PlaneShift
Support => Technical Help: IN GAME bugs (after loading world) => Topic started by: Jagefad on April 21, 2010, 04:38:08 pm
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I've been having a lot of trouble playing since the Arcane Chrysalis. The game crashes with a warning(I'll get the pic) every few minutes, and it's really annoying :@#\, it crashes even faster when there are a lot of players near. Also when I log in it takes a lot of time until I can see all of the 3d models AND textures(of both players and NPCs).
I'm running PS on Windows XP, 1GB of ram, RADEON 9250 AGP(ask if more info is needed).
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The forum and the bugtracker are full with similar reports and possible reasons...
- Update the game regularly when updates are available.
- Try to delete the "shadercache" file only once and see if it helps (it will freeze briefly more often right afterwards, but less later).
- Try different settings of "background loading" (especially "off" or "models", but better not "world" at the moment).
- Consider a more modern graphic card (preferably Nvidia).
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Where is the shadercache file?
EDIT:btw I can't find the updater in the folder
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Lolwtfhackzlololololroflmaoutd u lowspekznub... PS is 4 pr0s.
Mind you, I am on slightly higher specs and I have exactly the same issues. Don't bother updating, you will either be downgraded instead or it will make no change at all. Updates fixed nothing for me yet performance-wise, the game is meant for high specs and you should definitely upgrade to play such an astounding looking game.
(http://i50.tinypic.com/33jn4gm.jpg)
(http://forevergeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/crysis_450x360.jpg)
Same FPS, doesn't it make sense? :o
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Consider a more modern graphic card (preferably Nvidia)
Why nVidia? Think future-oriented, dont buy nVidia!
They changed their politics and give a hey on open-source drivers anymore[1 (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2010-March/049749.html)] (even though Win-users do install closed, proprietary crap carelessly anyway).
I say NO! to supporting nVidia in any way!
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Wow ..what game is that second screenshot from ?
Yeah yeah, i know .. :offtopic: But Thats one hell of a shot.
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@ Jagefad:
The updater is "pslaunch"; and we have several threads in this forum where you can find the "shadercache" file - it depends on the OS, under Windows it is in "%APPDATA%\PlaneShift".
@ Lhaa:
Maybe PlaneShift can look that way too if you pay outstanding salaries to a team of full-time engine developers. But as long as CrystalSpace and PlaneShift are only developed in leisure time and with fame as the only incentive, never expect miracles...
@ Raekh:
As soon as other 3D graphic card developers produce similar reliable and wholesome and correct OpenGL drivers, I will recommend those as well. But except Nvidia and ATI, practically all other chipsets don't support some specific extensions (and CrystalSpace needs to code matching workarounds), and ATI drivers regularly give users more problems than Nvidia drivers, still (especially under Linux) - which you can regularly read here...
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Nobody would care that PS looked like a GameBoy game as long as you could run it on a GameBoy. Now it looks like an 8yo game but if you try to run it in an 8yo machine chances are the latter will burn up. That's why you get threads like these, not that it doesn't look like Crysis *winks at Rigwyn*, which very few people expect it to. People are more likely to expect relative performace to the looks than amazing graphics they can't run.
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I don't know how many times we already mentioned it: To be able to run on outdated hardware, PlaneShift requires CrystalSpace developers with e.g. experience in writing render paths for different shader versions. You can keep complaining all day long about bad support for old graphic card, that won't summon new developers.
A bad teacher only tells you that you made mistakes. A good teacher instead tells you how to avoid them.
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I like playing games that look nice. But I also like playing games that run. If it was one or the other...hmmmm.... On one hand I could look at a nice picture...or, I could play the game.
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...
???
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Not sure if this might apply to anyone else but I increased the ram in my computer and since then no crashes and no lag. BBefore increasing the ram I could sometimes get crashes when porting to different map areas and would get some minor lag.
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So, what is modern hardware?
8GB of RAM? - At least I can run three clients with this.
Dual or Quad core processor? - Also helpful when I need more than one client. Even with three clients my computer keeps on responding. But for one client it doesn't seem to make any difference...PS doesn't use a lot of threading till now.
GForce GTX 280 - I can't complain about slow graphics....Sure, doom3 runs a lot better here but PS is somehow playable at least. The recompiling of the shaders takes some time, but gets better over the time with the shadercache. Too bad that you have to delete the shadercache every few days because it might avoid one of the many crashes an hour.
Windows, linux, MacOS? - No idea...only tried on linux and windows so far...but it's for both the same. Okay...even worse for linux, the official binaries for linux keep on crashing every few minutes for more than a year now. I know, the leaf-replace bug was a different issue than we face now but for users it's all the same. Since more than a year there wasn't a usable binary linux version. The Mac Version obviously suffers from different problems...but no clue anymore. Not playing enough anymore to know if running works now already right from the start on a mac or not.
So, what is this all about? Stop telling people with recent hardware the game will work. It's not true...The binary (and the self complied client I used until someone told me it's not allowed to connect to laanx with a self compiled client) suffers from exactly those random crashes on more or less modern hardware also. I can play for hours alone in a guildhouse with only one or two others without a crash at all. But as soon as more people are around the game crashes every few minutes. In Kada El's it's already enough if a other player runs past the tavern with some unusual (not really sure, but seems it are the equipped items) item equipped. So playing with many others is not really possible at the moment....or I have to wait until some new monsters are introduced and all the players with the fancy items are busy in the fields for a few days with mining the new monsters. Thinking of running an event under these conditions is stupid...and I was stupid enough to convince the others to try it even two times..with the result one of the event organizers wasn't able to login and stay for 10 seconds as long as there were so many people at the plaza and half of our guards kept on crashing every few minutes.
And that are only the major problems. No need to start to get into minor problems as not being able to see what you type, having to wait 15 minutes before you see any other player or NPC after logging in, having every trade offer making you execute half of the shortcuts you defined or the ghost items on every map at position 0,0,0. I can understand that fixing any of those problems has no priority...it's far too important to improve other things. No need to repair the chat window, with all those new monsters people should just fight them and not type more than two words in the chat window. A "/challenge" disturbs your writing in the chat window and makes you execute all spell shortcuts you have? Of course it does....that's meant this way...stop your stupid RPing and accept that challenge, this is how PS should be played. This is all very understandable of course...even more since the PS team has to fix all the camera issues now too since they already removed the no-collision camera option which was the only workaround from some issues so far. So, well done, keep on making your work harder than it is already.
So back to the topic....yes, a lot people experience those random crashes and no, I wouldn't expect them to be fixed soon. Try again every few months if you are really fond of this game...if not, better go an look for another one. The game for sure doesn't look as good as the hardware requirements make you expect...and for me all other reasons to play it have disappeared over the last years. So if you still want to play try the hints the others gave you but don't be too disappointed if they don't work...for a lot people they don't. And if you ever manage to get a working version of PS better don't use the updater without making a backup. For me the problems got far worse with every version...in fact 0.5.0 was still one of the most stable version for me...while it crashed for all others.
I don't know how many times we already mentioned it: To be able to run on outdated hardware, PlaneShift requires CrystalSpace developers with e.g. experience in writing render paths for different shader versions. You can keep complaining all day long about bad support for old graphic card, that won't summon new developers.
Okay, it's true...nvidia has already a directx 11 card...but I wouldn't go as far as calling a GTX280 old hardware. And maybe I get it wrong, but this thread is not about PS not working on old hardware but keeping on crashing the whole time..and this it does on new hardware also. Fine, PS doesn't work on gfx cards without shader support anymore...But that isn't true for a RADEON 9250 as far as I know. And also not sure if missing render paths can be blamed for crashes in game..only for not being able to start the game at all.
EDIT:btw I can't find the updater in the folder
The updater is "pslaunch"; and we have several threads in this forum where you can find the "shadercache" file - it depends on the OS, under Windows it is in "%APPDATA%\PlaneShift".
PS doesn't have a updater application anymore, it's now done in the pslaunch application. (Should be pslaunch.exe on windows). When you start it, it checks for updates and asks you if you want to apply them. People just still refer to updater because PS used to have an updater application in the past...now it's the same application you use to start the game and change the settings.
Not sure if this might apply to anyone else but I increased the ram in my computer and since then no crashes and no lag. BBefore increasing the ram I could sometimes get crashes when porting to different map areas and would get some minor lag.
