Max menu images

[UrienRheged]

Hi,
as many people who have gone up to the hard-coded faction limit may have experienced, I ran up against the selection screen crash, where if you add more than a certain amount of faction the game ctd's in the custom battle menu or the faction selection screen, because it needs to load more 'faction symbols', 'unique unit' and 'starting postion map' images than it can handle. I don't know the full specifics of why exactly this happens, but I managed to avoid it by making one general map. I have kept the 'unique unit', though.

Recently I had been a bit annoyed by how pixellated some of the faction symbols were (on the faction selection screen I made some bigger than others, as they were more powerful factions) so I decided to increase the size of the .tga image. And it worked! It looked ten times better, less pixellated and less fuzzy. Even the custom battle symbols looked perfect. The only problem is that I've run into the same problem I did before: select a certain number of factions in the faction select screen and the game ctds! Select a couple there and then go to the custom battle screen and the game ctds!

Look, I know what I have to do (use the old, smaller, images) but I was wondering if there is a way out of this? Is there something I can leave out so I can keep the hi-res faction symbols? I get the feeling I can easily leave out the _grey version of each faction symbol. I've never seen it used anywhere. I could delete the 'unique unit' images from the menu in the lnt-file as they're not integral to the info you need to play a certain faction, but would that help? Does the game crash on the max amount of faction symbol images or on the max amount of images total? So if I were to leave out the unique unit images (or make them a couple of pixels wide instead, as a shortcut) would that solve it?

[Callistonian]

I have suspected for a long time that the cause of this crash is poor memory management in the menus. The loaded images never get released from memory and eventually you reach some limit and crash. So, what matters isn't any particular image but the sum total of pixels that are loaded into memory. You can address this by reducing the total number of images or the size of the images or both.

My mod uses 31 factions so I reduced the number of custom battle preview images and this alleviated the crashes to the point where it's basically no longer an issue. But I think it is still possible to crash the menu by loading enough pages and clicking enough buttons in order to load more and more images. I feel like even the same image can be loaded over and over and eventually cause a crash - for example, by selecting and deselecting faction icons or other types of buttons and loading the selected/mouseover/deselected images for the button or by just going back and forth between two menu pages enough times.

[UrienRheged]

Yes, I removed the battlefield pics. They already gave me trouble at 26 factions in =)

I just tried replacing the fe_faction_units with tiny 1x1 pixel images so the game had to load less, but that clearly doesn't do anything: Clicked all the factions, went to 'custom battle' and the game ctd'd.

Would it not CTD if I removed the need for those images in the .lnt file, do you think?
Any tips on how to do that?

[Callistonian]

I'm not sure if you can specify which image each faction uses from the fe_faction_units folder either in the .lnt or anywhere else. They may be linked by the .tga file name corresponding to the faction name, in which case you will always have the same number of images for that. But it certainly doesn't work this way for custom battle preview pics and it surprises me to hear that removing those didn't help. I'm still using 13 images for battle maps (all the sett locked ones still have their own but the non-sett locked ones use the same image) and the menu CTD is basically impossible to induce.

[Jojo00182]

Can any of your factions selects too many units in custom battle? (i think 200 was the limit)

[Gigantus]

Clicking on multiple factions in the 'Faction Selection' screen has always been crashing the game - the more factions available the faster it crashes. There is a whole thread dedicated to that, but I don't have the link.
The 'fool proof' approach is to use only the default faction map graphics or exchange the the UI elements. Underneath a screenshot how 'one faction map' looks in RotK. The set up for it is available in the miscellaneous forum I think.