Ridiculous amount of critical bugs. Randomly. Race condition?

[freibooter]

I already posted my experience over a Valve's forum but I guess this is the better place for it:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=653808

Audiosurf is 99% of the time completely and utterly unplayable for me because I frequently experience just about every single critical bug already listed in this forum and a few more. Interestingly different ones on each start.

My system:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
2GB DDR400
Ati Radeon X1900 XT with 512mb
AC'97 Soundchip from Realtek

Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit with Service Pack 1 (final, from TechNet) with German and English MUI
Ati Radeon Driver v8.2 - WHQL - clean install - latest current version - default settings
Realtek AC'97 - v6280 for Vista - WHQL - clean install - latest current version

Dual-Monitor Setup with 2x 1280x1024


Bugs I experience (not all of them critical, the critical ones are bold):

* Audiosurf always starts in Windowed mode and always with the same odd resolution of 784x564
* Audiosurf can not be resized in Windowed mode, neither by the options more nor by resizing by dragging the border (the latter only happened after a clean install and seems top work fine now)
* The Audio Browser is broken, the text appears outside of the box (to the left) and nothing can be selected, neither by mouse nor keyboard. The PopUp File Browser still works.
* White Screen. The In-Game-Screen is White, nothing but white, like a Yeti in a snowstorm. I lovingly call it the "Blind Kung Fu Master Mode" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR-5Q_kEZHo
* All songs are flat-lining. No matter which song, even the ones from the Orange Box soundtrack or the ones from Audiosurf radio are not analyzed correctly. Instead of a rollercoaster Audiosurf creates a single, flat, horizontal line that only varies in height for each song. All blocks are placed at the beginning of the line. It doesn't matter at all if one checks the "decode MP3s with iTunes" setting or not (iTunes 7.6 is installed)
* No blocks show up on the tracks. This seems to be a direct result of the previous bug.
* Wire-frame: No textures, no blocks, nothing ... just some pulsing backgrounds synced to the song
* The track doesn't move at all. Seems to be a result of the previous bugs. The track is completely static, doesn't move, the ship hovers in one place and can only move horizontally.
* The cursor frequently disappears.
* The game simply quits with no error message given.
* Audiosurf freezes when switching screenmode. It freezes at max CPU (one core) or just quits without error message.

Interestingly these bugs don't always happen and some are more frequent than others. I already did a re-download and as-clean-as-possible reinstall of Audiosurf, it didn't change anything. The randomness of the bugs makes me believe that there might be a race condition on startup.

The songs flat-lining is the most frequent critical bug that makes the game unplayable and it happens almost all the time. Followed by "wire-frame" mode and "the road doesn't move"-mode including "there are no blocks anyways so why bother". "Quitting with not error message" happens much less often, followed by "White screen".

The most frequent non-critical bug is the "broken internal Audiobrowser", it happens almost always, but only almost. It is exactly as frequent as songs flat-lining, maybe they are connected, but at least ones my songs flat-lined without a broken Audiobrowser.

Out of about 50-60 starts of this game (before and after a re-install) I could play without any of the critical bugs exactly twice! Actually more like 1.1 times, since the second time I could play ONE song successfully and then the whole thing white-screened on the second one.

If you think I'm making this insanity up: Why should I? (and I also can document most of the above with screenshots)
I actually almost talked a few friends into pre-purchasing this seemingly great game like I did. I was planning to write a review on one of the top-100 German blogs, and I was hoping that I could praise it.
I'm just incredibly disappointed and I'm currently thinking of simply reviewing the piece of junk that Audiosurf is on my machine instead. No praise there ...
But I'm still hoping that these issues will be fixed very, very shortly.
How do I get a refund if these issues will not or can not be fixed within the next few days?

[freibooter]

By the way, the minor update that was just released doesn't fix anything of the above.

[Pwntastic]

does this all happen regardless of which monitor audiosurf is being displayed on? have you tried dropping down to single monitor mode and playing at all. obviously single-monitor mode to play audiosurf is not some sort of permanent fix, but humor me

[freibooter]

Yes, I disabled the secondary monitor, I even rebooted after that.

On every single start in single monitor mode the internal audiobrowser was broken and every song flat-lined. Not that it matters from there since the game is already unplayable, but the game white-screened once in single monitor mode. Of course there never were any blocks to collect (due to the "flat-lining" bug) but the tracks for the "radio" songs twist and move like they usually would - I guess those aren't really generated exclusively on their audio?

Every other game I tried works perfectly fine with single and dual-monitor mode. And that's a few, from Bioshock to Peggle Extreme. I don't think these bugs are exclusive to my system only.