That's for sure true, 1GB is not really much for PS. With 512MB RAM crystal blue was already not much fun to play with so I guess for the current version 1GB should be seen as the minumum.
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Hey Aiwendil gimme some RAM please.
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Aiwendil - I don't talk about DirectX 11. I only mean Pixel Shader 2.0 (that requires at least GeForce FX 5xxx or ATI Radeon 9500) and rather correctly and completely implemented OpenGL functions.
And that's only to be able to have a rather correct display (black landscape / overbright cities).
The problems with PlaneShift and CrystalSpace are probably much simpler in nature, but harder to solve: The best way of speeding up rendering is to not slow it down. Means: I am quite sure that PlaneShift does not use all possible ways to reduce the amount of rendering activities to the minimum. And probably does not use all features of CrystalSpace to optimize the output. So probably rendering time is wasted somewhere.
Furthermore there are still bugs about the content of the maps in general (remember the "Double Sky").
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The whole issue with random crashes & low performance on high-end hardware seems rather strange, because I haven't noticed any crashes or errors at all after I had set my graphics options to a reasonable setting, my hardware in mind. I'm running with pretty decent FPS all the time with a rig optimized for music composition (not really a gaming rig, no) with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, a dual-core Intel 2.4ghz CPU, an ATI Radeon HD card & Win7 x64. (and obviously I'm using the 64-bit PS client)
I do, however, want to express my concerns about the game's overall performance when compared to other, logically more demanding games. For instance, I have slightly *MORE* average FPS in Just Cause 2 than I have in Planeshift (which has outdated graphics) and my computer is using 1/3 less resources running Just Cause 2 than it does with Planeshift. The only conclusion is that there must indeed be a bug in the game engine & issues with the way it renders the graphics (as someone stated before me). JC2 also uses DX10 which, I've noticed, is more demanding on my hardware than DX9. Yet another thing that makes little sense.
I'm wondering, though - is PlaneShift using a back-to-front stencil buffer? It's a silly question considering it runs in OpenGL as well as DirectX, but it would explain the graphical issues if that stencil buffer is somehow running alongside the other two.
I'm not sure on what might be causing the crashes a lot of you seem to be having.
Nor am I really inversed in the code to begin with...
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PlaneShift uses only OpenGL (to be compatible with several operating systems, not only Windows). If there are any DirectX functions used, then only where OpenGL support might be limited by Windows.
PlaneShift only uses funtions provided by the CrystalSpace 3D engine. So there are two possible limits compared to a highly optimized 3D game & engine: a) The rather generic CrystalSpace 3D engine has its limits; b) PlaneShift does not yet use all possible features of the current CrystalSpace 3D engine version, because it is not easy to adapt a whole game to major changes of the underlying engine, which is as much in development as the game itself.
A game is not fast only because it uses a specific level of 3D API features. To be efficient, it has to use most to all available features the API and engine provide to not waste too much rendering time. Even the structure of the content may need a specific design for specific speed-up technologies (e.g. to use "binary space partition", a city map would need much more than just a set of meshes and textures).
And as much both the game and the engine are in development, as much are there twice as many possible reasons for crashes. Every development step introduces new bugs. Already targeting the reason in either PS or CS is a kind of art (e.g. "debug builds" often don't crash at all...).
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I see. Very informative, thanks.
Why not allow players to choose between DX & OGL on Windows machines, though? Running purely on OpenGL is a risky move, I think. Most of the software I've tried to run with OpenGL under Windows either loses a lot of performance or will not run at all while running it in OpenGL under Wine in a Linux environment (Kubuntu, in my case) with the very same computer actually increased the performance of the very same programs in several cases.
It could be that the bottleneck for PS in Windows isn't the engine (or even related to the game code at all), but the choice of method to process the graphics in an environment that doesn't really support OpenGL at all. (I realize that ATI & nVidia tries to maintain OpenGL support in their Windows drivers, but as far as I can see it's not working out too great)
I wouldn't be surprised of bad OpenGL support is a purposeful move from Microsoft either. After all, their DirectX is totally superior in every way imaginable. Completely. Right...
Have to stop now before I start a rant about Microsoft long enough to fill a novel.
[edit]: Might be good to know that the software I've tested usually run on DX & not OpenGL.
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I see. Very informative, thanks.
