Recent content by Sturmgewehr_44

Halgrim said:

thank you friend.This was a real problem for me. thank you!

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Of course!

I am glad that I was able to help!

I don't think those settings would matter.

I am not suffering from low fps. Just stuttering every few seconds (i.e 'hitching'). I'm running only 400 troop battle size too.

I cannot truly narrow down what causes the stuttering. Some people have issues, others do not. I originally thought it was a VRAM issue, then a RAM allocation issue, and I then I thought the stutter was a result of Warband only utilising one core in most cases. It might not be any of those, who knows...

Anyway, I am running AD 1257. It does have a lot more troop, map, and armour varieties, so that could also be a factor. Despite this, custom battles with 200 troops each do not have any stuttering, which is odd.

I would definitely like a solution. I have tried most commonly recommended 'fixes', to no avail. I even made a batch file to force Warband to use multithreading. It did not really do much.

Are there any stutter patches or .ini edits that alleviate my problem? Might just be wishful thinking, but Fallout: New Vegas had a very successful stutter patch and I'm wondering if Warband has anything like it as well.

Is there anything more obscure that I can try? Some people have luck with high troop sizes, even in non-Native modules, so I know a near-stutterless experience is attainable.

Sturmgewehr_44 said:

Hi!

Your mod is great and extremely simplistic. I could've manually changed the values, but in the end your little tool is a lot more elegant.

Anyway, I currently have my battle size set at around 500.

However, I am getting significant stuttering. I am running on a pretty powerful system, including a 4790k and a 980 Ti.

In theory, I think 500 npc battle size is reasonable. It is not a crazy amount, and is still somewhat modest.

The stuttering appears to be caused by Warband not allocating enough VRAM to render all the troops. For whatever reason, all battle sizes seem to use the same amount of VRAM. For me, 150 troops and 900 (The highest amount I tested) use between 1080-1200 MB, which I believe is too low in the latter's case, the result being the stuttering and the low GPU loads caused by a graphics card that is held back by the VRAM not being tapped into properly.

At least, that is my theory. Does anyone know how to successfully combat this? I am on Steam and therefore version 1.168.

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Can anyone assist me with this? I was gone from Warband for a month or two and want to see if there is any workaround. Stutter isn't really that bad, but it is volatile and still an annoyance. I only have what...450-470 battle size? Nothing too hard to handle, or so I thought.

I have realised that it is probably not VRAM.

I initially thought so because of the extra armour and weapons, horses, etc. which could consume a lot more VRAM.

However, it is Ram.

I used Msi Afterburner OSD (Rivatuner) to monitor the RAM usage, and I am using over 5GB in a battle. It really does not matter the troop amounts, but it consumes maybe 200 MB more with 500 troops as opposed to 150.

Part of the problem is that Warband cannot be made to use anymore RAM, at least from what I've tried.

Is there anyway to force Warband to utilise more? I have 16 GB in my system and I am not concerned if I have to use even 7 GB of it to get the huge battles stutter-free. I just want to know if I can force Warband to use that much of it.

Hi!

Your mod is great and extremely simplistic. I could've manually changed the values, but in the end your little tool is a lot more elegant.

Anyway, I currently have my battle size set at around 500.

However, I am getting significant stuttering. I am running on a pretty powerful system, including a 4790k and a 980 Ti.

In theory, I think 500 npc battle size is reasonable. It is not a crazy amount, and is still somewhat modest.

The stuttering appears to be caused by Warband not allocating enough VRAM to render all the troops. For whatever reason, all battle sizes seem to use the same amount of VRAM. For me, 150 troops and 900 (The highest amount I tested) use between 1080-1200 MB, which I believe is too low in the latter's case, the result being the stuttering and the low GPU loads caused by a graphics card that is held back by the VRAM not being tapped into properly.

At least, that is my theory. Does anyone know how to successfully combat this? I am on Steam and therefore version 1.168.

jacobhinds said:

500 men is very much doable. I think the cutoff point where it starts to drop below 10fps and eat your inputs is around 700 men, no matter how good your computer is. I do most of my tests at 300 vs 300.

Dropping the graphics only really helps if your graphics card is truly ancient toaster tier. Some things to consider might be these VC module.ini tweaks which were backported to vanilla warband:

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=328858.0

However I haven't really noticed that big of a difference even with them all enabled.

You could also try "brainy bots" which makes the troops act in batches. Not sure if that prevents stutter as it merely overrides the combat code rather than replacing it, but it does tend to get large blobs of men out of laggy situations more often.

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The problem here is that Warband does not dedicate enough VRAM for troops past 150.

The VRAM used for all maxed settings and 1-150 troops is around the same. It does not flactuate it all, which is fine. 1.0-1.12 GB of VRAM is enough for all of this.

