Mythruna

I understand that Mythruna is still in pre-alpha phase and with that in mind I am inquiring if the following is due to game limits or if they have a possible solution:

1) During certain times of the day (in game) light colored objects such as white marble and sand become blindingly bright, as if the block itself looks like it is radiating light like the sun. Is this something that I can change in my settings somewhere?

2) After exploring for 10-15 minutes or so, my memory reaches 99% and my frame rate drops to 1 rendering the game unplayable until exit/restart. Is this to be expected? If I stay mainly in one area (eg I am building something) the memory hovers around 75% and I have no problem.

Thanks in advance.

Well... I know the lighting is supposed to be like that, cause Paul hasn't worked on it that much yet. But for the memory issue you're gonna have to wait for Paul to come on, cause I haven't the slightest clue.

Yea I was building my observatory today and around mid-day the tops of the blocks where REALLY bright. Press F9 during this time to stop post-processing from being that bright. Press F9 a second time to turn it back on.

The brightness is actually carefully tuned to produce nice photos.  In real life, sand and marble really do glow like that but our eyes and brains automatically adjust... but I guarantee you if you stared directly at a sandy beach at noon for very long that you will go blind for a while.  The game cannot easily simulate this effect though I'd really like to. :)

re: the memory... it sounds almost like you aren't running with the right memory settings or you have your clip maxed out.

What platform are you running on?

Windows XP

Using F9 helped with the brightness situation. Regarding the memory, this happened yesterday:

I was building my house and was playing for about an hour with no problems. Taking a break from building I swam across the bay to the land on the other side. Upon reaching the shore my memory ( which shows in the lower right corner of the screen) went up to 98-99% and, although my frame rate was between 20 and 40 my game stuttered horribly. Like every two seconds the game locked for 1 second.  Exited and restarted the game and it was good again.

That's called land generation. It's trying to grab materials/faces of blocks and generate them, since Paul isn't using an atlas it takes up more memory to load it, and more costly in performance.

No, his memory was maxed out and so garbage collection was being more aggressive and I found a "bug" in JME that makes that situation 100x worse.

I have fixed the bug in JME and the next version of Mythruna should run much cleaner in these cases.  Still, a fully maxed out memory will cause occasional pauses.

Were you at default clip or max clip?  When I play on XP, I can wander far and wide on the default clip and my mem rarely goes above 70% or so.

P.S.: So glad I added that indicator... a real report is so much better than the "I get random stutters" reports that I used to get. :)

Okay, here is some more information. First off, ignore what I said about the FPS dropping to 1. During the course of my test, the FPS indicator on the HUD varied from 20 to 300, but did not drop to 1.

I went walking around exploring (at 64m clip) and kept an eye on my the Mem: readout.

-For the most part my Mem: was around 70-85%.
-I dug a small cave and entered and then started spinning and clicking (deleting blocks), just sporadically. With this flurry of movement and block deleting, my Mem: would keep increasing 1% at a time until it hit 95%. Then, the game would stall for a second and the mem: would drop down to 75%.
-I kept walking and exploring.
-After about 3 more minutes, my Mem: reached 99%. It wavered between 96% and 99% and would never go down again, resulting in the 2sec/1sec stuttering I described earlier, even if I just stood still and did nothing.

Paul, if this is something that would give you additional grief to look into, don't worry about it. If this is something that would assist you, let me know if there is something specific you want me to do/try.

FYI, My system info is: AMD Phenom 9550 Quad-Core Processor, 3.4 GB RAM, NVidia Geforce GTX 550 Ti video card

The maxing out part sounds really odd.  The freezing is a known issue that should be fixed in the next release.

In the chat bar, you can run a /mem command that will give you more details about the available memory than just a percentage.  If the max total memory on the far right of that output is less than 512 meg then the app isn't picking up your memory settings.

Last night on the server I worked a HUGE cavern and deleted many thousands of blocks over the course of many hours and never had memory stay 99% for more than a second.  So hopefully we can find the issue.

I have the same stuttering problem, but my mem always max's out on mythruna. No problem with it, but after I quit it takes awhile to load other things after having such stress on my laptop  :)

How much RAM does your laptop have?

What OS do you run?

As long as I stay in one location, I am fine. I can take 1 - 2 hours to build a big building with no issues. But, I ran around JPs island, right after logging into the game and had to logout/in again because the stuttering was so bad.



During one of these times when my Mem: was at 99% and the game stuttered horrible, I did the /mem command and the result is:

During one of these times when my Mem: was at 99% and the game stuttered horrible, I did the /mem command and the result is:

[/quote]

Thanks for this... it is as I feared and for some reason the memory settings are being completely ignored.  That last number should be closer to 518000000. ie: in your case default Java memory settings are being used which limits the app to 256 meg when Mythruna won't run very well in less than 512 meg.

