[BUG] World not loading

Conan Exiles PC Discussion
1

Game mode: Online Private
Type of issue: Bug
Server type: PvP
Region: US

Short description:
When walking around the world, it is possible to walk in on an area where the world is not loading. The player-built structures on top of that land load fine, but all the parts of the map itself do not load. In some cases this results in those parts of the world being completely invisible whilst in other cases it results in a low-quality texture and LOD environment.

Walking onto this environment is always practically impossible as the player-character automatically goes into the falling animation but does not actually fall through where the ground is supposed to be, which thus results in an ‘up and down stuttering’ motion.

Visual examples of this bug are linked below.
Case #1: Invisible part of world #1
Case #1: Invisible part of world #2
Case #1: Invisible part of world #3
Case #1: Visible part of world which belongs to the above 3 screenshots

Case #2: Invisible part of world #1
Case #2: Invisible part of world #2
Case #2: Invisible part of world #3
Case #2: Visible part of world which belongs to the above 3 screenshots

Low-LOD & -texture example #1
Low-LOD & -texture example #2
Low-LOD & -texture example #3

Please provide a step-by-step process of how the bug can be reproduced. The more details you provide us with the easier it will be for us to find and fix the bug:

  1. Walk around in the world. At first everything seems normal. It can often take 5, 10, 20, sometimes more than 30 minutes to get this issue.
  2. Keep on walking.
  3. Eventually you’ll just walk in on an area that doesn’t seem to load, even when you walk up right at the edge of the ‘border’.

Server info

Further important information
I have done my own troubleshooting so far and will share some rather important details about this bug below.

  • The bug started to occur since the latest DLC and seemed to have gotten worse over time, perhaps due to the recent Hotfix.
  • The bug seems to only occur on a server, not in singleplayer
  • The bug seems to only occur on a server with at least a few but preferably many player-buildings
  • For some reason, the bug happens more consistently when simply walking/running through the world rather than using the admin-option ‘Fly’ to swiftly fly through the map.
  • The bug can be ‘fixed’ by re-logging or killing the character and returning to the area or using the admin map-teleport option on/near the same position. In short: it seems like the server/client needs some help with ‘forcing’ to reload the area.
  • The bug seems to consistently occur when the player has run through an area with many (large) buildings and it seems to occur less in areas where there are less (large) buildings.
  • Several different people of the private server community on other private servers seem to experience the same issues as there have been a fair bit of talk about it, though not a whole lot of forum-reports it seels. However, I did find this bug-report that is somewhat (but not completely) related: BUG- Huge chunking missing in my building and more chunks not loading
    Even though the forum-rules state to not make a new post for the same problem, I decided to still do it since I feel like the information given in here is more in-depth plus we do not experience any buildings breaking, or at least not as far as I’ve heard.

Finally, a suggestion
Due to the nature of the bug and the ways it can be temporarily ‘fixed’ (see important information above), I have reason to believe that the following suggestion might at least be an easy work-around for players who do seem to experience these problems.

Basically: add an option to force the client to reload the world around the player. This could be done through a hotkey combination or a console command.

This isn’t an actual ‘fix’ of course, but it would be extremely useful rather than requiring players to re-log or kill themselves.

This is all the information I have on the bug for now. I aim to troubleshoot this problem more and if I have any more findings I will share them in this topic with you all.

1 Like
2

@SilverJustice
Many fundamental changings were implemented with the last 3-4 Funcom patches. Your modlist shows mods, which weren’t updated a long time or are not well maintained . Try to reduce the modlist one by one to find the mods which are causing this problem, because in vanilla you don’t have such graphical loading issues. At first you can try it in SP on your own client but think of it, that a problem can be different on servers.

2 Likes
3

We tested a few mods of which we thought would cause the problem, but it turns out the problem persisted even when those mods were taken out the list.

When it comes to the other mods, we have not tried taking those out of the mod-order since many other servers have them and far from all report the same issues.

The bug seems to not be consistent with specific mods and so I’m reasoned to believe that it doesn’t necessarily have to do with a mod (although a mod could worsen it, I imagine).

4

In this case I would suggest to try the other way around. First begin with no mods and then add one by one. And you should consider if the 18+ Mods are really improving your game experience, because the most of theses mods are the once which aren’t updated or aren’t well maintained. For example the slaver mod isn’t updated since March 3rd. Do you really use this mod often in the game? It just could be one special placeable or building tile or modded animation from it or special textures or modded emotes.

1 Like
5

Since my last reply my server’s team and myself have been testing a lot. We tried taking out many/all mods except for the Pippi mod and the issue seems to persist at random. With that I mean that sometimes the bug doesn’t occur after taking out a few specific mods, but then after a while it starts to occur again. When putting the same mods in again, it again might at random take some time (sometimes a couple of days) before the issue starts to occur again.

