Grimrock

so much time passed on modding, improwing, removing, reducing wallset, textures, I simply cannot test my mod with textures resolution set to max.

In high settings, when starting the mod, the game load and load things, the memory used get up to 1 696 Mb then the game crash and give me this: The mod is about:
105 levels, I planed 150 levels
117Mo (the exported mod take only 71Mb)
23,6 Mb of musics, I recently export all musics with 96Kbps ogg quality
4 Mb of sounds
49Mb of custom textures
33Mb of custom or modified log2 models
6,5Mb of lua files
Thousands of thousands lines in the dungeon.lua
Thousands of models spawned

71 Mb and it's the end of all! I'm pissed off and don't know what to do now, except going to make me a cup of tea.

log2 assets:
I have removed approx, 12Mb of textures (that I don't need)
About the models, I don't know how much but maybe 30Mb of model are removed
Also I have modified some textures size to 256x256 (items that have texture > 256x256), removed all specular textures of the item and replaced them by the black material. <--- 20Mb gained

Most of my custom assets use log2 models, some are loaded from the mod_assets but most of them are loaded from the asset pack, using custom or log 2 material, directly with the command line in the model class.

e.g: I made it this way because I think that it's better to improve mod size or memory usage, to not reload same models or texture under a different name twice. Of course, if the game act so.
I load all log2 assets in my init.lua, has to be done to remove some of the asset that are no longer needed.

So much improvement, small size wallset 2 to 10Mb. My modified, black tomb wallset takes only 2,3 Mb, and this is only with log2 models, no new textures. The city wallset of EW, which takes only 9,7 Mb now, reduced a lot. Most of the texture were replaced by log2 textures. A custome ice wallset, amethyst mines, imperial marble palace, Oddinball sci-fi stuff, dwarf wallset based on the castle wallset (not implemented, what's the point now?), all of this takes only 30 to 40 mb (40 with the dwarf wallset).

Tons of textures, normal or specular are no more used or are replaced by other textures, I have count 125Mb of textures no more loaded.
And I still have "not enough memory"! I figured that so, at least, things will be ok, and I can use any other custom wallset, like Phitt's asian tileset.
While trying to save memory usage at the expense of global graphic quality, I thought that will be great to remove lot's of things of the memory, but.. No! All this work for nothing!

Tested without any heavy scripts, not something like or , like fw hooks, mam or npcscript , don't work!
Tested without using some wallset, don't work!
Tested with 4 levels only (removed all other), works! OMG!
Tested with all settings to max, except texture resolution set to medium, works!
Strangely I simply removed 3 wallset, I don't know how many, let's say that make 20Mb of things removed, the mod wouldn't show itself with high resolution textures. Is the number of levels that is too big? the number of lines loaded in the dungeon.lua? the number of model spawned? Is there a limit? WTF!

wrong textures?
wrong models?
too much levels?
too much item in my gfx atlas?
wrong script?
wrong guy?

If someone got any idea of what's going wrong, you are welcome.
Anyway, I will not continu that mod, I'm simply bored. I don't want to play/test it with medium texture resolution or I can throw away my computer!

It's really hard to guess what's wrong without seeing the sources. But one possible cause could be some recursive or looping script which stores something in memory.
And 105 levels is a lot, the original dungeon has 34 levels, so maybe you just have too much stuff(objects) in your dungeon.

Here is a simple script which prints out the amount of objects in your dungeon. Copy paste this to a script entity named debug (or whatever) Start your dungeon and type in console: debug.script.countObjects()
For a reference the original dungeon has 58922 objects (just tested it).

It also sounds like this is the kind of mod that should be divided into parts 1, 2 , and 3, not at all unlike the three LOTR movies; and books. It's just one book, but it's bound as three volumes.

The ORRR2 mod had just ten levels, but we had to jump through several memory management hoops to allow that mod to be playable at a decent frame rate. (The comparison isn't 1:1 accurate, but the point is that the engine loads up all of the assets at the start... when it could be setup such that all of the maps in part 3, are not present until part 3, and not bogging down part 1.)

A cave-in or even just a pitfall ~for instance, can plausibly cut off part one from part two.

are you saying that for instance it is possible in a 30 level dungeon to load level 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ... and the rest later on when they player for instance activates a floortrigger --> script that loads level 7+ untill level 30 ?

and how would you do that?

Why not make it 1,000 levels? Go for the Gold!

kelly1111 wrote:are you saying that for instance it is possible in a 30 level dungeon to load level 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ... and the rest later on when they player for instance activates a floortrigger --> script that loads level 7+ untill level 30 ?

and how would you do that?

No... I was saying that such a large story could by split into more than one mod, and the party imported from part 1 to part 2, and so on. Saying that a mod that starts near an Ocean, but ends in a desert... perhaps... need not even include the desert and tomb tilesets in part 1 of the mod.

thats quite sad to hear, as I am expecting the same sooner or later :/
As for now my dungeon crashes with the same problem after loading about two dungeon areas when playing on high and about loading five areas on medium setting.
edit: it only convinces me not to edit fully what I wanted but better to finish my mod sooner but functional... quite sad.

@drakkan:

How many levels do you have?
How many objects?

I'm just curiuous as to what the limit is.

My mod is 28 levels in size
mod assets folder 510 mb
game objects 18050

but it is still working when I export it and play on high details (everything)

So ... what is the difference here with the mod from bongobeat? Is it levels ? objects?

Damm that's sad Bongo really mate I think I will have to consider change as well.

Issac how is it possible to check what items the party has at the end of Mod 1? So when the player goes to Mod 2 they have the same items from Mod 1??

Ok then to all the Coders out there. Is there a way when the player finishes Mod 1 that the save file is loaded into the second chapter Mod 2 etc.... Like the Bauldur's Gate series and others. I think I remember someone writing some code in LOG 1 that can do this.

The last save game would have to be called a certain name eg: LastSave then the 2nd Mod would look for this file and load what it needs I guess, I am not sure how this would work lol

Then you could make a Mod with many chapters and each one could be 30 levels big and not one Mod that's 100 or so levels big. This would be good for adventure type game with lots of open outside area etc..... I want to create a adventure mod but realize now it may be impossible with the amount of levels I need to complete it.

No.

However, you can abuse the party import feature to store arbitrary information. E.g. use Champion:setName() to encode all champions' inventories, game statistics, and whatever else you want to transfer, then have the player import the party into the next mod. I tested with a 1 MB name and it saved and loaded just fine, so there is plenty of space available. So if you want players to be able to go back and forth between two or more dungeons and have arbitrary persistence, it can be done. Whether this would actually be a good design is debatable, however.