Caster of Magic II Bug Reports!

[jhsidi]

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

Yeah, that's among the things I tested. There are power settings in multiple locations in Windows -- the Intel CPU, the actual power settings, and I think I found some in one other location. I tried fiddling with them all with no results, but in any case, while it's plugged in, it's set to max performance already.

I do have access to another laptop with about the same setup as mine, I'll try later to run the game on that just to verify it's not some niche issue with only my laptop.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

Maybe it's a really smart computer, and it's providing resources appropriate for a 1994 dos game.

Just checked: the Pentium was available then, but MOM was probably written for a 386 or 486 processor, maybe <50 MHz. I'm not sure what RAM size was typical then, but I'm guessing a couple of megabytes. Considering today's resources, you'd expect MOM to process turns instantly. However, dosbox slows things down.

It's at least possible that your dosbox settings have changed. Maybe check that just in case.

[Seravy]

Maybe it's a really smart computer, and it's providing resources appropriate for a 1994 dos game.

Just checked: the Pentium was available then, but MOM was probably written for a 386 or 486 processor, maybe <50 MHz.  I'm not sure what RAM size was typical then, but I'm guessing a couple of megabytes.  Considering today's resources, you'd expect MOM to process turns instantly.  However, dosbox slows things down.

It's at least possible that your dosbox settings have changed.  Maybe check that just in case.

This is CoM II alpha though, it doesn't use DOSBOX and it's compiled with software from ~2010.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

This is CoM II alpha though, it doesn't use DOSBOX and it's compiled with software from ~2010.

Okay, please send me the link to the alpha, since I can't follow the discussion anymore with all the changes from COM1.  If there's no linux version I can try to get it running under Wine.

[massone]

Stoning Touch on Cockatrices with Confusion seems to be bugged. Just had a battle where a confused Cockatrice is barely damaging War Bears. I replicated by replaying the battle and it was the same result. War Bears have only 6 res, against Stoning Touch -4 on 4 figures they should be getting wiped out easily, not surviving with 2 figures after 4 attacks.

SAVE: https://we.tl/t-9BLtRIpIWQ
In the upper left area, send Wolf Riders into the neutral stack then confuse the Cockatrices to replicate.

[jhsidi]

Re: FPS issue, I tested on a laptop that has exactly the same hardware as mine (also the same version of Windows). And it ran at 60 FPS, even with other programs running that were using up a fair amount of CPU. COM2 ran at about 6-15% of total CPU depending whether I was on title screen / map / battle, whereas on my personal laptop it maxes out at around 4%.

That was not what I'd expected. I can't see anything that's different about my machine. There has to be some hidden setting or program, which is somehow only affecting CoM2, and not any other game or program I can run. Uh, if anyone has any more ideas let me know.

[massone]

Re: FPS issue, I tested on a laptop that has exactly the same hardware as mine (also the same version of Windows). And it ran at 60 FPS, even with other programs running that were using up a fair amount of CPU. COM2 ran at about 6-15% of total CPU depending whether I was on title screen / map / battle, whereas on my personal laptop it maxes out at around 4%.

That was not what I'd expected. I can't see anything that's different about my machine. There has to be some hidden setting or program, which is somehow only affecting CoM2, and not any other game or program I can run. Uh, if anyone has any more ideas let me know.

It's probably interference from something else running on your computer, such as anti-virus. Best thing is to try running it in Safe Mode to confirm.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

I admit that I am shocked at the size of COM II. 900 MB? That's a huge jump from 6.5 MB of COM I. Is that because development stuff isn't stripped out, or is that just common code bloat these days? Is a simple "Hello World" program 800 MB?

Alas, it means that COM II is beyond me. My lousy rural wireless connection rarely lasts longer than a few hundred MB, and my service plan only provides 3 GB/mo, so I can't keep retrying. The sad realities of rural internet. I'm hoping that Starlink will be available at 54th latitude not too far in the future.

[Seravy]

I admit that I am shocked at the size of COM II.  900 MB?  That's a huge jump from 6.5 MB of COM I.  Is that because development stuff isn't stripped out, or is that just common code bloat these days?  Is a simple "Hello World" program 800 MB?

Alas, it means that COM II is beyond me.  My lousy rural wireless connection rarely lasts longer than a few hundred MB, and my service plan only provides 3 GB/mo, so I can't keep retrying.  The sad realities of rural internet.  I'm hoping that Starlink will be available at 54th latitude not too far in the future.

It's the music files. Mids are like 15kb each but wavs for the same thing are 15mb each instead somehow. The game itself is like 30 MB total including the exes and pngs and data files. But the music folder is 1 gigabyte.

[massone]

I admit that I am shocked at the size of COM II.  900 MB?  That's a huge jump from 6.5 MB of COM I.  Is that because development stuff isn't stripped out, or is that just common code bloat these days?  Is a simple "Hello World" program 800 MB?

Alas, it means that COM II is beyond me.  My lousy rural wireless connection rarely lasts longer than a few hundred MB, and my service plan only provides 3 GB/mo, so I can't keep retrying.  The sad realities of rural internet.  I'm hoping that Starlink will be available at 54th latitude not too far in the future.

It's the music files. Mids are like 15kb each but wavs for the same thing are 15mb each instead somehow. The game itself is like 30 MB total including the exes and pngs and data files. But the music folder is 1 gigabyte.

What player does the game use to play music? Can it not just play the midi files instead? Or, use a compressed format like mp3 or ogg. It's very rare to see games use the uncompressed .wav format these days.