nox_plague
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Posts posted by nox_plague
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On 5/31/2023 at 5:48 AM, LeBlaque said:
I posted a trouble ticket at AMD on this crashing out-of-memory issue. Apparently BF has done so as well as a result of my internal trouble ticket. Yesterday I got an email from AMD saying "they are tracking it."
Should be another nine months before a fix....
Are you able to post links to your ticket (and BFCs if it's public) on the AMD forums so folks here can easily chime in there?
For Day of Wrath scenario, I was able to reproduce 'out of memory' with the 23.5.1 driver
My AMD system specs:
Windows 10
Intel i7 9700K
16 GB DDR4 3600Mhz
Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB GDDR6
500GB Samsung NVMe
4K Display
Running the game with Balanced graphic settings
Both my Nvidia system and my MacOS system were able to open Day of Wrath without issue (even though the Mac is AMD, but Apple does better drivers, clearly)
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With Driver 23.4.2, I'm also no longer experiencing the white flashes, and game loading is so much faster.
I've tested this in Black Sea, Red Thunder, and Afghanistan.
Folks thanks for all adding to the forum on AMD - look how we all made some noise and got it fixed, finally!
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Yes folks here is the official AMD thread would be great if they let us Beta test it to make sure it's really fixed.
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Can these corrupted missions be posted somewhere?
The features page says there are 15 standalone battles. Currently with the installer I only see 11.
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btw it is worth pointing out that the OpenGL AMD team did improve game loading times tremendously in the newer drivers. Often reducing load times by as much as 75% for large-huge battles. So they're trying to make OpenGL run better. It just unfortunately introduced this explosion regression.
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Another AMD staff member replied to the thread:
"Just FYI, a bug ticket has been created to track this issue: "flashing white screen when explosions occur in front of camera/player" . The OpenGL dev team is currently looking into it."
If you have any information on which OpenGL functions/calls/extensions are used during explosions we should pass it along to help them narrow it down.
CM:CW gets the "Out of Memory" breaking error with AMD drivers after 22.6.1., if you have any ideas on that one we should pass it along while we have the AMD team attention, although we should probably create a separate thread and Bug tracker for that. One thing at a time.
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We got a reply from Ray_AMD who added Matt_AMD to the thread
In these situations, the best thing to do is provide examples and context so they can reproduce the issue.
The challenge with this bug is that since the game doesn't crash/hang etc the support people might not realize the "flashbang" effect is not the intention of the developer.
@BFCElvis is there anything you can provide Ray_AMD and Matt_AMD that could aid them tracking down this issue? Like do we know which OpenGL function/extension is the culprit?
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Also if anyone uses Twitter please reply to this tweet to see if we can get support to pay attention through this channel
@Redwolf yes I know, you and I both have Radeon Macs (which I've been using to play CM most of the time) but I want to play it on my more powerful Windows machine. AMD needs to fix this.
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Everyone please go to the AMD forum and add your reply here. Also like the replies of everyone else.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease at these businesses.
Also if you haven't submitted an AMD Bug Report Tool please do that as well.
It's been 9-months and this issue needs to be resolved. Additionally, people with newer 7000 series GPUs will never be able to downgrade, making CM painful to play going forward.
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@3156Regt @Roman9441 @CM-Kane @The General
Everyone please go to the AMD forum and add your reply here. Also like the replies of everyone else.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease at these businesses.
Also if you haven't submitted an AMD Bug Report Tool please do that as well.
It's been 9-months and this issue needs to be resolved. Additionally, people with newer 7000 series GPUs will never be able to downgrade, making CM painful to play going forward.
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Please go to the AMD forum and add your reply here. Also like the replies of everyone else.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease at these businesses.
Also if you haven't submitted an AMD Bug Report Tool please do that as well.
It's been 9-months and this issue needs to be resolved. Additionally, people with newer 7000 series GPUs will never be able to downgrade, making CM painful to play going forward.
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@LeBlaque @Redwolf @Schrullenhaft @Hetzi @Codreanu @Bufo @Rasputino @sbobovyc @Vacillator
Everyone please go to the AMD forum and add your reply here. Also like the replies of everyone else.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease at these businesses.
Also if you haven't submitted an AMD Bug Report Tool please do that as well.
It's been 9-months and this issue needs to be resolved. Additionally, people with newer 7000 series GPUs will never be able to downgrade, making CM painful to play going forward.
(I see some people in this forum have already commented on the thread, sorry if you've already done so)
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I think it’s great that you can buy the game here on BFC and still get access to the Steam key.
