Game constant freezes and voice delay

• During chargen every time a new portrait is loaded the game freezes for ~15 seconds.
• Accessing the main character inventory or changing his gear causes another freeze of ~5 seconds
• All voiceovers are delayed for ~5 seconds. Extremely annoying.

This problems seem to be quite common. Other than that the game works flawlessly, even when the game hangs up the music stills sounds and the cursor works, you just can't interact with anything and the graphics are stuck.

Just chiming in to give some more information. My device manager was not letting me disable Hamachi, so I went ahead and uninstalled it, and now my game is working perfectly. All lag and hangs are gone. My primary internet adapter is still enabled, so I think this problem, at least for me, is limited to Hamachi. I hope this helps. I'm excited to finally be able to play. 

 

 

Also thanks bhutchison, you are brilliant!

Edited March 27, 2015 by Ozark

I don't have inventory lag either after disabling Hamachi.

Kudos for the people who figured that out. I don't know if the sound works better though, didn't had a voiced conversation since.

 

EDIT : Even the voice stopped lagging, Loading are still a bit long thought but nothing game breaking

Edited March 27, 2015 by Vaalac

Okay so I am unsure if this solution has been posted before but I just did this and it has stopped all lag via inventory, audio during conversations and portrait selection.  All I did was disable my ethernet adapter through device manager.  If you are using wireless I suggest you disconnect.  Once I am disconnected to the internet the game works perfect, let me know if it works for you! 

 

WOW! Unbelievable dude! It was IT! I disabled the hamachi network and the thing just worked! Thanks. But Obsidian need to find a way to get over this. But thanks nonetheless, the game plays so much better now!

Confirming that Logmein's Hamachi was the culprit for me... Talk about random. Thanks guy I can now start playing

Woerked for me Fine thank you so much :D

 

disabled Hamatschi network

I had an old Hamachi network thing in the background, removing it has also fixed the problem for me.

Confirming that disablising Hamachi worked like a charm. Thanks so much for posting that.

Hi Guys

 

Just to add to this, I didn't have hamachi and needed to disable my primary network adapter to get the game running fine.

However it looks like if i just disable TCP /IPv6 i get the same result, so I don't need to completely disable my net thankfully =)

I don't run Hamachi or any VPN, so this won't do me much good, but it's nice that people are finding solutions at least!

 

E: To clarify, I deactivated my local network and launched the game, and it runs fine! So it's definitely something connected to how Unity handles network connections, and not an issue with Hamachi or any other program of the sort. But I'm the kinda dude who tabs out constantly, streams music while playing, etc so I'll probably just hold off on playing until it gets fixed or I'm desperate, hence 'won't do me any good'.

Edited March 27, 2015 by Insurrectionist

SOLVED IT!

 

I didn't have this issue myself, but I was looking into it for my room mate that I share the flat with.

We knew almost for certain it had to be something with the configuration of the computer and not the hardware, because we have the same computers! I have no issues at all, he has all the issues!

(I'm a tech guy and a programmer and I built both our computers roughly at the same time - with (almost) the exact same hardware.)

 

tl;dr: It's a network connectivity issue. Yep, you read that correctly. This explanaition will be a bit long and can be found below, but make sure that if you have multiple network connections, that all are connected and working (including hamachi or other tunneling software) -or- open the network connections manager and disable every connection except the one you are currently using.

 

 

Now for the "why-in-the-name-of-..." explanation:

This is a very old and obscure issue with win7: Win7 goes grumpy when the network isn't working optimally. Now I know what some of you are thinking, "I'm connected to the internet just fine! I dont have any problem." - well the issue doesn't always show, having internet access and having an "optimal" network setup is not the same thing... (probably only the coders over at Microsoft knows exactly when or why it becomes a problem, but moving on...)

 

First some techincal background:

This part is going to get quite technical, I will try to make it understandable, but if you dont care much for understanding why you can skip to the next part.

A simple example of the existance and nature of this issue can easily be demonstrated by disconnecting your router, then starting and logging on to a windows7 machine, measuring the time it takes to start up, login and get all your apps up and running. It is a known problem that it can often take noticably longer if win7 doesn't have internet access. Why? What is going on?

