Various gameplay & technical issues

[Nicholas Steel]

Hi, I just started playing today after finally getting around to fixing my computer. Here is a list of problems I've enountered:

 

1) The start of every piece of verbal dialog with Calisca is missing. The first 4 or so words in any verbal dialog of hers (Starting area of the game and second area visited tested) will not be mentioned, she will immediatly start talking mid-sentance, sometimes you'll hear the sound of an end of a word when she starts talking. I could probably make a video of this, assuming Fraps doesn't cause the bug to not trigger. This affects ALL dialog with her as far as I can tell. Other NPC's seem to talk fine.

 

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533997316 (First 6 words aren't heard)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533997372 (First 5 words aren't heard)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533997400 (Everything this guys says is audible/fine/correct)

 

This doesn't sound like the same issue as "Delay of Voice Overs, Music, and UI Windows" in the sticky topic, primarily because I am not virtualizing, emulating or playing the game over a network or anything like that. I am simply running it from my own PC. Single Player.

 

2) There is a loot location that contains a cloak of Fortitude in the second area (Requires a gem to reveal the location), Loot All results in it appearing on none of my characters and not in my inventory.

 

http://www.mediafire.com/download/nvawqln45ka29id/617ef335eab04192930ea9ab8c1bc3f9_7713517_CilantLs.savegame (Save game)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533997491

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533997517

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533997551

 

3) Health bars above characters heads (Or whatever the coloured green/red dots are supposed to be, endurance?) overlap when fighting an enemy making it impossible to see a party members and the enemies simultaneously.

 

4) It'd be nice if the game had some kind of anti-aliasing, chain mail armour (or whatever the Fighter is wearing during character creation) looks horrendous during character creation (**** tons of aliasing). I have the video quality slider set to the maximum and Anti Aliasing is set to Application Controlled in the Nvidia Control Panel. Hopefully you're not using the god awful FXAA antialiasing technique that does nothing but blur the image, hopefully you're engine is meant to be using either SMAA, MSAA or SSAA as these methods actually anti-alias without intentionally blurring the image in a vague hope that simply blurring the visuals will improve the picture quality.

 

5) The circles under characters could do with being more distinctly different for characters that are and aren't selected by the player (Make it slightly more transparent/duller for unselected characters). The Colour Blind option does a god job of distinguishing between characters you've slected and those you haven't, but I like them being green instead of shades of blue.

 

6) During dialog you can adjust the height of the dialog window, however dragging it down causes it to be impossible to scroll up enough to view the dialog (The dialog is stuck out of view), dragging the top of the dialog window to increase the height of it fixes this but leaves huge empty space under most dialog which is strange and feels like a waste of screen space. There's also seemingly no way to return it to the default height? Double clicking the border could be turned in to a way of resetting it to the default height.

 

7) Please remove or add an option to remove the Vignette applied to the Event Log/Combat Log. It serves no purpose other than to make it harder to read the top and bottom line.

 

Some tutorial dialog, like when first introduced to combat, doesn't get duplicated in to the Event Log, other tutorial information does correctly duplicate.

 

9) When first visiting a shop at the start of the game (Haedon or whatever), there is a tutorial message explaining shops, but the tutorial doesn't give a general idea of what you should get, which makes for a poor tutorial in my opinion. I was also told to get stuff from him, but he doesn't sell anything I didn't already have except healing potions, and everything was dearer than the amount of money I started with.

 

10) The shop interface has no tooltip for mousing over your own currency and no tooltip for whatever is below your currency, which makes it harder to identify that it is YOUR currency, kinda, maybe.

 

The first 3 issues are the biggest things affecting my experience of the game so far. The rest are niceties.

 

Windows 10 x64

Intel i7 920 @ 2.66GHZ

ASUS P6T Motherboard

Gainward Geforce 560Ti 2GB with latest drivers

Integrated Audio

8GB DDR3 RAM

Edited October 12, 2015 by Nicholas Steel

[Nicholas Steel]

The game is the latest version and I just now verified the integrity of the game cache, all files validated without issue.

