to character creation because the game can't hold itself together long enough to do so. Deadfire is a hot mess.

Hm... I've never really monitored GPU usage. Watching the Catalyst Control Center w/ the game running in windowed mode, I noticed the activity percentage oscilated a bit between 45 and 75% for most of the trek rightward. It never hit 99%, but the moment the game crashed it fell to zero. Not sure if that means anything. FWIW I'm using an older ATI card. Guess I'll try maxing out the AMD overdrive thing, see if that effects anything, but I doubt it will.

You can get around that by setting the game mode to windowed. Keep the display resolution set to your display's default, and it will still appear to be fullscreen--only now you can alt-tab without crashing. And, hopefully, unlike me you won't have to deal with the game constant crashing at random.

I guess "constantly crashing, all the goddamn time" isn't a known major issue yet. It should be.

UPDATE2: okay, cool. The bug isn't less bad than I initially, thought, it's worse. The game just likes freezing. All the goddamn time. I've no walked down that silly abstract conveyance thing watching flashbacks to the really-not-as-compelling-as-you-seem-to-think-it-was main quest from PoE, and freeze. Freeze. Freeze. FREEZE. I have yet to make it to character creation. I have tried adjusting every graphics option there is. Every compatibility option there is. Ever option available to me, I have exhausted. This is *infuriating.*

UPDATE: bug persisted on SSD. Should clarify that apparently it was not the very last line of dialog in the opening narration (the summary of PoE1, if that wasn't clear) but rather the second-to-last (didn't realize there was room on the page). Evidently the game freezes while trying to transition from the PoE1 summary to the opening cinematic. And I can play the game now! By pressing ESC to skip the summary and jump straight to the opening cinematic sequence (narrated by Eder). So, it's great that I can finally play the game, but a shame it took so long to figure out such an obvious workaround, and also a shame that I didn't get to hear all of the narration--or, indeed, see if there was a second page or more of narration (probably not, right?) before the cinematic sequence. Still, while not quite the game-breaking bug I first thought it to be, it would be nice to see this fixed.

At the risk of offending someone by bumping an old thread.... ...I'd like to point out that HBS' recently-released "Battletech" game does exactly this. If you own it, check it out. They even went a step further, somehow, as their (insanely robust 2D portrait generator) is capable of applying different lighting to each portrait, and can even alter really subtle details. It's beyond impressive, and way more than I'd expect from a dedicated 2D RPG like Pillars, so it'd doubly--triply--surprising to see in a strategy game like Battletech. (And if you don't already own it, don't buy it, it's buggy as hell and is pretty much the poster child for why the Unity Engine has such a bad reputation among consumers).

Summary: the game freezes/crashes during the introduction cut-scene, specifically during the final line of the opening narration (at or shortly after the colon preceding the last clause). Assuming the final clause is a separate audio file, it may be crashing while trying to load it, as the voiced narration ceases at the moment of the freeze. Screenshot: I'm unable to provide a screenshot, as I noticed the Steam overlay ceased to function at some point during the cinematic (I could take a screenshot when the first paragraph was on-screen, but could not by the time the third paragraph was visible); the Print Screen command only copied the desktop at the time of the freeze. Details: I've tried to run the game about a dozen times w/ various settings ticked in the options menu, trying various compatibility modes. Am currently running the game on a Windows 10 x64 PC w/ an older HD6870 GPU, which I know has had some problems with Unity, but PoE1 ran perfectly, so... I dunno. I've also (of course) verified the integrity of the game cache and tried running the game with administrator permissions, with and without the Steam client. Completely deleting and re-installing the game is a last resort as, unfortunately, I suffer from that terrible condition known as bandwidth caps. Save file: not applicable. Output file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AxLN1f9scVlJvda2K00c7b6FeacD8GQp/view?usp=sharing Notes: I've currently got the game installed to a nonstandard directory -- D:\[[ Steam ]] -- I'm going to try reinstalling it to C:\, which is an SSD; if that doesn't work, I'll also try running the game on an older laptop running Windows 8 (assuming an integrated HD4000 card is up to the task) and will report back w/ the results.

I love the *idea* of portraits, but am typically ambivalent (at best) about the execution. What modern CRPGs need are dynamic portraits that allow a degree of customization. Make each portrait a multi-layered image to allow players to modify certain colors (eyes, hair, skin, clothing, etc.) and we're good to go. The problem with most portraits in games is that they're seldom very diverse, and rarely match-up w/ the character models/sprites. But it's not like that's not a problem that's hard to solve--it's just a problem that, evidently, is very low-priority.