Incarnate

I can confirm this works, I've successfully loaded in a good bunch of times now, where I'd normally have 15+ minutes of load time without it necessarily successfully loading into the game, where now it around 3 minutes. Ever since doing the fix I've been able to log in. What I've have settings-wise, is have most graphic settings set either to low or off, and it's running in windowed mode. But once I get in I prefer to set it to fullscreen, and then turn on some graphics. However I don't think this is necessary, I just do it to be on the safe side.

Hello everyone. I've found a potential fix that solves the problem of the loading issue, where the game would become unresponsive, you'd have long load times, system would become unresponsive etc. In my investigation in an attempt to find out what could be the cause of this issue, which you can read about here: https://www.playatlas.com/index.php?/forums/topic/11535-client-instability-potential-causes/ lead me towards the solution, so onto the solution, though be warned: You have to do a bit a of manual work here. The Solution: 1. Step 1. Navigate to where Atlas is installed - this you can easily find without any real hassles. First right click on the game name in the steam library, click on properties, then click on the local files tab, then click on the browse local files. This will open the game folder where the game is installed. 2. Then navigate to this folder: ATLAS\ShooterGame\Content\Movies. 3. Create a folder named Backup in this folder. 4. Move AtlasTitle.wmv and LoadingScreen.wmv to the backup folder. 2. Step 1. Launch the game. 2. Join the server of your choice. Note: If this for some reason don't work for you, please do comment here for further help. If you need to revert back to the original state, just move the two files back from the backup folder into the folder they came from and you'll have it back to the original state. [DISCLAIMER] You accept the consequenses of anything you do on your computer, where Grapeshot or me cannot be held accountable for any issues or loss of data you may encounter in your efforts in doing the above. However I do not think this will cause any loss of data and solution provided can easily be reverted back to original state. IF this worked for you, be sure to comment, leave a like and be sure to let others know of this fix. Happy Gaming! //INC.

[UPDATE 1] I've done further testing, specifically to see what is cause the most amount of load, to see what could be impacting performance during loading, again using the windows resource and performance monitor. It turns out that the two main files that is being read and loaded by the Atlas.exe file, is LoadingScreen.wmv being the highest and some times having several of the files being run simultaneously, and the other one is Atlas.exe itself, those are the two with top highest amounts of reads. Whats even more weird, during the loading screen the AtlasTitle.wmv where also read, meaning it was being access for a purpose, which I only can think would be to display it, but wasn't, and the LoadingScreen.wmv were also present simultaneously, even with several duplicates of it. What does the above actually mean and what are the consequences in terms of impact on loading times and results? Generally speaking, the impact can be quite high and it reduces the amount of reads that can be done to other files, as harddrives and even solid state drives have actual hardware limitations, and amount of reads per second is no exception to this limitation, in fact it's one of the main ways to measure how fast the drive actually is. So in other words the more NON-ESSENTIAL reads it performs the less efficient it actually will be in terms of effiency towards loading into the game. This directly translates into unnecessary longer loading times and potential not being able to log in due to the initial networt connection being dropped or being unable to be maintained until the loading is complete, hence why a lot of people get the "Host Connection Timeout" message once the loading is actually complete. As mentioned before, the .wmv is a windows media file, which only has the purpose of making it look nice while it's loading, but this comes at a cost, namely loading times, efficiency and stability. Furthermore, the game isn't the only thing that relies on and needs the HDD/SSD to operate, in fact the operating system, in short the OS, also continuously uses the HDD/SSD to remain operational and responsive. So when the game is attempting load into the game after one has clicked join/connect, it will attempt use all of the drives resources and read capacity to load, and it would seems it tries to use ALL and not whats currently available for use, which would make the game become unresponsive and the system will also become unresponsive at some point or at several times during load. There could also be another reason why the game immediately becomes unresponsive, which could be due to the fact that the Atlas.exe seems to be reading itself from the disk rather than from memory to perform various things, which also seems to be quite unnecessary as it's already loaded into memory when you run it, and also makes it affect loading times, stability and efficiency, and above all it might be the sole reason why the game and system ends up becoming unresponsive. So with the above being said, why do not all seem to be suffering from it? There can be many reasons, but generally speaking the most likely reason simply is that they have much stronger systems and thus more stable system that can handle these kinds of issues caused by this. But even if this is the case, there is absolutely no reason to make it this way, as it's very inefficient and could handled a lot more efficient and smooth. I would like to recommend that the developers consider some options, both for stability and performance issues but also to make it more efficient and smooth, which would make require even less resources and which will translate into better game experience. The possible solutions below are not mutually exclusive, in fact I recommend that all of them are implemented ASAP! 1st Solution Add a debug option for the players to enable, this should be to collect important key information about various things, such as system specs, what processes were performed during load, load times, crashes, etc. Basically put any type of information that will identify the problem. WHY? First and foremoremost, since this is in early access it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT and I cannot stress this enough, because this is still in development and in early access the technical feedback from players are extremely important, especially when it's accurate information that help pinpoint the problem but also provides more information in regards to the problem that also might point in the direction of a solution. 2nd Solution Make it possible to disable the AtlasTitle.wmv and LoadingScreen.wmv and replace those with a static image of them. According to the resource and performance monitor, the amount of reads being doen 3rd Solution Make it read from the Atlas.exe loaded in memory, rather than from disk, especially since both HDD and SSD has actual hardware limitations, and by making it read from the memory rather than the disk, it would actually leave more room for the other files that needs to be read from, and also most people are using HDD rather than SSD.

