Ooookaaaay, so I went ahead and finally played for more then 3 minutes.
I'm kinda speechless.
The game works! It just works! I played for 1,5 hours with very minimal spikes, hitching, stopping or anything really annoying. It just worked. Wow. I guess I'm a full-on believer again, cos this was an awesome experience!
FPS was lower than before, no more hitting 40-60 fps for a couple of seconds, but way more consistent and stable with a min-max of about 15-35 fps, with 95% of the time doing 25-30, which is perfectly fine and playable, compared to last time.
I did a standard Cellin to Levski cargo box delivery mission, and for the first time for me, it worked perfectly! Went to Cellin, didn't crash the ship this time (earlier today I crashed my Aurora on descent trying the same mission, like a True Testie!), landed, picked up the box, put it down in the cargo bay, went to Levski, walked to the guy with box in hand, talked to him, and delivered the box. Perfectly clean run.
This I could never complete before. Either the game just crashed,or the box got lost as it fell through the ship in quantum, or couldn't be picked up, or in most cases, the delivery guy was totally broken and couldn't be spoken to. Not this time. Also, the framerate was perfectly fine at Levski, although it did drop from high 20s to low 20s, but nothing serious.
Btw, I used a freefly Cutlass Black. Even as an old backer, you can still validate the promo code and get some free ships to fly for a bit!
Do you remember the bit from a previous CitCon presentation, where they had a ship fly in front of the window and elevator at Levski? I did it this time! I could pull it off without crashing, cos the framerate was fine and I wasn't lagging! That was a pretty sweet experience.
Out of the 4 quantum travels (sat 306-Cellin-Delamar-PO), I had zero intercepts or interruptions.
Only issue I had was that I bought 44SCU of cargo on Levski, but as I had a duplicate (bugged) versions of the same ship on the trade console, I must have chosen the wrong one, and loaded up the duplicate Cutlass instead of the one I parked in the hangar. So I went back to Ollisar , and only realized it there when I tried to sell the cargo, that the ship was actually empty. Well, at least I still have almost half my aUEC left lol I'll stick to doing missions and beacons.
Crusader viewed from the dark side of Cellin, just after sunset (or before sunrise?)
Here's to hoping that it only gets better from here on! (or at least doesn't get much worse than 3.0 was lol) :beers:
TLDR.: 3.1.2 is a huge stability/performance improvement, for me at least. Give it a try!