Game mode: Single-player
Type of issue: Bug
Mods?: No
Edition: Steam
Bug Description:
A fairly minor visual bug, water ripples are not visible or more aptly turn off in various parts of water dotted around the Exiled Lands. Entering these bugged areas of water acts as if ripples are being turned off, so ripples created before entering the area disappear and then reappear again on exiting. Some example locations are the point the North/South western most river in the desert meets the main river near the Exile camp that’s surrounded by crocodiles, the oasis in the desert North of the Unnamed City, the entire river NE of Riversend until a short distance into the lake it flows from, and along the Ghost Fence SE of Dagon’s Claw. I have not been to the Isle of Siptah, so don’t know if the same thing happens there. The best place to test is the first one, as the boundaries between the bugged and not bugged water is pretty noticeable as you travel north from the main river into the tributary.
I can only play on GeForce NOW at the moment, so not certain what the hardware specs are, and I think the machines are running multiple VM’s at once so I imagine what is allocated to each user will vary anyway. However I also noticed this bug during early access on a laptop with a GTX-860M, 16GB RAM and an i7-4710HQ, I put it down to mid-range hardware or poor performance at the time.
Expected Behavior:
Ripples should appear whenever any object, such as a rock or an NPC, intersects with the waters surface.
Steps to Reproduce:
Wander around the water in the Exiled Lands, such as the areas mentioned above but likely also in other areas as well, and watch for patches where ripples don’t work.
A quick question: did you try the water quality settings? Probably it is set to low (a guess). Plus I remember there was a time not so long ago that setting the water quality to ultra caused some weirdness in water bodies, but that is resolved by now.
I’ve checked that. At least on the GeForce NOW machines I had everything on Ultra before the recent update, now all on Cinematic, and tested it on High as well, with anti-aliasing on and off. I’ve also tried all on low except for effects quality on high and the issue still occurs.
I intended to make a recording today but between yesterday and today something seems to have gone wrong with GeForce NOW and the game launcher no longer loads after steam validates and downloads some missing files (it has been reported on the GeForce NOW forums).
I’ve made a recording of the bug, Conan Exiles Water Ripples Bug - GIF - Imgur. Ignore the frame and audio skips, they are caused by streaming the game with high packet loss as my internet connection has a lot of noise. This is on a fresh dedicated server, I’ve recently installed mods on single player and backing up the saves is a pain when playing exclusively on GeForce NOW.
Sorry to keep on about this, but I didn’t want this to be ignored since the game lacks polish in general and every little improvement will help. There seems to be more places where ripples don’t work than where they do. These locations are the same in single player and on a dedicated server, with and without mods on new games started since patch 2.5. It is not the same bug with low quality looking water textures that was previously mentioned, that has been fixed and I assume is what the 2.5 patch notes meant by “funky” water. It is the dynamic ripples that travel out from any object that is in water that are not working correctly.
Since no one else has responded about also having this bug I decided to watch some gameplay videos on YouTube to see if any of them had this same bug, specifically ones playing on high or better settings, and every single one I found has this bug. The locations where ripples do and do not work in these videos so far correspond exactly with the locations I’ve noticed this bug.