itch.io

Ah, that's interesting.

It looks like it could be a few possible causes:

• Out of date drivers - The game is running on UE5.1 which is fairly new, so it could mean it's needing an update that hasn't gone out automatically to your machine for the graphics card.
• Antivirus - Some antivirus software can conflict with parts of Unreal Engines compiled code, so it might be getting flagged as something dodgy. Try disabling antivirus, play the game and see if it still crashes, then re-enable it because you need antivirus, but if the game worked right, you might need to add an exception for it.
• Laptop Battery - If the battery is low, it might go into a power saving mode which could reduce the efficiency of the GPU. Try plugging it in and see if it works while connected to a power socket. If that still doesn't do it, wait until full charge and try again.
• Hardware issues - most likely would be RAM. Try using Windows Memory Diagnostics tool to check all your RAM is working right. I mean, even if something else already fixed it, this ones a good idea to do occasionally anyway!

I'd work down that list from top to bottom. I'm not sure what it could register in antivirus as if it's getting caught there. I've seen UnrealEngine, UE5, and ShooterGame as possible things it could pick up.

But, going on the original report, I've also been working on improving loading. It seems on slower computers, when a landscape is used, it tries to place the player before the landscape can load. This explanation could get boring, so you may want to skip this bit...

Both OpenForest and the World Map use a landscape, but slightly differently. Worldmap *should* be able to load before the world spawns in, but sometimes it doesn't. However the player should always be stood on a Pad which loads instantly, so you won't fall through the map before the landscape loads.

The OpenForest loads in about 256 chunks of landscape. It should start with the one the player is spawning on first, which it does. The problem then is that after the player is place, the game randomises where the spawnpoint really is then moves the player. On slower machines, it looks like it tries to spawn into landscape that has yet to load, so finding nothing, it randomises spawn again and again until it crashes on an infinite loop. The thing is the landscape does spawn in, but it retries about 150,000 times within a couple of seconds, so it's over so fast the landscape still hasn't loaded in.

I've modified the way it now works by adding loading screens to all levels. It also imposes a mandatory 2 second delay before starting to randomise spawn location, and each time it retries it waits 0.2 of a second first. In testing with a slower machine it takes on average 10 loops before it finds a loaded chunk to spawn in. If it hits 150 loops without finding anywhere to spawn, it will just default back to where the spawn started before trying to randomise, so it should now always find a location.

The main thing though is all levels now have a mandatory wait while the loading screen is showing to give things time to load, then removes the screen once everything has initialised. Hopefully that should fix the issues if the hardware/drivers stuff doesn't.

I'm working on a few other bugs and hope to get a patch out tomorrow.