Confirming this ticket has been raised by me on behalf of Vepar. Replicated on my PC. Added to triage queue.

Just updating this thread following another report from the user Vepar.

This is definitely a case where, when we updated the AI in 2.0 the MPD level Hell's Deep which was using the Skirmish AI now has the Default (Placeholder) AI Personality. The fix would be to either suppress this message or ideally to replace the AI personalities on this level with their new personalities.

Hi Talkhayley,

Thanks for reporting this, you're not the only one having issues with the Multiplayer chat box. I think something went wrong with this particular UI element in the 2.0 upgrade when we updated our UI middleware. I'll see if we can look into it further as part of the next maintenance patch. 

However, I should inform you that this will be considered a low priority issue given its limited impact and depending on the work required to improve the functionality here it may or may not be feasible. UI issues in particular are a particular sore spot for us to work on given the reliance on third-party middleware.

Cheers,

Lee

Hi Talkhayley,

Can I confirm that in this scenario whether you are the client (joined the game) or the host (created the game) when the issues occur?

Should help us replicate them in house and hopefully try to figure out a solution.

Cheers,

Lee

Hi Vepar,

Just dropping in before the weekend to respond to your comment and try to answer what I can as well as provide some further insights to let you know where we're at. 

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

We try our best, while WFTO was in active development we aimed for a 24 working hour initial response time. This has slipped as our entire team (including myself) have become more focussed on development on the new project which consumes a lot of our time. It also means WFTO is not as high priority in our working days, especially with limited scope to address support issues. 

I would say on average it takes us between 1 working day and 1 working week to respond most times now. I mention this as I saw your post on Steam (which prompted me to reply the other night) and it reminded me I had actually been in the middle of my initial reply to you that very day! So that's where I need to apologise, unfortunately I couldn't reply on Steam as the servers went down immediately after doh! I also want to let you know that I will be on leave over the next week so it is unlikely I will reply until March.

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.

That's alright it's easy to do and I appreciate you trying to make our jobs easier. For us it's actually much easier to handle each issue on an individual basis. The reason for this is because we can individually manage and mark issues as resolved and in progress or pending customer etc. It's not possible to achieve that granularity without breaking up the issues. If issues are similar it is easy enough to merge them, much harder to break them apart!

With that said I'll probably try to break this up into several tickets so I can handle it on a case by case basis and we can progress under clear subjects. There's also an added benefit of if there is anything we can take into our triage queue that I can import directly from this system to our internal ticketing system for the development team's tasks. :)

Anyway moving onto the meat.

So what I've done today is I've tested a few cases and benched my own work system against the behaviours you've specified.

• I tested the Detail view on the creature panel and can confirm a significant loss in FPS when there's a lot of creatures. I lost 15 FPS from a safely VSynced 60FPS when this panel was opened. This is a great find and I'll make sure this gets ticketed properly! Unsure as to the cause or what the fix will entail, UI is... difficult now that we're so far out of development time.
• I also benched a few load times to give you an example of what we would consider to be normal. Now I should preface this my WFTO work copy is installed on a HDD. So these are HDD times not SSD. I'll have to run some SSD ones at some point:

New Boot (From Clicking play on Steam to usable UI on menu): 56.67 seconds
Level Load (Very heavy, large level, lots of units, 1.5 hour playtime): 33.92 seconds
Quit to Desktop (Loaded Map): 9.97 seconds
Quit to Desktop (From Menu): 2.36 seconds

I'd love to know how these numbers compare to yours. If there's a significant divergence I'd say that's a pretty clear there's an indication something is very wrong.

Now onto replies:

Here is the DXdiag:DxDiag.txtAnd 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.

Thanks for this. Helpful to know what I'm looking at. I don't see anything that stands out on your DXDiag, though I note a bunch of Windows Error Reports. This isn't my area of expertise though so I'm not sure if there's anything more to see here.

For the Save I'll try and review it when I'm back from leave.

Video 1Yes, the assets seem to pop in and out when transitioning. Sometimes when scrolling but i wasn't able to capture that.

This is pretty unusual. Culling shouldn't be visible in standard play. Just want to know when you see it when you scroll are you playing at the default camera angle. Would love to see a demonstration of this.

