1.1 Patch Stability and Overview

Well all I can say is 1.1 killed my FF experience lol. I can no longer play it on any of my systems.

I logged many many hours until 1.1 came out. I have pegged the problem down to a bad pointer being fired to the video drivers, which causes the nvidia drivers to totally sieze into an inifinite loop. Some more indepth of decompiled chunks of the mod show a handful of memory management and related oversights that seem to accumulate to instability.

More indepth analysis reveleaed what I had expected. 99% of the people having video-driver related crashes on here... well it does appear to be problems in FF itself that are causing the problems. Good examples are corrupted dxmodify tables and whatnot, proper video drivers see that the various dx are corrupted and works around them. The crashes people are having are when they use hacked up video drivers or whatnot, that have all the 'security features' removed. So in short, if you install proper video drivers, in most cases ATI/Nvidia/etc. have so many failsafes coded into the drivers (to keep crashes/hangs from happening) that it is rediculous.

Valve SDK? In theory if things were coded properly a mod would not have the ability to corrupt data sent to the host implementor of the mod itself (halflife 2 in this case). But with halflife2, you sure as hell can.

Fixing these problems? In reality, these problems DO exist in the code, and whoever wrote the code has probably never realized the 'walking on eggshells' kind of approach that has to be taken with all ins and outs with the hl2 layer in terms of texture modification and transfer. If I were to fix it myself, I would need more or less the entire source for the dll to pinpoint the problems. Fact is, they are not 'problems', they are more or less failures in the halflife2 mod implementation system.

Oh and a little tip about TF:
90% of encounters in maps that are less open have point-contacts between 300-900ms. This means if you are standing around a corner and a scout runs around the corner, you have on average 1 second to do something about it. This being said, every single class has to be engineered with the ability to handle this. With the new spin-up time on the hwguy being longer than the point-contact constant, this makes the class virtually useless in any of these situations. Some maps in the FF package consist of over 70% point contact choke points -- so this clearly eliminates the hwguy as a useful class in totality. Ive noticed that not a single person even uses the class since 1.1 came out. Ive heard the argument 'we are trying to balance it', but in reality, TF is NOT about true balance; the first quake versions were purposely inbalanced to create addiction. Addiction IS YOUR FRIEND when a new mod is made. So far the delay on the sniper rifle = lowered addiction. Hwguy spinup = lowered addiction. The spy cloak = raised addiction.. All said and done, you guys are balancing TF too much. It must be very carefully imbalanced to generate the addiction necessary to ensure the mod doesnt die. No engineer teleporters? This is a good example. This was added early on, because it seriously boosted the addiction level of playing engineer. Imbalanced the game? In actuality, not really.

What did it cause? Tonnes of people to join the server and play engineer. Thats better than what's happening right now; nobody is joining the servers at all anymore.

So in short: All the strange video drivers crashes? They are being caused by sections of code in the FF dll that do not account for sections of faulty code in the SDK itself, which are being ignored/filtered out by 'most' video drivers. Its the ones that don't that are crashing.

[barronofhellion]

Originally Posted by Virinix

which causes the nvidia drivers to totally sieze into an inifinite loop

you must have a OLD card or something i have 2 nvidia machines and no problems

[Digital_Ghost]

i've played ff with 2 diff nvidia cards now, a 6600gt and currently a 8600gts and the game ran fine for me. I only ever had a small handful of minor crashes with version 1.0, and not a single one with 1.1. As a matter of fact i get faster load times with 1.1 and the game runs even smoother then before.

So either your drivers got borked somehow..but i cant see the game doing that much trouble. Plus overall feedback i've read and heard its been running much better for everyone since 1.1 .

[barronofhellion]

Originally Posted by Digital_Ghost

So either your drivers got borked somehow

yea sounds to me like there was some borking going on... either that or hes gota 16meg tnt card

lol.. if you have no idea what your talking about, refrain from commenting.

[mervaka]

ok, so what are your specs? no point in taking the higher ground until you've actually posted this.

[Saint Thoth]

I'd be guessing old/corrupt video drivers, incorrect install, or incorrect/corrupt Steam graphic settings.