With Steam you can install a title on as many devices as you want, it only checks that you aren’t trying to play the same game on different machines at the same time.
I like to try new devices, use multiple machines and VMs. I reformat my OS every 12-18 months, meaning reinstalling the game on the same machine. Currently I’m over my limit for my BFC account for some CM games. I’ve even had to purchase a game a couple of times.
With Steam I can install the game as many times on as many devices/VMs/ etc. I just wish Steam had the MacOS version as well. Steam is fully multi platform, I don’t understand why they limited CM to Windows only on it. I assume Slitherine/Matrix are just afraid of MacOS.
Looking forward to Battlefront releasing all the games via Steam.
@BFCElvis Can you please have the Steam icons replaced with the standard BFC CM icons? The colorful circle logos are so much nicer and easier to distinguish than the dark armored vehicle icons used for Steam installs.
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@Redwolf https://developer.x-plane.com/2023/02/addressing-plugin-flickering/
Reading the source article from x-plane explains that their core game has been rewritten in Vulkan. They're using Zink translation just for the modding/plugin community.
Obviously the best thing for Battlefront to do would be rewrite the engine in Vulkan, but that seems like a non-starter for Steve & co. Maybe they can implement Zink, but it seems unlikely to me that will work without Battlefront developer support, or someone incredibly technical who is able to reverse engineer the OpenGL calls the game is making and create a custom Zink wrapper.
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@Redwolf Have you gotten this to work?
I actually spent a couple weeks of my life last year, around March 2022 trying to get Zink to run CM.
The documentation was pretty rough, but I was able to compile my own Zink DLLs and get them to work for another OpenGL game.
CM would start, but would fail to load into any actual mission. At this point, when I knew I had a working Zink DLL but it failed to to load CM, I gave up because I figured there was something about the way the game called OpenGL that Zink didn't handle. From reading the Zink support groups it seemed that the developers were essentially having to optimize the driver for each and every game individually, and CM would require the Battlefront team to contribute code to the Zink project to make it work.
Would love to know if they've improved it in the last year and it's working. I think it is a very promising project to improve CM performance.
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On 1/30/2023 at 3:14 PM, Battlefront.com said:
Therefore, someone who knew what they are talking about would conclude that Combat Mission was properly coded to work with the OpenGL API as it was at the time the core game engine was developed.
The one exception was an AMD driver that introduced two bugs into standard OpenGL API calls. We had a customer high up in the tech side of AMD and he was able to track down and identify the bugs, but it still took AMD more than a year to release a fix. Until then we did, indeed, have an optional hack around the API that people could opt into. It didn't work as smoothly, but it did work. After AMD fixed the problems we removed the option since it was no longer necessary and it would likely stop working at some point anyway.
The problem developers face is not so much that they wrote code that used calls incorrectly, but that new calls have been introduced to access hardware that previously did not exist. Optimally, existing calls are looped into the new hardware and therefore gain a benefit without the developer needing to do anything. Unfortunately, that's not always possible to do. It certainly isn't possible to do when novel features are added that have no prior API equivalent.
Sometimes improvements can be implemented relatively easy, though it usually still takes a fair amount of time. As an example we added support for bump maps and shaders, two features that IIRC weren't available when we the engine was developed. At the very least they weren't deemed viable due to framerate issues.
Ah, I was wondering about those AMD issues. I had the actual issues where the game rendered improperly with my PC Radeon 6700XT. For my latest desktop I went with an Nvidia RTX just because I knew it would have better OpenGL support. And the load times are so much faster.
I appreciate your dedication to multi-platform support over the years. I've done some tests on other forum threads comparing the load times on MacOS with a Radeon and then with Windows (Bootcamp), same machine, and seen much longer game load times when on Windows, my guess is that Apple just did a much better job with their proprietary OpenGL drivers for the Radeon GPU. My Mac is still the best at loading CM and it plays pretty darn well for a laptop. I've read on the forums that CM continues to perform well on Apple Silicon and their custom GPUs even though they've deprecated OpenGL support. To me this example of how well CM performs on a much less powerful portable Mac compared with my beefy desktop shows that a lot of the performance fault lies with the GPU vendor driver implementation, something you have zero control over.
Eventually you'll probably want to look into Vulkan and MoltenVK (Vulkan to Metal translation layer) since they are the Kronos Group successor to OpenGL. I understand the opportunity costs make it difficult to invest in such an expensive engine rewrite/re-architecture when OpenGL continues to run.