Well this is just my educated guess (tech-guy and programmer so I'm fairly sure about it), but basically not all parts of the API understands the concept of being-connected-or-not. What the hell am I saying? Well making a network request takes time, it's normal, networks can cause lag, its basic physics and what not, so naturally, whenever you request network data, you have a time-out period of patient waiting before you consider the data missing, the connection failed, destination unresponsive, etc. Now if you dont have a working connection, ofc you wont get any data, like ever, but not all code and components understand the "connected" concept as well as they should - so long story short: They still try to connect, which fails, but instead of failing instantly, as it would have if the calling code had understanding of this, it waits... the whole time-out period before it concludes that the connection wasn't possible to make. In programmer lingo, what is happening is there is a blocking call related to network access that blocks until the time-out is reached. That is why the delay is so long. It is the length of the network connection time-out! Where several seconds is a reasonable wait time (for a bad connection)!

 

How I discovered the cause:

I was trying out all kinds of things, you know, the usual, update drivers etc, since we already had a very strong reason to suspect it was software  /configuration related. But that yielded no result. So the next step was trying to look at his config of his system, look at running apps, running services, or any other thing he might have installed on his system that could interfere... Well no luck here at first either (except I increased the general performance of his system by a tiny amount, by I digress).

So I then proceeded to close as many programs as possible (including explorer, antivirus etc.) and monitored resource usage on the machine while I was changing portraits in the game. Very telling test results: What is the computer doing while you are waiting for the next portrait to load..? Absolutely nothing - CPU at ~1% load, and then after ~10sec you get a sudden brief spike of ~50% CPU usage (<1sec) and the next portrait is shown.

Since I'm a programmer I have seen this issue before, the game is waiting for something, (a "blocking call"), and it takes several seconds... you can be damn sure its network related because not many things have a reasonable expected time-out of several seconds on a computer.

 

This particular case:

It turned out that my friend, who isn't completely untechnical either, had made an "optimization" that would terminate the hamachi-service (not the app in the tray, not the (virtual) network adapter, but the actual hamachi network service) when he wasn't using hamachi. This would cause this time-out whenever an application or system-component tried to make connections or route traffic through that adapter. Simply undoing this "optimization" of his solved the issue completely. (And yes, everything else on his network was working seemingly fine.)

 

To the devs:

Ask your programmers to scrutinize your code-base for anything that can trigger a network call that's blocking. Identify those methods, work backwards from there to discover why this happens on portraits and voice sound effects. Remember to scrutinize any external calls or library code you may be using, its quite likely you are calling a method that you had no idea could trigger a network connection attempt. There should be no need to access the network to perform these actions - but currently there is. If it isn't from library code its most likely an unintended consequence of how some of your components interact. Debug and use a tool to monitor network traffic to discover which these methods are in case you don't have access to all the source.

 

Hope this can help a lot of players (and the devs) solve this issue!

 

Happy gaming!

Hi Insurrectionist

Try disabling your TCP/IPv6 protocol, I don't have a VPN/hamachi but that solved the issue for me. good luck!

SOLVED IT!

...

 

tl;dr: It's a network connectivity issue. Yep, you read that correctly. This explanaition will be a bit long and can be found below, but make sure that if you have multiple network connections, that all are connected and working (including hamachi or other tunneling software) -or- open the network connections manager and disable every connection except the one you are currently using.

 

So if I disable all my extraneous network-connections (3 wireless adapters and a bluetooth adapter that aren't doing anything) and just have my local network active, that should solve it?

 

E: I'll try the above, thanks for the advice.

E2: I already had IPv6 disabled unfortunately, and turning it back on did nothing.

Edited March 27, 2015 by Insurrectionist

 

SOLVED IT!

...

 

tl;dr: It's a network connectivity issue. Yep, you read that correctly. This explanaition will be a bit long and can be found below, but make sure that if you have multiple network connections, that all are connected and working (including hamachi or other tunneling software) -or- open the network connections manager and disable every connection except the one you are currently using.

 

So if I disable all my extraneous network-connections (3 wireless adapters and a bluetooth adapter that aren't doing anything) and just have my local network active, that should solve it?

