14 replies to this topic

[Wayward Winds]

So I'm sure I'm not the only one who has serious trouble in singleplayer because Westwood thought it would be funny to lock the speed control away, and on more modern machines the game runs a bit on the fast side.  Like 2x as fast as it used to, which is less than comfortable for me when there's fast reactions and micromanagement required.  There often is in Mental Omega, and it becomes nearly unplayable at times because you just can't shift your cursor quick enough to stop that terror drone munching on your Psi-Corps Commandos, or that just discovered Tsivil from filling your SEALs with lead.

 

Most people know the fix for vanilla Red Alert 2 and Yuri's revenge; you edit the shortcut with the command -SPEEDCONTROL.  And most people who happen to have tried it for Mental Omega will find that the launcher doesn't let it work.  In my case I tried reducing the number of active cores in my laptop to one and running in battery saver mode, which slowed things down a bit but wreaked havoc with the framerate.  Not willing to accept defeat, I went looking for alternate methods... and found one.

 

To enable the singleplayer campaign's speed slider in the current version of Mental Omega 3.0 (revision 1), open the gamemo.exe in a hex editor, say HxD.  Go to offset 0x12F949 and you will see 74 07.  Change them to 90 90, and save.

Note: the speed slider will behave as it would for vanila RA2 and YR if you'd used the aforementioned -SPEEDCONTROL technique.  It is only accessible from within campaign missions, under the options menu.  It will be set on "fast" by default, and will reset itself to this position every time you start a new mission.

As a bonus, if your computer goes all sluggish when the action really gets going, you can also make the game faster!

 

(If anyone's wondering how I found it, the same technique can also be used for vanilla RA2.  The offset changes between that and YR (and no-one's publicly posted the YR offset), and probably does so again for Mental Omega... but part of the surrounding hex values are the same.  Search for the local pattern, and you find the appropriate bytes to adjust.)

Oh, and I'm not guaranteeing this will work for MO 3.0 revision 2 whenever it comes; the bytes will probably have moved again.  And I'll just have to track them down again!

[Darkstorm]

I'd definitely like to see something like this officially included in the mod. It seems like something that would help slow people like me in the missions.

[Atomic_Noodles]

Why just Mental Omega. Shouldn't this be a request in general to fix for the YR Modding Community? :/

[Wayward Winds]

Hmm.  According to my notifications, Speeder replied to this topic... but there's nothing here.  Odd.  [joking around]It was probably something along the lines of "this modification of Mental Omega is not supported by the MO team and we will not be liable for any unforseen consequences such an act will bring about."  Or telling me off for posting already known knowledge (not that I can find any trace of it elsewhere though).[/joking around]
 
In other news, I've tried using the same technique for the vanilla Yuri's Revenge (gamemd.exe) in case it would provide a starting point for other mods, but couldn't get the same results.  Thank goodness -SPEEDCONTROL works for that one!  (And yes, I removed that command before starting my testing.)  Incidentally, the bytes at that particular offset are the same as for Mental Omega, but modifying the 74 07 to 90 90 doesn't seem to do anything.
 
(Just to be clear, I really do like Mental Omega; perhaps more so than vanilla RA2 and YR, but I just can't enjoy it if it insists on running so fast that an Apocalypse tank zips around faster than it would if it was secretly a NOD attack cycle carrying mirage camouflage.  I'm not interested in modifying the rules file in any way to give myself an unfair advantage; I just want to play as is, at the speed it should be running at.
If I get to the point I want to graduate from singleplayer campaigns to multiplayer, I'll undo the change if required.)

Edited by Wayward Winds, 12 June 2015 - 10:14 PM.

[mevitar]

The campaign is hardcoded to gamespeed 4, which is 30 fps. It doesn't change between computers. It only goes slower when you have a slow processor, and should never go faster than 30 fps.
We don't endorse using -SPEEDCONTROL because changing the game speed changes the difficulty of the game. Speed 4 is standard, and is slower than what people play on multiplayer. If you'll get used to games slower than 30 fps, you'll have problems in multiplayer.
If you want to play slower than that anyway, we won't stop you.

