hello everyone, we'll shortly be pushing out the next Public Beta build for your attention. Please post your feedback relating only to the build version 76.5a here. If you wish to discuss things not relating to this beta, please use the other forums.
What's Included/Changed
We've spent a bit of time looking at some of the crashes that had been identified in the last build. We felt these were fairly important to get into your hands as soon as possible given the nature of some of the crashes. The specifics of our latest work are:
Reverted Dispatcher change that was intended to make node deletion on pathing failure more robust, but instead could make it more unstable.
Fixed an STL assert failure in Debug build (this could also cause a crash in release builds) - tunnel iterators were being used after deletion when rendering 2D map.
Removed assert in Landscape texture that causes a crash/break in Debug builds.
Fix for crash in loading of Lingbao to Mianchi Scenario 3 (and other scenarios that include reversing sections). Caused by fix to prevent decrementing a stack pointer when at the beginning of the stack. Previous fix was to change loop check, new fix is a special flag to prevent and recover.
Added command line option "-DisableSilverLining" to fully disable Silver Lining to aid debugging the graphics device lost crashes on alt-tab and screen sleep.
Updated to Silver Lining 6.42 to fix D3D device lost error on screen sleep (and potentially others)
With this update, we believe we have resolved the D3D Device Lost error which is caused when alt-tabbing when in full screen. Thanks to wellington's note pointing us at SilverLining as the cause of the crash, we were able to find the specific part in their code and implement a fix. We're hopeful this should be the last remaining element of this crash and it should finally be consigned to history!
EDIT: Slight correction to the above, seems I jumped the gun a bit as I'm told that this build does not resolve all instances of the D3D crash. There are some further fixes that we've yet to test internally but will find their way out in due course, likely as soon as we've been able to test them. The new SilverLining library fixed one instance of the D3D error, notably when the game receives a "lost device" message followed by a "reset device". However, there are situations where the "lost device" doesn't trigger, and instead we just get a "reset device". So, this will not be the end of the D3D crash entirely as there are still some fixes we need to test but, we are on it.
We're hopeful you will find this altogether more stable but please let us know your findings.
Best, Steve
