My Thoughts On The Beta And Some Improvement Ideas

[AgentX]

I played through two complete 1939 campaigns and thoroughly enjoyed my "flashback" to the Panzer General games. I have some thoughts and impressions to share. RULE CHANGES: I liked the change in movement/combat rules from PG. In PC, the units can attack and use their movement option later. So, for example, your artillery can first shoot at an enemy, then attack with your infantry/tank units, and then move the artillery later to a strategic spot. In PG, units had to use their attack and movement options all at once. So, in my example, the artillery could shoot the enemy, but then would have to move right then or lose option to move later. It was a subtle change, but I like your PC's rules much better. Often, the artillery needs to attack first, but move later because it's movement is blocked by the unit you're attacking. It's nice having the option to move later.

As a further RULES enhancement, I'd like to see units that use trucks/halftracks (Inf, AT, AA, arty) have an extra option. If they don't attack in a round, they can mount, then move to a location, then dismount (but can't attack). If the units use their attack before movement, then they can't dismount after moving. It would make units like AA more worth having, if you could "wheel" them into position and dismount them so they are more useful. Because of the way the rules currently are, I never buy AT or AA and instantly convert all my artillery to the self-propelled type (so they are always unmounted and giving defense support). AT and AA are just too hard to get consistently into position. The AA are pretty weak attackers to begin with so I just overload on fighters to gain air supremacy (and they can then be used on ground targets later which AA can't; once there are no enemy planes, AA is useless and can't even take over cities or airports).

Another RULE change to consider: not losing experience when upgrading. During my first campaign, I learned this dirty little secret the hard way. I was constantly upgrading and wondering why it was taking so long to rank up. The only time you don't lose experience when upgrading is when you stay in the same class. For example, upgrading from a PzIIIE to a PzIIIF is OK; going to a PzIV will result in a loss of experience. This taught me to never upgrade out of class so in my second campaign, I stayed with an all PzIII tank force until the final US battle. The Tigers/Panthers then became available and had to upgrade because they are just so much better. But, by that time, all my tanks had at least 3 stars, so the experience dilution wasn't as severe (basically losing a star). It would be nice to not lose any experience while upgrading so you can experiment with different type weapons without penalty. I tended to not have a diverse army my second go around because of that.

UI CHANGES: While in game, you can't load a saved game and have to quit to the main menu and load from there. In a turn based strategy game like this, I save the game a lot because some battles get so complex, there are many ways to proceed and I like to experiment. This leads to a lot of exiting the game and is not very convenient. Why not have a load option from the in-game menu? Another possible UI CHANGE: The gold/silver outline is very subtle and I've read some confusion some people have recognizing their core units. In PG, they had a very easy method. Core units had their strength number in black and non-core units were in white. Very easy to distinguish. Gold/silver outline, not so much. I got used to it, but I could see how it would be hard for newcomers or people with small screens.

A final note, the game crashed a lot for me. Maybe it was because I save and load so much, but about every 30 minutes, the game would do some weird crash. Sometimes the game would load and have a white map, but everything else was fine. Or, a game would load with no enemies on the map. Or, the mouse would just make a "ping" noise when clicking with no onscreen response. Every time it did crash, the mouse pointer would soon disappear and <escape> would no longer bring up the option menu, so I would have use the task manager to close the game, then restart it. Don't know if anyone else experienced these crashes, but it was quite common for me. The game was very enjoyable to me, though, so I put up with the crashes. Hopefully, the final version will be more stable for me. Other than that, there were no performance issues. Can't wait for the release and really looking forward to it. Hope my feedback was helpful.

[Rudankort]

Hey AgentX! Thanks for feedback, very useful and gives some food for thought. However, right now the thing which is worrying me most is the situation with crashes. I can tell that few people experience what you describe, and this is something we definitely want to fix before the release. Was there any common pattern with those crashes?

To begin with, I would suggest to save game log every time it crashes (and before you restart it, as the log gets overwritten upon restart), and send all such logs to me at rudankort@rsdn.ru. The log file is located in %My documents%\My Games\Panzer Corps\Log\log.txt.

Thanks in advance!

[AgentX]

Hey AgentX! Thanks for feedback, very useful and gives some food for thought. However, right now the thing which is worrying me most is the situation with crashes. I can tell that few people experience what you describe, and this is something we definitely want to fix before the release. Was there any common pattern with those crashes?

To begin with, I would suggest to save game log every time it crashes (and before you restart it, as the log gets overwritten upon restart), and send all such logs to me at rudankort@rsdn.ru. The log file is located in %My documents%\My Games\Panzer Corps\Log\log.txt.

Thanks in advance!