Also, this hack is not necessary to use -SPEEDCONTROL, but in that case the game can't be ran through the launcher.

Edited by mevitar, 13 June 2015 - 04:53 PM.

[RP.]

That's correct, -SPEEDCONTROL was disabled by Thear at (IIRC) my request. Don't know that for sure, but we definitely had a discussion about it.

There is however an argument that enables the slider, which is one that you pass to the launcher.

If Speeder or who-ever is allowed to, grants me permission to share it, I'd be happy to share the argument.

 

There's a very good reason why the speed is locked, otherwise the text strings, audio and video playback would be fucked up.

Like EVA telling something and in the middle of the speech you hear "battle control online", boom, no more nice EVA speech.

 

 

EDIT: I remember now, I asked him to add the backdoor argument, lol.

Edited by RP., 13 June 2015 - 09:50 PM.

[Wayward Winds]

For the record, I only drop the slider one notch.  And, though I understand there is a hard limit to framerate (not that I properly understand the subject), I'm certain that RA2 runs faster nowadays than it was originally intended to.  Why?  Because whenever I play vanilla RA2 or YR on the default speed, I keep hearing voice clips cut short because the next one starts before the first is finished.  As in, about a third of certain voice clips disappear because the next one wants to activate.  And then there's Tanya appearing on the map in RA2 Allies 1 before the video clip of her talking about giving the "Commie's a nice view of the bottom of the river" is halfway done.  Even if I accept the ingame timer clicking down a minute for every forty seconds the clock on the wall shows, and paratroopers hitting the ground in a second at most, that sort of thing is just annoying.

Anyway, I'm not going to start any arguments or anything; I respect the fact that the MO devs almost certainly know what they are talking about (and as I've alluded to, my programming skills are next to non existent.)  I actually don't have a problem with higher speeds in skirmish, but then skirmish (and presumably multiplayer) are actually more lenient than base-less campaign missions where a single lost unit can mean you're now fighting a lost cause.  If I see scripts breaking (and I haven't yet), I'll know what to try.

 

Last bit of clarification' take a look at Martinez O's playthrough on Youtube.  That's the speed I want to play the singleplayer campaign at, but Windows 8 (I'm pretty sure it's Windows 8's fault) doesn't let that happen for me unless I drop the speed a notch.  As for dropping it further, where's the fun in winning if everything creeps along at a snail's pace?

 

...I'm going to keep my mouth shut on the topic from now on.  I probably should have thought before I opened my mouth in the first place.

[RP.]

I don't get it, Red Alert 2 was created in such a way that its perspective of time is tied directly to the fps.

Are you saying that Windows 8 lets RA2 run at a different framerate than Windows 7 does?

 

If that's the case than it is the first time ever that I hear about it.

[Martinoz]

Single player is set to run at 30fps because of the scripts, also back in the time 60fps was way too much and games were running ok with 30 or even 24fps.

[Black Temple Gaurdian]

I must admit I've experienced text and audio being cut off before it's finished by new text/audio. Didn't seem a big issue but it's definitely there. Windows 7 if you're wondering. Nothing but Ares and a mod of my own making (so definitely not just MO).

[mevitar]

This isn't the place to ask this question. First, it's unrelated to the topic. Second, it's a modding issue.
It happens solely because of how sound controls are set up and some sounds being able to interrupt others. You need to track for yourself which of them cause this issue and to which sounds.

Last bit of clarification' take a look at Martinez O's playthrough on Youtube. That's the speed I want to play the singleplayer campaign at, but Windows 8 (I'm pretty sure it's Windows 8's fault) doesn't let that happen for me unless I drop the speed a notch.

Back to the original post, if you're sure the game is running on higher fps than it should, look for any way to lower the game process priority (or acceleration, if applicable). I can't help you with it, though, as i don't have Win8.

Edited by mevitar, 29 June 2015 - 02:00 PM.

[Black Temple Gaurdian]

This isn't the place to ask this question. First, it's unrelated to the topic. Second, it's a modding issue.
It happens solely because of how sound controls are set up and some sounds being able to interrupt others. You need to track for yourself which of them cause this issue and to which sounds.

Not asking any questions. Clarified that a) it's not just him and b) it's not just MO.

[mevitar]

Well, that changes the context then. Still, first time i heard about any sound breaking issues that are not caused by mod's sound control file, but the system. I have Win7 and never encountered any in MO.

Edited by mevitar, 29 June 2015 - 03:43 PM.

[Wayward Winds]

For the record, I haven't encountered sound issues in MO either; it's the unmodified RA2 and YR that the interrupted dialogue issue happens in.  It's particularly noticeable in YR.  MO doesn't squeeze so many voice clips into such a short time frame, so that particular symptom of the higher-than-it-should-be game speed activating event triggers before the previous dialogue ends (somehow I seriously doubt that the developers planned for that to happen) doesn't pop up here. And when I say unmodified, I mean that I haven't touched the .ini's or anything else in the game directory beyond adding "VideoBackBuffer=no" to the settings configuration file (a necessity for RA2 and derivatives on WIndows 8, or the whole computer freezes after a few minutes of play) and adjusting resolution to my screen size.  Nor have I ever used any patches beyond the official RA .006 and YR .001.  It's a case of install from disc, make the above two fixes, go straight in and play, see/hear the issue.

 

Also, I made a particularly big leap in Windows OS - for an awfully long time I was chugging away on a Windows 98 desktop that was pretty good for its age and ran RA2 like a dream, and finally upgraded to a modern laptop and jumped to Windows 8 last year (I'm not bothered so much with modern games, I play Homeworld, Ground Control and C&C's preceding RA3.  Mostly I just use the computer for Microsoft Word.).  Base RA2 and YR suddenly running too fast and cutting off dialogue were the whole reason I went searching for a solution and found the -SPEEDCONTROL in the first place; if it hadn't been for that, I'd have been perfectly happy to leave things be.  The only reason that I suspected it was Windows 8 at fault was that a google search of "RA2 running too fast" didn't show up any Windows 7 users with the problem, just Windows 8 users griping.  This was before I even discovered MO by the way.

Incidentally, Tiberian Sun and Twisted Insurrection haven't sped up with the tech upgrade, in fact, I tend to bump the speeder up a notch or two in Twisted Insurrection (flipping slow infantry...).  Just RA2 and derivatives.

 

I'm not a programmer; I dabble in GBA ROM hacking (hence why I've got and know how to safely use a hex editor in the first place), but that's probably a whole different ball game.  Anyway...

 

 

 

Back to the original post, if you're sure the game is running on higher fps than it should, look for any way to lower the game process priority (or acceleration, if applicable). I can't help you with it, though, as i don't have Win8.

 

 

 

I haven't the foggiest idea where to go to disable whatever acceleration my machine has as default (I certainly haven't enabled any myself at any point, and as far as I know, this isn't a gaming dedicated laptop). I have used Task Manager to disable all cores but one, and to lower MO's priority to the bottommost setting.  It only makes a difference if the machine is in battery saving mode, and then MO stutters like crazy.  To be frank, I'd rather drop the slider a notch and have consistent frame rate than muck around with things I have no idea about and could conceivably crash the whole system in the process of experimentation.  Incidentally, the reason I started this whole topic was because I remembered seeing someone griping about the speed for MO v2.0 (http://forums.revora...s-thread/page-3) and thought the info might help anyone else so affected with 3.0.

Anyway, I'm done.  If the next MO version does move the bytes to activate the slider and I manage to track them down again, I'll keep my mouth shut about it.

[Black Temple Gaurdian]

The easiest example I've found is the allied desert level from YR iirc: the speech gets directly cut off by "Battlefield Control Online".