[BUG] Tonnage bar won't fill up (what mod)

[MaMa]

Hi to everyone... my first post here after years of membership in this great community !

After more than a year i got back to SH5 last week and i found for the first time the problem discussed in this thread...

After some investigation i found the cause of the problem... not the solution as i'm not a programmer but i think that's a little step worth mentioning. Beside this, the problem is not related to any MOD at all, my tests were done with the vanilla game, starting from the tutorial and from saved game campaigns... :

the campaign updates are managed by an application (called OSI) installed in the UPlay folder. This application starts with the main game and everytime a game is started from the beginning or loaded from a saved game it loads some commands dedicated to the update of the campaign and the tonnage bar as well... it seems not dependent from UPlay being online or offline nor from savegames being synchronized or not with UPlay main server (my thoughts are that Ubisoft moved those files in the UPlay folder and started using this application since the SH5 server isn't working anymore. In the previous versions of UPlay they weren't available...i'm not sure of this however).

Using the Debug viewer (found in a MOD, the UI mod from TDW if i'm not mistaken) i scanned OSI actions and after a lot of trials i found the difference between the game operating regularly and when it start bugged. It's all related to these strings :

- This one is the bugged one :

00000277 964.91510010 [3024] SH_OSI.cpp (50): SH5 online OSI Started
00000278 964.91522217 [3024] SH_OSI.cpp (68): Ready for Messages
00000279 964.91851807 [3024] orbit\helpers\DistLogBackend.cpp (51): No logbal_host specified. Distlogging disabled
00000280 965.06890869 [3024] SH_ServerOrbitProtocol.cpp (89): Got incomming connection to orbit spawn.
00000291 1172.60546875 [3024] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000292 1172.60559082 [3024] Entities.cpp (91): Init OSI user profile
00000293 1172.60571289 [3024] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000294 1172.60595703 [3024] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000295 1172.60607910 [3024] Entities.cpp (94): Init OSI campaign objective
00000296 1172.60620117 [3024] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000297 1196.14514160 [3024] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000298 1196.14562988 [3024] Entities.cpp (114): OSI Ping
00000299 1196.14599609 [3024] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded

As you can see there's only one string related to the user profile, nothing more...

- Here it is the correct procedure. When i found those strings loaded everything was running well, tonnage bar updated correctly and campaign also updated regularly :

00000053 63.32303238 [3604] SH_OSI.cpp (50): SH5 online OSI Started
00000054 63.32321167 [3604] SH_OSI.cpp (68): Ready for Messages
00000055 63.32634735 [3604] orbit\helpers\DistLogBackend.cpp (51): No logbal_host specified. Distlogging disabled
00000056 63.34624481 [3604] SH_ServerOrbitProtocol.cpp (89): Got incomming connection to orbit spawn.
00000066 138.39007568 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000067 138.39050293 [3604] Entities.cpp (114): OSI Ping
00000068 138.39071655 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000069 139.62884521 [2880] Start Campaign Screen
00000070 318.50369263 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000071 318.50411987 [3604] Entities.cpp (91): Init OSI user profile
00000072 318.50466919 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000073 318.50473022 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000074 318.50494385 [3604] Entities.cpp (94): Init OSI campaign objective
00000075 318.50500488 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000076 318.50534058 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000077 318.50540161 [3604] Entities.cpp (97): Init OSI map zones
00000078 318.50546265 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000079 318.50588989 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000080 318.50662231 [3604] Entities.cpp (100): Init OSI campaign named entities
00000081 318.50668335 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000082 318.50701904 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000083 318.50711060 [3604] Entities.cpp (114): OSI Ping
00000084 318.50717163 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000085 319.99963379 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000086 319.99969482 [3604] Entities.cpp (109): OSI Eval campaign objectives
00000087 319.99996948 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded
00000088 335.96643066 [3604] Entities.cpp (83): Process Message:
00000089 335.96673584 [3604] Entities.cpp (114): OSI Ping
00000090 335.96685791 [3604] Entities.cpp (123): succeeded

In Yellow you can find the strings related to the campaign updating and the tonnage bar filling. Each time an event occurs, such sinking a ship, the application elaborate the string "OSI Eval campaign objectives" and update everything...

As stated before, i'm not a programmer, so i don't know if anything is possible on solving this issue... the Ubisoft support admitted that there is no more people available on supporting this game thus leaving me without answers...

I just wanted to share those informations with everyone, maybe someone may find them useful... in fact, by looking at those strings in the debug viewer running, it's possible to understand immediately if the game is running fine or not, if not you just need to reload the game or to restart it (if it was the beginning of a campaign game) until those strings are displayed on the viewer (beware that more often the game starts bugged than not... ).

Sorry for the long post... hope it helps...

