No Man's Sky
Foundation Update Incoming
This week Hello Games will be releasing an update to No Man’s Sky. We’re calling it The Foundation Update, because we have added the foundations of base building, and also because this is putting in place a foundation for things to come.
Detailed patch notes will follow, and release will be soon.
Coming from five years of intense development, immediately after No Man’s Sky released the team spent six weeks updating the game with 7 patches across both platforms. The last of these was 1.09 on Sept 24th which you can read about here http://www.no-mans-sky.com/log/. These fixed many of the most common or critical bugs and issues post-release.
In the nine weeks since then our small team has been hard at work on development, testing and certification for the Foundation Update. It won’t be our biggest update, but it is the start of something.
The discussion around No Man’s Sky since release has been intense and dramatic. We have been quiet, but we are listening and focusing on improving the game that our team loves and feels so passionately about.
Positive or negative feedback, you have been heard and that will truly help to make this a better game for everyone.
This update will be the first small step in a longer journey. We hope you can join us.
Thank you,
Hello Games
Patch Notes 1.07
You can read a development update here:
Development Update
What’s different
Objectives and stuck without Hyper-drive Issues
- Player no longer able to redeem your pre-order ship at a point which would then prevent you learning the hyper-drive blueprint (and if you have done this, we save you).
- Player no longer able to bypass being sent to find hyper-drive tech by reloading a save in game at a very specific point.
Getting Stuck in the world
- Fixed a couple of low repro bugs that could result in you falling through the world and getting stuck underground.
- A raycast in some space stations could hit a very specific point that would put the player inside the floor.
- Fixed an issue that would cause your ship to be thrown in the sky at high speed when taking off (in rare cases could in turn lead to getting stuck).
- Fixed an issue that would cause your ship to get stuck in terrain and prevent you from taking off, if the player managed to out run generation of terrain LOD 1, and land inside an overhang.
Gameplay
- Some players were unable to achieve the extreme survival journey milestone, this has been resolved.
- Fixed an issue where some players had some technology types being reported as "already known" when they weren't actually known.
- Under some circumstances a message was sometimes misinforming you that you learnt a blueprint when you hadn't, this has been fixed now.
- It was possible you could use up all available slots for waypoints on the galaxy map and be unable to set new waypoints. This is much better now.
- There was a bug that could cause objective markers to disappear when you loaded a previous save. This is fixed now.
- Fixed a rare issue when scanning creatures that would cause all planets to show as 100% complete even if you had only completed one.
Save / Load
- Fixed a bug what could cause some corrupt save games to not be loaded, this is now fixed.
- Fixed an issue where saves made with the system clock set in the future could cause problems.
Crash Fixes
- Fixed a crash that would sometimes happen when warping into a system with a space battle in progress.
- Fixed a crash that could happen when interacting with an NPC.
Tweaks and Improvements
- It is now easier to scan flying creatures.
- Fixed height and weight stats being the wrong way around for creatures.
- Gek towers can no longer be interacted with repeatedly.
- The 'You have unredeemed items' message will now only show for the first 5 minutes.
- Fixed getting 0% charge on Photon Cannon when buying a new ship and constantly being prompted to charge it.
- Reduce Suit VO for life support warnings and only do life support VO on 25% and 50%.
- Fixed grave being transferred to the new star system after you warp.
- Fixed toxic protection 3 (theta) from having the wrong name.
- Fixed incorrect marking of sea caves under floating islands.
- Turning down music and SFX volume in the options will now work correctly (mutes the VO also).
- If you change ship or multi-tool and then revert to previous save the ship should now be the one you had at the time.
- Atlas station collision improvements to prevent you from bumping into them too much.
- Fix for the stars not being discarded during load/warp (causing duplicate stars).
PC Only Issues
- Editing the settings file and corrupting it could cause the game to crash. Instead of crashing it will now revert back to the default settings.
- The inventory screen now works correctly regardless of resolution.
- Added error message for older CPUs without SSE3 support.
- Synchronise frame capping with the first vsync (removes some framerate issues).
- Added steam id to login call to help track down some login issues.
- Fixed the X key size on the galaxy map.
- If you press Tab+P in quick succession, the game paused and didn't let you out of it.
- Fixed a performance issue by defaulting your texture resolution to a sensible value based on available GPU memory.
Patch Notes
Right now the team is fully focused on categorising and fixing support issues in order of priority, based on the number of people they are affecting. The information and crash dumps you’ve posted have been indispensable in helping us track down and fix these issues.
We’ve now released 3 patches, and hopefully they really improve the experience for everybody. As you can see it’s been a huge amount of work for a small team. We appreciate your patience and understanding.
