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

[locomusic01]

Post in here or PM me your observations.  Thank you all.

Started a new game recently with a Nitro map and the issue started within just a couple of minutes. Attached a screencap from the console below. I forgot to check the memory usage in task manager. Oddly, after quitting the game and starting up again, task manager showed the game using 13+ GB of memory - it ran a bit choppy, but no phantom blocks. Go figure.

If it helps, I'm using:

Ryzen 3 1300X

Radeon RX5600 XT

16GB RAM

And the game's installed on an NVMe SSD, plus I've also tested it on both standard SSDs and HDDs.

 

[Clarkyvfx]

i hope this helps, its the best (possible) fix and easiest i have found so far. every session you load (this is mainly for the person hosting) use the console type "dm" for debug menu as most of you probably already know, open the pause menu, then hit recalc stability. Everytime this has fixed my ghost blocks for the current session i simply do this if i encounter them when loading in. sometimes i get lucky and dont get them at all, also without disabling pois so i still get to keep my render distance etc.

ive noticed this is a ram issue. whenever i had multiple things open such as google chrome, fl studio other ram intensive programs i was constantly getting them, everytime i load the game now with no other programs running its kinda hit or miss if i get them say like 40% of the time im good.

again, possible fix. worked for me but no guarantee it will work for others, just a possible solution 

 

[jdm311]

I am having this problem as well after playing on a NitroGen created world with compopack. Never saw this issue on vanilla. The POIs affected change between playthroughs and can be big (like Izea) or smaller ones like my base below. Exiting to the main menu and continuing the save fixes the issue, but sometimes it will soon come back. Exiting the game completely also has the same effect. After a while of playing, the game might be using 13-14 GB of RAM out of a total of 16GB and game stuttering occurs which requires exiting the game. Recalc Stability didn't make a difference, although using 'pois' command does fix it (as shown below) at the cost of seeing pois in the distance. I tried memcl, but that doesn't make a noticeable difference. It really seems like a mem leak. I hope someone figures this out soon since this issue really disrupts the experience. Thanks to those of you reporting and attempting fixes!

 

 

[Laz Man]

i hope this helps, its the best (possible) fix and easiest i have found so far. every session you load (this is mainly for the person hosting) use the console type "dm" for debug menu as most of you probably already know, open the pause menu, then hit recalc stability. Everytime this has fixed my ghost blocks for the current session i simply do this if i encounter them when loading in. sometimes i get lucky and dont get them at all, also without disabling pois so i still get to keep my render distance etc.

ive noticed this is a ram issue. whenever i had multiple things open such as google chrome, fl studio other ram intensive programs i was constantly getting them, everytime i load the game now with no other programs running its kinda hit or miss if i get them say like 40% of the time im good.

again, possible fix. worked for me but no guarantee it will work for others, just a possible solution 

1st time hearing this but if it works for others this may help us narrow down the issue further.  If anyone here are experiencing the problem, try this workaround and report back your results here or pm me please.  Thank you.

I am having this problem as well after playing on a NitroGen created world with compopack. Never saw this issue on vanilla. The POIs affected change between playthroughs and can be big (like Izea) or smaller ones like my base below. Exiting to the main menu and continuing the save fixes the issue, but sometimes it will soon come back. Exiting the game completely also has the same effect. After a while of playing, the game might be using 13-14 GB of RAM out of a total of 16GB and game stuttering occurs which requires exiting the game. Recalc Stability didn't make a difference, although using 'pois' command does fix it (as shown below) at the cost of seeing pois in the distance. I tried memcl, but that doesn't make a noticeable difference. It really seems like a mem leak. I hope someone figures this out soon since this issue really disrupts the experience. Thanks to those of you reporting and attempting fixes!

View attachment 18579 

View attachment 18580

Instead of exiting to the main menu only try exiting the game completely.  I have see some cases where exiting to main menu  > continuing doesn't fully release all memory being used.

P.S. Thats a nice church POI...

 

[Boidster]

Update: I used vanilla RWG + Compopack 47 and this map does not show the same artifacts as the Nitrogen world, when played from a dedicated server (both maps worked fine in single-player mode). So I think the aging Nitrogen RWG engine might be the cause of my issues.

Original comment:

I'm having the same issue on an 8K Nitrogen map using Compopack 47 on a dedicated server. I'm still doing some tests to narrow down the issue, but my experience so far is:

1) The 'pois' command is not accepted by the console; something like "distant pois are not enabled" - maybe it's a ded server thing I dunno

2) The Recalc Stability option had no effect

3) Quitting and restarting 7D2D had very little effect. The initial chunks around me looked okay upon reentering, but as soon as I started traveling around, phantom blocks would start popping up.

