RSIII problems and bugs

[Grimbold]

Ur-lord Tedric how's that? I had no lag issues with RS 2.6

[ur-Lord Tedric]

Ur-lord Tedric how's that? I had no lag issues with RS 2.6

If it's the same PC and the same settings - then perhaps not then. Apologies; that is, sadly, the normal answer.

I didn't think there had been any changes to the Campaign Map - we'll have to ask dear dvk'.......

[dvk901]

Buildings do not catch fire and are non destructible...?At least in 2 city sieges I fought...

Some buildings won't burn because there are no 'destroyed' animations for them (most of the new Greek buildings). Some won't because there are things 'on top of' them....so if the building burned the thing on top would be left suspended in the air. Where I could, I added animations....but it wasn't always possible.

Im not sure if it's been reported or if it's simply my computer being old, but shadows on the campaign map makes the game laggy.

Ur-lord Tedric how's that? I had no lag issues with RS 2.6

If it's the same PC and the same settings - then perhaps not then. Apologies; that is, sadly, the normal answer.

I didn't think there had been any changes to the Campaign Map - we'll have to ask dear dvk'.......

As my colleague has said before....and I agree for the most part.....an older PC should run RTW\RS just fine on 'large' settings if it has a couple GBs of ram and just a 'decent' video card. RTW in very 'processor dependent'...so even the best video card in the world won't help it RUN any better. It may LOOK better, but how it runs is largely processor related.

That said, it's really hard to figure out why a campaign will start lagging, and impossible for me to say why RS2.6 would NOT lag, and RSIII would. RS2.6 used some insanely large textures for the environment (1024x1024, ground, trees, units, etc.), and of course, all the old RTW settlement models were being used up to huge city everywhere. In RSIII, very few settlements use anything larger than a 'city' model, and I went through the whole mod and downsized ALL 1024 textures to 512x512.....thus cutting in half the memory that would be used on a 'lesser PC'. I also corrected 'phantom tree' problems on the battlefield, and changed some of the layout files so that there are a lot LESS trees in some areas. So all in all, I did a lot to 'optimize' RSIII and make it run much smoother and crisper than RS2.6 did. And I noticed right a way, in the many hundreds of times I loaded this thing, that these measures made a big difference.

However, there is a 'glitch', or a nasty tendency, or whatever you want to call it in RTW that causes random lag in battles that I don't thing anyone even knows how to address. I've seen it in every RTW mod I've played....and it works like this. You're playing along fine...as I have been in a test campaign.....and you have monumental battles with no problem. I had one battle with six armies (three full stacks of my own, and three full stack Dacian armies) at a river crossing. This is by far the worst case scenario (because river crossings can be pretty laggy sometimes), and I even added my third reinforcing army to the battle although RTW was telling me I shouldn't. But the battle played like a breeze....not a single hiccup. Since then I've fought several of them like that with no problem.

Then I've had a battles with fewer armies on both sides, and you'd think someone was hitting a 'pause' button a bunch of times. Lag, lurch, stop, release, and then play fine. I have no clue why RTW does this, and it is totally random with no relationship to one's settings that I have ever been able to find.

I do have my suspicions, however. It could well be how RTW handles or addresses a multi-core processor (for which it was not designed), OR, it could be something that good old Windows is doing in the background for no good reason that you can't see, or maybe even stop. My bet is on the latter......Windows is just deciding to swap a bunch of files around in memory, or defrag something, or check something, or just fool around in the background.

[Alavaria]

I am a little amused at the tendency of the Greek Cities faction to load up all its units (eg: the stack at Rhodes, Crete, Syracuse, etc) and just sail them around the map to try and... well I am not sure, reinforce settlements bordering the player, I assume.

That it crams a stack of Syracusean elites into 1 trieme is ... an interesting decision.

[Grimbold]

I've grown acostumed to battle lag, but i found weird that the campaign map was being laggy, well, mainly on land. If i moused over to the water regions the lag disappeared. So, out of mere curiosity i started tempering with the graphic options and turning shadows off immediately removed the lag on the map.

[Vilica]

Hello all, will have a more updates for 3.0 or no? because i wanna start srsly campaign with Rome, but if have more updates i just will wait ?

[dvk901]

There is already an 3.1 patch just below the main installers.

[Tighes_Hood]

Im not sure if this a problem with my ui folder or something, but my battle field interface is bugged out.

http://s33.postimg.org/rqyk8xpgv/20160604173207_1.jpg

Fantastic mod its great to see it active.

[dvk901]

Im not sure if this a problem with my ui folder or something, but my battle field interface is bugged out.

Fantastic mod its great to see it active.

Whenever I have seen things like that it has been video card related......either a weak card, bad drivers, or just corrupted video memory from either playing too long, or not having rebooted your PC in a while.
Whenever you see that, reboot the PC and then play.

[Grimbold]

Okay there's something really irking me right now: battle CTDs. We all have had CTDs before - the game crashing when it goes from the loading screen back to the campaign map - but last night and just now my game keeps crashing during battles and always under the same circumstances.

Im playing as the Avernii fighting agaisn't the Cimbrii. Yesterday i tried to fight the same battle around the same location 3 or 4 times and everytime it crashed. It was around the former Belgae capital in northern Gaul.

Just now i was fighting 1 and half stack of the Cimbrii in Germania and it crashed mid fight.

I claim no knowledge of the workins of the mod/game but i highly suspect that is tied to the vegetation detail which i've not changed since installing RSIII. The battle crashes everytime there's some sort of sudden zoom in action, or hell, anything since yesterday one of the crashes happened when the game switched to the "enemy general dead" cutscene.

EDIT: Tried again the battle mentioned above, in Germania. It crashed right on the start, following a quick zooming action from my part into the enemy formation

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I changed the vegetation detail to medium before this battle, but it had no effect.

[dvk901]

In the important_stuff folder, there is a directory named 'RS26_Geography_database'. There is a file in there named 'descr_geography.db'. Go into your main 'data' folder, find the file by that name, rename it 'old' or 'orig', and then copy this older file into your data folder. This is the geography database from RS2.6.....it is less 'intense', so to speak, because fewer textures are used to create the terrain. I know someone else did this and it solved their problem. You may be 'taxing' your CPU or video beyond what it can handle, so try this.

Also, regarding 'lag'....I just had an experience last night that speaks to what I was talking about regarding 'random RTW lag'. I started a saved game and was instantly attacked by several Gaul armies at a river crossing during the end turn. I have fought scores of these same battles with no problem, and this one was to be two of my armies vs four of theirs. I deployed my units the way I wanted, hit start battle, and the battle was virtually unplayable. My mouse pointer was 'stuck' and jittery, and I was getting maybe one frame a minute. I tried setting all video settings to as low as possible...but no change. Finally, I just brought up taskmanager and killed RTW. Reloaded, hit end turn, fought a few battles...and no lag whatsoever.! Hard to explain why this happens...but it's yet another reason I save, save, and then save again often.

Let me know if the above helps your situation.

[Saul Tyre]

In the important_stuff folder, there is a directory named 'RS26_Geography_database'. There is a file in there named 'descr_geography.db'. Go into your main 'data' folder, find the file by that name, rename it 'old' or 'orig', and then copy this older file into your data folder. This is the geography database from RS2.6.....it is less 'intense', so to speak, because fewer textures are used to create the terrain. I know someone else did this and it solved their problem. You may be 'taxing' your CPU or video beyond what it can handle, so try this.

Also, regarding 'lag'....I just had an experience last night that speaks to what I was talking about regarding 'random RTW lag'. I started a saved game and was instantly attacked by several Gaul armies at a river crossing during the end turn. I have fought scores of these same battles with no problem, and this one was to be two of my armies vs four of theirs. I deployed my units the way I wanted, hit start battle, and the battle was virtually unplayable. My mouse pointer was 'stuck' and jittery, and I was getting maybe one frame a minute. I tried setting all video settings to as low as possible...but no change. Finally, I just brought up taskmanager and killed RTW. Reloaded, hit end turn, fought a few battles...and no lag whatsoever.! Hard to explain why this happens...but it's yet another reason I save, save, and then save again often.

Let me know if the above helps your situation.

I don't know if this is coincidence but since I unchecked the event cutscenes box I've never had a battle ctd, btw I play for 6-8 hours at a time, save every 2 turns and reboot every 2 hours and only have minor lag with 3-4 armies on the battlefield, I use LAA, customize unit size to 100, all settings are on high except for units and grass on medium, no AA, play on widescreen, shadows etc checked. AMD 6300 PC 3.5 to 4.1 GHz, 8gb RAM, Nvidia gtx 750 gpu Win 7.

[Grimbold]

I've changed the compatibility options to run the game according to Win7. It may be too soon to tell, but i redid the battle with no issues.

Edit: For future reference my pc specs are, besides being a 6 year old laptop:

- Intel Core i5 CPU M430 @2.27GHz
- GeForce GT 330M
- 4gb of ram

and win10.

[ur-Lord Tedric]

.................:
- Intel Core i5 CPU M430 @2.27GHz......................... - This, I'm afraid, is rather slow as all the work is being done here
- GeForce GT 330M.............................................. - Because this, I'm afraid, is doing nothing
- 4gb of ram....................................................... - This would be fine on XP with RTW; but I'm fairly sure 4Gb is low for Win10 - especially if any of the memory leaks of RTW appear...
and win10.

[dvk901]

The original requirements for RTW (on the box) were these:

Pentium III 1gb
Windows 98, 2000 or XP
256MB of Ram
8x CDrom
2.9GB of free HD space
DirectX 9
3D compatible Video card with 64MB hardware accelerated video
ATI Radeon 8500, 9000, 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800, or all Nvidia GeForce 3 and above

Which I take to mean were the minimum requirements for playing the game. Now this:

- Intel Core i5 CPU M430 @2.27GHz
- GeForce GT 330M
- 4gb of ram

Is basically what I was building RSIII on...although my laptop was connected to an external 'Insignia' television with a 39" screen, so I was using an Intel 4000 video card that is a piece of crap.

I have an MSI laptop with an Intel i5 3230M @2.60gb (Turbo Boost capability up to 3.0gb)
6GB of RAM
64bit Windows7
**********************

I have stuck with Windows7 because I like it, and because I know people who opted to 'upgrade' to Windows10 and are sorry they did. Windows10 was supposed to be more friendly to older hardware and PC's, but Microsoft lied.
As far as I've seen, if you go in and turn all the junk off you can take it back to roughly Windows7 performance, but that doesn't get rid of the fact that it's ugly. LOL If I wanted a Mac I'd buy one.

Anyway, I play and run RSIII with all settings maxed out except unit size...I have always played on 'Large' because I feel, anyway, that Huge is too big for the battlefield and the cities. If pathfinding is bad on Large, it is only amplified on Huge.
The point for all this is that you don't need a 'powerhouse' PC that plays all the fancy Steam 'shooters' and Rome2 or Attila to play RSIII or RTW in general. What you need is a 4gb aware exe, a decent amount of RAM (4gb should be fine), and a fast processor that is doing nothing when you're playing RTW.

But, one thing I haven't mentioned recently is that some Windows settings can have an effect on how RTW plays....a big one is the Windows Pagefile and how it works. By default, Windows versions of late will set an 8GB variable size and Windows managed Pagefile. That is, a section on the hard disk that is reserved for Windows to swap things that are in memory to the hard disk as necessary...up to 8gb of stuff. Normally, the file is 'dynamic', growing and shrinking as necessary....and that's a problem.

For one thing, Windows doesn't really NEED a pagefile.....it's applications that need it...including RTW. If you're in a work environment, it can be useful and necessary to run large work related applications....but most of us in a home environment playing a game or so don't care. So here's what I do. I set the pagefile to a 'static' size of '1024', which is 1GB, by setting the max and min size to 1024. This means that Windows no longer has to fuss around managing the size of it...it's just one size always. It also means that while your doing something...like playing RTW...Windows won't have to have a fit about managing the swap file and drag your game along with it. RTW uses the swap file, so doing this allows RTW to use it without Windows having to 'manage' it.

Another tip on older PC's.....run 'Defrag' occasionally. A heavily fragmented hard disk (where parts and pieces of files are splattered all over the place) is a slow hard disk. Running Defrag puts all the files back together so they are 'sequential' and can be read more easily and much faster.

[Grimbold]

While my laptop, in pc time, is old - i bought this back in late 2010 - i expect it to run RTW and it's mods smoothly, since this is a game from back, what, 2004?

The issues that the game has, personally anyway, have been found to happen regardless of the machine im playing on. For instance, most of the time i can't play a battle smoothly at the fastest speed. There are times that the battle does run with no issues at top speed, but that's towards the end when, i assume its related, there's hardly any men in the battlefield.

Or how have you examplified before Dvk there's huge lag during bridge battles. Forget out about zooming in on that bridge, it'll just make matters worse.

But lag on the campaign map? I don't recall having that happen to me with RS2.6.

Anyway, as i've said before, i changed the properties to run the game in Win7 mode. Im no software expert, but i don't find any major hassle with Win10. The only downside, as you've mentioned, is the issues one has with playing older games.

I had to pull a few tricks to play an old game called Warlords Battlecry II aswell.

[Julius Poliorcetes]

I have problem with starting installation. My PC cant up installation process, i dont know whats the problem now..

[Saul Tyre]

I have problem with starting installation. My PC cant up installation process, i dont know whats the problem now..

Hi Julius, just a thought, have you tried turning off your UAC? that very often helps. I do this for all my downloads & installs and I run as administrator.

[century x]

I have problem with starting installation. My PC cant up installation process, i dont know whats the problem now..

Do you have Windows 10 ?

[Julius Poliorcetes]

Do you have Windows 10 ?

No, i have win 7. idk wheres problem :/