Railjack bugs - including new-ish crash to desktop for clients when returning to Dry Dock

[Neurohax]

(Note: This started as a report for the bug below, but rather than report dozens of bugs individually, I thought I'd get them all ignored in a single post. At least the ones I could think of off the top of my head.)

The original bug:

Return to dry dock has stated causing crashes to desktop. New bug (for me), but has happened 3-4 times in the last couple weeks.

As a client, when host returns to dry dock, the games hangs and process must be killed (image freezes, sound cuts off, CPU/GPU/Disk usage drops to 0, spinning cursor, white overlay). Happens right before you should see the host's dojo/dock render in while the mission complete overlay is showing. (Judging by the timing, it appears to be the moment the dojo is supposed to render and the new team-view mission summary screen appears.)

I also wanted to add that the railjack bugs being reported by others are really common. In the last week, I've seen:

• Bugged shipkiller base door preventing mission completion.
• Archweapons rendering on players while on foot (in the RJ or other mission map areas).
• Pets being teleported to odd places when in RJ stations.
• Blacked out screen when something happens during a transition (like crewship exploding while on board, recalling while leaving a base/crewship).
• Forward artillery hits not registering (zero damage, no visible obstructions). I've notice this happen much more on mediocre host connections (~120ms) than good (<80ms) or bad (>200ms) connections.
• Connecting to RJ games doesn't respect the game option to warn of poor connection quality.
• Forward artillery gunner sometimes sees a half black screen.
• Base commander tileset sometimes renders black voids at tile transitions/doorways.
• Confirmation that base commander was killed takes minutes sometimes.
• Boarding parties sometimes have only a single enemy.
• Can't interact with forges sometimes (no prompt to hit x, can happen to individual forge stations such that 3/4 forge stations are fine).
• Unable to mount the forward artillery at all (no prompt) sometimes .
• Using Tactical View to view a teammate in the archwing launch is jittery, clipping garbage. Watching side gunners is not much better.
• When in archwing, flying into the small greenish-blue clouds that have large resources models (not sure which) and a destructible container in the middle disables blink until you transition out of archwing (recall, board crewship, enter base) and not all those resources will be lootable. Sometimes it's just one that that ghosts you, sometimes all.
• (Related to above) In archwing, flying within pickup/vacuum range of dropped loot prevents blink until the loot is picked up. If you never let up on 'w' and have maxed Hyperion Thrusters (AW speed mod), you'll never be able to use blink because the vacuum is too slow.
• Enemies from derelicts and anomalies can appear on the railjack. Not sure what triggers it, but a couple days ago I saw infested chargers and battalysts on the RJ in back-to-back missions. Seems like a case where some explanation is needed if it's intentional.
• Not enough enemies spawning in the anomaly, making it impossible to complete.
• Host migration losing track of ship/enemy spawn/kill counts, so you can have 5/6 crewships killed but no more will spawn after migration.

And there are still some bonkers UI things, like:

• Onboarding for railjack is non-existent. I run into players in Saturn Proxima that don't know where the forge is, and I'd say 5/10 players in the later Earth Proxima nodes think the ship just dies if you run out of revolite (repair juice) because they don't even know the forge exists. There's a reason that Railjack player numbers are abysmal - and don't tell me they aren't because finding a public team is rare (I find them, but they're usually the ONLY pub team on that planet). Hell, I still see folks in Veil Proxima that hijack crewships and don't know they should kill the gunners to prevent them from firing on friendlies.
• No one knows when it's safe to leave a team. This goes for every endless-style open world mission. I think it's safe right when you enter a new mission, but since all wording on team-related functions is ambiguous throughout the game, every player has their own little superstitions about what works. It's a terrible experience for new players. Who wants to invest more time in a game if they think they just lost hours of progress because they were forced to "ABORT MISSION" to deal with IRL stuff?
• Annoying modals:
  • Cephalon Cy's little chatter video obstructs the left abilities bar in Tactical View, so you can't see cooldown timers. Those video overlays are entirely unnecessary, distracting, and get repetitive REAL quick. Play the verbose ones once per month and have abbreviated ones that use an icon or text list similar to multistage bounty progress accompanied by a brief audio clip.
  • There's got to be a better method of telling players they picked up common resources than that annoying modal bling animation that covers a big chunk of the UI area, takes too long to play out, and offers no history of pickups.
• Tactical view annoyances:
  • No indication of ammo/flux/etc. Not very "tactical".
  • When outside the ship, Tactical View gives no indication of ship problems unless there is a full blown breach. It would be a good tactical move to know if there's 7 boarding parties waiting there and fires every 15 seconds leading up to the breach.
  • Teammates don't see that a breach or fire is being handled remotely (they come running to help when they see that no one is by the damage indicator). This indication should be on the regular and tactical maps.
• Avionics gripes:
  • (Possibly fixed, but I could swear this still occurs in a UI element edge condition.) Avionics now use mod cards in some cases? Did none of the designers say that was a bad idea when you have no artwork for them?
  • I've maxed out everything in railjack and I'm just working on collecting the last few variations of turrets I don't have. I could not tell you a single thing about any avionic from its icon. Is that a Lavan avionic? What's the Lavan classification have to do with avionics? Is it a battle or ship avionic? Is it installed? What's it's rank?
  • When trading, there's no way to tell if an avionic is installed and no cancelling the add to offer un-equipping it from your ship, even if you remove it from the trade. So, you have to remember which avionics you lost in the Russian Roulette style avionic trade selection game and mess with your ship's config after trading.
• That Command intrinsic - either add it or remove the faded element.
  • And if/when it actually gets added, how are you going to handle lack of excess intrinsic points? After the current 4 reach level 10, you no longer get intrinsic points, which are spent, not accumulated. All max ranked players have 0 intrinsic points, regardless of how many they would have banked while playing after they maxed everything. Seems like these intrinsic categories should have been tied to specific tasks, like "Kill x fighters/crewships" to rank up Gunnery.
• Map/Navigation gripes:
  • Going into proxima map view and selecting dry dock just brings you to the dojo main room.
  • Selecting "Join any crew" rarely finds groups, even though selecting individual nodes does.
    • Also, "Join any crew" button causes the parallax effect between cursor and map to go nuts, such that moving the mouse 10cm moves the map 30cm. Since this happens when the mouse is at the top of the screen (to click the join any button), you can't click any map nodes because they fly off screen. Zooming out and back doesn't fix it and you have to back out of navigation entirely.
• When the forge display is open, raw material (copernics, pustrels, etc) numbers update as expected, but not ship resources (ammo, flux, dome charges, etc.). It objectively makes no sense - people in other stations of the ship can see those numbers, but not the guy that has to actually worry about tracking them?
• Configure/Dry Dock system annoyances:
  • No way to configure railjack from orbiter.
  • No way to tell how much of your resources you're using when valence fusing. 4,000 Titanium? Great. Out of how much? Is that ALL of my titanium?
  • During component/gun upgrading, there is so much unused space, so little variation in the models, and so many extra clicks and keystrokes needed to do anything that it's annoying to use and visually awkward (camera zipping around the ship, minute visual differences between variations of components you never see/notice while playing). The visuals used don't even convey any useful information.
    • Example: Shield arrays
      • Stats vary in capacity and recharge delay - make one piece of the model scale in size to signify capacity and add a glowing doo-dad that pulses or spins faster/slower indicating recharge delay. Make these elements universal across brands, but vary the base model.
      • Show the current quality vs the potential - 200 shield capacity that can be upgraded (fused) to 400? Have 4 pips on the battery component, with 2 glowing and 2 dark. When an item is fully upgraded, draw a line through all the pips. Kinda like mod cards. Useful, tasteful, and consistent with other in game elements.
      • Levels I-III can scale in complexity with the same base components, use a larger "port" on the railjack itself, or use multiple connection points to the rail jack body. Level 1 has 1 conduit from the shield array to the ship, level 3 has 3 conduits.
      • Level 3 special features can be a third model element, a more complex animation when upgrading, or even a simple decal with clear iconography. Electrical pulse? Railjack silhouette with lightning bolts around it.
  • Somehow I've had more than the max forge inventory and installed avionics. I'm not sure if this is supposed to correct itself at launch or I've gained/lost cargo space/avionic points because the bugs and the features are starting to blend into each other.
  • And finally, every, and I mean every, UI element in the Configure ship screen. From button placement, to poor iconography, to bizarrely sized elements, to upgrading avionics, to the flip over intrinsic view, it's all so, so very bad. It was fine for an early alpha, but it's hot garbage as something you have to interact with regularly. And you HAVE to use it because you're constantly scrapping cargo.
    • Salvage/cargo slot limits are a bad idea. You have to travel just to look at them, and then 99% of the time it's just to scrap everything and leave. Why can't you depot them in your dojo? You're not actually, physically moving anything as the player, so this can't be done remotely from the orbiter? And even better, you can board the railjack, but STILL not manage the items that are somewhere on the ship. It's fantastically dumb.
    • Oh, and remind me where the cargo capacity/status is in the Tactical View... You know, so I can tell if I need to go back to dry dock and manage the space garbage.