4) RAM usage is at 70% with both ded server and client running on same (32GB) machine. Ded server is using 900M (! - this seems like a huge improvement) and client is using 15GB (! - this seems higher than I remember from 19.2 and before, but I could be misremembering)

Edit to add: this same map does not exhibit the problems in single-player mode. Only when run through the dedicated server. So I'm going to go poke around my serverconfig and logs.

Things I see:

Trash piles with blocks in them:



Underwater plants with 'faces' on their blocks when viewed from the surface, but not visible when actually underwater:



Whole areas of POIs stuffed full of ghost marble blocks:



Since Nitro + Compopack is involved, this probably really isn't a general support issue, but I thought I'd share in this thread since it has some recent activity.

 

[Michael Beitze]

Update: I used vanilla RWG + Compopack 47 and this map does not show the same artifacts as the Nitrogen world, when played from a dedicated server (both maps worked fine in single-player mode). So I think the aging Nitrogen RWG engine might be the cause of my issues.

Original comment:

I'm having the same issue on an 8K Nitrogen map using Compopack 47 on a dedicated server. I'm still doing some tests to narrow down the issue, but my experience so far is:

1) The 'pois' command is not accepted by the console; something like "distant pois are not enabled" - maybe it's a ded server thing I dunno

2) The Recalc Stability option had no effect

3) Quitting and restarting 7D2D had very little effect. The initial chunks around me looked okay upon reentering, but as soon as I started traveling around, phantom blocks would start popping up.

4) RAM usage is at 70% with both ded server and client running on same (32GB) machine. Ded server is using 900M (! - this seems like a huge improvement) and client is using 15GB (! - this seems higher than I remember from 19.2 and before, but I could be misremembering)

Edit to add: this same map does not exhibit the problems in single-player mode. Only when run through the dedicated server. So I'm going to go poke around my serverconfig and logs.

Things I see:

Trash piles with blocks in them:

View attachment 18849

Underwater plants with 'faces' on their blocks when viewed from the surface, but not visible when actually underwater:

View attachment 18850View attachment 18851

Whole areas of POIs stuffed full of ghost marble blocks:

View attachment 18852

Since Nitro + Compopack is involved, this probably really isn't a general support issue, but I thought I'd share in this thread since it has some recent activity.

Is there any way to use Compopack without using Nitro? That would be a great way to isolate the issue.

 

[Boidster]

Is there any way to use Compopack without using Nitro? That would be a great way to isolate the issue.

Yes, Compopack has a modlet form, which you can download from the first post of the official thread. That is in fact what I did for the post you quoted.

I have since noted, though, that I still get black marble and checkerboard marble blocks in POIs, trashpiles, etc. even in our Vanilla RWG + Compopack world. Restarting the client fixes it, and I rarely encounter it again in that play session.

 

[Skald]

i hope this helps, its the best (possible) fix and easiest i have found so far. every session you load (this is mainly for the person hosting) use the console type "dm" for debug menu as most of you probably already know, open the pause menu, then hit recalc stability. Everytime this has fixed my ghost blocks for the current session i simply do this if i encounter them when loading in. sometimes i get lucky and dont get them at all, also without disabling pois so i still get to keep my render distance etc.

ive noticed this is a ram issue. whenever i had multiple things open such as google chrome, fl studio other ram intensive programs i was constantly getting them, everytime i load the game now with no other programs running its kinda hit or miss if i get them say like 40% of the time im good.

again, possible fix. worked for me but no guarantee it will work for others, just a possible solution 

I just tried this, unfortunately it did nothing.

 

[Skald]

I've signed up to the forum specifically because of this problem, I started having it in A18, but it's continued all the way through A19...i've even spent £300 upgrading my system to try and get rid of it but it's still there, and it's frustrating me beyond all reason now.

I've been playing Darkness falls recently...or rather i've been trying to play it as this happens almost every single time now, and i've had to abandon the mod because it's unplayable like this... but I get phantom blocks happening to me on vanilla Navezgane too.

IS there seriously no fix for this other than turning off long distance rendering?

Have none of the devs said anything about this? 

 

[ggoblin]

I have read most of this topic's entries since my last post and I can say some of your findings are not correct.

I have seen these blocks in vanilla, in slightly modded (xml by hand) games, in nitrogen generated worlds and in darkness falls. I have an Nvidia card and ssd drive.

I have tried pois which switches this off and using it again turns the problem on again. These blocks are completely immaterial, you can walk and shoot through them and when you're inside, you can see the outside world (they are one-sided).

These blocks are chunk based - I experience them in building X, ride my motorcycle to a distant trader (no blocks during the travel), return back and the blocks are gone.

I have read about a memory leak the game has, that is correct. Most often these days, when I quit the game, I restart the pc as well. Sometimes I do that before I start the session as well, since the leak occurs when exiting game, not the actual program itself (continue game, exit, continue game, exit, likely crash from insufficient memory). I guess this has nothing to do with these blocks but it is just an educated guess. No proof here.

I'm starting to believe this might actually have something to do with hardware graphic card, although this is not backed up by proofs either.  I used to have a weird glitch (which by the way occurred to me exactly once while playing a19) where one vertex of a triangle moves away to infinity, stretching that rectangle all the way until it's no longer visible in the distance.  Again, completely phantom. In the past, I solved this issue by returning a faulty graphic card and properly cooling it. Might it be the card is too hot and fails to remove some objects?

Anyway, this needs to go, since when you are a server and four people connect to you, it's not really a solution to restart the game. Given the eternity it takes to load the game... this has to be fixed. Sooner than we get another fat cop model. Please.

 

[Laz Man]

I've signed up to the forum specifically because of this problem, I started having it in A18, but it's continued all the way through A19...i've even spent £300 upgrading my system to try and get rid of it but it's still there, and it's frustrating me beyond all reason now.

I've been playing Darkness falls recently...or rather i've been trying to play it as this happens almost every single time now, and i've had to abandon the mod because it's unplayable like this... but I get phantom blocks happening to me on vanilla Navezgane too.

IS there seriously no fix for this other than turning off long distance rendering?

Have none of the devs said anything about this? 

Hj Skald, we continue to be unable to reproduce this issue consistently in Vanilla.  We know it definitely happens and continue to check on it whenever new information/reports come in. 

If the problem happens for you pretty consistently in Vanilla I highly recommend posting a full bug report on our bug forum linked below.

https://community.7daystodie.com/bug-test-1/

The format for reports is in one of the banners on that page which is critical for us in narrowing down and isolating the problem.

As a side note, dynamic POI imposters are being worked on for A20 which may help address this issue to some degree.

 

[Falcon197]

Something I can share that hasn't been mentioned so far, which I learned from taking a closer look at NitroGen.  It seems that the tool's mapgen will place POIs from older alphas.  There have been a handful of instances where I've hosted a NitroGen map in A18 with denser cities and noticed that older POIs would have phantom marble blocks, while newer POIs (included in A16 or later) did not.

A19 seems to have equal opportunity issues across all POIs in dense cities on 19.4 stable, but I thought this might be worth calling out.

 

[Boidster]

Something I can share that hasn't been mentioned so far, which I learned from taking a closer look at NitroGen.  It seems that the tool's mapgen will place POIs from older alphas.

Possibly you mean Compopack? NitroGen doesn't include any POIs; it only uses the rwgmixer that you tell it to, and the only POIs which can appear in game are the POIs in your installed game's \Prefabs folder. NitroGen can't add POIs from older alphas unless those old POIs are hanging around in your game folder for some reason (maybe copied there from Compopack).

I play on a vanilla RWG map, but using Compopack's POIs/rwgmixer, and I occasionally get the phantom blocks. It doesn't happen too often, and I just restart the client and it fixes it usually for the rest of the play session. Hard to file a bug report; I can't repeat the problem.

 

[Falcon197]

Possibly you mean Compopack? NitroGen doesn't include any POIs; it only uses the rwgmixer that you tell it to, and the only POIs which can appear in game are the POIs in your installed game's \Prefabs folder. NitroGen can't add POIs from older alphas unless those old POIs are hanging around in your game folder for some reason (maybe copied there from Compopack).

I play on a vanilla RWG map, but using Compopack's POIs/rwgmixer, and I occasionally get the phantom blocks. It doesn't happen too often, and I just restart the client and it fixes it usually for the rest of the play session. Hard to file a bug report; I can't repeat the problem.

I don't believe I'm using Compopack.  Where would it be situated in my directory?

Edit: Confirmed I've only used A19 Vanilla (default) setting for my prefab list parameter in NitroGen.  Not sure if it's somehow pulling in older POIs and that's having some strange effect.  I don't seem to have any issues with the phantom blocks on vanilla, and as you said they void on a reconnect to the dedi server I'm using. 

The bug is 100% chunk-based though, in that the issue never occurs for me in the chunk I am located in on load-in, but I'll see it when I move into adjacent chunks.  This persists if I move to another chunk with the issue, leave, and reconnect - then travel back to the chunk which was phantom-block free on the last load-in.  So it seems like the game is only executing correct LODs on whatever active chunk you load into and then fails to do so on all others.

I'll keep experimenting.

 

[Chivalric]

This is exactly the problem my wife is experiencing. Also on a Geforce. It never happened before A19 though. It doesn't seem to be happening to me. I think it cropped up once on my laptop then stopped. I have a mobile Quadro K5000 card so it could be something about Geforce, as mentioned above? I don't have a solution (yet) but I figure something out I'll share.

This has been an issue since 16.4, possibly earlier. I played A16.4 for about 4.5k hours and would get this bug from time to time, in SP with vanilla files. Happened with mods and in MP as well.

 

[Boidster]

The bug is 100% chunk-based though, in that the issue never occurs for me in the chunk I am located in on load-in, but I'll see it when I move into adjacent chunks.

I noticed that too, now that you mention it. The load-in chunk was clean, but as I traveled into town I'd get the blocks.

On the rwgmixer thing, it could be a combination of two things:

1) Nitrogen is using an outdated rwgmixer (installed as part of Nitrogen)

AND

2) Some old POIs are still shipping with A19.4 (or whatever version you're on) which shouldn't be used, but Nitrogen still has them

The reason I think it's "AND" between those two is that if Nitrogen had an old POI in its rwgmixer file, but that POI wasn't actually in the game's /prefabs folder, then you ought to get errors when loading the world.

You could try copying the game's rwgmixer.xml into the Nitrogen directory, to be sure it's only pulling from the active A19.x list.

 

[Jugginator]

The bug is 100% chunk-based though, in that the issue never occurs for me in the chunk I am located in on load-in, but I'll see it when I move into adjacent chunks

Not 100% this, for once I saw this upon load in from a save. Granted the only times I've reproduced this was on my laptop which is below min-spec GPU wise with slow ram and a HDD. I've been experimenting with memory and such, it's a WIP. Still more info the better.

 

[SylenThunder]

This has been an issue since 16.4, possibly earlier. I played A16.4 for about 4.5k hours and would get this bug from time to time, in SP with vanilla files. Happened with mods and in MP as well.

It's been an issue since Distant POI was introduced in a16.0.

It's also been really hard to get people having the issue to submit proper bug reports containing useful information to try to replicate it.  I've only been able to get the issue to occur by either using obsolete hardware (and even then I had to over-stress it), or by using mods or other things that would invalidate most of the testing.

 

[doughphunghus]

It's also been really hard to get people having the issue to submit proper bug reports containing useful information to try to replicate it.  I've only been able to get the issue to occur by either using obsolete hardware (and even then I had to over-stress it), or by using mods or other things that would invalidate most of the testing.

I have this issue pop up fairly often in my machine, but I always play with mods/overhauls and I don’t know how to replicate it other than “it’s happening!” .

I will say that yeah, it does seem to always appear in the “chunk you didn’t spawn in” and I’ve had great luck recently getting the “POIs” command to clear it up.

I will also say my system is underpowered, both cpu and gpu. I typically play at whatever gets me 30-50 FPS, in windowed mode with lowered resolution, on custom “low” graphics settings. 
 

if there were a good / agreed upon method to “try to replicate this” that would be acceptable (like what map to load, what to do/how far to go/visit a certain POi to visit either manually or using debug menu commands) I’d be willing to try it out a bunch to see if I can replicate it. I know it sounds weird but usually when it happens I haven’t seen a pattern to “what I’ve been doing In  game” and it occurring.

currently I have a game running the Gnamod mod (and a few of my own) that’s having this issue periodically as I play. I will say in this game that the semi faraway POIs (maybe 3-4 POIs away) are also “shimmery/glittery” a lot, and the “pois” command clears that up too.

so maybe I can replicate it (somehow) with this mod loaded, if anyone was intrerested in game logs/debug command output/etc, when it does happen, even if a mod was loaded.

 

[BFT2020]

It's been an issue since Distant POI was introduced in a16.0.

It's also been really hard to get people having the issue to submit proper bug reports containing useful information to try to replicate it.  I've only been able to get the issue to occur by either using obsolete hardware (and even then I had to over-stress it), or by using mods or other things that would invalidate most of the testing.

I can support this.  My previos computer (>10 years old) had this issue all the time; my new computer haven’t had this issue at all.