Good Guy Silvan
I find it reassuring to hear when it is communicated that such problems are on the radar.
Sometimes one might think that feedback is not being heard by developers.
Good Guy Silvan
I'll be the judge of that, lol.. but good to hear!They fixed it in Sackboy
Sackboy™: A Big Adventure - Sackboy: A Big Adventure - November 9th Patch is Now Available - Steam News
Our latest update is now available to download and includes fixes for stutters relating to shader compilation, other bug fixes and new Costume DLC content.store.steampowered.com
Perfectly said. These are exactly questions that developers/publishers need to be pressured on.Can't wait to see @Dictator take in this.
IF they've really fully fixed the problem then 3 things spring to mind.
1. Well done to Alex and DF for highlighting it which could well be what directly led to the fix.
2. If it was so easy to fix, why did it ship in this state?
3. Kudos to the devs for acknowledging and quickly fixing the issue regardless.
Well in today's world everyone is awesome and failure is always down to some untenable circumstances beyond their control. People love to ignore that it's always the same developers who consistently deliver high quality products and the same developers delivering mediocre to poor products when both are playing by the same rules with the same limitations. The only difference is the personnel.What about Kudos for the devs making engines/games without such crappy stuttering in the first place ? I really don't believe Sackboy devs deserve praise, they're just fixing their own mistakes. And it was so quick that I'm pretty sure it was a well known problem before launch, has to be. Not everything is on editors/publishers wanting crazy launch date.
What about Kudos for the devs making engines/games without such crappy stuttering in the first place ?
I really don't believe Sackboy devs deserve praise, they're just fixing their own mistakes.
With this type of issue, unless they're doing shaders of the entire game at startup, then likely it's not a fixed/not fixed binary choice but rather the problem has been greatly alleviated by shifting compilation to some background async tasks or something.I'm still waiting for 100% confirmation that Sackboy's shader compilation stuttering has been fixed. I've checked the Steam forums, with some users saying yes it's 100% fixed, and some others saying nope.. it still stutters.
Just thought I'd chime in about Sonic Frontiers, if anyone was maybe on the fence about getting it and worried about shader stutter... but I can confirm there is no stuttering whatsoever in Sonic Frontiers.. shaders or otherwise. The game runs really smoothly, despite being locked to 60fps.
I'm still waiting for 100% confirmation that Sackboy's shader compilation stuttering has been fixed. I've checked the Steam forums, with some users saying yes it's 100% fixed, and some others saying nope.. it still stutters.
DSOGaming, a PC focused news site, said in their article that yes, it's actually fixed, but I'm still not sure. I don't trust random people enough to know how to properly test this with clean caches, so I guess I'll wait until one comes along.
Re: Sackboy UpdateWith this type of issue, unless they're doing shaders of the entire game at startup, then likely it's not a fixed/not fixed binary choice but rather the problem has been greatly alleviated by shifting compilation to some background async tasks or something.
Alright, that's good to hear, thanks for checking! Seems like I'll be purchasing this game after all then.Re: Sackboy Update
I cannot possibly know if EVERY shader has been cached (I am not going to play the whole game to find out), but now they burn all threads at 100% as the game is starting, making the first game start longer as they chew through shaders. I only tested without RT on, but the first level and cutscenes no longer had shader compilation related stutter on a Ryzen 5 3600/RTX 2060 S machine.
[Complete driver wipe with DDU, shader cache deleted via Disk Clean.]
But now the question remains as to why it released like that in the first place... This is a real issue with PC gaming at the moment. We have to get past this "release games first, and fix later" type of thing that's happening all too often.
It just goes to show a LOT of this particular issue can be avoided and overcome when the developer is essentially forced to deal with it.
Indeed. I think there's a few developers which this applies to. Double Fine with Psychonauts 2, Neon Giant with The Ascent, a few others I can't remember off the top of my head, and now hopefully Sumo Digital with this game. In all cases these developers seemed to be quite forward and interacted with their audience. Taking in feedback and working on the issues until they were essentially resolved. Hopefully they've all learned a lesson with regards to Unreal Engine and how to properly do it from the start to avoid these issues. I believe they have.I imagine the immediate and heavily negative response over something that was apparently so easy to fix will have been an eye opener for some devs. I doubt this particular studio will be making that mistake again. Unfortunately for them it won't be easy to shake off that stigma now of this being a broken game despite the issue being fixed mere days after launch.
On the subject of issues, how is the frame pacing issue that Alex mentioned? Are you running with his recommended fix? I can't remember exactly what it was. Something like matching the frame cap to the monitor refresh rate?
Yep. It's not 100% perfect, but very very good now. Like I said there are small spikes here and there, which I'm not sure are even Shader Compilation related at this point. There's also quick hitches that happen when you're browsing through new costumes for the first time in the menu. You can see the hitch, but it literally doesn't really affect anything, because it's in the menu. It's as if it just takes a fraction of a second to load the new costume. Lots of games have these hitches when in menus.Generally yes don't go by anecdotal reports, but someone who has enough knowledge to at least know that a new driver wipes the shader cache and also is aware of high CPU usage from shader compiling gives their take far more credence imo.
Doesn't sound 100% perfect, but massively improved:
This is one game where I think DirectStorage, and GPU decompression would really help.
Why you ask? Because it can definitely load much faster than it does. Check the PS5 version compared to the PC version.Not sure why it would be a good candidate? It doesn't stream textures to any large degree, and it's CPU usage is exceedingly low. DS would not help the choppy videos during shader compiling.