Patch 1.7 variantmeshes bug - issues loading meshes. Anyone else experiencing this?

**SpankyDmonkey** · November 21, 2013, 11:28 AM

Ever since i've downloaded the beta patch 7, I've noticed that not all variantmeshes from my mods are being represented on the character models. Look at this section for example:

Even though the variantmesh is listed, ingame for some reason, It'll only load say.... these two...

<VARIANT_MESH_REFERENCE definition="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/helmets/greek_corinthian_classical.VariantMeshDefinition" />
<VARIANT_MESH_REFERENCE definition="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/helmets/hellenic_pylos_crests_varied.VariantMeshDefinition" />

Now I know for a fact that if a model is missing, the game will not load the mesh (displaying the character model without the mesh)... but in this case, the game is skipping over some variantmeshes, and only loading certain ones. Whats even weirder, is that i'll see these SAME exact meshes which aren't being shown.... loaded on different units of a different faction. It doesn't even end there, faction colors also seem to be acting up on certain units where instead of displaying all three faction colors..... some units only show up with one color. I've been using these mods (updated per patch) since 1.2-1.3 and i've never experienced this before. Anyone else experiencing this?

**Maximus183** · November 21, 2013, 01:36 PM

Noticed the same. YOu know have to make several variantmesh slots (in lack of a better word) to get it to work.

I noticed with armors for example it only loads the first 4 in the list and same with shields. Looks like for whatever reason they decided to limit the amount of entries per slot or something, no clue why.

**Smarmy** · November 21, 2013, 02:35 PM

I was under the impression this was part of patch 7. In my testing it only ever renders, on Extreme unit detail, the first 5 entries on any given slot, and only 5 variants per definition. This would cut down on the number of objects loaded and rendered by the game, thereby improving performance in a slapdash fashion. I HOPED it was a bug with the beta, but now patch 7 is out in full and the limitation is still there. Any entries I make beyond the first 5 are ignored, so I've started the process of cutting down my variantmeshes to respect this new limitation. It's extremely depressing work so I've actually put it down for the moment, I hope CA chimes in and tells us that it's a bug. As it stands you can no longer control the probability of a given piece of armor or clothing showing up in a definition by the number of entries it has, and certain factions that possess many different variations of tunic, beards, or if you happen to want to use more than 5 different pieces of armor, are impossible to show or wont have any mask variation.

**warman222** · November 22, 2013, 08:16 AM

Well, this is rather frustating, however you might be able to over ride this if you arrange your variants in such a way so even though you put only 5 slots, each of those slots 5 variations, and those can hold 5 and etc. It was hard for me to figure out if this was true or not because even though it only holds five slots, because of how many variations were in those slots, it looked like more.

**Maximus183** · November 22, 2013, 09:50 AM

The basic workaround i used was this; here's an example of a reskin of the greek milita hoplites as seen in PFM:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

If you look at a lot of the variantmeshdefinitions for the newer, nomad units, you'll see they have the same sort of "template" or whatever, where it's split into multiple variant meshes. This worked fine for me, so instead of stripping down everything I had made, I just had to adapt it all to this format. Not that that makes it anymore stupid and annoying. Feels like if this was an intentional change it was done with little regard for the

ton of combined work on skins by the community as a whole.

**SpankyDmonkey** · November 22, 2013, 10:00 AM

yeah I had to go back to every single entry and create a new variants. Mind you i've literally reskinned every single unit in the game, so this was hours of adjusting... not to mention some of my barbarian units had several different variantmeshdefinitions to represent both bare chested and fully clothed soldiers within the same unit.

**Maximus183** · November 22, 2013, 10:03 AM

Yeah I feel your pain, it's something I'm doing myself right now. Feels like CA just shoved their dick up my clinched anus and then gave me homework.

**SpankyDmonkey** · November 22, 2013, 10:04 AM

I thought that was the point of every patch CA releases

**Maximus183** · November 22, 2013, 10:08 AM

Well usually yeah but it wouldn't include the homework bit. Call me homo but I'd rather they raped me than giving me a bunch of boring shite to do

**warman222** · November 22, 2013, 12:24 PM

well, to be fair, it is slightly less convoluted and in time might making newcomers less confused(like me). However it was a very massive blunder on CA's part to implement it now. I don't think it was to spite mods though, because some times people make mistakes. Remember the mod type issue in patch 3, it took til patch 5 to fix that because there is so much going on there atm. I believe it's more like a "one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing" kind of thing.

**Kurisu Paifuaa** · November 22, 2013, 06:13 PM

What exactly would the point be of reducing detail at the maximum setting? The audience for that level of detail are surely all folks who consider image quality to be of paramount importance. Especially for such a marginal gain... why disappoint an even larger crowd by sapping one of the game's few strong points?

I uninstalled out of frustration over other (game play) issues a few weeks ago, expecting things would shape up down the line. But if this is a permanent condition...

. I have a hard time believing this is intentional. Hoping for some official feedback on the matter now that the patch is out of beta.