[Jimbuna]

Great first post and welcome to SubSim MaMa

[gap]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Great first post and welcome to SubSim MaMa

I Agree. Brilliant post

Ciao MaMa, e benvenuto su subsim

P.S: I wish TDW was here, because it seems the kind of topic he could help with ;-)

[THEBERBSTER]

A Warm Welcome To The Subsim Community > MaMa
You Will Always Find Someone Here To Help You
New To Silent Hunter <> Need Help <> Click On My Thread Link.
Subsim <> How To Donate <> See The Benefits <> Support The Community
Treat Yourself To The Wolves Of Steel Mega Mod <> SH5 The Dawn Of A New Beginning
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Silent Hunter III from 2005 bring your game play to 2015 with the
LIVING SILENT HUNTER III EDITION 2015 Mega Mod

Fascinating and excellent information that explains a lot to me regarding Uplay when this tonnage bar problem all of sudden started to happen.
I guess we never stood a chance.

[MaMa]

Thanks to everyone for the warm welcome !

Still testing the game and this damned OSI application... if i'll find anything new i'll report back !

Thanks again !

[vdr1981]

Originally Posted by MaMa

Hi to everyone... my first post here after years of membership in this great community !

That's one hell of the post and really good way to start Subsim career...

And finally , we have an explanation for what is going on exactly...As always, Ubi...

If you still want to play SH5 with tonnage bar keep in mind that this "feature" is inconsistent with traditional SH campaign gamepley, probably because someone from dev team got a brilliant idea few days before game's actual release to pound in another feature which just may be appealing to new type of SH players...

For example, you can sink few neutral ships (even friendlies) and your tonnage bar will fill up, but at the same time, you'll be heavily penalized for your "work" in some important campaign files (classic SH) which are, from some reason hidden from the player (probably another "feature").

Someone will probably hate me for this but, as you can see, I'm a big opponent of tonnage bar "thing" and I'm proud to say that I even developed an addon for OHII which will completely ban this lame feature on a campaign level.

However, tonnage bar calculation could work very nice in combination with hidden progress bar in order to simulated more If/Then dependencies in the actual campaign but, since this feature is broken , we can see no benefits from it...

[gap]

Originally Posted by vdr1981

...tonnage bar calculation could work very nice in combination with hidden progress bar in order to simulated more If/Then dependencies in the actual campaign...

Where's TDW?

[MaMa]

However, tonnage bar calculation could work very nice in combination with hidden progress bar in order to simulated more If/Then dependencies in the actual campaign but, since this feature is broken , we can see no benefits from it...

My biggest concern at the moment is that this issue started when Ubisoft updated UPlay by including the OSI application into the game folders inside their browser.

Before that change there were no files stored in the UPlay folders and those informations were managed in a different way... now it seems that this procedure ceased to exist (giving Birth to this orrible bug... ) and this application act as a sort of emulator or a phantom server...

Despite being broken this application holds a lot of game informations (now stored locally, before they weren't accessible) and it could be a great chance to uncover an important part of the game tasks, allowing new gameplay possibilities on the game campaign for classical SH gamers and new ones alike... an expert like TDW could be of great help on that...

Where's TDW?

However, if anyone knows how to dig those contents he would be more than welcome !

In the meantime i'll continue my search...

[gap]

Originally Posted by MaMa

My biggest concern at the moment is that this issue started when Ubisoft updated UPlay by including the OSI application into the game folders inside their browser.

It is amazing how UBI guys broke a game that they keep selling, and at the same time they have the nerve of washing their hands of it

Originally Posted by MaMa

Despite being broken this application holds a lot of game informations (now stored locally, before they weren't accessible) and it could be a great chance to uncover an important part of the game tasks, allowing new gameplay possibilities on the game campaign for classical SH gamers and new ones alike... an expert like TDW could be of great help on that...

You say you are not a programmer, but it looks you know on game debugging much more than the average gamer.

It is more than one year now since the last appearance of TDW on this forum. I still hope he will be back anytime soon (it wouldn't be the first time he deserts this community and then pops up again). In the same time we could try getting in touch with some of the game developpers (some of them are appreciated members of this community, they visit the forum from time to time, and they have always been very helpful). If the OSI thing was intruced after SH5's release, I doubt they will be able to help us but, who knows, maybe they will be able to give us some clues.

Originally Posted by MaMa

However, if anyone knows how to dig those contents he would be more than welcome !

In the meantime i'll continue my search...

Please do!

[RealGrognard]

Great work MaMa!

As I am a programmer myself I can say you've done really good work to find this (I wouldn't have found it) and also you should forward that information again to Ubisoft, reporting it as a Uplay bug, not SH5 bug, and even include those debug logs as well.

This is because SH5 is no longer supported, but Uplay is supported ongoing. And this bug is actually part of Uplay (OSI is part of Uplay) and was introduced in a Uplay update.