[AndreaColombo]

2) Have you checked in your stash?

 

4) I discussed SMAA privately with BMac but unfortunately he's had no time to look into it so far. The "graphics quality" slider in the game's graphics options governs MSAA but most of the aliasing you see in this game is caused by shaders rather than geometry, so SMAA is what we'd need.

[Nicholas Steel]

2) Have you checked in your stash?

 

4) I discussed SMAA privately with BMac but unfortunately he's had no time to look into it so far. The "graphics quality" slider in the game's graphics options governs MSAA but most of the aliasing you see in this game is caused by shaders rather than geometry, so SMAA is what we'd need.

I did check the Stash and it wasn't there. How does the stash differ from regular character inventory? I assume I'm not meant to be able to access it everywhere but I think I have the option that makes it possible to do so, enabled. How would you access it if that option is turned off? I assume that it's normally meant to be like just a general storage area for things you don't want to carry around and don't want to sell either.

 

Good to know some effort is being made to get SMAA implemented. It really should compliment MSAA quite nicely. There is of course SSAA but that's very taxing on the computer compared to MSAA and/or SMAA.

[AndreaColombo]

How does the stash differ from regular character inventory?

 

It is bottomless. Basically a convenience tool for stuff you want to carry around even if your party's inventory slots are already filled with stuff of more immediate use to you.

 

If you turn off the option that makes it accessible at all times, it will only be accessible when you camp or—going by memory—in cities/towns/villages. You can sell stuff directly from the stash if you want (that's what I usually do as I don't bother keeping stuff I want to sell in my inventory.)

 

 

SSAA can actually be forced via your graphics drivers, but it's terribad in PoE. The backdrops being 2D, all you get from SSAA is a big fugly blur

[Abradoks]

1) I had this bug happen to me with Sagani. Restarting the game fixed it for the later dialogs, but I didn't try to load an older save to check if it wouldn't reappear when recruiting Sagani.

 

I thought that it might be some more general memory-corruption bug, considering that after long play sessions I'm also getting the bug with disappearing UI buttons. Which can be "fixed" by restarting the client too.

 

3) Battles can get messy indeed. It becomes even worse, when half of the combatants is standing behind a wall, while the other half is covered with some spell effects.

 

6) I can confirm that the dialog UI behaves weirdly. When you shrink it, you might not be able to scroll all the way up.

 

I've also encountered a bug while reading the description of one of the backer's NPCs. After scrolling a bit up, I was unable to scroll to the bottom: the text would scroll itself back up.

 

I hope you don't mind if I add a couple of issues I've encountered myself.

 

Vertical chat size and the state of "toggle interactables" aren't saved between game restarts.

 

On Windows the game settings are saved in registry, instead of a file. That's a bit annoying when you need to copy saves (and settings) from one system to another.

 

It would be nice to have "pause on load" option.

 

When the combat starts and your first character gets kicked out of sneaking, selecting the whole party and pressing sneak button won't do anything. Expected behavior: taking the rest of the group out of sneaking.

 

When selecting a row in enchant window, triangle that marks selection overlaps with an anvil symbol.

[Nicholas Steel]

3) Battles can get messy indeed. It becomes even worse, when half of the combatants is standing behind a wall, while the other half is covered with some spell effects.

Although this isn't exactly a fix, they could have it so that by default your characters health appears on top of enemy health gauges, and pressing & holding Tab changes it so the enemy health appears on top of your characters?

 

On Windows the game settings are saved in registry, instead of a file. That's a bit annoying when you need to copy saves (and settings) from one system to another.

A bit of a strange choice, why not store them in a file where the save games are located?

 

When the combat starts and your first character gets kicked out of sneaking, selecting the whole party and pressing sneak button won't do anything. Expected behavior: taking the rest of the group out of sneaking.

 

Indeed, I discovered this bit of unintuitiveness as well.

[Nicholas Steel]

Just to keep things in the one place, a video of the 2nd problem is available here. It demonstrates a way to get the cloak as well as a way for the cloak to "disappear":

Edited October 21, 2015 by Nicholas Steel

[Aarik D]

Hello Nicholas,

 

On Issues 1 and 2, I have not been able to reproduce in our latest internal build. They may have been fixed already. 

