December 7, 2015 | Dukus | 16 Comments
Things are progressing on both the Mac port and the current Beta. I did figure out the slowdown with OSX running at 1 FPS. Apparently there are certain functions in OpenGL 3.2 that are just unusable in the OSX driver because they cause a full GPU pipeline flush and the CPU just waits around doing nothing while it happens. Really this just means that the OSX version of the OpenGL renderer now diverges from the PC (and possibly Linux) version, which is okay, it just means maintaining the renderer over time is slightly more annoying, and that my shader compiler now outputs different vertex and pixel shaders for OpenGL depending on the target platform. Gah! I'll probably write more on this later after testing a few more GPU/OS configurations to make sure the PC version doesn't have to change. As for the beta, there will most likely be an update soon to fix a few issues. There are two very common bugs that people are reporting. The first is for mods that had custom materials built. In the developer build, those materials would just fail to draw anything, but in a release build the validity of the material was skipped (supposedly for performance reasons) and as soon as those materials ended up on screen, a crash would occur. That was an easy fix. The other issue occurs when cutting down trees in an orchard. There's a bug where the game tries to access the cut down tree after it's removed, causing a potential crash. Also an easy fix. What's stopping me from updating the beta right now is there are bugs I have to dig into, but can't. Unfortunately Windows 10 (I think) is causing me issues and I can't currently use many of the crash dumps that people have sent. What's happening is that when the game detects the errors I added additional checking for, it forces an exception so that a proper debug crash dump can be output. The instruction on the top of the callstack happens to be in a system dll when this occurs. If the crash dump is generated on Windows 10, my Windows 7 machine doesn't have debug information for (or even a copy of) the newer updated dll and therefore can't generate a proper stack frame to begin walking the stack too see where the error occurred. Basically this means I can't read these crash dumps, and I just need to upgrade my development machines to Windows 10. I've been avoiding this, because I hate doing OS reinstalls. This is mostly because there's a lot of software to install to get up and compiling and developing, and I have a lot of computers to update. I end up half-working on other machines but mostly looking at progress bars. There's also a big chunk of time spent making sure there's nothing local to the harddrives that isn't already on the server or NAS before they get wiped. What I'll probably end up with is my main desktop and new laptop with Windows 10, a desktop machine that dual boots Windows 7 and Linux, and my old development laptop will become a linux laptop. Time to wait on HDD formats and progress bars... Edit: Thanks for the tip of using the MS symbol server... works well. Goes to show there's always something new you haven't used or known about after 20-some years of programming. Windows 10 is still a good idea though as I've had a few Windows 10 specific bug reports...OSX
Beta Version
Windows 10
You should really be able to grab the Windows 10 symbols from Microsoft's symbol server automatically. No need to actually install the OS yourself.
Just do an Upgrade, not a Reinstall. This should serve a better path than a Fresh install. Do a disc cleanup after it to remove old files 🙂
Good luck.
Have you looked into Chocolatey to ease the pain of Windows reinstalls?
Yep, updating an OS on a development machine is always a task. 🙂 Thanks for the update
I just wanted to say the same as N up above: You should be able to grab the symbols from the MS Symbol Server. You might have to do some fudging/configuring to let your debugger (VS?) know it's a Windows 10 crash dump though.
thanks for the update, sounds great!
Boy, you need to switch to SSD.
Also, keep up the good work!:)
I love easy fixes. And it's lovely that this community is helping you with solving the windows 10 problem. 🙂
How do I join the Mac Beta? For the past month I've been checking this page for updates every day. I bought the game on steam, even though I don't have a Windows machine to play on and I would love to help test the OS X version.
You'll love Windows 10 install if you have an SSD - it's super sweet! Keep up the good work.
I'm pretty sure you can get the Symbol files if you connect to the Microsoft Symbol server in your debug environment?
The syntax for the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH variable is:
srv*[local cache]*[private symbol server]*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
And if you want any control over what happens with the OS, I'd avoid Win10 until they change how updates are sent out (and how much information they contain).
Thank you for the update! Desperate to play CC 1.6, been checking the site every day for a few weeks now!!
In return, I'll give you my idea I had today: have random ruins of buildings on some maps (from a forgotten people?) that you can de-construct as another source of stone/iron/wood. Just to give the game a bit more flavour! 😀
thanks for your support and for many great hours already with your game!
Hope the Mac work will be over soon... more time for the linux version ! (at last 🙂 )
Thx for your great work.
This game keeps getting better! Keep up the great work. How's it coming? Would love to help if I could.