13 replies to this topic

[DevCellSoftware]

A new StemCell Game Engine-powered demo is available for download.

http://www.devcellso...e.com/demos.php

It emphasize on soft shadows and good illumination, physically driven player control, in-game extensible and configurable GUI, realtime physics and controllable physical machineries, in-game scene loading, multiple rendering viewports, immersive 3d sounds and a lot more.

[Goz]

Well it won't run on my machine. Starts up and gives me a "Runtime error".

The crash "appears" to be occurring in wrap_oal.dll.

Last couple of messages when i run it through my debugger are

DebugSpam said:

Direct3D9: (ERROR) :Stage 2 - Texture coordinate index in the stage must be equal to the stage index when programmable vertex pipeline is used

First-chance exception at 0x7c812a5b in StemCell.exe: Microsoft C++ exception: long at memory location 0x008ef664..
Direct3D9: (ERROR) : DrawIndexedPrimitive failed.

Running on Windows XP, 2.4 Ghz Intel Quad core, 2GB Ram, and 8800 GT.

[DevCellSoftware]

Have you ran the setup first?
Do you have the latest graphics drivers installed?
What kind of sound card do you have?

[Goz]

I did run setup
I have the latest graphics drivers installed (For an 8800M GTX)
And i have a realtek HD Audio sound card.

[starstutter]

I'm sorry but I'm going to be brutally honest, this is a really bad tech demo.
It crashes every 2 minutes (no report, just stops working),
it's supposed to be showing a physics engine and I keep getting stuck in walls,
I have it on the lowest graphics possible and at 800x600 and it runs at 5 fps on the equivelant of a 7900 GTS
The screenshots on your site look fine and actually good, but the tech demo itself looks terrible.

and yes, I have the very latest drivers. Honestly, I'm sure the engine itself could be fine, but you really should have held off to clean up the tech demo.

I'm going to try this at home to see if its any better. I understand that sometimes tech goes completley wrong on certain computers, but this is not a good start.

[DevCellSoftware]

Well we are sorry to hear that but all the computers we tried on (and there are alot) there wasn't any problem with it. We are running on a 7900 here and we have between 50-55fps all the time.
We are not saying that it doesn't crash on your computer, only that this didn't happen to us on all configurations we tried it. If it was something wrong with the engine or the tech demo we have caught it im sure.
What are your computer specs if you care to help?

[Goz]

DevCellSoftware said:

If it was something wrong with the engine or the tech demo we have caught it im sure.
What are your computer specs if you care to help?

LOL. Be careful when you say this. Such problems, from experience, are INVARIABLY, caused by coder error.

The Error DirectX returns can ONLY have been caused by you. It is not a driver error at my end because DirectX is returning that error before it ever hits the driver.

So I, thus, beg to differ with your statement. There IS, unequivocally, something wrong with your engine and do not presume to be so above coding errors that you can rule out problems at your end.

[Sol_HSA]

I hate to reply with just an url, but I think this might be appropriate.

http://jcooney.net/a...2/01/42999.aspx

[DevCellSoftware]

Goz said:

LOL. Be careful when you say this. Such problems, from experience, are INVARIABLY, caused by coder error.

The Error DirectX returns can ONLY have been caused by you. It is not a driver error at my end because DirectX is returning that error before it ever hits the driver.

So I, thus, beg to differ with your statement. There IS, unequivocally, something wrong with your engine and do not presume to be so above coding errors that you can rule out problems at your end.

We are not denying that the error is not valid, nor that it isnt caused by our engine (is clear that because the engine or the demo doesn't run correctly is should somehow be generated by the application), only that the conditions in which is run or the configuration is not a common one. The poster emphasize the problem in such way that is suggested that the engine is invariably unstable which is not true. It can be unstable on some machines (which happens in untested, strange or faulty configurations), but is not on many normal configurations which were tested successfully here.

To state that "the demo looks terrible" only being able to run it with 5 frames per second crashing from 2 to 2 minutes is realy a rushed conclusion.

As i stated in the last post, different configurations where tested here and the demo doesn't crash even once nor fail to start. We are aware of the high number of configurations out there and we know some people won't be able to start or run the application because of reasons we just didn't think about but the image of the application the poster suggests is very different from what the quality and stability of the demo is.

[starstutter]

DevCellSoftware said:

If it was something wrong with the engine or the tech demo we have caught it im sure.

This time I'm agreeing with that "works on my computer" stamp lol. You can blame the crashing and the framerate on my computer *maybe*, but there's no way to explain how I keep getting stuck in walls. Every time I brush past them I can't move and a few times I even got so stuck I had to exit.

Quote

What are your computer specs if you care to help?

On the one I played it on:
Toshiba laptop,
2 1.66 MHz cores,
GeForce 8600M GT (plays Bioshock on full (with 1024x786 res) with no problem)

I downloaded the demo to my home PC:
dell xps 410,
GeForce 8800 Ultra 768 mb, (plays crysis on full)
2.40 GHz processor (plays games that require 3.2 GHz just fine)

But giving the specs for this PC is not really important because I can't even use it on this one. I started it up, it froze, and my whole computer crashed...

[starstutter]

DevCellSoftware said:

It can be unstable on some machines (which happens in untested, strange or faulty configurations), but is not on many normal configurations which were tested successfully here.

In an entire year of playing games on my laptop it has crashed once, and that was because beforehand I had been running my own program which contained a bad memory leak.

EDIT: to exclude this possibility now, I made sure memory was clean on my laptop (by restarting it) and I do not program on my home PC.

Quote

To state that "the demo looks terrible" only being able to run it with 5 frames per second crashing from 2 to 2 minutes is realy a rushed conclusion.

I'm talking from a developers point of view here. A "really rushed conclusion" may be what it is, but if a developer can't even run the engine properly, do you think he's going to put faith in that same engine to ship his title? I'm actually being very generous here and saying that the engine probably works fine and maybe it is just the tech demo, but the tech demo is the only thing we have to go off of.

Quote

the image of the application the poster suggests is very different from what the quality and stability of the demo is.

This is not a subjective opinion. I'm telling you that I've tried it on 2 PC's with very different configurations and have never had any trouble playing indie games, professional games, CPU intensive games and top of the line graphic games, and I can't get the engine to work whatsoever. The quality of the demo is based on whether or not it works, and in 2 cases with common configuration gaming PC's, it doesn't.

[DevCellSoftware]

starstutter said:

This time I'm agreeing with that "works on my computer" stamp lol. You can blame the crashing and the framerate on my computer *maybe*, but there's no way to explain how I keep getting stuck in walls. Every time I brush past them I can't move and a few times I even got so stuck I had to exit.

OK, lets state this clearly because i think we've been misunderstood. We have constructed this demo for a client, everything that's part of it is because that client needed it that way. We also use this demo as an example of a simple game type application constructed with the engine for which we ship the code and the resources together with the StemCell Engine SDK. We don't advertize that the things should be done this way in a demo, but only present a demo done with the engine in which we did things in a certain way. The wall sliding is not implemented because it wasn't any request for it.


We are not going to blame the computers you run it on, is clear there are configurations which can't run it (and we have to find the reason why).

We are sorry if we transmitted the wrong impression.
We appreciate the fact that you took the time to run it.

Thanks!

[DevCellSoftware]

If possible (@Goz and @starstutter) please send us the main.log file from the System directory to support@devcellsoftware.com. We are very interested to take a look and check some things out with your crashes.
Thanks!

[starstutter]

If you've developed it for a client, that's fine, but please do yourself a colossal favor and make that clear. The purpose of a public release tech demo is to showcase the very best that the engine has to offer. If you don't say that this demo is fragile and has known issues, then we assume that you don't know the difference. Designing a demo to display certain features and neglect others is ok if you've gotten a request for that, but the other people downloading are assuming that you're presenting a "full working" version.

As a side note, one thing you should consider doing is to make a list of bugs you know about and that you're working to fix. Presnet these to the tester and make it clear that this is a beta, and if he has any other bugs to please report them. That way they know that this is not the end product and will be much more willing to give it another chance.