Can you tell me what version of Java you have installed and for my own sanity, how you start the application?

Thanks.

I tried a few websites that are supposed to display the Java version and they failed  :P So, I found a website that showed how to find this information via CMD (java -version) and the result is:


Is that -Xmx256m -Xms256m somehow limiting my Java memory?

As for how I start Mythruna, I have a shortcut to Mythuna.exe on my desktop that I double click on.

Yeah, I bet it totally is.  From that same command line, try typing:
And hitting return.

If that returns something then I wonder what evil thing has set the JVM options that way.

In the mean time, if you want to manually use these options then you should be able to force them on the command line.  From the command line, go to the directory where Mythruna is installed (where the mythruna .exe is and the lib directory, etc.)  (I'd tell you the command but I don't know what the directory is... I don't know if you have ever worked in the command line before though.)

java -Xmx512m -jar Mythruna-20120308.exe

That should force Java to use the required setting... but I'm curious to know what sets the _JVM_OPTIONS and why since this is bound to be causing problems on other machines.

I may add a check for it during startup just to warn the user.

Also, if you don't want to go through and of that mess, you can just run on 64 m clip (press F12 three times in game).  I've run this way on 256 meg settings many times without too much issue.

The response is:



I tried that as well and the memory usage is still the same. I also followed other suggestions from the internet for allocating java memory and it still seems stuck at the 256. When I used your command line line, I see that the very first line displayed in CMD is: "Picked up _JAVA_OPTIONS -Xmx256m -Xms256m"

So, I am going to try uninstalling java and downloading the latest version and installing that.

Uninstalled and reinstalled Java and rebooted and still get the same same Java Options and the ingame /mem command still displays the 259522560 max.

Ok, that right there would seem to be the issue and I sort of wonder how it got set... but anyway.

(I will assume Windows 7... this is actually a little easier on XP... and I'm no Windows 7 expert so hopefully I get it right...)
Go to your Control Panel.
We are trying to get the "System" panel which on my computer was under "System and Security" then "System".
From there on the left is "Advanced System Settings".

If all goes well then that should pop-up a window like this:
(http://imgur.com/GOJ58)

Click "Environment Variables..." down in the bottom of that window.

See if there is a _JAVA_OPTIONS entry and delete it.  It might help to yell "DIE! DIE! DIE!" as you do it... but I may be over-investing. :)

The entry really serves no purpose anyway since it is just forcing the default maximum memory that is already there.  And I'm sort of casting evil looks at Java for not letting the command line override those settings but still.

Hopefully that's where the options are coming from and you can nicely clean them and we'll have a happy ending to this story. :)

I tracked down the infamous _JAVA_OPTIONS and challenged it. The beast put up a valiant fight as I tried to vanquish it, but it was unable to resist as I bespoke the Mythrunic words of power, "Die! Die! Die!" and the _JAVA_OPTIONS were no more. I was able to return to the world and wander around admiring the beauty free from the shackles of _JAVA_OPTIONS and it's evil minions, Maximum Memory and Stuttering Game. The world seemed anew and alive once again.

I.e. the issue appears to be resolved  ;D

I wandered all around various parts of the world. The only times I encountered a stutter was when loading a new area and sometimes the memory would get to 98% and then drop down to 40%, but even these only lasted for a second.

Thanks, Paul!

Excellent.  And the stutters should be greatly reduced in the next version, too.

Glad you can play unshackled now!

I still have my shackles :(

I'll deal with em' until the update :)

Well, I think I know where that "_JAVA_OPTIONS=-Xmx256m -Xms256m" came from; After removing that, I could not play Minecraft for more than 3-5 minutes without it freezing up. After I added "_JAVA_OPTIONS=-Xmx256m -Xms256m" back, I can play Minecraft again. But with those options, Mythruna becomes almost unplayable. However, I believe that I can set some Java variables specific to a jar file. So, I should be able to set those 256 MB settings to only apply when running the Minecraft jar. Weird, aye? Minecrafts only works for me by limiting the java memory.  :P

Nah... the max memory is the same with or without those options.  It must be the min settings that mess it up.

Try setting it to -Xmx512m instead of 256 and see what happens with Minecraft.  If they still have a problem then I know exactly what it is. :)

Incidentally, you are not alone in this issue...

In this last release, I changed the memory indicator to be red if the max memory is less than expected and I've already seen a Youtube video posted with red memory indicator. :)

This issue appears to be resolved for both games. With the Java_Options removed, I can play Mythruna. For Minecraft to run, I use a batch file which basically has the java settings for the Minecraft executable only to run with a starting and maximum memory of 1GB. I have played both games for hours and they seem to run fine. :)

Good to know.  Thanks.