Time to trim the fat.

Though my week off from work is almost at its end now, I haven't had much time to enjoy actually playing any games.

The week began with me ready to once again immerse myself in Oblivion, only to discover that one of the mods I was playing with (which still remains unidentified, by the way) was making the game instantly crash to desktop whenever I attempted to remove a specific vanilla item from defeated enemies. I could systematically open each active plugin with one of the editing tools and look for anything modifying that item, but instead I first chose to try the process of elimination method and in the process somehow borked the game so that now I can't even start a new campaign.

So I decided to turn my attention to one of my old favorites, classic Doom -- more specifically, Doom run with the source port GZDoom. With the latest version of my favorite source port I had only been running the game for about 45 minutes when suddenly the framerate deteriorated so drastically that I could progress no further. So what's the first thing I do in this situation? I go make a fool of myself in their bug report forum, of course. After a bit of posting and simultaneous testing, I came to the conclusion that there wasn't anything wrong with the source port but instead that the problem was somehow being caused by the mapset I was trying to play. So I switched to another megawad and, by the third map of the set, the framerate again went to crap -- worse, whatever is causing the problem is apparently preserved in the saves so restarting the executable in hopes that the issue will clear out of the RAM and GPU is ineffective.

I've read that the openGL support of AMD/ATI/Radeon video cards is becoming increasingly atrocious with each new series of GPUs they release, so I began to investigate further along that avenue. I tried several different versions of the drivers for my current video card, to no avail, then I went so far as to actually pull the hardware out of the tower and stick my older Radeon GPU back in. Still the problem persisted. In the end I decided that if I was going to get to play the game at all this week I'd have to switch to ZDoom, which is of course the source port that the openGL version is based upon.

But that wasn't the end; when things on the computer go good for me they go great, but when they go bad they go straight to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

I was playing Armadosia with ZDoom and by the time I was halfway through the second map the framerate again went straight to crap. WTF? It's not even openGL! I've been playing games like Oblivion at 1600x900 resolution with the details maxed! This should run like a racehorse! WTF?

I was only running the game with one other mod. The mod had never given me any trouble before so I had by default ruled it out as a possible cause of the issue... but just for the sake of being thorough I decided to disable the mod and launch the game one more time. Without that remaining mod the game ran without the slightest stutter, even in the openGL version; with the mod enabled again the stuttering returned and soon the game was unplayable. Anyone care to guess which mod was causing the problem?

Herculine's Doom Upgrade.

Now my critics can rejoice; my randomizer mod actually does make the game unplayable.

This of course has me very frustrated. I've been developing the mod and playing with it for over two years now and have never had such issues until now, though during that time the mod has steadily grown in its size and scope. Apparently it has finally reached a size where the source port engine can no longer handle the amount of information that needs to be processed, even if I enable the executable to take advantage of all my system's RAM. Again my critics can rejoice; all along they've said that the mod has too much stuff in it and now it seems that they're finally correct.

Readers familiar with ZDoom modding might ask: "Herc, what if it's just one item that you've recently added that's causing the problem?" While there's always a slim chance of that I suppose, I doubt that it's likely because the coding for all these things is basically the same. When something goes wrong in said code usually the worst that can happen is a sprite won't show up when it's supposed to or a monster won't do something when or how exactly it was intended. I really don't see how one could code a single monster or item to produce such a drastic impact on the graphics processing unless it simply had a ton of visual effects crammed into it, and even then the problem would have been abated by adjusting or even totally disabling the openGL options as I did while I was trying to locate the problem. Also, I think it would be safe to assume that the bug would only manifest itself when said object was actually spawned in a map, while this bug is persistent as long as the mod is active in any case. The only conclusion I can reach at this point is that the issue is the result of the sum of all the parts; too much data is being loaded at one time to be processed.

Thus the title of this post. The only option I see left to me at the moment is to create a version of the mod in which the content is at least halved. The easiest way I can think of to do so is to start a new mod from scratch and systematically add to it only the content that I refuse to omit and then work from there. That's not as bad as it sounds, though; in a way my critics are right in that the mod does contain some things that aren't really necessary. For example, of the array of weapons that are in the current version I only actually ever use about half of them, so logic dictates that I should only keep about half of them. Perhaps there really isn't any need for four different kinds of shotguns, after all. The list of monsters and power-ups that won't make the cut will likely be long in the end; things like the Time Imp and the Time Freeze Sphere, for example, are really cool but they depart from the original gameplay style drastically enough that they can be cut without really detracting anything from the ultimate purpose of the mod. Time to trim the fat.

