Bho on 29/9/2005 at 01:37
Hi all. I have GarrettLoader 1.12, and today tried to play Special Vintage. However, the mission would crash less than a quarter of the way through loading. As a result, i decided to do the vertex pool fix posted on these forums in user.ini. After doing this the level worked, but there were a few strange things happening:
Things that were strange with the FM and T3 OM's:
1. Everytime i looked at an inventory item that i had not picked up yet for the first time (eg oil flask, flashbomb) i would get a massive drop in frame rate. I also got this drop when looking at certain items too (like the mirror in the bathroom in SV)
2. Quite often, whenever a new sound propagated (like a guard yelling, or a change in ambient music, or a chest opening) i would get a big drop in frame rate, but this would eventually correct itself.
3. The main menu has a very bad framerate.
Things that were strange with the FM alone:
1. I would get the dialogue box telling me about oil flask, health potion the first time i picked one up. Not sure if this was meant to happen.
While the rest of my machine is fairly respectable (P4 2.8, 512 MB ram) my graphics card is pretty weak (Radeon 9200SE). Did anyone else have similar problems after altering user.ini?
ascottk on 29/9/2005 at 01:54
Does this sound familiar? Your & T-Smith's video cards are nearly the same. Honestly I'll start blaming the video card even though T-Smith says not to.
Quote Posted by T-Smith
I recently installed GarrettLoader (currently running V1.12, but I had the same problem I'm about to describe with the previous version). I'm using a clean install of Thief 3 (no Minimalist or custom textures), I downloaded the proper .exe editor file since I don't have the editor installed myself, and I added the required lines to the user.ini. I've downloaded two FMs (Impurities in the Mix and Special Vintage), and tried playing them both, and I have the same problem with both.
When I get to the main title screen, the game runs EXTREMELY SLOWLY. When I actually play the FMs themselves, I occasionally experiance horrible slowdown, and whenever a piece of loot comes into my view, the game damn near stops, the slowdown becomes horrific.
I'm running on 512DDR RAM, Athalon XP 2400, and a RADEON 9200. Now I know you'd automatically assume that the video card is the problem, but the thing is I've always been able to run the primary game (Thief 3) with none of these problems, typically at a decent FPS of around 25, with all the settings turned down.
I was wondering if there was any reason anyone can think of outside of the video card of why this might be happening. I plan to upgrade the card soon, but I wonder why I can run Deadly Shadows just fine, but not these FMs (though I know there's a large difference between the two of them).
nomad of the pacific on 29/9/2005 at 02:39
How much did you increase the vertex pools? If they're too small, the game will crash, as you have seen. But if they're too big, they eat up too much of your memory and the game will slow down. Try decreasing their size by small amounts until the game crashes and then bring them back up until it works again. That should give you your best possible performance for your computer.
Bho on 29/9/2005 at 11:13
Guys - the problem was because i made the following changes to user.ini:
[PCVertexPools]
DynamicVertexPool0=31457280
StaticVertexPool=26214400
StaticShadowVertexPool=15728640
instead of
[PCVertexPools]
StaticShadowVertexPool=15728640
when i changed user.ini to the latter text the problems largely went away, though there is still a slight slowdown when i look at an object which i have not picked up yet at all.
OrbWeaver on 29/9/2005 at 11:39
It sounds like a video memory problem, especially if you're getting slowdowns when new objects come into view (this can happen due to the delay in uploading the new texture to VRAM). Perhaps the textures in the retail game are much lower in detail than in this FM, so you did not experience this problem to such an extent.
Static Vertex Buffers are also held in video memory, so if you make these too big you can expect problems.
potterr on 29/9/2005 at 15:57
I think then what I will do is to reduce the default user.ini file settings GL does to slightly smaller settings....Again though it does make it important for the FM makers to set thier user_patch.ini files at the right levels.
New Horizon on 29/9/2005 at 16:03
Also, make sure you're not simply cutting and pasting these settings from the forum. There is a typo that I think is getting by a lot of people and is probably causing some issues.
Quote Posted by Bho
[PCVertexPools]
DynamicVertexPool0=31457280StaticVertexPool=26214400
StaticShadowVertexPool=15728640
That zero after Pool shouldn't be there.
ascottk on 8/10/2005 at 03:00
What kind of sound card do you have? I just bought an Audigy 2 ZS & it does wonders with performance. Before this sound card I wouldn't run Doom 3 or T3 with any anti-aliasing or multisampling or the frame rates would drop. Now I can run both games @ 4x multisampling/anti-aliasing on high detail settings & both games run great. For $99 dollars you can't go wrong :thumb:
