Bug/Issue An insight into Stardew Valley's issues on PS4 Pro

Where the people are getting ones made in November is a mystery to me. The majority are September and possibly October? The difference between any of them should be nothing, yet here we are. It makes no sense.

 

Recent Chuckle Update: PS4 Pro Rest Issues - We still haven't been able to reproduce this on multiple PS4 Pro test machines. We've been investigating the reports of this issue, and even asked Sony to help us look into it, but unfortunately don't have any more details we've found. Please keep reporting incidents of this too.

Devs, you have been offered by lots of people on these forums on 100% reproducing the issue. Myself included, offered video chat, game/system logs, sending in my PS4 Pro to you, and other methods of evidence. Why not take advantage of the helpful community here with these methods instead of just compiling forum notes and saying 'we can't reproduce it'. How about you share with us YOUR methods of attempting reproducing. What models of PS4 Pro? Build date? Software version? Etc.

Apologies if this seems rant-y, but I have had to hard reset my PS4 Pro for the Nth time since mid December, and I'm a little fiesty about it now

 

I couldn't agree more. They don't seem to be attempting to close the gap with us, despite our many attempts to be as helpful and informative as possible.

I can only assume there is a severe lack of communication between the actual testers/devs at Chucklefish and the employees that post on this forum. I've yet to see them provide any technical details or information, and they've only asked a few questions that were rather generic when they could have asked us so much more!

My fear is that all of the hard resets we've experienced over the past month will actually brick our consoles down the road (or at least make them die sooner) and at that point, we'll be out of warranty and out of luck. I'm trying to avoid playing Stardew as much as possible because of this but I must admit that it's hard not to play such a great game.

 

I played for 1.5 hours today while pressing the Share button on occasion and once again had no issues, then deliberately went on for about 20 minutes without pressing it and then pressed it, media previews didn't load so I knew I was in issue mode. Tried to turn off the console and it beeped 3 times.

I think it's becoming more and more apparent that SV brings issues to PS4 Pro after being played for a set amount of time without using anything else in the system, it's like everything else goes to sleep and doesn't function properly. I will now try to time myself to see the max time I can manage between Share presses without entering issue mode and report it here.

However, I will join my fellow forum members here and state that it's a tad underwhelming that we're doing more to fix the issue than the dev team themselves. I am willingly risking the well-being of my console because I want this issue fixed and I would greatly appreciate it if the team showed a bit more interest in the subject. It affecting a not-so-large amount of players doesn't mean it can be overlooked. The media already started echoing this and that's poor word of mouth for both the game and the people behind it. I of course understand all these processes so I remain patient and understanding and I hope the team decides to provides us with more information on how they are trying to reproduce the issue or if there is something else we can find out for them.

For the time being, I seem to be able to enjoy SV, albeit in an utmost annoying way.

 

I definitely think length of play time is an issue. It seems like everything is fine in short plays of under and hour or so but longer than that, that's when it starts to freeze when I join chats (even after closing the game) and the like.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I had another new hard crash today when I tried to till a piece of soil that a Junimo was standing on. Right as the hoe was right above my head, the entire game froze. All these issues are becoming irritating but luckily once I cook the last three recipes and get Leah pregnant a second time, I'll have finished all the trophies and can take some time off while the devs figure these issues out.

 

In regards to the issue being a time thing here is my experience with the no rest mode/can't start other games issues:

Play for less than a full day (aka quit before saving) = no issue.

Play for even one full day (what 10-15 minutes?) and save = issues for PS4 Pro system.

 

Yep, can attest if you just launch the game and don't even play then quit you won't have issues. Must be an application run time problem with memory leaks. Something I don't think we see in console games often.

 

Also (apparently), keeping the OS busy in a timely manner as you play keeps the issues away. I continue to play just nicely while pressing the Share button every <2 minutes, and the session has gone on for as long as 1.5 hours. Of course, only I have tested this in now 3 different sessions, if others post similar results then we can assume it happens to everyone, but we'll see.

I do hope memory leaks can be fixed lol

EDIT: I timed my session and the Share button has to be pressed pretty much every minute you play the game or issues happen. Extremely uncomfortable xD

 

Wow, what a Bullshit. Every Pro has this, how they are not be able to reproduce this? Just start the game and boom, console is fucked. Shutting down the console ends in a 3 beep hard reset.

The "solution" here in the thread sounds nice but I don't want to do that and change all my settings for this game, no, sorry. They have to fix it or give me my money back, I have no, Serious, no idea how this is still on the store, allowed to buy, a game that fucks with your console and maybe could even break it. (Permanent 3 beep shut down can't be healthy for the console)

I think they should be lucky that nobody started some legal actions against it. If my console breaks in the next few weeks or months until a patch is there, I definitely would blame Stardew Valley for it, rightly so.

 

Well, as much as I hated to do it, I ended up getting a refund from Sony (I do have the game on my PC but it would have been nice to play on my TV)
I just give up for now. I did return my PS4 Pro and got a new one but my manufacturing label say's July 2016 (didn't know they started the manufacturing that far back) and the same thing happened. My refund I wanted more based on principle then anything at this point. Aside from how bad it is that they can't replicate it so far, there are also a lot of other bugs for PS4/Pro and Xbox that are simply ridiculous.