However, going into 300-900 troops and the VRAM stays the same, for me, 1.0-1.12 GB. This is the problem. Not enough VRAM is allocated to utilise all those troops in a battle. The result is that the game is running off of system RAM and stuttering as a result. Meanwhile, the GPU load hovers between 10-30% on my 980 Ti because, although this amount of load is fine to produce almost 200 fps with 150 troops, the 1.0 GB the game is allocating is not enough to even put higher loads on the graphics card. As a result, my 980 Ti is literally in extended idle for troops of 300 it appears. It does not go past 30% load in nearly all cases, and stays far below the 1200MHz turbo I've seen my 980Ti go to in other applications.

jacobhinds said:

The stutter at high battle sizes is a fundamental issue with the combat coding which can't be changed. And even if it could, the AI would end up a lot dumber.

Stutter can be reduced by avoiding melee brawls, avoiding cavalry fights, avoiding the "charge" order and keeping men as spaced out as possible. When men are all bunched together they choose between all the hundreds of potential targets in their range and cause lag, which is why even small <200 man sieges get laggy at the top of the ladder.

It's pretty limiting to take all this into account but it's the only way you can make battles of 1,000+ men playable. In mods with muskets and line fornations you can easily have 600 men per side with not much problem, so long as they don't enter melee.

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Could LAA fix some of the problems?

I am not running 1000 troops. Just 500. Right now it is set to 499. Is that really too much to ask for?

I mean, Viking Conquest seems to support 750 troops without any modding. How did they pull that one off?

What about Render_Buffer_Size in rgl.exe? What does that do exactly?

Default is apparently set to 15. I set it to 2000 and it did nothing.

If I could force the game to use at least 3GB of VRAM instead of 1.0-1.4, I think I could fix most of the stuttering. 500 npcs is really not that severe compared to other stuff I've heard about. LAA please...

Using my personal genius, I believe I have came up with a fix!

The game needs to be tricked into thinking it is 'drawing' a shader parameter. I downloaded 1.03 to see if it was like that too. There was no string by the name of 'vFresnelMultiplier'. This means that only the more recent versions suffer from the shader parameter error(s).

On 1.13, I fixed the 'wall' of errors by removing 'qstr_vFresnelMultiplier vFresnelMultiplier' from the quickstrings.txt file that should be contained in AD 1257's module folder.

The game will not run with this string missing. Instead, it is necessary to replace it with another.

I downloaded this shader mod: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=302094.0

The .zip archive includes a mb.fx file. This is the same name as the one included with AD 1257.

However, this one does not cause glowing or any such effects. It does not contain the 'vFresnelMultiplier' parameter either.

If you open the mod download's mb.fx using notepad, (The text will be scrambled, albeit still semi-legible) copy-paste the 'matWorldView' string from the very top of the opened file. Make sure this particular mb.fx file replaces AD 1257's version of it.

After this, go back to the quickstrings.txt and migrate back to where the 'gstr_vFresnelMultiplier vFresnelMultiplier' used to be.

Paste 'matWorldView' in replacement of the aforementioned string, using the same format.

It should look like:

'gstr_matWorldView matWorldView'.

The result to this is that the shader parameter error no longer appears. The 'matWorldView' appears to be placebo in the context used and does not cause any ill or noticeable effects.

The reason why the vFresnelMultiplier error appeared was due to mb.fx being deleted. This original file caused glowing textures, and upon deleting it, the 'gstr_vFresnelMultiplier' string reported that it could no longer find the 'vFresnelMultiplier' string since the mb.fx containing it was no longer present. By replacing it with a file that causes no issues, as well as the string name, it appears to bypass all of these problems.

Vampiresbane said:

For curiosity sake, have you tried various characters during a brand new character creation?

Maybe that could give clues as to what works and what doesn't.  My guess? Only the typical English Alphabet is allowed.

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Well, as you might know, I cannot add non-English letters during character creation. I can only do it by copy-pasting the specific letters to the .txt document that exporting creates.

I tried a few other letters, including ð (Eth), and Í (Acute I). None of them appear either. The name is cut off at those letters and the rest of the name after is also not rendered.

I really hope there is another way. I tried creating a dk (Danish) language folder to see if it caused the Ø to appear properly, but it did nothing.

Curiously, towns and npcs can be modified using non-English Latin letters and will appear with seemingly no issue. I do not understand why it is not working in my character's case.

Do you know if there is some sort of download so I can insert non-English letters into my character's name?

I know some sort of Unicode kit was used to insert ð, þ, and all those acute accents. I wish I was able to do the same for my own character...

I made some edits to the existing translations.

Am I allowed to host it somewhere?


It has native-language lord names, but English troops and I also made edits to faction names and villages/cities/towns, particularly in Scandinavia.