Feedback on bugs

[scourn]

Fix your game seriously there is underlying issues since early access that have not been addressed. I will give you some examples. (This is not about balance or systems its bugs only)

-Fix your camera system , a modder is able to actually making your hitching go away using a mod, why on the old map is hitching still an issue in 2020? Camera hitching when you sprint is annoying can this please be addressed. Freedom of movement mod destroyed almost all hitching by just changing the camera interactions. Please fix this.
-Constant rubber banding on hidden objects because the server respawned something that was destroyed but the client cannot see the object without relogging. This creates situations where you get stuck in cycles of rubberbanding over and over again.
-Thralls walking at a crawl pace. This gets players killed and is frustrating. Dancer thralls not equipping a weapon, again this gets players killed. They stand there with fists in the air and do not fight. You have designed your game to require thralls to be the main tanks in your game - These sort of bugs cause players not to be able to actively play content you designed.
-NPC’s running around with permanent shield block even with their shields down. It continues to happen especially in summoned surges. But it also happens on the old map especially darfari and nord/cim
-Thralls leveling up over and over again survival/archery perks. I have rerolled thralls so many times over just to see if its really random or a bug and 9 times out of 10 fighters end up with archery traits or survival. Archers with fighter traits. This has to be a bug its not random or I have literally hundreds of dumb luck which I highly doubt.
-Object popin in distance killing frame rates. I have a gaming rig 2070 super ryzon 2600 nvsd 32 gigs ddr4 etc. I go from 75 locked sync all the way down to 30-40 often because of texture streaming popin at distance. In the middle of combat this causes hitching and needs to be looked at.
-Structural integrity is bugged in stormglass pieces and not consistent. Some pieces will not even connect to each other such as reverse triangle pieces only go opposite of the direction they are supposed to face.
-Tier 5 perk in vitality is still broken and not working since 2018.

This is just a few and some of these are major issues. I have done most content in this game and could keep going to broken encounters like witch queen to other more major issues like unreliable purges. I get you need to make money as a company releasing new content but can you please at least address the major bare bones issues that effect gameplay basics like hitching and performance? Thanks

[KorgFoehammer]

You should know that not all problems you have are problems with the game software.

The machine in which the server is run, and the machine the client is run play a huge role in many things.

If you use (like GPortal, sorry), the bare minimum hardware needed for a server or a client, you will have many of these problems because of that. If you run the game with a ton of “other things running” in your PC, you have those problems. It includes rubber banding, objects floating around, frame rate drop, etc. Nothing devs can do if you dont use a good machine. When I run my server locally here in a good machine, 32 RAM, and run the client in my main Ryzen 9 full RAM and 12 Gb VRAM, none of this happens. When I run a second game in the same server, but in a Core i7 with 8Gb RAM, this often happens. If I run it in one core i5 with 8Gb RAM, it happens all the time. Either you ask devs to make a good game, or a game the runs in low hardware, cant have both.

The only legit thing devs can do something about and they are the ones who should do something about is the very “simplistic” AI that runs the Thralls. While mods can make a better AI, it is not without making a huge rework of all the AI, because as far as the dev kit shows, the AI from Conan Exiles is made by a “good programmer” that is not a “AI developer”. Sorry, but it is true.

The AI in Conan Exiles is what we call Parallel Pipe AI, which is the “premade” model of AI. The behavioral tree gathers data from the Blueprint and chooses the action from it, without any other means of acting other than this. So it does not process the “lack of input” as an input itself. The “idle” movements, and the “stop acting” are timed or originated in the animations themselves, not in the AI system.

Parallel Pipe AI is often used in arcade old games, like 16 bit platformers, which have enemies that aim guns at you, and flee when you get close, or calculate a trajectory to flank you. They are meant for things that show up fast and die quickly.

For a persistent entity that should live through gameplay sessions, you need a Heuristic Clockwork AI. This kind of AI processes “no input” as input, and develops a series of circular processes that inform how many “cycles” a given action “did not happened”. It is not that it counts “how long I have doing nothing”, it counts “how long I didnt do this”, or “how long I did not do this since I did that”.

