[Role Playing Game] Acheron

[knight26]

Hey guys. I has been a while. During the quarantine I seem to find few spare hours a day, so I can work on this project again. Recently got pumped by few models, hehe.

Played this map of current state few times, took me on average 2 hours to complete current content, of course I knew the content and I did not explore and moved on. Found few bugs and got few ideas for improvement.

Hey man, I'm super glad you got the energy back to work on this, and looking forward to playing it, too! If anything will make me get Reforged, it will be project such as yours and other talented map creators here on THW. Glad you're back.

It still lacks cinematics and voice acting, this I may skip at the moment and I may release a Demo. I would say 2/3 of entire content is complete, so it would require few months of hard work to get it all ready.

I'd suggest you move past the voice acting, and don't release a demo state, other than for beta/alpha testing purposes. I know how important voice acting is for that immersion, but making a short intro-cgi-like video (I'm thinking Enderal mod for Skyrim) would make your life easier, and you can focus solely on gameplay. A good story can be delivered without voices, in my opinion.

1. On what game patch should I continue the development? Currently using 1.27.

I'm no expert in this matter, but if Blizz fixes most and grants us back most of missing futures, go for the newest patches, maybe? I bet there's quality of life changes and stability for the Classic version at least (Which I'm assuming this mod will be for). I don't have mine updated yet, so don't take my word for it. Keep working on that patch, and then we'll see how things progress parallel.

2. During loading screen game sometimes crashes, 1/4 or 1/5 loading ends up crashing the game. It appears that problem lies not with the RAM as it was with Iceborn, because it sometimes crash on RAM-clean map. Any ideas what could cause this random crashing? It does not make it impossible to play, it just needs to restart the game from time to time.

No idea, but I hope you can resolve it.

Good luck on your project, and thanks for your contribution, as ever.

 

[Veritas 117]

As far as the patch is concerned I have been looking into this question myself. I’ve read through a lot of threads where people have been laying out the pros and the cons. The best I can gather is that single player maps aren’t so much of an issue like some of the multiplayer maps are as far as bugs are concerned. I think one of the newer patches might be best. Or if at all possible make it playable on the newer and older patches, but that might be easier said than done.
I still use 1.27 but I have been working on updating my campaign for the newer patches to use some of the new natives. Right now I have to clean out a lot of old JNGP stuff that is no longer compatible. Also I guess custom campaigns aren’t working on the newest patch so far that’s a concern too. Not that that matters for this particular map.

If you are able to finish with 1.27 without using any of the stuff from USMWE that came with JNGP maybe that would allow the most amount of people the ability to play it regardless of the patch they are using?

 

[deepstrasz]

1. On what game patch should I continue the development? Currently using 1.27.

I think 1.27 maps should be working on newer patches. One of mine seems to on 1.32.

2. During loading screen game sometimes crashes, 1/4 or 1/5 loading ends up crashing the game. It appears that problem lies not with the RAM as it was with Iceborn, because it sometimes crash on RAM-clean map. Any ideas what could cause this random crashing? It does not make it impossible to play, it just needs to restart the game from time to time.

Still on 1.27? Does the editor crash when it loads the map sometimes? If it's not a problematic texture/model (too big blp>512x512 or bad geosets->you'd need to run the models through GhostWolf's Sanity Tester), then it might be that 1.27 isn't optimized for huge amounts of custom resources but I doubt right now Acheron is having more than Iceborn.
Ah, are you using the game's editor or a modded one? That could be the issue.

 

[Freddyk]

1. On what game patch should I continue the development? Currently using 1.27.

Please stay on 1.27 !
This is the patch all modders should be working on in my opinion, the one that should have last forever... before some blizzard bunglers came and broke everything.
With this version you make sure everyone can play it.

 

[APproject]

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

I guess I will be progressing with 1.27 then.

Map never crash except during loading process, when a saved map file is being loaded. It never crashed on the first load, only when I attempt to load a saved game, it happens. But it happends randomly, I did not find any pattern like with Iceborn, where it is all related to RAM build-up. Editor does not crash. For custom resources it is quite similar to Iceborn in current state, I tried to compress few massive models and saved like 40-50 MBs long time ago, it was mainly deleting animations though. I am using JNGP World Editor, I can't use regular World Editor because currently there are 22k Doodads. I hope its not models, because I would need a week to go through all of them, hehe.