Oh, and while this is not critical: Will my no-drivers-needed-USB-HID-compliant-generic gamepad every be supported by Audiosurf?

[freibooter]

I'm going to sleep now. Let me now if you need any information that might help you fix these bugs.

[lebeth]

Hey--I just wanted to let you know we have seen your bug reports both on the Steam forum and here and are really sorry you are having a rough time. We will do our best to help you.

[lebeth]

Someone over on the Valve forum posted this--I don't know if you're getting a Quest error or not, but if you are this might help:

"I had the game pre-loaded and downloaded beforehand and when it was officially released today that version did not work whatsoever, I had no blocks, menu messed up, etc.

Here is what I did to fix it:

1) Delete local content from Steam.
2) Reinstall the game (Took about a half hour for me over DSL)
3) Run the game
3a) If yo get a Quest3D error, go to the website it tells you, install the update.
3b) Restart steam, and try to launch Audiosurf after the update.

This worked for me and I have been playing for the past hour or so, the only bug that I still notice is the random cursor disappearing, but I have a feeling that will be fixed soon

Overall great game for the price, the Orange box soundtrack is a nice to have as well"

[freibooter]

I did pre-load it. That's why I already deleted the local game cache and deleted and trace of Audiosurf I could find and I then re-downloaded it. That didn't fix anything, it didn't change anything either.

I'm not getting any Quest3D error messages (if the viewer crashes it simply quits without any message at all and that is not one of my more serious problems anyways, it doesn't happen often). I also don't not which "update" you are talking about. Installing the Quest3DViewer is no remedy.

[Sabator]

I'm getting the invisible track, however judging by the sound and visual effects the blocks are still there, just invisible. if I leave it going for a while the grid supposedly overflows, I can tell from the shaking camera.

[freibooter]

I just tried again - I can't sleep and I'm kind of desperate.

And it worked! Almost flawlessly!
It still started in windowed mode and the stupid tiny default resolution but there were no critical bugs at all. Not even the mouse pointer disappeared. Everything was perfect, I could even play a few games in a row.
Whenever Audiosurf actually works it's a really cool game.
So just to find out if this was just a fluke I closed it and started it again. And still, everything worked almost perfectly.
This increases the total amount of times that Audiosurf was actually playable to a whopping four times and this time even twice in a row.
I was happy, I couldn't beleive it, I almost thought that something weird and unexpected fixed it.
So I restarted again. Of course, the internal Audiobrowser is broken again and all the songs flat-line.
Everything is lost, Audiosurf is once again broken and completely unplayable. I restarted three more times, and everytime at least one critical bug made it unplayable.

Why are these bugs so random? Nothing, absolutely nothing changed between runs! The only bugs I know that act this unpredictable are race conditions, but Dylan seems to be a much better programmer than that, some of the code in Audiosurf simply has to be brilliant - or is it really just brillant?

P.S.: Is it just me or did the last update remove the short but still annoying www.audio-surf.com intro-movie? If it did, great decision. If not: I guess I have a new, even odder symptom.

[lebeth]

Ah--we were almost happy there reading your post and then the sad ending

I sent you a request via email to FTP us your files if you would like and we will look at your files in depth to see what is going on.

We are so sorry it's not working for you since you were so excited about the game and I hope we can get you an answer!

[Sabator]

Your FTP kept cutting me off mid-upload.

Why do you think it's the files, though? Steam hands out the same files to everyone, not to mention I think most people have re-downloaded in an attempt to fix this. A better idea would be to compare all the dxdiags of inflicted users and see if there's any common patterns in things like hardware.

[Aleksei Vasiliev]

To anyone that knows: Are there many users playing Audiosurf on Vista SP1? It could have something to do with a change MS made.

Just an idea.

[Edge.hr]

Almost same here. Athlon X2 4000, 2Gb, ATI 1650, WinXP, Catalyst 8.2 (previously 7.9?).

Totally random, with maybe 10% probability of successfull start. Allways windowed mode, config.ini unchanged, sometimes it works if I start testapp.exe(?!) instead audiosurf.exe in E:\...\common\audiosurf dir.

Best indicator that game will not work is that Audio Browser is broken, with all fields on the left, out of the box.

Totally random login (or not), and characters availability.

It seems it's back to the drawing board

[sith_mike]

yup, also have redicilous amount of bugs, specs:

Amd X2 4800+, 2GB ram, Geforce 7950gx2.

i just checked and it seems to work when i run "testapp.exe".

I hope you can fix it, coz i love this game