So from my understanding, it seems that (depending on the variant definition) the instances that have mask=? switches are too far down in the list and thus, we're seeing units that all have the default color mask arrangement. So fewer mesh variations along with a one color scheme. That would mean that every vanilla mesh variant definition would have to be modified to get back to scratch (if you aren't already modding those units and taking proper measures). Yikes.

Or is it arbitrarily skipping instances (i.e. the 'list' isn't actually a list) ?

**Smarmy** · November 22, 2013, 07:10 PM

@Kurisu Paifuaa
I'll use the Iberian Tunics as an example of the problem, one of my units was "broken" by this patch because they used this VANILLA variant mesh in addition to one other VANILLA variant mesh. Both of which were affected by the patch/bug.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

In this variantmeshdefinition, only the first 5 variantmeshmodel entries are used on extreme detail under the current patch. This is an umodified vanilla variantmeshdefinition. What this means is that tunics 2, 3 and 4 will never be rendered, nor will any other tunic 1 that has a different mask if it isn't in the first 5 entries.
A similar "cut" happened with balearic cloaks, which I've since split into two variantmeshdefinitions for my own mod.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

<VARIANT_MESH>
<SLOT name="cloaks" >
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_01.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="1" mask1="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_01.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="1" mask1="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_01.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="2" mask2="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_01.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="2" mask2="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_01.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_02.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="1" mask1="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_02.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="1" mask1="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_02.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="2" mask2="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_02.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" mask0="2" mask2="0" />
<VARIANT_MESH model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/iberian_balearic_cloak_02.rigid_model_v2" imposter_model="VariantMeshes/_VariantModels/man/cloak/celtic_cloak/celtic_cloak_1.rigid_model_v2" />
</SLOT>
</VARIANT_MESH>

Notice that there's 10 entries, first 5 are for cloak 01, which means 02 is completely ignored.

**Smarmy** · November 22, 2013, 07:21 PM

Unless of course there's something I'm missing, but it wont load full detail for me when I use these vanilla variantmeshes. If this 'rule of 5' system is what they're changing things to then I expect they'll update references like this so all those rigid models they worked on aren't ignored. It's one reason why I insist this is a bug, and not an actual patch decision. There's way too much of their own work that's going to be cut by this problem unless they update for it, and if they made a change like this in the interest of saving time and improving performance, well I can see it taking them a bit of time to go over all of their stuff again to update it/break it apart for this new system. It also wasn't in the patch notes... I really don't know what to think. I'm not going to go into too much trouble trying to overhaul all of my old work until this is figured out, but for the time being I can bypass the problem by breaking apart my definitions once they hit that cap of 5, instead of combining them all into one big clean variant like before.

**Maximus183** · November 23, 2013, 05:36 AM

Jeez, I didn't realize it affected the vanilla definitions as well.

In that case you're probably right about the bug part, has anyone posted anything about this on their forums or anything of the likes?

**DogSoldierSPQR** · November 23, 2013, 10:41 AM

Some heads up by CA would've been good. Thank god I came across this thread. Don't think I would've figured this out for myself.

**Maximus183** · November 23, 2013, 02:25 PM

Posted a thread about it on the totalwar forums http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...327#post969327. Hopefully I'll get some sort of response sometime soon.

**Denco** · November 23, 2013, 02:51 PM

Its because somehow CA thought that decreasing unit variations with lower unit detail setting will increase performance but it doesn't, it only decreases ram usage. Anyway please join me in the thread bellow to show CA that we like our units to be varied and would like a separate option for it not tied to the unit detail.

http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...om-unit-detail

**Smarmy** · November 23, 2013, 03:04 PM

It affects all variantmeshes, that includes skins. So right now only 5 of the 13 total faces on skins in the game are being rendered. If they don't change it back I'll have to break the skins apart into 3 variantmeshes to get all of the faces to show up.

**Kurisu Paifuaa** · November 24, 2013, 02:45 AM

OK, I think I better understand now the scope of the problem and what a giant pain in the ass this would be to fix on a broad scale (like for all of the vanilla units). At least there's an option though...maybe a joint project to lessen the workload. Thanks for the discussion and the examples.

So, best case scenario is that they've changed the procedure but haven't gotten around to adapting the data (the definition structure) so that a similar level of variation appears at higher settings.

Worst case is that this is a global hack-n-slash effort to cut down on memory usage and we have to address it ourselves. If the 5 slot limitation relates to both the unit and parts definitions, that still yields 5x5x5 = 125 possible variations per unit. Or perhaps only 25 variations, but with 5 possible sets... if the top level <VARIANT_MESH> blocks are per instance of a unit. However that works, it still seems plenty of space in total, but you'd need to come up with a different arrangement to accommodate probabilities via duplicate entries since the lowest level definitions (parts) are now substantially limited.

Sound right? I guess it's wait and see how to proceed.

**Demokritos** · November 26, 2013, 03:20 PM

Important thread for the visual quality of the game. Thanks for digging into this matter, guys.

I'm not sure I follow all implications here, but if only some of the variantmeshes are loaded, shouldn't the game need to get its directives for that from somewhere? If so, then if we find that governing file or script, we might be able to edit it to bring back the original function of the game.

But maybe that's hardcoded.

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