Mechassault 2: Lone Wolf Intro Loop/ Fail to play

NyakiStryker commented 2 years ago

Title

https://xemu.app/titles/4d53006b/#MechAssault-2-Lone-Wolf

MS-107 [4d53006b]

Bug Description

When launching the game, it will start normally. However once the intro cutscene with logos plays it will load then show a loading screen and repeat. The game never makes it to the main menu and makes it unplayable. At times if you press start if it loads the game will hard lock.

To show issue:

Launch the game
Watch into video with logos
get partway through the loading screen and game resets

Expected Behavior

Basically the game needs to get to the main menu to be able to play, bug checking and error checking can happen afterwards.

xemu Version

Version: 0.7.28 Branch: master Commit: 176b574403e0f4a08bfb1f8ab58e0f819a45cf81 Date: Fri Jun 3 21:40:57 UTC 2022

System Information

CPU: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz OS Platform: Windows OS Version: Windows Manufacturer: NVIDIA Corporation GPU Model: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2 Driver: 4.0.0 NVIDIA 511.79 Shader: 4.00 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Additional Context

No response

SanteriHetekivi commented 2 years ago

Same behavior here on:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor, 3701 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s) OS: Windows 10 64bit GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU Driver: NVIDIA 512.15

abaire commented 2 years ago

@theboy181 did some investigating and noted that it may be related to audio: https://discord.com/channels/680221390359887933/680221390359888154/993583954185699339

NyakiStryker commented 2 years ago

Well at least we are getting closer to fixing the issue, thanks for the update!

MRC429 commented 2 years ago

I've been trying MechAssault 2 after every Xemu update faithfully hoping that this time it will load. Lol Same Behaviour on AMD hardware. Ryzen 9 3800X: 12 Core, 24 threads R9 380 4gb. 32gb Ram

oApez commented 2 years ago

Any headway into this MA2 issue on Xemu. Same looping issue when it loads to the 'start' screen.

Leader721 commented 2 years ago

@oApez Same issue here lol. And ditto to the question. One of my favorite games.

Airtroops commented 2 years ago

This is the game I was looking forward to playing the absolute most on my steam deck.. Same issue, just loops at the intro loading screen

dracc commented 2 years ago

This is not the place for popularity contests. Join the discord if you want to talk about such stuff.

Airtroops commented 2 years ago

In what world.. I was not appealing to popularity, I was expressing sadness that it doesn't work, reiterating that it is still broken, and stating my hardware.

mariaWitch commented 1 year ago

Based on conversation I had with individuals significantly more knowledgeable in the MA1 and MA2 engine, the main menu is actually in-game, so if there are any problems with ingame loading, like in #1302 then that could be the root of the issue. We should consider focusing our efforts solving #1302 as most likely the solution to that will solve this issue.

mariaWitch commented 1 year ago

Based on the information here: https://github.com/xemu-project/xemu/issues/1302#issuecomment-1383054247 I'm going to refocus my efforts looking into whether or not there are any read/write errors to one of the cache partitions during load.

heliophane commented 1 year ago

@mariaWitch How much do we know about the Mechassault engine? Did MS use something commercial or something in-house?

mariaWitch commented 1 year ago

@mariaWitch How much do we know about the Mechassault engine? Did MS use something commercial or something in-house?

That much isn't exactly clear. However, we know that it is using Meyer/Glass Interactive archive files in order to store its game data. Some digging may have to be done to see if Crimson Skies and MA share similar engines considering they were made by the same development team. Additionally, in the process of loading the game loads certain .mgf files into cache, where they are then expected to be located. From what I can tell this does seem to be a custom engine. However, I think it's worth looking into whether or not the files are being properly loaded into cache, as there appears to be some files which if not present will cause the game to crash upon startup.

heliophane commented 1 year ago

Would it be wrong to ask some of the original devs about this? Would that information still be under NDA 20 years later? I pulled up the game on mobygames and some devs are still active in the industry, with one working on a game that shipped in 2020. https://www.mobygames.com/game/mechassault

mariaWitch commented 1 year ago

Upon reaching out to some of the devs from MA2, it seems that this is definitely caused by a caching issue. I'll continue to dig deeper into this in order to more closely find out what might be happening.

heliophane commented 1 year ago

Awesome. Glad you were able to make contact. I didn't get any responses.

david0178418 commented 1 year ago

Seems like you guys have a lead on the issue. But just in case it helps, it also crashes on Steam Deck at the loading screen as well.

mariaWitch commented 1 year ago

Did XEMU crash or did it just loop the intro again?

oApez commented 1 year ago

It does both. Looping is the main issue that occurs and sometimes it crashing xemu when you launch the game

david0178418 commented 1 year ago

@mariaWitch I can confirm what @oApez said. It was originally crashing and returning to emulation station. But after going back to reproduce the issue, it's now looping from the loading progress bar back to the microsoft logo animation or freezing on the "press start" screen.

