Graphical glitches using 0.08 save?

[beowuuf]

I started to notice odd glitches in the grpahics of my game

1) Fountains from the front and side have an odd brown backing when viewed from more than a step away
2) The chopped door on level 4 end appears as a level 12 ornate door when view one or two squares back
3) One or two squares back iron grates have a combo analgam/fountain graphic behind them
4) Torch holders from one square onwards away, or two from the side, have a brown half - portrait backing

I wandered if they are caused by using the two different versions...I'll check out v 0.09 and v0.08 with their own saves later to check...they were very obvious so I was wondering why no one else mentioned them...

[George Gilbert]

I think you're running out of memory on your machine and it's gone pear-shaped. I could well be wrong though. If you (or anyone else) can reproduce these things then it's something else.

Clealy however the code should handle a low memory machine...

[Gambit37]

What's considered low memory? I have an old P233 with 96MB RAM and I have found that both DMute and RTC thrash the hard-disk quite badly at key points. I've never really noticed this on other games, not even things like Half-Life or Unreal which play perfectly well at 800x600 (although I do have a Voodoo 2 helping them along...

DMute always used to crash on me after about 200-300 changes per session, and when exiting the hard-disk churned away for quite some time while all the swap-file data was purged, at least that's what I thought was happening. RTC also does the same thing on exiting.

Does this mean anything significant? Is it something to do with the memory management in these programs?

[beowuuf]

Yes, I think something went pair shaped at uncompress time, which is odd as I did nothing different from what I rememebr. All is good on restarting.

Ususally the low memory sign is graphics being displayed as black boxes, and finally colours fudging out. I can't run too much else behind RTC even with a large enough amount of hard drive space (300 - 500Mb freed). I've played through the full game of RTC and not had the graphics diminish as long as nothing else was suddenly started behind it, so it's different to DMute's constant swap file that eventually takes up all space.

Off topic, but DMute never managed to fully purge - it would always degrade my hard drive again and again, and after 3 -5 uses (I think) I'd have to restart the machine!

[Gambit37]

I have noticed a few problems with RTC in general regarding memory management and the like:

1) If you minimise RTC during startup (which is a tricky thing to do anyway!) it can crash when it gets to the dungeon entrance. Also, it's more likely to do this if you start another program up at the same time.

2) You can't Alt-F4 RTC during startup if you decide not to play - you have to wait for the prescaling to finish. This is bad form.

3) Periodically as I play RTC the hard disk churns away for no apparent reason. I use pre-scaling and no anti-aliasing so I can't see why it should be doing this.

4) The mouse doesn't move while saving which makes it appear that the game has crashed or stopped responding - any way around this?

[George Gilbert]

1) Well, don't do that

2) Yeah, the whole thing is single threaded so you can't do anything else during the start up. It's a trade off between speed and flexibility; for now speed wins, but in the grand scheme of things...

3) The anti-aliasing makes no difference (it's done at start up then forgotten about if you're using pre-scaling). If you're pre-scaling stuff then the memory footprint is truly massive (200+MB) but the least used stuff is stashed away in swap space. You must have encountered something that was in there and it needed it. Alternatively it could be a Windows thing and pure co-incidence (although brought on by RTC doing stuff).

4) Nope - I can't allow you to regain control of the mouse as otherwise you might change the dungeon mid-way through saving it; it could go horribly wrong so easily! I will change it though so that CTRL+S takes you to the save screen though rather than just saving it on the spot.

[George Gilbert]

Fixed for V0.10