Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[Seravy]

"Water Walking from Enchanted Item with Water Walking does not show up in hero stats."

Movement types are shown as movement type icons in the amount of moves available for the unit. They don't use an ability icon, you don't have one on Lizardmen units either. So this is not a bug, just removed the inconsistent handling in the original.

"- A Fighter’s Guild cannot be sold, bc of a double text with City Walls: "
I'll need the save file for this.

[Slingers]

"- A Fighter’s Guild cannot be sold, bc of a double text with City Walls: "
I'll need the save file for this.

Oh, that has already been overwritten. And the buildings change their position randomly. Next time then. The text "...building cannot be sold" had a typo: "required"

[Slingers]

After I defeated Rjak (he wasn't banished before), there was no message: "You didn't find any spells." No spells were found, but Rjak used "Vertigo" in battle, a spell written in my spellbook but not yet researched. If I had gotten one of his spellbooks instead of finding one in a lair, the game would still be balanced up to that point. But it's still at the beginning ...

[Seravy]

Updated :

2020-11-08
-Fixed bug : Spell description can be viewed in the research book for encrypted spells
-Fixed bug : Info menu Governor and Mirror activates wrong menu item
-Fleeing : When the fastest enemy has zero movement speed (or there are no enemies due to Confusion), fleeing rolls are skipped and all fleeing units survive the battle.
-Added missing help entry for Barracks
-Fixed bug : Raiders cannot spawn
Disabled until we have more testing information : "When the human player requests a trade with an AI, if there are at least 6 AI wizards (at the beginning of the game), then the player has to offer at least +1 spell value for each 2 AI players in the game above 4."
-Fixed bug : Division by zero in automatic combat
-Fixed bug : Crash when the AI tries to find a target for overland Stasis
-Experimental : In the AI diplomacy formula for making alliances and pacts, there is a -20 modifier for each alliance the wizard already has with other AIs, or for each alliance the other wizard has with other AIs, whichever is more.
-Added logging of heroes being hired,summoned, resurrected, or dying. (Some AIs seemed to have duplicates of the same hero.)
-Fixed bug : AI can target Resurrection on heroes that aren't dead.
-Fixed bug : AI can target Resurrection on the Chosen.
-Fixed bug : AI Resurrection targeting returns hero type but spell expects unit type instead.
-Fixed bug : Resurrection creates a unit that's of the type of the last hired/summoned hero instead of the chosen target.
-Charismatic now adds a +20 modifier to the AI to AI positive diplomacy formula instead of +40
-Personality modifier is now divided by 2 in the same formula.
-"Elimination modifier" is now active in all battles against a wizard marked as "Elimination target", not only in their fortress. Instead in their fortress, the modifier is 1/3 to all stats instead of the usual 1/2.
-Fixed bug : Crash when a unit is being pushed over the border of the map due to 9 unit limits.

[jhsidi]

Couldn't test for a couple weeks. I started a new test game tonight and kept having the nagging feeling that it's running slowly. My FPS is around 30-32 pretty steadily (except moments on the endturn) but there's a general feeling of sluggishness.

... maybe I'm imagining this? Can you take a look at this clip of summoning phantom warriors? I feel like it should be maybe 30% faster, and it feels like it's noticeably notching up pixel by pixel. https://imgur.com/a/b3IvONd

Also curious -- is there any way to increase / decrease framerate in this game, like we could fiddle with cycle rate in Dosbox? 60fps would probably be weird, but maybe 40-45 or so would feel a bit better. My CPU isn't a limiter here, the game is usually only taking about 10-20% of capacity.

[Seravy]

Yes, 30 FPS is definitely too slow, it should be around 60. I don't remember any change that would slow down combat though. I tried entering combat but I get the normal 58-59 FPS.
The CPU definitely is the limiter as the game uses nothing else.
The game doesn't use multiple threads so it can only use one CPU core. If you have 10 cores, that means 10% is the most the game can use.

