Tactical battles = frustrating misery

from Elemental Forums

I don't really know how to be constructive at this point. The game was pushed out before being ready this much is obvious. A lot can be said about speedy patches but even more can be said about the shoddy state of this game. Giant memory leaks are STILL there....these are not anomolies, they are in the game code. If it was just OOM crashes I could live with it, it crashes every hour on medium maps and every 30 mins on large mins with OOM. However with the latest patch I am getting crashes on auto battles, when doing certain casting animations, or when enemies do casting animations.

All of this MIGHT be bearable if Stardock had FIXED the freaking animations in tactical battles. Why would you even think about releasing this game with the horrible tedious and pointlessly bad animations still there? Why should it take literally 5 seconds for my guy to do a counter strike? Why should I have to click the mouse 15 million times trying in vain to get my guy to hurry and attack. The animations(most of them) have LONG delays after the animation is done. This is making tactical battles an absolute chore. Something that should be the most fun part of the game is now some side show that I wish I could just auto battle through so I don't have to sit there watching these beta animations over and over.

The delays in tactical battles are my biggest issue with this game. It has been forever. The random crashes and the OOM crashes are definitely a very bad thing(I have one battle now where an AI controlled Air Elemental is crashing my game when he tries to cast an ability) but what really makes reloading a save that much more aggravating is knowing that I have to sit through another long drawn out tactical battle because of half done animations. I am shelving this game and recomending no one I know buy this. The animations have to be fixed. 

I almost am motivated enough to make a youtube about it, just about that aggravated, So people can see just how bad it really is.

 

 

elemental
4,661 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Regarding crashes: Did you try cutting the sound off? Worked fine for me to get rid of the crashes since 1.06 or somesuch.

And I would like an option to get rid of animations in tactical battles altogether so things get done faster.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

There is a custom patch for the crashes, somewhere. It allows more memory for the game so thatg it still leaks butif you have enough RAM it doesn't crash. (I have 4GB never crashes, only may become slower after 10 hours of playing).

https://forums.elementalgame.com/393090/page/2/#2764591

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I have tried the patch to address more memory which in theory should make the OOM crashes 3 times as lest frequent. I don't think i did it right before so I just didn't touch the .exe when it was hotfixed.

 

I'll try turning sounds off? You mean all of them? or just tactical ones?  The point I was trying to make is if the battles were not so agonizingly tedious reloading crashed games would not be so bad. I could live through the crashes until they finally fixed them. Right now the combo of crashes and unpolished animations and battle flow make the tactical battles god awful to play.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card. I was getting out of memory errors every 30 minutes of play. Turned out i had a 101.xx nvidia driver installed. Got rid of that and got the current 250.xx installed(talk about a version difference). No OOM anymore.

Concerning the tactical animations, there is a bug with the animation of a mounted unit being attacked in melee. The 'ouch' animation has a six or so second delay in it after it completes. Suggest not using mounts till it is addressed if it bothers you much(like me).

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I have the latest ATI drivers(10.7). It is not the setup, it is this game. There is no reason for OOM errors even if someone had drivers that were a year old. This is absurd.

 

Well the prblem being this...without horses you lose combat speed which means you attack less. Quite a big sacrifice when you think about it.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

What sound card do you have?  Please be aware that for us, there are no crashes or stuttering or anything (there wasn't in 1.0 either for that matter). So a lot of our work is tracking down things like issues with the 3D sound system or a problem with the way we're using a video card and what not.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Creative SB X-fi sound card. I am updating drivers for it now(since you posted about it). It is the only driver that can be updated. A sound card is usually something that is always performance neutral, if this fixes the crashes I will be happy.

 

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting John_Hughes, reply 8
Perhaps not related but might shed some light for someone.

http://techreport.com/discussions/9994

 

 
End of John_Hughes's quote

 

No this is not a problem for me. I have never had an issue with this sound card before. It is either this game or a combination of this game with the sound card. I have never had anythign run so poorly on this system before. I can just download and install whatever and it runs smooth no hiccups...this is the first time anything nuts has happened.

 

 

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Attempting to try and find an updated driver for sound card. I really can't find one for Vista. I am not really prepared to tear my computer to pieces to get this game running correctly. I can install anything else i want and it runs perfect. Why in the world do I want to reconfigure my whole system in probably a vain attempt to get this game running?

 

 

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting davidjc_af, reply 10
Attempting to try and find an updated driver for sound card. I really can't find one for Vista. I am not really prepared to tear my computer to pieces to get this game running correctly. I can install anything else i want and it runs perfect. Why in the world do I want to reconfigure my whole system in probably a vain attempt to get this game running?

 

 
End of davidjc_af's quote

No, if for some reason the driver doesn't address it, we'll work with you to make sure we work around whatever the issue is. If your computer works with other games then ultimately it's our job to make sure our game works with your PC too.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 11

Quoting davidjc_af, reply 10Attempting to try and find an updated driver for sound card. I really can't find one for Vista. I am not really prepared to tear my computer to pieces to get this game running correctly. I can install anything else i want and it runs perfect. Why in the world do I want to reconfigure my whole system in probably a vain attempt to get this game running?

 

 
No, if for some reason the driver doesn't address it, we'll work with you to make sure we work around whatever the issue is. If your computer works with other games then ultimately it's our job to make sure our game works with your PC too.
End of Frogboy's quote

I am updating the drivers, I am not to optimistic it will help anything. I will tell you that I have one CTD that is 100% repeatable. When an AI controlled Air Elemental tries to use a special ability the game CTDs every time. I can't get past the battle. I see the animation start for the special ability and the game crashes. I disable SFX like someone suggested and it did not help.

 

I am downloading 200 megs of SB X-FI drivers as I type this. I have a SB X-FI Xtreme Gamer card. But really that should be a very common card the X-FI series is pretty commonplace in the market. Other than that I have an ATI 4870 card with the latest 10.7 drivers and a I7 920 (very common) and Windows Vista Prof edition 64 bit.

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

Updated every driver still getting CTDs. In fact I can tell you almost anytime I use a special ability such as crush or any Champion special ability(unique ones) I get a crash. The animation starts and then a CTD. When an Air Elemental tried to cast something CTD. When units use special attacksor abilities in tactical gamemode the game is crashing.

 

When I try to autoresolve I get CTDs. I Get CTDs due to OOM. This is a very unstable buggy version. Oh and thanks for the tip about dismounting my troops the horse animations are screwed up apparently. But now let us observe what happens here. My movement speed is decrease in combat. To move at full speed (since organized is now gone) I must reqeuip all my horses again for all my champions.

 

latest debug.err

 

http://filebin.ca/vnhayr/debug.err