Next week expect at least one more major update, which will enter testing on Monday once we finish working on it this weekend. Once all our support requests have been answered then we can begin improving the game with new features :)
See below for notes on all three recent patches!
Patch 1
The focus of patch 1 was to add greater support for more hardware. Either specific hardware configs, or hardware outside our min spec. We want as many people to be able to play as possible, and these were our most reported issues.
AMD Phenom Support
Game is now confirmed working on Phenom CPUs.
Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten to support AMD CPUs. The game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2,
Havok Physics has also now created new libs for us to add Phenom support.
Alt-Tab has improved
Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt Tab. This should now be resolved.
Improved Performance
On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved.
On CPUs with exactly 8 threads, performance has also been significantly improved.
Framerate Stuttering due to Shader Caching
Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on. This is particularly true on ATI cards.
Max FPS Cap
On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been fixed.
Radeon 6xxx
Added support for this GPU, which doesn't support OpenGL 4.5 fully.
Save Corruption
Solution to try to prevent saves getting corrupted no matter what’s going on in background processes (see Patch 3 below, where we also are attempting to recover corrupted saves).
Intel GPU Detection
We do not currently support Intel GPUS. We are working on this for a future patch, to expand our min spec.
In the meantime, the game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high end GPU has not been selected.
Gsync
Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users
Mouse Smoothing
Generally this is most helpful for players with sub-30 FPS.
Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in “Mouse Smoothing”.
It defaults to off. If you feel micro stutters in framerate affecting controls, feel free to turn this up. If you feel the framerate is "slow" or "lumpy", please make sure that this is turned off
Patch 2
For patch 2 our focus was on the most reported bugs or crashes. Our aim was to improve stability, and make sure player’s saves are safe in future.
Stuck under the world
It was possible for players to save their game stuck under the terrain, leaving them stuck. This was caused by getting shot down in atmosphere, and their ship reaching ridiculous speeds as it crashed to the planet. This has been resolved.
Whilst it won't happen anymore, if you are currently already stuck under the world, we detect this and do our best to rescue you.
Crash after warping
Occasionally at random the game would lock up after a warp, or return to desktop. This was due to very specific timing in hardware (a threading specific bug) – meaning that unfortunately for some people it was regular, and for others they would never be able to recreate it. This was our most reported crash during gameplay, and has now been resolved.
Game failing to save until you died
If the player died, and then loaded the game ten times without saving, and then died, player progress wouldn’t be saved from then on until you died again. This is fixed now! This was also causing player’s saves to grow in size.
Crash fixes in scanning
Quite a rare crash, but in certain scenarios it was possible to scan from space or on planet and crash the game.
Crash warping inside a freighter
When warping into a battle sometimes the player warped into the inside of a freighter and everything went crazy :(
This is fixed now.
Patch 3
Patch 3 is targeted at our next most common support requests, fixing the next most common crashes, as well as trying to help players who have become stranded or have corrupted their save files.
Stranded in Space Station
If you died in your ship while in atmosphere of a planet with a damaged ship, you could respawn in a space station with your launch thrusters and pulse engine damaged. If you did not have the resources to fix them then you could no longer take off and be stuck there. This will no longer happen.
Loading Corrupted Save Files
Some players have corrupted save files, we’ve been working with them to still load saves even if they are corrupted (this can happen for many reasons outside of the games control). This fix has allowed many players to still load their save even if they have become corrupt on PC.
Crash fixes for next three most commonly reported issues:
- As the player gathers a huge amount of discoveries, there was a threading issue that becomes more prevalent the more discoveries you have, and could cause the game to crash.
- If you had collected a large number of blueprints, in a specific order it was possible to crash the game when you received a new blueprint. This has been fixed.
- Players who set a large number of waypoints could find themselves in a situation where they could crash the game in the Galactic Map, this is remedied now (PS. A better waypoint system is coming).
Overall these fixes should remedy around 70% of our current support requests. We're working on the next 30% right now. If you are still experiencing issues please do mail support@hellogames.co.uk
Thank you,
Hello Games
Support Update
We're genuinely so sorry for any issues people are having. A small per centage of players are seeing problems, but because so many are playing even that is a large number. All our energy is focused on these issues.
For a list of most common issues and workarounds please go here:
Common Workarounds
Many of the most critical issues now have workarounds. PLEASE try these first if you are encountering problems.
We have hot fixes for many issues in a build which is currently with our test team. This will exit testing and be made live for all players early next week.
If you are having issues and want to check this out immediately, we have made it available in a new Steam branch, called "Experimental".
To see what changes are active on Experimental, and how to use it, please check here:
Experimental Branch
If you are having issues, please mail support@hellogames.co.uk
Thank you,
Hello Games