AVWW Beta 0.921 "World Of Darkness" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/03/avww-beta-0921-world-of-darkness.html

This one is a lot cheerier than our last release, in that it's not fixing critical bugs.  Minor ones, sure, but that's a much better way to end the day as far as I'm concerned.  It also changes around the balance on the supply depot meteor defense missions, and makes the world map way more oppressive-looking in a way that players have been asking for.  Plus the world map just seems to look better now, too.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

[eRe4s3r]

I know Mantis would be the better place for this, but I have a HUGE huge request (its actually not huge, its just, kinda vital to my playing the game)

Can you please make an option in the games options to PRELOAD all assets and keep them in Memory? And with preload, I mean preloading them on game-start (so game-start takes a bit longer, but the game doesn't start loading mid-game)

Unless I misunderstand what this would do, essentially.. it would eliminate all load-times and transition delays from the gameplay, no?

[TechSY730]

I know Mantis would be the better place for this, but I have a HUGE huge request (its actually not huge, its just, kinda vital to my playing the game)

Can you please make an option in the games options to PRELOAD all assets and keep them in Memory? And with preload, I mean preloading them on game-start (so game-start takes a bit longer, but the game doesn't start loading mid-game)

Unless I misunderstand what this would do, essentially.. it would eliminate all load-times and transition delays from the gameplay, no?

find ${AVWW_INSTALL_DIR} -type f | xargs -I{} cat {} > /dev/null

EDIT: This of course won't cause AVWW to preload it, but in most POSIX operating systems, will cause the AVWW files to be put into the read cache in memory, speeding up access times when AVWW does start up.
There is an equivalent set of commands in Windows, but it'll take me some time to figure them out. My knowledge of advanced Windows command line constructs and commands is a little rusty.

[keith.lamothe]

Unless I misunderstand what this would do, essentially.. it would eliminate all load-times and transition delays from the gameplay, no?

Along with the game, as the process hits an out-of-memory exception

Probably not, but there's a lot more pixels to stuff in, in this game.

Edit: actually, iirc, a really big alpha tester world did hit this, hence some of the changes to preloading

[x4000]

Yep, thats a no-go. Doesn't matter how much ram you have, it will eat your pc.

[Bluddy]

Do you guys leave any textures in memory anymore? I seem to remember a few patches back that you switched to emptying the texture cache completely when switching areas. Is that right?

EDIT: reading over the comment suddenly suggested to me that it might be read as being meant in a complaining or accusatory tone. Just want to clarify that wasn't the case at all -- I'm just curious.

[eRe4s3r]

Yep, thats a no-go. Doesn't matter how much ram you have, it will eat your pc.

I have 16gb, I am up for the bet

But to understand this right, the loading and delay when entering regions is when it creates and saves those regions? So essentially whenever I enter a region or cave or building it creates that entire thing right then and there?

Mhh, if so more RAM would probably not solve the problem then. But with 16GB I am sure I could play an entire continent without problems of running out ;p

[c4sc4]

Unless I misunderstand what this would do, essentially.. it would eliminate all load-times and transition delays from the gameplay, no?

Along with the game, as the process hits an out-of-memory exception

Probably not, but there's a lot more pixels to stuff in, in this game.

Edit: actually, iirc, a really big alpha tester world did hit this, hence some of the changes to preloading

Yep, that was me.

Do you guys leave any textures in memory anymore? I seem to remember a few patches back that you switched to emptying the texture cache completely when switching areas. Is that right?

No they aren't (well except for the player art iirc), it now gets emptied when you go to the world map now to stop the game from crashing.

Yep, thats a no-go. Doesn't matter how much ram you have, it will eat your pc.

I have 16gb, I am up for the bet

I had 8 gigs and it still crashed for me.

[Donfish]

.921

Ouch, loaded this update, now when I get back to the world , I'm in a building, I get a hard lock-up when entering a door to leave a room.  Have to end process from task manager. First time I ever had any running problems. Nothing in logs,  will put on Mantis  later if needed but have to get to work now.

[eRe4s3r]

Yep, thats a no-go. Doesn't matter how much ram you have, it will eat your pc.

I have 16gb, I am up for the bet

I had 8 gigs and it still crashed for me.

Yeah but AVWW is not an x64 application, so it can only use 3gb of those 8/16 gb.. I guess this needs a native x64 binary

But I am sure it could work. Essentially high end systems could hold an entire contintent in the memory for long enough to make any inter-continent switching between regions near instant. When saving the whole thing is dumped. But it only needs to save the things that changed so there isn't any greater stress..

But maybe I misunderstand how this works in AVWW?

Does Unity support X64 natively ?

And while I can see the reason now for the way it is, those noticeable (ever so slight) delays whenever you enter a region or building or cave are *highly* annoying. Is there no way to make them go away, without breaking the game in the process?

[c4sc4]

And while I can see the reason now for the way it is, those noticeable (ever so slight) delays whenever you enter a region or building or cave are *highly* annoying. Is there no way to make them go away, without breaking the game in the process?

Well, when I game was keeping images in memory, I could consistently get the game to crash in about 20 minutes of playtime.

[Bluddy]

Well, theoretically, a really good texture manager could cache textures up to a certain memory limit, and dump those textures once the memory needs to be reclaimed, or when new textures need to be loaded. I'm guessing there was some bug that messed this up, but post-1.0 it might be worthwhile looking at implementing the texture manager again. You could then select how big your texture manager could get in the options dialog. You could even tag textures with how likely they are to be reused and therefore their priority in the cache: map textures would rank high, as would your spells, espers etc.

[TechSY730]

Is there a way to instead flush all the textures when going to the world map, is it possible to keep the last one or two region's sets of them (or the last N hundred of them, or some other policy), evicting anything from the cache that is older than that? Or will even that cause memory issues?

[LintMan]

Yep, thats a no-go. Doesn't matter how much ram you have, it will eat your pc.

I have 16gb, I am up for the bet

But this is a 32-bit application (even if you have a 64-bit OS), so only 4GB is addressable in any given program, and in general the OS (ie: Windows) allocates 2GB of that space for itself, leaving 2GB for the actual app.  It's possible to set a flag to allow up to 3GB in Windows, which a few apps "large address aware" can take advantage of, but this requires developer support.

So what good is having 16GB of RAM if your programs only can access 4GB?  Well, EACH program can access 4GB of address space so there's far less swapping when you're multitasking.  And if you have a 64-bit OS, there are some 64-bit apps available which can address up to 16 Terabytes of virtual memory (8TB of program space + 8TB for the OS space).

Which brings up the question I've been wondering - would it be feasible at all for Arcen to make 64-bit versions of Ai War and/or AVWW?  I know that both games have trouble fitting in the available space, but I'm not sure if it's the OS limitation or an engine limitation.

[keith.lamothe]

Yeah but AVWW is not an x64 application, so it can only use 3gb of those 8/16 gb.. I guess this needs a native x64 binary

I tend to get somewhat different answers every time I go looking for info on building 64-bit binaries from Unity, but the end result is always "no".  Yet, at least, though I've learned to not hope as far as new Unity features, and instead just get the occasional pleasant surprise

But I am sure it could work. Essentially high end systems could hold an entire contintent in the memory for long enough to make any inter-continent switching between regions near instant.

I'm guessing right now a largeish surface chunk is about 20MB.  Even if it's only 10MB that's a max of about 80 chunks you can hold in memory before the managed heap is in the unstable range (800MB or so; this doesn't include textures).  80 chunks might account for 10 regions if all you went into was the surface part.  More if you only partially explored.  But an entire continent's worth of regions, even just the surface part (the underground is infinite)... yea, no