When they reduced the spawn rate, they should also in conjuction with that, have wiped effectively the amount of ghost ships equivalent to the reduction amount, not buts, just action. In regards to the skill tree, I agree it was a needed change and it was certainly too aggressive. Restructuring the skill trees I think is necessary at this point. You could say some of the skills that have a much higher cost in comparison to their placement in their skill tree, just means that they should be located further down and have their cost reduced appropriately.

No I'm not, I have manually set the startup parameter -lowmemorymode. But even so, it still doesn't actually explain my findings with the windows resource monitor.

I completely agree with OP and many of the other points made. Also the amount animals is way too high, you can't even go anywhere without having to fight to survive against one or several animals, not mention their levels are also completely insane, including damage levels. Because with the amount of animals you're forced use a lot of your harvested materials on weapons and ammo to even be able to survive outside against them. Their aggro range is also insane, like seriously. Also the amount of different but equivalent materials just makes the game more complex without actually achieving something new, other than just making it more complex. Why should it be so difficult to get something so vital as water, because even with the amount of players there are now it's pretty damn difficult to actually find. The vitamin system however, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but certain should mostly be tied to being a long time out on the ocean without being able to get proper food and vitamins. Players having their characters die of old age is an interesting concept, this fits in single player games, not in MMO games, because as this requires other players to mate with your character, it forces this role onto players, meaning A LOT of players will not be able to continue with their character once it reaches that stage where it dies of old age, simply because thats a player controlled aspect, which it most certainly should not have. Making an MMO game without an authentication login server that also handles queues for all of the live servers is not a very bright move. That was just a few more to the list.

Guess we need to have a little chat about what early access is and isn't! ...and it makes me wonder, how many of you have actually read Steamworks Documentation about said topic in question? Let me take a wild card and guess - closer to zero!? So let me for your convenience quote EXACTLY Steam says about it, and it's taken directly from their documentation... Brace yourselves because here we go! It should be apparent from this what an early access title is and is not. But again for your convenience, let me break it down to make it real simple for you. Atlas is definitely an early access title, but is it playable? For the majority it is not, so for those people they did not deliver a playable game at the time of purchase for the majority of the players. Furthermore, it feels very much like they were crowdfunding it, as it seems a lot like they did not have the infrastructure in place as needed. Also this specific part - "a tool to get your game in front of Steam users and gather feedback while finishing your game." - please do take special note of the highlighted section and think for a moment what that means. Yes thats right, it means that it should only be in early access while the game is being finished, where this game far from being finished, the devs have even stated this themselves - up to two years, it's not even remotely close to being finished. So should this be out as an early access title now? Not in my opinion, as the game is far from being ready for it and has so many issues, not just technical issues, but actual gameplay issues. Despite it being a cool concept and an ambitious project , it feels like a cashgrab to an extreme degree. I do want the project to succeed, but they need to realize a lot of things, especially if they want this to be an actual MMO.

So you got the same results or not? Is your game client also suffering from instabilities, being unable to load in, and so on?

It's a harddrive (HDD). If the case is that it can't handle the writing speeds of what Atlas requires, then they seriously need to change some things in order to make it less demanding in that regard. HOWEVER, from what I've found out, it doesn't appear to be the issue what you're thinking, but obviously an SSD would be able to handle that strain a lot better, though it doesn't really change the fact that it seems they've made it in a way thats really inefficient and downright sloppy job, otherwise it's indicative of certain levels of incompetancy being present.

