Results of beginners tutorial test

[Franciscus]

Strange things that are solved by restarting an application are usually caused by code errors that cause memory leaks, and the gliding may be such a case. Increasing available RAM memory will most certainly help, of course. Improving the code would be "curative". I have always played with 4gig RAM and had gliding only rarely on version 1. It seems to have disappeared (at least I have not had it) with version 2. I doubt many of the other strange/imperfect 3d behaviors are related.

(ps at ajlewis: I enjoy playing Toy Story 3 with my son on our Wii. Does it imply that I can not enjoy/appreciate/criticize HWLG ?  )

[Hook]

Strange things that are solved by restarting an application are usually caused by code errors that cause memory leaks, and the gliding may be such a case.

It may not be a code error.

An example from another game, I used to play Sims 2 on a computer with a graphics card with a small amount of video RAM.  Sims 2 had both low and high resolution textures, and I was getting mostly low resolution textures because there wasn't enough room to load many high resolution textures.  I upgraded my graphics card to one that had more video RAM and got all high resolution textures. 

However, after playing for a while, with many textures being swapped in and out constantly, I started seeing low resolution textures occasionally.  If there wasn't enough free RAM to load a high resolution texture, a low resolution one was loaded instead.  This acts like a memory leak, but is actually caused by the video RAM getting "fragmented", so that while there was a lot of free RAM, there wasn't always a large enough free area to load the larger high resolution texture.  After another graphics card update, I never saw another low resolution texture.

If the animation data is being loaded into the graphics RAM, and you don't have room to load all the animations, there is no smaller "low resolution" animation to load instead, so you have some animations but not others.  The graphics RAM might be taken up by other textures from the game or from other programs which for whatever reason don't get unloaded, or leave free spaces in the RAM that aren't big enough to allow the animation data to be loaded.

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[Hook]

To continue the above after an interruption...

Even with my newest graphics card I have seen one time the problem with gliding units, and the other problems that show up at the same time.  This was solved by a reboot, which clears all the data out of the video RAM so that the next time I loaded the game, all the necessary data got loaded.

At one point during testing, there was a single animation that wasn't working, but that was a specific code problem that was fixed before the next patch was released and not related to the large number of missing animations that can be experienced by some people.  During testing we look hard for such problems and report them quickly.

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[quartermaster]

Just to mention that I run with onboard graphics and whilst I miss out on some ground texture I do not tend to see any problems in 3D that I would consider graphics problems.  Yes I get the odd circling unit - I though this had gone away but may be back for a different reason now.  That will probably be a game logic issue of some kind.

If you get strange graphical presentations perhaps it would be useful to reduce some of the graphics cards high-end functionality to see if the problems persist or reappear.