Matrix Games Forums

Just downloaded 1.17 Beta and hanging at the FF briefing screen. Any thoughts?


EDIT: Got it to work by using PS2.0 Shader option. No idea what that means but there you go.

I just tried some games with a friend using v1.17 too. I don't get a hang but I do get major error messages. I can't screen capture them so I uploaded the debug file, which looks like it was written out when it happened.

I tried the PS2.0 Shader route too and for us, it still produced a crash.

Both my friend and I tried to host in v1.17 and it failed.

Glad to hear it works with PS2.0 for you.

Is there still a multiplayer error message today?

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

Glad to hear it works with PS2.0 for you.

Can you please give me a very basic idea of what that is all about?

Regards,

Luddite

The game engine really wants your video card to support something called Pixel Shader model 3.0 (or PS3.0, for short.) This was introduced with DirectX 9.0c. Shader Model 2.0 (or PS2.0, for short) was the standard with DirectX 9.0. They are basically different types of computer hardware -- though I guess some of the capabilities can be emulated and so don't (necessarily) have to exist at the hardware level. The two models vary in a number of important ways and capabilities: PS2.0 has 32 constant registers, PS3.0 has 224; PS2.0 has about 100 instruction slots; PS3.0 has 512 or more; PS2.0 does not support certain types of looping and branching that 3.0 supports. We provide a PS2.0 version of the shader code for the game in order to run on the older shader model; it looks OK, but isn't quite as fancy as the shader 3.0 code.

One caveat is that while the shader 2.0 code should work fine on all cards that properly support PS2.0, because DirectX 9.0 and 9.0c have other differences beside the shader models, it's possible that some cards that support PS2.0 with DirectX 9.0 and otherwise meet the specs will still not work with the game, though to date we haven't encountered anyone who seems to have this problem.

Great reply, thanks.