From my experience working in a software company, so if you report the bug under a different category then it may get through to the engineers rather than getting blocked by customer support. If you report it as a SH5 bug then it gets filtered out but a Uplay bug may get through and be fixed. It's a long shot but worth a try. Also, if somebody reports a vague bug then it is less likely to get looked at but if you report exact information like you have found, it has a better chance of being acted on. So we should give detailed information like this.

As it stands, I think it would be difficult to actually fix this with a mod, apart from removing the tonnage bar completely as per Vecko's post above, since it seems to be hard coded into osi.

I had a look at the osi arguments in osi.args

-osi_memmax 45000 -osi_cpumax 100 -osi_netmax 250

There are only 3 arguments in there, I guess memory max, CPU max and network max.
I guess the first means how much memory is allowed.
Perhaps one thing to try is changing the mem max value from 45000 to a higher value (perhap it sometimes runs out of memory)???
Perhaps another thing is to raise the net max value to a higher value (perhaps it needs more network bandwidth sometimes)???

So actions are:

1)

We on this forum should all keep reporting this Uplay bug to Ubisoft and if they keep on getting lots of reports about it then they may actually pay attention and 'escalate' it as a real issue. Include the debug logs provided from MaMa and provide a detailed explanation and it's more likely to go through than if we just report it vaguely. More details is better.

2)

MaMa maybe you can try running again with those changes to the osi.args file?? And see if there is any change in the behaviour for OSI?
Another thing to try might be setting net max or mem max to 0 (perhaps setting to 0 means 'no limit').
Perhaps if it looks at how much memory or network bandwidth is used, it doesn't do the operation properly (I'm only guessing here, it's a long shot)

[MaMa]

Originally Posted by RealGrognard

Perhaps one thing to try is changing the mem max value from 45000 to a higher value (perhap it sometimes runs out of memory)???
Perhaps another thing is to raise the net max value to a higher value (perhaps it needs more network bandwidth sometimes)???

At the moment it's exactly what i'm looking at !

I also discovered that the OSI application is in fact the pack of files downloaded by UPlay when first launching the game... i deleted the OSI folder and verified that all files are downloaded again if the game is launched and UPlay is online... on the other hand if the browser is offline the game will stop working at the campaign start with a generic internet connection problem...

The first thing i've tried (and it didn't bring any result) is changing the netmax parameter (a bigger value). The application crashed demanding a valid parameter, however i have not tried the 0 value, let's do it ! Next step will point to the other parameters as you advised...

Regarding Ubisoft ... you're absolutely right about this, everyone should ask explanations and activate a support ticket as to bring attention to this issue. I'll do it again in a more detailed manner, addressing the problem to the UPlay browser this time !

EDIT : A little update... tried changing the paramaters values (the "0" theory seems correct !). No crashes or new problems but the OSI behaviour seems the same. To be honest this evening the percentage of games running correctly is higher but i doubt it depends from those changes, it's all so chaotic that a true stat isn't really possible to be made... anyway, i also forwarded again the issue to Ubisoft with more details and all my logs and statistics... let's wait an answer, finger crossed !

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Gap

I Agree. Brilliant post

MaMa Not being technically adroit myself...if Gap says it's brilliant...than it must B SO!

Scusami tu ! è mia abitudine avere a che fare con persone americane che parlano e scrivono bene l'italiano... pensavo tu fossi comunque di altra nazionalità !

Sentitevi liberi di inviare in italiano! Abbiamo bisogno di pratica. Disponiamo di traduttori. C'è un po' di Italiano a tutti!

[gap]

Originally Posted by MaMa

Scusami tu ! è mia abitudine avere a che fare con persone americane che parlano e scrivono bene l'italiano... pensavo tu fossi comunque di altra nazionalità !

I will however continue to write everything in english as to allow for everyone a good understanding of everything...

Sure

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

MaMa Not being technically adroit myself...if Gap says it's brilliant...than it must B SO!

Sentitevi liberi di inviare in italiano! Abbiamo bisogno di pratica. Disponiamo di traduttori. C'è un po' di Italiano a tutti!

If there wasn't an Aktungbby on subsim... we would need one

[MaMa]

Originally Posted by Aktungbby

Sentitevi liberi di inviare in italiano! Abbiamo bisogno di pratica. Disponiamo di traduttori. C'è un po' di Italiano a tutti!

Maybe we can start a new thread in italian but i must admit that i'm a terrible cook so don't expect any pizza recipe !

Back on topic now...

Well guys... first round with UBI completed...

My request has been forwarded from the UBI italian support to the Headquarters (they even asked me to translate the query in english... ).

Let's see where this match lead us... as Always i don't trust those guys but who knows !

[RealGrognard]

Well done MaMa, let's see what happens.