Regarding the Black Sea expansion - would it be possible to setup a donation campaign or some other form of giving to help show the release is not trying to exploit the ongoing conflict. I could see a purchase option to add an additional $5-10 dollars to each order to help raise humanitarian aid or some similar way to help bring to market the expansion while being sensitive to the reality.
Anyway thanks for the plan and looking forward to continued Combat Mission updates for years to come.
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1 hour ago, Lucky_Strike said:
Yeah, Parallels or any other VM will not really utilise the GPU in the same way as a proper OS, it'll work but just not to it's full potential. I'm thinking that BootCamp would be the way to go cos it's a proper OS install fully utilising the GPU. I have BootCamp set up on my iMac so I will give it a go, see what happens.
Yes, I can try BootCamp just to see if it is also slow like my desktop. If in BootCamp it's as/nearly as fast as in MacOS, that would indicate some sort of other bottleneck in my custom desktop PC. I'll update here with my results.
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15 hours ago, Ultradave said:
I have run BS in Parallels desktop on my MacBook Pro and while I haven't put a timer on it, the load times were pretty similar, subjectively. Certainly nothing like that huge disparity.
It doesn't run that well in Parallels. Graphics are pretty lame, but I'm sure that's because my Mac has onboard graphics, which doesn't seem to matter on the Mac side but does make a big difference in Windows. But that also might lend some more credence to the GPU driver idea, since that's not a factor in mine.
Dave
Why run it in parallels? Why not just run it on MacOS, the game works well in MacOS.
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User experience recap:
1. I bought a new Alienware x14 from Dell.
2. I installed Combat Mission Black Sea
3. Game failed to run. Error shown above.
4. I contacted Slitherine thinking it must be their issue since I was trying out the Steam version for the first time.
5. Their support failed to find a solution.
6. I uninstalled the Steam version, downloaded the BFC version, and ran into the same issue.
7. Spent hours trying to debug. Came across the issue - Display Scaling.
Conclusion: The default settings of a brand new Windows laptop caused Combat Mission to fail to run.
As a fan of the CM games and excited for Battlefront to grow their audience via Steam (which has nothing to due with the issue just to be clear) want to avoid turning off potential new players with a poor experience.
TDLR: Modern devices are shipping with default settings that "break" CM out-of-the-box.
I report this bug on the of chance it helps someone else troubleshooting with a new Windows device or that Battlefront wants to improve their software.
P.S. MacOS scaling does not cause this issue.
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36 minutes ago, Kevin2k said:
So Windows adds something and then software needs to be updated to bypass it? LOL
Yup, it's been around since Windows 8 so I think 10 years for software developers to support/work around something is acceptable.
Again, I'm not suggesting CM USES DPI scaling, I'm saying they should update their error handling when opening the game so it does not fail to load just because DPI settings are enabled. I doubt the OpenGL engine is even aware of scaling, it's just the games startup logic that fails.
Also CM handles this on MacOS, so it should be able to handle it on Windows too. Gotta get all those new Steam players up and running CM seamlessly
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This is bug because other games do not use the Windows Scaling, they know to bypass this and run the game at resolution either specified in the user settings or the native display resolution.
I believe that Battlefront just needs to update their error handling to not refuse to start the game when Scaling is used.
The other thing is MacOS has been using scaling for years and this Combat Mission works fine on my Mac with scaling always enabled.
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Testing out a new system I learned about an issue with Combat Mission and Windows Scaling feature.
Scaling is very common on smaller devices, especially ones with higher resolutions to provide an improved DPI experience.
However when scaling is enabled you get this cryptic message:
"Could not initialize graphics display. REQUIRED: 1024 x 768, 32-bit color."
Turning the scaling to 100% does resolve the issue but this is a pain for anyone who wants to PBEM and open and close CM frequently.
Maybe something engine v5 can resolve
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I've had luck finding games here: https://discord.gg/twHwatVh
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New PC
in CM2 General Tech Support
Posted · Edited by nox_plague
@Sluggo-337 If you only want to play CM I'd recommend a new mini pc like this:
Minisforum UM790 Pro 7940HS Mini PC
You can buy this configured with ram and a small SSD for $619. Although I'd recommend 32GB of RAM if you want to play lots of games.
This would crush that crappy old system on Amazon. This is using a 5.2Ghz latest 4NM AMD Ryzen with built-in AMD graphics.
These graphics are low-end (integrated) and you'd have to play AAA games on low settings, but this little machine is crazy fast.
This guy did a nice overview of it's capabilites on youtube: