Beta 2.1.18

[Dr.Disaster]

So I had a wierd idea today, I chugged my ram with 400 meg of images and ran grimrock. Lo and behold the stuttery movement became more pronounced, this leads me to the possibility that the movement issues I came across this patch has to do with that memory usage increase. I am going to try killing almost everything and seeing if the movement jitteryness reduces with more free ram.

It's also possible that this stutter happens due to swap activity from windows. This is pretty easy to check out: deactivate the windows swapfile, reboot and re-test.

[Taem]

Sorry I was away for so long. I had surgery for a hernia and have been on my back most of the week. Anyway, long story short, I read most of the comments and saw where you and that other fellow got a bit heated. I'd like to just stick with our conversation on the issue before all that if that's alright.

"Those games" felt more polished/balanced because they had less to offer than you recall.

Not really. I'd say dungeon-wise, they were proportionally about the same - GR2 having the slight edge here with more play-time - however the length of one game does not make the experience more fun so much as well-polished content with intuitive and enjoyable GUI and controls/mechanics. Just because LG2 is longer than some of those other titles I listed does not make it a superior game in any regards. What did GGG add to the table over LG1? Firearms, new monsters, underwater and better modding features; alchemy was already a features of LG1 and there are the same amount of spells in LG2 as there were in LG1, with the same minimal weapon and armor variety. So, taking this from a gamers point of view, they added in one BROKEN mechanic with firearms and undermined some other features I found enjoyable in LG1 with the trade-off being more monsters and underwater areas to explore, so unless I'm missing something, LG2 is worse than those other titles:

- Firearms: not there
- Special attacks: either done automatic (LoG1), selected like regular attacks with growing cooldowns (DM) or not there (EoB)
- Charged items: i agree they should cost a lot less energy but that's it
- Cooldowns: no difference; check your reference DM for it's cooldowns: they get longer and longer with more powerful attacks
- Spell damage: no difference; in LoG2 the magic skill levels are similar to DM power runes; damage cap in DM was the Mon rune

RE: Firearms... everyone agrees... you, me, everyone... that they need modification. I see Anti posted in this thread twice, yet didn't bother comment on this. Not unexpected. Shows to me their [GGG's] main interest is of course the bottom-line this time around, same as it was with LG1, meaning they will fix it in LG3 but not LG2. I'm sorry, but to me that's just sloppy modding that I can't respect - fix up the old game for the fans then move on!

RE: Special attacks/Cool-downs... You are correct that I haven't made it very far into this game yet. I was under the impression from some when I made this comment that some special attacks require over two seconds to activate. In DM and Ishar: Legend of Fortress, your one single toon had his attack icons greyed out as he recovered from his special attack and the better the special attack, the longer the cool down, but there wasn't also a "warm-up" period. The point here is if these rumors are true of 2-3 second special attack warm-ups, that seems quite off to me because I know with a min/maxer party with dex-based attackers up front and bomb throwers in the rear, you could get off a good 2-4 attacks per second, so in 3-seconds time the DPS you'd be missing out on comparatively to a single special attack would obviously overshadow the special attack completely. However I cannot speak on this from experience at all, so I'd rather not make any more comments on it until I see some of these special attacks with long warm-up periods myself. But seriously, the concept of a warm-up seems redundant when you already suffer a cool-down - that and I don't like the idea of tying up my mouse click for that long when I could be quaffing a healing potion or doing other things in that time. Do way with warm-ups I say and just increase the cool-down to balance out! Oh, and regarding cool-downs, I don't think I ever complained about them before since I've always viewed the cool-down as a necessary staple of all RPG mechanics used to balance skills, so I'm not sure where our wires got crossed on that one.