I've run it on a nVidia 7950GT (XP) and a nVidia GeForce 7150M (in Vista, not by choice, mind you), with both older, newer (beta), and OEM drivers, and I've had no issues.

The only trouble I've ever had with it, is if I alt-tab around during the loading sequence, sometimes it'll lock.

...and given that close to 70% of the players on Steam are running nVidia cards, I think if 99% of them were having problems, we woulda heard about this before.

Totally agree with the HWG observation, sounds like they are doing something about that, but probably won't be getting back our old quick-reacting HW from the sound of it.

[4est]

OP

Please read and follow this:

http://www.fortress-forever.com/foru...ad.php?t=11141

[zSilver_Fox]

Originally Posted by Virinix

Well all I can say is 1.1 killed my FF experience lol. I can no longer play it on any of my systems.

I logged many many hours until 1.1 came out. I have pegged the problem down to a bad pointer being fired to the video drivers, which causes the nvidia drivers to totally sieze into an inifinite loop. Some more indepth of decompiled chunks of the mod show a handful of memory management and related oversights that seem to accumulate to instability.

More indepth analysis reveleaed what I had expected. 99% of the people having video-driver related crashes on here... well it does appear to be problems in FF itself that are causing the problems. Good examples are corrupted dxmodify tables and whatnot, proper video drivers see that the various dx are corrupted and works around them. The crashes people are having are when they use hacked up video drivers or whatnot, that have all the 'security features' removed. So in short, if you install proper video drivers, in most cases ATI/Nvidia/etc. have so many failsafes coded into the drivers (to keep crashes/hangs from happening) that it is rediculous.

Valve SDK? In theory if things were coded properly a mod would not have the ability to corrupt data sent to the host implementor of the mod itself (halflife 2 in this case). But with halflife2, you sure as hell can.

Fixing these problems? In reality, these problems DO exist in the code, and whoever wrote the code has probably never realized the 'walking on eggshells' kind of approach that has to be taken with all ins and outs with the hl2 layer in terms of texture modification and transfer. If I were to fix it myself, I would need more or less the entire source for the dll to pinpoint the problems. Fact is, they are not 'problems', they are more or less failures in the halflife2 mod implementation system.

Oh and a little tip about TF:
90% of encounters in maps that are less open have point-contacts between 300-900ms. This means if you are standing around a corner and a scout runs around the corner, you have on average 1 second to do something about it. This being said, every single class has to be engineered with the ability to handle this. With the new spin-up time on the hwguy being longer than the point-contact constant, this makes the class virtually useless in any of these situations. Some maps in the FF package consist of over 70% point contact choke points -- so this clearly eliminates the hwguy as a useful class in totality. Ive noticed that not a single person even uses the class since 1.1 came out. Ive heard the argument 'we are trying to balance it', but in reality, TF is NOT about true balance; the first quake versions were purposely inbalanced to create addiction. Addiction IS YOUR FRIEND when a new mod is made. So far the delay on the sniper rifle = lowered addiction. Hwguy spinup = lowered addiction. The spy cloak = raised addiction.. All said and done, you guys are balancing TF too much. It must be very carefully imbalanced to generate the addiction necessary to ensure the mod doesnt die. No engineer teleporters? This is a good example. This was added early on, because it seriously boosted the addiction level of playing engineer. Imbalanced the game? In actuality, not really.

What did it cause? Tonnes of people to join the server and play engineer. Thats better than what's happening right now; nobody is joining the servers at all anymore.

So in short: All the strange video drivers crashes? They are being caused by sections of code in the FF dll that do not account for sections of faulty code in the SDK itself, which are being ignored/filtered out by 'most' video drivers. Its the ones that don't that are crashing.

What drivers and card are you running? Which DLL specifically is causing the problems? Just saying "The FF DLL" isn't enough.

PS Nice statistics, but how did you gather all your data?

[richard nixon]

I played this mod for a long time on a nvidia geforce 6200

didnt crash.

[zSilver_Fox]

And with no reply... do you know what you're talking about sir?

EDIT: And yet another day goes by. Almost sounds like someone wanted to get their hands on the C++ code for one of the DLLs.

[mervaka]

please respond?

[pF]

Using one right now.

[4est]

OK...

We are now on patch 1.11 and the guy with the problem won't respond.

locked.