Re: .animated sound

by LXQt Fri Apr 17, 2020 6:36 pm

leezer3 wrote:As Unload Unused Textures works & stops the issue, my strong suspicion would be that you're running out of available video RAM.
In *theory*, the drivers ought to handle this case gracefully, but something isn't quite right obviously.

I'll take a look and see if I can reproduce on a lower-end machine.

Some TLDR about the Hong Kong content:
A massive problem I'm seeing from digging around in what I've got saved is texture sizing and number of textures.
The compressed on-disk size is *not* what the texture will take up in VRAM- This is (roughly) the following:
First, the texture will be internally upscaled by the driver to the nearest power of two.
Either 3 (RGB) or 4 (RGBA) bytes per pixel.
An simple animated escalator from the Choi Hung to Whampoa route is eating well over 200mb of texture memory, and uses 11 unique textures.
With a little resizing of textures and object work, I could probably drop this to one texture at a quarter of the size.

The route has 658 textures in total, and so at a rough guess you're looking at somewhere around 20gb maximum theoretical video memory usage with a 3D train.

Any chance of getting that optimized escalators so the Hong Kong developers can do some dig in to it?

p.s. The devs of the Kwun Tong Line appreciate your effort of doing some dig in to their route.

by LXQt Fri Apr 17, 2020 6:38 pm

Also the Hong Kong developers want to ask a question

If each pixel is using 3 bytes (RGB) of data in vram, does it mean that using PNG (without alpha channel) has little to no benefit than using BMP in terms of loading speed and VRAM optimization?
Also if I still require large amount of texture for my work, is there any other way to improve the performance apart from reducing texture sizes?

by **leezer3** Fri Apr 17, 2020 7:03 pm

I can't reproduce anything at the minute, and at the moment I'm stumped Sad

Got a copy of OpenBVE, a HK EMU and a heavy route open in the background on my second monitor (20 minutes so far, I'm bouncing around occasionally) with nothing out of the ordinary. The amount of messing around with this I do, I hope I'd have seen somthing if it's as common as you're getting.

Do you have any combinations of route / train that you can relatively reliably reproduce on at all?

What sort of time in-game am I looking at before corruption occurs?

Anything running in the background (video recorders, FPS overlays etc.)?

---

At the minute, my best guess is that *something* you're doing or running is causing this.

by **leezer3** Fri Apr 17, 2020 7:10 pm

LXQt wrote:Also the Hong Kong developers want to ask a question

If each pixel is using 3 bytes (RGB) of data in vram, does it mean that using PNG (without alpha channel) has little to no benefit than using BMP in terms of loading speed and VRAM optimization?
Also if I still require large amount of texture for my work, is there any other way to improve the performance apart from reducing texture sizes?

Zero real benefit / change in loading speed (BMP is probably fractionally faster as PNGs have to be decompressed, but the game isn't fast enough elsewhere for this to matter), it's just better for download sizes really.

The only way to improve performance is by reducing the number and size of textures, and reducing the use of alpha wherever possible-
The slowest two operations in the renderer are switching between textures, and alpha drawing (this requires two draw passes instead of one)

Following the power of two rule will also help considerably; If you're a couple of pixels over the boundary size, it *will* be resized within the drivers to the next size up, and this is bad for performance.

by OmegaZeroKiller Fri Apr 17, 2020 7:15 pm

leezer3 wrote:I can't reproduce anything at the minute, and at the moment I'm stumped
Got a copy of OpenBVE, a HK EMU and a heavy route open in the background on my second monitor (20 minutes so far, I'm bouncing around occasionally) with nothing out of the ordinary. The amount of messing around with this I do, I hope I'd have seen somthing if it's as common as you're getting.

Do you have any combinations of route / train that you can relatively reliably reproduce on at all?

What sort of time in-game am I looking at before corruption occurs?

Anything running in the background (video recorders, FPS overlays etc.)?

---

At the minute, my best guess is that *something* you're doing or running is causing this.

Here's a list of routes/train combination I have seen memory corruption occurring:
1. JR East Nambu Branch Line | JR East Nambu Branch Line 101 Series (2-cars; private file)
2. KCR East Rail (Lok Ma Chau to East Tsim Sha Tsui; HKRSC) | KCR East Rail MLR EMU (STOHK Edition)
3. MTR Tuen Ma Line Phase I (HKRSC Internal Beta) | MTR Tuen Ma Line Phase I SP1900 EMU (GE5135 Studio Edition)

Regarding time in-game, it occurs right at the beginning of loading in (it is broken already when the simulation finishes loading)

Background: Shotty, Kaspersky Free, MSi Afterburner + RiverTunerStatisticsServer (though the same issue occurs even when the system is running at barebones, i.e. nothing besides Kaspersky Free)

P.S. For the Tuen Ma Line, the route is still work-in-progress and heavy on VRAM, so the occurrence is plausible; but when it is happening on light-weighted routes; that has thrown me off the balcony.

by **leezer3** Fri Apr 17, 2020 7:32 pm

I would try exiting Kapersky temporarily and see what happens then.

It's doing all kinds of funny business with overlays, kernel drivers etc. to support it's browsing and virtual keyboards, and frankly I wouldn't trust it as far as I can throw it.
OpenBVE is rather too niche for them to have tested with it.

by LXQt Sat Apr 18, 2020 1:16 pm

I've removed the bug fix (the duplicate texture) on my custom build
It turns out that the dimmed texture are not coming from the bug patches, I don't know why. This lighting glitch exist with/without the new render enabled(But this glitch only exist after v1.7.0.3). Here is HKRSC's C-Train:
.animated sound - Page 2 NZeeqkq

by OmegaZeroKiller Mon Apr 20, 2020 9:27 am

leezer3 wrote:I would try exiting Kapersky temporarily and see what happens then.

It's doing all kinds of funny business with overlays, kernel drivers etc. to support it's browsing and virtual keyboards, and frankly I wouldn't trust it as far as I can throw it.
OpenBVE is rather too niche for them to have tested with it.

I've disabled Kaspersky on my test machine, but memory corruption would still occur occasionally, which is odd.
In addition, I've got updates from the aforementioned AMD user, who just clarified that he is using the in-built Windows Defender, and similar to my case, face the same memory corruption issue on builds beyond 1.4.X on a random basis.

by **leezer3** Mon Apr 20, 2020 10:43 am

The short answer is that builds beyond 1.4.x completely replaced the backend windowing / GL library.
Have you tried testing some of the broken content on 1.4.3 recently? (confirmation bias....)

I've *never* seen anything like this, and I've got thousands of hours both playing and debugging over multiple machines.
Without a way to actually reproduce the effect reliably, I'm somewhat stuck.

Have you tried turning on and off Load in Advance?
As a secondary test, looking into the C-Train, I'd suggest creating a copy with all textures resized to the power of two and see if that helps. It shouldn't, but I'm somewhat short of ideas at the minute.

My best guess is essentially that this is a graphics card driver bug affecting certain specific machines.

by OmegaZeroKiller Mon Apr 20, 2020 10:54 am

leezer3 wrote:The short answer is that builds beyond 1.4.x completely replaced the backend windowing / GL library.
Have you tried testing some of the broken content on 1.4.3 recently? (confirmation bias....)

I've *never* seen anything like this, and I've got thousands of hours both playing and debugging over multiple machines.
Without a way to actually reproduce the effect reliably, I'm somewhat stuck.

Have you tried turning on and off Load in Advance?
As a secondary test, looking into the C-Train, I'd suggest creating a copy with all textures resized to the power of two and see if that helps. It shouldn't, but I'm somewhat short of ideas at the minute.

My best guess is essentially that this is a graphics card driver bug affecting certain specific machines.

I have run the same files on 1.4.X, 1.6.X and 1.7.X, and 1.4.X trial runs had never suffered from Memory Corruption.

Regarding the power-of-two, I am currently doing texture resizing for an isolated Tuen Ma Line build (high-risk to memory corruption due to its sheer size) and the MTRC SP1900 EMU; will see if this would improve the situation.

P.S. Oddly enough, I have been running trials on a recently acquired Surface Go unit in an attempt to replicate the same issue, but it can always render without a hitch (albeit at the price of lower framerates due to the performance gap of the iGPU); hope this helps...?

by **leezer3** Mon Apr 20, 2020 12:22 pm

OmegaZeroKiller wrote:I have run the same files on 1.4.X, 1.6.X and 1.7.X, and 1.4.X trial runs had never suffered from Memory Corruption.

Regarding the power-of-two, I am currently doing texture resizing for an isolated Tuen Ma Line build (high-risk to memory corruption due to its sheer size) and the MTRC SP1900 EMU; will see if this would improve the situation.

P.S. Oddly enough, I have been running trials on a recently acquired Surface Go unit in an attempt to replicate the same issue, but it can always render without a hitch (albeit at the price of lower framerates due to the performance gap of the iGPU); hope this helps...?

Not really Razz

All that tells me is what I know already- It's a machine specific bug somehow.

Copying across the settings folder from the broken machine *might* show something interesting, but I'm still doubtful of it being internal to OpenBVE.

by Delsin Sun May 03, 2020 3:45 pm

Returning to the original topic: can .animated sound be used in player's train objects? I found some applications that need it.

by **leezer3** Sun May 03, 2020 8:49 pm

Delsin wrote:Returning to the original topic: can .animated sound be used in player's train objects? I ound some applications that need it.

No, not with the current implementation.

Let me think on it, but this may be a little complex.

by LXQt Mon May 04, 2020 5:33 am

leezer3 wrote:No, not with the current implementation.

Let me think on it, but this may be a little complex.

Alright, I've got it working, but there is some issue.
I've created an animated objects, code as follows.

Code:: [Object] States = oly_003.b3d Position = 0,0,0 [Sound] FileName = one.wav Position = 0,0,0 Volume = 1.0 Pitch = 1.0 Radius = 40

So I put this object onto the route(freeobj at 4200m)
Then I launch OpenBVE and load the route.
Right after loading, I heard this animated sound on the first station(25m), and I DIDN'T hear the animated sound on 4200m(where I freeobj)
Am I doing this wrong or it's just a bug?
Also even on 1.7.1.4 Route Viewer, whenever I load a route with animated sound, it will crash the route viewer(but not the object viewer nor in-game)
Also I would like to see a way to enable hacks in RouteViewer. As more Hong Kong route developers make uses of newer feature, they need a newer version of OpenBVE(or Route Viewer). But the lighting on the routeviewer is still..weird.(I do appreciate the hacks on 1.7.1.4 tho)

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