Unreal2-Engine based games (like Pariah) with multicore CPUs

[3dslUserLoad]

Problem: Such games (like Pariah) may crash with an error message Negative delta time! when trying to run on a multicore CPU hardware (e.g. AMD-635 with 4 cores).

Solution: There is a program called RunOnProcessorExplicitly or short ROPE which restricts a process to access only certain CPU cores.

Homepage: http://innes.org
Download: ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/winn ... ope100.zip

Unfortunatly the program above requires installation and activation and it expires after 30 days so you might download a version with these annoyances removed here (100kB, only necessary exe & pdf).

Syntax (taken from the .pdf):

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ROPE -f <specific>| -p <number> -x <minmem> -n <program>

-f the actual processor numbers on which to run the task e.g. -f 2-4 or -f 0,3,7
-p the number of processors to use for this task e.g. -p 3 note this implies load balancing
-m the minimum working set size in K, maximum working set size in K e.g. -m 32,64 or -m 96
-n the fully qualified program name to execute, along with any parameters required for the executing task. e.g. -n h:\Ostar\bin\hrncr.exe log

For example if you want to run Pariah on a multicore system simply extract rope.exe from the .zip of the latter download link to any folder and create a .BAT or a shortcut to:

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<ROPE_EXE_FOLDER>\rope.exe -p 1 -n <PARIAH_MAIN_FOLDER>\SYSTEM\Pariah.exe

There is still a problem with Pariah: Looking straight at an explosion from the grenade launcher results in a black screen instead of showing any special effects. When the explosion is over the screen returns to normal view.
I have no solution for it.

[Virgil]

There are number of such small utilities and ones I saw were free. Check FlipTib for example.

[3dslUserLoad]

After roaming some forums I found out that none of such utilities are necessary.
Any PE EXE file contains a "characteristics" field which is located at offset 16h relative to the PE header.
It usually contains the word 10fh and must be changed to 410fh to indicate Windows that it should run on one CPU core only.

[elsie3]

ImageCFG is what I use.

[Maraakate]

There is still a problem with Pariah: Looking straight at an explosion from the grenade launcher results in a black screen instead of showing any special effects. When the explosion is over the screen returns to normal view.
I have no solution for it.

This happened to me on my older computer a few years back. It was a P4 3.2GHz with a GF 7800 GTX 512MB. I could never find out why it did it. I even tried disabling stuff on the driver side and still nothing. Tweaking ini's all that. Out of curiosity, what card are you using? Maybe it's related to nvidia drivers and something got broken later on and nobody fixed it.

[3dslUserLoad]

You may be right. This could be an NVIDIA driver issue.
My system:

MSI 770-C45 (MS 7599), latest BIOS
AMD 635 (4 * 2.9GHz)
4*2GB DDR3, PC3-10700, Ganged mode 128bit (4GB usable)
NVIDIA GTS250 E-Green 512MB (it's a discontinued relabeled 9800GT, actually, and runs fine for me even with latest games)
WXP-SP2 32Bit
NVIDIA v266.58

I had a similar problem with Red Ocean some years ago. On my older PC the game crashed early in the first level until I changed to a newer driver version.

I think it's always the same: Developers implement new superfluous functions into their sofware but crumble other parts of their work. Often they silently omit referring bugfixes in their changelogs to hide that they were fudging.

[Shattered]

There is still a problem with Pariah: Looking straight at an explosion from the grenade launcher results in a black screen instead of showing any special effects. When the explosion is over the screen returns to normal view.
I have no solution for it.

Change the option Disable Post Render FX from NO to YES. You can find it under Performance. This worked for me.

[3dslUserLoad]

@Shattered: No, I must reject that because it's depreciates visual quality.
I found the solution by chance here, physical page 18:

GeForce 7800 GTX, GeForce 6800/6800 Ultra, GeForce 6600 GT: Explosion effects in the
game Pariah result in full-screen corruption.166775
This is an issue with the application. To work around the issue, set the variable
HasNvidiaTexM32Tex in the file pariah.ini to (1). ((0) is the default.)

This affects not only cards mentioned there but other too (I've got a GTS250=9800GTX)

[Shattered]

Thanks, that works also.