[jhsidi]

Yes, 30 FPS is definitely too slow, it should be around 60. I don't remember any change that would slow down combat though. I tried entering combat but I get the normal 58-59 FPS.
The CPU definitely is the limiter as the game uses nothing else.
The game doesn't use multiple threads so it can only use one CPU core. If you have 10 cores, that means 10% is the most the game can use.

OK, yeah, there's something wrong. For reference, my CPU is a quad-core i7 7700HQ. This is a gaming laptop, not a desktop, which may be related. But generally I can run very modern games at high FPS -- never as low as 30fps. The GoG version of Master of Magic runs at a steady 60fps in full screen mode.

To test a few things, I just opened the game to the title screen (closed and restarted for each test). On the title screen, task manager shows a steady 2-3% CPU utilization for the game. When opened, the game goes straight to 32fps and stays there for all of the following tests:

• Windows 8 compatibility mode
  
• Low resolution and reduced color modes for the game
  
• Set my entire PC to low resolution mode
  
• Run as administrator
  
• Disabled my peripherals and using a single screen
  
• Disabled a bunch of HID devices in Device Manager (recommended by some random thread)
  
• Told my Nvidia GPU to run the game (I know, no GPU usage, just getting desperate here)
  
• Changed power settings to Max Performance
  

OK, next... I closed everything, including Google Chrome. Now.. the game goes to 50fps and stays there. My CPU is running at about 4% utilization due to some random Windows processes, with the game accounting for about half of that. Once I go into a save file, the game drops to about 35-50fps.

So yeah, something is really wonky here. I suspect a lot of people might run into this issue, since I'm running a pretty bog standard setup. It seems something is drastically limiting the app's CPU usage, but I can't figure out what it would be. Any suggestions?

[Seravy]

Sounds like the OS is making the same core run the game and other things instead of using different cores.
Either that or Intel CPUs are that much slower per core than my AMD one but I doubt, if that was the case we'd see more people report this problem.

Wait, 4%? That doesn't seem to be right. Even assuming the cores use that feature that makes each of them count as two, you still only have 8 cores, so one core = 12.5% of CPU power. Otherwise it's 25%. If you aren't reaching at least that it means the game doesn't even get one single CPU core worth of processing power which definitely is the operating system's fault.
Try running the game at higher than normal priority?

Edit : On my CPU, 1 core is ~8% (it's 6x cores doubled) but the game only uses 5.9% to run at max FPS on the overland map. And that's running in debug mode.

[jhsidi]

Sounds like the OS is making the same core run the game and other things instead of using different cores.
Either that or Intel CPUs are that much slower per core than my AMD one but I doubt, if that was the case we'd see more people report this problem.

Wait, 4%? That doesn't seem to be right. Even assuming the cores use that feature that makes each of them count as two, you still only have 8 cores, so one core = 12.5% of CPU power. Otherwise it's 25%. If you aren't reaching at least that it means the game doesn't even get one single CPU core worth of processing power which definitely is the operating system's fault.
Try running the game at higher than normal priority?

Edit : On my CPU, 1 core is ~8% (it's 6x cores doubled) but the game only uses 5.9% to run at max FPS on the overland map. And that's running in debug mode.

Might be optimistic to think people would have reported the issue... there aren't a ton of testers, and it took me several weeks to even pay attention to it. I guess I just assumed that for an old-school game, <60fps was no big deal.

Looking at my system details, you're right. I have 4 cores but 8 logical processors. Well, that's annoying. But as you said, the game should at least use one of those to capacity, instead of using 1/6th of it.

Re: changing priority, good idea, but no dice. On the title screen, changing priority to any setting does nothing; it just stays at 32 fps. Interestingly, when I loaded a save, changed priority to "low" then to "realtime" (the highest), FPS went up to 50. Then it dropped back down to 32. When I tried to repeat that, it didn't happen again, the game stayed at 32fps.

I also tried changing affinity, which allows setting the specific core that is used. Similar outcome; I saw fps pop up briefly then drop back down.

It really looks like some other system process is controlling the resources the app can use.

[Seravy]

Just a guess but maybe power saving settings?
It's a laptop so that might be a thing?