As I'm one of those who're affected by client instabilities and being unable to join, long loading times without being able to successfully load in. I did some investigation to try and dig a bit deeper, where what I've found, might be one of or the main reason behind the client instability that players get when the attempt to join a server. I used the windows task manager and the windows resource monitor to do this. So what I did was I opened the task manager, resource monitor and the Atlas it self, then set the resource monitor to filter for Atlas.exe, which basically means it shows what the Atlas program is doing, both in terms of cpu, disk, network and memory. The most important part here is what it's doing with the disk, basically what it's reading or writing to. What I've been able to find so far... The menu animation is a windows media video file named AtlasTitle.wmv, which also seems to be running when the game is attempting to load in the actual game. The loading screen animation is a windows media video file named LoadingScreen.wmv, where several of these are being run simultaneously from the disk after clicking the button to join/connect. The Atlas.exe is running it self from the disk - this could potentially be a very serious issue, to the point of it being one of the main reasons, if not the main reason for the client instability issues when trying to connect and load into the game. I've also noted it using the msdmo.dll to compress data, which as far as I'm aware is only used when fragmentation to data happens, which I can only assume it's because fragmentation of data has been caused. I don't know why the Atlas.exe is reading/writing to the executeable itself, as it's loaded into the memory, so it should not be necessary to read from the program on the disk, it would be other files that would be accessed, primarily to read them or run them, but some files could be written to like configuration files. Anyone reading this, you're more than welcome to try and do what I've done to see if you can recreate the same results I got - on your systems, or maybe even get similar or different results that you can share with us here, this will help the developers more accurately pinpoint what could be going on as it is a very widespread issue. In whatever case, please do share what you find and if you happen to have expert knowledge in terms of computing, programming, etc. feel free to chime in and elaborate or share your thoughts as to what you think is going on. /Inc.

I'm not exactly sure why a lot of players have their client become unresponsive which also for most locks up their system, where they can't really do anything other than just sit and wait, although what I'm about to reveal might shed some light on this. However I have done some investigation using both the windows task manager and the windows resource manager , where I'm questioning my findings, like for instance why it's not using an optimized video format for games for its menu video sequences, like for instance the bink video format by radgametools, because the menu animation is basically just a video named AtlasTitle with the format .wmv, which for those who don't know, this is windows media video, which is NOT optimized for games and furthermore uses windows program libraries to function. Another thing I found that it's actually compressing data some data, I don't know what data specifically, but I can see that it's compressing data, which could causing performance issues and instability issues. Another odd thing I notice, which is super weird and might also be one of the reasons why it's becoming unresponsive, the Atlas.exe program seems to run the program from within itself. Furthermore, the loading animation is another video file thats running - LoadingScreen.wmv, which happens to be run more than once simultaneously, weird right? It's definitely something that could cause more instability. I did get screenshots of this, just in case.

I agree, they need more servers, and not just actual gameplay servers but servers to handle various task. I might be wrong, but I think they need something more like the capabilities of datacenter to pull this off. I've already suggested they should get servers up to handle authentication and queues, so they don't have a massive amount of connections hitting the live servers severely impacting their performance, which are already dealing with heavy load. They also need to realize that they need to change some things if they really would like this to be an MMO, currenly it is not - it's just servers with a player cap of 150 players.

I currently have 19 hours logged, but only less than one hour of actual game time on any of the servers. When I actually got on I was like "Finally, frigging about time", because I'd been trying for several days since release of the early access to get on to a server, enduring long times of connecting / loading while my system was completely locked up and unresponsive while it was attempting to connect and load into the game. But then I changed the homeserver region, I get disconnected and the client crash and could no longer login into any server, and were then stuck with the loading limbo issue, which I currently still have. So I'm one of those who cannot play, who bought the game and I fully understand what it means that it's in early access, I want this game to succeed, but they're actually somewhat in violation of the terms and conditions with Early Access titles on Steam, because of the majority of players cannot play the game. My pc is above the required specifications, and still I'm not able to play the game, and I've been trying for so long to play the game, trying so many different things, trying the same things again whenever a new patch has been released, but clearly it still doesn't work. I'm open to helping the developers getting the game to work for those it currently does not, I'm open to test out various workarounds and other kind of things to identify what is going on when the issues occur and to try and fix these these things.

Perhaps you should read the part about what early access IS NOT? The game is currently UNPLAYABLE for thousands of players. In Early Access the game has to be playable at the time of purchase, Atlas is not!

