Tractor said:
I agree that 1.52 does work worse than 1.09 + Harkonnen fix.
They seem to have picked Hark's ideas, but not implemented them as well.
What really surprised me was the side effect (Alt-Tab) of advanced memory-saving option, being exactly the same as the one of Harkonnen. I though first that they re-used Hark's code.
but no.
I'm a bit pissed that Firaxis just comes here, take the ideas, and re-use them without even mentionning Harkonnen or talking to him. How rude.
These guys are always there to complain about software piracy, and when they get the possibility, they copy other's work without even giving the credit. Not a thing that will improve Firaxis credibility. At least in my own eyes.
Just to clarify a few points about this issue, Firaxis has almost 20 top-notch programmers and most of them have been in the game programming business for years. We have numerous experts in graphics technology who have also worked on major 3D titles at other game companies (including our director who was the head of the Xbox graphics group at MS). My point is that we are familiar with the tricks of the trade by now, especially general techniques like Hark's patch uses (which allows it work on any game). Don't assume that because Hark's patch or some other game came out before ours, that we stole their ideas. For example, the alt-tab side effect is caused by not using managed graphics resources (which saves system memory). This is common knowledge; here's a DirectX article about it:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...ctx9_c/Resource_Management_Best_Practices.asp
I assume that Hark's patch is doing something similar with managed memory, but he never said what his code does (other than sharing graphics buffers, which we also do, and is another general graphics trick). I understand that he was hoping to work out some kind of arrangement with Firaxis so he didn't want to explain his work. However, no one on the programming team received any email or call from Harkonnen; we haven't ignored his call. We've been busy working hard on the 109 and 152 patches which have been under development the past 2 months. Even though the game has been selling great we wanted to improve it as much as we could for the fans and for ourselves. It might have seemed like we were doing nothing while Hark and others were fixing Civ, but we were working long hours on the same issues and more. It just takes longer for us to make an official patch since we have to deal with installers, patching, testing, copy protection, etc.
So if we knew about these memory tricks, why didn't we use them earlier? We've been working on Civ IV for over 2 years (from scratch) - so we are experts on its source code and had a long list of optimizations to choose from. At launch, our focus was on making the game as stable as possible (even then we still had issues). Many of the optimizations in V152, such as the ones mentioned above, required extensive modification to our rendering engine, and usually had a downside (such as the alt-tab effect) so we didn't want to make those changes initially (we still plan on handling alt-tab in the future). V152 has ALOT of memory and performance improvements, much more than are mentioned here. We were able to reduce the size of (and optimize) models, textures, and interface elements, as well as implement more aggressive algorithms for releasing memory as the game progresses. Many systems were made more efficient and that allowed us to also reduce the RATE of memory usage, which is the most important factor to avoid late game problems. As a result of this, my tests show that V152 is the fastest and lowest memory version of Civ yet, even compared to V109 + Hark's patch.
In any case, if you get better results on your system from a previous Civ version or with Harkonnen's patch, by all means use it at your own risk. That especially goes for advanced Civ experts like many on these forums. Understand that Firaxis and Take 2 can not officially recommend or endorse external code patches since we don't know what's in the code. Instead of a friendly Merry Christmas easter egg like Hark's patch, the next unofficial patch that comes along could just as easily contain something destructive or offensive to people, resulting in big problems for Civ and the companies involved. Even if the patch coder thinks it's fine, it might not be appropriate from our perspective. As a legal issue, the last thing that Firaxis and Take 2 want is to be associated with another 'Hot Coffee' situation caused by unknown content in a recommended patch, which results in millions of $ of losses or other damages.
So please don't take this personally. Harkonnen, you're a good guy with a bright future as a programmer from what I can see and I've enjoyed our conversations this week. You've really helped alot of folks get Civ running well and that's the most important thing. So I'm not trying to take anything away from Harkonnen, in fact, he deserves plenty of applause. But please do the same for the Civ team, we've worked hard for a long time to make the game as great as we can, and we are proud of the improvements in V152. We plan to continue working on Civ and there are more exciting things in the works.
Thanks
Mustafa Thamer
Civ IV Lead Programmer
).
I've also gone through the MAME sourcecode and made some modifications with my limited understanding to suit my own desires. BTW, if you want to see some INCREDIBLE coding done by some random people, take a look at the MAME source code. Simply amazing stuff).
