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The Out Of Mem crashes.
Jargle
Member Posts: 6
According to Sebastian, one of the developers over at Star Vault, this crashing issue is down to them wanting to lessen the work load on the gfx artists. See this thread for details. http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/44776-world-texture-512-crash-why.html
My question is, how many other short cuts are there and to what extent will they remain and screw up peopel's experiences of this game?
Second question, is it really acceptable to get people to pay for your education in games development (mmo industry generally)?
Comments
WTF are you talking about?!? Sebastian didn't say anything like that in in his post.
Wow yeah. . you totally didn't get what he was saying. its not a shortcut. it is a design that makes crafting an gear incredibliy dynamic. it takes more to process on the client end. Just because he says they could add another crafting material to the same armour peice quicly doesn't mean it is a short-cut. The armour and weapons are all individual to a degree so they are not one item that your client can pull up and display. . it is a glove, a material etc. A weapon handle, head and material. . several materials per component that all have to be called up client side to display.
Will that hurt them in the end? Likely . . but you still missed the point.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
Oh but I beg to differ.
He said
"In our game EACH item is generated and NOT pre-made. That's why you can create each armor from a wide variety of materials, if we would decide to add 4 new base materials it wouldn't take us to long and you could make each of the old armors in the new material without our artists having to make a special texture for each mesh.
Now this is awesome since it saves us a lot of time and we can pretty much add a whole new material in an hour and that could be applied to all the old armour-pieces in a wide variety of combinations giving us a huge amount of new different armours just by adding a single new material."
Translation: "The reason for this system is to reduce the workload on our gfx artists"
Problem: this system is a resource hog, eats memory and causes crashes.
read my edit above.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
I follow what you are saying. I understand why they wanted such a system. Still, their system does not work is under optimised and causes crashes. Again, I am still correct in saying system is to save them the workload involved in 'manually' (i.e. not client side) creating content for every combination.
If they had worked out that you can, as a coder and artist, automate to a large extent textures for every combination developer side (i.e. not client side), and spent time doing that, then we wouldn't have this system which causes crashes.
Um, no.
You still don't get it.
He's saying that thier system allows for them introduce all new armour pieces by simply adding in a few new resources.
Wereas in other games when a new piece gets added it's because the artists make them.
MO= new pieces actually made by the player.
Other MMO's= new pieces made by the artists.
And people wonder why more game companies don't comunicate with thier communities. I wonder if it's because they know that people will take what they say and twist it to sound like they're saying something else in an effort to troll other sites and make them look bad? Nah, can't possibly.
Read my post above....again (edited it to be more clear)
I did. It still didn't say what you're trying to spin it to say. It never will.
What's up with these day-old accounts that keep popping up, stirring controversy in one or two threads, than disappearing entirely? Bizarre coincidence
Edit: Out of mem crashes happen because the game defaults to max graphics settings. Set the graphics setting lower and the crashes stop.
I did.
You're still trying to imply a reason that doesn't exist, and say that it's causing problems that you have no way of proving.
Edit: Out of mem crashes are more likely caused by people setting texture and shadow memory to levels higher then thier systems are able to handle, before they're fully optimized.
BTW, I haven't had a single OOM crash.
The actual problem, if there is no memory leak, may be due to the way Windows manages memory with modern graphics cards that have a large amount of memory. That would make it a Windows operating system bug, rather than a bug of the game software.
I wonder if 64 bit Windows has the same memory management issues? That might give an indication of whether it is the Windows operating system that is at fault.
Is that a problem with 7, vista, or both?
I use 64bit vista and a GTX250 with 1gb of mem, and I haven't experienced any mem. crashes. I have all setting maxed in game as well.
Windows can't do anything if MO wants another chunk of graphic card memory, and graphic card simply doesn't have any free memory left.
It's not system RAM, where you can just dump few libraries from memory to disk, and provide as much RAM as application requests, at the cost of crappy performance.
Few years ago some games tried AGP texturing to overcome graphic card memory limit - but the effect was cutting performance in half. In modern graphics cards, with very fast on-board RAM, it would be even worse. So everyone quietly abadoned the idea of AGP texturing.
So now It's up to developers to work within texture memory budget. They can always use compressed textures, which are handled quite nicely by recent ATI and NVidia cards.
Before I go into my opinion on this, let me explain how I understand Sebastian's comment so someone can correct me if I am off base.
Example: 3 different sword blades (short, bastard, and long )
3 different hilts (simple crossbar, angle crossbar, basket)
3 different materials (bron, pig iron, steel)
Currently they have it set up such that your computer calls up the blade type, applies the mesh appropriate to its material, calls up the hilt type and applies the appropriate mesh to the hilt. This uses nine files to generate the 81 different possible combinations, but stresses your computers graphics memory because it has to calculate all of that. The alternative would be 81 different files for each possible combination (bron short sword with bron simple crossbar, bron short sword with bron angle crossbar, etc, etc.)
Ok, that is my understanding of Sebastian's explanation. Now for my comments.
There are 50 types of heads, 30 handle/hilt shapes, 40 types of hard materials, and 20 soft materials. The end result is 142 million possible weapons. http://mowiki.wikia.com/wiki/Crafting The choice then is 80 shapes that can have 60 different meshes applied to them or 142 million individual weapons files. The same applies to armor, Adding a single new material (e.g. meteor rock) may add a few million more possible combinations (or just one new mesh) It seems like either method makes some major demands on memory, just in different ways. The way they have chosen is more easily modified if they introduce new materials, new heads, new handles (i,e, one new shape or texture as opposed to a million new items in the games database) Ultimately it doesn't save the artists much work since they could generate the new files the same way that the graphics card and put those into the games data base to be called up when weapon #146,435,248 (for example) comes on the screen