JoeyDagger commented 1 year ago

Can confirm that intro loop is still a relevant bug

heliophane commented 1 year ago

I'm not sure if this would help, but someone is working on a tool to explore Meyer/Glass Archives. https://github.com/LarvalExtract/MGF-Explorer

NyakiStryker commented 10 months ago

Hey all, just checking in to see if any progress was made?

eonder87 commented 10 months ago

Same behaviour on my Ryzen 5 5700x + 16GB DDR4 and RX580 Graphic cards. My friend wants this game to play. But he doesn't have an Xbox og.

Please update.

pwnedbygary commented 7 months ago

Can confirm, this is happening still on my 7800X3D + RTX 3080 system

antoniodesousa commented 6 months ago

Same behavior as everyone here. I think is audio related. I can hear the audio breaking before it crashes.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX OS: Windows 11 64bit 23H2 GPU: AMD RX 6600 XT GPU Driver: Adrenalin 24.5.1

Equinox23411 commented 5 months ago

confirmed still ongoing, tested via steamdeck oled.

AKG-audio commented 4 months ago

Updating this, issue is still ongoing. Crashes on Xemu in the loading screen. Will continuously play intro sequences and fail to even make it to the loading screen after it crashes.

Pretty disappointing as I was really excited to try to play this again.

SYSTEM: RTX 4070 SUPER, Ryzen 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5 RAM

antoniodesousa commented 4 months ago

It works in the Vulkan branch! Even though the branch is still work in progress, the game already works perfectly: perfect graphics, perfect sound, movies have a little stuttering but they render fine, save works and performance is great.

NyakiStryker commented 4 months ago

It works in the Vulkan branch! Even though the branch is still work in progress, the game already works perfectly: perfect graphics, perfect sound, movies have a little stuttering but they render fine, save works and performance is great.

How do you go about doing that?

AKG-audio commented 3 months ago

It works in the Vulkan branch! Even though the branch is still work in progress, the game already works perfectly: perfect graphics, perfect sound, movies have a little stuttering but they render fine, save works and performance is great.

Hey, we have a community of MA2LW players that would like to understand how you got the game working specifically. Please join it here:

https://discord.com/invite/Z3SzEfcPE7

EdoGTR117 commented 3 months ago

It´s functional with Vulkan renderer . I'm halfway through the campaign without any problems. https://github.com/xemu-project/xemu/actions/runs/10221239434

nimorrax commented 3 months ago

It's mostly functional. Occasionally the render will break and black screen during regular gameplay with no chance of recovery outside of restarting the emulator. With frustration, I was able to complete the entire campaign. I had to redo the tank mission like four times because it consistently broke rendering at a walled section with two elementals. Game is definitely playable but not perfect.

heliophane commented 3 months ago

Cool, gonna have to check this out when I get home form work today.

It works in the Vulkan branch! Even though the branch is still work in progress, the game already works perfectly: perfect graphics, perfect sound, movies have a little stuttering but they render fine, save works and performance is great.

Hey, we have a community of MA2LW players that would like to understand how you got the game working specifically. Please join it here:

https://discord.com/invite/Z3SzEfcPE7

I think that if there are any steps, they should be cataloged publicly in a place that can be indexed by a search engine, not discord.

Dhampir49 commented 3 months ago

what are the steps to get vulkan renderer working on xemu?

ChrisBurt commented 1 week ago

To run with Vulkan, I downloaded the windows release from https://github.com/xemu-project/xemu/actions/runs/11768771370 (To enable the links, sign in to github) Go to the menu Machine > Settings > Display > Backend > choose 'Vulkan'. (In the main release, I don't see a Backend option.)

As others have noted, the result is sort of usable, but not a representative experience. Xemu's progress has been breathtaking and I do hope the main release can figure this out in a robust way.

xemu-project / xemu