That is why you often have thralls just stuck on a wall, or aggravated but not doing anything. They have the “in” to be aggravated, but they lack the “in” to act, however they also lack the “not in” that they did something about that first in.

One thing that most games have but it is not that “easy” to ask is the Theory of mind, which gives the Thralls the knowledge that they are besides being A thrall. This is not “self awareness” as they say in movies, which are the worse way to know AI. Theory of mind is equip thralls with the ability to understand for example that they dont need to rush to a player repeatedly if they will not attack that player. They need to know that before rushing to the player, rather than rushing to anything and then processing if they going to attack or not. Once, seems funny, doing it multiple times seems dumb.

There is a long list of things that the AI developed in parallel pipelines make thralls do, but if these are corrected, the others wont happen as well.

[scourn]

thanks for a detailed thought out reply. But I run two servers a g portal server and a server on a ryzon 2600 samsung pro 970 nvsh 32 gigs of ddr4 and a 2070 super. My rig can run ark with me playing on it and 4 others at the same time and i still get 70-100 fps playing on it without any issues. So I get what you are saying but thats not what is the case at play here. Invisible objects are causing rubberbanding, not faulty server hardware. Same with the hitching going on for players (not everyone experiences it) If you think conan’s system specs are greater than Arks or AI, graphics, shaders, performance demand, etc you should go play ark. These issues come from a poorly optimized game with fixes that are slapped together. Just the way they do containers and storage alone leads to server performance issues. Had they had the foresight to use a folder system things would be better but you cannot change the past etc. You even notice a large performance boost from Siptah compared to the old map in regards to hitching, its almost non existent. Mods can also play into extra server issues and weird conflicts that when they are cooked do not show errors but still produce them. I personally do not want to leave feedback on systems they can change over time, I just want the basic systems to actually work how they are supposed to. Is that really to much to ask?

[CodeMage]

Let’s not forget things like:

• Followers getting stuck randomly. I once got my horse and myself killed, because I was fighting the Rhino King near Muriela’s and my thrall got stuck by a small tree (his foot overlapped the tree mesh) and wouldn’t move.
• Autorun not working correctly while mounted. It can be solved, they just won’t prioritize it.
• Follower cap is still not active. After all the hullabaloo about it, they never activated it on official servers. As a result, whenever I’m on 1823, I see the server FPS tank into single digits (and the ping go sky-high) because there’s a clan with a boatload of followers in and around their bases.
• The hate list for volcano archers and fighters is still bugged.
• I’m not sure whether they ever fixed the Abyssal Remnant going “out of alignment” with the server. That bug has been around for so long, that I stopped hoping they’ll ever fix it.
• Followers will still walk into lava of their own volition.
• There are still weird, non-deterministic bugs in the stability graph calculation. The way they manifest is that the stability won’t propagate correctly on reboot and, if you don’t have redundant stability for the affected pieces, they’ll get destroyed. The workaround is to dismantle and rebuild the affected parts of the base, but that makes base construction a gamble.

Those are a few Exiled Lands and/or general bugs and issues I could think of without straining too hard.

EDIT: I forgot my “favorite” – whenever I fight a rhino (on foot), I get stuck inside its head on a regular basis.

[Giglioti]

I pretty much lost all hope for Funcom to fix what actually needs fixing

[TheLOLxd2]

Hey there,

I have changed the title to be more descriptive. Your thread will be seen regardless.

The Conan Exiles Forum - Community Guidelines expect posts to be constructive. As such, it is redundant to say ‘If Funcom listens to constructive feedback, here are some examples’.
This title also does not reflect your suggestion, namely the feedback itself.

I would recommend putting any “if” statements which are relevant to the post in its description, as they usually make the title very long. Short, descriptive titles are the best way to convey your topic to the reader. Long titles are ok if they capture the essence of the topic, but they can be seen as attention-seeking or clutter.