All in all, I believe this issue isn’t caused by mods. I make this assumption because I’ve compared the modlists of many servers with the same issues and tested the identical mods which all result in the same random results: sometimes the bug occurs more frequently than other times, even when the modlist hasn’t changed.

I also have reason to believe it has to do with the rendering/streaming-levels since I made a little hotkey in my personal mod which basically runs a ‘Flush Streaming Level’ function, which is capable of temporarily ‘fixing’ the issue whilst re-loading the area around the player which returns everything to normal. However, when the player walks far enough away from the spot at which they used that hotkey, the issue of the world not loading starts to occur again.

I’ve also collected several logs of different players and also looked at my own. From my findings in those, I can tell that there definitely seem to be a lot of issues with the loading of “forbidden filename” files which all belong to the base game, none of these errors refer to files of mods.

Besides that, there are also a fair bit of draw buffer log messages.

Besides that, it seems that the “levels loaded” (indicated by logs like this one: ConanGameInstanceLog:Warning: Levels loaded: 298/298) get stuck at around 280/298 whenever the loading issue occurs.

Overall I’d like to discuss this more or work towards a solution. I’ve been troubleshooting this issue for more than 3 weeks now.

6

It’s not caused by mods, I’m playing single player with nomods and I have the same issue.

7

I’m still having this issue now. I started playing again recently and I’m constantly running into this issue. I’m on my own private server I rented from G Portal, don’t know about this issue in single player but as far as servers it still happens.

My only fixes is logging off and back in or using the admin teleport, not sure if killing yourself fixes it.

1 Like
8

The only thing I would suggest is reducing the large builds until the rendering improves.

Not necessarily removing them, but reducing their respective sizes by rebuilding.

I strongly suspect your server may have crossed an engine rendering limit.

9

If you have one available or If you can “afford it”, try running your own server on a dedicated machine.

I run a private server on a dedicated mini-pc with 12GB RAM and the game has had very minimal issues with nothing happening with what the OP is experiencing.

1 Like
10

Hmmm shoot, unfortunately I don’t have the extra hardware at this time to try that. I saw in your other response you said the OP might have been running into an engine rendering limit, would you be able to explain that further? I only have like 3 bases, 2 being really small with only one being “big” like three floors.

If I have to stay with renting a server, would you say increasing the slots would help or is this something on G Portal’s end that I wouldn’t be able to resolve? According to my server info page the server has a little over 6.3 GB of ram (I’m currently not playing so I’m thinking that’s the max amount I currently have and can use.

So you don’t run into the issue of the world stopping loading using your own hardware as a server?

11

Just three bases should not be causing problems for you, especially how you described them.

As for increasing slots, I guess that depends on how many slots you currently have available and whether or not RAM allowance is tied in with that as well as how much memory allotment. It has been years since I rented from GPortal and I quit them in less than one year long before my paid in full rental contract expired. (I was that disappointed). One thing I discovered that troubled me the most is knowing they can run multiple instances of the same game on a single multicore CPU. (Industry standard). That’s where I had problems with them because other servers were showing up as my own just one too many times even though mine had a unique name.

When I did rent a server from a different host ( Survival Servers), it had 10 available slots and I didn’t run into those problems, even when my friend and I built some really super massive builds on the Exiled lands and Isle of Siptah. I don’t know what kind of situation you’re in with GPortal and I hope you can sort it out.

An associate of mine pointed out a flaw in the Unreal Engine where a lot of builds (and big ones) can lead to lag and rendering issues. (Not actually a flaw in itself, but how it was implemented). This is what leads me to believe what the OP mentioned in their current situation is experiencing. (A bottleneck from the demands on rendering but it’s not crashing the server with a fatal error). But I wonder when was the last time their server was updated.

Currently on the Mini-PC server, we’re running at least 4 large bases, fully loaded with thralls at different locations on the map with one large Purge Base currently at a Level 10 just north of the Summoning Place on flat ground. Still, we’re not experiencing the same terrain rendering issues. Then again, I imagine our “large” bases are nothing compared to what I’ve seen screenshots and heard about on officials. I also imagine the OP’s situation might be similar by comparison of their description.

Buccaneer Bay, Near Jhil’s Roost, Left in the woods along the pathway toward Eyelet Lake, and our starting base just north of the pond on a plateau south of the Summoning Place, then the Purge Base. Now, for all that it’s just the two of us putting a load on the engine, but only when we get within range of any of those bases. For any other practical reason, the other bases are in what must be a hybernating state until we get near them and that’s when they get active.

Now, for a server with multiple players on it at any given time coupled with large builds, that’s going to put a much larger strain on the engine.

One thing in particular that strikes me as out of order is that normally, terrain is rendered first before any structures are rendered. What is occurring seems backward.