Your comments

Thank you, i will follow the threads and new tickets.


Loading times - You're probably right. Maybe i'll buy some more RAM if it's cheap thrn see the difference. Probably win't be anything spectacular. But yeah, if you have a more powerful system, even a HDD load times will be great. So i don't think there is an issue here in that case. Just a difference in specs.


Justice crash - I know what i was doing when it crashed so i'll try the same thing again. 


Splash screen - No idea. I'll see if i can maybe guess what's happening. Or try a few thinga. If i find anything i'll open a new ticket so you can try it.


That is all for now. Thank you for your help! I appreciate it!

Noontide you're a genius!

(I don't know how to quote here...)

"This is unfortunate but does give me some ideas. Is it possible that your Cloud Saves or some resources for WFTO are located on the HDD instead? This would go a long way to explaining a core root for the most peculiar side of your problems. Maybe you could try disabling the HDD entirely temporarily to see if there's some improvement.

Also I would check your Page (Virtual Memory) file location. Make sure it's on your SSD and that there's space to spare on there. You could even try disabling it for a test run though I'd recommend against that with your system having 8GB Physical RAM."

That was it! The page file was located on the HDD drive where windows used to be, E: or something. When i reinstalled windows, i never deleted the old drive with it because i still had some stuff i needed to copy, and i assume the installation found the pagefile and left it there for the new OS installation to use. I moved the page file to C: drive SSD and the game is working SO much better now!

That would also explain the high disk usage on my previous task manager screenshot!

I also updated the graphics card drivers.

Here's how posession now works:


There's still visible culling (those empty spaces), but there's no lag anymore now.

I also did some measurements that you requested but since i first tried the pagefile fix, i did the measurements AFTER i moved the pagefile to SSD and updated the drivers. There are still some issues, but the game works better now.

Start time: 87s
Quit to desktop from level: 47s

I didn't measure level loading, but it's not 30 seconds, it's more. Still, not as bad as before. Before, it would take minutes to load anything, especially quitting the level. Now it's "just" around 40 seconds. Which is still a lot compared to your load times, but it's manageable now. The weird thing is, my copy of WFTO is installed on an SSD, and my SSD times are comparable to your HDD times... Even worse. So, there's still something weird here.

The garbage collection freezes are WAY less noticable now. So that's a good thing. They do happen, but not nearly as much as before.

I played a lot of MPD levels to test out how the game works after i moved the page file to SSD and here's the results.

Justice crashed once very badly. I tagged all the earth inside the circle of impenetrable rock where the dungeon heart is, and the game started to lag like crazy. I wanted to dig everything and put down rooms then put augurum walls around them. It crashed before i could excavate everything.

Next time, i ran Justice without excavating everything and it ran fine.

Frostfossil was fine.
Deepwater was fine.
Goldrust was fine.
The one with the empire units was fine as well.

Revelation ritual produces extreme lag. Tested on the emire MPD. Sorry forgot the name.
Prospector ritual also produces lag but not as much. Also tested on the empire MPD.

I couldn't capture culling when in RTS mode, but that might have been fixed by moving the page file to SSD.
I did capture another instance of this culling when playing a community map that's a copy of Dungeon Keeper 2 first MPD level.
20200301231900_1.jpg
This one did not go away like the posession culling does. It was just like that no matter what angle i looked at it.

"Pretty much within expected bounds. Did you have the level loaded when
you took these? Would be nice to know. Also only thing of note is the
90+% usage on one of your drives. Though it's not clear why that is in
the screenshots."

Yes, the level was loaded when i took those screenshots.

"That's very peculiar. This should never happen, the splash screen should
be closed before the game launches. Any chance you can find the
launcher.log file and send that across?"

Here is the launcher log:
War for the Overworld Launcher Log.txt

I can no longer see the taskbar popping in an out.

Another thing i noticed is that when there is small amount of UI elements the game feels smoother. For instance, when i switch from the units tab to spells (and there's only a few spells researched), it feels smoother. I can't get any FPS counter to work in game, so i couldn't measure it, but maybe you can try. Start one level, play it a lot, and just never research any spells. Then switch from unit view to spells when there's a lot of units to see if it makes any difference.

And of course, as expected, the more units and objects in the level in general, the less smooth the game is, but that's to be expected. The framerate then does drop a bit, but not as much as it did when the page file was on the HDD. It's playable now, at least when MPD is concerned. I still wouldn't play campaign levels with this performance.

I also never encountered the AI message on any other map. I did not try Hell's Deep this time though. Might be just that map's issue, or might be related to page file thing.

So, in conclusion, there's still issues happening, but it's way better now that the page file is on the SSD.
If you need me to do anything else, just ask!
And thank you for your time!

Hello!

No need to apologize, your response was super swift to what i'm used to. :) And very detailed!

I thought most of the issues here were related, that's why i posted them in the same ticket. And i thought one ticket would be easier to handle than posting 5 of them with separate issues. Sorry about that.

Before i installed WFTO this time, a lot of time passed indeed. I'm not sure if it was pre 2.0 patch or before though.

Here is the DXdiag:

DxDiag.txt

And here is a .zip with all the hell's deep MPD levels i saved. Outside of the game they don't have the same name so i don't know which one is the latest, i'm sorry. But you should be able to compare them to the videos.

remote.zip

Video 1

Yes, the assets seem to pop in and out when transitioning. Sometimes when scrolling but i wasn't able to capture that.

Here is the resource usage when the game is open.

Disregard Firefox, it's usually closed, it's now open so i can write here.

