Crash

[Josh]

Game starts, I select map, progress reaches 100%, game crashes. I am using the latest alpha on windows xp. I think it may be related to my hardware, but my graphics card (ATI RV200) supposedly supports OpenGL 1.4. Tell me if additional info is required and thank you in advance.

mainlog.html

system_info.txt

crashlog.dmp

crashlog.txt

Edited October 30, 2012 by Josh

[historic_bruno]

According to your system_info.txt and Wikipedia, that card only supports OpenGL 1.3. Your crash is very similar to #1006 which has been around for some time, I've only seen it on old and low-end hardware.

Do you have the latest drivers? AMD has a tool which might help. You might try some different graphics settings, in particular see if enabling novbo makes any difference. Given how old that card is (2001), I think you'll have a much better gaming experience by upgrading to something newer...

[Josh]

Well, I did that, put it in windowed mode and it worked! (sort of)

The map loaded, model meshes loaded, terrain loaded with textures, and fps were OK but no model textures loaded. I have attached a screenshot. One other possibly relevant thing, as far as I can tell my gpu is not very heavily loaded but my cpu is working overtime. And finally I was wondering what enabling novbo actually does?

(edit: Yes I'm nearly positive I have the latest drivers. Also I'm afraid this is a laptop so a graphics upgrade isn't possible, I do however have my graphics pretty heavily overclocked.)

(edit 2: another thing, my GPU has 64mb video ram.)

(edit 3: this may be random or helpful, but Age of Empires 3 runs flawlessly on the same computer.)

(edit 4: I may have spoken to soon about the fps)

(edit 5: I may have spoken to soon about the crashing too. Now it runs awhile before crashing. This may be coincidental but it seems to crash when I move around using the middle mouse button or arrow keys.)

(edit 6: Also every test I ran was without AI.)

Thank you very much for your help!

Edited October 31, 2012 by Josh

[historic_bruno]

Well it's reasonable that it works with AOE3 since that game uses DirectX, not OpenGL, the drivers would be completely different. Also your card is literally on or below our minimum requirements (OpenGL 1.3), so it might not work perfectly. Perhaps myconid (our current graphics expert) would have some ideas.

[myconid]

The player colours are drawn on the buildings/units, so that means the model textures are being loaded correctly. The problem is with the rendering. This looks suspicious:

GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS   3

Historic, remember when we changed the fixed renderpath to draw LOS on models? That might have set the number of samplers above his hardware limit...

Then again, this probably doesn't explain the crash, does it?

[historic_bruno]

And finally I was wondering what enabling novbo actually does?

It prevents the game from using OpenGL's vertex buffer objects, so some of the rendering data is stored in system memory instead. Otherwise VBOs are enabled by default, if the driver claims to support them.

The player colours are drawn on the buildings/units, so that means the model textures are being loaded correctly. The problem is with the rendering. This looks suspicious:

GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS   3

Historic, remember when we changed the fixed renderpath to draw LOS on models? That might have set the number of samplers above his hardware limit...

Hmm, it would be nice if we could detect that and handle it gracefully (ommitting features that exceed the limits), but I don't know how much time we can/should put into that?

Then again, this probably doesn't explain the crash, does it?

That crash or similar, has been around long before any changes you've made. IIRC changing novbo didn't always solve the problem. My laptop was able to reproduce the crash, so I might be able to test, if I know how to debug it (I don't really like blaming it on drivers since it occurs with different brands).

[wraitii]

Your second point is "probably not much", HWDetect.cpp basically is the place for that and almost already does it, it checks for a few other stuffs.

I think the advanced water might also require such changes, BTW.