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TDM Technical Problems


SlipNthruShadows

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Hey All,

 

I've been viewing the boards as a guest for quite some time now and I hate for this to be my first post, but it is what it is. I'm a huge fan of the thief fanchaise and I'm tickled to see this group investing their lives into a mod that resembles the feel/formula that made the orginal Thief such a masterful game. Anyhow I want to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to this mod's development. Its a great achievement and a jewel to the Thief Community; keep up the fantastic work!

 

Now onto the subject of my post. I didn't see an offical technical problem thread so I figured I'd start one in the hopes that it would consolidate such issues for future troubleshooting for the users and be a means of tracking them for the mod developers.

 

I've just recently installed the TDM: St. Lucia Mod/Map =D. The problem is I'm suffering from some issues.

 

 

Background about my Rig & Doom3 w/o St. Lucia.

 

- Rig -

Make / Model: Custom

OS: Vista Ultimate - 64bit - (SP1)

CPU: Quad Core Q9550

Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - (Drivers: Catalyst 8.10)

RAM: G.Skill DDR2-800 - (8gig)

Motherboard: Asus Rampage Formula - (Chipset: Intel X48)

SoundCard: Asus Supreme FXII - (PCI-x card shipped w/ mobo)

Monitor: Dual Monitors

**Hardware Drivers Updated: 1 month ago.

 

Doom 3 Specifications:

Doom 3: Version - 1.3.1.1304 *verified using console*

-Able to run Doom3 w/o any problems.

 

St Lucia Video Settings:

Screen Size: 1600x1200

Aspect Ratio: 4:3

V-sync: No

Antialiasing - Off

Ambient Rendering - Standard

 

When I loaded St. Lucia, all the menus / load screens worked well. As soon as I entered the level all the ground / terrain & most building textures were Black. I could see vegetation, static mesh objects like wagons / barrels / pallets / boxes, and the sky box appeared error free. I could also see 2 different building textures, a cross hatched wood type texture and a wood grain texture, the rest of the building textures were black. I would have taken a screenshot of it, but I don't know how =D. I tried adjusting the gamma but it had no affect on the ground / terrain textures.

 

Then after I tried to exit the game for the first time, it crashed and left a light grey screen and I had to hard reset my computer because it was completely locked. There was no error message that I could relay to you either. Since then I have not been able to repeat this crash.

 

I hope this is enough detail to start with. I'd be more than happy to provide more details. I'm just out of ideas and would need a bit more direction.

 

On the topic of screen resolution, are there any plans of supporting widescreen such as the 16:10 / 16:9 resolutions in the future?

Edited by SlipNthruShadows
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Regarding the black texture problems, have you checked out the FAQ on our wiki?

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/FAQ#Graphics

 

You can adjust the 16:10 aspect ratio in the Settings / Video menu section to fit your monitors.

 

PS: And thanks for the kind words, appreciated. :)

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Fantastic, thanks for pointing me to your wiki... guess I should have looked a little bit harder.

 

Anyhow I edited the config file for both the textures and the screen resolution. Now I can see the level in its full glory.

 

 

I did however notice one other thing while playing, Anytime I panned / rotated the screen using the mouse the image appeared really choppy. Moving in straight line everything was seemless no "choppiness". Using the com_showfps command, I could see that I was getting a constant 40 fps no matter what I did physically in the game. From my experience that frame rate should be more than enough to prevent this type of visual "choppimness" affect.

 

I've tried lower resolutions, turnning off AA, turning Vsync on / off none seemed to eleviate the affect, and my frame rate would remain 40fps no matter what I changed these settings to. Kinda seemed odd.

 

These are the current texture settings:

 

seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "1"

seta image_useNormalCompression "2"

seta image_useAllFormats "1"

seta image_useCompression "1"

seta image_preload "1"

 

Have any ideas?

 

Thanks again for the help.

 

P.S. So far St. Lucia looks stunning. I'm looking forward to being able to use TDM to create some content. Its simply amazing what you all have achieved with this mod thus far.

Edited by SlipNthruShadows
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  • 7 months later...

Hi guys, it's my first post here as well and unfortunately my Dark Mod doesn't work properly. I've patched D3 to 1.3.1.1304 (version info in the console) and it works fine. I've extracted the /saintlucia folder into the D3 folder and copied the devil.dll into the windows/system32/ folder. I ran TDM by creating a desktop shortcut (that works) and started a new game. The video-briefing works fine and so does the buy-menu, but when I try to start the mission and the loading bar reaches 100% (at least I suppose, but you can't tell exaxtly by those blooddrops), the game freezes for about 30 sec and finally returns to the menu screen. From this point on the sound is gone as well. I've tried different sound and graphics settings and installed the newest audio and video drivers. I also tried to run TDM from the D3 mod-manager and loading the map manually via console. Same result :angry: Did I probably miss a step? Please help a newbie so he can enjoy TDM as well!

 

System:

XP professional 32bit SP3

3GB RAM

Athlon X2 3800 @ 2Ghz

ATI HD 3850 512Mb

Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS

Edited by Alx
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Yep!

 

sound: missing efxs/saintlucia.efx

Failed to open \\.\pipe\dm_renderpipe

Game Map Shutdown

ERROR: idRenderSystemLocal::UnCrop: currentRenderCrop < 1

WARNING: idSession: triggering mainmenu watchdog

 

and dozens couldn't load model and couldn't load sound warnings above that! :angry:

 

Looks like the game is looking for the files in the wrong folder...

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Have you tried compiling the map in console: "Dmap saint_lucia" and then trying to launch the mission?

