M&B Warband Beta version 0.720 is released

[CryptoCactus]

Side note, Field by the River is still LAG By the River.

Do you have fast reflections (or whatever it's called) on?

 

[Dudomoss]

I cannot access the game at all. After the first window panel before starting the game it gives me this error:

------------------------------------------
RGL ERROR

Unable to open texture file Textures\mp_ui_maps_b.dds
------------------------------------------

What should I do?

I had the same problem, to fix it patch the game from 0700 to 0711 and THEN to 0720, that should do it. Since i was away on vacations never realized there was a patch for 0711 and just downloaded the last one, wich is a lot smaller than the previous one .

 

[CryptoCactus]

Okay, just reporting:

(note: the lag I'm talking about is not the all-around poor fps Halycon et al are talking about, afaik)



When I'm on a horse, about half the time when I approach an enemy, especially a foot troop, the game lags terribly. As in, a good four or five seconds of me and my horse just randomly skipping around all over the place. Rubberbanding or ice-skating or whatever you want to call it.

This still happens when I have everything on lowest settings possible. 800x600, everything at 0%/off, LOD disabled, everything. My FPS stays pinned at 200 (my max setting) ALL the time.. except this one particular scenario (horseback, near enemies). It usually happens the worst when I actually touch an enemy with the horse itself.

I tried to fraps it, but fraps causes just enough lag by itself to make it hard to distinguish. Still tinkering with it though, so..

If I can get a good vid of it I'll file a bug report on the tracker.

 

[A_Mustang]

Okay, just reporting:

(note: the lag I'm talking about is not the all-around poor fps Halycon et al are talking about, afaik)



When I'm on a horse, about half the time when I approach an enemy, especially a foot troop, the game lags terribly. As in, a good four or five seconds of me and my horse just randomly skipping around all over the place. Rubberbanding or ice-skating or whatever you want to call it.

This still happens when I have everything on lowest settings possible. 800x600, everything at 0%/off, LOD disabled, everything. My FPS stays pinned at 200 (my max setting) ALL the time.. except this one particular scenario (horseback, near enemies). It usually happens the worst when I actually touch an enemy with the horse itself.

I tried to fraps it, but fraps causes just enough lag by itself to make it hard to distinguish. Still tinkering with it though, so..

If I can get a good vid of it I'll file a bug report on the tracker.

I get this too... therefor, i shall be mainly absent from this version of warband online

 

[HTAPAWASO]

Okay, just reporting:

(note: the lag I'm talking about is not the all-around poor fps Halycon et al are talking about, afaik)



When I'm on a horse, about half the time when I approach an enemy, especially a foot troop, the game lags terribly. As in, a good four or five seconds of me and my horse just randomly skipping around all over the place. Rubberbanding or ice-skating or whatever you want to call it.

This still happens when I have everything on lowest settings possible. 800x600, everything at 0%/off, LOD disabled, everything. My FPS stays pinned at 200 (my max setting) ALL the time.. except this one particular scenario (horseback, near enemies). It usually happens the worst when I actually touch an enemy with the horse itself.

I tried to fraps it, but fraps causes just enough lag by itself to make it hard to distinguish. Still tinkering with it though, so..

If I can get a good vid of it I'll file a bug report on the tracker.

I've got this too.

Some people have reported that turning off Textures on Demand fixes this.
Some have needed to turn down to dx7.

I haven't had a chance to test either yet, but will tonight.

 

[Halcyon]

maybe its related to how they track horses and infantry, and if they do collide or not. Cavalry colliding with infantry is very jumpy it does not look fluid at all, and it seems like the horse just 'skips' a section of the map instead of actually trampling the infantry.

changing from dx7 to dx9 has yielded no real results in any form, from my experience.

 

[Jack_Merchantson]

When I'm on a horse, about half the time when I approach an enemy, especially a foot troop, the game lags terribly. As in, a good four or five seconds of me and my horse just randomly skipping around all over the place. Rubberbanding or ice-skating or whatever you want to call it.

This still happens when I have everything on lowest settings possible. 800x600, everything at 0%/off, LOD disabled, everything. My FPS stays pinned at 200 (my max setting) ALL the time.. except this one particular scenario (horseback, near enemies). It usually happens the worst when I actually touch an enemy with the horse itself.

I had this last night for a bit. Once when approaching a bunch of infantry on a ladder, and a second time a short while later while escaping infantry near the same ladder.

Both times, it was like the server suddenly didn't know where I was.  The second time, the effect lasted for several seconds and I ended up halfway across the map.

It only happened twice that I can remember.  This was also happening for me in previous .7x patches.  It acts like a connection issue, but it ONLY affects me when mounted and ONLY when interacting with infantry.

It may have been happening in the .6x patches, but I would get such bad stutter that it was hard to differentiate. Now that I don't get stutter anymore, it's really obvious when my horse starts time-travelling.

