Steps to Reproduce:

1. Start the game and click "Continue Campaign".
2. Left-click a fleet on the sector map.
3. Left-click another fleet on the sector map without de-selecting the first.

Observed Behavior:

1. About 80% of the time, this will result in a crash. Specifically a timeout in the Unreal Engine display thread.

Expected Behavior:

1. The fleet selection will change and no crash will occur.

All my Windows NVIDIA graphics drivers and my OS have received all of their most recent updates. The game actually performs well during battles with the graphics settings turned down. Ironically it is only in the least graphically intensive part of the game that this crash occurs.

0_1549303394597_DxDiag.txt

0_1549303637375_UE4CC-Windows-960B47BA4F2034B2A2F20F811DDF5A08_0000.zip.zip

The exact text of the error is:

LowLevelFatalError
[File:C:\UE4.18\Engine\Source\Runtime\RenderCore\Private\RenderingThread.cpp] [Line: 1015]
GameThread timed out waiting for RenderThread after 30.00 secs

This error also is reproducible when de-selecting fleets as well. For reference, I am using an Alienware m14 r2.

If there is any information I can provide to help, please let me know. Right now, the game is only playable one turn (at most) at a time, and I am sure to quick-save after every action, because it's hard to predict when simply clicking a fleet will cause the game to crash and all progress to be lost.

The actual battles perform very well without incident. The only problems are in the sector maps.

I have done further updates and further testing. I got the latest drivers for the GeForce GT 650M directly from the GeForce website, just to confirm that is NOT the problem.

I also started a new campaign to see if there was any difference in behavior. What I found is that the problem with selecting fleets grows in time. A campaign at the start allows one to rapidly select fleets without difficulty, but later in the game, the time it takes to select a fleet grows and grows. Eventually, the act of selecting a fleet simply causes the game to crash.

There is some growing amount of data associated with selecting a fleet that eventually overwhelms the system one is working on, and the but is reliably reproducible even with the latest drivers. This bug ONLY impacts the System Map fleet selection, and it happens even when the system is powerful enough to handle the actual battles.

Crash Files: 0_1550323306240_UE4CC-Windows-78F9A95A4CE6B051B3AD8C8CF9565793_0000.zip

Save file: 0_1550323390647_End round auto save.sav

DxDiag system info: 0_1550323441581_DxDiag3.txt

Load the save file, and click fleets 10-15 times and the game crashes every time. It is even reproducible by clicking the same fleet repeatedly.

Please do not dismiss this issue as being merely attributed to my graphics card. This has all the symptoms of a memory leak, and my card merely exposes a problem that impacts everyone faster. The rendering thread is timing out due to the massive amount of garbage memory it has to sift through which is added to every time a fleet is clicked on.

Hey @madric
We have been checking your system and we're sorry to say that you are under the minimum specifications for the game. You're right that the source of your problem is the map. We have passed this on to the devs, in case they decide to work on lowering the minimum requirements in the future. Very sorry we can't do more than this for the moment.

@Jellyfoosh while I believe it is logical to assume that a weaker graphics card is the cause of the problem, there are a few other circumstances with the problem that I believe indicate that there is something deeper wrong in the game.

• The exact same number of fleets on the screen can be successfully displayed on turn 40, but only results in crashes later on (such as on turn 85).
• The crash occurs when selecting even the same fleet repeatedly. No new graphical assets should be loaded in such cases.
• The battles themselves, which are far more graphically demanding, have no such crash problems.

It seems there is some asset in the game that is accumulated which slows down performance of the sector map. Other people, even with far more powerful graphical cards, also experience lags when selecting and moving fleets.

Either there is a memory leak, or there there is an overly aggressive loading of assets. For example, instead of just loading fleet IDs, perhaps all the graphical assets associated with the fleets are loaded as well, including all past fleets which had been previously destroyed in earlier turns.

I believe fixing this problem would greatly improve the experience of all users, and the benefit to me would be to simply be able to play the game at all.

Patch 3 has come out, so I decided to see if the campaign can be played again.

I followed the same procedure, I opened the save file linked above, scrolled to the right until I got to the "Amistel" system with 3 fleets on it. Then I selected the top, middle, and bottom fleets one at a time (slowly) for about 4 cycles. On the 12th click, the game froze with the same exception error:

LowLevelFatalError [File:C:\UE4.18\Engine\Source\Runtime\RenderCore\Private\RenderingThread.cpp] [Line: 1015]
GameThread timed out waiting for RenderThread after 30.00 secs

For others who are facing this bug, it is still not yet resolved. More powerful systems may simply need more interactions before the game crashes on them, but the underlying bug is still there.

I saw a patch being deployed today, so I decided to try out the campaign. The problem is still there. I loaded the above save file, left-clicked one fleet, then another, and on the second click the game crashed.

I tested again after the release of Patch 4.

The crash is not resolved. However, upon loading the saved file, it took until the 16th time that I clicked a fleet before the game crashed (same symptoms as above). This represents a very minor improvement from Patch 3, where it took 12 clicks.

Performance normally degrades after each click, with the fleet select action ranging from 0.5 to 2 seconds to complete. However, on the 16th click, the game completely freezes and crashes with the same error: GameThread timeout waiting for RenderThread after 30.00 seconds.

It seems that the game is still not managing graphical resources correctly on the Sector Map. Maybe next patch.

I tested again with the recent minor patch that also introduced the Planet Killer ship.

Now the game doesn't crash on the mini-map until I select a fleet 20 times. This is actually an improvement. I hope that in all the work that's being done, that memory leaks are being caught and being fixed, because each successive patch has been making the problem slightly better.

I can confirm what madric is saying. My game performs comparable to what he is reporting.

This has been getting reported since the games launch.

[0_1562252872252_742019crashinfo.zip](Uploading 100%)

I tested again after the last patch released a few days ago.

To my surprise, I could no longer reproduce the crash. I clicked roughly 30 different times and the game continued to work normally and was no longer slowing down after every click.

If this is consistent and it was not just a fluke, it seems the bug may have been fixed, which makes the campaign actually playable for the first time on my hardware (Alienware M14x R2).

If the original bug was a memory leak like I had suspected, this would also mean much smoother and consistent performance even for those with more powerful computers.

Nevermind, it's back to crashing. It only took 3 clicks.