Why not allow players to choose between DX & OGL on Windows machines, though? Running purely on OpenGL is a risky move, I think. Most of the software I've tried to run with OpenGL under Windows either loses a lot of performance or will not run at all while running it in OpenGL under Wine in a Linux environment (Kubuntu, in my case) with the very same computer actually increased the performance of the very same programs in several cases.
It could be that the bottleneck for PS in Windows isn't the engine (or even related to the game code at all), but the choice of method to process the graphics in an environment that doesn't really support OpenGL at all. (I realize that ATI & nVidia tries to maintain OpenGL support in their Windows drivers, but as far as I can see it's not working out too great)
I wouldn't be surprised of bad OpenGL support is a purposeful move from Microsoft either. After all, their DirectX is totally superior in every way imaginable. Completely. Right...
Have to stop now before I start a rant about Microsoft long enough to fill a novel.
ati drivers tend to have a bad opengl implementation unfortunately as directx is a windows only api it's not a good idea to support it (time to code such a thing) also because it should be implemented on crystal space side where it would take a lot to reimplement all the g3d functionalities for directx (this excluding the fact you need also a directx expert) so far i know of no games which use directx and opengl chooseable but i might be wrong, most games which want to go multiplatform use opengl or use 3rd party engine which have support of only one api per platform (eg: unreal engine=> dx for windows and xbox, opengl for ps3).
unfortunately opengl 4.0 is on par with dx 11.0 so i'd not say this superiority but sure supporting old cards (using dx9 or ogl 2.x in place of dx10 ogl 3.3) is definitely a big performance gap for newer hw as many new techniques aren't possible, while it's a showstopper for old hw.
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OpenGL does not need to be slow.
Compare e.g. with "Sauerbraten" (Cube²): You can get insane fps with this engine. All pure OpenGL. But so extremely optimized on octrees and space partitions that modelling a level is a completely different issue.
The decision to use CrystalSpace 3D was already done about 10 years ago (http://pswiki.xordan.com/index.php?title=PlaneShift2D#2000_-_Something_new.2C_something_old). And it won't change next week.
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...so far i know of no games which use directx and opengl chooseable but i might be wrong...
WoW offers rendering with d3d or openGL. I guess they needed the openGL renderer for the Mac and then packed it also in the windows version, so also a multi-platform decision. For the choose-able...Yes, not really. You have to edit a ini file to get openGL rendering, so not really a choice for most windows users.
And for me directX and openGL aren't really comparable. If you want to compare openGL to something then only to direct3D. OpenGL doesn't offer any functions for user input, network or sound. You have to use other libraries to get this. And not so sure about graphics anymore, I haven't looked much into openGL 3.0 specs and even less in 4.0 yet, so no idea if this changed, but at least openGL 2 didn't offer some mathematical functions like quaternions which direct3D has. Also openGL doesn't offer support for VIPM methods directX has as far as I know. OpenGL is really only a library for graphics while directX is an API that offers much more needed in games.
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- Google Earth offers both (switchable via start menu links) and prefers Direct3D (e.g. refuses OpenGL on an old S3 chipset).
- The "Tirtanium" benchmark supports both (and differences are sometimes ovbious).
- The OGRE engine supports both (selectable if no INI is present).
- The Vavoom Engine supports both (via launcher or CLI).
Some drawback of the DirectX system is that the different versions partially lack in compatibility among each other - you will have to chose either a specific DirectX Version level or support several API versions if you want to chose between compatible and up-to-date Direct3D features at runtime (which might not be a great issue with object classes and inheritance). OpenGL is a bit more flexible, it is possible to check for the support of extensions and to use them when available - but it is also a bit more abstract, while Direct3D offers a few more closely hardware related features.
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(http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/4315/psgej.jpg)
This is what I get. :(
But the crashes aren't so often anymore, it does lag all the time, but not so much crashes.
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Jagefad:
Those are hard to solve because they don't give any hint in which routine of the application it happened. And from my experience, debug builds somehow avoid those crashes. Sometimes they may be related to possibly unsafe CPU optimizations by the compiler. Sometimes they may be related to differences between the "shadercache" and updated art (then it might help to delete that file once, but at most once in a month).
Hint: Capture only the active dialog by pressing Alt+PrtScr. And sometimes you may even be able to copy its text by pressing Ctrl+C.