RSIII problems and bugs

[LoGaL]

yes, dvk , it should be play one turn

[Rushwithoutmercy]

A couple of points, playing Rome 0 Turn, Steam, Alexander Exe, AI formation is Darth (Alexander Only) and Player formation is Athenogoras :

- On the load screen, it says that I can destroy the treasury building of opponents to get money. I can't, so not sure if Working As Designed.

- Slingers seem to have had their range buffed, so that they outrange archers and reach targets on the other side of the map.
- In addition, their missiles are very inaccurate, even at point blank range, which seems to be a departure from the last patch. The missiles fly in a million directions and half of them at the ground.

- Upon encountering a Roman Rebel army near Capua, the battle started with my leader calling them "Gauls".

[fenrir36]

my friend is having issues posting to the forum and with the game. He has RSIII running now but as soon as the Marion Reform starts his game crashes. We've looked for solutions to his problem to no avail.

His setup:
Windows 10
Intel 4790
MSI Gaming 5
16gb ram 1333
GTX 970 in SLI
Steam copy working until said problem.

[ur-Lord Tedric]

It's nothing to do with the PC if RSIII was running fine before it crashed.

Is he running the script religiously? <-------

[Searry]

Hey the patch you made (RS 3.1) fixed my battle crash. Thanks!

[Searry]

Sorry for double post.

The Pontus campaign is bugged. There is no fog of war and the map is explored from the start.

[Darth Bane1]

This isn't a bug. It seems that the fog is disabled in each preference file for every campaign. You can change it in this file or you just use the toggle_fog command ingame. Works both.

[Searry]

This isn't a bug. It seems that the fog is disabled in each preference file for every campaign. You can change it in this file or you just use the toggle_fog command ingame. Works both.

Thanks! I had no idea.

[Searry]

Okay, the Pontic campaign is definitely bugged. Suddenly all nations even those without an alliance broke it with me. Then for some reason I had peace declared with Pergamon even though I never saw any diplomatic screen of them asking for peace.
I have religiously activated the script. Tell me if you want the save before this happened.

Okay, it's difficult to reproduce. Sometimes only the alliances break but no peace. This is a really weird bug. Just to clarify, to active the script you load a save, click a city, click the advisor and just start playing.
Or do I have to do this after every turn, as in load a save, click a city, click the advisor, play, end turn, save, load click advisor?

[LavaCreeper]

I've been playing RS3 today, and noticed a few issues. Not necessarily bugs, but things that could be improved.

1. In Syracuse, the inner wall doesn't have stairs to climb on it, although you can order units to get there (which they'll never achieve). Adding stairs would be useful, especially for the defender, so that he can have 2 levels of walls.





2. There are loads of pathing issues in Syracuse.
- Buildings your units can walk through :


- A beautiful fountain, but it causes issues to get from one side of the square to the other :



3. Some really low resolution textures, that don't go well with the rest.




4. When attacking something with 2 or more stacks of units, you can choose to let the AI manage the other stacks by selecting a checkbox. Selecting it or not didn't change anything during my testing, the AI took control whatever I chose. Very frustrating given its relatively low intelligence :/.

[ur-Lord Tedric]

.............. Adding stairs would be useful, especially for the defender, so that he can have 2 levels of walls.....

Yes, but then this would make it too easy for the defender and the poor AI would never cope.

...2. There are loads of pathing issues in Syracuse.....................

- A beautiful fountain, but it causes issues to get from one side of the square to the other :..............

Both of these would be much less if you weren't using 'Huge' units.

Remember - vanilla RTW was: Small; Normal; Large; Huge..... Personally I stick to Large.

[Searry]

There's similiar kinds of pathing Issues in Athens and in Ptolemaic cities as well.

[dvk901]

1. Regarding the walls in the Syracuse city center.....the model for these walls is different from the models that RTW uses for the outer walls. It is in fact an 'unused' wall that was just in the game for some reason, probably left over from an earlier version of the game. I used it in Syracuse and in other inner city places because it's different...just a little variety. But RTW probably doesn't\didn't use these walls because they don't work like the ones that are used, ie, you can't get units on them.

2. The low resolution textures...I'm assuming you mean the floor of that palace, was just all I had to use. It was part of Jarlaxe's stuff. The wall textures are particularly difficult to work with....if you use something that is very 'crisp' and detailed, you invariably get a 'tiled' look that doesn't look very good at all. I found very few wall textures that worked well, considering the way the models 'applies' the textures in a very weird way, sometimes using only half of it, and even turning it upside down. The wall models in RTW are at best...poorly made.

3. The fountain...yes, I knew when I put that in there it was going to be an obstacle. But really, if there was a big fountain like that in a city square, wouldn't it be an obstacle? A little reality, I guess.

4. Units walking through buildings. Again, I was aware of this as I worked on these cities. It came to a point where I had to make a decision, because I couldn't fix all of them (though I did manage to fix a few). Use the buildings an live with units going through them, or ditch the buildings because I couldn't fix them? I chose the former because I think the buildings add a lot more to the game than the minor issues of units being able to walk through them. Jarlaxe's models didn't come with 'collision' models...he used his city models that he made to control pathfinding. I tried to use RTW collision files where I could...there were many similar sized buildings....but in most cases the RTW models were turned 90 degrees, so the collision files were turned as well, whereas Jarlaxe's were made '0' degrees. So if I attached an RTW collision model to that building, it would 90 degrees 'off', and I found that this was blocking streets here and there. I had to load up every city and painstakingly go over every street to make sure they weren't blocked.....and then remove the offending files.

So yeah, I know it's not perfect. I just did the best I could with what I had at hand. I am still trying to fix some of the issues, but it's taking forever.

[LavaCreeper]

1. I wonder if you can get units on them as the defender, when initially placing your units. If the game doesn't take pathing into account (units are moved instantaneously), your units could theoretically get stuck up there. Sounds like an exploit, almost. Is there no way to change these walls ?

2. About the textures, I do think it's possible to ameliorate them. If you keep the initial texture and use it as a base to ameliorate, you shouldn't run into tiling issues. I'll try to play with it tomorrow, see if I can get something that looks good.

3. True, but that was counting without the pathing AI .

4. Nothing to say here but to wish you patience and good luck^^.

All in all, it sounds like a lot of work, thanks for taking the time to fix issues. If you need help testing, I'd be glad to participate !


Another issue, this time a tad bit more serious. The wall texture doesn't apply correctly on certain wall parts (or at least that's what it looks like) :


Since the wall model is repeated many times, you get many of these flickering purple spots on the walls.

[Searry]

Hello. Is the forest siege equipment FPS lag bug from CA or from this mod and is it fixable?

[neep]

Hello. Is the forest siege equipment FPS lag bug from CA or from this mod and is it fixable?

Hi Searry,
that would be from CA (not this mod) and it's not really fixable.
It's a computational, path finding problem so it's your CPU that is getting overloaded. I can see my CPU running at 100% when this is happening, and the GPU is just sitting there twiddling it's thumbs.
What may help - a little - is if you can overclock your CPU to get at least 3.5GHz
That may not be fast enough but a couple of times I noticed that if I could get a high clock rate then the issue was greatly reduced. Not entirely solved but at least 'playable' where I could manage to get through the battle without bailing out from frustration.

From this I surmise that the issue is that CPU calculations take juuuust a little longer than the GPU framerate update and so everything gets bogged down.
Once you can get above that threshold then things speed up noticeably - there's a real knee point where the game speeds up thanks to a few extra MHz that get's the cycles just under the threshold. But the trick is getting to the magical speed.

[LavaCreeper]

Any idea what is the exact texture used by the walls ? I found a texture database that contains many nice textures, but I don't know which I should replace exactly. http://www.textures.com/category/medieval/2

[dvk901]

1. I wonder if you can get units on them as the defender, when initially placing your units. If the game doesn't take pathing into account (units are moved instantaneously), your units could theoretically get stuck up there. Sounds like an exploit, almost. Is there no way to change these walls ?

2. About the textures, I do think it's possible to ameliorate them. If you keep the initial texture and use it as a base to ameliorate, you shouldn't run into tiling issues. I'll try to play with it tomorrow, see if I can get something that looks good.

3. True, but that was counting without the pathing AI .

4. Nothing to say here but to wish you patience and good luck^^.

All in all, it sounds like a lot of work, thanks for taking the time to fix issues. If you need help testing, I'd be glad to participate !


Another issue, this time a tad bit more serious. The wall texture doesn't apply correctly on certain wall parts (or at least that's what it looks like) :


Since the wall model is repeated many times, you get many of these flickering purple spots on the walls.

Almost all RSIII textures are located in the 'models_building\textures' folder in the mod_0.pak file.

The texture used for the walls in question is 'GREEK_TOWN_WALL_INSIDE.TGA.DDS'.

I am aware of the 'purple spot'. It is a bug in the RTW wall model and how the game places it on the BF, not the texture. I was unable to fix or adjust it.

Hello. Is the forest siege equipment FPS lag bug from CA or from this mod and is it fixable?

The problem was reduced somewhat by reducing the sizes of siege equipment units from three to one. Any time a unit gets stuck on something, or on itself (like siege weapons), CPU usage goes up as the game tries to 'un-stick' the unit.
The single unit siege pieces move much better on the BF. However, some lag can be caused by playing on settings that are just too high. Try reducing unit quality to 'High' instead of 'Highest'. These settings only affect at what point sprites are used vs the models and textures themselves. RS has very good sprites, so lower settings will hardly be noticeable. Also, playing on Huge unit settings is another cause of lag if your PC is weak or having difficulty. Play on 'Large'...this setting is much more friendly in many aspects, especially in cities.

[LavaCreeper]

Hmm, I'm having trouble with the .pak file it looks like. I figured out how to extract and repack them, but the game crashes when I load Syracuse, if I change the "GREEK_TOWN_WALL_INSIDE.TGA.DDS" texture. It starts working again once I revert to the original mod_0.pak.

I tried replacing that texture with a 1024 DXT1, then a 256 DXT1, both resulted in a crash. Is there something I may be missing ? I'm completely new to RTW modding, please bear with me .

Edit : Nevermind, found it. Directories in the .pak rebuild list make a mess with the game apparently.

I'm still wondering why there are textures outside of the .pak, in similar directories, that have no effect in-game (overwritten by the .pak ?). eg a 1024 "GREEK_TOWN_WALL_INSIDE.TGA.DDS" texture in "RSIII\data\models_building\textures".

Edit 2 : And done !
Before :


After (2048 texture, I'll change the hue to be more yellow, closer to the original) :




Before I work on upgrading other textures, I would like to know if there is a reason why textures are so low resolution (~256), aside from lack of time ? Like, performance or stability issues, in which case 512 or 1024 would be better.

----------------------

Edit 3 : A few bugs to report.
1. Floating grass (and soil) before wooden walls :


2. A missing floor/ceiling in a blacksmith building :

[dvk901]

Textures in RTW must, in almost all cases, be DXT5.......especially for any building related textures. DXT1 will work for terrain in some cases, but not for buildings. That's why you get a crash. I like the looks of your texture, BUT, you'll need to check what it does to other buildings that use the same textures. RTW shares a lot of them, and if you change one, it will change other buildings...sometimes in ways that don't work that well.

The walls and the blacksmith are RTW original models....and yes, they have their problems. I replaced\removed a lot of buildings that had issues far worse than these, but some of them were minor and you really had to look close to see the problems. RTW models were often of poor quality, but sometimes a really nice texture would fix the bad stuff. The wall section you show is on the Hillfort model, and there have always been issues with that since it was first made. In most standard RTW settlement models, the walls sit ON the model base for the settlement, so they are nice and flat. But with the Hillfort, the wall sections are not on the model, so there can be un-level ground in some spots. That can either drive the wall bottom into the ground, or even leave small sections above the ground.

The textures outside the pak files 'may' have no effect on the game....but I wasn't sure. So I just left them. At one point early on I was just putting textures in the game directories to test them, and then in the pak file. But it got too confusing after a while as to which one I was using or testing. LOL So I started putting them all in the pak file.

If your texture works out well, send it to me and I'll include it in the next patch. Thanks for looking closely at things. Nice to have a second pair of eyes checking stuff.