X3TC crashing on launch - high resolution issue confirmed

[DrBullwinkle]

something was hardcoded that really should not have been. ...

...I'd agree if it were something that could not have been easily foreseen.

I don't think that is a legitimate complaint.

When we write software, everything has some sort of limit. It is the only way the program knows when to stop. We can hard-code the limit; picking something that we do not expect to be exceeded during the lifetime of the product. If we expect the product to be substantially upgraded in the next couple of years, then we may not try to predict a decade into the future. Even if we could, with any accuracy.

Or we can try to detect the limits. But, again, it may be difficult to predict what detection techniques may be available a decade into the future.

Sometimes developers build something thinking that it will be rewritten in a couple of years, but it winds up lasting for a decade or more. That is approximately the history of X2 and X3.

Don't forget that Egosoft *did* substantially update the graphics in their most recent product.

So it is unreasonable to fault Egosoft for not being sufficiently prescient to predict your current setup. Especially when it is a rare environment even today. Or that you would still be playing one of their games that is already several years old.

That said, I don't think we have discovered anything conclusive in this thread. Not yet. It is unfortunate that you are having trouble playing at your highest resolution, but you *can* play at lower res.

[Vector_Gorgoth]

When we write software, everything has some sort of limit. It is the only way the program knows when to stop. We can hard-code the limit; picking something that we do not expect to be exceeded during the lifetime of the product. If we expect the product to be substantially upgraded in the next couple of years, then we may not try to predict a decade into the future. Even if we could, with any accuracy.

Or we can try to detect the limits. But, again, it may be difficult to predict what detection techniques may be available a decade into the future.

Sometimes developers build something thinking that it will be rewritten in a couple of years, but it winds up lasting for a decade or more. That is approximately the history of X2 and X3.

I've written a lot of lines of code, and I'd be embarrassed (not to mention probably fired) if I did something like this. It's just bad engineering to make something that is capable of crashing one's code contingent on a limit one absolutely knows WILL CHANGE in the future. If this was the first X game, I'd be a lot more forgiving, but this dev studio are not amateurs or novices.

There are means of enumerating valid resolutions which have existed (and probably will exist) in Windows for a very long time. If they disappeared, a lot more programs than X3 would be doing this.

[Nanook]

I think you need a reality check. TC is six years old. Expecting game developers to write code for non-existent (at the time) resolutions is a bit much. Games can only be coded for the current batch of video drivers and video cards in existence when TC was released weren't capable of the high resolutions you're trying to use. I've got plenty of games released in the late 90's and early 2000's that won't play at anything higher than 1024x768. And I don't reasonably expect those developers to have coded for my current 2560x1440, or even to update those old games for the newest resolutions. It's an old game, dude. Deal with it.

[Vector_Gorgoth]

I think you need a reality check. TC is six years old. Expecting game developers to write code for non-existent (at the time) resolutions is a bit much. Games can only be coded for the current batch of video drivers and video cards in existence when TC was released weren't capable of the high resolutions you're trying to use. I've got plenty of games released in the late 90's and early 2000's that won't play at anything higher than 1024x768. And I don't reasonably expect those developers to have coded for my current 2560x1440, or even to update those old games for the newest resolutions. It's an old game, dude. Deal with it.

Late 90s, let's see. That's DirectX 6, at best, OpenGL 1.2.1, and Windows 98. That's not just "a few years old", that's an entirely different era of computing.

And you say these game still run, yes? They don't crash instantly when the desktop resolution isn't to their liking?

And mind you, these games were designed to use the vast majority of the resources available to them; the shortcuts they took were often performance-based, to eke out the last bit of speed in an era when hardware was a great deal slower than it is now.

If that's the case, that makes the idea that a game written a measly six years ago--in the era of Windows Vista/XP, DirectX 9/10, and OpenGL 3.0--would crash when the desktop resolution is too high, all the more embarrassing.

The days of hardcoded values as a necessity, as a mark of limited hardware and brittle APIs, are long behind us. Nowadays they're a mark of laziness, short sightedness, and sometimes, incompetence; it IS easier to hardcode than to learn to use an API properly. My job depends on that fact, since I spend a lot of time fixing other people's disasters.

Were X3 a business logic application, it would represent an extremely lucrative opportunity for me.

Update: just to hammer my point home, consider a little gaming gem: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. This is a game which runs in 256 colors SVGA, originally targeted for Windows 95, IIRC. SVGA, incidentally, means that my vres is FIVE TIMES what SMAC was designed to deal with.

Steps to run Alpha Centauri on a modern PC:

1. Set ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1 in 'Alpha Centauri.ini' to work around an architectural difference between 1999-era CPUs and modern 64-bit CPUs emulating 32-bit mode.
2. Run the game.

It doesn't crash, even though it has every right to, considering some people born after that game was made are having kids now (a bit on the early side, admittedly).

I don't necessarily expect old games to RUN at modern resolutions, although my tolerance for that wanes each year as the number of technical limitations preventing the handling arbitrary resolution decrease, but I sure as hell expect them not to crash when the host desktop environment uses them. That's the part about this that's just plain stupid.

[Nanook]

I think you need a reality check. TC is six years old. Expecting game developers to write code for non-existent (at the time) resolutions is a bit much. Games can only be coded for the current batch of video drivers and video cards in existence when TC was released weren't capable of the high resolutions you're trying to use. I've got plenty of games released in the late 90's and early 2000's that won't play at anything higher than 1024x768. And I don't reasonably expect those developers to have coded for my current 2560x1440, or even to update those old games for the newest resolutions. It's an old game, dude. Deal with it.

Late 90s, let's see. That's DirectX 6, at best, OpenGL 1.2.1, and Windows 98. That's not just "a few years old", that's an entirely different era of computing.

And you say these game still run, yes? They don't crash instantly when the desktop resolution isn't to their liking?....

No, that's not what I said. I said that they don't run unless I set the resolution to something of their liking. The only way I can run most of them without changing my desktop res is in a virtual box. Or if I buy a new, modified version through GoG.

As for your Alpha Centauri example, you do realize that's a 2D game. 2D games have much, much less stringent video requirements than 3D games. I doubt the DirectX driver requirements for 2D has changed much in the last 20 years, whereas 3D has evolved way beyond what could be done at the time of AC's release. Try running an original version of, say, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter on your current machine and see how it fares, if you want to make a more fair comparison.

[daniel001]

This a somewhat dated topic, but since UHD-Monitors will get more common, so will probably problems related to them.

Just wanted to point out that i can run all X games starting with X2 (to be more precise: The Threat, Reunion, Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude) with a resolution of 3840x2160 without crashes.

I run a UHD-Screen combined with an R9 280x so, maybe its a Driver Issue?

If i remember correctly i had some problems when i tried to run X in UHD while the Desktop resolution was set to 2560xwhatever and enabling GPU Scaling in this scenario was also not flawless.

As long as i am running both X and the Desktop at the same resolution, there are no crashes.

There is a frame-rate Problem in (and only in) Albion Prelude, but that needs a thread for its own.