 

[CryptoCactus]

I've been trying to get a video of it all night, but I swear it's like fraps is the anti-lag for some reason. Which, well, I would think it would be *worse*, but..

I'm so confused.


Fwiw, my specs:

Spoiler

Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit
Language: English
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
System Model: EP45-DS3L
BIOS: Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU    Q6600  @ 2.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.4GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 3326MB RAM
Page File: 1083MB used, 5568MB available
Windows Dir: C:\Windows
DirectX Version: DirectX 11

 

[Elthore]

Armagan, I have been trying to figure out what is causing this stutter all day today. I did some tests with the Textures on Demand option and I should correct my earlier assumption that this is the issue. However, there is not much improvement with the option turned off. For example, about 45min of the option off on a siege map with 35-45 players gave me 7 instances of stutter, with the option on there were 5 moments of stutter. This was actually surprising because there were a lot of players and I was only getting about 15FPS, would expect more stutter. I kept switching this option on and off throughout the day, which I would estimate equaled 5-6 hours of gameplay. To the point where I couldn't even tell if it was on or off, the difference to stutter is minimal. It could still be affecting overall FPS but I was not observing this.

Another issue I was testing was a suspicion I had that the game was leaking memory and the longer the game was on and more maps were being cycled, more stutter was happening. The game takes about 630mb of system RAM on my machine +-30, but it was not increasing overtime, so it wasnt system memory leakage. Can there be Video RAM leakage? I am not familiar with this concept and have no application to monitor my VRAM so I cannot say either way. Is there something not being unloaded from VRAM? is this even possible? I observed that there was generally an improvement after the game was restarted (not the system), but this could be coincidence, however, its worth looking into as others have mentioned it as well.

The final thing I observed was that if there were cavalry being used, the stutter was generally worse. I am even adjusting for general performance, and by this I mean Ill count cavalry as two people. The issue is not just a performance problem though, because I could be getting 40FPS and still have more stutter in a given amount of time than I got when I was only getting 15FPS. There is some other error here.

I didnt take anything I wrote here lightly, I wrote everything I observed down while I played and I was only playing to observe instances of stutter. A lot of the information I omitted because there was no pattern to it, like I mentioned, less FPS didnt mean more stutter. I define the 'stutter' as a 1 second complete freeze of the game. My system has minimal background applications, the harddrive is 7200RPM and the game directory is fully defragmented.

If you care for my testing today, I do have an idea as to what could be causing this. It seems that the rate at which objects travel towards the camera(player or spectator) play a role here. That is why when there is cavarly, we notice more stutter but its not just a normal performance problem. What I think it is that there are different LOD of textures and meshes being loaded into the VRAM, but if too many or even one player loads too many of these too quickly this could be causing the stutter. The stutter is identical to what happens when players spawn near the player, so it an issue with something being loaded right? Is it maybe that the distances for different detail levels of meshes or textures being too close to one another? So if a horse is running towards you(or you towards him), the game attempts to load too many different levels of detail, maybe some are being loaded before the last one is even done. Increasing the distance between levels/stages, or removing an entire 'level' in your LOD code may improve performance?

I hope I am able to explain myself properly here, please message me if I can clarify anything or if I can test anything further.

EDIT:
I may have found something that may lead to a fix: I enabled AGP fast write/read in my bios as well as my graphics drivers. From what I understand, enabling these options will use your system memory for video. This improved my performance tremendously! So much so that I have increased my resolution to 1024x768 from 640x480 and in the only game I was tested so far that had about 30 players with one team as khergits....I experienced NO STUTTER at all!  I attribute this to the slow or small VRAM in the Radeon 9800 as compared to my system. I have both overclocked and the specs are: VRAM 128mb 380mhz DDR1, System 2Gigs 420mhz DDR1.  I will test further.

EDIT2: 3 more maps, and on the 3rd one we were up to 40 players and some cav units. I experienced a couple of stutters and restarted the game, otherwise it was stutter free, the next few rounds there were no stutters again.   Can anyone else confirm that stutters appear after a few maps in a row?

 

[CryptoCactus]

Regarding that last part, surely turning off texture load-on-demand would have solved it if that were the problem, yeah? Unless it's still using LODs for some reason even when it's supposed to be off..


edit:

I may have found something that may lead to a fix: I enabled AGP fast write/read in my bios as well as my graphics drivers. From what I understand, enabling these options will use your system memory for video. This improved my performance tremendously! So much so that I have increased my resolution to 1024x768 from 640x480 and in the only game I was tested so far that had about 30 players with one team as khergits....I experienced NO STUTTER at all!  I attribute this to the slow or small VRAM in the Radeon 9800 as compared to my system. I have both overclocked and the specs are: VRAM 128mb 380mhz DDR1, System 2Gigs 420mhz DDR1.  I will test further.

Hmmmm. Now that is interesting..

