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[Tiberius]

I'm just linking to fonline.ru, as I have described my problem there, because it's a general client issue:
http://www.fonline.ru/forum/showthread.php?p=578382#post578382

I wonder if anybody else has observed similar symptoms. Maybe sombody will find my solution helpful.

UPDATE:
After all, it was my personal problem with audio drivers. Case closed.

[Hects Hakal]

Would you be so kind and describe it here? Im on my phone and cant view the link and i probably know whats wrong whit your game . Btw sorry for my English

[Tiberius]

Hello. About a week ago I have returned to playing FOnline after a nearly 2 year break. Although I only play on 2238 at the moment, what I am about to describe also concerns playing on TLA as I have tested, or more precisely, it concerns the D3D client (I can't run the OGL client, so I cannot test).

The problem is that I have been experiencing very sharp frame rate drops -- video freezing that lasts 1-2 seconds. This ALWAYS (even on the worldmap) occurs when holding the mouse button to open the roll-up menu - there's a freeze when opening the menu and then another freeze shortly after (including cursor). It also happens massively during real-time combat making it almost impossible to play. These are two most evident cases, but it also happens at random (circumstances hard to define). Bringing up the roll-up menu and trying to choose an icon works as a reliable test for me.

At first I thought that my PC (P4) is just too weak to run this game. Although I don't recall anything this annoying from 2 years ago and I had even slower CPU back than. It's been two years, the client got more demanding -- so I thought. But then I noticed that the freezes don't always occur, sometimes the game would run smoothly. I started experimenting with video settings but it wouldn't make a difference. I tried changing the sleep setting (10, 0, -1), disabling antivirus, killing useless procesess, setting highest priority for fonline process, disabling/enabling hyperthreading, installing newest video drivers -- nothing would help. However during this testing I have noticed that my PC can't be too slow since the game doesn't fully use my CPU and GPU. GPU load is only full in fullscreen (freezes occur even in 640x480 window with minimal GPU usage) and CPU load is usually around 50% (never 100%, not even spikes). In fact, whenever there's a freeze, there's also a sudden drop in CPU and GPU load. It seems like it's not the hardware that's too slow, but it's the software that stalls. However I have only observed this phenomenon on my desktop PC. I tested FOnline on my two laptops (one with faster CPU but slower GPU, the other with slower CPU and really slow GPU). On both those laptops there are no freezes (although the slow one averages 20 fps, still there's no freezing). All three computers run D3D client on Win XP SP3 (DX 9.0c).

Yesterday evening I had a breakthrough moment. I was enjoying the game  all freeze-free while running Winamp in the background. When the playlist reached end, the freezing started again. That was the key all along. Whenever I would listen to music, the game would run smoothly. Even a paused song prevents the freezes. Stopped song does not. I have tested it multiple times. Playing a movie in Media Player Classic or playing Youtube videos in Firefox also helps. Doing a file search doesn't help. It seems playing multimedia somehow stops the client from stalling. Perhaps DirectX issue? But then why I only have this problem on my desktop PC? I don't know.

If anybody else has observed similar symptoms, please share your experience (might be in Russian).



By the way, I cannot start OpenGL client, I get the following message:

Code: [Select]

[01:494] Starting FOnline (version 0399-DF)...

[01:495] Engine initialization...
[01:802] Sprite manager initialization...
[03:162] GraphicLoader::LoadEffect - glGetProgramBinary( program, buf_size, &length, &format, &buf[ 0 ] ), error<0x00000502 - nieprawid│owa operacja>.("invalid operation")
My video card supports OpenGL 3.3. I don't know why it doesn't work. If I managed to run OGL client, I could check if the same freezes occur.

Here's a performance graph comparision.

FOnline working smoothly with Winamp running in the background:



FOnline stalling with Winamp stopped: