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I finished it on the weekend, but gave it few days for the impressions to settle down.

First, "7-9 hour long experience" is a lie. Galaxy already says I have 9 hours in the game from this part alone, I only found very few secrets, and I know of at least one place where I have to backtrack now that I have a correct tool - unfortunately I can't, more on that later. It was running only on background for some time while I had to deal with something else, but still, at least 5 hours of fun, and my inner completionist says there will be quite a few more. So, it's a good kind of lie, thanks for being conservative.

System demands are quite high. In "standard units of measurement", my PC can run Witcher 3 on medium 1920x1080 without any trouble. Solus project - not so much. It's playable with everything set to low, but it still freezes for few seconds ocasionaly, mainly with sharp turns of the character. Win7-64, AMD R9-270x with 2G of VRAM, 8G system RAM, FX-6300 for a processor. I suspect it's the amount of video ram that is behind the freezes, should have got 4G model... After writing this, I tried again with 70% resolution scale and it seems to do a bit better.

I've had several technical problems, in places the game just stops responding completely. Sometimes it recovers if I wait long enough (minute or two), but more often I have to kill it's process from task manager. Those situations are not consistently repeatable (had it happen twice in Yuri's camp, but I got through), except for one place - when I try to backtrack from the last save before that cliffhanger at the end to surface. I just get black screen after the loading screen disappears. The F10 tool brings up it's window, but only once, if I dismiss it the game is completely dead. Loading autosave works, I appear in the previous part, but there are door blocking me from returning to the surface (I believe I weighted down their trigger, so they should have stayed open), and going back down just kicks me to the game menu.

I found one point of interest close to the start that can't be interacted with, but it's hard to describe where without being able to return there.

The difficulty 100% feels all right. I froze to death once in the first cave while I was still learning controls and how to deal with inventory (I went through water before, that's why it was so quick). It's okay after learning what to do and what to avoid. The game has few very nice ideas. I'm not usually too much into survival games, but stuff like resting stations with infinite food and water make it pretty enjoyable (if sometimes creepy, especially when the tornado appears).
Talk about stupid. After I stopped underclocking my computer, the game runs much better :) It wasn't underclocked in the usual sense, but in power options the processor was limited to 85% max frequency. Now I can run in 1920x1080, resolution scale 100%. I may even try to increase some graphics options from low in the future.

I tried latest patch today, the freezes didn't stop - they got worse if anything. First was when act 1 started. Second was when I tried to sleep to save my game, few more after alt-tabing. It feels like the game tries to simulate the celestial bodies and ocean tide and tornadoes and all that stuff, and when demanding scene change happens* on top it just falls out of sync, and spends the next two minutes catching up. Unless it's next 10 minutes and my patience runs out.

Started new game, cleared the first island of all stuff I know about. Then I spent lots of time trying to unlock the new endless food secret. First switch was easy and worked, second switch is hidden very well, and unfortunately didn't work in that game. After watching a video how it should work I tried in yet another new game (not on foot this time, just a quick teleport to check it out), and it worked this time...

Edit:
* I base the "demanging scene change" on the fact that the freeze is not instant. There is some overlay with act change graphics, or the sleep animation (with the dots increasing) or whatever. During it, or directly after, the music / sound starts stuttering for about a second or two, then dies completely. Sometimes Alt-tab + back nudges it back to life, but more often it just seals it's fate. Even after Alt-tab, everything is extremely unresponsive until I manage to kill the game. Switching to task manager takes ages. The strange thing is, when it finally opens, it shows my processor almost idle - 16% of 6 core processor = 5 cores available for windows stuff. That would mean resource exhaustion of some kind, but NOT processor. Graphics memory maybe? I found Steam thread, it seems common problem for AMD users. BTW using latest drivers, 16.2.

Edit2:
now it occured to me it could be caused by out of date OS. I disabled windows update completely when Microsoft started pushing spyware through it, which is already about 9 months. Guess it's finally time to bite the bullet and sort out which updates are legitimate and which to kill.
Post edited February 27, 2016 by huan
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huan: Edit2:
now it occured to me it could be caused by out of date OS. I disabled windows update completely when Microsoft started pushing spyware through it, which is already about 9 months. Guess it's finally time to bite the bullet and sort out which updates are legitimate and which to kill.
KB3035583 is the one you definitely want to stay away from. Also check out GWX Control Panel.

As for the long waits as you ALT-TAB back and forth, it almost sounds like you're running low on RAM and the poor thing is swapping itself to death. But 8GiB of system RAM should be plenty. I have 16GiB, but my RAM usage never goes above 25%. Where does Task Manager think all your RAM is going?
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ewhac: KB3035583 is the one you definitely want to stay away from. Also check out GWX Control Panel.

As for the long waits as you ALT-TAB back and forth, it almost sounds like you're running low on RAM and the poor thing is swapping itself to death. But 8GiB of system RAM should be plenty. I have 16GiB, but my RAM usage never goes above 25%. Where does Task Manager think all your RAM is going?
It's definitely not swapping to death, hard disk light shows no activity, Solus process shows about 1.2G memory consumed. Read the linked steam thread, they suspect it may be caused by act transition music, fixed in next patch. Or not if their suspicion is wrong. It's hard to fix bugs you can't reproduce on your machine.

