Possible Bug - Phantom Blocks - I Believe It's a Long-Known Problem

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I've encoutered this, but it's not just marble blocks, there's also ghost terrain involved. Sometimes I just go dig a hole for a quest and once I leave it, it looks like there's no hole and suddenly I'm 5 meters deep with a full motorcycle. Usually restarting makes it go away.

Specs:

Radeon RX470 8GB

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

16GB DDR4@3200MHz CL14

 
Having this issue as well, and it isn't only a GeForce problem as I am using a Radeon RX580. This problem seems to be common enough to warrant some attention, and is pretty game damaging, if not breaking.

 
I have found a "Resolution" to this issue. I opened the game launcher, and switched to Vulkan Rendering engine. Since switching I have not had this happen once, this was happening every launch using OpenGL.

 
Serfdog3 said:
I found a solution that worked for me. In the steam settings there is shader precaching, and I had one of the boxes checked when I started. I tried the game with nothing checked and the phantom block issue is gone. You can still see them from about 150 meters, but once you get close they go away. Worth a shot for anyone having this issue
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This helped me, at least a bit. The phantom blocks have disappeared, but now POIs that I already demolished have returned and won't go away...as in the mesh remains even when I'm right in front of/inside them.

EDIT: My performance has gone to complete @%$# without shader pre-caching. Major lag as I drive around on my motorcycle when it was at least reasonably smooth before. 10-15 freezes to load new areas are not worth this "fix", IMO.

EDIT 2: This is not a fix. After another 10 minutes playing the phantom blocks are back.

 
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This is absolutely infuriating. I stopped playing 7 Days for quite some time because of the poor performance. Came back recently for A19 and the game runs perfectly now.. except for the phantom blocks. Mostly marble, but I've also noticed sink tops appearing on top of trash piles and a few other glitchy things. It happens so often, especially on random gen, that it makes the game virtually unplayable. It doesn't seem to matter what settings I change - I've tried everything from fully maxed to medium settings + half textures, I've tried DX11/OpenGL/Vulkan (Vulkan just crashes), tried changing the Steam shader precaching, etc.

For reference, my specs:

Ryzen 3 1300x

16GB RAM

Radeon RX5600 XT

I love this game, but I'm about to give up on it altogether because this issue - which has been around for a while and apparently gone totally unaddressed - makes it almost unplayable.

 
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Similar things used to happen to me occasionally, but not even remotely as often as it does in A19. Now it's virtually every time I venture beyond my base, and even sometimes when I don't. I rarely get more than 10 minutes of gameplay in before I have to quit and restart.

 
guys, Im pretty much desperated at this point. There are some huge and beautiful pois Im yet to explore.

what is driving me crazy is how everyone says "pois" helped, yet I cant even use it. Everytime I use it I get "distant pois not active". And if I use it again, I get the exact same message.
Theres no on/off, true/false, 1/0. Its just always inactive and although it says that the phantom blocks are there.

I can even stream if needed, just looking for guidance working around this

 
@danielspoa honestly I'm not even sure on the cause of it besides running on HDD *usually* and, for whatever reason, Nitrogen has more consistent imposter issues (why? I really don't know lol but it sticks longer). Perhaps... try lowering textures to half (or full if < full), max (or lower to min if maxed) your view distance, turn occlusion on or off. Shooting in the dark kinda.

If you do have some time to steam tomorrow (and I do too, not sure) shoot me a DM it sounds like you can consistently reproduce it. I can't to save my life since upgrading to my new system with an M.2 SSD. I have plans on running on a HDD on the same computer to see if that makes a glaring difference.

 
I can't speak for @danielspoa but my game is installed on an NVMe SSD and it makes no difference. I've also tried half textures, max/min settings, etc. Pretty much every possible combination of things I could think of. Seems like it happens slightly less often with all settings maxed (which is weird), but still rarely get more than 10 minutes of gameplay before it starts tweaking out.

 
Jugginator said:
@danielspoa honestly I'm not even sure on the cause of it besides running on HDD *usually* and, for whatever reason, Nitrogen has more consistent imposter issues (why? I really don't know lol but it sticks longer). Perhaps... try lowering textures to half (or full if < full), max (or lower to min if maxed) your view distance, turn occlusion on or off. Shooting in the dark kinda.

If you do have some time to steam tomorrow (and I do too, not sure) shoot me a DM it sounds like you can consistently reproduce it. I can't to save my life since upgrading to my new system with an M.2 SSD. I have plans on running on a HDD on the same computer to see if that makes a glaring difference.
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I use a SSD, but I do play on a nitrogen map, thats true. Nitrogen + compopack, this happens to me only in big POIs, two specifically.
I can stream at any point, share screen on discord or whatever. Its consistent.

I play with full textures but most other config at a low setting.

 
Hmm, @danielspoa, try half textures with the Nitrogen/compo game and see if it makes a difference. Then, can you try with the exact same setup but on either Navez or natural RWG?

 
it never happened in other scenarios. Its pretty consistent, only compo pack, only those few huge pois.
I'm gonna try half textures. I always assumed it was something wrong with the POI instead, but no one trusts me 😐

 
Jugginator said:
Hmm, @danielspoa, try half textures with the Nitrogen/compo game and see if it makes a difference. Then, can you try with the exact same setup but on either Navez or natural RWG?
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I talked to one of the subscribers in discord, and we tried to find a solution to this problem from him. I think that the problem is in RAM. It seems that some chunks cannot fully load, so the system leaves the imposter in place, assuming that the POI is not loaded. I suggested that we make a swap file for it, which the system will determine itself. Now he advises this to everyone, because his problem has become quite rare...

