Ugly White Blobs

thunderfoot

Shortly after 08/02/12, I went to my KDF toon to harvest some dilithium. I had not done the T'Kanis Nebula mission in awhile. Imagine my shock when instead of the smooth performance of my middle of the road computer normally gives me, I got the very worst lag and latency issues I've ever seen in any game. I aborted the run and proceeded to check out my install. No issues. Maybe it is my internet connection. Like everyone else, I get bumped for no reason once in awhile. Tried the T'Kanis Nebula again the next day. Same issue. This time I decided to look further into it. Immediately behind and below my spawn point are two very large white blobs which take up a significant fraction of my screen. Whenever my ship or any of my targets were near one of these, the lag issues became insurmountable. To the point where I achieved a Blue Screen of Death/Crash to Desktop issue. Something which is supposed to be nearly improbable with Win7.

Decided to investigate further. The same two ugly blobs are now in place in the Azure Nebula vs. the Romulans, the ChoS Nebula vs. the Cardassians and in the KDF Mirror Event as well. I have found a way to work around them. Which is to turn the graphics settings all the way to their very lowest and reduce the window size to 1024 x 768 pixels. Needless to say, this makes STO looks like the pixelated blobs I used to play against on my Commodore C64 back in the day. For a game which is heavily dependent on eye candy as part of its appeal, this ain't a good thing.

The Blobs resemble something which has been erased by someone using a very old version on Windows Paint. I've no idea why they are there or what caused them. But they are there anyway. I am hesitant to play any of the missions which have them and I am concerned they will multiply. My hesitancy comes from possibly disrupting the play of others.

Before I forget, Dell Inspirion One. AMD vid card. A few tweaks which I've installed myself and a Windows Experience Rating of 4.1. More than sufficient to play this game on the medium settings. I fully realize this post is troll bait. For this I apologize in advance for the irritation they may cause to any who try to help me.

trek21

I can confirm this. My connection and everything else are all as fine as can be, and I'm well aware of my computer's normal performance.

Merely having these white blobs in the screen slows down STO. Closer equals worse. Turning away from them in combat, completely, improved the smoothness considerably (back to normal even), but every single time we so much as see a portion of these white blobs in our screen... it slows down the game considerably.

flekh

This bug got introduced by the season 6 patch, as part of the graphics updates. IIRC, disabling Bloom was the key to get rid of it.
It's a known bug, and will be fixed some day ... just now it doesn't seem to be very high on the priority list as it's not gamebreaking, just very, very annoying.

cusashorn

Those blobs show up in Fed Mirror and some borg Invasions too.

thunderfoot

flekh wrote: »

This bug got introduced by the season 6 patch, as part of the graphics updates. IIRC, disabling Bloom was the key to get rid of it.
It's a known bug, and will be fixed some day ... just now it doesn't seem to be very high on the priority list as it's not gamebreaking, just very, very annoying.

So if I turn off the Bloom completely, they'll go away? Or will their effects merely be reduced?

Thank you for the help.

EDIT: Just tried the KDF Mirror Event with the Bloom turned off. No Joy. Although playing with the Half Resolution Feature turned on cured the lag issues completely. Good thing I'm not one of those people who are all about the eye candy in a game. Although this is one of STO's strongest selling points, isn't it? I was going to treat myself to a lifetime subscription for my birthday or Christmas. Now, I guess we'll see. Argue and complain and b***h all you like in a forum such as this. Companies do not listen until consumers vote with their cash. By then it's too little, too late. Why do you think WoW is now F2P?

foundrelic

I'm glad it's not just myself and my friend.

I run the game on a brand new notebook and it runs very well at mid range.


These rifts LAG ME THE **** OUT.

I told my buddy about it and he loaded up a Sirius sector Klingon encounter where these resource sucking blooms always appear.

His rig is pure power, the game looks and runs BEAUTIFULLY on it, seriously it's almost like watching a movie of the Gal-X rolling through space when he's in sector space.

HIS computer lagged out too.


These things are HORRIBLE and NEED to be fixed as they are impacting gameplay.

majesticmsfc

You could try and turn your graphics detail down. But I agree you shouldn't have to play with settings when this is an obvious bug that should have been fixed weeks ago, well to be honest should have been fixed on Tribble before Season 6 came to Holodeck. Seriously this game needs to be tested more, by gamers and Cryptic. I don't do testing for the simple fact that the rewards are lame. Offer me 10,000 dilithium for an hour and a purple Duty Officer and I'll happily test on Tribble.

travelingmaster

majesticmsfc wrote: »

You could try and turn your graphics detail down. But I agree you shouldn't have to play with settings when this is an obvious bug that should have been fixed weeks ago, well to be honest should have been fixed on Tribble before Season 6 came to Holodeck. Seriously this game needs to be tested more, by gamers and Cryptic. I don't do testing for the simple fact that the rewards are lame. Offer me 10,000 dilithium for an hour and a purple Duty Officer and I'll happily test on Tribble.

Precisely. Eff the whole 'oh, just lower your settings!' routine. That should never be necessary, unless your computer simply can't handle the graphics level on a regular basis. Having to turn down your graphics level just because Cryptic/PWE's too busy/lazy to remove an obvious graphics bug from the system is BS.

mgmirkin426

Yeah, these ungodly things came out w/S6.... They never lagged me, at the time, I don't think. They just made it IMPOSSIBLE to see any enemies anywhere near them... Supposedly, they're supposed to be nebulas or something? But they're basically just blinding white blobs of pure FAIL... They REALLY need to be fixed.

I pretty much don't do those grinding mission anymore because of them.

~MG

gerudon

They don't need to be fixed, they need to be deleted never to be seen again.

nanomorph

Try turning off post-processing, not bloom.

otsa609

Those things are so f**king annoying. I already have to deal with lag, and now this? Makes the encounters unplayable for me.

rifter1969

I've seen these too.

Mainly in the Borg Red Alert zones, and usually when someone drops a gravity well.

Slows me down, also I seem to get "lost" the in the zone, and can't even see which way is up. Let alone where everyone else is.

Happened yesterday, and I accidently went 1-on-1 with a tack cube.. :eek:

End result was expected... :rolleyes: