U3.5 Game freezes when not 'in focus' on PC and/or when saving

[reef timber]

The game has started to freeze completely when I change the focus of the open items on my laptop PC. It's a Windows 11 setup with Intel Core i9 CPU, RTX4090 laptop GPU (w/ 32GB VRAM) and 32GB main board RAM.

For example, I have Steam, the game, a browser, a spreadsheet and a file manager all open at the same time and everything is fine until I switch the focus from the game to the browser (Firefox), spreadsheet or file manager. Then the game freezes out and I have to reload my PC session because the game is completely unresponsive.

There have a been a few instances of this in the past (if I have too many RAM-hungry applications running) but, with the introduction of U3.5 Beta, this happens pretty much any time I change focus away from the game. I doubt that the browser or spreadsheet are the only culprits in this!

Update: Well, actually, not really ... I went into the NVIDIA control panel to change the graphics usage from 'Default' to GPU-only ... but that hasn't improved matters.
However, this seems to be more prevalent, as a bug, if I 'pause' the game and then switch application focus. If I leave the game running in the background, it seems to be more tolerant of the loss of focus.

[reef timber]

Another update now that U3.5 is on the main branch ...

The game (or, at least, my PC's screen refresh) is now freezing periodically (not every time and mostly not with any provocation) when I do a manual 'V' save. Also, the game starts the save process but never completes it.

Investigating my saves folders shows that an update has been written to the 'SaveGamesBackups' folder (which, therefore has the latest manual save) but it does not update the relevant save slot in the main 'SaveGames' folder.

I don't, therefore, (or, at least, not very often) lose any game play because I can restore from the ...Backups folder but it is more than a little frustrating when this happens as it breaks my gameplay.

Also, as the screen has frozen, the only fix for this is to log out of my PC and log back in again ... which loses anything I had working, but unsaved, in the background (although I'm trying to limit that as much a possible until this issue is resolved).

[edit] And ... it's also frozen at the point at which it's doing an autosave ... again, the autosave goes into the ...Backups folder but not into the regular 'SaveGames' folder. [/edit]

[reef timber]

My ongoing stability/freezing issues are persisting in spite of:

• a clean installation of the latest NVIDIA graphics drivers (v596.21 dated April 16th)
• re-optimization of the game settings through the NVIDIA app
• display mode set to 'GPU only' in the NVIDIA Control Panel

The PC is running hot and using 90% or so of the GPU resources. This was way better in U3 (once the problems there were resolved) so something else is causing the problems post-U3.5 rollout.

[reef timber]

I'm now playing on the main branch and with a moderate improvement due to the previous chnages made. GPU usage is down to around 85% but still feels too high and hot for my prefernces.

Stability is somewhat better but I still get periodic freezes ... most notably (but not exclusively) when the game is saving (either auto or manual) and I try to do something which significantly changes the image displayed on the screen (e.g. move around a lot or bring some other app into focus on top of the game). I've also noticed that, when the game starts saving whilst in 3rd person driving mode (the flashing icons in the bottom right indicates when this is happening), there is a short (half second?) screen freeze as well.

And an additional point ... my game's .sav files have shot up over the last two release (U3 and U3.5) from 17MB to 31MB per save. Given that I have the autosave time set to 5 minutes (due to this ongoing stability issue) and I alsoi like to save fairly frequently, this adds up to a lot of storage space for a few hours of in-game play.

Given the .sav location is in the 'Voyage' folder on the PC's C:\ drive, and mine is restricted to 100GB unless I do a complete o/s reinstall and reconfiguration (becauase I never expected to be using this amount of dynamic h/disk space for a game!), I am constantly having to clear out the backup saves folder ... usually every day or two at most.

@zealous vector Apologies for the direct ping but, can you please ask the devs whether my .sav file size (31MB) is now typical or is bloated (through being an ongoing playthrough) and also ask them whether they would give some thought to relocating the whole 'Voyage' folder to be somewhere under the 'Steam' folder (as that, for me, is on a seperate drive with ample spare space).

[zealous vector]

@reef timber sorry for the delay in replying pal! Had a busy weekend installing CCTV! I have raised this to QA, they have requested a copy of your save for checking pls

[reef timber]

@zealous vector Thanks for responding and that's not a problem at all. Everyone needs time off to do something else and/or for themselves; I've had a fairly busy one myself ... albeit I did find some time to continue my game.

I've begun noticing a more specific scenario (at least, I think is) ... to whit, the 'freeze' problem seems to arise most often when the game is autosaving. Most recently, I'm seeing a brief game 'mini freeze' at points where it starts the autosave process ... and that's most obvious when I'm in third person driving mode. The 'freezing when not in focus' might be associated with that ... or it might not.

Anyway, my latest save file (from this morning) is attached per your request and I hope the devs find something ... even if it's only a bugged file at my end!

Many thanks for your help 🙏

[zealous vector]

raised to QA for checking, I'll get back to you if and when they find something to note 🙂

cheers

[reef timber]

U3.5 Game freezes when not 'in focus' on PC and/or when saving