 

[Halcyon]

thats strange because i also have my bios set to agp, have an agp board and video card and i have bad performance. I will check the bios again and see what i can change...

 

[Monk]

Okay, just reporting:

(note: the lag I'm talking about is not the all-around poor fps Halycon et al are talking about, afaik)



When I'm on a horse, about half the time when I approach an enemy, especially a foot troop, the game lags terribly. As in, a good four or five seconds of me and my horse just randomly skipping around all over the place. Rubberbanding or ice-skating or whatever you want to call it.

This still happens when I have everything on lowest settings possible. 800x600, everything at 0%/off, LOD disabled, everything. My FPS stays pinned at 200 (my max setting) ALL the time.. except this one particular scenario (horseback, near enemies). It usually happens the worst when I actually touch an enemy with the horse itself.

I tried to fraps it, but fraps causes just enough lag by itself to make it hard to distinguish. Still tinkering with it though, so..

If I can get a good vid of it I'll file a bug report on the tracker.

I'm getting a lot of this as well. Last build was totally stable for me, but now it's really rough. I also get occasions where the screen totally freezes and I can hear the guy who can still see what is going on hacking me to bits. Alt-tabbing will reset it though, so if I can just do that fast enough...no, couldn't do it.

Graphically I'm having a lot of issues now but it was rock solid before. I'm curious to know if we helped or hindered more people with the graphical "fixes". =)

 

[Jack_Merchantson]

I was playing cavalry last night and started skating for FORTY SECONDS.

It seemed to mostly go away when I would slow down, but it was an illusion -- if I sped up again, or made a weapon attack, the weird pulse-updating would rear it's ugly head.

It's not like a framerate stutter -- the animation remains quite smooth, it's just that every dozen frames or so the server changes it's mind about what direction I was headed in and what I was doing, and helpfully updates my client, resulting in a new heading and velocity, and in some cases causing an attack to go back and partially replay itself a few times like a climactic JCVD jump-spin-kick.

I'm pretty sure no one else can see it happening, whatever information the server is sending them about my position/speed/actions remains consistent (I saw no texts about me teleporting around the map, and I've never seen other players doing that when they complain about this problem).

 

[kaleena]

Another issue I was testing was a suspicion I had that the game was leaking memory and the longer the game was on and more maps were being cycled, more stutter was happening. The game takes about 630mb of system RAM on my machine +-30, but it was not increasing overtime, so it wasnt system memory leakage. Can there be Video RAM leakage? I am not familiar with this concept and have no application to monitor my VRAM so I cannot say either way. Is there something not being unloaded from VRAM? is this even possible? I observed that there was generally an improvement after the game was restarted (not the system), but this could be coincidence, however, its worth looking into as others have mentioned it as well.

Video RAM leakage does exist, cos it's not much different than the typical RAM you got on the motherboard.  You can monitor it easily with GPU-Z (google it, free fast and very simple software).

 

[Eagle114th]

I want to thank Armagan and his dev. team very much for this patch because of this patch, I can FINALLY run this game with every setting maximumed out with my new gamnig computer.  I have been having a truly great time in this game!  I am certain that there are alot of other that have experienced improved perfomance with this new patch.




Eagle out...

 

[tylertfb]

I've been trying to get a video of it all night, but I swear it's like fraps is the anti-lag for some reason. Which, well, I would think it would be *worse*, but..

I'm so confused.

I get the same thing, really bad lately. I managed to capture a video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4hBGmjO10Q

It was really really bad on Field By the River tonight. Are we sure it's a graphics issue with our PC's and not a network thing?

system specs:

Spoiler

  Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-215
          Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: System manufacturer
      System Model: System Product Name
              BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
          Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+,  MMX,  3DNow, ~2.2GHz
            Memory: 2048MB RAM
          Page File: 533MB used, 3407MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

---------------
Display Devices
---------------
        Card name: ATI Radeon HD 4850
    Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
        Chip type: ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x9442)
        DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
      Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9442&SUBSYS_24701682&REV_00
  Display Memory: 1024.0 MB
    Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (60Hz)
          Monitor: Plug and Play Monitor
  Monitor Max Res: 1600,1200
      Driver Name: ati2dvag.dll
  Driver Version: 6.14.0010.7018 (English)
      DDI Version: 9 (or higher)
Driver Attributes: Final Retail
Driver Date/Size: 11/4/2009 07:44:14, 300032 bytes
      WHQL Logo'd: Yes
  WHQL Date Stamp: n/a
              VDD: n/a
        Mini VDD: ati2mtag.sys
    Mini VDD Date: 11/4/2009 08:15:30, 4423168 bytes

 

[Dermeister]

What are the advantages to having "Load Textures on demand" set to on any how? i cant see any Grafical diferances with it on or off it does nothing for me that i can nottice.

 

[The Shadow]

Load textures on demand loads textures in a scene only when you need to see them.  It improves performance. 

 

[Dermeister]

thank you then i will leave it on