I've been testing what's been causing so much lag, frustrating lockups, and other problems in Warband under DirectX 9, especially when playing mods like mine. This has been a constant complaint by players of most of the big mods forever, and solutions haven't shown up in terms of engine patches.
As some of you know, I'm a bit of a performance nut; I've done all sorts of things to try and make Blood and Steel perform as well as possible. My mod was one of the first Warband mods to make LODs for practically everything, for example, and lately I've been doing shader optimizations and other fun tricks.
While all of that improved people's framerates, it didn't stop people, including myself, from having horrible problems with seemingly-random lockups that would halt the game state.
After many tests, I am fairly confident that I've pinpointed the problem and have found a solution. It turned out that problem isn't graphics at all; HERR_BUFFER_LOCK errors were a symptom of CPU lock states happening, not the result of running out of VRAM.
The real lockup issue appears to be sounds. In particular, the sound format.
I found this out after doing several tests with sounds off. This pretty much solved my problems with lockups and lag, which I found intriguing. Since I didn't want to play Warband without audio, I looked at this issue further, and found that Warband supports multiple audio formats, like a lot of modern engines that are using various sound loader systems. It also became apparent that the early engine builds were developed to use WAV, and that OGG support was added much later.
So I tried something simple; I converted all of the OGG files (including all of the Taleworlds sounds) to 16-bit 22kHz mono WAV (note that there are a few Taleworlds sounds that are WAV- leave them exactly as they are), then changed all of the Module System code to point to the WAV files instead of the OGG files.
The results have been extraordinary; thus far, I haven't had a single HERR_BUFFER_LOCK error. Period. Considering that I had this problem to the extent that I was very lucky if Warband didn't completely lock up during every battle (it was so bad that I was used to hitting ALT-ENTER at least once a battle, and sometimes even that didn't work) this is amazing, and may resolve a lot of players' problems with your mods.
In short, please try this out, especially if you're a modder whose hardware has also had trouble with Warband. I think you will find, like I have, that this resolves a great number of issues.
As some of you know, I'm a bit of a performance nut; I've done all sorts of things to try and make Blood and Steel perform as well as possible. My mod was one of the first Warband mods to make LODs for practically everything, for example, and lately I've been doing shader optimizations and other fun tricks.
While all of that improved people's framerates, it didn't stop people, including myself, from having horrible problems with seemingly-random lockups that would halt the game state.
After many tests, I am fairly confident that I've pinpointed the problem and have found a solution. It turned out that problem isn't graphics at all; HERR_BUFFER_LOCK errors were a symptom of CPU lock states happening, not the result of running out of VRAM.
The real lockup issue appears to be sounds. In particular, the sound format.
I found this out after doing several tests with sounds off. This pretty much solved my problems with lockups and lag, which I found intriguing. Since I didn't want to play Warband without audio, I looked at this issue further, and found that Warband supports multiple audio formats, like a lot of modern engines that are using various sound loader systems. It also became apparent that the early engine builds were developed to use WAV, and that OGG support was added much later.
So I tried something simple; I converted all of the OGG files (including all of the Taleworlds sounds) to 16-bit 22kHz mono WAV (note that there are a few Taleworlds sounds that are WAV- leave them exactly as they are), then changed all of the Module System code to point to the WAV files instead of the OGG files.
The results have been extraordinary; thus far, I haven't had a single HERR_BUFFER_LOCK error. Period. Considering that I had this problem to the extent that I was very lucky if Warband didn't completely lock up during every battle (it was so bad that I was used to hitting ALT-ENTER at least once a battle, and sometimes even that didn't work) this is amazing, and may resolve a lot of players' problems with your mods.
In short, please try this out, especially if you're a modder whose hardware has also had trouble with Warband. I think you will find, like I have, that this resolves a great number of issues.
