Performance Issue: Massive slow down/hanging.

[Ralle]

I also had no problems anymore since the last patch.

[KeldorKatarn]

Are you guys talking only about the steam version? Because I'm experiencing certain problems like slowdowns (especially while playing replays) and random crashed (rare but happens) since the Soviet Corps patch also, but with the non-steam version.

[Ralle]

Yes steam version.
I had one crash since the Soviet Corps patch. No message just ctd.

[KeldorKatarn]

I had several. The game has become a heck of a lot more unstable since soviet corps. Which is quite a disappointment as it was rock stable before.

[Ralle]

Yeah normally it is extremely stable - that`s why I remember that one particular crash.

[Rudankort]

Game code changed very little in the last patches, and this includes Soviet Corps. In order to narrow down a possible cause, it would be useful to compare game performance before and after installing Soviet Corps, on the same machine. Will Soviet Corps crash more often than the version without? Or is it some other change in the environment which causes this? I think, you have mentioned Win10, this could be a possible reason. Of course, even if it is something in the environment, we will have to fix on our side in the end. Conditions change, and the game must adapt. But to know what exactly is causing issues would help a lot.

[Ralle]

I had none or nearly none crashes before Soviet Corps. Already with Win10 that is. At least I can`t remember when the last ctd before Soviet Corps happened.
Now I had a single crash since Soviet Corps came out. So for me this isn`t a real problem. If others have more frequent crashes it might be a problem though.

[KeldorKatarn]

Switch to WIn10 certainly seems part of it, at least the performance I think. but there definitely seemed to be some changes in the game code also. For example since the update the music is a LOT more quiet and I have to ramp up the volume slider to 75%. Before that the music was rather too loud and I had it at 25% always. So I suspect the sound engine part to be at least part of the cause.

Also I've played Poland on Manstein today just for fun and I noticed that when I do a lot of moves in quick succession without waiting for the current animation to finish the game crashes nearly every time. Maybe the game has touble doing stuff before the previous animation has finished or maybe with playing a combat and a moving sound at the same time or something?

I know this all isn't really helpful but I'm a bit at a loss on how to track this problem down more in detail.

[Rudankort]

We indeed switched sound engine at some point, because the original one was problematic, but it does sound like a big change which might affect performance and stability on some system. I wonder if using the standard troubleshooting test - renaming Audio to _Audio to suppress sound output - will improve the stability for you? If yes, we will know rather well where to look. In fact, the old sound engine could be restored (for example as an option) if this helps some people to avoid issues.

[KeldorKatarn]

I'll test that.

[KeldorKatarn]

Ok without audio it definitely performs a lot better.

[Rudankort]

Thanks for testing this out, good to know. We are right now experiencing similar issues in Armageddon. We'll see what we can do, perhaps upgrading to a newer version of audio library will fix it. Otherwise, we can always restore the old way back as an option, at least in PzC.

[KeldorKatarn]

It happens very regularly when playing a replay and leaving the mouse alone and just let the game play the replay. It seems after a while something thinks the game is idle or something because then it starts to freak out and low framerates happen. In my video recordings I always keep moving the mouse a bit every 30 seconds or so to make sure this doesn't happen, and it works. So for some reason not doing anything and the game being idle and just playing itself freaks some part of the engine out. Not sure what could cause that, but it definitely wasn't there before that update.

[Rudankort]

This is really odd, but I could try to use some tricks similar to what media players use, to let the system know we are not idle.

[KeldorKatarn]

Worth a try I'd say. as I said I'm not sure why the heck this happens but it doesn't happen if audio is off (volume sliders to 0 is enough to achieve that, I don't even have to rename the folder)

[KeldorKatarn]

If you want me to try anything else, lemme know.

[Rudankort]

If you want me to try anything else, lemme know.

We have got a new version of audio library from Miles. I've tried to use it in Panzer Corps, and it works. Could you please try to use it on you end and see if the game behaves any better with this updated sound engine? To test this, you need to download zip from here:
http://www.rudankort.me/NewMiles.zip
And copy its contents to PzC folder (old files will be replaced with new ones).

You may want to backup Mss32.dll and mss folder first, then you will be able to revert to old version in case of any problem.

Thx!

[KeldorKatarn]

I'll use JSGME to make sure nothing gets overwritten. I'll report back to you once I've played around with it.

[KeldorKatarn]

The new Miles doesn't seem to make any difference whatsoever. I still observed the slowdowns during replays and the normal game performance seems to be exactly the same too.

Two things I did notice however. During playing a replay "norway" the game's memory usage rose from ~300MB to >500MB. This memory usage only dropped slightly when going back to the Main Menu and remained above 500MB. Do you allocate a lot of memory for the combat animation sprite frames and not clear those maybe? Or for the sounds? Because something get's allocated continuously and doesn't get cleaned up. The memory rose steadily by small amounts at a pretty constant rate during the replay.

Also regarding the sudden slowdown... I'm not sure if it's releated but I certainly noticed Windows starting background work and all kinds of crap services in the background (I had the task manager open) and also some disk activity after a while. I think the idea of using the same mechanisms that media players use to notify Windows the Application is NOT to be treated as Idle is worth it for the replay manager (and I don't event hink that 's a hack, after all you ARE re-playing something without the user doing any interaction. That basically IS media player behavior.

So my two ideas: Check where the memory goes during a replay (I didn't check this during a normal game yet, might be the same), and make sure the application isn't regarded by windows as being idle whenever a replay is being played.

[Rudankort]

Thanks! Are you still experiencing crashes with this version of the sound library?