 
Hello Folks,

There is one theory that one variable to this issue is systems running out of memory (e.g. memory leak).  The next time the issue occurs, please check what your systems current memory usage in both your Windows Task Manager > Performance Tab and in your game console. (Press F1)  If you stand still you should see the following line appear in your console.  The last part shows your memory currently in use.  The most I could get mine to go up was 10GB / 16GB and have not been able to reproduce the issue.

2020-11-18T22:48:52 86.769 INF Time: 1.14m FPS: 92.19 Heap: 1494.8MB Max: 1494.8MB Chunks: 289 CGO: 144 Ply: 1 Zom: 0 Ent: 4 (4) Items: 0 CO: 1 RSS: 4451.4MB
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Post in here or PM me your observations.  Thank you all. :)

 
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Laz Man said:
Post in here or PM me your observations.  Thank you all. :)
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If my subscribers write me their observations, can I post it here on my own behalf?

Edit: It just seems to me that Russian-speaking users will not register and translate their messages, and I can't reproduce this problem myself.

 
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Games'n'Grumble said:
If my subscribers write me their observations, can I post it here on my own behalf?

Edit: It just seems to me that Russian-speaking users will not register and translate their messages, and I can't reproduce this problem myself.
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I don't see why not.  It may help isolate the problem further.

 
this is from a one player:

2020-12-06T14:31:31 330.398 INF Time: 4.93m FPS: 18.39 Heap: 2605.4MB Max: 2605.4MB Chunks: 595 CGO: 239 Ply: 1 Zom: 8 Ent: 11 (30) Item: 2 CO: 1 RSS: 7418.0MB

2020-12-06T14:32:01 360.429 INF Time: 5.43m FPS: 20.92 Heap: 2702.7MB Max: 2702.7MB Chunks: 611 CGO: 232 Ply: 1 Zom: 3 Ent: 5 (41) Item: 2 CO: 1 RSS: 7838.0MB

Another player sent:

2020-12-07T09:10:33 3759.579 INF Time: 61.22m FPS: 20.95 Heap: 2440.0MB Max: 2540.1MB Chunks: 254 CGO: 179 Ply: 1 Zom: 4 Ent: 15 (61) Items: 4 CO: 1 RSS: 3022.2MB

2020-12-07T09:11:03 3789.592 INF Time: 61.72m FPS: 23.59 Heap: 2461.9MB Max: 2540.1MB Chunks: 254 CGO: 188 Ply: 1 Zom: 2 Ent: 14 (62) Items: 4 CO: 1 RSS: 3028.9MB

2020-12-07T09:11:33 3819.606 INF Time: 62.22m FPS: 20.98 Heap: 2483.3MB Max: 2540.1MB Chunks: 254 CGO: 188 Ply: 1 Zom: 0 Ent: 12 (63) Items: 4 CO: 1 RSS: 2928.9MB

2020-12-07T09:12:03 3849.615 INF Time: 62.72m FPS: 28.74 Heap: 2511.5MB Max: 2540.1MB Chunks: 254 CGO: 185 Ply: 1 Zom: 1 Ent: 13 (65) Items: 4 CO: 1 RSS: 2899.8MB

 
Experiencing this issue on my 5th Gen Intel NUC (on lowest settings, single player, Navisgane map).  Normally experienced when activating a quest POI.  Not sure how much memory was being used at the time, but the 'workaround' for me is to face away from the POI, quit, reboot and reload (just reloading does not always seem to work).  I'll try to record the RSS value the next time it happens.  One time I activated a POI, it was bad, so I reloaded and re-activated the POI, it seemed okay, but I still had some issues later with ghost blocks).

Primary symptoms:

-sink bowl texture on windows

-metal sheeting on vertical flat surfaces

-grey blocks inside trash piles

-black marble walls or pillars in open areas (you can walk through them, sometimes they are one-sided)

-'ghost' blocks in random places (usually in open areas), often a wood texture

I also have on one instance rebooted and reloaded and the problem persisted.  If a POI has multiple versions (to randomize the courier satchel location perhaps), the problem could be related to one or more of the versions that get loaded.  If this is the case it could explain why reloading clears up the issue (if 2 of 5 are bad, I'd have a 3 in 5 chance of getting a good copy).  I can recall the issue most frequently with the corner shop NE of Trader Jen (the quest giver) by the bridges, and the Shamway factory to the South.

More info:

My (old) laptop has a GeForce 720m with 2gb of ram, same settings, same save file, and I've not noticed the issue on it since I've been watching for it.  This leads me think part of the issue is memory management as the NUC (Intel Iris 6100) uses system RAM as video RAM and there could be a latency or allocation overhead the laptop does not suffer from.

On the laptop I can game for 10 hours, no issues.  The NUC, probably experience the issue one or more times per session, sometimes very early.

Both systems have 16GB of RAM and SSD drives (the one in the laptop is slower spec than the one in the NUC).

Summary:

-Intel NUC (Iris 6100) has the issue

-Laptop (GeForce 720m 2GB) does not

 
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