 

E: I'll try the above, thanks for the advice.

E2: I already had IPv6 disabled unfortunately, and turning it back on did nothing.

 

Mine works when i disable IPv6 but before that I just disabled my primary network adapter and it works.  Try disabling all adapters to ensure the game cannot try to call methods related to networking.

SOLVED IT!

 

...

Thank you, but do not work for me, again :'(

 

Hamachi and all VPN are uninstall and all of my other connection are disable.

 

Insurrectionist, have you tried disabling you network adapter, starting Pillars, and then reenabling you network adapter while the game is already running? It's not an ideal solution, but it might get you playing with internet access until the devs can work out a solution in the code.  

Ah, it seems like I got it working in the end - I just disabled my local connection and connected to my router through wireless instead, and now I'm not getting inventory lag or audio delays. Not ideal but close enough, thanks for the help.

SOLVED IT!

 

I didn't have this issue myself, but I was looking into it for my room mate that I share the flat with.

We knew almost for certain it had to be something with the configuration of the computer and not the hardware, because we have the same computers! I have no issues at all, he has all the issues!

(I'm a tech guy and a programmer and I built both our computers roughly at the same time - with (almost) the exact same hardware.)

 

tl;dr: It's a network connectivity issue. Yep, you read that correctly. This explanaition will be a bit long and can be found below, but make sure that if you have multiple network connections, that all are connected and working (including hamachi or other tunneling software) -or- open the network connections manager and disable every connection except the one you are currently using.

 

 

Now for the "why-in-the-name-of-..." explanation:

This is a very old and obscure issue with win7: Win7 goes grumpy when the network isn't working optimally. Now I know what some of you are thinking, "I'm connected to the internet just fine! I dont have any problem." - well the issue doesn't always show, having internet access and having an "optimal" network setup is not the same thing... (probably only the coders over at Microsoft knows exactly when or why it becomes a problem, but moving on...)

 

First some techincal background:

This part is going to get quite technical, I will try to make it understandable, but if you dont care much for understanding why you can skip to the next part.

A simple example of the existance and nature of this issue can easily be demonstrated by disconnecting your router, then starting and logging on to a windows7 machine, measuring the time it takes to start up, login and get all your apps up and running. It is a known problem that it can often take noticably longer if win7 doesn't have internet access. Why? What is going on?

Well this is just my educated guess (tech-guy and programmer so I'm fairly sure about it), but basically not all parts of the API understands the concept of being-connected-or-not. What the hell am I saying? Well making a network request takes time, it's normal, networks can cause lag, its basic physics and what not, so naturally, whenever you request network data, you have a time-out period of patient waiting before you consider the data missing, the connection failed, destination unresponsive, etc. Now if you dont have a working connection, ofc you wont get any data, like ever, but not all code and components understand the "connected" concept as well as they should - so long story short: They still try to connect, which fails, but instead of failing instantly, as it would have if the calling code had understanding of this, it waits... the whole time-out period before it concludes that the connection wasn't possible to make. In programmer lingo, what is happening is there is a blocking call related to network access that blocks until the time-out is reached. That is why the delay is so long. It is the length of the network connection time-out! Where several seconds is a reasonable wait time (for a bad connection)!

 

How I discovered the cause:

I was trying out all kinds of things, you know, the usual, update drivers etc, since we already had a very strong reason to suspect it was software  /configuration related. But that yielded no result. So the next step was trying to look at his config of his system, look at running apps, running services, or any other thing he might have installed on his system that could interfere... Well no luck here at first either (except I increased the general performance of his system by a tiny amount, by I digress).

So I then proceeded to close as many programs as possible (including explorer, antivirus etc.) and monitored resource usage on the machine while I was changing portraits in the game. Very telling test results: What is the computer doing while you are waiting for the next portrait to load..? Absolutely nothing - CPU at ~1% load, and then after ~10sec you get a sudden brief spike of ~50% CPU usage (

Since I'm a programmer I have seen this issue before, the game is waiting for something, (a "blocking call"), and it takes several seconds... you can be damn sure its network related because not many things have a reasonable expected time-out of several seconds on a computer.