RE: Charged items... we agree

RE: Spell damage... to me, it's not so much the damage itself that needs tweaking from what I understand, but I prefer the dmg tied to a stat to give it more variety in its damage output and less static. When spells are consistently doing the same damage based on how many points are in their level and the spell level is already maxed out, the motivation to keep playing is diminished and on top of that, I feel like I'm playing Super Smash Bros where everyone does the same damage all the time. I say, find a way to tie in Willpower attribute points to damage like it was with GR1, like how melee and thrown weapons, and missile work with Strength and Dexterity respectively. From your comments, I'm lead to believe you think I was complaining about the system itself, which I don't remember specifically mentioning in my balance issue post. To be perfectly honest, I much preferred the spell system in Dungeon Master over any other game like this I've played; LG2's system seems to cartoonish to me, like I'm playing on a child's LEAPFROG educational iPad connecting dots to "make stuff happen".

***FINAL COMMENTS: And the rapier not being dex based is ridiculous! Have you ever used one IRL? They are used for fencing, which requires finesse and guile over brute strength. Minor nit really. -EDIT: I'll retract this comment due to learning something new about era-specific rapiers I wasn't aware of while making this statement.

[Nexus]

So I had a wierd idea today, I chugged my ram with 400 meg of images and ran grimrock. Lo and behold the stuttery movement became more pronounced, this leads me to the possibility that the movement issues I came across this patch has to do with that memory usage increase. I am going to try killing almost everything and seeing if the movement jitteryness reduces with more free ram.

It's also possible that this stutter happens due to swap activity from windows. This is pretty easy to check out: deactivate the windows swapfile, reboot and re-test.

Yep, test confirmed it. The memory leak was making things happen on the pagefile and now with the page off the game does 2 things. The first thing is the game (on loading a save) triggers the windows low memory alert. The second it that movement is as crisp as a fern after a forest fire. Input lag is down, movement is as smooth as an icesheet and I am in constant fear of an out-of-memory crash. :/

[badhabit]

Oh my CPU does render the frames? Then my GPU prolly does the sound:

Yeah, most probably as your systems seems of strange architecture overall if is locked to integer FPS only.

In the case you described (assumed the base 5FPS would have not been rounded, but most probably it was rounded) 100% GPU load would lead to 5.814FPS, which is perfectly fine for a computer. So, still CPU bound.

Edit: typo fixed

Aye must be my system because it now manages to be CPU bound with 100% GPU load

*Sigh* still clueless and loudmouth. Obviously your system don't achieve 100% GPU load, while fractional fps are completely no problem, so your limitation in your P4 PC system is the CPU and not the GPU; conclusion CPU bound.

[minmay]

***FINAL COMMENTS: And the rapier not being dex based is ridiculous! Have you ever used one IRL? They are used for fencing, which requires finesse and guile over brute strength. Minor nit really.

The rapier in Grimrock 2 weighs 3.2kg, so it makes sense that it would take a lot of strength to use effectively. Of course, this also means the handle must be filled with uranium or something.

[Dr.Disaster]

Yep, test confirmed it. The memory leak was making things happen on the pagefile and now with the page off the game does 2 things. The first thing is the game (on loading a save) triggers the windows low memory alert. The second it that movement is as crisp as a fern after a forest fire. Input lag is down, movement is as smooth as an icesheet and I am in constant fear of an out-of-memory crash. :/

Q: How much ram does your system have?

LoG2 requires 1+ gb to play the main campaign. This did not change in any version i could look at. The memory usage grows during play depending on how many areas you visit and what happens there. Up to now i haven't seen the game request more then 1.5 gb.

When you're running WinXP with more then 2 GB or Vista/Win7/Win8 with at least 4 GB you should be ok. Just make sure you have more then 1 GB free ram after starting Steam client; close other programs if necessary.

Yet you can still have windows run with a swapfile and be rather swift. To accomplish this you first need to defrag your disk drive(s). Then create the swapfile as "user defined" and set the same size to both min and max i.e. 1 GB. This way Windows will create the swapfile in one piece with few or even no defragmentation plus it won't grow the file on it's own, causing no further defragmentation and thus access slow downs during swap activity. In case you happen to have more then 1 disk drive, create the swapfile on a drive that does not hold your windows.

Another quick and dirty way for a fast swapfile would be to dedicate a swift USB stick to it.

[Dr.Disaster]

Aye must be my system because it now manages to be CPU bound with 100% GPU load

*Sigh* still clueless and loudmouth. Obviously your system don't achieve 100% GPU load, while fractional fps are completely no problem, so your limitation in your P4 PC system is the CPU and not the GPU; conclusion CPU bound.

It amuses me how you pretend to know hardware. Let's see who the actual clueless loudmouth is.

Find and explain the differences shown in these screenshots from my P4.

SpoilerShow

[Neutronium Dragon]

- Firearms: not there
- Special attacks: either done automatic (LoG1), selected like regular attacks with growing cooldowns (DM) or not there (EoB)
- Charged items: i agree they should cost a lot less energy but that's it
- Cooldowns: no difference; check your reference DM for it's cooldowns: they get longer and longer with more powerful attacks
- Spell damage: no difference; in LoG2 the magic skill levels are similar to DM power runes; damage cap in DM was the Mon rune

Firearms: I actually consider Firearms to be okay taken by themselves; the trouble they run into is (much like class balance) there's another ranged option that is generally far superior in most group compositions. Craftable ammo would at least ease up on the "must save it for..." issue that usually dogs consumables in any game like this, though. Linking firearms to stats as with other weapons is an issue because there's really nothing that would conceivably make the firearm hit harder. (Random weird idea: give them bonus damage based on Vitality - the sturdier you are, the better you are at controlling the kickback. That would also make them stat-distinct from other ranged weapons.)

Special Attacks: I far prefer the LoG2 model to the LoG1 one.

Charged Items: A nice idea in theory, but apart from the "must save it for..." issue, they also run up against the problem of needing to invest in the relevant skill to use... at which point the character could probably just cast the spell anyway. Removing the charges would at least make them a better convenience feature (you can cast this one spell without having to swap items), as would reducing the energy cost or having the effect bolstered when cast this way. (IE: You still use the full amount of energy but the spell effect gets a damage/duration boost.)

Cooldowns: Nothing terribly unusual about this.

Spell Damage: If the damage doesn't currently scale (has this been thoroughly tested?) then maybe a stat-link would be helpful, although here again I wonder whether it would be more interesting to link the damage scaling to stats beyond Willpower. If each stat boosts a specific resistance, maybe it could also act as a % boost to damage of that type. This would make hybrid concepts a bit more feasible into the bargain.

[Neutronium Dragon]

***FINAL COMMENTS: And the rapier not being dex based is ridiculous! Have you ever used one IRL? They are used for fencing, which requires finesse and guile over brute strength. Minor nit really.

The modern fencing foil is a descendant of the rapier, but it's one designed for modern (nonlethal) sport, not renaissance-era spilling of blood in the streets. An actual battle-worthy rapier of the latter sort is a different weapon and would not be used in the same way (unless you wanted to get yourself killed).

[badhabit]

Aye must be my system because it now manages to be CPU bound with 100% GPU load

*Sigh* still clueless and loudmouth. Obviously your system don't achieve 100% GPU load, while fractional fps are completely no problem, so your limitation in your P4 PC system is the CPU and not the GPU; conclusion CPU bound.

It amuses me how you pretend to know hardware. Let's see who the actual clueless loudmouth is.

Find and explain the differences shown in these screenshots from my P4.

SpoilerShow

wuuhuu...a puzzle, meta-grimrock gaming.

First thing, in comparison to your earlier image (viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8328&start=70) you increased the GFX settings (higher memory load, image looks different) to increase the GPU load (86 to 95%) ? Then you pinned Log2 to CPU0 only and nothing changed (or only slightly, maybe even up due to reduced overhead)? Or you played with down or overclocking the CPU? Do you played with some driver settings, enforcing some optimization/GFX setting? What happend with the fan-speed? Or do you refer to the negligible difference of 92% to 96%, whcih could be jsut noise? You shut down your browser who had eaten 50% CPU cycles?