New Beta Build 70644 up!

[Richey79 10]

Shadows seem to render properly all the time now for me (set to high), and those seen on windows look crisp and clean. Feels like twilight is more pleasant to look at too, although that might be wishful thinking.

After an hour's testing, I haven't had any artifacts or HDR 'strobing': I had both of these (minor but) annoying problems pretty regularly before this beta (ATI cards).

I managed to induce the 'Invalid Access To Memory Location' crash a couple of patches ago. Can't remember exactly what I did to get it, but I think it was a command line parameter I had added - either cpucount=x or fullproc. Something I did to try to appease the gods of multi-core threading. When I removed the offending parameter, all was well once again.

If the game has somehow set the wrong amount of graphics memory in the .cfg file and you've set it to 'write-protect' at some point, that could maybe lead to the error...?

[sprayer_faust 0]

I have had a couple of crashes in MP a few days ago. Then I remembered I set the video memory on default after reading a post here. I think it was you Maverick. You said that the game runs smoother on default. I changed it back to high and all was right, no crashes. I think high is for cards at around 1GB.

EDIT:

Or maybe it was exThreads=3, because I run exThreads=0 now. Don't know which one (exThreads or default), I changed both at the same time.

Edited May 19, 2010 by sprayer_faust

[CarlGustaffa 4]

This one made me giggle a bit. :) Seems to me like the AI can't see anything at night... so... "too good"?

Try a NVG less fight, with some moonlight as the only lightsource (AI doesn't seem to be helped by flares without scripting), and you'll figure out how incredibly good they actually are, once you've been made. And that is with a moon.

[MavericK96 0]

EDIT: Flying is very smooth until coming up over villages/cities where it feels performance is worse in this beta. But only when going over houses. Otherwise its the same - very smooth flying.

That can be a reason to the crashes Maverick if your memory isnt properly set through "default". More stress than usual over cities and not properly set the video memory setting. Just an idea.

Yeah, I've found the same to be true, it's definitely related to flying over cities/buildings, not just out in the open.

And it's obvious something is wrong with the Default setting, but that's why I'm complaining about it, because I want it to be fixed. :cool: It's supposed to detect how much VRAM you have and use it accordingly, so theoretically any amount of VRAM *should* work on this setting. Unfortunately, as it stands, this is not the case, and setting it to High or Very High gives me awful stuttering, stability or not. Obviously this is because High/V. High is not utilizing all of my VRAM, so Default seems the obvious choice. However, stability is an issue as I have said.

I managed to induce the 'Invalid Access To Memory Location' crash a couple of patches ago. Can't remember exactly what I did to get it, but I think it was a command line parameter I had added - either cpucount=x or fullproc. Something I did to try to appease the gods of multi-core threading. When I removed the offending parameter, all was well once again.

If the game has somehow set the wrong amount of graphics memory in the .cfg file and you've set it to 'write-protect' at some point, that could maybe lead to the error...?

Interesting, though the only parameter I've been using (other than exThreads) is maxmem=2047, and I've tried with and without that and there's no difference I can see in either performance or stability. I don't use cpuCount because I never saw a difference with that either, and I have HT turned off. Never heard of this "fullproc" one, though.

And I don't have any of my config files write protected. Here is what it detects for Local and non-Local memory:

localVRAM=1054539776;
nonlocalVRAM=2147483647;

Which seems about right, since I have 1 GB VRAM. Not sure about non-Local, or how it obtains that value. My page file is set at a minimum of 6 GB, maximum of 9 GB.

I have had a couple of crashes in MP a few days ago. Then I remembered I set the video memory on default after reading a post here. I think it was you Maverick. You said that the game runs smoother on default. I changed it back to high and all was right, no crashes. I think high is for cards at around 1GB.

EDIT:

Or maybe it was exThreads=3, because I run exThreads=0 now. Don't know which one (exThreads or default), I changed both at the same time.

Yeah, you were the one that told me about setting Threaded Optimization off in the nVidia control panel. That more or less solved the "v-buffer creation error" I was getting, but this seems to be a different animal altogether. I agree that High is more stable but at the same time it comes with a steep performance cost in terms of stutter for me. Also, performance seems to decrease over time while LOD thrashing seems to increase over time with High/V. High. until it gets to a point of being unplayable.

The whole thing seems like a memory leak somewhere.

---------- Post added at 04:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:22 PM ----------

Did some flybys over Chernogorsk as per usual, and I still get the "Receiving..." issue with exThreads=0 (no exThreads param used).

With exThreads=3, I get "Out of Memory" crashes. I can't win with this game, lol. :(

[Punisher5555 0]

Maverick96.

You can see where the nonlocalvram number comes from.

You are running Win7 Pro x64 so do a start->run->dxdiag. Click the Display tab. You will see the number under the Approx. Total Memory.

[MavericK96 0]

Maverick96.

You can see where the nonlocalvram number comes from.

You are running Win7 Pro x64 so do a start->run->dxdiag. Click the Display tab. You will see the number under the Approx. Total Memory.

My Approx. Total Memory says 3817 MB. I'm guessing this is local + non-local VRAM?

EDIT: Interesting to note also is that, for the hell of it, I tried turning back on Threaded Optimization, and I saw no difference in the new beta versus having it off (i.e. no v-buffer crashes so far). So maybe they fixed that issue at least so that you don't have to have Threaded Optimization off.

