Bug/Limit with Strategicview icons

[Hulfgar]

Hello everybody,

I'm encountering a strange bug that seems to come from my strategic view icons, so I'd like to know if there is a limit in the number of SV icons that the game can handle or if those icons need to be in a specific DDS format?

The bug :

The harmless form is a handfull of SV icons scattered on the map (in the strategic view of course!).
Those icons are displayed even if there is no unit on their tile.

In the screen bellow the bug displays the helicopter sv icon but it can be any other icon.




The bad form is a CTD, either when clicking on the strategic view button or anytime while being in the strategic view.

My DDS settings :


thanks for any help

 

[LeeS]

I'm not an expert on Art-files but I thought SV icons required MipMaps because as I understand it MipMaps are used when altering zoom level (which SV icons need to be able to do).

 

[Hulfgar]

Thanks LeeS I will try this

 

[Craig_Sutter]

I found this thread extremely useful for kniwing sizea and when things such as mipmaps were required.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=499400

 

[whoward69]

Mipmaps for SV icons are recommended but optional - they trade file size against renderer speed.

The couple of times I've managed to achieve the same effect, the root cause was a mismatch between the unit graphic entries in the database and the entry/name of the sv icon file.

So we need to see the full unit definition, not just the icon. Doesn't need to be the full mod, just extract the specific unit into a smaller test mod.

 

[Hulfgar]

Thanks for the hints Craig_Sutter and Whoward, I will try to narrow the bug to some units and then post their definitions here.

 

[Hulfgar]

Some feedback about my problem with the SV icons.

Whoward I followed your hint pointing to a mismatch between the unit graphic entries in the database and the entry/name of the sv icon file.
I found 2 or 3 such mismatches, correcting them seems to solve the CTD but I still had the sv icons scattered on the map.

So I've begun to disable/enable my ArtDefine_StrategicView entries to find out which line/unit could trigger the bug.

The result to make it short :
handled alone or in small number my ArtDefine_StrategicView entries work fine, as long as I don't have more than 256 ArtDefine_StrategicView entries for units there is no bug.
As soon as I try to have more entries the bug appears!

I wanted to share this result with you, maybe it can be useful to somebody, for me it seems that the game cannot handle more than 256 ArtDefine_StrategicView entries for units.

 

[LeeS]

hmmm....256 is one of the 'magic' binary numbers.

0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc.

So if something can have up to 256 'values', 0 to 255 are usually used, and 256 (which is actually the 257th value) will cause .... who knows what.

Sounds like an assumption was made for memory allocation purposes that 256 SV icons would never be exceeded, therefore a larger memory-allocation 'chunk' was not needed.

 

[whoward69]

There are quite a few internal arrays of size 256. Looks like when Firaxis fixed the very early issue of having more than 256 promotions they only did that one, and not a more generic solution

 

[Hulfgar]

yes if I remember right there was such an issue with units as well but they probably did not think that if somebody would use more than 256 units he would need more than 256 SV icons

 

[whoward69]

yes if I remember right there was such an issue with units as well but they probably did not think that if somebody would use more than 256 units he would need more than 256 SV icons

Don't remember the units being an issue ... but one programmer would have fixed that in the game core and then "never sent the memo" to the UI programmer to fix the SV icons as well (and QA would only have tested the 3d map )