Frequent freezing on Steam Version

Hi, I've installed the steam version today and experienced multiple freezes when driving around. They could only be resolved by alt+tab out of the program and then alt+tab back. This would respawn the car. Any idea why?

 

For the most part i think it's just a migration bug but for me I've had the game running better on Steam so it's just a bug in the migration to Steam. The devs will most likely post a patch for this in a short time as quite alot of people have reported this

 

According to search and the fact I read every post on this forum, nobody has reported this issue.


The steam build is identical to the standalone build. There is absolutely no difference, its the same game simply downloaded differently (which shouldnt just make the game crash or slow down).


OP, what are your computer specifications.

 

Although this particular case hasn't been reported, many other people have reported issues with the Steam version. But, if your Standalone copy still works fine, make a copy of the steam version at program files, steam, steamapps, common, beamng.drive, and replace the files in the folder with your Standalone version, i don't knkw if this will work but it's better than nothing

 

You specifically said "people have reported this", that implies this issue which has never once been reported. People have posted steam migration issues, but the thing is they seem almost non existent really. Take a checksum of the files in the standalone copy and the steam version, they are the same files.

 

Or you could trg validating the game cache as i've had many games that steam hasn't properly downloaded that have caused issues and it just downloaded files that became corrupt or weren't there to start with and sixsixsevenseven, forget about the thing i originally said, i hadn't properly looked up this.

 

I think the issues arising with the stream version have to do with the overlay. I think it is more taxing than devs realize and has been the cause of a few games running poorly. I'm sure these guys will figure it out and make it all better.

That being said I am having no issues with the steam version

 

You can try to deactivate the overlay to see if it makes any difference:

 

Hmm, I might have to see what difference disabling the overlay makes. I always used to run BeamNG as a non steam game so had the overlay anyway

 

Win8.1, 32GB DDR3, Core i7-4770K, Nvidia GTX Titan Z. I know my CPU is kind of a bottleneck but I don't think it is bad enough to cause freezes right?

Sent from my Pigeon

 

Only issue I see in that spec is actually the Titan. DirectX 9 doesnt seem to like NVidias GK110 architecture used in the Titan so there have been some performance issues there, but those have simply emerged as a lower than expected framerate rather than freezing every now and then so I doubt thats the problem, someone did find that overclocked CPUs seem to exhibit the issue even more so - which does bring me onto 1 point.

You have a high end computer. You haven't by any chance overclocked the CPU at all? If you have are you 100% certain that the overclock is stable and that the issue isnt to do with an unstable overclock? I haven't messed with overclocking myself yet but I hear people use Prime95 to test overclock stability and if you have got an overclock it may be worth confirming it is stable. This might not be the issue at all, for all I know you might not have an overclock (its just high end machines often seem to have one because they aren't high end enough already ), but if you do its certainly an avenue of research.

Something else to try anyway. Right click BeamNG in your steam library, Properties>Local Files>Verify Integrity Of Game Cache. This will just confirm you don't have any mysteriously broken files, unlikely if the game is otherwise running fine but again its perhaps a good idea to confirm that this isnt an issue.

Also check the PC somehow hasnt ended up in low power mode somehow and most importantly isn't thermal throttling. HWMonitor should allow you to confirm the CPU temperatures, if a CPU starts to overheat then it will underclock itself, this could be responsible.

Final one. If its possible with your setup, try and run the game on integrated graphics (you'll of course need a motherboard supporting the integrated GPU video output) and see if the freezing issue remains, if it seems to have magically disappeared on the integrated chipset when the above points have all failed to rectify the problem then we know it may well be another DirectX 9 Nvidia GK110 problem in which case I'm not sure theres alot that can be done except wait for OpenGL support in Torque3d (on the way as part of the roadmap towards linux support, fingers crossed the OpenGL renderer will be an option in windows too)

 

1. No, I've never over clocked this computer.

2. Did the Verify Cache and it made no difference.

3. AFAIK, nothing is running in low power mode.

4. I don't think my motherboard supports that.

I am wondering tho, why doesn't beamng use DX11?

Sent from my Pigeon

 

BeamNG uses the torque3d game engine which currently only supports DirectX9. Not upto BeamNG whether they can use 9, 10 or 11 sadly.

Have you checked the CPU temps yet?

 

I would try forcing SLI to be off in the Nvidia Control Panel, maybe you are getting some serious microstutter or something? And while you are at it, disabling vsync might also do something for stuttering. Also you wouldn't happen to have an SSD and an HDD in your system would you? By default the old installer used the appdata directory, which by default will be on your C: drive. Perhaps in the move to Steam BeamNG was installed to a mechanical HDD, and the stuttering is just more pronounced.

 

a hard drive would only impact loading times and not the game running (except when it first has to cache crashed textures but that would be 1 time per session)

 

SLI and Vsync are off, will see if it makes a difference later. Didn't know people still used HDD's. I've been SSD only for quite some time.

Sent from my Pigeon

 

Actually it does. Torque3D loads some resources only when they're needed and since the loading isn't multithreaded this can lead to stuttering. Which would be less noticable on a ssd because the files can be read faster.

 

Even when all items are cached on a big map by a flythrough with free cam to load up everything along a route I still get freezes, even when it's installed on my, albeit somewhat old, SSD. The problem is 10x worse on HDD, when I accidentally installed BeamNG to the wrong Steam library it made me realise how much more worse of an experience people using HDDs are getting.

Hehe, even though I have 2x2TB disks in RAID0 for storage, I can't afford to go full SSD.