[BtS] Wolfshanze's Revolution

[phungus420]

Well, if you don't like the legends concept, you can easily just remove them as well.

 

[phungus420]

Well I've thrown most of my focus behind the Legends of Revolution mod. But I'm still curious, is WolfRevolution 1.4.0 working well for those who are sticking with it?

 

[bestbrian]

Well I've thrown most of my focus behind the Legends of Revolution mod. But I'm still curious, is WolfRevolution 1.4.0 working well for those who are sticking with it?

It seems to work fairly well. I play Huge/Marathon, which seems to be a known problem. Once I got out of the BCs, it would start slowing down, the time between turns would become longer and longer, and it would inevitably seize up or CTD. I'd load a save (I save every few turns with this), and I'd be fine for about 10 turns or so, but things would start slowing down, yadda, yadda. I finally minimized the graphics, froze the animations, went with Quick Moves/Battles, etc, and it seems to perfrom much better. I'm about 1400 AD currently, and it seems it's doing much better with everything minimized, although I still save every few turns as I get very random crashes. I assume this is all Vista-related.

 

[phungus420]

You don't have this problem with default Wolfshanze? I would think it's related to the high poly count units from that core mod.

 

[bestbrian]

You don't have this problem with default Wolfshanze? I would think it's related to the high poly count units from that core mod.

I never could get Default-Wolf to work, so I wouldin't know. This is the deepest I've gotten into WolfRev since I learned to help it along by Running As Administrator (don't know why that works, but it makes everything work the way it's supposed to).

It might all be related to the high-poly units you're taking out for LoR, but who knows? Most folks seem to play on less than Huge maps and on quicker speeds, so I don't think alot of these problems are things that would show up for most folks. I'd like to be able to point you in the right direction for bugs, but it's all stuff that's too random; occassional MAF errors, weird seize ups, and random CTDs - nothing that can be isolated and cataloged. It just seems that WolfRev is just a bit much for the big maps without giving up a few graphic "nice to haves" and saving every ten turns or so, just in case; a worthy tradeoff in my books. I just hit the Industrial era on a Huge Arborial map; I'll let you know how it handles the Modern era. That'll probably take about a month, and then I'll give LoR a shot.

Oh, and someone posted this before, but sometimes my enemies are attacking me as Pink Blobs (the graphics aren't kicking it for some reason). Not a problem for me (heck, they're going to all be dead soon anyway), but just thought you should know.

 

[Palinathas]

I just finished a game with WolfRev, Huge/Marathon. First game I've played on my new machine, first time I had no problems with CTDs and MAFs, new machine is a beast though, Vista64 (non-standard install path gets around Vista access errors), Quad-core, 8GB RAM 512MB on the GFX card plus it can steal 2GB from regular RAM......I finished the game before 2000AD, and it was starting to get rather slow between turns....probably 30s+ I will probably switch to LoR though, as the Legends units sound fun. I am not a great player (before BBAI and Rev I played Noble, I am now dropping it down a level and dominating, so I plan to go back to Noble soon), so I tend to nerf Revolutions a bit, I look forward to having everything clear as to how I can affect the RevIdx......I think that will improve my game enjoyment. I really like the extra units Wolf added, I really like IDW, I like SOME aspects of DCM (not using stack attack, and sometimes using ranged bombard and bombing missions) I am still not sure about fighter stuff, I know DCM has some fighter stuff, BBAI added some fighter changes, I've also played MergedMod, with Ninja's fighter changes....really like the concept of start as minors (although it plays havoc with my chances of winning) not a big fan of millions of new civs (usually cap it at 20, start at 9-12) and barbarians usually mess up my game as well, so no barbarian world for me. I tend to nerf Revolutions in the .ini files, and I change exp a bit as well (allowing promoted units to keep up to 50xp, and allowing Barbs to give units up to 20xp) which allows me to enjoy the game more...OK I've run this on enough, hope my opinion helps, keep up the good work!

 

[Zeiter]

It seems to work fairly well. I play Huge/Marathon, which seems to be a known problem. Once I got out of the BCs, it would start slowing down, the time between turns would become longer and longer, and it would inevitably seize up or CTD. I'd load a save (I save every few turns with this), and I'd be fine for about 10 turns or so, but things would start slowing down, yadda, yadda. I finally minimized the graphics, froze the animations, went with Quick Moves/Battles, etc, and it seems to perfrom much better. I'm about 1400 AD currently, and it seems it's doing much better with everything minimized, although I still save every few turns as I get very random crashes. I assume this is all Vista-related.

Standard/epic seems to work just fine for me. Only one memory allocation failure so far, and I'm well into the industrial period in my current game. Apparently this is the upper limit for me, though, because that large/marathon game I was playing a while back was getting MAFs every two turns or so by the industrial period.

Also, a quick word of advice for windows vista users: make sure to run WolfRev (or any mod that has BUG incorporated) as an administrator (rightclick on the shortcut, and the option should be the second or third one listed). Apparently the game tries to write to "BUG main interface.ini" any time you do things like change the field of view, and if you are not running as an administrator, I've found that it won't work (I guess this is because, when not playing the game, you need stupid administrator approval to modify things in the program files directory in general) and you'll get bombarded with messages at the top of the screen saying something like "Failed to write to BUGcore" or "Failed to write to BUG main interface.ini," and it will totally prevent you from getting the alerts to show up.

 

[Palinathas]

Also, a quick word of advice for windows vista users: make sure to run WolfRev (or any mod that has BUG incorporated) as an administrator (rightclick on the shortcut, and the option should be the second or third one listed).

Yeah, Vista protects files in the Program Files(x86) dir and sub-dirs. I just don't install things to that directory if I can help it, then I don't need to run as admin.....I just need to know that I have nonstandard install dirs for most programs

 

[Zeiter]

Vista64 (non-standard install path gets around Vista access errors), Quad-core, 8GB RAM 512MB on the GFX card plus it can steal 2GB from regular RAM......

Grrrr...I envy you! The thing is, I don't think it would make a difference to install 64-bit Vista on my machine because it only has 1GB of RAM anyways (I don't even know if my machine would be set up to handle it), but it appears that using a 64-bit operating system is the only way to get past the hard limit of 2GB of RAM per application that 32-bit systems are constrained to.

 

[Palinathas]

I'm not really sure how much RAM it will actually use. I believe the theory is that it can use more than 2GB, but I think I would have to mod the .exe to use the LBA switch or something...I haven't actually looked into doing it, I personally feel that most of that 8GB is wasted, but it came with the system so.....

 

[phungus420]

Just a note on the whole bit thing. Been studying up on C++ at the library since I'm doing SDK modding now, and learned some things. Basically what the Bit refers to is how many bits per byte can be stored. When an aplication does things like store values for variable or whatever, C++ assigns certain amounts of RAM for the storage. So for a standard integer it will sets aside 4bytes. So basically a 64 bit system doubles the ammount of storage capacity for things stored in the RAM. For Civ4, I don't think this makes one lick of difference, but for some applications this is obviously necessary.

 

[mamba]

Just a note on the whole bit thing. Been studying up on C++ at the library since I'm doing SDK modding now, and learned some things. Basically what the Bit refers to is how many bits per byte can be stored.

A byte can always store 8 bits, that is its very definition

When an aplication does things like store values for variable or whatever, C++ assigns certain amounts of RAM for the storage. So for a standard integer it will sets aside 4bytes. So basically a 64 bit system doubles the ammount of storage capacity for things stored in the RAM. For Civ4, I don't think this makes one lick of difference, but for some applications this is obviously necessary.

What 8, 16 (both way outdated by now) 32 and 64 bit means is the bit-size of a pointer (and in C usually also that of an integer), i.e. how much address space the machine has, which in turn also means how much RAM it can at most have.

A 32 bit machine (and OS) can at most address 4 GB (in Win that is 2 GB for an application because the upper 2 GB are reserved for other purposes), as 4 GB is 2^32 bytes.

