Smoother transitions between doors and zones please

I hope I put this thread in the correct spot. :slight_smile:

Anyways, going through doors and zones have been disorienting for me because the world suddenly freezes (like a picture) while it loads. It literally throws me off balance and I have to brace myself every time.

For going through doors, I would recommend some sort of fading out to black before the world freezes and then a loading screen so that you aren’t just floating in the black void wondering how long it will take to load the next area.

Similarly, I will be sliding along a pathway and suddenly my world will freeze because (I assume) I am switching zones. Either this transition has to be smoother or have some sort of archway/cave etc. to act like a “door” and then you can do the whole fading to black with a loading screen like I mentioned above. Unfortunately, this will make the world seem smaller and more broken up into chunks…less of an open world feel. I do not like this option, but if transitions can’t be smoother, then I would prefer this so that I don’t feel sick.

Thanks for reading!

EDIT: Thanks for all the comments. I am an oculus user and aware that we tend to have black voids for our loading screens. I’m more pointing out the issue with the abruptness of transitioning between zones. Sometimes I will be gliding along the path and my world will suddenly freeze, and then after a couple seconds/minutes it will unfreeze and I can continue. Same thing with doors, I start opening the door and everything will feel smooth up until a certain point where it freezes. If I look around, I might see a black void behind me.

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I always have some sort of loading Screen.
Sometimes it’s the Orbus Wallpaper with the redtail on it and a loading bar below it or a little Steam Window with the Orbus logo and a loading bar below it.
Just black void never happened to me…

Someone said its an oculus problem…I am on oculus…black void for me too…also for starting loading screen --> black void

Playing via Oculus, GTX 1070, i7 6700 and 16GB Ram, Dcs happen while entering new areas around 50% of the time, and increasingly when using Autorun anywhere, also sometimes in midst of fights and - when I still had quests - annoyingly once some just finished, like picking up the item. (PS: And I misread the OP, it doesn’t mention actual disconnect - the void and freezes when transitioning might be related to my issue, though).

I am using oculus on steam and didn’t even know there was a loading screen. I guess it’s a bug? I thought what the OP describes was the intended behavior.

I thought It was just me because of all the hdmi/usb extension cables I have chained to get to my PC. Some places are crazy with this. I think I sit thru 5 of these between the door and the witch in her cave. Often just in open areas while moving it happens, sometimes a few times within seconds. I def see it at the borders between named zones (ie, Lucian ramp to Desert), but also inside a named area. Are named zones split into subzones?

Yeah, the witch area is reallllly bad. 5 freezes when trying to walk up and talk to her sounds about right. I also have it happen when:

  • walking from HS to guild city right after I walk down the south staircase leaving HS
  • entering the frosted spit from the gardens
  • entering the rainforest after leaving HS

…and maybe a couple other places I cannot think of this moment. When it happens I hear all my fans on my PC spin up to max speed (actually it may just be the CPU or GPU fan, but I have never taken the time to check). I have 16GB of ram and an SSD.

Do Vive users not experience this? I always thought this was just part of the game. (Rift user myself)

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Forgot to say, Vive, 32Gb, SSD, can’t remember which card I got.

I’ve heard they don’t

Yes, I am describing what I feel and also what I think might be a good solution.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone is arguing that the zone stutters are an issue. I know we’d all like to see them fixed.

It is a notoriously tricky problem seen in even some larger budget games.

I hope that they can fix it, but with the open world design that they’ve created, I’m not holding my breath. It would probably be a fairly large redesign of their loading system.

Same here and also on Oculus. While looking at smoother zoning, I’d like if I was turned around the correct way when entering/exiting something. Usually when entering, for example, a dungeon, I’m facing the exit again. When going to the witch, I’m looking straight at the door I just came through.

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Yeah, I agree. I’ve found that it always is North.

This is actually the first I’ve heard of this issue. In my experience playing on both Vive and Rift I’ve always seen either a black void screen (Rift) or loading screen (Vive) when exiting my house and I get the same style black void loading screen on both headsets when near enough to a new zone that it loads in. Would you mind sharing your specs and graphics settings? I’d like to try to recreate this.

I have what seems to be exactly the same behavior, my specs:

i7-3770k
Asus P8B75-V (BIOS v.1608)
GTX 980
16GB DDR3 @ 1600Mhz (Dual Channel - 4 sticks of 4GB)
Windows 10 (Version 1709)
Oculus Rift running game through Steam
Game runs from a symlinked directory on my SSD

Exiting/Entering through doors fades to black (although I can still see a box in front of me and a void around me), but there are a few zones that halt my game temporarily when I enter/exit them: this is when I just see a static image of the game world in front of me and a black void everywhere else (probably due to loading resources). It generally takes my system 5-10 seconds to “catch up” and start rendering the game normally again when these “temporary freezes” happen. I could try recording it if you want, but I am not sure how well it will show the issue (I have never recorded anything from within VR before…)

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climbing down the steps in the south of high step results in a pretty long hang up every time. Also the pathway leading from high step to the rainforest has the same issue during the transition. I’ve always just assumed that this was the loading screen for the next area.

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Yeah, I get the stuttering when I zone as well. I’ll try to get a video tomorrow and gather some specs. But I’m rift on steam as well.

The black screen when exiting the house seems universal.

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