[Heldenstein]

4 hours ago, Neurohax said:

The original bug:

Return to dry dock has stated causing crashes to desktop. New bug (for me), but has happened 3-4 times in the last couple weeks.

As a client, when host returns to dry dock, the games hangs and process must be killed (image freezes, sound cuts off, CPU/GPU/Disk usage drops to 0, spinning cursor, white overlay). Happens right before you should see the host's dojo/dock render in while the mission complete overlay is showing. (Judging by the timing, it appears to be the moment the dojo is supposed to render and the new team-view mission summary screen appears.)

I experienced this hang multiple times as well, and have killed the process to exit Warframe. But as it turns out, it is no crash. Waiting about 5 to 10 minutes resolves this hang and the game continues. However, you return to your Orbiter and not to the Dry Dock, so I guess it is a connection or loading isssue.

4 hours ago, Neurohax said:

When the forge display is open, raw material (copernics, pustrels, etc) numbers update as expected, but not ship resources (ammo, flux, dome charges, etc.). It objectively makes no sense - people in other stations of the ship can see those numbers except, but not the guy that has to actually worry about tracking them?

I can confirm this bug and I also made a post about it.

4 hours ago, Neurohax said:

Avionics now use mod cards in some cases? Did none of the designers say that was a bad idea when you have no artwork for them?

I have seen that bug as well some time ago, the Avionics were regular mods with no image and a white rectangle instead, but I think it was resolved already as I have not seen it again in the last days.

4 hours ago, Neurohax said:

There's got to be a better method of telling player they picked up common resources than that annoying modal bling animation that covers a big chunk of the UI area, takes too long to play out, and offers no history of pickups.

I could not agree more. This is annoying and also a problem on the Cambion Drift on Deimos.

4 hours ago, Neurohax said:

Going into proxima map view and selecting dry dock just brings you to the dojo main room.

I can confirm this bug and I think this should be fixed easily.

[Neurohax]

7 hours ago, Heldenstein said:

I experienced this hang multiple times as well, and have killed the process to exit Warframe. But as it turns out, it is no crash. Waiting about 5 to 10 minutes resolves this hang and the game continues. However, you return to your Orbiter and not to the Dry Dock, so I guess it is a connection or loading isssue.

It might be a different, but related issue. The first time it happened was after a long run of several back-to-back missions and I REALLY didn't want to lose all that loot, so I thought I'd see if there was a silent timer (like how some endless missions will automatically start if you wait too long to step in the objective circle or hack the panel) and walked away for a good 20-30 minutes. I came back to a still frozen game.

It's like the game was waiting for a handshake/ack response and was hoping it would time out, but that wasn't the case the first time it happened, so I killed the process after a few minutes in subsequent occurrences.

As for the avionics using mod card elements, I could swear I read about the fix in the patch notes, but then saw it again the same day. I distinctly remember finishing a mission and thinking, "Good. Looks like it's fixed." And then 15-30 minutes later thinking, "Whoops. Guess not!" It was/is fixed in the mission complete screen, but it might still be hanging around in some dark corner of the UI spaghetti code, like the trading interface (though I'm pretty sure the trading interface wasn't it).

[Sonickal34]

I would also add to the list of bugs but during Emperyan mission, when using Nyx of all Warframes. When Nyx goes out of railjack and enters into a grineer ship or station, her abilites do not work at all. Im not sure if it because Nyx is still in "Archwing" mode or some sort of script error, but it sucks to play as Nyx in these missions.

[Roble_Viejo]

Same here. I got an average of 3 crashes for every 4 or 5 missions. 
Im tired, DE said multiple times they fixed it. They did not. 

[XzWasPzX]

February 7, 2021, crashed when returned to dry dock as client, not always but many times.