I know other games tend to have bugs, but I've never experienced this (I've been playing video games since I was 6 and I'm 29 now) Yes, I've experienced bugs that are game breaking but I've never had a bug mess with the OS and I'm not willing to exchange a perfectly good PS4 Pro that has no problems except for this game for me (I know that DOOM can be a culprit too but I don't have DOOM at the moment) So, for the simple fact alone that it has these other problems along with messing up the OS, I just contacted Sony through their chat, nicely explained my situation and the fact that I have been very patient and a few days later I got my refund.

I really didn't want to do that but my patients only goes so far. I still love Stardew Valley and I thank ConcernedApe for making it. It's just the ports are a bit of a mess that I just give up on for now. I will still check in from time to time to find out if anything has been learned or fixed.

 

Good for you, Chrisy. Actions speak louder than words! I've requested a refund as well and believe giving feedback to Sony is also very helpful.

 

In just to report that I continue to satisfactory play for a long time (2.5 hours now) while dodging "issue mode" by pressing the Share button more or less every minute. I can also leave the game running and leave while the Share menu is open with no issues happening. If I don't press it for 2 minutes, issues begin.

I have been doing some reading on the matter of memory leaks and I am starting to believe we may be dealing with one here, but I can't state it as fact, of course. It simply sounds quite similar to what the PS4 Pro deals with.

Long story short: a memory leak occurs when a particular program or application fails to manage the RAM in use in a system properly, eventually filling it up completely and causing performance issues (it happens mostly on computer software). Symptoms are hard to identify, but they include slowdowns (check), incapacity to run other programs/applications (check) and/or a full system freeze (check). They are also difficult to spot because they can manifest only under a scenario in which the totality of the RAM available is used. The reason why pressing the Share button keeps the issues at bay may be because it interrupts SV's attemps of creating a memory leak, which takes the game less than 2 minutes, it seems.

Of course, this is all pure conjecture. I don't know if the devs in here check this thread but I hope they do and they can check whether if this is the problem we're facing or not. I used this insight on memory leaks together with further reading to enlighten myself.

http://www.pcgamer.com/dealing-with-memory-leaks/

Thoughts?

 

Certainly a possibility. If it were a memory leak, though, I wonder whose jurisdiction it would be under to fix? You'd think Sony would have constraints in place to prevent games/apps from taking more than their allotted share of available RAM. Unfortunately this will all be pure speculation until we can get some communication from an official source; however, I'd like to think your efforts are immensely helpful to the devs, bousf.

 

Thank you! I do hope that's the case, I'm actually having fun and not risking my system that much thanks to the Share little trick. If my findings help us all enjoy this super awesome game without hiccups or damage, then I'm up for as much research as I can make! Plus, I just made it to Fall and I'm going to be RICH very soon lol

I would love it though if more people tried to confirm on the Share thing being commonplace. I would like to make sure I'm not the only one under those circumstances. I also understand that people don't want to download the game in its current state though, so just in case I will keep investigating on my end

 

Started it up and went into the game with the Share menu just opened as I went off to do some stuff and test this. Came back, quit game and it shut down fine. The PS4 Pro does have more memory than a standard PS4 for the OS.

 

Then putting the OS at work/interrupting Stardew Valley very recurrently prevents the issues from happening, which I'm sure has to be a valuable piece of information for the dev team. I think we now have a somewhat clearer picture of what may be going on here. However, I don't know about you, but I know zip about these matters lol I hope they get hard at work soon. The more they take, the worse it's going to be because people are taking refunds over this and the Xbox One savefile issue so I would drop everything else and work exclusively on these two problems before tackling minor in-game shenanigans like glitches and odd happenings, which are bothersome but certainly don't lead people to uninstalling/getting a refund. We can only wait and keep reporting whatever we find now.

 

From today's update, so nothing new to report. Luckily they fixed the Xbox One issue so they can hopefully focus on this. As for the last part, sure it might not but I'm not going to play the game until it's fully fixed.

I'm usually in a party when playing and having to press the Share button constantly is not ideal. Not doing that results in the issues and when doing random OS functions will freeze the entire console having to hard shutdown which is something you're usually told not to do on anything with an active HDD doing it's thing. Brick console? Probably not. Corrupt HDD? Possible.

 

I love how they are both right and not right lol of course it isn't Stardew Valley what could brick the console, but what players decide to do to get out of the issues caused by SV xD
The game on its own won't brick a system, but if you pull the plug one too many times (even though it is strongly advised not to do it) then you may kill your console yourself. Just in case and for the record: please KEEP THE POWER BUTTON PRESSED FOR 30 SECONDS instead of pulling the plug to hard reset the console.

On the bright side, our issue here is now by far the most threatening one, meaning it should be their top priority. Let's hope they can emulate the hiccups in their devkit and solve the issues. All they should have to do is play for a few hours (issues didn't show up for me until I was well over 10 hours into the game) and then once they hit, they'll be there to stay lol

To the rest of you, keep reporting! Every bit of help counts

 

Hmm, I see they mention test machines, are they standard PS4 Pros? or the devkits? maybe the devkits run something more than the "normal" pros that prevent the issue from appering, like the probing from extra logging? I do hope they can test out on a "normal" pro and just not devkits.

 

Yep , just like a PC. One too many powering off while holding the power button down will effect the HDD.