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 1 year ago

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

NyakiStryker commented 1 year ago

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

MRC429 commented 1 year 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 1 year ago

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

Leader721 commented 1 year ago

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

Airtroops commented 1 year 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 1 year ago

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

Airtroops commented 1 year 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.