S17 Performance Issues and Excessive Hostile Mob Spawn Rates

  • GiantHorizon330
    Master
    Insider

    Hello!
    I only played the new Smugglers update for an hour or so, and upon entering the Smuggler's caves (on Crooked Masts and Plunder Valley, I believe) I had horrible framerate drops. I am typically at a solid 60fps, with the odd occasional hiccups on a normal/good day, but when entering the new Smuggler's areas the framerate is incredibly unstable. My fps was rapidly jumping down from 60 to 40s like crazy.
    I've never had such massive instability in this game before, on such a regular basis.

    The new areas look stunning... but the game performance is oddly abysmal for me atm (when entering the Smuggler's lairs)

    I was happily surprised to see the new Smugglers NPCs have fully voice acted dialogue. However, each time I went on the island with a Smuggler NPC, I'd be greeted by incredibly frequent waves of skeletons and phantoms. The spawn rate was so high I couldn't even let the Smuggler NPCs say all of their lines per the 3 dialogue questions you can ask them. It was, sadly, near constant interruptions from spawning hostile mobs.

    The performance issues aren't literally unplayable, but they are so jarring and unpleasant they made me and my friend put the game down.
    (Which stinks because we were actually pretty excited to check out the new stuff).

    As I've said, I've never seen performance issues this bad before, and they are more than enough to not want to play. And the incredibly frequent skelly and phantom spawns really hinder the entire already shoddy presentation to what would otherwise be a neat little addition to the game/lore.

    I love SoT, its probably my favorite game, but I think I might have to put it down until these issues are fixed.

    P.S. The only brightside to the increased hostile mob spawn rates is that I happened to get an Ancient Skeleton spawn (but I'm not sure if this was just a coincidence or not).

    Thank you for reading this! (This is my first time posting in the forums)

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  • BurnBacon
    Vanguard
    Insider

    Keep the spawn rate for the npc.
    Just do what they did with Vaults. Unable to get in. Put up a barrier or whatever.
    But please keep the spawn rate, being chased with cargo is better than running silently.

  • GiantHorizon330
    Master
    Insider

    Edit:

    So after playing for a few hours today, it seems that only Plunder Valley's and Crook's Hollow's Smuggler's Lairs suffer from fps drops!

    All of the other Smuggler's lairs had either normal or very minimal fps drops.

  • xDreegan
    Seafarer

    It is rather odd to have Skeletons spawn right behind the NPC and start attacking me while we're talking. I don't think that should happen.

  • GiantHorizon330
    Master
    Insider

    @xDreegan
    Yeah, I wish the skeletons did not spawn inside of the smuggler lairs. I love the new characters and fully voice-acted dialogue.
    Or as the other poster previously mentioned, skellies/phantoms not being able to enter the lairs.
    (Athough I would like the spawns to chill a little)

  • PotatoSord
    Marauder
    Insider

    I have an older GPU, but the game is almost always at 60fps aside from Port Merrick, and the new hideouts put my framerates to under 20 often

  • TheMetalMan4011
    Marauder
    Insider

    Yeah its really annoying when you wanna hear the dialog and read the journals only to be constantly interrupted.

  • PC MonkFish
    Marauder
    Insider

    Don't mind the spawn rate but I wish they would more reliably (or regularly) drop ammo on death.

  • Super87Ghost
    Commander

    I do think the spawn rates are a bit excessive. Previously it was a bit low, but now its a bit to high. Hope they find a good middle ground.

    However, i have more issues with the new hostility rate from the roaming skelleton ships. Previously they tended to stay neutral unless you came realy close or when you attacked them, now they already attack you when you are within a square of them. This is realy annoying. I had to stop doing my fort for 4 times because of skeleton ships (1 galleon and 3 sloops) coming close to the fort and first had to take them out. In the end it took me double the time to finish the fort and i ended with more picture frames from the ships then actual treasure items from the fort...
    I think this change might hurt the experience. Imagine doing a vault and one of those ships sails bye. Previously that wasn't a problem, but now they will attack you and you have to choose to either save your ships or finishing your vault...
    Also imagine a new(er) solo slooper that suddenly gets attacked by a skeleton galleon. They intentionally didn't let them spawn on sloops because of this, but now they will still be attacked by the roaming ones...

    I do get that the ships previously were a bit to neutral, but i hope they can make it so that as long as a ship is in range of an island, they won't get hostile (so only when you're on open sea).

  • BurnBacon
    Vanguard
    Insider

    From everyone’s issue. It’s not really the fact npc spawn so much, they just wanna talk and listen to the new npc voice acting.

    They just need a defending barrier to prevent npc in the hideouts. That fix that issue.

  • RealStyli
    Vanguard
    Insider

    Performance-wise, the game in general has a LOD swapping issue. They've overly-optimised the LOD swaps so it's moving them in and out of memory far too often, which is hitting CPUs hard.

    You can see how aggressive this culling is, even at short distances, if you do an emote and move the camera in and out. You see LOD swaps constantly, even at Mythical settings. This was a big issue before when the game didn't utilise enough CPU cores, but it's becoming a problem again. I think the solution may be to add a texture pool setting and let players with more VRAM available use it. We could also do with an option to do a full shader pre-compilation step. The game does a short shader compilation pass when you update your drivers, but don't think that's enough.

    Regarding the mobs, I expect these will be tweaked really soon. Everything seems to have been turned up to 11 for this update, and it doesn't feel intentional. Wouldn't surprise me if we see a hotfix this week.

  • PotatoSord
    Marauder
    Insider

    They can make skeletons and Ashen lords stop attacking you on pluder valley while you're doing glitterbeard, they can make it so you can't take a skull of siren song into reapers, but they apparently can't make it so that skeletons don't spawn in the smugglers hideouts.

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