However, fans of the mod up until this point need not despair; I'm not throwing it away. It will remain here in my DropBox folder, patiently awaiting the day that a version of the source port will be developed capable of handling it smoothly. But in the meantime, I'll be diligently working on a "lite" version of the mod and when it's ready for release you'll hear it here first. Until then I'll either have to play "vanilla" Doom or just go back to another game; hopefully the game I pick next won't be a crash-happy mess as well.

PC Gaming Pros And Cons

We PC gamers have an advantage over console gamers when it comes to things like having virtually endless libraries of additional content for our favorite games and modding tools to create our own custom content; this alone weened me from the consoles years ago and I've never gone back. However, the console gamers have long had the advantage of not having to deal with the technical burdens we PC gamers must endure: assembling a rig with hardware capable of running games, constantly updating software and increasingly frustrating DRM schemes are the first that come to mind. In recent years some of those burdens have been incorporated into the newest console games, but before that all one had to do was drop in a disc or cartridge and you were ready to play.

I wanted to post a bit of a rant about this sort of thing because I recently had to sort out an issue plaguing my gaming rig. In the end the problem was mostly my own fault, but still it made me briefly yearn for my console gaming days as it was something that I never would have been bothered with on those platforms.

I use a number of tools to keep my PC healthy and running smoothly: registry cleaners, performance optimizers, virus and malware scanners... you get the idea. To make a long story somewhat shorter, at some point one of those tools (and I'm still not sure which one) went too far and somehow borked my OS, forcing me to restore a backup from an external drive. Fortunately, making such backups periodically is something else I've made a habit of doing to ensure that I continue to have a working rig to play on. This time, however, my precaution was only partially effective. After restoring the backup, I was frustrated to find that something was now terribly wrong with just about all of my games:

As far as I could tell, something was preventing polygon objects from rendering properly. At first I thought that it might be something specific to the games themselves; sometimes after restoring a C:\ drive backup things that were installed to my other drives might not work properly and need to be re-installed. Thus I spent some time re-installing some games, but to no avail; the problem persisted to manifest itself in multiple games.

The next logical course of action was to uninstall, re-install and update my video drivers; since the problem was showing up in almost all of my games, the driver software was a likely culprit. But again, my efforts were to no avail; after multiple repetitions of the video driver uninstall/re-install/update process the problem remained unflinching.

At length I grew so tired of attempting to resolve the issue that I resorted to playing one of my favorite games that doesn't involve any 3D rendering whatsoever (regular readers of this blog will have no trouble guessing which game I'm referring to). But even my favorite games can grow tiresome after a time (and my patience with the modding communities supporting those games can grow short after an even briefer time) so eventually I found myself wanting to play something different again. But of course my 3D renderer issues were still there.

This is the point where I found myself longing to return to my console gaming days. I decided that my last resort would be to totally re-install my OS... not quite as drastic a measure as it might sound since re-activating my version of Windows 7 64-bit is not an issue; the last time I did so Microsoft kindly provided me with an application to ease that process (which I of course saved on an external drive). I was concerned that perhaps my video hardware was going bad but I needed to be certain before I rushed out to buy a new video card since I'm not a wealthy person. But before I did so I decided to try re-installing the video drivers one last time as I had become certain that said software was the source of the problem.

Apparently waiting patiently for the software development geniuses at AMD to realize and repair their own mistakes was all I had really needed to do; my issues were caused by a specific version of their video driver and thus no matter how many times I re-installed it the problem would still be there. A check of their website revealed a new version of the drivers that had not been there when I began experiencing all the problems; downloading and installing the update fixed things beautifully.

And so, my PC gaming brethren I beseech you heed these words of advice: always keep any driver updates you might download, no matter how old they may be; you never can tell when you might suddenly need them to fall back on.

In the end, I decided to re-install my OS from scratch anyway. I'd been running it for a few years now and no amount of maintenance and tweaking was going to fix some of the issues it had developed (like my frequently-crashing Windows Explorer). It's all turned out for the best now, and in the process I discovered that even my old Dell Dimension E310 can run Windows 7 64-bit even though it shouldn't be able to do so.

Hence my recent brief and almost irrelevant blog entries; I hadn't been able to do much quality gaming until the last week or so. But finally things are running smoothly again and I'm back to attempting to finish playing Two Worlds. I'm also in the process of re-installing several hundred Neverwinter Nights modules, so you might expect a blog post regarding that in the near future.

But first, I have in mind a rant regarding Realm667 and just how displeased I am with the way they run things over there...

I'm Herculine, and I approve this message.