Tiberian Sun and it's mystery with compatibilty modes

Astor

Hey guys!

I am experimenting with compatibility modes and different DDraw.dll's and got some interesting results. I am providing two DDraw.dll's with my mod.

But my problem is now with XP compatibilty or if you won't set one. The performance improvement is massive vs Win98 mode.

That's mostly because if you set a program to run in Win98 mode it will force it, to run only on core 0.
So I was watching CPU usage on my G19 LCD a few weeks etc. The global usage won't be higher than 25% - 30% maximal as global usage.

Core 0 100%
Core 1 0-5%
Core 2 0-5%
Core 3 0-5%

Without Win98 compatibilty I get a global CPU usage of 60%

Core 0 20-60%
Core 1 20-60%
Core 2 20-60%
Core 3 20-60%

Please notice that the game mostly at first splits it's thread to all cores. So in average each core does have about 25% usage, so in "theory" this should be slower. I would say this doesn't count on TS. I see an average use of at least 30-50% with 1280x768 in windowed mode. When I play on higher resolutions like 1920x1080 or 2560x1080 (which I wouldn't recommend for this game Rolling Eyes

) the CPU usage even reached for short times 75%! For comparison it's a i5-2500k with 4,5Ghz

I don't know how well this is working on Windows 7 or without one of the DDraw.dll's. But it's for sure far faster in Windows 8.1.

But yeah the problem is Tiberian Sun's file structure, I know when you not play in Win98 mode it will crash rare when starting a game and very ofthen when starting a second game at the loading screen.

AFAIK Super Joe had done some testing with this, which is some time ago. I can't remember right now, it has to do with terrain files or SHP files not placed inside a MIX file (isosnow/isotemp?) and the other things I had in my mind was about LKO talking that it has to do something with DemandLoadBuildup.

Now I would like to get that someway fixed, as I don't want to play in Win98 because the performance is horrible. I still prefer far better performance with a crash chance than the other side around Confused

Need to find that old topic now Very Happy

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Lin Kuei Ominae · Seth **Joined**: 16 Aug 2006 **Location**: Germany

Is this only your mod or do you have to set win98 mode for vanilla TS as well?

here the topic you mentioned, Getting rid of the "needs Win98 comp mode" problem, concerning DemandLoad

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Bittah Commander · Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2013 3:05 pm Post subject:

It's DemandLoad=true, actually. This key makes the game load the SHP from isotemp.mix or isosnow.mix and this also makes it likely for the game to crash if said SHP has a filename that's longer than 8.3 chareacters. Additionally Hyper informed me that SHPs with DemandLoad=true aren't cached, which means that they are loaded again every single time a map is loaded, opposed to only being loaded once when the game starts.

Edit:
LKO you damn ninja Mad

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Lin Kuei Ominae · Seth **Joined**: 16 Aug 2006 **Location**: Germany

Very, very interesting additional info you provided though.
So this would mean big mods could reduce loading times if they don't use the key at all.

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Astor · Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2013 3:52 pm Post subject:

Lin Kuei Ominae wrote:

Is this only your mod or do you have to set win98 mode for vanilla TS as well?

This is only for my mod, but I mostly bet it's that DemandLoad in art.ini thing #Tongue

Lin Kuei Ominae wrote:

here the topic you mentioned, Getting rid of the "needs Win98 comp mode" problem, concerning DemandLoad

Yes that was that thread Smile

Bittah Commander wrote:

It's DemandLoad=true, actually. This key makes the game load the SHP from isotemp.mix or isosnow.mix and this also makes it likely for the game to crash if said SHP has a filename that's longer than 8.3 chareacters. Additionally Hyper informed me that SHPs with DemandLoad=true aren't cached, which means that they are loaded again every single time a map is loaded, opposed to only being loaded once when the game starts.

I replaced all DemandLoad= with ;DemandLoad= and the crashes are gone. Looks like that was it.

But wouldn't that cause some problems like for example invisble graphics etc?

EDIT: Nevermind that was DemandLoadBuildup what I meant with invisible graphics Rolling Eyes

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Bittah Commander · Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2013 4:06 pm Post subject:

If you remove DemandLoad=true from SHPs you'll simply have to make sure those SHPs aren't located in isotemp.mix or isosnow.mix (so move them to EcacheXX.mix for example) and they'll show up perfectly fine.

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Lin Kuei Ominae · Seth **Joined**: 16 Aug 2006 **Location**: Germany

Astor wrote:

Lin Kuei Ominae wrote:

Is this only your mod or do you have to set win98 mode for vanilla TS as well?

This is only for my mod, but I mostly bet it's that DemandLoad in art.ini thing #Tongue

Vanilla TS works fine because WW used DemandLoad on the right places. That's why i asked, as it's then surely a mistake in your mod.

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Image Shaper______TMP Shop______C&C Executable Modifier

Astor · Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2013 3:56 pm Post subject:

I noticed that DemandLoad also fixed most crashing with the Random Map generator.

Now it's only crashing when it tries to place rivers. First I thought that it may don't like that I changed the order of the CABHUT building. So I placed it on 65 again - but didn't work.

What else could the problem be?

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