Voidwatch, the Xbox360 and its issues/bugs.

[Ryotto]

I just did Hahava twice with a full alliance. Only to d/c at 1% on Hahava T4 Voidwatch. I come back a few minutes later, only to find out, half of my alliance disconnected, and we are ALL on Xbox 360. This isn't this first Voidwatch NM this has happened on either. Something needs to be done about this and I would assume the GMs wouldn't be stingy and reimburse us stones/cells? Anyone able to help with this issue or have the same issue on your server? I am rather annoyed with the game because everytime I do Voidwatch for friends, half the alliance disconnects and we lose items.

[Triffle]

Yup, happens every time for all the people on Xbox's on my server. We don't exactly disconnect though. Our Xbox 360s just freeze. Same thing that happens during Besieged if you stay in it too long. Apparently it also freezes if you stay too long in Beaucedine Glaciar [S] and if you try to enter the Aquatic Depopulization in Moblin Maze Mongers.

The only way it seems to kind of stop freezing during Voidwatch is to relog during each fight. As much as it is a pain to do, it does cut down the freezing by like 95%.

[Camate]

Greetings!

Producer Hiromichi Tanaka commented earlier on the Xbox freezing issue during Voidwatch battles and I would like to share it with you all.

I would like to inform you of the current progress with the XBOX360 freezing issue.
I apologize for the inconveniences this has caused.

■Issue
　For FFXI, the necessary renderings in-game are deployed from read memory files and then displayed.

　The effect management program receives requests for necessary in-game effects, requests the effect file, and plays it back at the deployment stage from memory or opens the effect files that are not necessary due to area changes, etc.

Files that are being read consume memory, while files that are opened free up memory.

The necessary structuring for effect rendering is contained in effect files.
Models, sound, sequences, textures, and other things are packed and when organized together it makes it possible to render a single magic spell or other things.

The effect management program has a cache feature so that even if the same magic spell is requested, as long as it has already been deployed from memory, it will re-use the existing memory without reading the file. This feature quickly responds to effect requests and will not use up free memory space, but for other effect requests it needs to read the file and it consumes memory. As the amount of things that need to be read increase, memory consumption increases as well.

Currently these types of effect files are remaining in memory more than we had thought and as a result it is causing termination due to a lack of memory. As a countermeasure to this, we are monitoring the cases where memory consumption is large and adding a process to open these effects that are not being utilized.

With this addition, it will be possible to free up memory and inhibit the things that cause insufficient memory while playing.

■Current Status
　For the hardware specs of the 360, memory that stores textures and memory that stores things other than textures are shared, creating a scenario where there are situations that easily cause insufficient memory. Due to this, when we first confirmed the occurrence of insufficient memory we tried to open the effect textures that were being shared; however, there were cases where program termination would occur during playback and we were forced to change our approach. 　

Also, when adding an open process, we discovered a number of areas for insufficient memory that we did not expect, so we proceeded to handle this as well so that problem would not worsen.

Currently, we changed this so not only the textures, but all effect files in general would be covered by the open process and we are now performing tests in test environments and official client. Unfortunately, even with this, problems related to textures are occurring, and we are currently trying to eliminate the problems one by one.

At any rate, we are working on this with higher priority than other content development, but we are behind on this, diving into this situation where nothing has been fixed. Unfortunately these fixes didn’t make it in time for the version update that just took place; however, the programmers are working their hardest to make it for the March version update.

If there are any significant developments with this issue I will be sure to let you all know.

[Tagrineth]

Translation: Yes, it really is a much more complex issue than people have assumed.

[Greatguardian]

Translation: Yes, it really is a much more complex issue than people have assumed.

noit'snot.

Their memoized cache was getting too big for the 360 because it happens to share system/graphical RAM (PCs and PS3s do not, and PS2 plays at a lower resolution). The 360 only has 512MB of RAM compared to PS2's 256MB, overall not a huge jump in active memory even though it's generally a more powerful console.

The issue is extremely simple to look at, but extremely difficult to fix because you're basically forced to say "Well. The 360 is straight up too weak to handle all these animations in the memoized cache at the same time. Wat do?"

The easiest solution would be to start lowering the resolution that 360 players can play at, which a reasonable person might understand because, frankly, the console isn't strong enough any more, but unfortunately the majority of players are not reasonable and I'm sure this would never get cleared by management.

Beyond that, they either need to find a way to flush the memo more often (creating more strain on the processor and hard drive, which may not help at all), or reduce the file size of the textures being pulled by the game and stored in the memo without affecting their apparent resolution (Which may not even be a permanent fix).

I do not envy the programmers assigned to this.

[Kraggy]

'XBox limitations', makes a nice change from 'PS2 limitations' as the excuse.

[wish12oz]

'XBox limitations', makes a nice change from 'PS2 limitations' as the excuse.

wwwwwwwwwww

[Kristal]

I wonder if the same issue is also responsible for the occasional invisible maws, confluxes and npcs on PC.

[Kaisha]

I wonder if the same issue is also responsible for the occasional invisible maws, confluxes and npcs on PC.

That's more a problem with XI's network code. It doesn't handshake on a lot of stuff, so if you miss the packet that says "Load this object up", it never double-checks that you received, so you're forced to either log, or run out of range of the entity to make the server resend it.

At any rate, I'm curious if that problem with the 360 is related to the problem where prolonged visits to a single zone start making FFXI jitter badly non-stop after a few hours. I used to have bad performance late into LS abyssea runs during its primetime, which tend to result in zoning out taking over 15 seconds to commence.

[saevel]

That's more a problem with XI's network code. It doesn't handshake on a lot of stuff, so if you miss the packet that says "Load this object up", it never double-checks that you received, so you're forced to either log, or run out of range of the entity to make the server resend it.

At any rate, I'm curious if that problem with the 360 is related to the problem where prolonged visits to a single zone start making FFXI jitter badly non-stop after a few hours. I used to have bad performance late into LS abyssea runs during its primetime, which tend to result in zoning out taking over 15 seconds to commence.

FFXI use's UDP on ports 50000+ to communicate with the world servers. UDP by it's nature is state-less, meaning no packet acknowledgement or session information. It also happens to be faster by requiring less processing and having less administrative overhead. UDP's used for things where missing packets won't result in a failure, things like VoIP and VTC connections.