 

Issue 6, I did not see any issues here on our internal build. I was able to scroll up and down in the dialogue window after shrinking it, I also checked the combat/event log just in case.

 

Issue 7, I did not see any vignette around the combat/event log during those events.

 

In the future, please keep each post to one bug/issue. It gets very cluttered in trying to manage and organize each issue, especially when multiple users posts on the threads. I am more than happy to answer all your issues even if you make 30+ posts.

 

Thank you for your support! 

[Abradoks]

It gets very cluttered in trying to manage and organize each issue, especially when multiple users posts on the threads.

I'm sorry about that, I just wanted to confirm the issues Nicholas has reported, because I've encountered them too. And bugs like #1 are easily dismissed by devs, because they are hard to reproduce.

 

Besides, new users on this forum are limited to 5 posts a day, so creating 10 threads at once would be impossible.

 

On Issues 1 and 2, I have not been able to reproduce in our latest internal build. They may have been fixed already.

Could you reproduce them with the latest public build? 2.02.0749 is where I've encountered #1 with Sagani. But restarting the game fixed it, so I doubt that this bug can be reproduced by simply loading a savegame.

 

Issue 6, I did not see any issues here on our internal build. I was able to scroll up and down in the dialogue window after shrinking it, I also checked the combat/event log just in case.

Here are 2 examples of what it looks like:

Scrolling further up is impossible.

 

Issue 7, I did not see any vignette around the combat/event log during those events.

[Aarik D]

Not a problem Abradoks and thank you for adding screenshots of the issue.

 

When I say I tested in an internal build, this means I'm testing on a build that has bug fixes already included in them. If the issue is happening on the Live steam build 2.02.0749, and its not happening on my end which could be for example build 2.02.756, chances are the issue has already been fixed. 

 

I will keep an eye out for these issues today while running some tests.

 

Thank you for your support. 

[Nicholas Steel]

Thanks for the images Abradoks, they clearly demonstrate the vignette and dialog window issue. No worries Aarik D, I'll try to remember to separate issues I encounter in the future. There's no possible way that Vignette could be for style lol, it's not at all artsy in presentation ^_~ it just gets in the way.

 

Also, while testing a report on the latest build to see if it's fixed is welcome, it'd be good to hear that you tested it in the current public build if you can't reproduce it in the developer build because it would assure us that you know what we're trying to explain to you and that there was no miscommunication between us. More tedious work for you for sure, but you get where I'm coming from right?

Edited October 22, 2015 by Nicholas Steel

[Abradoks]

If the issue is happening on the Live steam build 2.02.0749, and its not happening on my end which could be for example build 2.02.756, chances are the issue has already been fixed.

Well, if it doesn't happen on the dev build, you would still need to check on the Live, to make sure, that you can actually reproduce it. Otherwise the bug might be still there in the dev build, hiding from you.

 

Vertical chat size and the state of "toggle interactables" aren't saved between game restarts.

 

On Windows the game settings are saved in registry, instead of a file. That's a bit annoying when you need to copy saves (and settings) from one system to another.

 

It would be nice to have "pause on load" option.

 

When the combat starts and your first character gets kicked out of sneaking, selecting the whole party and pressing sneak button won't do anything. Expected behavior: taking the rest of the group out of sneaking.

 

When selecting a row in enchant window, triangle that marks selection overlaps with an anvil symbol.

Aarik, could you please comment on these too?

 

There's no possible way that Vignette could be for style lol, it's not at all artsy in presentation ^_~ it just gets in the way.

Actually, I think it is there for style: to make lines of text "fade out", instead of being cut off. Normally it shouldn't obscure the bottom line, unless you scroll up.

[Nicholas Steel]

In regards to sneaking, the issue is that if you have multiple characters selected and click the Sneak button it will toggle the effect for individual characters instead of the entire selected group simultaneously, so you have to click it multiple times for it to affect everyone you've selected instead of only having to click it once and that's kinda annoying.