[bangtail 0]

Just installed and started it and now with "Namalsk" map, i get a "wheater overcast" scripting error on start.

a bit from the RPT:

Exe version: 1.05.70644
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather1.height'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather1.size'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather2.height'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather2.size'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather3.height'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather3.size'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather4.height'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather4.size'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather5.height'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value
Warning Message: No entry 'bin\config.bin/CfgWorlds/namalsk/Weather/Overcast/Weather5.size'.
Warning Message: '/' is not a value

Same thing here

[Gera_CCT 12]

With this beta 70644 and exThreads=3 i get benchmark 1 average fps droped from 34 to 29 and got a LOT of flickering textures on buildings and vehicles. :confused:

[darthmuller_cro 10]

Maybe not important but CAA1 project crashing game with this beta...

[Punisher5555 0]

I am getting Windows memory low errors now. I had no issues with 313. I think there is a memory leak somewhere.

Wiin7 x64 Pro

8Gb RAM.

[MavericK96 0]

With this beta 70644 and exThreads=3 i get benchmark 1 average fps droped from 34 to 29 and got a LOT of flickering textures on buildings and vehicles. :confused:

I also noticed the flickering. I've gotten that in the past but it seems worse in this beta than in 70313.

[Bulldogs 10]

Due to the changes in the cloud system (weather forecast) I'm guessing that all custom maps will have to be recompiled.

[tonygrunt 10]

@MavericK96

I have reported the same problems with yours in dev-heaven just a bit earlier, so you are not alone.

For me Chernogorsk has become a no fly zone, as the problem intensifies there.

On MP I usually set View Distance 5000-8000 depending and it has a negative effect on stability.

I think the problem is being worked on by BIS as in the latest betas I noticed a new command line "maxVRAM=", I tried setting some different values at it but couldn't notice any difference.

[MavericK96 0]

@MavericK96

I have reported the same problems with yours in dev-heaven just a bit earlier, so you are not alone.

For me Chernogorsk has become a no fly zone, as the problem intensifies there.

On MP I usually set View Distance 5000-8000 depending and it has a negative effect on stability.

I think the problem is being worked on by BIS as in the latest betas I noticed a new command line "maxVRAM=", I tried setting some different values at it but couldn't notice any difference.

Interesting, thanks for at least letting me know that I'm not alone. :D

Hopefully we'll see some use of that new parameter. How did you find out about it?

[tonygrunt 10]

Text search in EXE file, searching for any of the known parameters brings you to the sections with them (2 sections ASFAIK).

[Alex72 1]

I can't remember having this issue with ArmA vanilla but many times with sound mods. Don't have time to test right now though.

You never had sounds cut out in vanilla arma? Lol it has been around since ArmA even. But i had it cut out yesterday once. Felt bit better but might been lucky.

[jw custom 56]

You never had sounds cut out in vanilla arma? Lol it has been around since ArmA even. But i had it cut out yesterday once. Felt bit better but might been lucky.

Like i said, i can't remember having this issue with ArmA 2 vanilla. I have been using sound mods most of the times and i never played ArmA 1 so i wouldn't know about that!

And like i said i have had the sound cut out while using sound mods. With some of the first versions of ACEX_SM i even had sound cut outs using the M249, that i have never experienced with vanilla ArmA 2 maybe thats why i connect the issue with sound mods.

[Alex72 1]

Yep its an old problem alright. Go vanilla - get in a heli with FFAR's - shot a lot of them when close to the ground so you hear the explosions - experience the lack of sounds. :D

Really great having the shadow problem gone while zooming though. Good stuff. If the grass could be a bit lighter for performance also that would make my day.

[pauliesss 2]

The Z-Fighting is still there if you do maximum zoom with M107, sad...:mad:

[Zipper5 74]

I don't think it's possible to entirely remove it, Pauliesss. Even big-budget/big-title games have the same issue.

[gossamersolid 155]

I think I'm doing something wrong here. I set the target to arma2.exe in the beta folder and the start in folder is the root of arma 2. I deleted the old beta folder and then installed this one. I run the game and get:

"Error Compiling pixel shader PSSpecularAlpha:0"

Once again you all seem to be running it fine so I'm probably just missing something.

Specs:

Q6600 @ 3.0ghz

4gb ddr2

GTX 260 core 216

Win 7 Pro x64

[kklownboy 43]

most likely your shortcut is wrong.

[the.d 0]

A friend of mine has the same problem, GossamerS. We just went through several attempts to fix it - but to no avail. After searching around a bit it seem that some others have experiences this error since the 7xxxx beta patches.

[gossamersolid 155]

A friend of mine has the same problem, GossamerS. We just went through several attempts to fix it - but to no avail. After searching around a bit it seem that some others have experiences this error since the 7xxxx beta patches.

oh boy, maybe it's a mod I'm running. Here is my shortcut line:

"E:\Games\Armed Assault 2\beta\arma2.exe" -showScriptErrors -nomap -nosplash -world=Empty -mod=@HiFiSOUND;@TRSM_SoundPack;@mapPlus

[the.d 0]

The bug is definitely not caused by any mod - should I, against all odds, stumble upon a solution I will post it here. Don't count on it though :-/

The only thing that really "helps" is reverting to earlier betas or v1.05.