 

This particular case:

It turned out that my friend, who isn't completely untechnical either, had made an "optimization" that would terminate the hamachi-service (not the app in the tray, not the (virtual) network adapter, but the actual hamachi network service) when he wasn't using hamachi. This would cause this time-out whenever an application or system-component tried to make connections or route traffic through that adapter. Simply undoing this "optimization" of his solved the issue completely. (And yes, everything else on his network was working seemingly fine.)

 

To the devs:

Ask your programmers to scrutinize your code-base for anything that can trigger a network call that's blocking. Identify those methods, work backwards from there to discover why this happens on portraits and voice sound effects. Remember to scrutinize any external calls or library code you may be using, its quite likely you are calling a method that you had no idea could trigger a network connection attempt. There should be no need to access the network to perform these actions - but currently there is. If it isn't from library code its most likely an unintended consequence of how some of your components interact. Debug and use a tool to monitor network traffic to discover which these methods are in case you don't have access to all the source.

 

Hope this can help a lot of players (and the devs) solve this issue!

 

Happy gaming!

 

Well this had us scratching our heads a bit but interesting that network issues are seemingly cause the issue. The only thing that I can immediately think could have any communication with any network is us opening a connection with the Steam API.

 

Does anyone here have this issue and is using GoG or some other service besides Steam?

 

Well this had us scratching our heads a bit but interesting that network issues are seemingly cause the issue. The only thing that I can immediately think could have any communication with any network is us opening a connection with the Steam API.

 

Does anyone here have this issue and is using GoG or some other service besides Steam?

 

Yes, I use GoG and many problems too.

 

(PS : Sorry for my bad english ^^' )

And as a note, we were able to reproduce the issue with a computer here that had Hamachi installed after this was noted so we will be looking into finding a way we can fix the build so it works fine without having to adjust network settings on your own computer.

Good news ! Thanks for your concern & involvement ! With the workaround mentioned above I eventually can fully enjoy the game :D

 

 

Well this had us scratching our heads a bit but interesting that network issues are seemingly cause the issue. The only thing that I can immediately think could have any communication with any network is us opening a connection with the Steam API.

 

Does anyone here have this issue and is using GoG or some other service besides Steam?

 

Yes, I use GoG and many problems too.

 

(PS : Sorry for my bad english ^^' )

 

 

Just to be clear, are the issues you are seeing the VO delay and portrait viewing delay or just other issues in general?

Thanks Roby, glad to hear its being worked on - and that the simple solution isn't as complex as other workarounds! Killing the Hamachi VN works perfectly.

 

 

 

Well this had us scratching our heads a bit but interesting that network issues are seemingly cause the issue. The only thing that I can immediately think could have any communication with any network is us opening a connection with the Steam API.

 

Does anyone here have this issue and is using GoG or some other service besides Steam?

 

Yes, I use GoG and many problems too.

 

(PS : Sorry for my bad english ^^' )

 

 

Just to be clear, are the issues you are seeing the VO delay and portrait viewing delay or just other issues in general?

 

 

I tried both GoG and Steam versions on my computer and both had the issue with portrait and voice hangs. However I uninstalled the GoG version before the Hamatchi fix / network fix was found. 

Well this had us scratching our heads a bit but interesting that network issues are seemingly cause the issue. The only thing that I can immediately think could have any communication with any network is us opening a connection with the Steam API.

 

Does anyone here have this issue and is using GoG or some other service besides Steam?

Yes, I use GoG and many problems too.

(PS : Sorry for my bad english ^^' )

 

For me its vo delay, portrait issue. When loading game in any circunstances the game stops responding for some seconds, llike the portrait issues, when change any equipment from the characters that change their visual appearance the bug occurs. I think that is all. And the hamachi thing at the moment had worked just fine for all the issues. Just some random when loading, but its 100% better now.

 

And im using GOG.

Edited March 27, 2015 by TLPS

 

Just to be clear, are the issues you are seeing the VO delay and portrait viewing delay or just other issues in general?

 

Voice delay and freeze when I open inventory. (and freeze at the character creation, portrait section )

Edited March 27, 2015 by Aldenya