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.pngScreenshot 2020-02-19 03.47.32.png

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.

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.

Unfortunately, there's not really much that can be done about it. It will happen less often on systems with a higher amount of memory and it will take less time on systems with a higher CPU clock speed (Cores don't help WFTO massively, it's somewhat but not extensively multithreaded).

I hear from some users on lower memory systems that saving and loading can alleviate it. Also rebooting the game. It's frustrating I know, everyone will suffer from it to some degree when dungeons get large enough.

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.

My thought on this is that Hells Deep is a pretty intense level with lots of units and prebuilt AI Dungeons. Smaller levels might have less of an impact, but generally, I wouldn't expect there to be such a drastic difference. You do have a lot of units which can factor into some of the Framerate dips when viewing large rooms with lots of them in.

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.

That's super difficult to quantify for sure. I'll see if I can figure out a way to replicate but there's many things it could be and I suspect without experiencing it myself I wouldn't be able to determine what was happening. I know that on occasion there's been cases where the UI has behaved erratically with the game. But these should have been eliminated with 2.0. You could check out the old KB article on it though Missing, Invisible or Laggy UI [Fixed in v2.0].

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.

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?

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.

This, unfortunately, is normal. The UI middleware is booted once the game is loaded. There's nothing we can do about that though we're certainly exploring other UI solutions for future games I can tell you that!

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

I noticed this today as well and as far as I can tell is something new. I think it's probably due to some Windows Update maybe the new game overlay hooking in. Not a clue on this, seems fairly harmless.

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.

Definitely give the driver updates a go. See if you can do the safe mode thing as well. That will boot windows with the absolute bare minimum. It's one of the best ways to ensure there's nothing else running. I'll confess I've never tried to run WFTO in it though so I dunno how that'll go.

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.

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.

If stuff for the game is being sent to a Paging file on the HDD which is slow and faulty that could explain some strange behaviours.

Hope that helps, let me know how you get on with that and the rest above.

Cheers,

Lee

Hi Vepar,

Apologies for the delay in responding to you. Busy times at Brightrock between working on the new project and various happenings in the past week I've not had much time to dedicate to reviewing tickets.

Now there are quite a few different issues that you've reported in this ticket so I'll try to go through them in the order you've presented them. Each will have to be treated as a separate issue and normally we'd ask for individual reports for each, but in this case I'll reply here and try to action further before the end of the week.

Before I start I'd like to confirm when it was that you last played. The game hasn't received any major updates since April 2018 so nothing significant has changed on our side since then and beyond general performance improvements there shouldn't be anything at the root cause of some of the issues you present with one exception. We updated our UI Middleware for patch 2.0 to fix a number of issues several different users were having, this could have had a few knock-on effects but none which have been reported to us thus far.

Also I'd like to ask you review How to: Submit a Bug Ticket and try to drop in as much info as you can. In addition to the output log presented can I also get a DXDiag output and if possible the save file which you're playing on.

Now onto the issues:

Video Titled "Lag 1"

Interesting watching this as you appear to be experiencing a short pause when entering and exiting possession as it culls and unculls the environment and everything you can now/not see. Never seen this before and I have two theories. 

1. There's issues loading assets to/from memory and to/from storage, which I would say is consistent with some other issues you're reporting. Do you know what the game's memory usage is like at the time you're playing and how much free memory you have at the time.
2. The size of the map and number of entities in it is overloading the game and just reducing performance of the scripting. Given that you're on the last MPD level which is very large with two other AI underlords I think this might be a possibility. There's no timer but do you know how long you've been on the level?
   

I also was very surprised to see the lag on the unit panel when toggling into the detail modes. This is something I'll see if I can try out myself before the end of the week. My suspicion is that the increased number of UI elements is causing an issue here. But I've never seen it reported or witnessed it myself.

Video Titled "Lag 2"

The freeze described looks like Unity's Garbage Collection which is freeing up unused memory. This is a problem with the Unity Engine where the GC Algorithm can't deal with large heaps of memory fast enough, the game pauses while this happens. Sadly this is unsolvable on the version of Unity WFTO is built upon (from 2016) and can happen on large maps, with lots of entities that have been going on for some time, it will occur more often on systems with lower available memory. 

Unity had been promising a new GC Algorithm for a long time to address this and started work on it with the first 2019 release unfortunately it's still experimental even in current versions and WFTO's version is so diverged from the current version of the Engine now it's unlikely we'll be able to move to the newer version once it is stable. This is an incredibly frustrating issue for both us and many of our players and something we have done our best to limit the impact of where we can. 

You can try saving and loading, but given a later issues this would seem undesirable. Are other levels are bad as this one in particular?

The choppyness isn't possible to see unfortunately and without knowing a little more about it it'd be difficult to say what it is. Can you describe in a little more detail what it might be.

Log

There's some exceptions in here that I'd like to get code eyes on. As it stands though all our resources are now on the new project so it'll be a while before we can come back to this. It'll be something that'll go in our backlog to see if they're issues we can identify and fix. I'm not convinced it'd be the cause of any issues but I'll try and ask around this week.

AI Message

This I have seen before. I think it's an issue that was introduced in Patch 2.0 when we overhauled the skirmish AI. For whatever reason the AI in this MPD level in particular was using the old Skirmish AI, when the update happened this was removed but it wasn't updated to be using a specific personality as such it defaults to the placeholder test version. This causes that message to appear. It's something I think we should be able to fix and should only appear on levels where the old AI was present and wasn't correctly updated.

Unfortunately the first time I saw this reported was after we'd moved WFTO into maintenance mode and we've not had time to come back since! It's a pretty low-priority issue for us due to the low impact in any case but I'll make sure it's in our backlog.

Long Loads, Exits & Starts

WFTO does have rather long load times but I wouldn't expect them to be in the scale of minutes as you've described. First startup on an SSD in our office is about 30-50 seconds, levels are around 20 seconds, exiting takes a moment but is a lot quicker.

The fact you're having multiple loading issues in this sense, coupled with the issue mentioned in Video 1 about loading assets to/from memory and storage could indicate something is happening here. Especially if it's most pronounced after you've played for a while. 

This is just a theory but if your system is approaching memory cap whilst playing on this level then it may be offloading memory to the page file. Causing longer access times, if this is on your SSD it would be quicker but it's a lot, lot slower than memory. That might go some way to explaining why it freezes briefly on possession and why you're experiencing such long loading times.

There are two things I can think to try on this:

1. Reduce the memory footprint of everything else as much as possible, close other programs, reduce windows memory usage, maybe even consider safe mode with video drivers.
2. Monitor WFTO's memory usage and the memory available for your PC. If WFTO seems to keep going up I'd be interested in getting hands on a save file as there might be something causing a memory leak.
3. Try installing WFTO on another drive. On the off-chance there's something weird going on with your SSD. Ideally try an entirely different computer as well and if you have some extra memory sticks lying around (who does?!) then see if you can up that memory amount.

Finally I want to say I'm sorry for the dreadful experience you're having, we try our best to make WFTO as stable as we can. We've learned a lot about games since we started in 2012 and there's certainly a few things we could have done a lot better, but too deep to touch now. But in all cases WFTO should perform better than it did at any point over its lifecycle, that you're having new issues I'm sure is deeply frustrating and it is for myself as well. Especially as the scope to address new reports is greatly reduced.

I look forward to your reply. Hopefully we'll be able to work something out.

Lee

Unfortunate. Thanks for keeping us in the loop though.

Hi Paddle,

Sorry to hear you're having issues launching the game and apologies for the late response.

Can you try the solutions proposed in this article?

Black Screen on Startup on Linux & Windows (Post 2.0 Update)

Cheers,

Lee

That sounds very peculiar Talkhayley, we're always eager to investigate issues but anything related to AI and pathfinding can be quite esoteric and this is not something we've seen ourselves outside of an issue related to Moongates that we fixed quite some time ago.

Would love to get some more information from you on how we might replicate this ourselves. What level are you playing on? Is it a custom level? Can you send us screenshots, or better yet a video and a save file? 

How to: Submit a Bug Ticket should give you all you need to know with regards to what we need to best help us on this.