Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Age

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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Thu Feb 13, 2020 11:27 am

Sirius wrote:
Tsar Hoikas wrote:With the recent-ish release of the PotS beta executable, I have gained the ability to fully interpret stack dumps from crashes from that particular build of the game.

Oh, cool !
I would have never suspected Uru created textures during regular exploration. I thought everything was in VRAM once the Age was loaded and no new data was created afterwards.

philipgr wrote:If there is not enough memory on my graphics card will the game not then an take what it needs from the 32GB on board memory?

Unfortunately, no. The RAM generally does not extend the VRAM (Video RAM), so running out of VRAM will cause Uru to crash. It is however possible to force some applications to use software rendering only (rendering with the CPU instead of the GPU). This is much slower so you'll have less FPS, but means you will use all your 32 gigs of RAM.
Lowering the texture resolution should be much easier though. It's best to try it before attempting software rendering which has its own issues.


Uru loads all textures into system memory on age load. Further than that, it is difficult for me to say since the rendering pipeline was upgraded from Direct3D8 (PotS) to Direct3D9 in EoA/MOUL. In the EoA/MOUL pipeline, textures are loaded into DirectX's "managed" pool. The managed pool is very convenient -- DirectX copies the resources into its own system memory and ensures they are always available for rendering. So, for example, if there is not enough VRAM, DX will take care of ensuring textures are moved from system to video RAM so rendering can proceed. I note philipgr asked specifically about using the system RAM -- for sure on MOUL that works just fine.

What I cannot say is that the DX8 pipeline uses the managed pool, or if there even was a managed pool in DX8 at all. I am, after all, unfamiliar with DX8, and finding documentation on pre-DX9 graphics technologies (read: 20+ year old code) is challenging at best. However, the released Plasma source code allows an interesting window in history that goes all the way back to 1997. There are lots of comments in the DX9 pipeline about the default pool and lots of old bugs around things like the GeForce2, Savage, and Windows 2000 (fun). The default pool does not attempt to help you at all. Everything is sent directly to video memory. If the device is lost by, for example, Alt+Tabbing away from the game, you have to reload the resources yourself. I expect this is how the old DX8 pipeline works primarily.

dendwaler wrote:i have done all what i can to lower this, the engine does not support "streaming graphics " There are many visregions used in a way to avoid loading graphics of areas you can not see from your point.


VisRegions do not prevent the loading of "graphics," rather they turn on/and off the rendering of geometry.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Ehren » Thu Feb 13, 2020 4:57 pm

I've been curious about this for a long time, and since it seems like a related subject now: What causes the texture mix ups in MOUL's engine? Like on the TOC shard where there have been lots of customization and work done, it's not uncommon for textures to somehow end up in the wrong place. Here's a picture of a major mix up in Relto that existed for a short while a long time ago:
Show Spoiler


Even to this day The Wall in Gahreesen in TOC has the wrong texture mapped on the giant face of the Wall itself and the control panels. Yet when I open its file in PrpShop, it looks like it SHOULD be calling up the correct textures.

I say "MOUL's engine" because I've only seen it happen there, not because I know for sure if it can only happen there.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Sirius » Fri Feb 14, 2020 2:42 am

Tsar Hoikas wrote:textures are loaded into DirectX's "managed" pool. The managed pool is very convenient -- DirectX copies the resources into its own system memory and ensures they are always available for rendering. So, for example, if there is not enough VRAM, DX will take care of ensuring textures are moved from system to video RAM so rendering can proceed. I note philipgr asked specifically about using the system RAM -- for sure on MOUL that works just fine.

Ah, very interesting. My knowledge of DirectX comes only from modding. I knew they were duplicated in RAM, but didn't know DirectX could delay actually loading them in VRAM. Thanks for the explanation !

Tsar Hoikas wrote:I am, after all, unfamiliar with DX8, and finding documentation on pre-DX9 graphics technologies (read: 20+ year old code) is challenging at best.

Haha, I can guess... It seems documentation was less common in that era too, and coding standards lower. I wouldn't want to be the one dealing with those technologies at the time.
Although nowadays we have to deal with fossil code from 20 years ago which is kept for compatibility's sake, so I'm not sure which is better :)
(Oh boy, yeah that delay when alt-tabbing out of DX9 was painful too.)

Ehren wrote:What causes the texture mix ups in MOUL's engine?

Wow, I have no idea what's wrong, but the results are... interesting.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby philipgr » Fri Feb 14, 2020 4:50 pm

Hi dendwaller

I have enjoyed your Cathedral age despite the crashes and freezes I have experienced. I am now at the gong puzzle and my enjoyment has ceased. I think it is an unfair puzzle because you assume everyone knows the complete Big Ben chimes. They are different each hourly quarter. I have done a search of the internet and I am unable to find the symbols you are using. I have found a page in Wikipedia which shows and plays the chimes for each quarter. It shows a music score with the proper written symbol for each note played. I have no idea how to match the note symbols you used with the music note symbols on the score sheet. I have KI shots of the D'ni symbols with their corresponding note displays. I have looked at each of the twelve gongs, seen what I needed to see and made screenshots of each. In the Wikipedia page I saw some of the notes that Big Ben plays have a #. Some of the D'ni letters have a #. I do not know what the English letter equivalents are for the D'ni letters. I will have to do a search for a translation table. This gong puzzle is a hit and miss affair. Hopefully I will eventually find the right four gongs to hit.

Show Spoiler
MOULa KI#24852041
TOC KI#00320847
Gehn KI#00252463
DI KI#00274303
UAM KI#00149988
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Deledrius » Fri Feb 14, 2020 5:03 pm

philipgr wrote:I think it is an unfair puzzle because you assume everyone knows the complete Big Ben chimes.


I was completely unaware of this connection, and I solved the puzzle entirely with what was given in the Age.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Fri Feb 14, 2020 7:56 pm

Ehren wrote:I've been curious about this for a long time, and since it seems like a related subject now: What causes the texture mix ups in MOUL's engine? Like on the TOC shard where there have been lots of customization and work done, it's not uncommon for textures to somehow end up in the wrong place. Here's a picture of a major mix up in Relto that existed for a short while a long time ago:
Show Spoiler


Even to this day The Wall in Gahreesen in TOC has the wrong texture mapped on the giant face of the Wall itself and the control panels. Yet when I open its file in PrpShop, it looks like it SHOULD be calling up the correct textures.

I say "MOUL's engine" because I've only seen it happen there, not because I know for sure if it can only happen there.


This is probably result of hacks applied with an older version of PRP Shop that inadvertently junked the object IDs in references. What's so insidious about this is that I expect the correct textures appear in the internal client--it realizes the reference is wrong and looks it up by name. The external client does not do this because it is intended to use correct and up-to date data. We had this problem once before on Gehn and cleared it up relatively quickly, I think.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Ehren » Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:00 pm

Tsar Hoikas wrote:With the recent-ish release of the PotS beta executable...

Sorry to pull the subject away from the Cathedral Age again, where can I find a download of this executable? I can tell that The Deep Island shard uses it, but I assume there is also a single player version.

Searching the forum for the words "PotS" and "Beta" didn't seem to help much.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Sun Feb 16, 2020 6:33 pm

Just copy and paste it from DI.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Ehren » Sun Feb 16, 2020 8:07 pm

Tsar Hoikas wrote:Just copy and paste it from DI.

That doesn't work, I just get stuck in a loop where Uru Setup just keeps popping back up.
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Re: Keep getting a crash dump while playing the Cathedral Ag

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Sun Feb 16, 2020 10:27 pm

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