When No Man’s Sky received a new PC patch at the end of last week, it wasn’t accompanied by any official changelog or notes. Hello Games said those notes would be “incoming” in due course, and have today released details on all three of the PC patches to date.
In addition, they note that players should expect “at least one more major update” next week. The plan is for that fourth No Man’s Sky patch to enter testing on Monday (which may mean it’ll be available on Steam through the opt-in Experimental Branch Hello Games have set up). Instructions on how to join that can be found at the foot of this page.
It’s the usual process of finding the Betas tab in the game’s properties menu (right-click on No Man’s Sky in your Steam library) and then entering the code 3xperimental to unlock a drop-down menu option. Only if you want to, though. Otherwise just wait for patches to leave testing and be applied automatically.
Here’s the full list of additions, changes, fixes, improvements and so on added across the last three patches.
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
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 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).
Published: Aug 20, 2016 05:55 pm