Yesterday I have applied the OS updates, except for some 6 or so that were clearly hostile. Took me at least a hour to read through their descriptions, but at least the descriptions are available. The game didn't freeze since, but it may just a coincidence. I didn't spend much time playing, mostly just trying to unlock the food cave. And looked to the ground when I knew act transition was coming, to reduce the load on the machine.

The food cave still doesn't work. If I cheat myself to the button right after start it opens, if I play without cheating, no luck.

Edit: more details about the freeze (this one happened during 8 hours sleep, so the on-screen dots looped several times over, game froze near the end). I took a peak with more aggressive tools - process explorer to be exact. First interesting thing - only the game itself and windows native task manager are slowed down. Process explorer, browser, galaxy - everything else works at normal speed, while the game is busy looping somewhere in audio thread. Which is the second interesting thing: all game threads are almost idle, except for one that is eating one whole cpu core. I captured several stack traces, all of them point to some audio stuff. I doubt the music fix will help, there is no special music during sleep:

XAPOFX1_5.dll!CreateFX+0x9e89
XAPOFX1_5.dll+0x31c1
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x77f9
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x442c
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x48a6
kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk+0xd
ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart+0x21

XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x1e176
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x207e7
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0xd9fe
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x77f9
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x442c
XAudio2_7.dll!DllUnregisterServer+0x48a6
kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk+0xd
ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart+0x21
Post edited February 28, 2016 by huan
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huan: First interesting thing - only the game itself and windows native task manager are slowed down. Process explorer, browser, galaxy - everything else works at normal speed, while the game is busy looping somewhere in audio thread. Which is the second interesting thing: all game threads are almost idle, except for one that is eating one whole cpu core. I captured several stack traces, all of them point to some audio stuff. I doubt the music fix will help, there is no special music during sleep:
Next obvious question: Have you installed the latest audio drivers for your system?
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ewhac: Next obvious question: Have you installed the latest audio drivers for your system?
I have never installed ANY audio drivers. I'm not even sure what soundcard I have (I know how to find out, just don't see the reason to). Last time I worried about audio drivers was Soundblaster AWE32 in ISA slot. Those things come with mainboard for ages, and windows builtin drivers were rock solid for about the same time.

I think more appropriate question is "does it still freeze if I have sound off?" I don't think I'm prepared to make such sacrifice to find out. The audio is at least half of the whole fun.
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huan: I have never installed ANY audio drivers. I'm not even sure what soundcard I have (I know how to find out, just don't see the reason to). Last time I worried about audio drivers was Soundblaster AWE32 in ISA slot. Those things come with mainboard for ages, and windows builtin drivers were rock solid for about the same time.
Ooo...

It turns out it's not all that simple these days. Yes, the generic Windows drivers can usually handle motherboard audio well enough to make the system beeps and boops, but anything beyond that means you need the chipset-specific drivers to utilize them to the greatest extent.

If you built the system yourself, go visit the manufacturer's Web page for your motherboard, and download all the latest drivers. If it's a pre-built box from HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc., visit their Web page for your model machine and grab the latest drivers. Do not download or install drivers from any source other than the system, motherboard, or chipset manufacturer.
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ewhac: ...
Sorry, I should have been more precise. Downloading and installing chipset drivers is part of the routine to get new computer up and running, of course I did that. That was two years ago and you are right that audio drivers were probably part of that package, just as the hardware chip is part of the chipset/mainboard. So while I technically didn't download and install anything called "audio drivers", they are not base windows version. The point is still the same: audio drivers are one of the least likely things to suddenly break in modern computer. Install once and forget about it.

I never had similar problem with any of the other games. Some of them pretty demanding. Some of them Unreal Engine based (not sure if UE4, most likely earlier version). Don't take it the wrong way, but I'm not exactly new in diagnosing weird computer problems - for fun and sometimes even at work (already had to solve problem with similar characteristics, our app sometimes mysteriously froze the whole IIS in one thread, with none of our code in the callstack. It turned out to be .NET problem - http://www.zpqrtbnk.net/posts/appdomains-threads-cultureinfos-and-paracetamol if you are developer interested in how subtle some bugs can be. Not my text but very well researched and explained).

This is game in development, developers expect feedback, so I tried to provide some. It took unexpected direction with the audio thread freezing, at first I expected it would be only about game balance. But they already acknowledge it as a problem, there are few people reporting the same in the linked Steam thread, and there are at least two new bugs about this just from this weekend at their sink for F10 problem reporter. As far as I can tell, none have captured the frozen thread callstack, or noticed that apps other than task manager and the game itself run fine. I have no idea if it will help in this case, it was instrumental to find the cause in my case. That's for the devs to decide, if some of them comes by.

Just for the peace of mind, I did check. "Windows has determined the driver sofware for your device is up to date: Realtek High Definition Audio" (same for "AMD High Definition Audio Device").

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For some lighter fun, after several restarts and fighting with hypothermia and tornadoes and game freezes and door bugs, and finally discovering that this game DOES have a compass (!), I may finally be ready to properly explore the DREADED CAVE OF WEIRD SOUNDS (and doom, of course).
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