 

Tried that and it gave me this error: couldn't load map file: 'maps/saint_lucia'

The file is missing indeed and some models and sounds are missing as well. Looks like something went wrong during unzipping/copying and I'm downloading the whole package once again...

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No. The currentRenderCrop issue is the one which is stopping the show. Try starting the map again.

 

Besides, there is no saint_lucia, because the map is called saintlucia without the underscore character.

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Yep. Whenever I'm torture-testing a map, I run TDM on only one core (1.5 ghz x 2) and I occasionally get those currentRenderCrop-s on my PC.

 

Strange that it's having problems with models (bad download?). Sound warnings probably just relate to the main menu.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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Downloaded the files one again and checked them. The md5sum matches the one in the wiki. However, I can't explain the missing-broken-bottle-models-errors. I fixed those by copying and renaming the other model files, but st lucia still won't load.

 

Loading the map by console command didn't change anything. I tried to start a new game once again after it crashed to the main menu and the only thing that changed is that the same crash occured just after a few seconds :wacko:

 

Looks like st lucia dislikes my ancient hardware :angry: I installed the thief's den and it runs fine btw, so how is that possible?

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If you ran thief's den, St. Lucia should also run (albeit a little slower)

 

did you try the "dmap saint_lucia" before "map saint_lucia"? A bad compile is what the crash-to-main-menu sounds like.

 

Also, have you tried opening up your Doom3/saint_lucia/darkmod.pk4 (temporarily renaming it to .zip) and manually extracting the gamex86.dll?

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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"dmap saint_lucia" did not work, but "dmap saintlucia" did. At least the game was busy for a few minutes and produced hundreds of lines of uotput in the console. Back in the game menu I tried to start a new game as usual and this time the game crashed to desktop with a "

malloc failure for 4194312" in the windowed console. I restarted the game, ran "dmap saintlucia" again and tried to load the map by typing "map saintlucia" into the console with the same result.

I have also extracted gamex86.dll manually, but it was already present in the stlucia directory, so it didnt't change anything.

I'm surprised I'm the only one on this forum experiencing these issues. Is there anything else I could try?

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ah malloc :) reminds me pointers. alx it seems you have not enough ram to run the game. and that's maybe the reason why thiefs den works, because it is smaller than saintlucia. I can advise you to look up your task manager then performance where you can see how much ram is using and how much is free. Close any programs that use ram. Then try again.

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"dmap saint_lucia" did not work, but "dmap saintlucia" did.

 

You also need to use "map saintlucia" to load the map in case you accidentily tried "map saint_lucia" (the underscore is wrong :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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I still have mora than 1,5 gb of free ram when I try to load the map, so I that's not the reason. Since there seems to be no solution for my problem except for installing new hardware, I'm giving up stlucia and I'll wait for the beta-release. Maybe I'll have a new system by then. However, thanks for your answers guys. What I've seen of TDM so far looks really cool and I'm sure it will be an awsome game when it's done!

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lol I noticed someone said alx didn't have enough ram. He has 3 gigs, and he's only running XP SP3. I don't know what the problem is. If you're running Thiefs Den, St Lucia should run like a champ...especially since it is far more optimized. I can run Dark Mod on my older system. Athlon XP2800+, with 1gig of ram. It just has to be some weird glitch. I might even suggest uninstalling Doom 3, any other Dark Mod/doom3 related mods and install D3 from scratch and install Saint Lucia all by itself.

 

Also, disable anything at startup "start menu - run" and type msconfig. Click on the start tab and uncheck anything that you don't need running. You can safely turn off everything in here usually.

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lol I noticed someone said alx didn't have enough ram. He has 3 gigs, and he's only running XP SP3. I don't know what the problem is. If you're running Thiefs Den, St Lucia should run like a champ...especially since it is far more optimized. I can run Dark Mod on my older system. Athlon XP2800+, with 1gig of ram. It just has to be some weird glitch. I might even suggest uninstalling Doom 3, any other Dark Mod/doom3 related mods and install D3 from scratch and install Saint Lucia all by itself.

 

Also, disable anything at startup "start menu - run" and type msconfig. Click on the start tab and uncheck anything that you don't need running. You can safely turn off everything in here usually.

 

that someone is me :) when he said malloc error firstly not enough memory came to my mind because as my C knowledge there is a malloc func to allocate memory. And 3 gb ram doesn't mean anything if you don't have enough free of it. He can use all of it easly if his comp is a server. But as he mentioned 1.5 is free. It seems there is something wrong with allocating resources efficiently.

 

@alx

 

I found exactly same error that you got in a forum and it is releated with doom3, not saint lucia. But still no solution, so that may be a common problem. If you can contact with support then you may get a help about it.

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I found exactly same error that you got in a forum and it is releated with doom3, not saint lucia. But still no solution, so that may be a common problem. If you can contact with support then you may get a help about it.

 

Yeah, but it's a home computer. he would have to be running a lot of things in the background to use up 3 gigs on XP

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Yeah, but it's a home computer. he would have to be running a lot of things in the background to use up 3 gigs on XP

 

exactly. That's why I advised him to

look up your task manager then performance where you can see how much ram is using and how much is free. Close any programs that use ram. Then try again

I was just trying to narrow the possible reasons of the error, and now we know that although he has enough ram it is not enough for it :laugh:

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Have you tried greebo's suggestion?

 

It's quite common for D3 to throw that error right after a dmap command. I usually exit D3 and relaunch it to run the map, i.e. dmap, exit, run map.

In other words, do this:

 

1. launch TDM

2. open the console

3. type: dmap saintlucia

4. quit TDM

5. launch TDM again

6. attempt to start the mission

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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