I set down the value and it worked at first. then i installed rebirth Flame and it started crashing again. Not just with the Fated circle but also with Blast zone. I will try again with disabled Rebirth Flame and the low cache value and report if something happens.To those who are experiencing the crash:
Set your cache_size=250 or less in \tonberry\prefs.txt. I believe the problem is that the cache is growing too large.
I managed to reproduce the crash today, and the debugging I've been able to do is making it look like the FF8_EN.exe process is trying to use greater than the ~1.75GB of memory allowed to 32-bit processes. It seems the simulated PSX GPU is using more non-GPU memory than I realized... and I may have added a zero when I was doing my memory calculations to determine optimal cache size.
But on the bright side, debugging this thing has led to all sorts of optimizations that should make things faster once we get the crash sorted out. I'll know more in the next few days, but our solution may be as simple as keeping the cache size between 100-250 (which seems to be about 20 gameplay minutes worth of textures).
No. The problem is not a full cache--the data structure we've created could hold millions of textures if we had the RAM for it. The problem is that 32-bit processes are only allowed 2GB of memory, and after necessary OS components that ends up being less, something like 1.75GB. The FFVIII process (FF8_EN.exe) is necessarily 32-bit and the d3d9Callback.dll library we've created is attached to that process at startup, so we're limited to that 1.75GB minus whatever the game is already using. I haven't had an opportunity to properly profile FF8_EN.exe to see the most memory it uses without Tonberry and I'm not sure there's any way of determining that maximum for sure, but when I set my cache_size=300 it finally crashed after a long while and at =280 it seemed to reach a steady state, so I think <=250 should be safe, assuming we have at least 2GB of RAM to work with.
Really happy to hear this. I will release 2.04 ASAP with the optimizations I stumbled upon while debugging the crash and everything should be even smoother.
I am not convinced that these crashes are related to the memory overflow exception we've been talking about. The fact that you're seeing the crash specifically during certain moves and animations is evidence that this is something texture or hash related. I vaguely remember some others discussing a problem with certain limit breaks in conjunction with the new character textures, I'll see if I can find it.
Neat, I didn't realize you could enable Large Address Aware without compiling the executable yourself. Still, this is not guaranteed to work; depending on what kind of pointer arithmetic FF8_EN.exe is doing--the fact that the port is emulating PSX processes worries me--this could break the game even without Tonberry running. Have you (or anyone else) tried patching FF8_EN.exe? I will try later when I get a chance.
) your guess is as good as mine, but I'm thinking I must have dropped a zero when I first did the math. Replacement textures are generally 1024x1024 pixels and each pixel is 4 bytes for a total of 1024x1024x4 = 4MB per image, plus a little bit of overhead for the cache logic. For 2GB of RAM that comes out to 512 images, but of course we have to allow for FF8's memory usage which is why we drop to 250. For the additional 1-2GB enabled by LargeAddressAware, we can safely add 200 and 500 images to the maximum cache size since the additional RAM will not be used by FF8 itself.That's because it's using the PSX's cache management system. The menu module's graphics that have the font/menu stuff are loaded into VRAM perminatly and never swapped out. Things like backgrounds and battle scenes are overwritten at a drop of a hat, (Most often during a module swap)
Precisely. I want to expose this capability to modders and players such that hashmaps have an option for designating textures that should be kept in the cache at all times. This should be quite possible using the current cache setup, I've just got to add a persistent portion that will not be involved in a few cache operations.
Mcindus brought this up before. But it's probably the battler codes, Squall's most likely, from Rebirth Flame colliding with the Lunar Cry mod if you're using that. You can either disable one of the mods to see, or disable the Tonberry upscale code and or Squall's to see if that fixes the crashes.
This is super helpful. As FatedCourage said, this is a known issue, but colliding textures should not be causing the game to crash--they should just look weird in game. I've recently been successful in attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the FF8 process (which is made unnecessarily difficult by that damned launcher...) so I will try to replicate this crash and figure out what's causing it.
It was said before that because Tonberry had special animations, it would cause a bit of a problem. I personally turned Lunar Cry off for that side quest and turned it on again only after getting Tonberry King. This was before I limited the cache size to 350 (and before Tonberry 2.03), which, by the way, has eliminated my crash problems for the time being.
Use OllyDbg or Cheat Engine debugger to show debug window, as those two allow you to attach to running process instead of running with debugger.
You can attach the VS debugger to a process as well, it was just cumbersome because the options VS gives you make it seem like you have to start the actual process from within VS, which is impossible because FF8_EN.exe must be launched from FF8_Launcher.exe. What I ended up doing was creating a message dialog from within d3d9Callback.dll that halts the process before Tonberry is loaded, then attaching the VS debugger to FF8_EN.exe through the Windows task manager before closing the dialog and continuing.
I've went and fought against the Tonberry and every Limit Break I use(Lion Heart, Blasting Zone, Fated Circle) does indeed cause a crash. It's like when those Grendels use Breath and causes my game to crash.
Okay well I've also been using this opportunity to test out the new persistent section of the cache and the optimizations I've made along the way, so maybe this means the other changes fixed this bug without my realizing it. 2.04 should be released by tonight or tomorrow
start00_13,18407996689093672857start01_0,17754410698961239961magita_0,15996785876420001791!sysfld00_13,8637763346649579509!sysfld01_13,18410706480546952703!sysfld01_13,18410706480580507135!iconfl00_13,17292482743138735965!iconfl00_13,17292623961730439001!iconfl00_13,17292623961730700665!iconfl00_13,17292482743138997597!iconfl00_13,17292623961596221273!iconfl01_13,6318371992938829623!iconfl01_13,15546067051815065015!iconfl01_13,15546067051817164215!iconfl01_13,6318371992938829735!iconfl01_13,15546067051816113975!iconfl01_13,6318371992938829607!iconfl02_13,9070099529679074665!iconfl02_13,9070099529679066473!iconfl02_13,9079106728933889869!iconfl03_13,18121884401087167930!iconfl03_13,18121884401086577978!iconfl03_13,17257784389123030461!iconfl03_13,18121884401086578106!iconflmaster_13,15435299784218115583!iconflmaster_13,15507357378256043519!face_b00_13,12373840744287225834!face_b01_13,11207991935878756332!gf_big00_13,18129762662332643306!gf_big01_13,10743326825426753480mag00_13,18437446603385071613mag01_13,18446734040665948111mag02_13,18437446053629263869mag03_13,18446734100795486141mag04_13,18437446053629263851mag05_13,18446576801913237501mag06_13,18437446053629259769mag07_13,16226826136128831453Doubt it's the specs. Your computer shouldn't have any trouble playing the game. I have lag at those moments and I have an AMD FX 8370, GTX 970, and 32GB of ram. It's no Intel rig, but it's great for most everything. I've noticed it only lags depending on the resolution you set. For example, when I set it to 1600x900 there is no lag for summons like Eden or Gilgamesh. Or for Wishing Star. And no lag in the final battle. But once I set it to 1920x1080 it's obviously there. And if I use GeDoSaTo to go even higher...well let's just say that it's a slideshow.
Not sure if others experience it much or not. I don't see it discussed often. Just seems like it has something to do with the game itself.