2^64 bytes is 16 ExaByte (4,294,967,296 * 4GB), so we won't make use of all of it just yet (a 33bit machine would double the RAM of a 32bit machine - 2^33 = 2 * 2^32 - except that those obviously do not exist)

Of course, if you run a 32bit app on a 64bit OS, it still can only make use of 4 GB at most, as its pointers are 32 bit and thus cannot address / allocate more than that.

Just wanted to clear this up a bit

 

[Zeiter]

Of course, if you run a 32bit app on a 64bit OS, it still can only make use of 4 GB at most, as its pointers are 32 bit and thus cannot address / allocate more than that.

So it wouldn't matter if you had a machine and operating system that could handle more than 2GB. Basically, without making Civ4 into a 64-bit program (impossible, I know...you'd have to start from scratch, right?), you are limited to using 2GB of RAM for the game. If the game requires more than that, you're basically screwed, right?

 

[mamba]

So it wouldn't matter if you had a machine and operating system that could handle more than 2GB. Basically, without making Civ4 into a 64-bit program (impossible, I know...you'd have to start from scratch, right?), you are limited to using 2GB of RAM for the game. If the game requires more than that, you're basically screwed, right?

From what I have heard, Vista 64bit can give up to 4 GB of RAM to a 32 bit app, unlike e.g. XP or Vista 32 bit. That also is the absolute maximum a 32 bit app can allocate (that they only get up to 2GB under Vista 32 is a limitation of the OS, not the app).

There have been reports that there are no MAFs with Civ on Vista 64 because of that (as any mod which would still MAF with 4 GB is bound to do so a lot earlier in a 32 bit environment). So because of that, having a 64 bit Vista might actually help, but it 'only' allows a jump from 2 GB to 4 GB, unless you have a 64 bit CIV, you cannot exceeed that limit.

Having said that, I do not have Vista 64, so I do not speak from my own experience.

 

[Zeiter]

From what I have heard, Vista 64bit can give up to 4 GB of RAM to a 32 bit app, unlike e.g. XP or Vista 32 bit. That also is the absolute maximum a 32 bit app can allocate (that they only get up to 2GB under Vista 32 is a limitation of the OS, not the app).

There have been reports that there are no MAFs with Civ on Vista 64 because of that (as any mod which would still MAF with 4 GB is bound to do so a lot earlier in a 32 bit environment). So because of that, having a 64 bit Vista might actually help, but it 'only' allows a jump from 2 GB to 4 GB, unless you have a 64 bit CIV, you cannot exceeed that limit.

Having said that, I do not have Vista 64, so I do not speak from my own experience.

Yay! So there is at least some hope, then! That's good. If I end up getting a new computer soon, I'll know to get a 64-bit one with Vista 64 and at least 4GB of RAM. I'm glad to hear that that's not totally useless.

But it does sound like huge maps with lots of 20,000 poly-count tanks would be the upper limit even for a 64-bit computer.

 

[Palinathas]

Yay! So there is at least some hope, then! That's good. If I end up getting a new computer soon, I'll know to get a 64-bit one with Vista 64 and at least 4GB of RAM. I'm glad to hear that that's not totally useless.

But it does sound like huge maps with lots of 20,000 poly-count tanks would be the upper limit even for a 64-bit computer.

Just be aware that there are still a shortage of drivers for 64-bit OS's, and 16-bit programs do not work at all under 64-bit Vista, so you may lose programs and devices by going to 64-bit. But yes it does handle a big Civ game well.

 

[phungus420]

Thanks for the feedback Palinathas. After you play a game of Legends, I'd apreciate the same. I don't really get a chance to play, usually just watch AI vs AI games, so really balancing things toward the player only comes from feedback I get from users now.

 

[bestbrian]

Quick WolfRev query for you Phungs, Is there still an uninstaller for WolfRev?

 

[phungus420]

The more recent versions yes. Just double click on the uninstaller in the WolfRevolution folder, or access it through the control panel like any other program to remove. Definately uninstall though, don't just delete the WolfRev folder, so that you clean it from the registry.

 

[Capt_Logan]

Hey Phungus,

The new 3.19 patch renders the Wolfhanze mod inoperable.

Does this effect you mode as well?