[Dev] Xbox Freezing, Voidwatch, And Tanaka Issues

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.