 

[Freddyk]

If it crash only on loading a saved game, it's probably linked to a specific trigger or system, with a state that is not saved properly.

 

[deepstrasz]

I am using JNGP World Editor, I can't use regular World Editor because currently there are 22k Doodads. I hope its not models, because I would need a week to go through all of them, hehe.

Make a test version where you don't bypass the normal doodad+destructible limit. See if it happens again.

 

[Veritas 117]

In the first two maps of my campaign I have over 30K doodads in each and I am able to transition back and forth between them (saving a game cache and then loading) BUT I just recently found that when I have been playing for long enough and try to make a transition it will crash on the loading screen. I wonder if we are having a similar issue. As far as I know all of my triggers are leak free and it doesn’t happen during the game, just loading the next map. I’ll keep investigating and if I come up with a solution I will let you know.
I wonder if it would have the same problems with a newer patch, but I’m not to the point where I can test that yet. (Doodad limit being one of the issues JNGP being another)

 

[deepstrasz]

@Veritas 117 leaks can come from a wide variety of things like tome/rune type items that aren't cleared and stack the memory.
It's not easy to find out what the cause is but I guess as much stuff as a map has in it, imports, triggers etc. it will need more memory to handle over time.
For instance, I don't remember having issue with @APproject's Seth's Reign. Don't know how heavy that one is compared to Iceborn, Acheron and yours.

 

[APproject]

For Iceborn it was triggers, it leaked like hell. With newer versions I managed to clean up most of it. You can play the game and constantly check Task Manager for RAM usage by wc3.exe, during Iceborn it quickly turned from 300 MBs to unlimited amount of you play long enough. I found out that in Iceborn case if you have over 1500 MBs of RAM, it will 100 % crash upon loading a saved game, when wc3.exe is closed and reopened, you can load easily, because it is leak free. Also I found a massive leak from object editor, I wanted to remove health bars from certain units and for that I used negative values for the selection scale, by clicking such unit you instantly boost RAM by 30-40 MB, this also led to excess of RAM and crash. If long gameplay assures a crash, check Task Manager before loading and see what RAM is used before and now.

Acheron is seemingly different, because even if RAM free I attempt to load the same file 5-6 times in a row, there is a high a chance it will crash at least one of those times. Just constantly reloading over and over the same file sometimes leads to crash, without pattern.

Seth's Reign is quite simple and smaller when compared to those maps in multiples.

 

[Veritas 117]

I wanted to remove health bars from certain units and for that I used negative values for the selection scale, by clicking such unit you instantly boost RAM by 30-40 MB, this also led to excess of RAM and crash. If long gameplay assures a crash, check Task Manager before loading and see what RAM is used before and now.

This is interesting. I use this method with a few things as well. If there is a better leak free way of removing the health bar while still having a unit selectable I would like to hear it. I will try playing my game with the task manager on and see what happens. Not sure why I never thought to try that!

 

[APproject]

I did not come across any proper and easy solution so far, so I went with 0.01 scale. It still has a black dot over unit, but I guess it is better than excess RAM.

 

[FeelsGoodMan]

I did not come across any proper and easy solution so far, so I went with 0.01 scale. It still has a black dot over unit, but I guess it is better than excess RAM.

I'm not really sure if this works or not, but I have heard that a units height is calculated from its highest point, and that the health bar height is set according to that logic. This means, if my theory checks out, that you can create a single bone very high up and then re-save the model with the newly created bone. That way the health bar will appear too high to be seen.

I am very far from any modeller, but it is an interesting thought It might break something idk.

 

[Yousef]

That's some very exciting news! I'm really excited to play Acheron!

 

[PROXY]

I'm not really sure if this works or not, but I have heard that a units height is calculated from its highest point, and that the health bar height is set according to that logic. This means, if my theory checks out, that you can create a single bone very high up and then re-save the model with the newly created bone. That way the health bar will appear too high to be seen.

I am very far from any modeller, but it is an interesting thought It might break something idk.

Should work, although it might need to be some form of mesh, although a bone might suffice too.

 

[YingMM]

I did not come across any proper and easy solution so far, so I went with 0.01 scale. It still has a black dot over unit, but I guess it is better than excess RAM.

maybe you can use a very very high height hp bar for the models of the special units？

 

[A Void]

@APproject is this dead?