devtrackers.gg
Hi everyone,
As you know we were hoping to release our latest patch today. We have, however, made the difficult decision to push the patch back to Thursday. We’ve explained this decision below – please do take the time to read it as it contains important information.
tl;dr: We encountered a couple crash issues and need your help to determine the risk they may pose!
During our final tests of this latest patch, our team encountered two different crash scenarios, as described below:
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Issue 1:
- A rare issue that, after installing the patch, appeared to cause the game to crash on launch for a small number of testers. After a certain number of these launch crashes, the game launched without any issues and the crashes did not reappear.
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Issue 2:
- An issue that can cause the game to crash for players when returning to the lobby from a multiplayer session.
- Theory: This crash may only occur when one of the party members is a Pyromancer and has specific skills (e.g Heatwave or Overheat?) and mods (e.g Tidal Wave?) equipped.
Throughout our ongoing work on Outriders, we only encountered these issues for the first time when testing the latest patch. Using specific reproduction steps, we are able to trigger these crashes between 20% to 40% of the time.
However, our recent community research indicates that both of these crashes may already be present in the game but have never been formally diagnosed until now (because testing didn’t encounter them). If this is the case, then this patch wouldn’t actually introduce any new issues and could be considered “safe”.
So here’s where we ended up today:
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Option A:
- Release the patch today, having only partial information about these encountered crashes and running the risk of introducing new issues, including crash on launches, into the game for an unknown number of players.
- The fixes for these issues would be rolled into the next available patch once we’ve identified and resolved the root cause.
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Option B:
- Push back the entire patch to fully understand these issues, fix them, retest the patch for a number of days and then release the patch sometime next week at the earliest. This in turn could also delay the next patch thereafter.
- Given the already long wait in-between our last and this current patch, we want to avoid delays as much as possible.
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Option C:
- Delay the current patch till this Thursday to gather more information about whether these issues (and how often they occur) are already prevalent in the game and how often they may occur.
- The fixes for these issues would be rolled into the next available patch once we’ve identified and resolved the root cause.
We have opted for Option C and we need your help to determine whether this is the best move to make.
Please let us know in this thread if you feel that you have recently (in the past few weeks) encountered either Issue 1 (Crash on Launch Subthread) or Issue 2 (Crash on Return to Lobby Subthread). As usual, the more information you can provide, the more likely it is that we will be able to identify and resolve them.
What happens next?
- If we, alongside the community, are able to determine that both of these issues are already present in the game, we will go ahead and aim to release the patch this Thursday.
- With community data about under which circumstances these issues appear, it will also be easier for us to identify and fix these issues in a future patch.
- RISK: It is possible that something within the patch has increased the frequency at which these crashes appear, but this will be very difficult to determine in the time we have.
- If we are unable to determine that both of these crashes are already present in the game, this would indicate that one (or both) of them would have been introduced as part of this patch. The patch would therefore need to be reworked.
We appreciate that this isn’t ideal and not what you wanted to hear today. Whilst we attempt to cover every single scenario in player behaviour and set up, the complexity of gamecode can make this very difficult to do every single time, especially on PC. Even more so under COVID working restrictions where most of us are still required to work from home.
Nevertheless, we are determined to continue enhancing and improving the Outriders experience and will continue to keep you in the loop with the latest. We also very much appreciate all those community members who believe in what we’re trying to achieve and would like to thank everyone for your continued help in making Outriders the best it can be.
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