Very slow enemy turns

[rickyr]

I just installed Shandalar 2012 on a virtual machine running Windows XP 64bit. I'm about two hours into the game and so far things seem to be going okay, except that occasionally I will get into a duel where the enemy takes 10 minute turns starting from turn 1.

It's happened twice so far, out of five duels total, with a random druid and with Prismat. I've fought other druids without issue. With this druid, I killed Shandalar from the task manager, and when I relaunched the game everything was fine. I tried the same with Prismat, but he still seems to be very slow.

Is this a known bug/issue? Is there a fix for it?

Thanks!

[rickyr]

Update: I played 5 or 6 turns vs Prismat. His turns would take something like 20 minutes the whole way. On turn 6 the program crashed. I upped the RAM on my virtual machine from 512 mb to 1024 mb, and let it use two cores instead of one. I'm dueling him again now, and it might be a little bit faster? It seems about the same really. I can't imagine a game this old needing this much RAM in the first place.

[Korath]

XP will use up most of that 512mb itself if it's there to use. Try experimenting with giving it a gig and a half.

If that doesn't help, and it truly appears cpu-bound, I can try to track it down if you get me a debugging dump. There's instructions here, near the bottom.

[stassy]

Also did you try the debug mode and remove some of his cards from hand at the beginning of his upkeep? (though i don't know if it's possible to enable debug mode in Shandalar 2012...it's the ISo version right?)

[rickyr]

This is a copy/paste of a PM from myself to Korath with personal information removed:



Hi Korath,
Turns out drwtsn32 had been configured from the get-go, so I have logs of all the crashes I've experienced (3).

The first crash is uninteresting: I tried to run Shandalar via the .cmd file instead of just directly running the exe in the Program folder.

The second crash is the one that I made the post about.

The third crash is one I just experienced. The game was not slow like it was during the second crash, so I'm not sure what the cause was. I turned up the RAM to 1.5 gb like you recommended, so maybe that has something to do with the game crashing despite running at a reasonable pace? I'm not too bothered by this one.


I will post this in the thread in an effort to keep the conversation public, in case other people are having the same problem. I can't attach files, but I've uploaded the two relevant ones to dropbox. You can find them at the urls below. Let me know what else you need.

Thanks so much for the help!

[rickyr]

Also did you try the debug mode and remove some of his cards from hand at the beginning of his upkeep? (though i don't know if it's possible to enable debug mode in Shandalar 2012...it's the ISo version right?)

At a glance I don't see any option to enable debug mode. Where would I find this option? I didn't see any .iso files. I got it from the signature in the OP of the sticky, which was a .zip containing a .cmd file which automatically installed everything.

[Korath]

Debug mode can't be activated in unmodified Shandalar; F12 turns it on like normal, but then it's immediately turned off in the same handler.

[Korath]

Run 2 was killed as the AI was considering casting one of the regenerate-for-one-colored-mana creatures (Uthden Troll, Wall of Brambles, Drudge Skeletons, Wall of Bone, Will-o'-the-Wisp, or Walking Dead); they all share the same function and there isn't enough information in the Watson log to tell which. More to the point, there isn't enough data in the log to tell why the AI continued to speculate.

Run 3 is difficult to analyze; the call stack was corrupt, so I can only see which function it crashed in, not what called that function. (And a lot of functions call the one it crashed in.) It's not one I've reverse engineered yet, and nontrivial. Apparently something to do with graphics handling, since it accesses the bmp_cache global.

[rickyr]

After upping the RAM to 1.5gb I haven't experienced any more slow turns. I still experience occasional crashes, but that's fine. Thanks very much for the help!