Screenshot 2020-02-19 03.47.05.png
Screenshot 2020-02-19 03.47.32.png
Screenshot 2020-02-19 03.47.42.png


The time i spent on the level is 1:48. I opened it up and checked.

And yes, the detailed unit tab makes the game lag. This was always present, i just never reported it until now.

Video 2

If this is caused by garbage collection... Is there anything i can do about it myself? Because it's happening every few seconds. A minute tops. It's very distracting.

As for other levels, i didn't try. I started the Hell's Deep MPD and all the problems appeared so i never bothered to try other levels because i assumed they would be the same.


Choppyness is yes, hard to capture on video as you're not the one controlling the cursor so it looks like it behaves normally. But in general, it's like a lot of times it feels like it clicks slightly apart from where i think it will, missing some objects, unit pickups, slaps, tabs... And is generally not very precise. It's like it has some acceleration on it and when i stop it "drifts" a bit more to where i think it stopped. I don't know how else to describe it, but it's a pain to use. Some of it can be attributed to lag, like that drift part, i might have moved it harder than it looked on screen and it ended up farther than i think it would. But other stuff like misclicking all the time, and such, maybe not, i don't know.

Log/AI message


It's ok, take your time. I just hope i can minimize all the issues. So whenever you can is great, i'm not trying to push you, i just reported what i was experiencing.

Load times

I forgot to mention, sometimes, when the game exits. It doesn't actually shut down. The splash screen remains, and i can only shut it down by killing the WFTO.exe process in task manager. Even in steam it looks like it's still in game, the "play" button changes to the "stop" button, but clicking it doesn't shut the game down. Only the task manager.

Also, after starting the game, the interface amd the cursor take a few 2 second freezes until it pops up.

Same happens when loading a game.

Also, during loading, the bottom taskbar is popping in and out. Not sure what's that about.

Further replies:

1. I always close what i can when playing games. Not sure what else i can do here. Never tried drivers in safe mode though, i'll see what that is and if i can do that. I'll also try updating the drivers, maybe that fixes some of the issues.

2.Well i posted all the save files, so you can poke around them and see if there's something wrong there. I'll monitor the memory usage though.

3.I unfortunately can't do that. I only have 1 SSD, and one failing HDD which is for storage only and only accessed when needed. Though, i did at one point have WFTO installed on that drive, and submitted a ticket. If you have my post history you'll see. The problem was the drive at that time. After i got the SSD, it improved drastically. Load times and the game itself. I also don't have any memory sticks lying around lol, and this is the only computer i have.

That should be all the replies to your questions i think. If you have further questions or need me to do something else just ask.

I also hope we can work something out and get the game in a playable state. I've spent 126 hours playing it and have all the DLC's, even the charity one, and i really really love the game. Especially building weird My Pet Dungeons. But i've never even finished the campaign lol, and that's partly because the campaign is high stress and requires precision. So i mostly played MPD levels that can handle laggy playing. Before, with the old HDD i had issues, then with the SSD it became ok, so i progressed further into the campaign, then had to stop playing, and now it's even worse than it's ever been.

I look forward to your next reply. Let's see what can be done! :)

Cheers!

Thank you!


The rest of the game is great, and as far as i can tell, everything else seems to be working fine, but this unhappy thing is really annoying. It seems to get worse the longer i play a map and i have no idea why that is.


Also, some minions seem to be more affected by this than others. Necromancers and Beastmasters seem the most unhappy. Also, on that MPD map, golden golems were constantly unhappy too, but that might have been my fault, i'm not sure. They ended up thrown in the portal so that got sorted out quickly lol... :P


I should also tell you that, i have abysmall read/write speed on my hard disk so it takes the game ages to load, to become responsive and it stutters every time some disk writing is happening. I submitted a ticket about this so you can check that out, i assume you have access to it if you want to take a look. I'm telling this in case this is somehow related so you have more info to go on. I'm working on buyng an SSD, but in the meantime, i can't be sure that my slow disk isn't somehow causing this. Well, the more info you have, the better chances for you to find what's wrong i guess. :)


Good luck and tell me if you need anything else!

Yeah i beter start backing stuff up and looking for a new SSD or HDD.

Thanks!

CDM_20180628160216.txt


I ran the defragmenter and although it didn't show any fragmentation, after running it it looks a little bit better.

It's still abysmally low, even for a HDD, and i think my hard disk is dying... Funny thing is, i never noticed it because not a lot of programs are very hard disk intensive so i guess it's a good thing i started playing WFTO again, i never would have seen it otherwise. :P


Well i guess we found the culprit of the issues i'm having. It's probably time to buy an SSD. :P


Thanks for all your help! I'll play the game as is now, hopefully i'll be able to buy an SSD soon so i can just use the HDD for storage and prolong its lifetime a bit more.

Right, got the wrong one lol. :P


Here's the one you requested.

CDM_20180628151918.txt


It kinda looks like my disk is ultra slow for some reason and WFTO probably uses the disk a lot...

That would explain the issues i'm having i guess.

CrystalDiskInfo761.txt


Hi,


Here's the info you requested. Hope it helps!


EDIT:


I just now saw that you had another question.

No, other games run fine. I recently bought Divinity Original Sin Enhanced edition and it runs without stuttering on Ultra. Serious Sam 3 runs great, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, Shadow Warrior, Ziggurat, Grim Dawn, those are some of the games i have installed that are "more demanding" and they all run great.


Now, i don't know how demanding WFTO is in comparison, but i only get that kinds of issues in WFTO.