I uninstalled the game because the beta ended for me yesterday at midnight. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any log files in that folder after uninstalling the beta. There are files in the Replay and Save folders, but not the Log folder. Sorry about that. Is there another beta coming up so I can test again and save those logs? Another possible common pattern was just before this would happen, units would lose their sound effects when attacking. Actually, I took this as a clue that a crash was eminent and would quit the game before it would and restart fresh. Another reason why I tended to save a bunch, so I wouldn't lose game progress with the crashing.

[IainMcNeil]

Just grab the updated beta from the top post in the forum and you'll be able to continue.

[skyfox122]

I agree with all your comments and would have posted the same but you did such a great job saved me the time.
However, I have not had the crash issue but once or twice. I too like to reload and try different methods of attack etc..
I would like to emphasize the simple yet effective core identification of PG - this is the one thing I would not have changed.

[Rudankort]

I uninstalled the game because the beta ended for me yesterday at midnight. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any log files in that folder after uninstalling the beta. There are files in the Replay and Save folders, but not the Log folder. Sorry about that. Is there another beta coming up so I can test again and save those logs? Another possible common pattern was just before this would happen, units would lose their sound effects when attacking. Actually, I took this as a clue that a crash was eminent and would quit the game before it would and restart fresh. Another reason why I tended to save a bunch, so I wouldn't lose game progress with the crashing.

As Iain said, new beta is out and you can try it. Judging by your description, the issue might somehow be related to sound. When you are testing again, could you please try to turn music and sound off and see if the same crashes happen? The logs will also be useful of course. Thanks!

[AgentX]

Hi Rudankort, I reinstalled the newest beta and it is still crashing for me. I sent you an e-mail, attached with two logs from my last crashes. I don't understand why it is giving these messages: "Not enough memory available for this task. Quit one or more applications to increase available memory, and then try again." I have 4 gigs of RAM and never running any other application other than the beta. I've been playing graphically intense games like BF: Bad Company 2 with no problems, so I think my memory is fine.

The main problem seems to be these other messages: "mciSendString(play DamageGroundMiss1) failed, mciSendString(play DamageGroundMedium1) failed," and "mciSendString(play MoveSfx/tracked) failed." I'm not a programmer, but those seems like sound files and I do remember that when the sound effects failed, that a crash was eminent. I'll try your suggestion of playing it without the sound later today and give you an update. Hope these log files help you out. I'll also get a screenshot if I get that partial white screen again, but I think its a sound issue and not a graphics issue.

[Rudankort]

Thanks a lot, so indeed the issue may be related to sounds. As for memory, I understand that you have a lot of memory and a game as simple as Panzer Corps should not be using that many. However, if there is some bad memory leek in the game, it could eventually deplete memory on your machine. So, next time you experience problems, please open task manager and check how much memory PanzerCorps.exe consumed and let me know. If there is anything suspicious, I'll have to investigate this.

[AgentX]

@Rudankort, I believe your suspicion about the memory leak is correct. I started the game and checked the task manager: the memory usage was about 300mb. I played a turn and checked again: this time it was up to 500Mb. For an experiment, I did a reload and checked again: it went up by 20mb. Reloaded again, same thing: up by 20mb. So, every time I did a reload, it would add about 20mb to the memory usage. By the time it crashes, it is up around 1.5gb of RAM usage. Since I'm such a big user of saving and reloading, I guess it adds up quick and I get the crash. Maybe this is happening to other people, but they aren't noticing it since they are not reloading as often as I do. Does this mean that it isn't a sound issue and the memory leak is causing the problems?

[Rudankort]

@Rudankort, I believe your suspicion about the memory leak is correct. I started the game and checked the task manager: the memory usage was about 300mb. I played a turn and checked again: this time it was up to 500Mb. For an experiment, I did a reload and checked again: it went up by 20mb. Reloaded again, same thing: up by 20mb. So, every time I did a reload, it would add about 20mb to the memory usage. By the time it crashes, it is up around 1.5gb of RAM usage. Since I'm such a big user of saving and reloading, I guess it adds up quick and I get the crash. Maybe this is happening to other people, but they aren't noticing it since they are not reloading as often as I do. Does this mean that it isn't a sound issue and the memory leak is causing the problems?

Well, I don't know for sure yet, but I see that:
- Sound does work for you for some time. So clearly the sound-related code is compatible with your system.
- In the log I see that the sound-related API call fails, and error code I get means "Not enough memory available for this task".

This makes me suspect that failure of sound and lack of memory are related.

Another important point is that it crashes at 1.5GB of memory usage. 1.5GB is a critical threshold: each process has 4GB of which 2GB is reserved for use by operating system and 500MB is easy to lose because of memory layout. At least on a 32-bit system this is true, I'm not sure if you use x86 or x64 PC.

In any case, 1.5GB of memory consumption is outrageous. It is clearly a bug which I'll need to address. Thx for reporting this.