Just to emphasize on the information provided in the image ironhyena has uploaded. This is straight from the Steamworks Documentation: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/earlyaccess - you can go read further if you like! What is Early Access IS NOT! You should not use Early Access solely to fund development. If you are counting on selling a specific number of units to complete your game, then you need to think carefully about what it would mean for you or your team if you don't sell that many units. Are you willing to continue developing the game without any sales? Are you willing to seek other forms of investment? Early Access is not a pre-purchase Early Access is not meant to be a form of pre-purchase, but a tool to get your game in front of Steam users and gather feedback while finishing your game. Early Access titles MUST deliver A PLAYABLE game or usable software to the customer AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE, while pre-purchase games are delivered at a future date. NOW!? Did Atlas provide this at the time of purchase, no it did not. I do want to see Atlas succeed, but I not if the developers priorities aren't right and the majority of the players cannot even play the game and the developers aren't focussing on fixing these issues specifically before anything else. For thousands of players this game is currently UNPLAYABLE and it's basically just wasting people's time.

This -lowmemorymode doesn't seem to work at least it's not working for me, still having 20+ minutes connecting and loading times, without even getting into the server, at all. What is even more weird is that if this is an actual memory leak issue, how come some of the players have it and not all have it? There has to be commonality present here, so assuming it's a memory leak, then what is triggering the memory leak to occur, furthermore, what amount of memory do you consider low memory? Currently I'm launching the game with -lowmemorymode -high -nosplash -novsync, currently have over 19 hours logged, but only have around less 1 hour of actual game time. It also seems to be suffering from some of same connection, loading and responsiveness issues as Ark does. I would really like to be able to disable the menu video files from playing, and I'm thinking it might actually be affecting performance that it's running. I'm also noticing that it's the .wmv type of file which also might be affecting, instead of using an OPTIMIZED format for video play back in menus, like bink videos by radgametools. Perhaps you could add a debug startup parameter that will the game to create a log of whats going on when trying to connect and load the game, because this way it's becomes possible to be a lot more accurate in determining what and where it goes bad. I'm sure most of us who're not able to connect / load into the game servers, have client crashed, random disconnects and so, would be inclined to share whatever logs that are created this way, to help determine the cause of this so you in turn can fix it. /Inc.

Just so you know, that site is NOT official, and it's a bit weird that those NA servers show up as located in Germany. At least not my knowledge it isn't.

Their terms does say after 2 hours or more you cannot refund the game. HOWEVER, just keep at it and ask for it to be escalated, as you have not actually played the game, you have been in the game trying to connect to the game without being able to get in to the game, jus like so many other people. In fact there are reports of people having been issued refunds with over 5 to 10+ hours in the game without having been able to get into an actual server for very for less than 2 hours, due to it being escalated and them not having been able to actually play the game that they bough due technical issues on the developers end.

How did you get the IP, could be useful to know how to find the ips for other servers, as what you're facing seems to be a general issue. I cannot connect either through the game, not since the update that apparently was pushed to me right after a client crash, but not everyone else. So people are playing while some are forced to update, so they do but afterwards they cannot join.

Same here!

Same here, I've noticed that the game is actually unresponsive when this happens.

I actually managed to get in, and play for a while, but then die. I've now tried to set a new home location a couple of times, where the game crashed at one point. Where I'm now stuck with the same thing happening, which basically is that I select a point to load in at where I then get "Host Connection Timeout" but it actually continues to load right after but then stops and then the game locks up, but after a while it unlocks and then shows the "Host Connection Timeout" afterwards - the process keeps repeating itself. I have tried verifying game cache, tried a bunch of time with various servers, still the same.

I sure can. Specs: CPU: i7 4720HQ - 2.6 - 3.6 Ghz. Memory: 8GBs DDR3 Graphics: nVidia 960M GTX - 2GBs GDDR5 OS: Windows 10 Home x64 Harddrive has been tested, and has no issues. Drivers are as up to date as they can be.

+1 for your guide and effort to help people out. Perhaps you have an idea to fix this problem: [HELP NEEDED] Anyone know how to fix Atlas when the game becomes unresponsive when connecting? Would be great if you do

I have not been able to access any of the servers since they were all brought online the very first time, and I've been trying since to get into a server, but everytime I hit join one or more of the following happen: - Atlas becomes unresponsive (either to begin with or after awhile and sometimes correct itself) - When it corrects itself I usually get the message "Host Connection Timeout" or similar. I've tried...: - verifying the game's cache several times. - running it with admin rights. - giving the Atlas.exe high priority. - running it in windowed mode with absolute lowest settings. - tried running it with advanced startup parameters. - tried using Razer Gameboost. As far as I know quite alot of people have this issue. Anyone have any suggestions to getting this to work? - I'm suspecting if I can disable the loading screen that might actually do something, but I'm not sure if this is caused by something serverside or clientside.